Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Near-Death
Experience:
- Attorney Victor
Zammit's
- The Myers
Cross-Correspondences
Irrefutable proof - Cross Correspondences
In the early days of psychic research critics used to argue that
the information produced by mediums as evidence for the afterlife could have come from the
medium's own unconscious or from reading the mind of the sitter.
However this position has now dramatically changed. Psychic
research into the narrow issue of the role of the unconscious of mediums was most
successful in showing that with genuine mediums their unconscious has nothing to do
with information transmitted from the afterlife. Nor is 'telepathy' from the sitter to the
medium involved.
The 'Myers Cross-Correspondences' have now become classic evidence
for survival and are most influential and persuasive in helping many people come to terms
with life after death.
One person who took the time to study the Cross Correspondences in
depth was the former secular-humanist Colin Brookes-Smith. After researching them he
stated in the Society for Psychical Research Journal that survival should now be regarded
as a sufficiently well established fact to be beyond denial by any reasonable person.
Further he argued that this conclusion should not be kept in the obscurity of research
records but should be presented to the public as:
'a momentous scientific conclusion of prime
importance to mankind.' (Murphet 1990: 64).
Frederick W.H. Myers was a Cambridge Classics scholar late last
century. He was one of the pioneers who founded the Society for Psychical Research and was
involved in investigation of the afterlife. When he was alive he was particularly
interested to find a way of proving that information transmitted through mediums could not
have come from their own unconscious.
The method he thought up was cross-correspondences — a series
of messages to different mediums in different part of the world which on their own would
mean nothing but which when put together would make sense. He and his fellow leaders of
the Society for Psychical Research felt that if such a thing could be accomplished it
would have high 'probative value' and be a high level of proof of continued existence.
After he died in 1901
The scripts were all about obscure classical subjects, were often
in Latin and Greek which most of the mediums did not understand, and did not make sense on
their own.
The mediums were told by the Communicator to write down the dates
of each transmission and have them witnessed and then to send them to a central address
where they were assembled;
In all more than three thousand scripts were transmitted over
thirty years. Some of them were more than forty typed pages long.
The investigation went on so long that some of the investigators
Like Professor Verrall, died during the course of it and began communicating themselves.
The mediums used by Myers and the others from the afterlife were
not professors of the classics. They were not highly educated and all messages transmitted
were outside their learnt knowledge and experience. On one occasion one of the mediums,
Mrs Coombe-Tennant, was conducting a discussion using 'automatic writing' between the
spirit entity of Professor Sidgwick and his living colleague G.Balfour on the 'mind-body
relationship', 'epiphenomenalism' and 'interactionism'. She complained bitterly that she
had no idea what they were talking about and lost her temper that she was asked to
transmit such difficult things.
Myers did say it was extremely difficult to transmit his messages
from the spirit world across to the mediums, in fact he said it was:
like standing behind a sheet of frosted glass which blurs sight
and deadens sound dictating feebly to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary (Wilson
1987: 176).
After her own death in 1956 at the age of 81 one of the key
mediums in the Cross-Correspondences, Mrs Coombe-Tennant using her pen-name Mrs Willett,
transmitted a long and detailed book of personal reminiscences containing incredible
intimate detail about her own life through the medium Geraldine Cummins who had never met
her or her children. Published as Swan on a Black Sea the Willett scripts, as they
are sometimes also known, are considered by many, including Colin Wilson, to be:
the most convincing proof of the reality of
life after death ever set down on paper (Wilson 1987:183).
The information transmitted in the Myers experiments was so
accurate that it stunned the members of the Society for Psychical Research. At one stage
those who were investigating the Myers Cross-Correspondences hired private detectives to
put surveillance on Mrs Piper, one of the mediums involved in the Myers experiments. Her
mail was opened, private detectives followed her, questions were asked about her friends,
who she spoke to. All the investigations proved her innocent of fraud or conspiracy or
trickery .
The evidence is absolute.
All the original documents are on file for any investigator to
study. For those who have initiative to investigate, sufficient information is available.
And whilst for the investigator of cross-correspondences the information available is
challenging, the rewards are evidentiary proof of the afterlife.
Colin Wilson, himself a former skeptic and now a writer with an
international reputation, did investigate. He writes:
Taken as a whole, the Cross Correspondences
and the Willett scripts are among the most convincing evidence that at present exists for
life after death. For anyone who is prepared to devote weeks to studying them, they prove
beyond all reasonable doubt that Myers, Gurney and Sidgwick went on communicating after
death (Wilson 1987: 179).
The Myers Cross Correspondences have successfully shown that what
was transmitted from the medium was not from the medium's own unconscious.
Interestingly in the Scole Experiments (see Chapter 5) there were a number
of clues and puzzles set up by the communicating entities which related to the life and
work of Frederick Myers and one of the ‘spirit scientists’ gave his name as
Frederick ¾ suggesting to the experimenters that the Scole
experiments were a continuation of the Cross Correspondences. (See Grant and Jane Solomon The
Scole Experiment, Chapter 9).
Editor's note: Leslie Weatherhead, in his book, Life
Begins At Death, offers this footnote to the above:
"Think of F. W. H. Myers saying, through a reputable medium like
Geraldine Cummins, 'If only I could tell you what it's like; I just
haven't the words to tell you how marvelous it is; the sense of beauty, the sense of
freedom, the sense of love'"
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