On page 314 of the January 31, 1890 edition of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, which you can read here, we have a long article by the extremely accomplished psychology and parapsychology scholar Frederic W. H. Meyers. On page 332 Myers stated this while discussing apparition sightings, using the term "phantasmal figure" to refer to an apparition:
"Sometimes we have the phantasmal figure seen as though illuminated on a dark background. Sometimes it appears as in a disc or oval of light. Sometimes its contour is indistinct, and it resembles a luminous cloud, either for the first moments of its appearance or throughout all its stay. Sometimes there is no figure at all, but a phantasmal 'ball of light,' or a brilliant diffused glow, which seems a sufficiently unique experience, and coincides sufficiently closely with a death, to have some claim to rank as a veridical phantasm. Now from all this I argue that the phantasmogenetic agency at work-whatever that may be-may be able to produce effects of light more easily than definite figures."
We have here a fascinating speculation by one of history's greatest scholars of anomalous phenomena: the speculation that maybe visible orbs appear when mysterious psychic powers are producing their less dramatic efforts, with full human forms appearing when more vigorous or successful efforts occur. Similarly, it takes much less effort for you to quickly bang on your neighbor's door to alert him than for you to write a note and slip it under the door.
Perhaps for some mysterious unseen agency there is an "easiest, harder, hardest" situation in which orbs visible only in photographs are the easiest effects, orbs visible to the naked eye are the harder effects, and full apparitions in human form (such as translucent apparitions) are the hardest effects to produce.
Frederic Myers was the author of the monumental two-volume work Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, which you can read online here and here.
No comments:
Post a Comment