2020-07-25, 06:04 AM
(2020-07-25, 04:09 AM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]That said, I would agree this does provide a better argument for the possibility of Super Psi than we've seen before. However Gauld also references some more cases re: Leonard's mediumship that challenge Super Psi. Will get into those next.
One of the cases Gauld believes challenges the notion of Super-Psi is as follows (note the book is in public domain and can be found here):
Quote:Many proxy cases went on for several sittings, and it is hard to convey the ‘feel’ of them adequately in a brief summary. For instance one of Drayton Thomas’s most remarkable cases, the ‘Bobbie Newlove’ case (157e), extended over eleven sittings. Bobbie was a boy of ten who had died of diphtheria. He proved a fluent communicator, and through Feda made unmistakable references to such matters as a dog-shaped salt-cellar he had owned, a ‘Jack of Hearts’ costume he had once worn, visits to a chemical laboratory with his grandfather, gymnastic apparatus which he had set up in his room and exercises carried out therewith, a girl skater of whom he was fond, an injury to his nose, and the topography of his home town (including place-names). Most curious of all, he repeatedly insisted that some weeks before his death his constitution had been undermined by contact with poisonous ‘pipes’, and that this had lowered his resistance to the diphtheria. In connection with the pipes he talked of cattle, a sort of barn, and running water. This meant nothing to his family, but upon investigation some water pipes round which he had played with a friend were discovered. The locality answered the description given and it is possible that Bobbie had drunk bad water there.
Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.(The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.
Of which Gauld says:
Quote:In the Bobbie Newlove case some of the relevant information (about the pipes and their location) was not known to any member of the communicator’s family. We are forced to attribute its production either to telepathy between Mrs Leonard and one of Bobbie’s friends (the one who played with him around the pipes), or to clairvoyant scanning of the neighbourhood plus skilful guessing about Bobbie’s likely habits, or to a clairvoyant monitoring prior to Bobbie’s death of his pastimes and activities, and a subsequent storing up of a record of them in the medium’s unconscious mind. (This last possibility, implying as it does continual monitoring of the lives of an indefinitely large number of potential communicators who are as yet still living, seems to me more fantastic than any version of the survival hypothesis.) For both of these cases, therefore, we would on the ESP (or super-ESP) hypothesis have to postulate that Mrs Leonard located (telepathically or clairvoyantly) two separate sources of information, tapped them, and collated and synthesized the results.
Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.
Another case we've yet to discuss is as follows:
Quote:At a Leonard sitting on 28 October 1938, Drayton Thomas’s regular communicators (his father and his sister) enquired if he had recently received from a middle-aged man a letter about his son. He had not yet received such a letter, and the communicators proceeded to give some further particulars of its contents. The letter would concern an accident to do with a motor car. In this accident the young man was killed outright, or nearly so. There was a connection with ‘Morton’ or a like-sounding name. The father once lived near where Drayton Thomas lived. Finally another name, sounding like ‘Char’, was given.
The anticipated letter duly arrived. It was dated eleven days after the sitting, and was from Mr Lionel G. Aitken, a member of the SPR. Mr Aitken told Drayton Thomas that he first thought of writing after hearing him speak at a Queen’s Hall meeting on 9 October, i.e. three weeks before the sitting and nearer five before he actually wrote. A sentence of the letter reads, ‘Not very long ago I lost my son, a splendid young man, full of the joy of life and success.’
After reference to certain London mediums, it continues, ‘I think on the whole that we have been most fortunate in the evidential nature of the messages received.’ Finally Thomas’s advice was asked about other mediums, but there was no word to suggest that he might possibly obtain a message for him through Mrs Leonard. Drayton Thomas entered into correspondence with Mr Aitken. From this correspondence certain facts emerged concerning the statements made at the sitting of 28 October. In this quotation (157g, pp. 103–104) Drayton Thomas places these facts for comparison beside the items given at the sitting.
