10bl-Eb81 map ISS: Biography of Frederic Myers Page 1 of 5 SurvivalAfterDeath.org News and articles on Mediumship, Psi and Survival every week Researchers Homepage About Us Frederic Myers Latest News & Events 1843-1901 Biographies Articles A LEADING mind in psychical research)founder of a Experiments cosmic philosophy which may yet revolutionise scientific thought, a profound scholar, a poet of distinction and a brilliant Photographs psychologist. For thirty years he filled the post of an inspector Theory of schools at Cambridge. Here his resolve to pursue psychical investigation was born in 1869 after a starlight walk and talk Online Library with Henry Sidgwick. Links His starting point was that if a spiritual world ever manifested to Recommended Books man, it must manifest now, and that, in consequence, a serious Contact and Feedback investigation must end by discovering some unmistakable signs of it. For "if all attempts to verify scientifically the Search intervention of another world should be definitely proved futile, this would be a terrible blow, a mortal blow, to all our hopes of another life, as well as of traditional religion" for "it would thenceforth be very difficult for men to be persuaded, in our age of clear thinking, that what is now found to be illusion and trickery was in the past thought to be truth and revelation." He had in mind the same methods of deliberate, dispassionate and exact inquiry which built up our actual knowledge of the visible world. It was in this spirit that the SPR of which he was a fellow-founder came to be established in 1882. He devoted all his energies to its work and concentrated with a deep grasp of science on the psychological side. Of the sixteen volumes of Proceedings published while he lived there is not one without an important contribution from his pen. In Phantasms of the Living the system of classification was entirely his idea. The words telepathy, supernormal and veridical and many others less in use were coined by him. He played a large part in organising the International Congress of Psychology and acted as secretary to the one held in London in 1892. In the SPR he filled the post of honorary secretary. In 1900 he was elected to the presidential chair, a post which only distinguished scientists had filled before. To periodicals such as the Fortnightly Review, the Nineteenth Century, he contributed many articles. They were collected and published, in 1893, under the title Science and a Future Life, and Other Essays. His chef d'oeuvre, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death, was posthumously published. The University of Madras adopted it as a text book for its courses on lectures on psychology at the faculty of philosophy and letters. It is an exposition of the potential powers of the subliminal self which he pictured as the real ego, a vast psychic organism of which the ordinary consciousness is but an accidental fraction, the life http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/researchers/myers.htm 8/29/2007 ISS: Biography of Frederic Myers Page 2 of 5 of the soul, not bound up with the life of the body, of which the so-called supernormal faculties are the ordinary channels of perception. It is a theory of tremendous implications. It is an attack on the spiritualist position that all, or most, of the supernormal phenomena were due to the spirits of the dead. Myers contended that by far the largest proportion was due to the action of the still embodied spirit of the agent or of the percipient himself. The theory has brought order into a chaotic mass of psychical phenomena. On the other hand, it greatly enhanced the probability of survival. As the powers which he claimed for the subliminal self did not degenerate during the course of evolution and serve no purpose in this life they are obviously destined for a future existence. Why, for instance, should the subconscious SO carefully preserve all thoughts and memories if there will be no use for them? William James suggested that the problems of the subliminal mind should be called "the problem of Myers." "Whatever the judgment of the future may be on Mr. Myers' speculation", he said, "the credit will always remain to them of being the first attempt in any language to consider the phenomena of hallucination, automatism, double personality, and mediumship as connected parts of one whole subject." "If future discoveries confirm his thesis of the intervention of the discarnate, in the web and the woof of our mental and physical world," writes Theodore Flournoy, "then his name will be inscribed in the golden book of the initiated, and, joined to those of Copernicus and Darwin, he will complete the triad of geniuses who have the most profoundly revolutionised scientific thought, in the order, Cosmological, Biological and Psychological." The same author, a profound psychologist himself, considered Myers "one of the most remarkable personalities of our time in the realm of mental science." Dr. Leaf compares him to Ruskin and considers him in some respects his peer. According to Charles Richet "if Myers were not a mystic, he had all the faith of a mystic and the ardour of an apostle, in conjunction with the