[00:00:00] SPEAKER 1:
Ladies and gentlemen, uh, thirty-two years ago, Miss Edith Zweybruck of San Francisco established the Agnes A. and Constantine E. A. Foerster Lectureship in honor and in memory of her sister and her brother-in-law. It was her request that in each academic year, at least one lecture be given on the immortality of the soul or some kindred spiritual subject, not as a part of the regular college course, but by an authority especially qualified and especially appointed for the purpose. Since 1928, as you have noticed in the program, uh, given you tonight, the Foerster Lectureship has brought to the university some of the most distinguished English and American scholars in philosophy, uh, eminent Vedantist and Buddhist scholars, uh, distinguished scholars in Christian theology and in classical literature and archaeology.
The platitude that, uh, a lecturer worth listening to needs no introduction has never had more force than it has this evening. Since the, uh, First World War and his days at Balliol College, when Mr. Huxley published two volumes of poems, he has played an influential part in critical journalism. He has written novels that have delighted all of us.
He has traveled the face of the earth and given us fascinating interpretations of places and peoples and their cultures, which most of us will never, uh, know at first hand. He has written criticism of poetry and of other arts and has attempted to develop and to justify standards, uh, by which, uh, criticism could be made objective and instructive.
[00:02:02] HOST:
He’s brought together one of the great collections of letters of our time, uh, those of D.H. Lawrence. And our lecturer, who I may remind you is a Doctor of Letters of this university, besides all this, he has studied sympathetically some of the great literatures of Asia and has attempted to make some of their insights access-accessible to, uh, Western, uh, thinkers. He has looked into some of the pharmacological developments of recent decades to determine what their promise may be and what their dangers for the health and the range of experience and the moral independence of human beings.
Mr. Huxley, as you all know, has analyzed energetically and vividly and with deep concern the risks that may be posed to our, uh, intellectual and moral integrity and our independence as persons by such factors as hidden persuaders, as the increasingly ingenious and insidious techniques of propaganda, of electronic conditioning, of hypnopedia, and so on. He’s done many other things besides, but above all, he has tried to set forth a comprehensive conception of the main tendencies of our civilization and the, uh, promise and risks of these for human values, some of which he might insist are perennial values, others, uh, values yet to be created. Each of your large audience, uh, Mr. Huxley, is likely to prize especially, uh, some one of your many achievements, but all of us recognize that we’re very fortunate to have the opportunity of hearing you speak tonight on Matter, Mind, and the Question of Survival.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is a very great pleasure to introduce the twenty-second Foerster Lecturer, Mr. Aldous Huxley.
(applause)
[00:04:39] ALDOUS HUXLEY:
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I propose to begin this lecture with a rather long quotation from William James. It’s extremely relevant to our purpose, and it has a great deal of charm as all James’s writing has. This is what he says: “To no one type of mind is it given,” uh, to discern the totality of truth.
Something escapes the best of us, not accidentally, but systematically, and because we have a twist. The scientific academic mind and the feminine mystical mind shy away from each other’s, uh, facts, just as they shy from each other’s temper and spirit. Facts are there only for those who have a mental affinity with them.
When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the academic and critical minds are, are, are by far the best fitted ones, uh, to interpret them, uh, and, uh, uh, and discuss them, for surely, to pass from mystical to scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity. But on the other hand, if there is anything which human history demonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary academic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which present themselves as wild facts with no stall or pigeonhole, or as facts which threaten to break up the accepted system. In psychology, physiology, and medicine, 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, while the scientifics have had the better of it in respect to theories.
Now, the reluctance of the scientifics, the the academic and critical minds, to accept wild facts, facts which don’t fit into the current, uh, theories. It has, of course, been recognized long before James, uh, drew attention to it. It was recognized, for example, by Lord Chesterfield when he said that,
(coughing)
“If someone in our days were indubitably– dubitably to rise from the dead, the Archbishop of Canterbury would be the first to deny it.”
(laughter)
And it, uh,
(laughter)
it was recognized again by one of the early British historians of science, Playfair, in the end of the eighteenth century, where he spoke about the difficulty with which, uh, uh, people who had, so to say, an intellectual vested interest in an idea, the difficulty that they had in changing their ideas. Uh, and, uh, similarly, we find this, um, uh, this trait of reluctance to accept wild facts going right on through the nineteenth century. A particularly flagrant example of this is the attitude of the official scientific mind towards what used to be called animal magnetism, which, which came to be called after the days of James Braid, hypnotism.