1. I am to expect a letter from a father about his son … On my enquiring when Mr Aitken had first thought of writing he replied, ‘I don’t think I had thought of mentioning my case to you and asking for advice until I actually wrote the letter. I merely intended to thank you for your address. It appears that you had news of something I was going to write before I wrote it or had consciously thought of it.’
2. The father is middle aged. This is correct.
3. An accident case. This is also correct.
4. Connected with a motor car. Mr Aitken writes, ‘Not a motor car accident exactly.’
5. The young man was killed outright or very nearly so. He was killed outright.
6. Morton or a like-sounding name; this father once lived near where you lived. In correspondence about this statement I learnt that Mr Aitken had resided at the village of Norton and that his son was born there and had been familiar with all the neighbourhood. Norton is but one and a half miles from Baldock where I lived with my parents in 1876–8. Is it too much to suppose that Feda’s ‘Morton’ was misheard by her for Norton? 7. Another name like Char – is given. This was unsatisfactory, just possibly an attempt for Charles, the Christian name of Mr Aitken’s friend killed at Gallipoli.
Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.
Gauld then makes the following assessment for this portion of the case:
Quote:Drayton Thomas was entirely convinced that something more than chance was at work here. Several of the items, however, are either commonplace or wrong. The case rests largely on: (a) the coincidence in time between the prediction of a letter that a man would write about his son, and the fulfilment of that prediction, and (b) the fairly clear indication of a particular locality. The former is somewhat hard to assess in the absence of detailed knowledge about the sort of letters Drayton Thomas habitually received; (b) is, however, not easy to discount. Thomas uses the apparent precognition displayed by his communicators to knock the super-ESP hypothesis. He says (p. 104):
Those who incline to the universal telepathy hypothesis will suggest that the messages originated with Mr Aitken. But this would imply that the medium tapped the Aitken memory before either she or I were aware of his existence and, more incredibly still, that she divined a purpose of which he remained entirely unaware until he was in the act of writing to thank me for remarks he heard me make in public.
Drayton Thomas’s criticism of the ‘universal telepathy hypothesis’ is no doubt entirely justified. One suspects, however, that he wishes to pass from the shortcomings of that hypothesis directly to the validity of the survivalist position. The principle seems to be – and it is, unfortunately, a principle enthusiastically applied in this field by partisans of all persuasions – that if your chief competitors are bankrupt, your own business must be on a sound footing. Many hopeful theorists have tried to persuade themselves of the latter by proving the former to their own satisfaction. But of course the present problem – that of the apparent precognition of Mr Aitken’s letter – is not solved simply by attributing the precognition to discarnate spirits. Such a move would be entirely regressive.
Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.
However he then adds this second part of the case:
Quote:The most remarkable aspect of this case, however, still remains to be told. At four later Leonard sittings, for which Drayton Thomas was sitter, and at which Mr Aitken was not present, a good deal of material ostensibly relating to Mr Aitken’s son was received. Mr Aitken regarded much of this matter as highly evidential. There were however some passages which he could make little of, but which his other son recognized at once as a message concerning a common friend of his and his brother’s, a friend of whom Mr Aitken had never heard. It transpired that the living son had (in thought) deliberately asked his dead brother to try to send a message concerning this friend through some medium. I give now Mr Aitken’s own corroborations of Feda’s statements (157g, pp. 122–123):
In Mr Drayton Thomas’s sitting of 20 January 1939, Feda says: ‘There was somebody else he was very interested in, that perhaps you don’t know … a name that starts with the letter B, and I think there is an R in it … it’s not a long name – very much linked with him … it might be a Mr BRICK … I feel this is something you could use for building, and is a name much connected with this boy and his interests.’
In Mr Drayton Thomas’s sitting of 3 February 1939, Feda says: ‘A name starting with BR – rather an important name with him … Somebody he was linked up with shortly before his passing … there is a link between this BR … and the boy’s passing. I also want to know if there is anything to do with him like a little ship … or a little model of a ship – something he had on earth and was very fond of. He is showing me something like a toy ship – a fancy ship, not a plain one – ‘laborate, rather ‘laborate – with a good deal of detail shown in it – it seemed to be connected with his earth life – but some time before he passed over, rather early in his earth life, but I think it is something that his people have still got …’
A name beginning with BR – like the name Feda says ‘might be Mr BRICK’ – had been mentioned by other mediums, but we had been unable to place it, nor was the reference to a ‘model ship’ understood; but my son, on seeing the Leonard script, recognised its meaning.
