Psychical Research and the Study of Personality

: PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH VOLUME 28 — MAY, 1969 _ Lecture Forum Honoring the Memory of Chester F. Carlson 5 West 73rd Street, New York, N. Y. 10023 — Price $3.00

PSYCHICAL RESEARCH AND THE STUDY OF PERSONALITY GARDNER MurPHY Speaking this evening of some of the interests closest to Chester Carlson’s heart, we shall try, in our various ways, to show how the structure of modern research binds these deep interests of his together. One of our questions relates to the ultimate nature of human personality; another is the more immediate problem of devising suitable scientific tools which may allow early break- throughs into new knowledge of man. Each of us speaking tonight will develop his own approach, well aware that none of us can say anything final. But all of us will be dealing with issues to which Chester Carlson had for years been devoting his deepest thought. My own thoughts—some of which I had the privilege of exchanging with Chester in the last years of his life—relate to the study of personality as seen in terms of modern psychological investigation. Psychology needs psychical research, and psychical research needs psychology; indeed, each desperately needs the other, especially in the inquiry into the nature of human indi- viduality. We must gratefully utilize all that has come down to us from eastern and from western philosophy regarding such individuality and its place in the world and, at the same time, note with special gratitude the modern experimental methods associ- ated with developmental, clinical, and cross-cultural study. There is indeed an urgent need for research to give new and enriched meaning to the traditional concepts so well seen in playwrights like Sophocles and Shakespeare and in biographical novelists such as Dickens and Dostoevski. The ancient wisdom takes on new forms. In Sir William Dampier’s words, ‘Scientific

12 Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research methods of observation, induction, deduction, and experiment are applicable not only to the original subject-matter of pure science, but to nearly all of the many and varied fields of human thought and activity.” Even personality itself, we see in these words, can hecome subject matter for a scientific investigation. The poet Wil- liam Watson treated the same double reality of man’s nature in very different words. Having in mind man’s dual nature, as seeker after ultimate things and as an organism developing like other organisms on the face of this earth, Watson writes: ‘Magnificent out of the dust we came, and abject from the spheres.” The sor- rows and frustrations, the triumphs and the long, long thoughts, are all parts of the same human condition, and science and poetry alike find it their duty to cast their searchlight beams all the way from the humblest and meanest to the most ecstatic and the most sublime. Indeed, the same man that you see lying on the operating table, with his diseased or mangled body being skillfully and gently put together again by the surgeon, inexorably obeying the laws of physics, chemistry, histology, and bacteriology, is also the man who, in his imagination at the time, may appear to wander far from his body, look upon distant scenes, and come back and describe for us what we call an out-of-the-body experience. Psychical research, insisting upon the methods of science, be- gins with simple instances of telepathy and clairvoyance, goes on to sift the strong evidence for precognitive and retrocognitive modes of perceiving reality, and finds its way to studies of those “altered states of consciousness” in which many hidden aspects of personality may become visible. If our studies go on consistently replicating current results, we shall learn to observe points in future time and past time moving along pathways that we do not presently understand. Apparently as persons we outgrow some aspects of the time-space continuum that we know, while still functioning within this same time-space continuum, as if there were two ways of studying mankind. Our studies show with some consistency that we may indeed define many of the attributes of successful participants in paranormal communication such as the capacity for profound relaxation, detachment, and focusing. Psy- chological studies of these attributes are always helpful in psychical Psychical Research and the Study of Personality 13 research. At the same time, experimental and clinical psychology have offered a good deal to explain the fluctuations in perform- ance and to define the optimal psychological conditions when a sensitive is at his best. We are often asked why so many scientists ignore these studies, so rich in scientific promise. It is, I think, because science took articulate shape in the last few centuries as physics and chem- istry were born. Most of the models of the universe remind one of rigid boxes into which newer observations must fit. Actually, western science exemplifies just one way of thinking, developing as one phase of human experience in one period, emphasizing a system of philosophical assumptions about time, space, matter, and energy. Cross-cultural studies would give us every reason to expect that there would indeed turn out to be many other legiti- mate systems of approach to the personality of man. No one sys- tem is anything more than a framework for observations. Indeed, why should psychical researchers believe that they have the only forward-looking way of knowing reality? Is it not probable that with developing skill in investigation and with the broadening of human openness to new observations and new ways of thought, we shall discover that part of our modern confusion in psychical research is actually due to the availability to us of several new frames of reference, each temporarily incompatible with each of the others? Is it not possible that from ancient India, from ancient China, from the Greeks, from the Moslem and medieval Christian philosophers, and from many of the exploratory new psychologies of recent decades we shall discover more and more systems, more and more frames of reference, each of which is useful in itself, each valid within the limits set by its own assumptions? Psychical research, thinking of itself in purely negative terms as something different from classical science, may be puzzling because its own concepts are so heterogeneous. Actually, they have to be hetero- geneous because they come from these diverse cultural sources, and indeed from these ultimately distinct kinds of humanness so well hidden one from the other. Does it not seem to you, in these terms, a little odd that any one system should be regarded, even by serious philosophers,

