(7) Modifications Of Subliminal Personality

(A) Birth; As Spiritual Individuation

With the profounder con-ception of the Self which our inclusion of its subliminal elements implies, we find associated profounder severances and re-arrangements in its constituent elements; - more significant changes, so to say, in its internal configuration. I desire to compare these with the modifications of personality which occur in ordinary life; to compare them, of course, with the purpose of ultimately showing that here also we are making a forward step in precisely that path of which spirit-control is in some sense the goal. The first modification of personality of which we have cognisance, the first on our former list of supraliminal changes, was the crisis of birth. From our former point of view that crisis was one of physiological individuation only. Regarding the organism now as in truth an organon - as an instrument through which a spirit essentially distinct therefrom exercises the faculties which subserve its self-expression - we shall ask ourselves what else has occurred at birth, besides the separation of a new bud from the genealogical tree which is rooted in earth's prehistoric past.

At present we have seen reason for conjecturing that this at least has occurred; - the individuation, in connection with the organism, of some form of spiritual faculty, - of faculty, that is to say, which must have been called into being in some other environment, since the struggle for existence in this material world could not have originated or developed it. Such, as I have elsewhere urged, are the faculties concerned in telepathy and clairvoyance; they are modes of perception which the corporeal organism may restrict but can hardly in any conceivable way have evolved. Yet although we may trace this one side of our lineage to a spiritual or metetherial world, it does not follow that we can therefore claim that our personalities now incarnated in these bodies are the continued manifestation of personalities which have already lived as distinctive entities elsewhere, or which can survive as personalities that other crisis of bodily death to which the fact of incarnation necessarily exposes them.

Let us see whether other phases of terrene personality throw any light upon this problem.

(B) Sleep And Trance; Self-Suggested Or Telepathically-Suggested; With Clairvoyant Visions

Parallel with our heading of "sleep" in the column of supraliminal faculties we have the heading of "trance" in the subliminal. And in its first and simplest aspect trance is suggested sleep, - sleep imitated by the subliminal self from the familial spontaneous pattern, but often improved in the imitation, both in restorative efficacy and in fitness for ends other than physical recuperation. From the thought-transference experiment with lightly hypnotised subjects to the sommeil a distance inspired by Dr. Gibert or Dr. Janet in "Leonie"; - from the hyperesthesia of some of M. Binet's subjects to the "travelling clairvoyance" of "Jane" (573 B) we find each supernormal faculty in turn facilitated by the abeyance of man's habitual attention to the stimuli of the material world. The degree to which this protection from intrusive thought, or intrusive pain, may be carried is hardly yet explored; but the same abstraction which is enough to induce in many subjects a complete indifference to severe surgical operations, may perhaps hereafter be utilised to assist in securing undisturbed intensity of thought.

And in the meantime most of these states of sleep or trance present an unsolicited crop of ideas and pictures of their own. All dreams, indeed, according to my definition, are properly subliminal; they do not belong to the superficial memory, although they lie so close to it that they may get included in it by a sort of accident. They are bubbles breaking upon that surface from the deep below. It is natural, therefore, that this easiest method of communication should be taken advantage of by the subliminal self to send upward messages of deeper import. All the newly-noted forms of faculty which we have already touched upon find expression either in dreams or in the sleep-waking intervals which are a kind of transitory emergences into a condition on the other side of sleep. Hypermnesia is oftenest shown in dreams, and clairvoyance in the sleep-waking or somnambulic stage of hypnotic trance. In dreams also retrocognition and precognition are manifested; faculties which, since their origin is obscure, I am now claiming solely for the unaided subliminal self.

(C) Ecstasy

Under this heading I include experiences where the subliminal self in trance changes its environment and passes for a time into the spiritual world, retaining such relations to the organism as enable it to return to its ordinary condition.