Interestingly enough, there was a famous medium who was a skeptic,
she did not believe the voices she channeled came from the discarnate spirit
world. Eileen Garrett, a contemporary of Pearl Curran's, did raise the
possibilty that the four voices speaking through her during trances were the
unconscious aspects of her psyche. Two of these voices were personalities Uvani,
a medieval Arab soldier, and Abdul Latif, who identified himself as a 17th
century Persian physician. The other voices were not personalities in the
conventional sense: Tehotah symbolized the divine world and Rama the life force.

Ms Garrett did not doubt her other psychic abilities, however. She
demonstrated feats of ESP and psychokinesis for famed psychologists William
McDougall and J. B. Rhine. Ellian Garrett uncle, who raised her, appeared to her
a few weeks after his death, so she did not deny the existence of the spirit
world.
She continued to have ambiguous feelings about these spirit voices, and
eventually consulted a psychotherapist in 1957. The therapist, Ira Pogroff,
discovered she had two traumatic events in her life, the suicides of her parents
in 1893 and latter the death of her surrogate father. Ira placed Eileen under a
hypnotic trance and began a series of conversations with the four voices. It was
Dr. Pogroff's opinion that the voices were products of her unconscious.
Evidently they allowed her to air ideas she would have suppressed.
Ms Garrett was a famous, respected medium who remained a skeptic until her
death in 1970. Just before her death, she wrote, "I prefer to think of the
controls as principles of the subconscious. I have never been able to accept
them as spiritual dwellers on the threshold, which they (the spirit voices) seem
to believe they are."
|
|