During his final years at Harvard and immediately thereafter, William James, is said to have suffered from fits of depression, what he called “soul sickness,” and even considered suicide. Apparently, the “death of God” and the increasingly materialistic world view of the times brought on by the Ages of Reason and Enlightenment and then Darwinism, seriously impacted him. However, he overcame his depression to some extent in 1872 when he accepted a position to teach physiology and anatomy at Harvard.
In 1876, James founded the first laboratory for experimental psychology in the United States, and along with Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Wundt, and John Dewey, is considered one of the pioneers of modern psychology. However, he gradually moved from psychology to philosophy as he felt that psychology was too limited. He is also one of the pioneers of psychical research, and one of the founders of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR), an offshoot of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in England. His interest in the field was prompted by a dozen sittings in 1885 with trance medium Leonora Piper, whom he came to refer to as his “White Crow,” the one that upset the law that all crows are black.
Recently published by White Crow Books, Mind Dust and White Crows, edited by Gregory Shushan and with an introduction by Andreas Sommer, provides many interesting lectures and writings by Professor James and an explanation as to his views and reservations about the survival hypothesis, especially in the chapter on “Human Immortality.” I “interviewed” Professor James on the 100th anniversary of his transition to the spirit world in 2010 for a magazine and a journal. The “interview” was conducted by extracting James’s words from various reference, all now in the public domain, and putting questions to them. I had many of the references in Shushan’s book available to me, so I’ll stick with my original interview rather than attempt a new one. But a future blog will discuss more that Shushan’s book brings to light. Words in brackets are inferred to create a smooth transition from question to answer.
Professor James, in spite of having called Mrs. Piper your “white crow” and having received some very evidential messages, you continue to sit on the fence relative to the survival hypothesis. Is it really that difficult to accept?
“Tactically, it is far better to believe much too little than a little too much; and the exceptional credit attaching to the row of volumes of the SPR’s Proceedings is due to the fixed intention of the editors to proceed very slowly. Better a little belief tied fast, better a small investment salted down, than a mass of comparative insecurity.”
I know you have been reluctant to accept Dr. Phinuit (Mrs. Piper’s early “control”) as a spirit and concluded that he might be some kind of secondary personality. Would you mind telling the readers of this interview a little about Dr. Phinuit?
“The most remarkable thing about the Phinuit personality seems to me the extraordinary tenacity and minuteness of his memory. The medium has been visited by many hundreds of sitters, half of them, perhaps, being strangers who have come but once. To each Phinuit gives an hour full of disconnected fragments of talk about persons living, dead, or imaginary, and events past, future, or unreal. What normal waking memory could keep this chaotic mass of stuff together? Yet Phinuit does so…So far as I can discover, Mrs. Piper’s waking memory is not remarkable, and the whole constitution of her trance-memory is something which I am at a loss to understand.”
It often seems that you are playing the devil’s advocate.
“[True], I have myself been wilfully taking the point of view of the so-called ‘rigorously scientific’ disbeliever, and making an ad hominem plea.”
And yet you seemingly change hats very easily by rebuking the scientific point of view relative to God and immortality.
“I can, of course, put myself into the sectarian scientist’s attitude, and imagine vividly that the world of sensations and scientific laws and objects may be all. But whenever I do this, I hear that inward monitor which W. K. Clifford once wrote, whispering the word ‘bosh!’ Humbug is humbug, even though it bears the scientific name, and the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘scientific’ bounds.”
Herbert Spenser’s philosophy seems to have been pretty popular with scientific men and scholars of your era.
“Agnostic substantialism like that of Mr. Spenser, whose ‘Unknowable’ is not merely the unfathomable but the absolute–irrational, on which, if consistently represented in thought, it is of course impossible to count, performs the same function of rebuking a certain stagnancy and smugness in the manner in which the ordinary philistine feels his security. But considered as anything else than as reactions against an opposite excess, these philosophies of uncertainty cannot be acceptable; the general mind will fail to come to rest in their presence, and will seek for solutions of a more reassuring kind.”
There are those who claim that such reassurance is not necessary, that we can live moral and happy lives in the present without any regard for God or life after death.
