ABSTRACT
Is there any way of making contact with the unknown world outside our diving-bell? I have never found any scientific or instrumental way into it. That world only seems to make contact with a few human unconscious minds, and then only occasionally. Sceptics can deny its existence with complete impunity. But if it exists, there should be some way of demonstrating that fact, and I like the idea of looking for it scientifically. In Chapter 7 I imagine a way of showing its existence by small thermal effects. It seems to have many abilities: not least those of creating actions in the physical world (as in the various forms of psychokinesis, some of which I discuss in Chapter 9). Yet it is probably best to think of it as a source of information. Sometimes, as in many types of telepathy, that information is so direct and transparent that the receiver has taken it as a true sensory impression. At other times, as in many dreams (Chapter 10) the 204information is so strongly disguised that it needs some sort of interpretation. I fear that such disguise is usual. The unconscious human mind is so inherently deceptive that most communications that it allows ‘upstairs’ need to be interpreted or decoded in some way, and this may warn us that equivalent deception may occur in the transfer of information from the unknown world to the unconscious mind. I was greatly touched by the description given by the dead Myers (whom I discuss in Chapter 15) of the frustration he felt in his attempts to communicate from the unknown world to the physical living one. He may, of course, have been part of some entity in the unknown world, but his written complaint seems like one from a single individual. He felt greatly hampered by having to deal with the brain of the person he was trying to send a message to, though he felt that brain contact was indispensable. He even had great difficulty in just sending his identity to that brain. I assume that his message was initially aimed at the unconscious mind of the receiver, who would then have the troublesome or even uncontrollable hand-and-arm task of writing it out by automatic writing. The process might have been much easier if it had been conducted not by a rare and unreliable human being, but by some fast machine. At present the only way of making any contact with that unknown world is via the highly uncertain and baffling human unconscious mind, but I am reminded of the early days of current electricity. It could be observed by the way it made a pair of freshly dissected frog’s legs twitch. Much later, electrical instruments were devised which did not depend on a special preparation of once- living material. In the same sort of way, we may initially find that we have to exploit the abilities of a few rare gifted living individuals, but the advance of experimental methods might ultimately allow us to make useful contact with the world outside our diving bell by constructed 205inorganic instrumentation. I cannot guess how or in what way this might happen: but it would be a wonderful advance. My guesses below continues my feelings about moving research into the unconscious mind away from the mysteries of living systems to the more controllable inorganic ones used by instrument makers. Those guesses include my musings on the experiments with bacterial cultures that inspired Alexander Fleming to invent penicillin.
