In my previous two posts I tried to present an idea about mediumship and personality. But I don’t think I did a very good job, so I’m going to try again from a different perspective.
First, here are some of the mistakes I made before. I should not have used the term "cosmic reservoir." This was an attempt at being poetic, but it only confused the issue and brought up the idea of super-psi. I am not arguing for super-psi. I think super-psi is super-silly.
Second, I should not have used the term "astral shell." I was trying to tie in my ideas with the vocabulary of the mystical tradition, but this approach created confusion, since the term "astral shell" is understood in a variety of ways.
So what exactly am I trying to say?
Suppose we take a person named Joe Blow. Asked to describe himself, Joe replies that he is a political moderate, an occasional smoker, a New York Giants fan, 45 years old, who lives in Brooklyn and works as a legal secretary. That’s who Joe is, according to his own description. Now suppose we had asked Joe the same questions 20 years earlier. Back then, Joe was a political liberal, a chain smoker, a Seattle Seahawks fan, 25 years old, who lived in Tacoma, Washington, and worked as a courier. Fast forward from the present day to 20 years in the future and ask Joe the same questions. He will consider himself a political conservative, a non-smoker, someone who has lost interest in football, 65 years old, who lives in Fort Lauderdale and is retired.
All of the descriptive details that Joe provided have changed and will continue to change over the years. Yet Joe is still Joe. How is this possible? How can he change in so many respects, as well as in many other respects that are not enumerated, and yet continue to be essentially who he is and has always been?
Clearly, there must be some underlying continuity in Joe’s life, some essence untouched by the changes in his personal circumstances, habits, likes and dislikes, and beliefs. This underlying essence is what can be called the Witness, the core, the persistent Self that is larger and more stable than any changing dynamics of the personality.
The other aspects of Joe’s identity, the ones that change over time, can be called the ego-persona.
Now, when we talk about postmortem survival, what is it of Joe (if anything) that survives? Broadly speaking, there are four possibilities.
1. The ego-persona alone may survive.
2. The Witness alone may survive.
3. The ego-persona and the Witness may survive together.
4. The ego-persona and the Witness may survive independently of each other.
If the first option is correct, then the ego-persona may persist indefinitely, but without the animating intelligence of the Witness. In this case, Joe will survive only as a collection of opinions and memories and behaviors.
If the second option is correct, then the Witness may persist indefinitely, but without the individuating characteristics of the ego-persona. In this case, there will be no Joe who survives in any recognizable way.
If the third option is correct, then the postmortem version of Joe will be essentially the same as his antemortem version.
If the fourth option is correct, then there will be a postmortem Joe who is only a shadow of his earthly self, and, separately, there will be the Witness that was formerly connected with Joe.
I think we can rule out the second option. There is enough evidence that personal characteristics, memories, and so forth survive — evidence found in the better cases of mediumship and in Ian Stevenson’s reincarnation cases, etc. — to show that the ego-persona does not simply wink out of existence altogether at the point of death. But this still leaves us with three other options. And any of those three options, it seems to me, may be consistent with the available evidence.
A medium may be in touch with only the ego-persona (option one or option four), or with the ego-persona plus Witness (option three). In some cases, it does appear as if there is an animating, creative intelligence behind the ego-persona in these communications, which would suggest that option three is correct. But in other cases — I would say the majority of cases — there is little sign of any true creative intelligence at work. In fact, there are strange lapses of memory and logic which may point to a communicator deprived of some essential faculty — such as the higher intelligence of the Witness.
There are also cases in which a purely fictitious communicator is heard from, and yet the other, apparently genuine communicators or controls vouch for the reality of their fictional colleague. This is certainly very odd, but perhaps not so odd if we assume that even a fictitious communicator still constitutes an ego-persona — a constructed identity, a thought form that is ultimately artificial, just as Joe’s constructed identity is also ultimately artificial.
Maybe the medium is not capable of distinguishing between an ego-persona alone, on the one hand, and an ego-persona plus Witness, on the other. If you think about it, this is a very hard — perhaps impossible — distinction for an outsider to draw. We know that we ourselves are self-conscious, but we can only infer the self-consciousness of other people. A chess-playing computer may seem just as intelligent and self-aware to an observer as any human chess player. The machine is not, in fact, self-aware, but we would hardly realize this on the basis of its behavior.
If we can’t distinguish between the ego-persona alone and the ego-persona plus Witness even in our physical lives, how can we expect to make such a distinction when dealing with discarnate entities? We probably can’t, at least in most instances. So the assumption made by many researchers that we can distinguish between "genuine" and "artificial" communicators (or controls) may be fatally flawed, at least in the majority of cases.
That’s all I’m saying.