“A philosophy whose principle is so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at one blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism. Better face the enemy than the eternal Void! This is why materialism will always fail of universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into an atomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future eternity. For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all the impulses which we most cherish. The real meaning of the impulses, it says, is something which has no emotional interest for us whatever…Any philosophy which annihilates the validity of the reference by explaining away its objects or translating them into terms of no emotional pertinency, leaves the mind with little to care or act for…A nameless Unheimlichkeit comes over us at the thought of there being nothing eternal in our final purpose, in the objects of those loves and aspirations which are our deepest energies.”
Living in the moment or in the present as the materialists advocate is not as simple as they make it out to be.
“[Exactly.] The luster of the present hour is always borrowed from the background of possibilities it goes with. Let our common experiences be enveloped in an eternal moral order; let our suffering have an immortal significance; let Heaven smile upon the earth, and deities pay their visits; let faith and hope be the atmosphere which man breathes in; and his days pass by with zest; they stir with prospects, they thrill with remoter values. Place around them on the contrary the curdling cold and gloom and absence of all permanent meaning which for pure naturalism and the popular-science evolutionism of our time are all that is visible ultimately, and the thrill stops short, or turns rather to an anxious trembling.”
Yet, I have friends who claim they have no fears of extinction and have no problem enjoying themselves in the present.
“It all depends on how sensitive the soul may become to discords….A little cooling down of animal excitability and instinct, a little loss of animal toughness, a little irritable weakness and descent of the pain threshold, will bring the worm at the core of all our usual springs of delight into full view, and turn us into melancholy metaphysicians. The pride of life and glory of the world will shrivel. It is after all but the standing quarrel of hot youth and hoary eld. Old age has the last word: the purely naturalistic look at life, however enthusiastically it may begin, is sure to end in sadness. This sadness lies at the heart of every merely positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy. Let sanguine healthy-mindedness do its best with its strange power of living in the moment and ignoring and forgetting, still the evil background is really there to be thought of, and the skull will grin in at the banquet…The old man, sick with insidious internal disease, may laugh and quaff his wine at first as well as ever, but he knows his fate now, for the doctors have revealed it; and this knowledge knocks the satisfaction out of all these functions. They are partners of death and the worm is their brother, and then they turn to a mere flatness.”
So, you must certainly take issue with the humanistic philosophy?
“[Most certainly.] I propose this as the first practical requisite which a philosophic conception must satisfy: It must, in a general way at least, banish uncertainty from the future. The permanent presence of the sense of futurity in the mind has been strangely ignored by most writers, but the fact is that our consciousness at a given moment is never free from the ingredient of expectancy. Everyone knows how when a painful thing has to be undergone in the near future, the vague feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control our attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the given present. The same is true when a great happiness awaits us. But when the future is neutral and perfectly certain, ‘we do not mind it,’ as we say, but give an undisturbed attention to the actual. Let now this haunting sense of futurity be thrown off its bearings or left without an object, and immediately uneasiness takes possession of the mind.”
It is obviously easier to adopt the moralist or humanistic philosophy when one is young and does not have death on his mind. Do you agree?
“[Of course.] The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense; and so long as this athletic attitude is possible all goes well – morality suffices. But the athletic attitude tends ever to break down and it inevitably does break down even in the most stalwart when the organism begins to decay, or when morbid fears invade the mind.”
Would you mind summarizing your primary belief?
“The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous as certain points, and higher energies filter in. By being faithful in my poor measure of this over-belief, I seem to myself to keep more sane and true.”
So, you see faith as a necessity in your belief system?
“Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance…The only escape from faith is mental nullity…We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis. The only difference is that while some hypotheses can be refuted in five minutes, others may defy ages.”
Where does religion fit into all of this?
“It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.”
Mainstream science has been reluctant to accept the findings of credible scientists who have risked sanctions in exploring the psychic world. What is the problem here?
“I think that the sort of loathing – no milder word will do – which the very words ‘psychical research’ and ‘psychical researcher’ awaken in so many honest scientific breasts is not only natural, but in a sense praiseworthy. A man who is unable himself to conceive of any orbit for these mental meteors can only suppose that [the founders of the SPR] mood in dealing with them must be that of silly marvelling at so many detached prodigies. And such prodigies! So, science simply falls back on her general non-possumus; and most of the would-be critics of the Proceedings (SPR reports) have been contended to oppose to the phenomena recorded the simple presumption that in some way or other the reports must be fallacious – for so far as the order of nature has been subjected to really scientific scrutiny, it always has been proved to run the other way.”
In spite of your outward reluctance to fully accept the spirit hypothesis, it often seems that you want to but are held back by academic and professional considerations. Am I misinterpreting your position?
