Automatic Writing

To the Society for Psychical Research in High Street Kensington to hear a talk on automatic writing. The speaker was Myra Basey, a clairvoyant who specialises in this form of mediumship, once quite common, now not so much. The idea is, you hold a pen or pencil lightly over a sheet of paper and your hand starts to move of its own volition, writing intelligible phrases which seem independent of your own mind.

The process is not necessarily paranormal - it's as though the unconscious is getting a chance to have its say. But it can sometimes appear that discarnates use it to communicate. Basey did a brief demonstration, getting scripts from two communicators who said 'hi' and thanks for the opportunity to prove that they were not really dead. She has no doubt at all that these are genuine personalities - they have apparently been communicating with her for years - although to me it would take more than the fact that their handwriting differs from each other, and hers, to suggest a real paranormal process here.

Still, the effect can be startling. Take the case of Meredith Young, author of a book of channelling scripts Agartha.  When she began to practice meditation she felt a presence, and then a thought formed in her mind that she should pick up a pad and pencil.

Without warning, my right hand began to move across the manila pad. I opened my eyes and stared at my hand as it continued to move quite without my assistance, the pencil making large random arcs on the paper. I watched in amazement as my hand moved in slow, steady rhythms across the paper. The movement continued... in an autonomous back-and-forth pattern as I watched, feeling awestruck and silently detached from the process.

This was the first of a number of scripts, which consisted of rather abstruse metaphysical material that she had trouble understanding. It's one example of many; books purporting to have been dictated by recently deceased personalities, such as Helen Greaves Testimony of Light and Jane Sherwood's Post-Mortem Journal, are others. The material is often quite coherent and meaningful; it also appears to have no relation to the writer's own concerns.

But is it actually paranormal? Or are the writers just tapping into a stratum of their unconscious minds, fed by spiritualist ideas? That probably has to be assessed as part of the whole survival debate, not just in relation to automatic writing. But you don't have to think it paranormal to find it interesting, or even to do it yourself -  lots of people have managed it with a bit of practice.

For a bunch of useful research articles go to survivalafterdeath.org and enter 'automatic writing' in the Google search box. There's also a useful section on the subject in David Fontana's Is There An Afterlife?