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Introduction–Beyond Consciousness

SARAH MARTIN PAUSED OUTSIDE HER ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD daughter’s bedroom door. Again she heard a sob, a moan. She opened the door and went in quickly. Margaret was sleeping, but from the corner of her eye a tear was squeezed out and trickled down her cheek. Mrs. Martin shook her daughter. The girl sat up, rubbed her eyes, and suddenly burst into tears.

“He’s dead!” she cried. “He’s dead!”

“Who’s dead? What do you mean?” Mrs. Martin asked.

“Brownie’s dead!” wailed the girl. “He’s been run over. He’s dead.”

“Nonsense,” said her mother. “He just ate a pound of meat. He is very much alive.”

The girl smiled weakly. “I must have dreamed it,” she said. “I heard you tell me Brownie was killed by a car. It was so real. Please don’t let him out of the yard today.”

Two days later when Margaret returned from school, Mrs. Martin did tell her daughter of Brownie’s death. He had been struck by an automobile.

What appears to be a psychic warning of the dog’s death in this strange little dream can possibly be explained by checking the habit patterns of the family and coincidence. At times Brownie may have barked at cars. The family probably had talked about the danger of the dog being killed. Mrs. Martin could have been heard expressing concern over the dog. Margaret’s dream therefore may have reflected only her unconscious worry. It just happened to be brought to consciousness when Mrs. Martin awakened her daughter. However, the dream, like all dreams, is an indication that the mind is more active on an unconscious level than we are generally aware.

As a Sunday school teacher for fifteen years in an orthodox Protestant church and as a scoutmaster for twenty-five years, I have had an opportunity to observe and record a great many spontaneous cases of dreams, premonitions, apparent telepathy, and religious experiences of young people, which seem to be rather normal and frequent actions of the mind beyond consciousness. Persistent observation always ends with the disturbing thought that the regular psychological explanations of memory patterns and coincidence do not adequately explain all of these occurrences.

Rather early in my life I had the opportunity to observe a distinct group of people whose mental activities were even more startling. During seven summers of my childhood and adolescence I visited a Kentucky farm adjacent to a large State mental institution. My cousin’s father was a very popular physician at the institution. He frequently took us from ward to ward as he talked with the patients. With two other boys of our own age, sons of the superintendent, we had the freedom of the extensive grounds where hundreds of the less disturbed inmates spent endless hours sitting in the sun or moving restlessly about in restricted areas. During many long summer afternoons my friends and I listened to these patients talk. There were times when their conversations were quite normal. Then suddenly one of them would open a door into another world peopled with angels, devils, and weird animals. Some of these men and women frightened us. Others were gentle and kind. Obscenity, beauty, imagery, and fear were mingled in a kaleidoscopic outpouring from their distorted minds.

With a few of the less disturbed patients, the “trusties” (those we could trust), we went swimming and blackberrying. Sometimes we stole watermelons and, while eating them in the shade of a convenient haystack, our peculiar friends gave fantastic accounts of impossible happenings from their early childhood.

Years later with a little background in abnormal psychology it was possible to identify some of the types and their problems. Daniel and Ezekiel’s visions from the Old Testament were no more symbol-filled than many we heard described in our youth. I will never cease to wonder about the man who, after pledging us to secrecy, would accurately and instantaneously tell exactly how many small rocks were in a pile or how many blackberries were in a can or a bucket. Each day when he was able to join us provided a new opportunity to challenge him. He was right so frequently that we lost interest after a few rounds. There was another man who would stick pins in himself, apparently without experiencing pain; and an older teenage boy could imitate any sound he heard. We became acquainted with a very interesting group of people.

From these troubled individuals, as from the more normal young people, I learned that the mind beyond immediate consciousness was filled with strange patterns, capable of unusual feats of memory and remarkable control over the body.

More than any other experience or observation, it was the day-today examination of the words pouring out of one unconscious man which brought me face to face with a world about which we know very little in normal consciousness. When I was born, my father was already attracting local attention through his ability to speak from a self-induced unconscious state. By the time I was three years old, the accuracy of the psychic content of his unconscious speech had become the subject of national newspaper publicity. My earliest memories include fragments of discussions about the value and dangers of, as well as how to handle, this peculiar ability. Throughout the years a great many people came to ask for help, question, study, test, and sometimes ridicule and persecute my father. It was natural that my interest in psychic subjects would grow. And it is understandable that in considering the activity of the unconscious mind I must draw heavily upon my experiences with him and the information which he gave during his unconscious states.

I have become acquainted with an enormous, and frequently confusing, mass of writings by and about people who had experiences beyond normal consciousness. More exciting and rewarding have been the years of investigations and comparative studies of contemporaries who (like my father) spent considerable parts of their lives in unconscious states. I have visited mediums, talked with people who claimed to have had visions, read thousands of pages of automatic writing, and been involved in various types of experiments with hypnosis.