“[Let me just say this:] One who takes part in a good sitting has usually a far livelier sense, both of the reality and of the importance of the communication, than one who merely reads the records. I am able, while still holding to all the lower principles of interpretation, to imagine the process as more complex, and to share the feelings with which [Richard] Hodgson came at last to regard it after his many years of familiarity, the feeling which Professor [James] Hyslop shares, and which most of those who have good sittings are promptly inspired with [i.e., the spirit hypothesis].”
Thank you, Professor James, any parting comments?
“[The work of the SPR has], it seems to me, conclusively proved one thing to the candid reader; and that is that the verdict of pure insanity, or gratuitous preference for error, of superstition without an excuse, which the scientists of our day are led by their intellectual training to pronounce upon the entire thought of the past, is a most shallow verdict….The tide seems steadily to be rising, in spite of all the expedients of scientific orthodoxy. It is hard not to suspect that here may be something different from a mere chapter in human gullibility. It may be a genuine realm of natural phenomena…My deeper belief is that we psychical researchers have been too precipitate with our hopes, and that we must expect to progress not by quarter-centuries, but by half centuries or whole centuries.”
Michael Tymn is the author of The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die, Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I.
His latest book, No One Really Dies: 25 Reasons to Believe in an Afterlife is published by White Crow books.
If in spirit we can’t recall what we looked like, how will people we knew recognize us and how will we recognize them?
Hi Michael,
How nice it was to read about your long-term investigation of your own personal memory.
I have known you for a long time and have a reasonable appreciation of the origins of your weltenschauung (sp?). Your principal sources are the utterances of mediums and scholarly research pertaining to such soothsayers.
One of my favorite sources is hypnotic regressions, including those that pertain to both present and past life recollections. Most of my academic sources are scholars from California who are experts in altered states of consciousness and parapsychology. Some of the most amazing insights have resulted from in utero consciousness, in which state the embryo recorded prenatal memories. In such circumstances the memories are pre-verbal, and thereby often refer to tactile sensations and an awareness of the emotional tone of conversations heard prenatally.
My favorite scholar and long term acquaintance is Jenny Wade who authored Changes of Mind, a book
I would commend to you. She is a trans-personal and developmental psychologist.
Hope you are well and happy.
Kindest regards,
Dave
Hi Michael,
Thanks for giving the email address to enable contact. I have been unable to post comments on your blog due to the problem that has been mentioned by various posters on there but I have been reading your articles with much interest as always and lets hope things can be remedied.
I was interested to here about you mentioning, on your lates blog post, about how you were convinced you remembered something only to find that it wasn’t the case. You might have heard of the Mandela Effect it’s where peoples memory of something is not what is currently stated about that memory. For instance the KitKat chocolate bar I have a distinct memory of it (along with many thousands of other people) having a dash between the KIt and Kat as KIt-Kat but this dash has apparently never existed. The Dick Dastardly & Mutley cartoon I remember as ‘Catch the pigeon’ and also the tune but it’s now ‘Stop the Pigeon’. Not everyone is affected and some remember one version and some another but which memory is correct? Without looking do you remember the Fruit of the Loom logo? Have a good think about what you remember it looking like. Now go and look for it by google or whatever and see what you find you might be surprised or maybe not. I know what I remember of it and it certainly isn’t what it is now but apparently it has always been like that and many thousands of people remember it the way I do. There are many Mandela effects of all sorts of different things from the names of products, films, song lyrics, car logos etc etc. Anyway just thought you might find it interesting and I think our reality has far more going on than we think afterall there’s 90% of stuff that we can’t see in our universe but it is there.
Incidentally I’m presently reading ‘Modern American Spiritualism a twenty years record of communion between earth and the world of spirits by Emma Hardinge Britten and is available on ‘Archive’ if you haven’t read it. This is a great book covering the development of Spiritualism in America in the 20 years or so after the ‘rappings of Rochester’ although there is also mention in that book of things happening a few years before the Rochester knockings. I think it was incredible just how much things took off and there were hundreds of circles and a lot more mediums than I was aware of. The amount of revulsion and antagonism to Spiritualism initially is also recorded in numerous chapters along with the various ‘Crackpot Spiritualists’ movements that were set up.I particularly found the chapter that covered the spirit rooms of Koons and Tippy where it was reputed that they were in communion with spirits that were around on the earth way before the Adam of the bible. The fact that they had very large families most of them having mediumistic abilities especially the younger members of the family meant that they had increased power to achieve many varieties of phenomena from trance through to the playing of musical instruments and direct voice and on numerous occasions many voices at the same time as well as the usual verifiable evidence given at their circles.. This book has left me quite astounded to be honest and it gives such a good description of the overall atmosphere at the time these incredile things were happening almost like a commentary of events and by written by someone who was deep in the heart of it all.