This is a, a really extraordinary story when you find men like, uh, Lord Kelvin saying that, uh, hypnotism is half fraud and half bad observation, and when you find, uh, doctors, for example, eminent surgeons used to say in the early days when anes– uh, before anesthetics, when amputations were performed under, in the mesmeric trance, they used to say it was quite obvious that the man who was having his leg cut off was merely pretending not to feel pain just in order to spite the doctors. And other surgeons admitted that he probably wasn’t feeling pain, but they said he ought to feel pain because pain was very good for people. And, uh, the most extraordinary and monstrous example of the, this behavior towards people who made experiments in this field, uh, is the case of James Esdaile, the young Scottish surgeon who went to India and performed several hundred, uh, major operations, many of which had never been performed before, under mesmeric, uh, trance.
And the the most startling fact, uh, was that not only did he perform these operations without pain to his patients, he also performed them with, uh, a then incredibly low mortality rate. The standard mortality rate, uh, after surgery in his day, before anesthetics and before antiseptics or asepsis, was about twenty-nine percent. And Esdaile, uh, did his three or four hundred operations with a five percent mortality.
But all he got for his pains was to be violently attacked by his colleagues and hounded out of the medical profession. This shows, indicates very clearly how right, uh, James was to, to emphasize this, um, this fact that, that, that people with a vested interest in a certain kind of, uh, philosophy find it almost impossible to accept facts which go against, uh, that particular philosophy. And, uh, James himself went on to discuss the reaction in his own day, uh, to subjects like telepathy.
The word was invented by F.W.H. Myers, and was of course, uh, the, the thing was extensively studied in the early history, the early years of the, um, uh, Society for Psychical Research after eighteen eighty-two. Um, and James, um, um, ha-has a interesting comment on this. He says, “Why do so few scientists,” quote, “even look at the evidence for tele-telepathy?”
Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me, “that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together to keep it suppressed and concealed. It… it would make, uh, mmm, it would undo the uniformity of nature and all sorts of things without which scientists cannot carry on their pursuits.” And, uh, this is not an exaggeration because, uh, uh, at about, about the time that James was writing this, another eminent biologist, uh, Ray Lankester, uh, sir– uh, resented, uh, 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 by even inquiring whether such, such evidences had been presented could possibly be true because it couldn’t, could not be true. And as late as, uh, nineteen twenty-six, we get, uh, Professor Troland of Harvard saying that “the modern psychologist tends to regard alleged psychical phenomena as the modern physicist regards perpetual motion machines.” And, uh, at about the same time, we have Professor Joseph Jastrow saying, “Obviously,” now this is curious, obviously, “Obviously,” if the alleged facts of psychical research were genuine and real, the labors of scientists would be futile and blind.”
It’s, uh, very difficult to see why they should be futile and blind. I mean, all that th-this seems to prove is that the, uh, theory of the world on which the, the scientists were basing their, uh, efforts required modification. I mean, it doesn’t mean to say in the least that, uh, their labors were futile.
And yet we find at the present time, uh, certain extremely eminent psychologists, such as Dr. Hebb of McGill, uh, speaking in exactly the same way. Hebb has a very interesting comment on the work of Rhine, for example. He says, “Personally, I do not accept ESP for a moment because it does not make sense.
Rhine may still turn out to be right, improbable as I think that is, and my own rejection of his views is, in a literal sense, prejudice. This reminds me of an anecdote of my grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, where he said of Herbert Spencer that that philosopher’s conception of a tragedy was a deduction foully murdered by a fact. And here again, we have this, uh, this strange phenomenon of the, uh, of the apparent, of the existence apparently of facts, which because they do not fit into a certain, um, type of philosophical system, are com– either denied or else blandly ignored.
So, and, uh, we have to, uh, to remember that this is a, a very deeply rooted human tendency, and it is a deplorable tendency, but, uh, it, uh, it seems to be very deeply rooted, and we must take it into account. Uh, now, We have to consider the problem now of survival. If ESP is a fact, and I think it is a fact, then there would seem to be some prima fac-
facie, uh, reason to suppose that survival is a possibility. If, for example, uh, it is possible to establish some kind of communication between people without the intervention of bodily signs and without the intervention of the sense organs, then on the face of it, uh, it is possible to imagine that some kind of survival after the death of the body may be possible. 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, uh, survival becomes immeasurably greater because practically every case, I don’t think every case, but certainly a great majority of the cases which on the face of them appeared to be veridical cases of spirit communication, can, on the hypothesis that E-ESP exists, be interpreted in terms of the medium’s, uh, uh, great ability in picking up information from the living.
For example, uh, a case becomes veridical, uh, is regarded as veridical if the alleged spirit communicator gives a piece of information which subsequently is found out to be true. But somebody then must know it is true, and in this case, some living person must know it is true, and in this case, obviously, uh, ESP becomes a possible explanation of the phenomena. Uh, so that we see there is this curious paradox that with the, uh, establishment of ESP, and I think I personally believe it has been established, with the establishment of ESP, we have not only a, a certain intrinsic probability that there may be survival, but we also are confronted with an extraordinary difficulty in ever demonstrating, uh, that a, a given phenomenon is due to survival.