sagacity and precision of a savant." "I never knew a man so hopeful concerning his ultimate destiny," writes Oliver Lodge in memoriam. "He once asked me whether I would barter - if it were possible - my unknown destiny, whatever it might be, for as many aeons of unmitigated and wise terrestrial happiness as might last till the secular fading of the sun, and then an end. He would not." He was so convinced of survival that his friends often heard him say, "I am counting the days until the holidays." In Human Personality physical phenomena receive but little consideration. Myers believes in the occurrence of telekinetic phenomena but in spite of the experiments of William Crookes and his own, their genuine occurrence, from the viewpoint of the public, did not appear to him sufficiently believable to justify their discussion in his book. Nevertheless, in dealing with possession he suggested an ingenious explanation, i.e., that the possessing spirit may use the organism more skilfully http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/researchers/myers.htm 8/29/2007 ISS: Biography of Frederic Myers Page 3 of 5 than its owner and may emit some energy which can visibly move ponderable objects not actually in contact with the flesh. Of his own investigations between 1872-76 he said that they were "tiresome and distasteful enough.' On May 9, 1874, in the company of Edmund Gurney, he made the acquaintance of Stainton Moses. The acquaintance led to friendship. When Moses died on September 5, 1892, his notebooks were handed to Myers for study. His articles in Proceedings, SPR, Vol. IX and Vol. XI contain the best accounts of this remarkable mediumship, but his conclusions were not based on personal experiences with Moses. When he had some startling ones with Miss Wood and Miss Fairlamb in 1878 he kept strangely silent. Alfred Russel Wallace seen his notes on the séances held under the auspices of the SPR with the two mediums at Cambridge in Henry Sidgwick's rooms. They state that the medium's wrists were securely tied with tapes and the ends were tacked down to the floor and sealed. Many forms came out of the cabinet, both adults and children. The seals were found untampered. The colour of the tape and the scaling wax was varied at each séance, the medium was put into a hammock which was connected with pulleys to a weighing machine, nevertheless the phenomena occurred as before without the least suspicious cause. In 1894 on the lle Roubaud he was the guest of Charles Richet and participated with Oliver Lodge and Julien Ochorowitz in the experiments conducted with Eusapia Palladino. He could not refrain from expressing an opinion and admitted that the phenomena were genuine. The Cambridge exposure shook his belief and he wrote: "I had no doubt that systematic trickery had been used from the first to last, and that there was no adequate ground for attributing any of the phenomena occurring at these sittings to a supernormal cause." Later, however, he participated in another series of sittings with Eusapia in Paris and at the solemn adjuration of Richet he declared himself convinced that both telekinesis and ectoplasm are genuine phenomena. He sat with Mrs. Everitt, Mme. d'Esperance, and David Duguid, he had the strange experience of seeing objective pictures in a crystal ball and he investigated the haunted Ballechin House in Perthshire, Scotland. As a result he published two papers in Proceedings: "On Alleged Movements of Objects without Contact, occurring not in the Presence of a Paid Medium" (Vol VII, Parts XIX-XX., 1891-92). Still, he was not enthusiastic for physical phenomena. It was owing to his discouragement that Mrs. Thompson ceased to sit for physical demonstrations and developed chiefly as a trance medium for the SPR. He had his reward. The communication received through Mrs. Thompson finally confirmed his belief in survival. Before the International Psychological Congress in 1900 he read a paper on his experiences. http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/researchers/myers.htm 8/29/2007 ISS: Biography of Frederic Myers Page 4 of 5 Attention to some remarkable omissions in Myers' great work was called by James Robertson in an address printed in Light, May 30, 1903. He objects that Andrew Jackson Davis is passed by a single remark and says that "a clear, unbiased examination of the life and writings of this extraordinary man would have given him more than all he has gathered together in these long drawn out statements as to disintegration of personality, hypnotism, trance, possession, etc." After Myers' death a flood of communications was put down to his spirit by many mediums. The most important ones were those received through Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Holland. As regards the latter, Frank Podmore and Miss Alice Johnson agree that the Myers control is a subconscious creation of the medium. The views there expressed are alien to the mentality of the living Myers. Mrs. Verrall obtained the contents of a sealed letter which Myers had written in 1891 and left in the care of Oliver Lodge for such a test. However, when the letter was opened in 1904 the contents were found to be entirely