Anyway I have rambled enough but guess it makes up for all the comments I’ve been unable to make. Great article once again and look forward to your next one.
Many thanks.
Mark
Hi Mike,
It has been my experience of over 50 years attending spirit communication sessions and of others who do so that, whether in the material or spiritual world, we remember most the persons and events, etc. that are MOST meaningful to us.
Generally, details become fuzzy and irrelevant in the grand scheme of things when we become more fully ourselves in the spirit world. There are more important things there for us to learn and concentrate on.
Our priorities change to more spiritual and moral matters, as well as duties there, when we return, especially for those with more knowledge of spiritual matters.
Remember too, every time our body sleeps, our spirit is already participating in that life. We may be working on much more important projects than what we may be concerned about here on earth.
Let us not forget the moral and spiritual power of the superior spirits that can be exerted upon us, and they can help us to remember, whatever we may need and DESERVE …if for a good purpose.
The miniscule and truly unimportant details of material life will seem small and inconsequential before the immensity of the new knowledge we can explore and learn.
Moral progress and spiritual evolution is the purpose of life and the top priority of all spirits, whether they realize it our not.
Respectfully,
Yvonne
My father passed over in August of 1983. Every member of my family clearly remembered his last Thanksgiving in the flesh, at my brother-in-law’s parent’s home that they had just bought.
After a few years, my brother-in-law pointed out to us that his parents did not move into their new home until after August of 1983 (but before Thanksgiving).
I think we all conflated remembering him during that Thanksgiving of 1983 with him being there.
I forget where I read it, but someone who was having hallucinations of little men around him as he was (temporarily) dying, reported later that when he slipped out of his body, he could sense his brain having those hallucinations a few feet away, while he could see and experience everything clearly and realistically from a vantage point that was free of his drugged-out brain.
Once I realized that so much of the brain is used in filtering experience, reports of afterlife-connected phenomena started to make so much more sense. Apparently, the brain is also used to fill in gaps in our experience here on Earth, to be better able to cope with situations that arise when we don’t have all the data. When it goes overboard filling in gaps, that’s when you get hallucinations.
Or memories of a departed father in a house he never (physically) stepped into.
Good question, John. I recall reading somewhere that we recognize each other by our auras, but so much of this is beyond human comprehension, at least mine. The same with language. There apparently is no sound. It is telepathic communication.
It doesn’t seem right that we should take our physical appearance into the afterlife, at least if we have the same standards of physical attractiveness there as we do here. Why should some person who is not especially attractive in this life carry his or her appearance over to the next life if that person transitions with a high moral specific gravity? Then again, maybe earthly standards don’t apply there. We are often told not to apply our 3-D standards to the larger life.
For what it’s worth, in August 2021 I launched a documentary entitled “The Afterlife Views of Sir William and Lady Barrett”. You can see it here. It adds to what Michael has reported in his blog.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqHkq8hUknU&list=PLLB-82YMhiPFPKSm2Ke69aK0DKTftpvo0&index=43&t=2s
Keith P in England.
Corrections & Clarification:
“On the other hand, I had been to a number of football games before 1958 and could picture the stadiums and name the home teams in all of them.”
I should have clarified that statement. There is no way I can say for sure that I can remember all of them. How would I know if I forgot about one or two?
Also, there is a possible reason I remember the $12 betting loss at Pimlico. A week or so later, a fellow Marine officer living in the same BOQ and just a few rooms from me had his wallet stolen from his room. NCIS investigated and interviewed every person who resided on that floor. I was asked if I gambled. I admitted I lost $12 at Pimlico the prior week. I think that made me an immediate suspect as I was called back for a second interview, the focus being on my “gambling habit.” However, I’m not really a gambler. I just liked the horse races. A large pencil drawing of the mighty Citation, which I have had for the past 72 years, hangs on the wall over me as I type this.