(cough)
Well, the, um- It is almost impossible, I think, to– Well, anyhow, it is very difficult, difficult, or perhaps almost impossible to devise an experiment which would definitely eliminate all possibility of explanation through ESP and, um, uh, definitely demonstrate the spirit survival. This, of course, is, is one of the problems which does confront parapsychologists at the present time who are interested in the problem of survival. The extraordinary difficulty of setting up a, um, a-an experiment, uh, which, um,
would definitely
(clears throat)
establish survival, as I say, without, uh, opening the way to an explanation through a kind of extended ESP. Uh, practically all the, uh, mediumistic communications, Which, uh, the best of which can be f-, uh, studied in the Proceedings and the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in London and in the American Society. Practically all of these, with a few exceptions, do lend themselves to a perfectly plausible explanation in terms of ESP.
And consequently, we have somehow, uh, to think of some alternative, uh, type of experiment, uh, in relation to survival. And something of the same, I think, is true in the cases of those veridical apparitions which, uh, have been studied ever since eighteen eighty-two and have been studied recently with great, uh, thoroughness by Dr. Louisa Rhine at Duke and by Dr. Hornell Hart, who was at Duke. Uh, this too, uh, lends itself to the same kind of interpretation, Uh, because we know now by experience that an apparition which appears to give veridical information may be not what it seems to be, uh, something willed into existence by, uh, an incorporeal personality, but the creation of the percipient.
It may simply be the percipient picking up out of the psychic medium some kind of veridical information, and then by means of this extraordinary dramatizing and storytelling faculty, which seems to lie at the back of so many minds, and especially at the back of the, the minds of sensitives, building up this figure, this apparitional figure. Uh, Dr. Louisa Rhine, in her enormous collection of cases, she sorts them out into degrees of, of, uh, probability of, um, of survival. The great majority, she thinks, are the actual creations of the percipient, uh, using ESP plus this dramatizing faculty.
And she would regard as completely, uh, evidential only cases in which, um, the percipient of the apparition had no active motive for seeing the ap- uh, the apparition, whereas the hypothetical disembodied spirit would have a very strong motive for presenting himself to the percipient. And, uh, some of the cases that she has collected, she’s collected many thousands of them and examined them very carefully, uh, some of them come fairly near to this. But, uh, only one appears to, uh, fully come up to the, to this standard of complete, uh, convincingness in this respect, and this particular one is not very well confirmed, unfortunately.
On the other hand, um, Dr. Harnel- Hornell Hart, who has also made a considerable study of the apparitional evidence, uh, is of opinion that, um, there are many apparitions, uh, apparently, uh, stemming from incorporeal personal agencies, uh, which cannot be distinguished from the apparitions of the living. Uh, these, uh, the– one of the early classics of um, of psychical research was Gurney’s Phantasms of the Living, where he brought together a very large number of, of very interesting cases of, um, apparitional appearances of people actually alive. And these, this kind of census of phenomena has gone on since.
And, uh, Hart points out that, uh, in many cases, these, uh, the apparitions of the dead appear to be of exactly the same nature as the apparitions of the living and, uh, seeing that, uh, in many cases we know that apparitions of the living have been the vehicles of communication and action by, uh, personalities, we may by analogy perhaps, uh, imagine that some anyhow of the apparitions of the dead are also, uh, vehicles of, uh, personal thought and action. Well, be it as it may, uh, there are, um, I think, um, a, a number o-of cases which, i-in which the, the weight of evidence seems on the whole to fall on the side of the survival hypothesis. That it, there are cases in which it seems to be simpler and more plausible to adopt what, uh, is now called the IPA hypothesis, the incorporeal personal agency hypothesis, in favor of the ESP hypothesis.
There is another point, however, which I think has to be raised, uh, uh, here, uh, which is that as a matter of historical fact, it is only fairly recently that it has been assumed that most of this kind of, uh, evidence did refer to spirits of the dead. Uh, it’s interesting in this context to compare, for example, what Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy has to say on the subject with what one of the pioneers in the, uh, of psychical research, F.W.H. Myers, had to say, uh, two hundred years later. Uh, Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy dismisses as self-evidently absurd the idea that a departed spirit could possess what we should now call a medium and, uh, i-impart information through the medium.
