Thought transference

“ It has been established on the clearest evidence that thought-transference and reception between two nearly harmonised or sympathetic human beings, or embodied human spirits, are possible, and this without intermediate sense or physical agencies. If, then, between mind and mind on earth, distance or space being no obstacle, matter no hindrance, why not between mind disincarnate—if we can conceive of mind apart from the human brain and organism—and mind incarnate? ”

“ Now turn to our experiments in thought-transference. Here again the agent is a living man; but he is no longer operating by ordinary means,—by spoken words or visible gestures. He is operating on the percipient's subconscious self by means of a telepathic impulse, which he desires, indeed, to project from himself, and which the percipient may desire to receive, but of whose modus operandi the ordinary waking selves of agent and percipient alike are entirely unaware. ”

“ The opinion of a majority of scientific persons has been altogether averse to the theory of thought-transference from one mind to another without the aid of the senses and the ordinary means of communication; and they have maintained that intimations of the thing to be done by the sensitive were conveyed by slight muscular movements unconsciously made by the agent and perhaps unconsciously received by the sensitive. ”

“ Because it is difficult to perfectly transfer a thought from one mind to another it is essential that the principal medium through which such transference is accomplished may be as perfect as it is possible to make it. ”

“ If we further assume that sentiments so excited may then, by association, excite appropriate ideas in the intellect of the recipient, we have a likely explanation of what is called 'thought-transference.' Since ideas excite emotions, it is reasonable to suppose that feelings may excite ideas, or even the illusion that objects are being perceived. ”

“ I need not enter into particulars, but I will just say that the conditions under which apparent transference of thought occurs from one or more persons, steadfastly thinking, to another in the same room blindfold and wholly disconnected from the others, seem to me absolutely satisfactory, and such as to preclude the possibility of conscious collusion on the one hand or unconscious muscular indication on the other. ”

“ The possibility of the transference of thought, apart from the recognized channels of sensation, has been too frequently discussed, with the suppressed or unconscious assumption that our knowledge of the means whereby we ordinarily and normally, consciously and unconsciously, convey to others some notion of what is passing in our own minds, is comprehensive and exhaustive. ”

“ Another kind of displacement which seems hard to believe possible until it is repeatedly encountered in intelligent human beings is the process called transference, by which everybody at some time or other acts toward the people he meets, not according to rational standards but according to old unconscious attitudes toward other people. Each of us carries, within, subconscious pictures of the people who surrounded us when we were children ”

“ It admits that the idea of personality which has deluded us through life may not be instantaneously extinguished at death, but may be lost by slow degrees. On this is founded the doctrine of transmigration. ”

“ Whereupon we may proceed to act toward that person very much as we did toward the original person in childhood.
Transference is subconsciously identifying one person with another and behaving toward the one as if he were that other. ”

“ The cause of the transference, however, from the obvious material appearances, is a very natural one,—the same, which has included so many analogies, from external things, in the language, which we employ to express the intellectual functions. It is with the changes of the material substances around us, that all our operations, which leave any fixed and permanent marks of our agency, are immediately concerned. ”

“ Transmigration, in some form, has certainly been, if not hereafter to be, the lot of man. I do not believe the Platonic conception of this great truth to be the correct one, nor that man will ever undergo the doom again; yet. that the soul has reached its present through many an inferior state, is a self-evident fact to me. ”

“ Spiritual transmutation consists in an entire reversal of the ordinary self-seeking attitude of mind towards men and things, and this reversal brings about an entirely new set of experiences. Thus the desire for a certain pleasure is abandoned, cut off at its source, and not allowed to have any place in the consciousness; but the mental force which that desire represented is not annihilated, it is transferred to a higher region of thought, transmuted into a purer form of energy. ”

“ Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual's life, we tend to speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a 'transformation.'
These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be divided. ”

“ The Analysis of the Transference We have already seen that the transference brings about difficulties, because the personality of the physician is assimilated with the image of the patient’s parents. The first part of the analysis, the investigation of the patient’s complexes, is rather easy, chiefly because a man is relieved by ridding himself of his secrets, difficulties and pains. ”

“ This philosophy is unfortunately too crude. Even though we were to conceive the outer successions as forces stamping their image on the brain, and the brain's successions as forces stamping their image on the mind, [552] still, between the mind's own changes being successive, and knowing their own succession, lies as broad a chasm as between the object and subject of any case of cognition in the world. A succession of feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession. ”

“ And, thirdly, if we are to hope for a real change in our relations to God, there must be a real change in our personality,—a progressive transmutation, which without breach of continuity will bring us to be something different from what we were. ”

“ This easy transition is the effect, or rather essence of relation; I and as the imagination readily takes one idea for another, where their influence on the mind is similar; hence it proceeds, that any such succession of related qualities is readily considered as one continued object, existing without any variation. The smooth and uninterrupted progress of the thought, being alike in both cases, readily deceives the mind, and makes us ascribe an identity to the changeable succession of connected qualities. ”

“ The conjunctive relation that has given most trouble to philosophy is the co-conscious transition, so to call it, by which one experience passes into another when both belong to the same self. About the facts there is no question. ”

