THE PSYCHIC REALM
From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord deliver us. (Traditional Scottish prayer)
As we think about death and what if anything might come after we need neither blind belief nor blind unbelief. We need to look at the evidence, even if the evidence is going to be anecdotal. And we need to start by considering various phenomena which happen here and now.
Ghosts
Ghosts are usually inert apparitions from the past. I knew a girl who went to look at an empty house her parents were thinking of buying. In one room she saw a woman playing the piano. She did not mention this, but was interested to note that when they moved in, her parents put the piano in the same position.
A lady In I knew in Earls Court once saw a lady in an old-fashioned dress posting a letter in a post box in Barkston Gardens.
Then there is the famous ghost of the battle of Edgehill 1642, the first battle of the English Civil war. It is the only ghost recorded in the British Public Record Office. The heading is ‘A Great Wonder in Heaven, showing the late apparitions and prestigious Noises of the War and Battles, seen at Edgehill, near Kineton’. The apparitions were noisy, terrifying and recognisable, but after three months, when the dead had been given Christian burial, the sightings mostly stopped; though some are still witnessed around the anniversary of the battle, 23rd October.
These apparitions seem to be something like photographs of the past caught in time.
More active ghosts
A young couple I know in Kingston-upon Thames had an elderly male ghost in their Edwardian house. Theysometimes heard him going up the stairs. When the wife was on her own, reading a book on the sofa, he would sit companionably next to her and cough occasionally. It did not faze the couple at all!
A more disturbing ghost was in a 1920’s house. It once sheered off the base of a decorated glass tumbler while the women was holding it. (I had it on my window sill for a number of years). My guess is that it was annoyed at her smoking in the kitchen. We prayed Compline or Night Prayer in the house and I heard of no more happenings.
Poltergeists
When I came up for interview at Merton College Oxford, I read in a local paper of a mischievous ghost in a local Co-op store which kept moving packets of bicarbonate of soda through air to the sugar counter. At one occurrence, the cashier fainted, so the manager called in the local vicar to conduct an exorcism. At the conclusion of the service there was a blue flash from one of the neon lights and the disturbances ceased.
Poltergeist behaviour, I understand, is usually the product of excess mental energy from someone present, often a teenager. My rule of thumb is that the more obvious the phenomena the less there is to worry about.
Psychic infestation
In 1975 a young couple in Earls Court, a guitarist and a go-go dancer decided to go to hear Billy Graham for a laugh. But they were both converted. The trouble was that they then encountered frightening psychic disturbances, particularly when some force shook their bed night. They linked it to a rock group they had accompanied on a tour of Japan who practised black magic. They came to church to get help. I said that it was no problem, they should come to our late night outreach cafe the One Way Inn and we would pray for them. They did. End of problem
In Kingston two young women came to see me about a very unpleasant atmosphere in their flat, which they attributed to a room downstairs which had been painted black. I went with a church member and we had a simple service of Compline, during which my colleague felt something unpleasant leave.
As Dom Robert Petitpierre, a monk officially allowed to conduct exorcisms in London, said, “It’s quite simple really, you say your prayers and the Lord deals with it.”
Psychic Studies
Near South Kensington tube station is the College of Psychic Studies, formed in 1884. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was President from 1926 to 1930. There you can get workshops and courses in mediumship, chakras, dowsing, tarot, shamanism, palmistry, astrology witchcraft and psychic development.
Of course, the trouble is that you do not know what you are getting into. In his marvellous book ‘The Devils of Loudun” Aldous Huxley has this warning:
‘If they ignore the call to union with the Son through works, if they forget that the final end of human life is the liberating and transfiguring knowledge of the Father … there will be a mere merging with spirit, with every Tom, Dick and Harry of a psychic world, most of whose inhabitants are no nearer enlightenment than we are, while some may actually be more impenetrable to the Light than the most opaque of incarnate beings.’ (p.84)
Is this a joke?
As a young man the journalist and novelist G K Chesterton dabbled in spiritualism, specifically with the planchette or ouija board.
‘I saw quite enough of the thing to be able to testify, with complete certainty, that something happens that is not in the ordinary sense natural, or produced by the normal and conscious human will… The only thing I can say with complete confidence, about that mystic and invisible power, is that it tells lies….
I will give (an) example. We asked the planchette in our usual random fashion what advice it would give to … a solid and rather dull Member of Parliament who had the misfortune to be an authority on education. Planchette wrote down with brazen promptitude the simple words, “Get a divorce.” We sternly enquired of our familiar spirit what the devil he meant… It wrote down very rapidly an immensely … long word which was at first quite illegible. It wrote it four or five times and it became apparent it began with O-R-R. I said, ‘This is all nonsense; there is no word in the English language beginning ORR…’ Finally it tried again and wrote the word out quite clearly; and it ran ‘orriblerevelationsinighlife.’’