different. In 1907, Eleanor Sidgwick obtained good identity proofs through Mrs. Piper. On her behalf Mrs. Verrall asked some questions to which she did not know the answer and received correct replies as regards the contents of the last conversation that had taken place between Mrs. Sidgwick and Myers. Many other impressive indications of his surviving self were found in cross-correspondences, especially during Mrs. Piper's second visit to Britain in 1906-07. The whole system of cross-correspondences appears to have been elaborated by him and the wealth of classical knowledge displayed in the connected fragments, given by several mediums, raises a strong presumption that they have emanated from Myers' mind. The most striking evidence of this nature was obtained after Mrs. Piper's return to America by Mr. G. B. Dorr in 1908. Podmore considers it "perhaps the strongest evidence yet obtained for the identity of any communicator." In The Road to Immortality which was automatically produced by Geraldine Cummins a stupendous vista is opened up by F. W. H. Myers of the soul's progression through the after-death states. As regards the authorship of the book, Oliver Lodge received independent testimony through Mrs. Leonard from Myers of his communications through Miss Cummins. Oliver Lodge sees no reason to dissent from the view that the remarkable accounts of the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh state "are the kind of ideas which F. W. H. Myers may by this time (1932) have been able to form." Source (with minor modifications): An Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science by Nandor Fodor (1934). Articles by Frederic Myers on this website: Science and a Future Life Introduction to "Human Personality" Phantasms of the Dead Motor Automatism Trance, Possession and Ecstasy http://www.survivalafterdeath.org/researchers/myers.htm 8/29/2007 Frederic Myers - Proof of Life After Death Page 1 of 5 Home Products Affiliations Facilities Free Materials Partner Site Frederic Myers - Proof of Life After Death Personal development has, as one of its aims, to transcend the human condition. If consciousness is limited to one's current lifetime, and if one's only route to immortality is to reproduce one's genes and to try to make one's mark on the world for the benefit of future generations, then still these are worthwhile aims. But if, instead, one's consciousness survives death, then the motivation to transcend the human condition becomes far stronger. One's personal development in this lifetime will affect one's situation in the after-life, and it will determine one's future - whether it be to reincarnate in this world (in a worse, similar or better condition than one is now) or to fulfill one's potential by moving on to higher purposes and responsibilities. Frederick Myers recognized this as a critical question for all intelligent people and worked relentlessly to provide us with a solid proof of life after death. 1. Frederic Myers Frederick Myers was a professor of classics at Cambridge University in England. He was born in 1843 and he died in 1901. One overriding interest characterized this man: a passionate curiosity about the meaning of human life. He devoted most of his adult years to trying to satisfy this curiosity, but he did it in a rather unusual way. He did not pore over theological writings and philosophical speculation. He felt that if human life did have a purpose, then it could be discovered in only one way: through the study of human http://www.trans4mind.com/spiritual/myers1.htm 9/5/2003 Frederic Myers - Proof of Life After Death Page 2 of 5 experiences. This conviction led him, in 1882, to found the first Society for Psychical Research with some of his Cambridge colleagues. In particular, Myers and his associates wanted to know if human beings survived bodily death. If they did, then life in a body must have a discoverable purpose. Myers was a man of enormous energy and great intellectual ability. After twenty years of intensive investigation, he concluded that he had answered this question. He wrote a book about what he had learned that became a classic - probably the most important work ever written in this strange field, though now out of print - called 'Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death." [To obtain the out-of-print works by Frederic Myers call John Gach Books on (800) 465-9023 or email: inquiry@gach.com]. Myers had a strong interest in mediumship, and grappled to the end of his life with the problems involved in interpreting its results. The difficulties lay not with the limitations of the mediums' powers, but with their scope. When a medium became entranced, and a voice, remarkably like that of a dead person, issued forth from her mouth, claiming to be that person and showing an encyclopedic knowledge of that person's life, then it seemed to Myers that contact was being made with the dead. Or when a medium, in a half-trance, seemed to be talking to someone who had been in his grave for some time, and was able to answer detailed questions about his life, Myers at first reached the conclusion that the dead still live. But his research, in the end, didn't turn out to be quite that