He and his deceased brother had been friends at an RAF Station with a young officer called BRIDGEN – whom we had not heard of – and who had been killed about a year after my son. This young man, before joining the RAF, had worked for a firm which made scale models of ships for shipping companies, and he had shown my son a photograph of one of these models which he had made himself and which he said his people still had at home. My son had felt sure that this matter of the model ship would be given as a sign if they were unable to get the name through correctly.
These corroborations were accompanied by the following letter from Mr Aitken’s surviving son:
The Editor, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research.
Dear Sir, I have read my father’s account of the ‘Leonard-Aitken’ proxy sittings, and I testify to its correctness.
I was the only living member of the family who knew of ‘Bridgen’, and I had never had any communication with Mr Drayton Thomas or Mrs Leonard.
My ‘thought-message’ was not directed to Mr Drayton Thomas or to Mrs Leonard – but to my ‘dead’ brother – and to me, the reply was unmistakable.
Yours sincerely, LIONEL AITKEN, Flying-Officer, RAF 14 November 1939
Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.
Gauld then furthers his critiques of Super-Psi:
Quote:An obvious underlying problem which successful proxy sittings present for the ESP hypothesis is of course that of how the medium manages to locate (telepathically or clairvoyantly) sources of information appropriate to the case in hand. These sources are, in a number of different senses, remote from the sitting and the sitter, to whom the very existence of some of them is likely to be unknown. We might propose that the medium learns from the sitter’s mind the identity of his principal (i.e. of the person for whom he is acting as proxy), and that this somehow enables her to home in on the mind of the principal; from the mind of the principal further clues to other sources of information may be obtained; and so on. One has only to ask oneself in detail what would be involved here to see that the proposed process is grotesquely implausible. Proper names, addresses, dates, and so forth – details which identify a person uniquely – are notoriously among the most difficult of all items for sensitives to obtain; and yet such uniquely identifying details (or their equivalents) would have to be obtained in a proxy case before the medium could pinpoint the right source of information to tap; and in some cases they would have to be obtained from several sources as the medium’s mind so to speak moved along the chain of clues. It must be added, of course, that the survivalist theory too must cope with the problem of how Feda managed to locate Bobby Newlove, F. W. Macaulay, etc., on the ‘other side’ in order to extract evidential messages from them. Did she do it by ESP? Certainly she often speaks as though her awareness of communicators were of a fluctuating and uncertain kind. However, if there is ‘another world’ to which our spirits pass at death, it is perhaps reasonable to suppose that it contains some form of established communication network or heavenly post office directory...
...Finally it should be noted that in some proxy cases the principals have felt the messages received contained not just correct information, but hints of the personal characteristics (humour, interests, turns of phrase, and so forth) of the ostensible communicators. If they are correct in this, we have additionally to attribute to the medium the power to glean the relevant facts and then, instead of presenting them in statement form (’he had a dry sense of humour’), so to speak to enact them in dramatic form by reproducing the communicator’s characteristic dry humour (or whatever it may be). Certainly, the more numerous the unusual gifts we have to attribute to mediums in order to support the super-ESP hypothesis, the more cumbersome that hypothesis becomes.
Gauld, Alan. Mediumship and Survival (The Paranormal) . David and Charles. Kindle Edition.
I think Gauld - if he's seriously talking about a heavenly postal service - is making a mistake in believing the next life has to conform to something akin to the physics of this reality. In fact varied accounts of spiritual realms suggest distance is partially if not completely determined by emotional and mental connections, something perhaps worth getting into down the line in this thread...
Next up is the trance mediumship of Lorena Piper.