Breaking the Bonds
Dr Kenneth McAll was a missionary doctor in China and interned by the Japanese. On returning to England he joined a GP partnership, then in 1956 retrained as a psychiatrist living in mental hospitals. ‘Many emotional problems have their roots in a purely chemical imbalance… Many deep emotional hurts need a different sort of therapy…. An increasing number of the patients sent to me admitted that they suffered from the presence of ‘spirits’…. This was reminiscent of the traditional Chinese superstitions about good and evil spirits I had encountered so many times when I lived in the Far East… (Some voices) seemed to be evil and often came as a result of occult practices, while others seemed to be neutral, harmless voices begging for help.’
Dr McAll came to believe that simple prayer and holy communion could effect remarkable cures. Here is two examples from his riveting book “Healing the Family Tree’:
1. ‘Norma (a clergyman’s daughter) had developed an urge to gouge out the eyes of her own children… When we drew up the family tree we discovered that generations ago the family residence had been a castle with moat and dungeons. We found a torture chamber in the dungeons containing, among other evil things, implements which would have been used for the deed that was obsessing Norma.
‘(The father and the bishop) decided to celebrate a Eucharist for the dead in five days time. To our amazement, the father heard that his daughter was completely freed from her obsession on the day this decision had been made. She had had no knowledge of our intention; the hospital where she was kept in a padded cell was more than an hundred miles away.’
2 ‘Margaret was seventy-three years old when her ‘attacks’ began suddenly. Violent outbursts of temper, unprovoked aggression towards her younger sister with whom she lived and bouts of smashing objects. Their mother who had died four years earlier aged ninety-six had behaved in a similar way. After each attack Margaret was genuinely remorseful. Her sister Nellie sought my help and we agreed that on the next distressing occasion she would command Satan to leave. But when Nellie did so, Margaret slapped her face with great force screaming “It’s great-aunt Agnes! It’s great-aunt Agnes!”
‘So we drew up a Family Tree in as much detail as we could. For the past six generations the eldest female in the family had shown similar disturbed behaviour. It began about 1750 when a murder had been committed in the family; the eldest daughter Elisabeth had become an alcoholic and died at forty. Now Margaret’s eldest niece Rhonda had been having psychiatric treatment since her husband threatened to divorce her because of her destructive behaviour.
‘We held a private eucharist for six generations of the eldest women of the family with two clergy, a doctor, two nurses, Nellie and Dr McAll. Neither Margaret nor Rhonda knew of it, but the disturbing behaviours stopped.’
Dawkin’s View
Richard Dawkins, guru of the New Atheists, has a chapter in his excellent book ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ called ‘Hoodwink’d with Faery Fancy’. He is particularly scornful of the way television and newspapers, take the authenticity of psychic practitioners for granted. His targets are astrology, faith healing, telepathy and reports of miracles like levitation. Even where reports are possible, as in alien visitors from space, the alternative explanations of fraud or illusion are more probable. He closes the chapter with this sweeping but undiscussed assertion: ‘There are no (fairies but) also no devils, no hellfire, no wicked witches, no ghosts, no haunted houses, no demonic possession…’ (p. 142).
Some discussion on any of these points would have been nice, but sadly Dawkins does not offer any arguments at all.
My view
In the hilarious movie ‘Ruthless People’, one of the characters says, “Unless the chief of police is a complete idiot, and complete idiots are rare, something strange is going on.”
And something strange is definitely going on! Some of it may be an expansion of our normal mental energy as in telepathy. But for others the only explanation it seems to me is the existence of a ‘psychic realm’ parallel to and interpenetrating our three dimensional universe. And what goes on there is as good, bad and indifferent as in our workaday world. Some are open to a loving and creative Higher Power, some are resistant. A lot of the unhappy experiences seem to me to stem from those who get stuck in that earth-bound psychic realm.
Jesus took the reality of such entities for granted. But interestingly in the earliest gospel tradition (i.e. Mark) the expression used of such is not ‘evil spirits’ but ’unclean spirits’. You could almost translate it as non-kosher spirits. The essence of being kosher or clean in the Torah is that of not mixing things that should not be mixed, such as animals which have cloven feet but do not chew the cud; or sea creatures that do not have fins or scales; or wearing a mixture of wool and linen. Maybe the idea is that unclean spirits are wandering unhappily in the no-mans land between this world and the next. As Jesus said, ‘When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it wanders through waterless regions looking for a resting-place, but it finds none.’ (Matthew 12.43-45)
Perhaps we should leave the last word with Shakespeare’s Hamlet: