Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/212

196 XII asked Swedenborg what Charles the Twelfth was like in the other world. "No different from what he was in this," was Swedenborg's answer, and his stand was consistently that for some time after the death of the body the "spirit" remained the same kind of man.

Neither he nor Mr. Carington, however, believes that this condition can last. The psychon-system, getting no more fresh impressions via the physical body, might well disintegrate. You might, as Mr. Carington says, survive shipwreck on a desert island, but die of starvation after you got there.

According to Swedenborg, that would depend on whether your mind were a mere pattern of reactions to physical stimuli or whether you had developed your "understanding."

Mr. Carington can well imagine that certain psychons in a "surviving" psychon-system might, via the law of association of ideas, link up with certain psychons in a "medium." A "medium" may be said to be the kind of person whose psychon-system is more easily dissociated than that of a normal person, for one reason or another, perhaps because of a neurosis. A fairly permanent subsystem of psychons may be formed in such a person, may even develop into something resembling a separate personality, able to dissociate itself so completely from the normal personality that the latter becomes unconscious or goes into what is called "trance." In this condition, which closely resembles the deeper hypnotic sleep, the subsystem personality may take "control" of the body and speak as a separate personality, referring to the normal person as "she" or "the instrument" or the "subject" and to itself as a departed spirit who "controls" or uses the body for the purpose of communicating messages from the spirit world.

This phenomenon would belong to the province of psychiatry if it were not that the medium's "control" so often produces knowledge that cannot possibly have been known to the medium, sometimes not even to the sitter, and not even to any living person.

Mr. Carington therefore is willing to suppose that the "surviving" psychon-system of Jones, say, is able to associate part of itself with the medium's dissociated system, the result being a sort of Jones-plus-Medium which has some of the characteristics and knowledge we identify as his, and some others that puzzle us. The