In considering any type of unconscious state, questions always occur far faster than they can be answered. How does the mind work beyond physical awareness? How valuable is the information which comes through or from the unconscious? What can an understanding of this area of the mind tell us about the dimensions of ourselves? Through various doorways—hypnosis, the use of drugs, trance, automatic writing, meditation, spontaneous experiences, religious ecstasy, and the everyday, universal experience of sleep—people slip away from physical consciousness. Throughout many decades I have observed the weird and grotesque, the amusing and the filthy, as well as the beautiful and complicated, the profound and challenging, aspects of this hidden mind. Perhaps here we can find some answers to questions about the nature of our being.

The type of the outpourings from an unconscious is governed to some extent by whose unconscious is being explored and by who is doing the exploring. It must have been an exciting experience in olden times to watch the unloading of a ship returned from the Orient laden with exotic and beautiful treasures. When slave ships docked, however, some would have witnessed the unloading with horror and apprehension. Just so the material from an unconscious can be stimulating or disturbing. Obvious tensions, conscious fears, dreams, and repeated mistakes in speech are only a few of the psychological indications of unconscious mental activity. Psychology and psychiatry have made great strides in tracking such material to its source, at times in some deep-hidden memory bank. When exploring the unconscious, we are like children walking at night through familiar woods, imagining trees to be wild animals and waving bushes to be ghosts and dragons. In the unconscious, as in the woods, a little light can be most helpful. Reports are sometimes so incongruous that it is not recognized that explorers are describing small sections of the same labyrinth.

It is obvious that much of the furnishings of the unconscious are memories of forgotten conscious experiences. Some memories are beautiful; some are unsightly; and there is a considerable mixture. Childhood recollections of the old swimming hole can be pleasant—unless the individual almost drowned there. Or a war experience which contains many painful reminiscences may also include thought patterns of friendships which remain strong and positive.

In attempting to discover just where our memories are located, it is logical to begin the search in one of the most remarkable components of the human creature—the fifty ounces of pulpy, gray mass in the head—the brain. This is a world in itself, made up of millions of cells. Though the functions of some groups of these cells are known—sight controlled through the occipital lobe, hearing through the temporal—the activity of a large part of the brain is unknown. Humankind knows far more about the surface of the earth than it does about the human brain.

I have tried visualizing the earth and attempting to locate the various continents and countries in them. Then, I have tried to think of the brain. My knowledge of even the areas from which the control of activities of the body stems is woefully limited. A few years ago I learned of the discovery of a new country in the brain.

Dr. Wilder Penfield, until 1960 director of the Montreal Neurological Institute, speaking before a 1957 meeting of the American National Academy of Sciences, described experiments with tiny electrical currents which when applied to an area in the fine tissue covering the brain, stimulated memories of forgotten experiences. Apparently details of consciousness are physically recorded and can be recalled when activated. The brain seems to contain a very efficient tape recorder. Almost a thousand patients reported vivid recall more real than remembering. One patient not only heard a forgotten song again but also recognized it as being heard in the present. The interpretative process seemed to work simultaneously with remembering. This discovery locates at least a part of what is known as the unconscious mind of man. However, the memory of conscious action, as complicated as it may be, does not seem to account for all of the strange discoveries being made by many “inward” explorations.

When the North American continent was first sighted by Europeans, the first landing crews penetrated only a few hundred yards inland. Most of the observations were made as the ships sailed along the coast. Later, better-organized expeditions returned, bringing explorers and settlers who kept records and journals. The discoveries of areas of the mind have been like this. First explorations skirted around its edges; then more trained scientists led expeditions into the interior. Their findings have become the basis for many of our psychological theories. Psychiatrists like Freud, Jung, and many of those who followed them would have been the first to acknowledge that their discoveries only began to measure the dimensions of the unconscious mind. Comparable to vast forests, rivers, and mountains or ore deposits of a new-discovered continent, there are areas of the mind which lie unexplored and undeveloped. Like the urges which drove our early American pioneers, fever-like in their intensity, there seem to be similar impulses in our modern society to explore the unconscious. Popular motion pictures, plays, television and radio programs, wide-read books, newspaper and magazine articles reflect a trend of interest which amounts to fascination, as man begins to unlock doors leading off the dimly lighted corridors of his mind.

Even at the risk of oversimplifying the profound concepts of some of the first modern discoveries about the mind, it seems to me that a few brief definitions will help us move forward in our thinking about the unconscious. Sigmund Freud, one of the earliest explorers, described it as that part of our mental life of which we are unaware. Unconscious material is shut off from consciousness when it is not needed or is unacceptable. He concluded that the unconscious holds infantile instinctual material with all its inherent amorality. The “id,” according to Freud, is that part of our mental personality which clings to all primitive cravings and instincts.

