– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
Perhaps all of this is clarified somewhat when Myers takes up his methodological metaphor of the spectrum and transforms it into an ontological suggestion. Enter the classic mystical understanding of consciousness as light. This is an ancient and well-worn metaphor, but it takes on a new life in the second half of the nineteenth century as physicists began to discover that visible light is in fact only a small part of a much larger spectrum of energy. Hence Myers’s aforementioned “spectrum of consciousness” through which he sought to draw “a comparison of man’s range of consciousness or faculty to the solar spectrum, as seen by us after passing through a prism or examined in a spectrascope”. Myers uses such a prismatic effect to suggest that the light of consciousness is not singular at all, that consciousness can be broken up into various bands, much like white light can be separated into a rainbow of colors. Most of the light spectrum, moreover, particularly that beyond the infrared (on the lower end) and ultraviolet (on the higher end), appears well outside the bands of everyday awareness. Similarly, Myers suggested, most of the spectrum of consciousness is entirely invisible to our normal senses and present egoic form of awareness.
But this hardly means that such bands of consciousness are unreal. What we need, then, is a way to see beyond the tiny visible spectrum. We need a new psychical technology, or what Myers called “artifices.” “Just as the solar spectrum has been prolonged by artifice beyond both red and violet ends, so may the spectrum of conscious human faculty be artificially prolonged beyond both the lower end (where consciousness merges into mere organic operation) and the higher end (where consciousness merges into reverie or ecstasy)”.
Myers, then, was not so naive as to confuse our present egoic methods of seeing with the real.
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