Mike’s anomalous memories reminded me of something impossible that I “remembered” from when I was a small child, a meteorite falling into a suburban backyard and lying there glowing in the grass. Here’s the story: https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2017/10/22/it-couldnt-have-happened/
Science has learned a lot in recent years about how unreliable our memories actually are and how the past constantly gets remodeled in our minds. It’s vexing and disorienting to realize this.
As to our appearances to ourselves and others in the next world—well, I’ve often thought that I’d be disappointed to have to keep these thighs! But it seems likely that images of the bodies we wear on earth will be like costumes we can put on or take off according to our needs.
I do have a message from the other world related to that. The other day I was reading something about parallel lives and alternate realities in the comments to another of Mike’s posts, and had the opportunity to ask my main spirit contact how he saw the matter, and how or if he experienced his larger, multiple self. He showed me an image of standing in the Sandia mountains (a few miles from here) and looking down at the broad vista of Albuquerque and its surroundings. He could see the entire landscape of lives at once, he told me. A useful metaphor.
Regarding alternate realities and whether we can choose between them, he said, “You get the reality you need.” I didn’t particularly like that answer!
Elene
Michael,
I was born on May10th and my first memory was being in a crib placed next to an open window. I experienced a warm very comfortable breeze coming in through the black-screened window with white lace-like curtains which were popular at that time. I had no sense of a body then but it was more like an experience, not something I perceived through a body. I surmise I must have been one or two months old.
Another memory I have is standing up in a crib and calling for my mother. My mother had gone out shopping for the evening and my father was in the living room. I was in my bedroom and called for my mother. My father pretended to be her and I said, ”That’s not mother!” and threw my bottle of milk out into the room. (That was the last time I got a bottle.) Apparently, I must have been less than two years old then. – AOD
Sir William Barrett’s observations during mediumistic communication of the way memory seems to work can at least partially be understood via the interactional dualist transmitter/receiver or filter model of consciousness. This model can reconcile many observations of the apparent dependency of consciousness on the physical brain, with the existence of spirit.
This theory of consciousness holds that the human spirit manifests in the physical via intricately occupying and utilizing the brain as its interface mechanism. In this model human consciousness is drastically limited or filtered down by having to operate through this physical interface. Various disruptions of the physical neural interface can damage this neural machinery such that memory information in different ways is not available to the embodied spirit consciousness (or cannot be stored), as if the memories were actually being carried by the brain rather than as in fact they really are, held in immaterial spirit.
Hence the cases of “terminal awareness”, resumptions of consciousness where moribund Alzheimer’s patients or brain tumor victims – people with massive irreversible brain damage – can spontaneously “wake up” for a brief period and speak to caregivers as if their brains were suddenly healed. This is evidence that consciousness is not a function of the brain and that memory ultimately isn’t carried by the brain, and that spirit can in extraordinary circumstances bypass portions of the brain/spirit interface. Veridical NDE OBE accounts also indicate that memories are not carried by the brain, since during the experiences the physical brain is usually dysfunctional.
Michael,
I am glad to see familiar names returning to comment such as Mark. The section (shown below) you mentioned is very important.
Sir William further explained that it was much easier for him to communicate an idea than a detached word, such as a proper name. “When I am in my own sphere I am told a name and think I shall remember it,” he communicated. “[But] when I come into the conditions of a sitting I then know I can only carry with me – contain in me – a small portion of my consciousness. The easiest things to lay hold of are what we may call ideas; a detached word, a proper name, has no link with a train of thought except in a detached sense; that is far more difficult than any other feat of memory or association of ideas.”
The platform work in a Spiritualist Church is to link a spirit to an audience member. Usually first time for both parties. So the level of message transfer (having no background with either party) is low. Names are very difficult but ideas are better as symbols can be used. I taught Disnet style animation (I was multimedia IT teacher) and showed students of how we have a symbol library already built in to our minds.
I worked with international students and started my lecture with my kneeling on one knee. Depending on the culture it was seen as marriage proposal. Some thought I was having a stroke. Other symbols were discussed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols
The reason was the to lead towards clear design to get the clear marketing message across. The animation for Kit Kat might reach in to the cat symbols. Remember cat videos get eyeballs. (My daughter runs social media marketing – her food client say 3,000 views her blind cat views 37,000).
To return to my point platform work is giving a message at the poorest (in terms of communication) level. It is the highest in love. There are more advanced forms of communication. Elene’s spirit friend used an image known to her to get the message across.
