Afterlife (39 page)

At which point, Dawkins asks: ‘Shall we call the original replicator molecules “living?” Who cares?…’ And here he seems to be attempting some sleight of hand.
The hypothesis of replicator molecules being formed by accident seems dubious enough — as likely as the works of Shakespeare being written by Eddington’s monkeys strumming aimlessly on a typewriter.
But to then suggest that these self-copiers would be somehow ‘alive’, and therefore capable of evolution, seems an attempt to play fast and loose with language.

My own deep and intuitive conviction is that there is a basic difference between living and dead matter.
So computer experts may try forever to convince me that we might one day build a computer so complex that it would be literally alive, and I shall remain a sceptic.
They may as soon convince me that
I
am not really alive.

What I might be willing to accept is that the basic building blocks of organic matter were created by chance — by the action of sunlight or electrical discharges on ammonia and carbons — and that, when half the work had been done, the force we call life took advantage of the situation to somehow ‘insert’ itself into matter.
This seems to agree with my own intuitions about the nature of life, which — in my own case — is a continual struggle of the ‘alive’ part of me to widen the boundaries of the dead or mechanical part, which seems determined to entrap me in the ‘here and now’.

Now if this view is correct, and Dawkins is wrong to believe that life is a mere product of matter, it would also seem to follow that life has its own independent consciousness and sense of
purpose.
In the 1860s, a philosopher named Edouard von Harmann wrote a vast work,
The Philosophy of the Unconscious
, largely devoted to examining the amazing manifestations of instinct in nature — all, apparently, so full of purpose, all totally unconscious.
He reached the gloomy conclusion that life is full of blind striving towards nothing in particular.
But he might just as well have argued that all this blind striving does not
begin
in a state of blindness.
A man who has to walk a mile in the dark without a light is not necessarily lost and aimless.
He may have consulted a map before he set out, and know exactly how many yards will bring him to the next crossroads.
The incredible complexity in nature, from the amoeba to giant squid, seems to suggest that although life is ‘blinded’ once it descends into matter, it may have had a very clear sense of direction before it set out for its walk in the dark.

The same argument would apply to Darwin’s picture of evolution by natural selection.
Darwin, unlike Dawkins, admits that ‘life’ somehow exists apart from matter, but he still sees life as a helpless and passive spectator of the changes brought about by accident and the survival of the fittest.
The primitive giraffe may wish it had a longer neck, but it can do nothing about it; millennia will have to pass before its descendente will acquire a longer neck by pure chance.
If Dawkins is wrong, the chances are that Darwin was also wrong.
Life may not be able to initiate the changes (although even that is not certain), but it may be able to take instant advantage of every accidental change to achieve its own purposes, like a man selecting chunks of stone from a landslide to build his own house.
But if he can select stones from a landslide, there seems no logical reason why he should not also be able to make his own bricks.
If the study of the paranormal has taught us anything, it is that human powers often seem to be able to defy the ‘laws of nature’.
For example, in 1899, a New Zealand magistrate named Colonel Gudgeon went with a group of friends to watch a Maori tribe perform a fire-walking ceremony.
They were embarrassed when a
shaman
held out his hand and invited Gudgeon and his friends to join them.
‘I confer my
mana
on you.’ To his surprise, Gudgeon felt no burning heat — just a pleasant, tingling sensation — and none of them were even blistered.
Clearly, it was some form of mind over matter — a form that should be impossible according to the Darwin-Dawkins view of evolution.

The ‘paranormal’ view, then, presupposes that ‘life’ (whatever
that means) can exist apart from matter, and possesses its own consciousness and sense of purpose.
In that case, we may assume that when life separates from matter at ‘death’, it returns to a different state of consciousness, involving a higher degree of freedom.
In that case, why did it descend into matter in the first place?
Presumably to bring the realm of matter under its control — as it may already have brought other realms of ‘finer’ matter — matter whose rate of vibration is higher than ours — under its control.

This view — that ‘life’ is attempting to establish control over matter — is known as ‘vitalism’, and its two leading exponents in the twentieth century have been the philosopher Henri Bergson and the biologist Hans Driesch.
It is significant that both Driesch and Bergson joined the Society for Psychical Research and became its presidents.
In his presidential address in 1926, Driesch expressed the basic idea of vitalism: that the development of organisms is ‘directed by a unifying non-material mind-like Something … an ordering principle which does not add either energy or matter’ to what goes on.
This principle might exist outside time and space.
^*
Driesch was violently attacked by his scientific colleagues for his interest in psychical research — as though it displayed a foolish credulity.
Yet it can be seen that,
if
the primary evidence for ‘survival’ can be accepted, then it is a very short step from vitalism to ‘spiritualism’.
Their premises are identical.

The problem for Driesch — and for every other psychical researcher in the past century — is that even sound philosophical premises cannot make ‘the paranormal’ respectable.
They
might
succeed if paranormal research confined itself to investigating the unexplored regions of the human mind — clairvoyance, psychokinesis, telepathy, psychometry, and so on.
But it is practically impossible to do this.
The moment the investigator raises the question of whether a medium is genuine, he is raising the question of whether the communications come from the ‘dead’.
He may decide that mediumship is really another name for multiple personality, and that the ‘communications’ are based on telepathy or clairvoyance; but if he is honest he will admit that there are cases where neither of these hypotheses cover the facts.
And to admit the possibility of survival is also to admit the possibility of ‘spirits’.
At that point,
most modern investigators dig in their heels; they feel as if they are being dragged back into the superstitions of the Dark Ages.

