ASPR Journal, V14 - Iapsop.com

Book Reviews.
Well, here I am again, and I've proved it.
(Proved what?)
Why, that I'm not dead. I've not only had a swell meal, but I've met
up with an old chum who is in the service and we both had a fine chow.
Now where is a ghost going to put a big meal like that? Does a ghost
have a stomach? Ha! Ha! And my chum is just as alive as I am. I
pinched him to see and he hollered • Ouch ' ! What do you say to that?
(Did you pay for your meal?)
Sure I did.
(Where did you get the money?)
I don't know. I iidn't have my purse in mr. uniform and yet somehow
I paid for the meal. Look here, Doctor, I'm wdling to play this game fair.
If you can prove to me that I'm a ghost I'll admit it, but if I can prove
that I'm alive you must admit it too."
The conversation went on with further evidences of a curious confusion
and occasional hints of curiosity and perplexity, tho they did not come to
the surface in definite expression or self-consciousness.
Now the first thing to us is whether we can accept the narrative as told.
It is reported from memory and we wish we could have had more of it.
But I shall not enter into the credibility of the story. I am assuming it
bo11a fide for the argument. There are so many independent instances of
the kind that we may accept it as a genuine deliverance, whether it be subconscious
or transcendental On any theory it represents a dream state in
the dead aviator. He does not know that he is dead. He is in a delirium
caused by having been shot and only a part of his consciousness is active
and that part obsessed with the ideas he had as a boy about flying. What
he sees is onl;v his own mental creations. This is most distinctly evident in
the eating inc1dent. He had not thought of hunger until jt wos suggested to
/Um. Then his mind wanders off by association and memory to eating and
in a moment returns to the subject of discussion. He has gone through the
mental imagery of eating and resumes the argument about his being dead
which he' evidently half suspects, but cannot believe. '
Now our authors ought to have realized that the man w.as not ;erceiving
any reality, but dreaming or in a delirium, creating his own phantom world.
Accepting this fact which is evident in the case, what evidence have we that
the " Order of Christian Mystics" are revealing anything else in their
deliverances?
Here is a very large froblem and this book does not even suspect it, but
narrates everything as i it was the revelation of a reality representable in
terms of sense perception of the living. Worse still, he mixes it up with
quotations from others which' are hardly messages from the "Mystics",
and has no appreciation of the evidential problem involved in establishing
the validity of such communications. They may all be dream hallucinations
like those of the aviator. ]. H. H.
377
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