A PSYCHIC PUZZLE

Greymouth Evening Star, 5 March 1926, Page 7

A PSYCHIC PUZZLE

SCIENTIST AND SEANCE. An extremely interesting account ot sittings z with a spiritualistic medium is given by Mr S. G. Soal, M.A., B.Sc., in the December issue of the “Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research” which may have far-reaching results in the interpretation of tnese phenomena. The medium, was Mrs Blanche Cooper, the scene of the “communications” was an apartment in the British College of Psychic Science, and the series of sittings‘ -were mainly occupied by three individual “communicators”— one a deceased brother of Mr Soal, another a former schoolfellow whom he had erroneously supposed to have been killed in the war, and the third a fictitious person of Soal’s own imagining. Mr Soal dismisses the hypothesis of conscious fraud upon the part of the medium, and is chiefly impressed with the strong suggestion which ..all three cases make of unconscious transmission of thought from his own mind to that of the medium. The questions addressed through the medium to his deceased brother elicited reference to a' number of incidents known to both of them—there being great improbability in some instances of their being known to any third party. In one or two cases incidents were mentioned which Mr Soal could not consciously recall, but which were corroborated by an early play-

mate of his brother’s, and the possibility remains of their having been once known to Mr Soal and sub-con-sciously retained. The most curious episode of this series was a statement of Mr Soal s brother, through the medium, that he had buried a medal in a certain place and told no one of it. After this “communication” Mr Soal and another brother dug upon the .Scene and unearthed a round leaden disc, which a boy might have described as a “medal,” which corresponded in certain other ways to the particulars given, and which, could not have been recently interred. ■ ■ • In another case Mr Soal built up

round an imaginary personality a story piecemeal in his own mind with local and family connections, and as it grew from stage to stage the appropriate particulars were forthcoming in the “communication.” The most remarkable case, however, is connected with Mr Gordon Davis, a boy whom Mr Soal had known slight- . ly at school, and with whom he had had a brief meeting and conversation while they were both war cadets, and of whose death he had received a false report. The “spirit” of Mr Davis intervened in a seance without initiative on Mr Soal’s part, “From the first moment,” says Mr Soal, “I had a lightning impression that the tone was quite familiar to me, but,l could not immediately place it.” The forms of address were highly characteristic, and several authentic references were

made to school memories and. to the war-time conversation. When Mr Davis afterwards read the notes of the seance he recognised the style of speech as being that which he would naturally use. It was not until three years later that Mr Soal discovered Mr Davis to be still alive—whereupon he held a thorough discussion of the “communications” with him, with the result of bringing out one remarkable feature which they possessed. The general trend of Mr Soal’s experiences, as has been said, was to indicate that nothing emerged in the “communications” which had not been already in his own mind, though perhaps only sub-consciously. Sub-consciousness, indeed, appeared to furnish, the better avenue of con-: tact: — ■ “Questions asked by the sitter are seldom answered immediately in the case when the sitter is holding the correct answer in his conscious mind. In such cases it was usually found that the idea had to pass back into the unconscious mind of the sitter before it could emerge, form the automatism of the medium. The communicator, when asked for an answer, would usually reply: “I cannot give it now, but will try to give it later.” Then at a later period of the sitting, when the sitter had quite forgotten the matter in question, the correct answer would be forthcoming. It cases when the correct answer was not known to the sitter, a direct question would often result in immediate success.” Upon these lines the accumulation of facts pointing to transmission from the sitter’s mind to the medium’s of what the sitter knew in some fashion or another was of a very impressive character. But the remarkable thing about the

“communication” from Mr Gordon. Davis was that it described ‘’his house” in a way that did not apply to the one which he then occupied, but represented in striking fashion another into which he removed at a later date. It gave the initials of the road in which the house was situated, spoke of a “funny dark tunnel” of the steps, of landscape pictures (one in detail), of a profusion of flowers and of certain distinctive ornamental vases and candlesticks. The house described was substantially the house as Mr Soal found it on visiting Mr Davis three years later, and reference to Mr Davis’s business diaries established the fact that three days before the seance he had been inspecting the house and engaging his mind with it with a view to occupancy. The “communication” had spoken of “five or six steps and a half.” The actual house “has six steps, the bottom one being very thin.” The correspondence between “communication” and actuality in this matter cannot be ascribed to telepathy between Mr Soal and the medium. Mr Soal thought Mr Davis was dead, and if he had any thoughts about “his house,” they could only have applied to some former dwelling. If telepathy is’ in question, it could only, be of a remoter kind—between Mr Davis himself and the medium. And, of course, speculatively, another hypothesis presents itself, bringing the phenomena into relation with Einstein’s chain of theory. As Mr Soal says: “The case has special interest in re-" latiQn to those theories in which the mortal universe is regarded as a four-dimensional complex, with time as the fourth dimension. Looked at from this point of view, human beings have an extension in time as well as in the other three dimensions. They exist in their totality independently of the particular moment at which we choose to view them, lhe personality of Gordon Davis was arrested, as it were, at a particular point of the time stream—i?te., a special three-dimensional section was taken of his four-dimensional complex. He was dramatised in 1922 to appear as he would be in his new environment of 1923.”