Michael Cremo - Human Devolution - A Vedic Alternative To Darwin's Theory

From all the evidence recorded in his books, Flammarion (1923 v.3, p. 348) arrived at five conclusions: “(1) The soul exists as a real entity, independent of the body. (2) It is endowed with faculties still unknown to science. (3) It may act at a distance, telepathically, without the intermediary of the senses. (4) There exists in nature a psychic element, the character of which is still hidden from us. . . . (5) The soul survives the physical organism and may manifest itself after death.”

Concerning the relationship of the soul to the body, Flammarion (1923 v. 3, p. 346) said: “The body is but an organic garment of the spirit; it dies, it changes, it disintegrates: the spirit remains. . . . The soul cannot be destroyed.” This is remarkably similar to the following statement from Bhagavad Gita (2.22): “As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.”

On a Friday night in April of 1880, Mrs. N. J. Crans went to sleep in New York. She reported in a letter to Richard Hodgson, of the American Society for Psychical Research: “After lying down to rest, I remember feeling a drifting sensation, of seeming almost as if I was going out of the body. My eyes were closed; soon I realized that I was, or seemed to be, going fast somewhere. All seemed dark to me; suddenly I realized that I was in a room; then I saw Charley lying in a bed asleep; then I took a look at the furniture of the room, and distinctly saw every article—even to a chair at the head of the bed, which had one of the pieces broken in the back.” Charley was her son-in-law, Charles A. Kernochan, who was living in Central City, South Dakota. Mrs. Crans continued: “In a moment the door opened and my spirit-daughter Allie came into the room and stepped up to the bed and stooped down and kissed Charley. He seemed to at once realize her presence, and tried to hold her, but she passed right out of the room about like a feather blown by the wind.” Allie was the daughter of Mrs. Crans and the wife of Charles Kernochan. She had died in December 1879, about five months before this incident. Mrs. Crans told several people about her dream, and then on Sunday wrote a letter to Charles. Meanwhile, Charles himself had written a letter which crossed hers in the mail, delivery of which took about six days between New York and South Dakota. In this letter, Charles wrote, “Oh, my darling mamma Crans! My God! I dreamed I saw Allie last Friday night!” Mrs. Crans said that Charles described Allie “just as I saw her; how she came into the room and he cried and tried to hold her, but she vanished.” After Charles sent this letter, he received the letter sent by Mrs. Crans, and wrote another letter in reply. Mrs. Crans said that Charles “wrote me all that I had seen was correct, even to every article of furniture in the room, also as his dream had appeared to him” (Myers 1903, v. 1, p. 244). In this case, it appears that both percipients were in the dream state when Allie appeared to them. One might propose that there was an unconscious telepathic link between Mrs. Crans and Charles, and that together they manufactured the joint appearance in an intersubjective dream state. But there is hardly any less reason to suppose that there could have been a third party to this intersubjective encounter, namely Allie herself, in some subtle material form.

General Sir Arthur Becher was serving with the British Army in

India when he saw an apparition (Myers 1903, v. 1, pp. 250–251). In March,

1867, he went to the hill station of Kussowlie (Kussoorie) to inspect a house where he and his family were planning to reside during the hot season. He was accompanied by his son. During the night, the General woke up to find an Indian woman standing near his bed. As he got up, the figure went through a door leading from the bedroom into a bathroom. The General followed, but the woman was not there. He noticed that aside from the door by which he had entered, the only other exit, a door leading from the bathroom to the outside of the house, was securely locked. The General went to sleep again, and in the morning wrote in pencil on a doorpost a brief note that he had seen a ghost. But he mentioned the matter to no one.

After a few days, the General and his family, including his wife Lady Becher, arrived to set up residence in the house. Lady Becher decided to use the room in which the General had slept as her dressing room. On her first evening in the house, Lady Becher was dressing for dinner in this room when she saw an Indian woman standing in the bathroom. Thinking the woman to be her own ayah, or maidservant, Lady Becher asked her what she wanted. There was no reply, and when Lady Becher went into the bathroom she found the woman gone and the door to the outside locked.

At dinner, Lady Becher mentioned the strange occurrence to the General, who replied with his own account. Later they went to sleep in their bedroom. Their youngest son, who was eight years old, was sleeping in a bed in the same room. He had no knowledge of the apparition. His bed was near the door to the dressing room and bathroom. During the night, the boy woke up, and his parents heard him cry out in Hindi, “What do you want, ayah ? What do you want?” He had obviously seen the form of an Indian woman. On this occasion neither the General nor his wife saw the form. In fact, none of them ever saw it again. The General wrote about this last appearance: “It confirmed our feeling that the same woman had appeared to us all three, and on inquiry from other occupants we learned that it was a frequent apparition on the first night or so of the house being occupied. A native Hill, or Cashmere woman, very fair and handsome, had been murdered some years before in a hut a few yards below the house, and immediately under the door leading into the bath and dressing room, through which, on all three occasions, the figure had entered and disappeared. . . . I could give the names of some other subsequent occupants who have told us much the same story” (Myers 1903, v. 1, p. 251).

Charles Lett, a military man, recalled the following apparition incident, noteworthy because of the multiple simultaneous percipients (Griffin 1997, pp. 218–219). On April 5, 1873, his wife’s father, Captain Towns, had died in his house. Six weeks later, Lett’s wife was in one of the bedrooms of the house and saw reflected on the polished surface of a wardrobe a very detailed and lifelike image of the head and torso of Captain Towns. Accompanying her was a young lady, Miss Berthon, who also saw the image. At first they thought someone had hung a portrait of the Captain. At that moment Mrs. Lett’s sister, Miss Towns, entered the room, and before either Mrs. Lett or Miss Berthon had a chance to say anything, Miss Towns said, “Good gracious! Do you see papa?” Several household servants were summoned individually, and one after another they expressed astonishment at the apparition. Charles Lett recalled, “Finally, Mrs. Towns was sent for, and seeing the apparition, she advanced towards it with her arm extended as if to touch it, and as she passed her hand over the panel of the wardrobe the figure gradually faded away, and never again appeared.”

Was the apparition really caused by the surviving soul of Captain Towns, who manifested his form in space? Superpsi theorists would say no. But such multiple perception cases are difficult to account for by the superpsi explanation. One would have to propose that the main percipient generated in her mind an image of Captain Towns, acquiring it from her own mind or by extrasensory perception from the mind of a living person. The main percipient would then have to experience this image in the context of the room. By a process called telepathic contagion, the same image would then be transmitted to the minds of others. But extensive experiments in telepathic image transmission, reviewed in chapter 6, show that it is not easy to transmit a complete image from one mind to another. Another possible explanation is a kind of super psychokinetic (super-pk) ability, whereby the main percipient generates an actual form in three dimensional space. But whether we are talking about superpsior super-pk, there are difficulties. In this particular case, seven individuals saw the image and it looked the same to all of them. Also, the individual percipients were standing in different places in the room, and the image was placed in proper perspective for each of them. It is also significant that the percipients saw the image only as they entered the room, and later it faded at the same time for all of them. This discussion is based on an analysis given by Griffin (1997, pp. 219–221), who, after noting that multiple perceptions of apparitions are not uncommon, said (1997, p. 221), “The view that at least some of the apparitions are due to postmortem agency of the apparent could certainly provide the simplest explanation.”