ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

Incipient Mediumship. 97
the mind of the communicant and the delivery of the message.
It is in the study of these that we shall learn the difficulties attending
the investigation and the complications involved in the
receipt of the messages. So much depends on the dissociation of
the medium's mental contents and those sent from the communicating
mind.
The subconscious is the vehicle through which the message
must come and the development of the medium depends on the
success with which the communicators or the controls can eliminate
the influence of the subconscious memories from the messages.
The functional action of the subconscious is necessary
for obtaining foreign impressions at all, but it must be trained
or must grow to dissociate the contents of its own ideas from
those which are delivered to it from beyond. We see in the
work of Mr. Moriarty the influence of both his subliminal and
normal processes on the impressions that come to him. His
mediumship was in a transitional state from pure guessing at
foreign stimuli to the receipt of pictures that exactly represented
the memories of the foreign mind. And even this pictographic
process is an intermediary process between interpreting stimulus
and delivering messages in their purity. But Mr. Moriarty's
evocation of his memories is the first instance in which the influence
of foreign impressions expressed themselves in specific
memories of the subject without betraying the intervening processes,
except in those instances where the pictographic process
took the form of exactly representing the transmitted picture.
In the eliciting of his memories it is probable that the intermediate
process was suppressed in the subconscious and the instigation
of latent memories brought out pictures which were safe objects
for interpreting the meaning of what was intended, tho they had
to run the gauntlet of all sorts of error in this process. The
record shows what those errors were and but for the evidence
that chance coincidence does not explain the incidents as a whole,
the case would appear, at least superficially, to be either illegitimate
gliessing or pure illusions created by spontaneous association
aroused like those of a chaotic dream life.
The cross reference experiment with the case confirmed all
this, as allusion was made to the man's " visions " and " voices ".
I cannot take space for the discussion of this. It is not necessary.
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