The Mystics and Joe Bloggs August 15, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
From 1889-1892 the Society for Psychic Research asked a series of 17,000 Britons (of all classes and both sexes), whether they had ever had a ‘hallucination’, that is hearing or seeing someone who was not actually there and yet while ‘awake, and not suffering from delirium or insanity or any other morbid condition obviously conducive to hallucinations’. Now a question? How many of the 17,000 answered yes: the number is, at least to this, blogger incredible: c.1900 or over ten percent of the group measured had experienced some form or visual or aural hallucination while awake and not ill. This leads to the suspicion that people seeing or hearing: aliens, angels, demons, fairies, ghosts, zombies and all that merry crowd is rather greater than most of us would think. Beach has been boggling about this number for a few months. The SPR was, in its heyday, an extraordinarily serious organization and the Census of Hallucinations was written by first-rate minds: btw anyone want the Census Beach can send it on. Of course, polling methods were not quite at the level of Gallup but that ten percent figure is probably as close as we would get to a late nineteenth-century ballpark. It would be interesting to know what a comparable study would come up with now: that is not just a one off question, but a series of probing and insistent propositions.
Beach has had some experience with collecting fairy reports: that is children, men and women who believe they have seen an entity that they would describe as a fairy, here is a little (ahem) ‘wisdom’. Those who see fairies split neatly into two groups: there are the shamanic mystics and the Joe Publics. Mystics are individuals who have recurrent visionary events throughout their lives: the lady who is presently cleaning the Beach family kitchen has spotted fairies in the garden; she has encountered ghosts and she has ‘feelings’ and ‘instincts’ that she chooses to act upon. In short, she would have been burnt alive in the sixteenth century, whereas today she is pleasantly eccentric company and a bad influence on the kids. Joe Publics, on the other hand, are those who have never had these experiences prior to a one off bizarre event. Some will absorb it, some will ignore it, some will eventually discount it. Back in the sixteenth century they were doing the burning, and if they did see aliens with tin-foil helmets descending from the sky they shut up or blamed their neighbours.
The second category is more interesting than the first, because their experiences demand more of an explanation. More to the point the first group are probably far more present in anomalous sightings than we actually realize. For example, in fairy sightings, perhaps seventy percent of people who see fairies are not seeing them for the first time, or at least have a long mystical history. Often, though, researchers are not aware of this tendency. For example, A UFO researcher who is called in because Mrs Smith has seen Venus/the mother ship will get a full report from Mrs Smith and come to his or her own conclusions. Beach’s impression is that very few researchers will ask, directly or obliquely, the most important question of all: ‘do you often seen these things, Mrs Smith?’ Yet, if we got the last five hundred sightings of Nessie we would find that a goodly percentage of these sightings were not by paranormal virgins. For example, a sighting of a Yeti does not invite a confession ‘that it all seemed magical’ and yet this is a key question. What about the ‘mystics’? Are they soft-headed or vital to humanity’s survival? Having looked at this question now for a couple of years, though admittedly with lots of personal hang-ups, Beach would say, ‘both’. What would really be fun to know is not what percentage of the population gets to see ‘hallucinations’, but how many of that ten percent are mystics. Other thoughts: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Ps Sorry this was accidentally released early (for about two hours) a few months ago.
Invisible writes: Here are some links to popular reports on ghost-belief/experience surveys.
http://carlossalvarado.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/recent-surveys-of-psychic-experiences-ii/ [hate the background on this site!]
Here is the original request for people to fill out the survey–although it may just be the same researcher.
http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2012/03/survey-of-psychic-experiences.html
http://www.oceanfinance.co.uk/blog/something-spookys-going-on-in-british-homes-0-4158-0.htm
http://www.upi.com/Odd_News/2012/02/13/Survey-Many-Swedes-believe-in-ghosts/UPI-18371329160386
http://hayleyisaghost.co.uk/belief-in-ghosts-rising/
Gallup did a Question of Belief survey in 2005 https://twitter.com/conradhackett/status/602383534511132672/photo/1
http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2013/10/on_halloween_polls_show_many_a.html
From “A Dreadful Drumming,” by Theo Tait, a review of David Clarke’s A Natural History of Ghosts and Undiscovered Country: Journeys among the Dead by Carl
Watkins: “Polls have consistently shown that between 30 and 40 per cent of people in Britain believe in ghosts – about the same proportion as, in principle, support the Labour Party. (Ghost-belief levels seem to be slightly higher in America, and much lower in France.)”
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ParanormalPhenomena – this person might be a good person to ask about the prevalence of experience and beliefs
This survey looks exactly what you’re looking for:
http://publicparapsychology.blogspot.com/2011/04/online-survey-investigating-experiences.html
When I taught a unit on the “6th sense” in a class on “senses,” I found this piece below on “experiencers.” or, as you call them, “mystics.” This is still a copyright book, so you probably don’t want to post this, but I thought it had some interesting things to say about “sensitives” and possible neurological explanations. Also the link between trauma and psychic experience vs fantasy. There is also a recognized psychological category called “fantasy-prone individuals,” who are said to be the day-dreamy people who have multiple paranormal experiences.
Invisible then added in a subsequent email: I’ve been delving into “superstitions” lately. Here’s a theory: Judging by the persistence of “superstitions,” one wonders if, in the same way humans need certain vital gut bacteria and an exposure to dirt in childhood to maintain a healthy immune system, humans need a salutary dose of the illogical from time to time to top up whatever part of the brain it feeds.