C.G. Jung, for a time a student of Freud’s, spoke of the unconscious as having two layers—the personal and the collective. He said that the personal layer includes the earliest memories of infancy, but the collective layer comprises the preinfantile period—that is, the residues of ancestral life. Jung explained that our consciousness floats like a little island on the boundless sea of the unconscious. In describing the help which can come from it, he suggested that the unconscious gives us all the encouragement and help that a bountiful nature can shower on us. He points out, “It holds possibilities which are locked away from the conscious mind, for it has at its disposal all subliminal psychic contents, all those things which have been forgotten or overlooked, as well as the wisdom and experience of uncounted centuries which are laid down in its archetypal organs … the unconscious can serve man as a unique guide, provided he can resist the lure of being misguided.”¹

The direct approach to the unconscious, which allows it to speak for itself under controlled conditions, has provided some of the best material for study. The worth of this approach, like the worth of a garden, may be judged by its fruits, and the fruits have been good. An outstanding historical example was Sigmund Freud’s early studies of Anna Q., a patient of Josef Breuer. In a conscious state and under hypnosis she was allowed to talk about her symptoms, and each in turn disappeared. Freud visited Professor Jean Baptiste Charcot to observe his work with hypnosis. Later Freud turned from hypnosis to dream analysis and free association as ways of exploring the unconscious. The discovery that this hidden area of the mind to some extent could “explain itself” led to the development of Freud’s monumental work in the psychiatric field.

As already mentioned, one of the major approaches to the unconscious mind which will be considered in this book is the mass of data which came from the unconscious of one man. Of special interest will be the material which seems to involve clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, and descriptions of other than three dimensions. All of these subjects lie in the province of psychical research, which explores the unconscious as it attempts to measure and evaluate mental and spiritual powers apparently operating beyond the five senses. My personal experiences involve many of the different approaches which are used. Among the most widely publicized are hypnotism, experiments with mediums, drugs, card guessing and matching, spontaneous cases of extended perception such as warning dreams, hunches, visions of the dead, etc., investigations of so-called haunted houses, and automatic writing. As will be seen, such invasions of the unconscious frequently awaken “a sleeping giant” like the ogre in Puss in Boots, capable of becoming an elephant, a lion, or a mouse.

Obviously this book can be only a very limited examination of the psychic phenomena I have observed. Some brief historical references have been included in order to make comparative reference to my father’s experiences and data. This book is not a psychiatric study, though it deals frequently with abnormalities in mental activity. It is not an examination of the vast and complex world of symbology, so obviously associated with the language of the unconscious mind, though the stories related here contain much symbolism. Nor can this be a psychological analysis of complexes and frustrations, interpreted through various tests and measured evaluations of responses to either individual or group stimuli. It is not a documented laboratory study. If there seem to be contradictions and confusing explanations, it is because of my inadequate observations. There is no pretense here that all the answers have been discovered. I will be content if the importance of the direction of the search is suggested.

This is a compilation of my studies and observations of people who through psychic experiences have found themselves in touch with this seemingly boundless unconscious. In spite of the dangers, the fraud, the self-deception, the ever-present question of insanity, my conviction has grown through the years that in or perhaps through this unconscious lies a thread of light, hard to find and harder to follow, which leads to higher realms of mental and spiritual awareness.

This book is addressed to thousands of people who have had spontaneous psychic experiences which seem to transcend normal sense perception—hunches, warning dreams of coming events, and flashes of telepathy. It is also directed to the many individuals who are confused because of having dabbled in some psychic experiment. They have attended a séance or tried automatic writing or a Ouija® board. The directions given them have been just exciting enough to lead them on. Can it actually be a dead grandfather, an East Indian guide, or an alien being who spoke so flatteringly of one’s place in the New World Order? Also there are within orthodox churches many sincere people who are asking questions about the many psychic abilities and experiences described in both the Old and New Testaments. Can modern psychic research offer helpful explanations of such happenings? Are these same kinds of events taking place today? And last, there is a small but important group of students of the paranormal who may find here a few bridges from one area of mental and spiritual phenomena to another. The searching of this last group is not so much concerned with the magic-like powers of the unconscious exhibited through psychic phenomena, but rather with achieving some small insight into the true nature of man. Through focus on controlling matter, we have acted like a person who has entered a small room, shutting himself away from the grandeur of the stars, the majesty of the forest and mountains. Plato described this as being chained in a dark cave, forced to observe only flickering shadows on a wall. William Blake puts it in those haunting words from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.”

Mystics, sages, and philosophers of many ages have directed us to move outward through love, service, and sacrifice. It is these very people who have simultaneously ventured inward beyond the barriers of individual and mass fears and conflicts to find the indwelling source of inspiration and energy from which direction and control for outer expression may be achieved. This book is predicated on the belief that a better understanding of the functioning of the inner world, the unconscious mind, can bring insight into the true nature of humankind. And further, that such understanding can be clarified through examining some of the historic and contemporary practices of venturing inward.

¹C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Bollingen Series II (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953, p. 114)