(5) Mental Nutrition Modified By Spirit Control

(A) Ordinary Sensory Perception Spiritually Controlled

-The next heading in our previous series was sensory receptivity. In the scheme of supraliminal faculty this included the ordinary action of the sense-organs, whose limits so largely determine our intellectual life. In the subliminal scheme, we found that the action of these senses was sometimes heightened in hyperaesthesia, and sometimes deadened in anaesthesia more or less complete. We found also, - and this was the most significant extension of faculty, - that under certain circumstances the sensation of pain could be voluntarily inhibited, and the organism thus devoted without interruption to those higher purposes, with which pain, - an ancient form of warning, now often worse than useless, - too frequently interferes. Passing on to the effects on sensory receptivity produced by spiritual control, we find, as under previous headings, that the effects which self-suggestion can produce on the organism are produced also, and with apparently greater facility, by spirit power; and moreover that a new delicacy of directive or selective action is observable under the more skilful manipulations (so to say) of disembodied intelligence.

Such at least is the claim advanced; although naturally it is often only by the analogy of other phenomena occurring in connection that one can be guided in attributing these intellectual results to an external rather than a merely subliminal influence. The hyperaesthesia, anaesthesia, or analgesia of trance, for example, does not in itself indicate whether a spirit external to the subject has been at the work or no. If however during a trance D. D. Home places his head without pain or injury amid glowing coals, and if we there admit a spirit's action (although perhaps on the environment rather than on the organism), we may consequently attribute to similarly external influence other forms of insensibility shown during the same or similar trances. And in connection with trance, when we reach that topic, there will be further instances of the abeyance in which ordinary sensation can be held by spirit-control.

(B) Memory Controlled; Retrocognition Spiritually Given

And some-what similarly, just as the subliminal control over memory is greater than the supraliminal, so it is claimed by spirits also that they can influence the sensitive's memory; can make him recall things forgotten or never noticed, and on the other hand, can obliterate from his recollection things previously known. This claim - thoroughly concordant with our scheme - is hardly capable of objective proof.

(C) Sensory Automatism Spiritually Controlled; Phantasms Of The Dead, Erc

This parallelism of action continues under our next heading of "sensory automatism." Even as the subliminal self can present visual or auditory phantasms for supraliminal observation; even as the human agent, acting telepathically, can present - still through subliminal agency - his own phantasmal appearance for the percipient to recognise, so can the spirit. The "ghost" of common parlance - the "phantasm of the dead" - may often seem but a dreamy and purposeless reflection of some portion only of the departed spirit's being; but, nevertheless, it comes from that spirit, I believe, as truly as the still living agent's phantasm comes from him, in his dying or his critical hour. The spirit here is acting concurrently with the supraliminal intelligence, just as the subliminal intelligence has already done.

(D) Telaesthesia Developed Into Perception Of Spiritual Environment; Precognition

But this series of spiritual modifications of sensory receptivity which has thus far seemed merely to run parallel with the similar modifications introduced by subliminal control, takes here a great, a significant extension. We have come to the heading of telaesthesia - to the point where the man's unaided spirit has seemed already, though still acting in the physical, the planetary, environment - to transcend the bounds of space. Whether and how far at the same time it has learnt to transcend the bounds of time - in retrocognition or precognition - is a point which we have not here felt it needful to discuss at length. But now, when we consider the scope of clairvoyance under spiritual guidance, we find that the word must assume a strange and novel meaning. There are, indeed, some instances of spiritually-guided clairvoyance of the terrestrial type. It was clairvoyance of that kind, one may say, when, under spiritual control, Mr. Moses felt himself present - though rather as by translation than by clairvoyant vision - at the distant funeral of his friend.