simple. For he became aware of cases in which those attending a seance had been given such detail about a person they knew who claimed in the communication to be dead. Later, however, they would discover that he was still alive! And in a few cases, as an experiment, someone had gone to a medium and mentally concentrated on an entirely fictitious personality, only to receive 'communications' from that 'personality,' claiming to come from beyond the grave! In other words, when mediums went into trance states, they could at times pick up accurate information about living or fictitious persons telepathically and deliver it as if it came from the dead. In other words, the medium may be unable to distinguish between telepathic communication from the living and telepathic communication from the dead. So this posed a problem. Mediums did not seem to do such things in a fraudulent spirit; they were sometimes unable to tell whether information came from the living or from the dead, but tended to make the sometimes false assumption it was from the latter. Myers never solved this problem during his life. What he did was even more impressive. He solved it after he was dead! 2. The Cross-Correspondences Within a few weeks of Myers's death in 1901, some very strange communications began to be received by psychics in England, the United States and India. They came through automatic writing to a total of a dozen psychics and continued for a period of thirty years and then later by his fellow leaders of the Society for Psychical Research, Professor Henry Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney as they too died. What was strangest about them was that they made no sense. Or perhaps they did - for they were SO mysteriously worded that it http://www.trans4mind.com/spiritual/myers1.html 9/5/2003 Frederic Myers - Proof of Life After Death Page 3 of 5 almost seemed their meaning was being deliberately concealed. And most of them were signed, "Myers." In all more than three thousand scripts were transmitted over thirty years. Some of them were more than forty typed pages long. But although the text of the messages seemed indecipherable, the 'instructions' which often accompanied them were clear. These instructions repeated a number of themes. The 'script' should be sent to a particular person, who would turn out to be one of the other psychics involved. Or it should be sent to the Society for Psychical Research. And that although its content may seem to be senseless, it was in reality anything but: it was an attempt by the deseased communicator to prove his continued existence. These instructions and explanations were, in fact, frequent and explicit. "Record the bits," wrote Myers, "and when fitted they will make the whole." And again, "I will give the words between you that neither alone can read but together they will give the clue." It was some time, however, before the people involved fully realized what was happening. When they did, they gathered the fragments together and found that they had communications which were clear, coherent and continuous. Most of these scripts consisted of references to and quotations from both classical and modern literature. Some were SO obscure that only a scolar, and a specialized one at that, would recognize them. The intention was to make these scripts seem random and pointless to the individual psychics, in order to avoid giving clues to the train of thought behind them. They would only become meaningful and show evidence of design when pieced together by an independent investigator. The interest lies in the question: Who selected them to convey a train a thought which could not be deduced from any one person's script? The answer was the dead communicator. Myers was trying to prove that the mind of the medium could not be the creator of the message: how could it be when the message was only a fragment which made no sense unless linked with other, equally 'meaningless' fragments. Myers was quite explicit about what he was doing. He was causing a dozen psychics, in various widely separated parts of the world, not only to refer to the same topic - often a highly obscure one - but to do SO in ways which were complementary. Like the parts of a jigsaw puzzle, these 'pieces' did more than refer to the same theme; they did SO in ways which were intricately intertwined. Those who studied and tried to interpret these 'jigsaw puzzles' called them cross- correspondences. The simplest case involved the repetition of particular themes drawn from various language and literary sources. On April 24, 1907, while in trance in the United States, an American medium named Mrs Piper three times uttered the word "Thantos," a Greek word meaning 'death,' despite the fact that she had no knowledge of Greek. Such repetitions were often a signal that cross-correspondences were about to begin. But it had begun already. About a week earlier, in India, Mrs Holland had done some automatic writing, and in that script the following enigmatic communication had appeared: "Mors [Latin for death]. And with that the shadow of death fell upon his limbs." On April 29th, in England, Mrs Verrall, writing automatically, produced the words: "Warmed