This was the problem we encountered at the beginning of this book.
Adam Crabtree is a psychiatrist; his job is to cure people with psychological problems.
From his personal point of view, it makes no difference whatever whether the problem is due to Freudian repressions, multiple personality or ‘diabolical possession’.
But from the point of view of his standing in the scientific community, it would certainly be preferable to dismiss the last hypothesis and to think in terms of orthodox psychotherapy.
This corresponded with his own inclination.
He has described how, when he was a theology student in Minnesota, he came across a pamphlet called
Begone Satan
by the Rev.
Carl Vogel, describing a case that occurred in Wisconsin in the 1920s.
A girl named Anna Ecklund began to be plagued with desires to commit ‘unspeakable sexual acts’ and to blaspheme.
When she began to show classic signs of ‘possession’, Father Theophilus Riesinger, a Capuchin from the community of St Anthony, decided on exorcism.
Anna was laid on a bed, and the ceremony of exorcism began.
Within moments, Anna’s body had flown off the bed, and landed against the wall above the door, where she stuck.
She was dragged down by main force and the exorcism continued.
Her howls and screams were so loud that people came from all over the town of Marathon to see what was happening.
The exorcism continued the next day and for many days after.
Voices speaking in many languages issued from Anna, although her lips remained tightly closed.
Her head would expand ‘to the size of a water pitcher’ and her body swelled like a balloon.
Her convulsions were so powerful that the iron bedstead bent to the floor.
Various entities who announced themselves as demons spoke to the exorcists, and showed intimate knowledge of sins they had committed in childhood.
Finally, Anna’s deceased father was ‘summoned’, and admitted that he had constantly tried to commit incest with her, and that because she had resisted him, he had cursed her and invoked devils to possess her.
The father’s ex-mistress also appeared, and admitting to killing a number of her newly born children.
During all this time, Anna was deeply asleep, or in trance.
Finally, Anna’s body shot up off the bed, so that only her heels were resting on it, and as the priest repeated the exorcism, there was the sound of a strange scream, that gradually faded into the distance.
Then the girl’s eyes opened and she began to cry.
The ‘possession’ was over.

The monk who had translated the pamphlet from the German was in the same monastery as Crabtree, and he verified the details of the story.
Crabtree knew him to be a level-headed, good-humoured man; yet he still found the monk’s story preposterous.

In due course, Crabtree decided that the monastic life was not for him, and entered psychotherapy in 1969:

It was not until 1976 that a colleague spoke to him of a patient who seemed to be ‘possessed’ by a spirit, and Crabtree was able to witness this phenomenon.
He still declined to take it seriously.
But in the following year, he began to encounter cases of the ‘possession type’ in his own practice — as described in the first chapter of this book — and decided, from the purely pragmatic point of view, to treat them
as
possession.

Crabtree insists that, as a psychotherapist, he remains a phenomenologist: that is to say, he does not say: This
is
possession, but: This patient shows all the signs of ‘possession’, and treating it
as
possession will probably be the simplest way to affect a cure.
But he is a member of the Society for Psychical Research, and his book makes it clear that he is willing to give serious consideration to the ‘possession’ hypothesis.

Another psychotherapist, Dr Ralph Allison, who practises in Santa Cruz, California, has written a book on multiple personality
^**
which makes it clear that he has come to accept the real possibility of ‘possession’.
In 1972, Allison encountered a case of multiple personality.
In her teens, Carrie had been the victim of a gang rape, and it was after this that she began to experience black-outs in which another personality took over.
Also in her teens, Carrie had been involved in amateur witchcraft, and simply as a therapeutic measure, Allison tried ‘exorcism’ under hypnosis.
It worked, but Allison considered that this had simply been due to suggestion.
But in subsequent years, Allison
encountered cases of multiple personality in which he could not accept that the ‘other selves’ were genuine alter-egos.
‘An alter personality serves a definite and practical purpose — it is a means of coping with an emotion or a situation that the patient cannot handle.’ But in some cases, this did not appear to be so.
He placed a girl called Elise, who was suffering from multiple personality, under hypnosis, and a male alter-ego who called himself Dennis emerged.
‘Dennis’ seemed to serve no purpose.
And he insisted that he was ‘possessing’ Elise solely because he was sexually interested in another of her personalities, a girl called Shannon, who had ‘taken over’ after Elise had been prostrated by the loss of a baby.
When he asked ‘Dennis’ how he hoped to have sex with ‘Shannon’, ‘Dennis’ explained that he entered the bodies of men ‘Shannon’ went to bed with, and so enjoyed making love to her.
Allison found this an interesting concept: obviously, Elise’s body was the same as ‘Shannon’ ‘s; but ‘Dennis’ was not in the least interested in it when Elise was ‘in’ it.

When Allison questioned ‘Shannon’, she confirmed all that ‘Dennis’ had said.
Allison was baffled at the idea of an alter-ego entering someone else’s body (although if he had read Kardec or any other number of spiritualists he would have found it familiar enough).
But Elise’s other personalities also insisted this was so.
‘Dennis’ himself claimed that he had once been a stockbroker, who was killed during a robbery.
He claimed that Elise was not the first person he had ‘inhabited’.
He also explained that if ‘Shannon’ would settle down with one lover, he would be glad to enter the man permanently.
But she ‘moved around’ too much.
Allison admits: ‘Despite all my efforts, I was unable to find a more plausible explanation for his existence than the spirit theory.’