a, 8=6e 14 Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research as the sole legitimate and valid way of studying the nature of man? The reconciliation of systems is, of course, possible, but only by transcending the assumptions of each such system. Science in the narrow sense will gain, while science in the broader sense will force it to wake up to this wider and wider system of expanding modes of observation and conceptualization. Psychical research itself will become less childlike, less jejune, less primitive and awk- ward as it gains in control over the kinds of phenomena with which it is concerned; as it develops improved methods of observ- ing, systematizing, and organizing its findings. Like an inventor who considers many systems of ideas which contain valid elements and looks for a feasible integration of these elements in a vital, new, valuable product, the psychical researcher will have to con- sider the various frames of reference from psychology, biology, physics, anthropology, and other relevant sciences. Of course, from the special bias which my own slot in life represents, I have to believe that personality study is one of the especially vital and important new ways of seeing the meaning of psychical research, and that psychical research is one of the most vital ways of understanding personality. One reason for my con- fidence in this interdependence of the two fields is the fact that the transcending of time, space, matter, and some other classical realities with which philosophy is concerned, is exactly the kind of thing that experiments in telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and retrocognition appear to offer us. Experiments on the influ- ence of distance upon the form of communication which we know as telepathy—as represented, for example, in Karlis Osis’ recent studies (1)—make it appear that we are not dealing with the fam- iliar type of distance effects and force us to conceptualize space— perhaps energy too—in new ways. Studies of time displacement also—seeing that which does not yet exist, or that which did exist and has passed from ordinary observation—suggest that new ways of conceiving the time-space continuum, and new ways of stating man’s relation to such a continuum, will have to become available to us. When, for example, Sefiora Maria Reyes de Z. saw the details of a shipwreck which later could be validated, the evidence pointed to the fact that she was not tapping anyone’s Psychical Research and the Study of Personality 15 memory of the event; rather, she was seeing a past reality (2). It will be the labor of decades or centuries to clarify these paranormal processes as they become adequately authenticated and as con- ceptual schemes go through disciplined revision to allow new and better frames of reference to emerge. This may well mean not one new system, but a number of new and interrelated systems. If the world is rationally constructed, we shall find some kind of compatibility of each system with the others, just as the X-ray evidence of Rose Franklin independently confirmed the biochemical evidence of Crick and Watson in their Nobel Prize-winning studies of the structure of the gene. This multiplicity of frames of reference is doubly needed when we pass from external events to the subtle and delicate in- ternal structures that function, dimly felt, within our own bodies. I have in mind, for example, what Lois Murphy has called the “ability to maintain internal integration,” an aspect of personality which proves to be a dimension of major significance in mental health. I would add that a number of studies now going on, such as the work of Joe Kamiya in San Francisco, Elmer Green in Topeka, S. David Kahn in Atlanta, and Kenneth Gaarder in Washington, D.C., have found themselves converging upon the problem of the internal environment and the modes of internal scanning of this environment as fundamental devices for giving the individual a broad conception of his own deeply personal relation to other persons and to other realities. All of these are new instrumental methods for dealing with ancient problems. The ancient problems have provided great riches, but personality in all its many dimensions will take ever-expanding Protean forms if it is observed from multiple viewpoints by Protean-minded in- vestigators who are not afraid to change their whole orientation to human individuality. Now, as a matter of empirical fact, these dimensions, dis- coverable in the psychological laboratory, begin to look very much like the variables that have long been signalized in psychical research. We have long known that relaxation, for example, is fun- damental, and it is under conditions of profound relaxation that this inner world is best observed. There must be openness and

16 Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research high motivation to get beyond the routine trivia of the environ- ment. One aim is to make contact with distant living realities through dissociation—the special attribute or ability to “split the mind”—so that preoccupation with irrelevant events does not disturb the tranquil flow of inner experience. Strong evidence of the reality of this freeing of the mind for the sake of better para- normal communication has been reported throughout the history of psychical research; and our own current studies related to this inner world appear to confirm it. This is one of the reasons why we speak of “altered states of consciousness,” an area in which we are now pressing for a breakthrough. But other lines of evidence are at hand to show that para- normal experiences among the more gifted subjects appear to be by no means inevitably rooted in the solitary individual, but at times express truly interpersonal relationships, a one-to-one rela- tionship, an individualized loyalty, or a loyalty to a co-working group. Long ago Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick (3) of the (London) Society for Psychical Research drew attention to the fact that telepathy depends not upon individual gifts alone, but upon dyadic relations or reciprocities; and the French chemical engineer, René Warcollier, found experimentally that there was a flow of com- munication among his subjects which he called “contagion among percipients.” The final sentence in his great study of telepathy is: “We are all the same man; I am you and you are I .. . we are the electrons of the atom of Humanity” (4, p. 294). As for our future labors in psychical research, they must move flexibly to new problems that are related to three main issues: First, finding the most favorable conditions under which gifted subjects can do their best work; second, among ordinary, less endowed individuals, discovering the kind of teaching and train- ing which will lift them toward the level of the gifted subject; and third, ascertaining the cross-cultural and indeed the cosmic settings within which the paranormal can flower, and as it flowers, what it can teach us about the depths of human personality. Speaking broadly from the standpoint of both psychical research and general psychology, I think we may say that these issues are defined in the spirit of that scientifically-trained, philosophically- Psychical Research and the Study of Personality 17 minded, and generous and sympathetic inventor and philanthropist, Chester F. Carlson, whom we are honoring this evening. REFERENCES 1. Osis, K., and Turner, M. E., Jr. “Distance and ESP: A Transcon- tinental Experiment.” Proc. A.S.P.R., Vol. 27, 1968, 1-48. . 2. PacensTecHER, G. “Past Events Seership: A Study in Psychometry. Proc. A.S.P.R., Vol. 16, 1922, 1-136. . 3. Swewrck, E. M. “On Hindrances and Complications in Telepathic Com- munication.” Proc. S.P.R., Vol. 34, 1924, 28-69. . 4. Warcoturr, R. Experimental Telepathy. Boston: Boston Society for Psychic Research, 1938. Department of Psychology George Washington University Washington, D.C. 20006