Uh, he says that these, uh, that information is given through mediums, but it does not come from departed spirits, but on the contrary, it comes from some non-human spiritual source, either divine or diabolical. Uh, if W.H. Myers, on the other hand, completely dismisses this, uh, very ancient hypothesis in favor of the, uh, IPA hypothesis, the departed spirit hypothesis. And here, this again, I think, is a rather disturbing fact, that the same– essentially the same phenomena do lend themselves to interpretation, either in terms of some kind 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, um, these things into account, uh, it seems to me that there are– there is enough evidence, for example, in the celebrated cross-correspondence cases, in the best, uh, work of Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Leonard, uh, there seems to be enough evidence to make it reasonably plausible that something does survive bodily death. Uh, now, if we accept this evidence on its face value, if we assume that
(cough)
given the immense number of facts collected since 1882, since the foundation of the, uh, Society for Psychical Research, if we assume that these do point to some kind of survival of a personality or a part of a personality, uh, after the dissolution of the body, 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? We’ve seen that, uh, a, an eminent, uh, psychologist of the present day, such as Dr. Hebb, regards this whole thing is making no sense. Well, of course it doesn’t make any sense in terms of the particular, uh, hypothesis, uh, the theory of the world, in which, um, uh, he, in, in terms of which he is carrying on his experiments and interpreting them.
(cough)
Obviously, if you, uh, believe that mind is an epiphenomenon of matter, of the action of matter, Or even if you believe that mind and matter are, uh, the manifestations of a single neutral substratum, unknown substratum. If you think that, uh, for example, that, uh, matter, so to say, is the outside of mind and mind is matter as experienced from the inside, uh, then neither of these views seems to be compatible, uh, with, uh, the idea of survival If you accept either of these views, then the evidence, I think both for ESP and also for survival, which is much more difficult to accept than ESP, it quite clearly doesn’t make sense. But do we have to accept this view of the world?
Is it– is the, is the fact that mental phenomena are so obviously a function of bodily phenomena, does this fact drive us of necessity into postulating this kind of naturalistic, materialistic monism? Well, this question was discussed many years ago by William James in his Ingersoll Lecture on Human Immortality, And he said, “Of course, it does not necessarily, uh, mean that we have to accept this kind of view of the world. Uh, he says that there are two, uh, that mind, uh, may be a function of, um, of matter, but that there are two kinds of functions.
There is the productive function th-where we say that mind is actually produced by some kind of material activity. Uh, but there is also what he calls the transmissive function, that, uh, matter, and especially the central nervous system, is the organ, the reducing valve through which, mm, uh, a previously existing mind stuff, uh, passes into the material world. And, um, uh, This view, of course, was, uh, strongly supported by Bergson and, uh, it, uh, as I shall point out later on, it still has, um, its adherents.
And James, uh, points out that the… He says that the theory of production is not a jot more simple and credible in itself than any other conceivable theory. It is only a little more popular.”
So that, uh,
(coughs)
Let us then distinguish between these two possible views of mind as a function of matter. The productive function, it is, is it functionally, uh, i-is it, uh, um, is the function of a productive nature, or is it of a transmissive nature? Now, this debate, uh, has been going on ever since James’s day.
And, uh, let me quote here another remark of Dr. Hebb’s, where he says, “We have no choice but to physiologize psychology.” Well, now the question is: Who is we? Because he does not speak for all
(clears throat)
uh, biologists by any means. Uh, there are, uh, plenty of them who do not feel that they have no choice in the matter, that they have to physiologize psychology. Uh, for example,
(cough)
take the case of an extremely eminent, uh, biologist, uh, Professor Joseph Needham, uh, who doesn’t feel anything of the kind. He doesn’t feel at all that there is any necessity in the nature of the evidence to compel us to physiologize biolog– uh, psychology. And what he has to say on the, um, matter is this.
This is how he sums it up. “Mind and all mental phenomena cannot possibly receive explanation or description in physico-chemical terms, but that would amount to explaining something by an instrument which is itself the product of the thing to be explained.” Uh, because obviously all, uh, scientific theories, such as the scientific theory of, uh, of naturalistic, uh, materialistic monism, is a product of the mind.
And as, uh, we know from the philosophers of science from Mach onwards, the, um, all these, uh, um, scientific theories have a, an enormous subjective element in them and are, are themselves the most characteristic products of the mind which they seek to explain, so that, uh, mind is being explained away in terms of something which is a product of mind, so that we see there is a, a profound logical fallacy here. Now, Needham goes on to say, “Legitimacy, the le-legitimacy” of physico-chemical explanations in the realm of physical life is well-grounded. But we have found that as far as mental life is concerned, biochemistry and biophysics have no authority.
The opinion, therefore, which seems to me most justifiable, is that life in all its forms is the phenomenal disturbance created in the world of matter and energy when mind comes into, comes into it. Living matter is the outward and visible sign of the, uh, of– the outward and visible sign, uh,
(coughs)
of the, uh, presence of m– of, of mind, the splash made by the entry of mental existence into the sea of matter. And he concludes this essay by saying, “The biochemist and the biophysicist can and must be thoroughgoing mechanists, but they need not, on that account, hesitate to say with Sir Thomas Browne, “There is something in us that can be without us and will be after us.” Now, mm, I quote this in order to show that the transmission theory is a, is a perfectly live theory at the present time and that there is, uh, philosophically, it seems to be better founded perhaps than the production theory.
