“Are you saying that the people who write these books are just phonies
and liars?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. But here, too, we are talking about a
Darwinian system.”
“You’ll have to explain that.”
“Think of all the different things that can happen in a single day. You can
even take a day in your own life. Think of all the things you see and
experience.”
“Yes?”
“Now and then you experience a strange coincidence. You might go into
a store and buy something for 28 crowns. Later on that day Joanna comes
along and gives you the 28 crowns she owes you. You both decide to go to
the movies—and you get seat number 28.”
“Yes, that would be a mysterious coincidence.”
“It would be a coincidence, anyway. The point is, people collect
coincidences like these. They collect strange— or inexplicable—experiences
When such experiences— taken from the lives of billions of people—are
assembled into books, it begins to look like genuine data. And the amount of it
increases all the time. But once again we are looking at a lottery in which only
the winning numbers are visible.”
“But there are clairvoyants and mediums, aren’t there, who are
constantly experiencing things like that?”
“Indeed there are, and if we exclude the phonies, we find another
explanation for these so-called mysterious experiences.”
“And that is?”
“You remember we talked about Freud’s theory of the unconscious . . .”
“Of course.”
“Freud showed that we can often serve as ‘mediums’ for our own
unconscious. We might suddenly find ourselves thinking or doing something
without really knowing why. The reason is that we have a whole lot of experi-
ences, thoughts, and memories inside us that we are not aware of.”
“So?”
“People sometimes talk or walk in their sleep. We could call this a sort of
‘mental automatism.’ Also under hypnosis, people can say and do things ‘not
of their own volition.’ And remember the surrealists trying to produce so-called
automatic writing. They were just trying to serve as mediums for their own
unconscious.”
“I remember.”
“From time to time during this century there have been what are called
‘spiritualist revivals,’ the idea being that a medium could get into contact with
a deceased person. Either by speaking in the voice of the deceased, or by
using automatic writing, the medium would receive a message from someone
who had lived five or fifty or many hundreds of years ago. This has been
taken as evidence either that there is life after death or that we live many
lives.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I’m not saying that all mediums have been fakes. Some have clearly
been in good faith. They really have been mediums, but they have only been
mediums for their own unconscious. There have been several cases of me-
diums being closely studied while in a trance, and revealing knowledge and