Thanks
Bruce
I’d just like to mention one more thing about the Mandela Effect I mentioned in my last post. The main cause of the Mandela Effect has been put down to false memories because this is the best and most obvious scientific explanation for it happening or Occam’s razor might be a better way of attributing it to the simple fact of people mis-remembering something that didn’t happen or didn’t exist in the way they rembered it. This is because it doesn’t fit into that little scientific box and it goes beyond the mind boggle threshold so science must therefore be right and thousands of people are just plain stupid and are having mass delusions on a huge scale. As we all know the scientific world will not accept things beyond the scope of their general laws and theories so anything that falls outside this is considered nonsense and absurd. Obviously we can’t go back and check something at a certain point in time to verify we did indeed remember it right or wrong so we have to look for some other way to back up our memory of it. Many Mandela Effects may indeed be false memories but regardless it is not the case with certain ones.
This brings me back to my memory of the Fruit of the Loom logo in which I have a distinct memory of buying T-shirts for my business and looking at the logo on the labels and thinking to myself what the horn thing was on the label and also making a joke about it to a friend of mine. This was not mis-remembering or false memory, imagining, hallucination but 100% certainty that this happened along with hundreds of other people who have a memory of the cornucopia (horn of plenty) on the logo with the fruit. But the cornucopia has never existed in any shape or form on any Fruit of the Loom logo in the history of the company (this has been verified with the company). So either myself and a few hundred (possibly thousands) or so other people have been reality shifting in and out of another dimension very similar to this one or we need another explanation which has yet to be offered on how this could happen. Obviously many people just remember the fruit on it’s own so they are all right and we are all wrong.
What is so interesting and mystifying about the Fruit of the Loom Mandela Effect is that it has what is called ‘residue’ meaning that there is something left over from the original memory of the Mandela Effected person.
There is an album by Frank Wess called ‘Flute of the Loom’ (google it and you’ll see the album cover) came out around the 1970’s. The artist that did the art work for the album cover was a guy by the name of Ellis Chappel and his son Reed was contacted about five year ago and asked about where Ellis got the inspiration for the cover.
This was Reed’s reply;
This is Reed, Ellis’s son, responding for my dad here. I remember the cornucopia specifically, as does my dad. This is the second time we’ve been contacted about this album cover and Ellis (and I) are more than happy to answer any questions you have about it. I was a little kid when Ellis painted the Flute of the Loom cover and I remember specifically this album being a reference to the cornucopia in Fruit of the Loom’s original logo, which is where my dad says he specifically got the inspiration for the design (when I talked to him about it he said, “Why the hell else would I have used a cornucopia?”). The food coming out of the flute is soul food, actually, a ham hock, cabbage, black-eyed peas, etc. I remember when (in my mind) Fruit of the Loom quit using a cornucopia in their logo and switched to just using fruit by itself. It impressed me because I thought the logo looked better with a cornucopia in it. In my memories this was roughly around 1978 when I was in second grade. So, anyway, feel free to ask away.
Thanks a lot!
Reed and Ellis Chappell
Ellis also remembers the cornucopia and remembers it changing to just fruit but no it’s always been the fruit period. So that is an example of residue and for me it enforces what I remember or should I say what I truly believe I remember it is not a false memory or mis-remembering but actually happened. There is no explanation and it defies all our current understanding of reality but I think reality is far more complex and unfathomable than we dare realise. Oops sorry slightly longer than I meant it to be.
Why don’t we remember things that happened to us when we were an infant or a small child? For example; few, if any people remember being born and that has got to be a very traumatic experience for us. Was cutting of the umbilical cord painful? Being slapped on the butt! What about circumcision? And why don’t I remember having my diapers changed? or being submerged in water for a bath. I must have been crying a lot. What was I upset about? Why don’t I remember that? What about being potty trained? Eating solid foods for the first time? I could go on and on. These are all very important things and probably generated a lot of emotions for the new being.
Maybe we don’t remember because our soul or spirit was not fully incarnated in that body during those early years. As Michael suggested maybe we were off doing other things. I think this is an important idea to consider especially in view of the current discussions about abortion.
Just when does the soul fully incarnate and at the other end of life, when does the soul actually leave the body. On the morning I sat with my father when he was dying, it was apparent to me that his spirit was no longer in his body even though his heart was still beating; it stopped about an hour later. It is reported by NDE-ers that they are off and away from their body when their body may still be “alive” on the operating table or at the scene of an accident. And some people report leaving their body without any traumatic event happening at all and their body was “sleeping” in bed.