That, uh, w-we, uh, 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, uh, things which make no sense. They do make sense in terms of a transmission theory. Now, the transmission theory obviously is related to the old Platonic and Cartesian, uh, theories, uh, but, uh, is considerably more subtle, say, than the, th-than the Cartesian theory.
Uh, Descartes postulated the relationship of, uh, mind and matter, uh, in a, a much too limited way. He, he spoke of, of, of mind as being something whose essence is consciousness, uh, being related to matter, whose essence is extension, uh, and each mind being completely watertight and separate from all other minds. But of course, now we are able to, to see that his, uh, cogito, ergo sum, his I think, therefore I am, uh, should be really modified as von Baader, the romantic German philosopher of the early nineteenth century modified it when he said that cogito, ergo sum should be revised, and that we should say cogitor, ergo sum.
I am thought, therefore I am. We are thought by an immensely much larger subliminal mind than the– this conscious ego of which we are aware. And in the, the, any kind of reasonable and realistic transmission theory, we have to postulate, I think, that this, uh, subliminal mind in which our self-conscious ego floats, so to speak, like a kind of crystal within a, a sea, uh, within a solution.
Uh, this, uh, subliminal mind is not cut off from all other minds, that it communicates somehow with, with all other minds in a kind of, of psychic medium, and that, um, we are in a certain sense like, uh, like crystals floating within this, this medium and communicating with other crystals through the medium. Well, Bergson, uh, accepted this view and maintained that, uh, intrinsically the mind was virtually omniscient, and that it, it merely– it was not in fact omniscient here and now because, uh, for the benefit of the animal who has to survive on the surface of this planet, we cannot be omniscient because we should be so full of irrelevant information that we should simply not be able to get out of the way of the cars in the street. And consequently, the nervous system, central nervous system in the brain exists in order to limit this virtually endless quantity of consciousness which we virtually have to limit it and to funnel it through for the purposes of of biological survival on the surface of this particular planet.
Well, my own feeling is I, I would, I would think that this idea of a a completely omniscient mind is, is a lit– seems to me a little fantastic. But I, I would think that there is something to be said for a view
(coughing)
which would say that the– this, uh, psychic medium, whatever it may be, eh, is, let us say, virtually omniscient. That it is, it could take on into itself every kind of specialized information. But, eh, what it is in itself is a kind of undifferentiated consciousness.
And as I shall try to point out later on in this lecture, uh, there is a lot of evidence from the part of the, on the part of the mystics, both East and West, uh, to the effect that our particular specialized, individualized consciousness is underlain by an undifferentiated consciousness. And this undifferentiated consciousness possesses, uh, what the Catholic mystics call obscure knowledge. This is a very curious and interesting phrase, which we meet with very frequently in the literature of myst-mysticism.
Uh, they speak, uh, the mystics constantly speak of this obscure knowledge of the world, which is not a particular knowledge of, uh, how to make, uh, sulfuric acid or what is the distance of the nearest fixed star, and so on. It is, uh, a generalized knowledge in the individual, an awareness of this total underlying awareness which, uh, as I say, underlies all particular awarenesses. That, that, that this, this, um, obscure knowledge of the universe, uh, is, I think, uh, a, a direct awareness of the undifferentiated consciousness, mental, mentoid state, uh, which, uh, underlies all particular consciousnesses.
Now, um, uh, we exist within this undifferentiated awareness as, so to speak, a, a succession of vortices
(cough)
i-in a, in a liquid. We have, unfortunately, our psychological vocabulary is so extremely poor that we are always driven back to use these, uh, material and spatial metaphors. But we must always remember that, uh, when we use material and spatial metaphors, that we use them in a– that they are necessarily very misleading inasmuch as this, this mental, uh, this under-differentiated consciousness is not in space and time, and it does not, uh, have the characteristics of a material medium.
Nevertheless, we, we have to because– simply because we do not have the necessary vocabulary, uh, to speak in these sort of terms. We have to use analogies with vortices. Well, it is as though, uh, we were persistent vortices within a medium.
And I think we have to postulate that by our experience in the embodied state, we build up these particular awarenesses within the general undifferentiated awareness, and that we leave certain traces in the form of persistent vortices upon the undifferentiated medium, that these things, uh, go on. Uh, Now, the question then arises, uh, what, what are these, uh, vortices within the undifferentiated awareness? Uh, here there’s some– I think we find some very interesting suggestions from the Oxford philosopher H.H. Price, who speaks of, uh, of these different types of, uh, unity—of, uh, uh, so to say, the molecules of awareness, which may be of any– the complexes of awareness may be of any size, so to speak, from a, a single idea, from, from a haunting, for example, to go back to the question of survival, this, uh, purely non-personal thing which seems to remain attached to a certain place, uh, up to a f– large fragment of a personality and perhaps to a complete personality.
