Afterlife Read Free Page A

‘inner storms’ in which a censorious voice criticised him and various people he knew. He was vaguely aware that the voice sounded like his mother — who was living in Detroit — and he hadarrived at the commonsense explanation that the voice was some negative aspect of himself, and that he had somehow incorporated elements of his mother, who had always been intensely possessive towards him.
    Crabtree followed his usual procedure, placing Art in a state of deep relaxation, and then opening a dialogue with the mother, who was called Veronica. Veronica was perfectly willing to talk at length about her relation to her son, and about why she disapproved of so many of his friends. ‘Veronica came across as blatantly, almost naively, self-centred …’ She explained that she simply wanted to make her son recognise that many people he trusted — including his future wife — were stupid and scheming and not worthy of his respect.
    Crabtree asked her if she thought all this interference could be good for her son, or even good for herself, and she finally admitted that the answer was probably no. In Detroit she was living a drab and boring life, and Crabtree pointed out that if she paid more attention to her own affairs and less to her son’s, things might improve.
    During the therapy, Art’s mother discovered that she had a cancerous growth, and had to have an operation. The ‘Veronica’ who spoke through Art’s mouth agreed that this might be because she was robbing herself of vitality by ‘possessing’ her son. And at this point, Art’s ‘inner voice’ began to fade, until he finally ceased to hear it. But there was a remarkable change in his mother in Detroit. She had been experiencing a slow deterioration, and emotional withdrawal from life. Now, suddenly, her vitality began to return; she started going out and making new friends. ‘She seemed to have gained the proverbial “new lease” on life.’
    Crabtree insists that his own attitude towards such cases is not that of a believer in the paranormal; he claims to be merely an observer, a phenomenologist, who simply treats each case ‘as if it were possession. And clearly, there is nothing contradictory in such an attitude; Susan and Sarah and Art
could
have been manufacturing the voices themselves; the unconscious mind is capable of far more remarkable feats. Still, the fact remains that most readers will feel that, taken all together, these cases make an overwhelming impression of being something more than unconscious self-deception.
    I turned back to Julian Jaynes to see what he had to say about ‘disembodied voices’. He outlines his theory in a remarkable work called
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of theBicameral Mind
, published in 1976 (‘bicameral’ means simply having two compartments). Jaynes advances the extraordinary theory that our remote ancestors heard ‘voices’ all the time, the reason being that — according to Jaynes — early man lacked all self-awareness in our modern sense of the word. Jaynes believes that our cave-man ancestors could not look inside themselves and say: ‘Now let me think …’, because they had no ‘inner me’. Their eyes were like a car’s headlamps, directed permanently towards the outside world. So if one of these men was ordered to go and build a dam down the river, he would find it extremely difficult to remember why he was ambling along the river bank. But his sense of purpose would be refreshed by a voice — the voice of his chief — which seemed to come from the air above his head, and which would repeat his instructions.
    And where would that voice come from? According to Jaynes, from the right-hand side of the brain. For Jaynes’s theory depends heavily on the science of ‘split-brain’ research, which has made such remarkable advances since the mid-1950s.
    For some reason no one yet understands, the brain consists of two identical halves, as if a mirror had been placed down the