Hi folks,
This is actually my first post. Just wanted to share a curious find made through bookstore "happenstance."
A few weeks ago I came across the Nandor Fodor
Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science at a used-book store. I was intrigued by a brief browse through it, but it was too expensive. Later I found a less expensive copy online and ordered it.
Some days later, I was looking through it and came across the following entry:
Quote:GROUP-SOUL, a philosophical concept, expounded by the discarnate F. W. H. Myers in The Road to Immortality, of a number of souls, all bound together by one spirit, acting and reacting upon one another in the ascending scale of psychic evolution. There may be contained within that spirit twenty, a hundred, a thousand souls. "The number varies. It is different for each man. But what the Buddhists would call the karma I had brought with me from a previous life is, very frequently, not that of my life, but of the life of a soul that preceded me by many years on earth and left for me the pattern which made my life. I, too, wove a pattern for another of my group during my earthly career. . . . I shall not live again on earth, but a new soul, one who will join our group, will shortly enter into the pattern or karma I have woven for him on earth. . . . Here, in the After-death, we become more and more aware of this group-soul as we make progress. Eventually we enter into it and share the experiences of our brethren. . . Its spirit feeds, with life and mental light, certain plants, trees, flowers, birds, insects, fish, beasts, men and women; representatives of living creatures in varying stages of evolution. It inspires souls who are on various planes, various levels of consciousness in the After-death. It feeds also creatures on other planets. For the spirit must gather a harvest of experience in every form."
Kind of curious, isn't it! I can't remember if it was before or after finding this entry that I found another entry that identified the source more fully.
The Road to Immortality (1932) is one of two books automatically- or directedly-written by Geraldine Cummins that are attributed to Frederic Myers, the other being
Beyond Human Personality (1935). Among other books, she also wrote
Swan on a Black Sea (1965), her last published work, with scripts attributed to Mrs. Winifred Margaret Coombe Tennant, known as "Mrs. Willett" in the publications of the Society for Psychical Research, who produced much of the material in the "cross-correspondences" researched by members of the society in the first quarter of the twentieth century. (Charles Fryer, in
Geraldine Cummins: An Appreciation, calls this latter work "perhaps the most impressive piece of evidence for survival of death so far to be documented," which is quite a strong statement!)
I haven't yet received my copies of these three books, so I can't comment further on the context of the "group-soul" entry at this moment, but it was intriguing enough to prompt me to go ahead and mention it. I think there are full-text transcriptions of the two Myers books available online.
With best wishes,
James Ward