Now, we pronounce this word personality, and it’s a word we use very glibly. But when we come to examine exactly what it means, we are confronted by very great difficulties. What, what precisely is a personality?
Uh, when we look, uh, closely at personalities, our own or other people, uh, what do we find? Uh, well, I think the first thing that we are struck by is that any given personality is certainly not a monolithic unity. The, the personality is a good deal more loosely s– uh, bundled together than we ordinarily think.
And it is, uh, it is a non-unitary thing. It is made of, of disparate elements, both in its temporal extension and in its cross-section. In its temporal extension, obviously we, we change very considerably, um, as we grow older.
But in it is not merely a question of maturation that changes the personality. It’s quite clear if we look at the history of almost any life, that there may be profound changes of the personality, uh, brought about by particular circumstances. I mean, let us take a hypothetical case of a, of a child whose mother dies and who from having been a happy and completely healthy personality becomes a very wretched and neurotic personality.
I mean, here is a, a startling change in the nature of the personality. Uh, and, uh, similarly, changes of surroundings. Uh, casual meetings may make the most profound difference to people.
I mean, one often hears of cases of, of people who seem to be almost moronic, who, uh, suddenly find what their talents are, what they can do. A chance meeting opens up a new world for them, and from having been practically idiotic, uh, they become alert and intelligent and efficient. And, one sees that there is a profound change in the personality.
And after all, it’s one of the commonplaces of religious literature that certain types of religious experience will produce immense changes in personality, that the, the whole attitude towards life, towards other human beings, uh, the whole way of behaving will change profoundly. And the whole– Consequently, the whole stock of memories, uh, which obviously become extremely important in the problem of survival, will be totally changed. And, um, uh, similarly, uh, In the, uh, cross sections of a personality at any given time, there are again, obviously, uh, disparate, uh, elements brought together.
After all, there is the conscious and the unconscious. There is the rational and the childish in human beings. Um, there is the respectable persona and the generally rather disreputable psychophysiological reality which lies beneath it.
All these things are there as, um,
(clears throat)
uh, as very loosely connected bits of the personality. And so, uh, this leads us to ask, what, what exactly do we mean by a, a personality? Do we mean what I think I am, or what I would wish to be, or what the Freudian analyst interprets me as being,
(laughter)
or what my friends think I am. There are obviously a great many, uh, ways in which a personality, uh, can be thought about. And then, on top of everything else, we have to remember that there are in every personality immense numbers of, uh, an indefinite number, I think, of pote-potentialities which might have been developed in other circumstances, but which in the particular circumstances of the life have not been developed.
So that there, over and above all the other e-enigmas of personality, there is this, this immense enigma of the, of the might have been, the, the fact that we carry about immense latent, uh, potentialities which have not in fact been actualized, but which might have been actualized. Well now, uh, from this, let us return to the question of survival. Uh, now let us assume that the evidence which points to something surviving is valid.
Now, the question arises, what is it, uh, that is actually surviving? Now, I would, uh, agree with, uh, Professor C. D. Broad, who is, uh, one of the
(coughs)
rather few philosophers who has really taken the trouble to study the literature of, uh, psychical research with great care and has devoted a, a lot of speculation to the problem.
(coughs)
I would agree with, uh, Professor Broad
(coughs)
uh, in thinking that in most cases, certainly, what survives and what comes through in the, uh, communications with the medium or the percipient is perhaps not a complete personality, whatever exactly that may be, uh, but is, is rather a, a fragment of a personality, that a piece comes through and, uh, establishes some kind of communication with the percipient in life. And in this case, we would have to assume that, uh, these traces left in the psychic medium, this– these surviving vortices, uh, have some sort of power of being– of establishing communication with, um, the, uh, the percipient, and sometimes bringing through some kind of veridical information. But as I say, in the majority of cases, it does look as though what is coming through is, is not a total personality, but only a piece of one.
This may be because the communication is extraordinarily difficult between one mode of being and another. But, uh, on the whole, I think we have to s- to envisage this possibility, uh, that, uh, what, what in general is coming through is only a fragment of a personality. Now, this means that it, it may be possible for the same human being, uh, to survive in several fragments simultaneously.
For example, let us take the case of a boy X and a boy Y. The boy– uh, the– these are close friends in their boyhood. The boy X dies.
The boy Y goes on and lives to a ripe old age. Now, presumably, if there is survival, uh, the personality or some fragment of the personality of the boy X associates with the vortex which left in the psychic medium by Y when he was a boy. I mean, he may be associating with something that Y has left behind him, even while Y is still alive.