both hands before the fire of life. It fades and I am ready to depart." This is a quotation from a poem by nineteenth-century English poet, Walter Landor. Mrs Verrall next drew a triangle. This could be Delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. She had always considered it a symbol of death. She then wrote: "Manibus date lilia plenis" [give lilies with full hands]. http://www.trans4mind.com/spiritual/myers1.htm 9/5/2003 Frederic Myers - Proof of Life After Death Page 4 of 5 This is a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid in which an early death is foretold. This was followed by the statement: "Come away, come away, Pallida mors [Latin for pale death]," and, finally, an explicit statement from the communicator: "You have got the word plainly written all along in your writing. Look back." The 'word,' or 'theme,' was quite obvious when these fragments, given in the same month to three mediums thousands of miles apart, were put together and scrutinized. And in view of the lifelong interest of the communicator, it was certainly an appropriate theme. Death. This gives some indication of the complexity of even the simplest cross-correspondence. And most of those who have studied them have concluded that they were exactly what they claimed to be: an experiment conducted from beyond the grave to establish that Myers still lived. Myers pursued this task with a diligence characteristic of him in life. From 1901 to 1932, more than three thousand scripts were communicated. Receiving and interpreting such a vast body of material was often burdensome to those involved. But for Myers, the whole enterprise was a source of anguish. He had survived physical death, as others do, and now he was desperately eager to communicate this fact in a fashion which would convince his still living colleagues. But, because he had no body, he had to use the minds of others. He had to struggle to 'get through. And in the scripts he sent, he refers again and again to the suffering that this cost him. "Oh, if I could only leave you the proofthat I continue. Yet another attempt to run the blockade - to strive to get a message through. How can I make your hand docile enough - how can I convince them? I am trying, amid unspeakable difficulties. It is impossible for me to know how much of what I send reaches you. I feel as if I had presented my credentials - reiterated the proofs of my identity in a wearisomely repetitive manner. The nearest simile I can find to express the difficulty of sending a message is that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass, which blurs sight and deadens sound, dicatating feebly to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary. A feeling of terrible impotence burdens me. Oh it is a dark road." Myers, for all the grand scope of his interests, was a very modest man. And he was also a very systematic one. These two qualities perfectly explained the style and timing of his after-death communications. He had first to prove to his friends that he still lived and he devoted thirty years to that. But what was of even greater interest, once that was established, was his description of what it was like to be dead. Myers, always the scholar, was not about to run hastily into a discussion about such a momentous subject. He was very systematic and cautious about that too. He had been dead for nearly twenty-three years before, at last, he started to communicate on that most mysterious of all geographies - the world of the dead. Myers was not, of course, the first to describe life after death. Plenty of other communicators had done that in spiritualist seances, but although their reports had at first been examined with fascinated anticipation, thay were soon dismissed with snorts of derision. For Heaven, the afterlife, had always been something very special to man - a transcendent paradise where the pain and struggle of this life would be surmounted and the mysteries of human life and death would at last be revealed in the very abode of God http://www.trans4mind.com/spiritual/myers1.htm 9/5/2003 Frederic Myers - Proof of Life After Death Page 5 of 5 himself. But what was reported was quite something else indeed. For what the communicators described was nothing but an earth-life. It was terribly beautiful, and the 'dead' were very happy, and active too. What exactly did they do there? Well, pretty much what they had always done - they played golf, for example, and drank Scotch. They had sexual adventures and they smoked cigars. They played cards, lived in houses like those they had occupied on earth, and even went to work! Now this, obviously, could not be Heaven: it was clearly spiritualist self-delusion. Myers, however, was to show that these communicators were right - at least in part. For it had never occurred to the critics that if men were going to transcend their earth-lives after death and move onwards to a 'divine' realm, then it would certainly be a kindness to them them to start them off with something familiar - to match the lives and beliefs they were familiar with on earth. Continue to Page 2 Meta-Programming TOOLS FOR TRANSFORMATION http://www.trans4mind.com/spiritual/myers1.html 9/5/2003