I think our belief system about a spiritual life needs to be coherent and logical. We either are a spirit inhabiting a physical body or we are not! If we are a spirit then life becomes more of a play in which we put on different costumes and play our parts and then, take off the makeup and costume, go to the cast party and eventually audition for another part. That costume (body) is really not that important and in fact we have had many costume changes over a lifetime especially if that lifetime is a long one. – AOD
Amos I believe we are not able to form memories before age two and a half although I’m sure I remember sitting in a pram at my grandma’s gate before I was two. Also we are supposed to forget most things that happened to us before we were seven and a half years old according to recent research.
You might try looking into Rupert Sheldrake and his Morphic Resonance theory.
Rupert Sheldrake on “How Morphic Resonance affects our memories, families, rituals and festivals.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d6_H9IPlUc
I’ve never paid much attention to Kit Kat candy bars and am not sure I’ve ever had one, but yesterday I saw an advertisement on TV in which there was a hyphen between the two words, although it showed a picture of the candy bar without the hyphen. I wonder if the hyphen is used only when it precedes “candy bar” as an adjective.
It all brings to mind the test that one of the NDE researchers planned a few years ago. I think it was Dr. Sam Parnia. It involved putting a number or sign of some kind over a high point in the surgery or Intensive Care Unit of the hospital, so that if the patient were out-of-body, he or she might record the number in his memory and give it as evidence later. However, as previously discussed here, what might be “seen” might not be registered. As an example, I mentioned passing a service station almost daily. There is a large sign in front of the station indicating the cost of gas (petrol) per gallon. The numbers are well over a foot high and can be seen from a distance. However, even though I pass it and “see’ it, I rarely record the number (cost) in my memory bank. I assume it is that way with many others.
Amos’s “snapshot memories” are certainly much earlier than mine and suggest a “loose” soul, according to one reference. Amos was probably off doing other things while his infant body slept in the crib.
One snapshot memory came to me yesterday when I saw the word “judgment” spelled with an extra “e”, i.e., “judgement.” I realize that the latter spelling is acceptable in England, but the American way is to spell it without the “e”. I can recall sitting with my boss and going over one of my investigative reports with him about 1963 and he mentioned to me that I had misspelled “judgment.” I can picture sitting there in his office and see him telling me that I had misspelled a word. Strange that I would have a snapshot of that seemingly small experience in my life. However, I think I see that snapshot every time I see the word spelled “judgement,” and so it is a recurring memory.
Thanks Mark for the link to the Sheldrake video. He is always very entertaining to watch, not that I subscribe to his theories of Morphic Resonance though.
Most of us don’t have complete memories of all of our years of life. My memories are like vignettes or snippets of memory. Like Michael, I do remember going to Kindergarten at 5 years old and that the teacher from England was not certified to teach in the U.S. and we had to have a replacement. I also remember my first grade teacher Mrs. Neubauer when I was six and my second grade teacher Mrs. Strubinger when I would have been seven. And I remember the boxes of watercolor paints that were handed-out. Ah, and Miss Webster who taught cursive writing which isn’t taught any more. From there on I do remember all of my grade school teachers and some sense , feel, image of their classrooms and some things I did in each class. And I remember the man on the street corner of the school ground who sold yo-yos, and I am still triggered by the colors of cars that remind me of those yo-yos.
Highschool is somewhat of a blur for me. which surprisingly should have been more memorable than grade school. – AOD
Michael,
An interesting discussion on memory.
I have a retentive memory (this was picked up by a CSIRO scientist as I continued our discussion on the phone conversation from six months before – his wife was similar). I had assumed everyone was the same but changed their version of events to promote some hidden reason. When I met people at conferences sometimes years apart I would repeat the salient information (wife’s name, what they were up to etc). My memory would upload trivia. They sometimes didn’t remember meeting me and walked away. I put it down to the person having a poor memory.
Spirit messages use a different path so these are written down to avoid relying on memory. I have found false memory in people where the brain reaches and substitutes a variation of the events. A different construct. The various early memory recollections are interesting. If people can only remember back to two has the long term memory mechanism just developed? Is there a short term memory in operation while long term memory develops?
William James referred to the sensory-perceptual world of infants as a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” I would also apply this term to the spirit world.
Thanks,
Bruce