That, uh, it, it seems to me perfectly on the cards that, uh, uh, uh, there may be this, uh, survival of bits of personalities which may communicate with, uh, disembodied personalities even while the, uh, um, the first personality is still in life and that the, th-this, the boy X and the boy, uh, and the, the boy who was Y will perhaps go on associating. And here, uh, I mean, quite obviously, seeing that this is a, a purely mental and subjective life which is going on in the psychic medium, we must assume that the association is necessarily through similarity or through some other kind of, uh, psychological congruity, that there, there, there is not a, uh, an association through any spatial or chemical relationship, but solely through some, uh, psychic, uh, congruity between the two groups of surviving experiences. Well now, we may pursue this, uh, still further and assume that, uh, that Y as he grows older, and let us assume that he marries and he loses his wife after a few years, uh, marries again, and then in later life has an accident which, say, reduces him to imbecility.
Well, here he is already– or his personality is broken up into a number of fragments, each of which, uh, may leave its traces behind in the so, in the, uh, psychic medium and associate with those, uh, surviving fragments of the people with whom he associated during life so that, uh, he will, as I say, perhaps survive in, uh, several forms at the same time. Uh, this, uh, I think is a, i-is a genuine, uh, possibility. Uh… Now, suppose that– we now have to come to a very curious and difficult point.
Suppose this kind of association of, um, fragments of personality is possible within the, the, uh, psychic medium, what, what can happen? I mean, suppose that, uh, w-we, we assume that these, uh, vortices which remain can associate with similar vortices. W-what, um, what can we envisage, uh, in this, um, posthumous life?
Here, let me quote a curious and interesting passage, uh, where C.D. Broad has discussed this. Well, he says, “When we consider analogies with persistent vortices, stationary waves, transmitting beams, etc., we can envisage a number of interesting and fantastic possibilities. We can think of the possibility of partial coalescence, partial mutual annulment or reinforcement, interference, etc., between the psi-components of several deceased human beings, in conjunction perhaps with a non-human flotsam and jetsam, which may exist around us.
There are reported mediumistic phenomena and pathological mental cases not ostensibly involving mediumship which suggest that some of these disturbing possibilities may sometimes be realized. And then he adds, “It is worthwhile to remember, 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.” This is a rather characteristic, um, summing up by Broad, who has said, in a wry sort of way, that he would be more, uh, slightly more annoyed than surprised to find himself surviving.
Uh, And it is characteristic of him to see only that the world might be a considerably nastier place. But he might have added, I think, that the world also may be a considerably nicer place. Uh, and for the evidence of this, let us turn for a moment, uh, to the whole mystical tradition.
Uh, here I think there is, uh, I cannot see why we should reject the evidential nature of much of this mystical tradition. This has, uh, gone on for an immense time, both in the East and the West, this conception of this underlying undifferentiated consciousness, this divine ground, this mother sea of cosmic consciousness, as William James called it, uh, with which, uh, by suitable practices, individuals can become aware, become, uh, unified even during this life. And, uh, this, uh, operational process, for it, this is what essentially it is.
The, the ori- all Oriental philosophy is essentially a kind of transcendental operationalism, which, uh, provides certain techniques for producing certain changes in consciousness, and which then goes out into speculation, uh, to give a metaphysical explanation for the nature of the, uh, of the change of consciousness. And the fundamental, uh, formula for, uh, describing, for, uh, for interpreting these changed states of consciousness is, of course, the ancient Indian formula, formula Tat tvam asi, thou art that. The, uh, or as the Buddhists say, mind with a small m from Mind with a large M is not divided.
Uh, or again, as Eckhart would say, that the ground of the soul is the s– identical with the ground of the Godhead. Uh, now, in relation, uh, to survival, what ab- what does this mean? Uh, it means that immortality in the sense in which the mystics use the word, they don’t use the word survival so much as immortality.
That immortality is the continuation into the post-mortem life of the kind of awareness of the divine ground which can be attained in this life. And in this context, I would like to make some quotations from this, perhaps one of the most remarkable of all pieces of religious literature, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is a kind of handbook For helping the dead person through the intermediate state between lives. The–
This is a Buddhist, the work of Tantric Buddhism, and the Buddhists, of course, assume that there is reincarnation. This has al-always been taken for granted in the Far East. And incidentally, in, in our own Western tradition, David Hume said that the only form of immortality which a philosophic mind could accept was that of reincarnation.
I don’t think we have to discuss whether this is true or not. But, uh, the, uh, the point is that the, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, uh, speaks of the possibility of communicating with the departed spirit immediately after death and helping it in this intermediate state between lives. If the person who dies can be made to be aware of the basic fact of the mind from mind being not divided, then he can escape from the wheel of birth and death and enter into this ti-timeless immortality.