“ And more than this, as many students and practitioners of modern mental science know, every material condition depending upon the minds of other people may be changed or transmuted in accordance with the earnest desire, will, and "treatments" of person desiring changed conditions of life. ”

“ Your whole life becomes "transformed by the renewing of your mind." (Romans 12:1 and 2.) The TRANSMUTATION Principle applied to the Mind, brings GLORY in its right use to all the other faculties and thus the whole Life. ”

“ For communication defined as strict transference of or participation in identical experiences does not occur. This is not a heart-breaking conclusion. No general theory, in fact, as to the nature or conditions of experiences can affect their value. For value is prior to all explanations. If actual transference and participation did occur we should of course be compelled to adopt a transcendental theory. ”

“ Consequently, to the average mind of the modern Western world, the doctrine of transmigration remains a mere fancy, although, as we shall immediately see, it has a strange poetic charm, a deep metaphysical basis, and a high ethical and religious quality.
The first ground on which the belief rests is the various strong resemblances, both physical and psychical, connecting human beings with the whole family of lower creatures. They have all the senses in common with us, together with the rudiments of intelligence and will. ”

“ And it is the especial business of what we may call the central consciousness, the dominant thought or emotion, to bring these separate thoughts and impulses, these separate groups thereof, into more complex relations, to continue on a far vaster scale that vital contact, that trying of all things by the great trial of affinity or repulsion, of congruity or incongruity. Thus we make trial of ourselves ”

“ But, secondly, the transmigration of souls has been considered as the means of their progressive ascent. The soul begins its conscious course at the bottom of the scale of being, and, gradually rising through birth after birth, climbs along a discriminated series of improvements in endless aspiration. Here the scientific adaptation and moral intent are thought to lead only upwards, insect travelling to man, man soaring to God ”

“ No one who has followed the course either of biology or psychology during this century, and more especially during the last five-and-twenty years, will tolerate the reintroduction of the soul as something apart from the substratum in which both feeling and action must be held to inhere. ”

“ THE transference of emotion is a phenomenon so common, so constantly witnessed, that mankind in general have long ceased to be conscious of its existence, as a thing worth our wonder or consideration, regarding it as being as natural and commonplace as the transference of things that act by the ascertained laws of matter. ”

“ It may be admitted that this consciousness of movement, of change, which is no more, fundamentally, than the sense of different directions of thought, belongs less to the category of clear notions than to that of subconscious states, of tendencies, of actions, which explains why the terms of relation are wholly wanting, or rare, and only conquered their autonomy at a late period. ”

“ The condition of the feeling of transition, and hence of the feeling of personality, is then the presence in consciousness of at least two possible objects of attention; and the formal consciousness of self might be schematized as a straight line connecting two points, in which one point represents the foreground, and the other the background, of consciousness. ”

“ The genesis of a personal being consists, then, not in the transmutation of physical force into psychic states, as materialism represents, but in the concentration and unification of pre-existing psychic elements, which in their isolation are unconscious, into a conscious individual. ”

“ The process of transfer from the primary consciousness to recognized mental consciousness is a mystery like every other transfer. Yet it follows its own laws. And here we begin to approach the confines of orthodox psychology, upon which we have no desire to trespass. But this we can say. The degree of transfer from primary to mental consciousness varies with every individual. But in most individuals the natural degree is very low. ”

“ But these relations, though not, like other relations, grounded on states of consciousness, are themselves states of consciousness: resemblance is nothing but our feeling of resemblance; succession is nothing but our feeling of succession. Or, if this be disputed (and we can not, without transgressing the bounds of our science, discuss it here) , at least our knowledge of these relations, and even our possibility of knowledge, is confined to those which subsist between sensations, or other states of consciousness ”

“ But with us the transmigration is not veiled in darkness and mystery as with you. We can watch the transformation; we can see the spirit emerge from its old casement more ethereal than ourselves, but still visible ”

“ This notion of the purely substitutional or conceptual physical world brings us to the most critical of all the steps in the development of a philosophy of pure experience. The paradox of self-transcendency in knowledge comes back upon us here, but I think that our notions of pure experience and of substitution, and our radically empirical view of conjunctive transitions, are Denkmittel that will carry us safely through the pass. ”

“ And yet the most mysterious part of the whole process, the effect of it all upon the central self, is also the most certain and the most important result of the whole movement, a movement which ever culminates in a modification of the personality and which prepares this personality for the next round of sense-perception, intellectual abstraction, ethical affirmation and volitional self-determination,—acts in which light and love, fixed and free, hard and cold and warm, are so mysteriously, so universally, and yet so variously linked. ”

“ Even if we were not in relation with the external world, and our mind was confined to internal facts alone, to the consciousness of the me and its modifications, we should know that there is transition from not-being to being, by the testimony of the successive appearance of new perceptions and affections. Within ourselves we experience the ebb and flow of modifications which pass from not-being to being, and from being to not-being. ”

“ In the development of thought, feeling, and will, we have noticed a certain parallelism, the attainment of new knowledge, the deviation of feeling into new channels, and the direction of will to new ends; indeed, our analysis must bring us to regard this development as something more than a parallelism, since, as we have seen, thought, feeling, and will, cannot be defined as separate organs of mind. And we are here led to notice a theory sometimes advanced, that the feelings of one individual can never be changed by another. ”