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, which in the language of Mahayana Buddhi- Buddhism is called the clear light. He becomes aware of this, and if during his lifetime he has practiced this awareness, he is able to associate himself with this. If he has practiced during his lifetime the realization that thou art that, the, the basic, uh,
(breathing)
(coughs)
uh, the foundation of his own, the ground of his own existence is identical with the ground of the universe, then he can unify, unite himself with the clear light and escape
(coughs)
from the horrors of birth and continuous birth and death. But the chances are, of course, that he will not have– I mean, the overwhelming probability is that he will not have been, uh, have achieved this kind of enlightenment during life, And so will not be able to accept the pure light, the clear light as it is presented to him. It will, in fact, it will seem intolerably brilliant and impossible to bear, and he will then have to go on to a series of of less intense lights.
In all these stages, as he goes down, he can get back to immortality. But the, the difficulty becomes greater and greater, and he will pass then through a stage of, uh, of, uh, wild visionary illusions, and finally will come down to the point where he has to reenter a womb and be born again merely to escape from the intolerable purity and brilliance of the clear light. It is a, it’s a very powerful conception, which is not unlike, uh, St. Catherine of Genoa’s conception of purgatory, where the pain of the, of the suffering souls in purgatory is the pain of being impure in relation to this supremely pure light of God, which is then experienced as fire.
And in this, uh, conception in the, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, we see something similar, that the, the clear light is of a degree of purity so great that, uh, th-the majority of people can’t stand it and have to go down finally into this comforting world of flesh once more. But now let me read, uh, the, the passage which, uh, with which the priest speaks to the dying man, a-a-and goes on speaking when the breath has ceased. What he says, “Oh, nobly born, the clear light seen at the moment of death, uh, um, you are now aware of the clear light seen at the moment of, uh, death.
Now thou art experiencing the radiance of the clear light of pure reality. Recognize it. Thy present intellect, in its real nature void, undifferentiated, naturally void, is the very reality, the all-good.
Thine own intellect, which is now voidness, yet not to be regarded as of the voidness of nothingness, but as being mind in itself, unobstructed, shining, thrilling, and blissful, is the very consciousness, the all-good Buddha. Thine own consciousness, shining, void, and inseparable from the great body of radiance, has no birth nor death and is the immortal and the light. Knowing this is sufficient.
And this knowledge of the clear light of the undifferentiated consciousness underlying our ego consciousness seems to be also among Western mystics, the, the conception of the essence of immortality. For example, Meister Eckhart says that for an enlightened soul, and he was obviously speaking from personal experience, uh, he, he says that, uh, for the soul which has purified itself, uh, such a soul enjoys even in this life all that it will enjoy in the eternal life. That already there is eternity here and now in this knowledge of the undifferentiated ground of all, uh, particular awarenesses.
And I shall conclude with a, an anecdote which is told about Jacob Boehme, the, uh, great Protestant mystic of the early seventeenth century. He was asked by a young friend, “Where does the soul go after death?” And he replied, “There is no need for it to go anywhere.”
The reason being that if the soul has been properly prepared, it is, so to say, there already. And this, uh, over and against the, the whole problem of survival, which the, uh, Tibetan Book of the Dead regards as ending necessarily in the reincarnation, is set over against this, uh, mystical idea of immortality, of participating in the, uh, divine ground of all being. And I think we m– uh, should always, uh, make this distinction.
I don’t think, uh, we make it sufficiently, uh, strongly that the, that survival
(clears throat)
is not necessarily a divine state at all. It may be, be just, uh, exactly on a par with, uh, the sort of life that, uh, is being lived now by the average sensual man. But, and, but there is always a possibility for anybody who is prepared, uh, to fulfill the conditions.
There is always a possibility of achieving this, uh, union with the clear light, uh, which is, uh, of the essence of immortality. Uh, it may be, of course, a complete, uh, melting away into the totality of mind, or it may be, as the mystics have, uh, constantly, uh, assured us, uh, the, wha— what is possible during life, 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, so that there is a possibility both in this world and if there is and in the next, of a kind of individual awareness in which the soul, so to say, makes the best of both worlds. Where the, the absolute is not apart from the world, but is seen in the relative.
Where the, as Blake says, the, you see, uh, infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in a flower. Uh, but that there is a, a possibility, as I say, if the m- ground of our own being has been realized as identical with the ground of all being, o-of a continuing personal existence which shall, uh, have the quality both of the absoluteness of the divine ground and of the, uh, individualized life. This is, naturally, as all the fundamental truths of life are.
This is a, a huge paradox which, uh, makes no sense, of course, uh, except insofar as it is a fact of experience. Thank you.
(applause and cheering)