The interactions between mental entities and physical reality

The mediumistic trance

The site's sections on Psychic phenomena and Psychical research deal with the manifestations of mediumship and the investigations and studies on the phenomena produced. Also some pages of the Blog 2019 were dedicated to the examination of communications by some mediumistic entities, while in 2020 the page on The alien matter had as its topic the experiments on the physical effects of a young lady's mediumistic activity, carried out from 1914 to 1920 by engineer William J. Crawford. Now, I take it for granted that those who follow this site have no doubts about the reality of the mediumistic phenomena carefully investigated and ascertained by many scholars of good standing: should this be not the case, but the readers were still interested in deepening the subject, as well as consulting the already mentioned sections of this site they can read some of the texts present and downloadable in the site's Library. I also invite them to investigate the reasons that induce their Ego to identify with the psychic dynamics that feed their doubts. The interest aroused by mediumistic phenomena is due in part to the physical and sensory effects determined by unknown forces, and in part to the communications transmitted by presumed entities that manifest themselves through mediums. In many cases, although not always, the phenomena occur when the medium's organism is in that particular condition which is defined as mediumistic trance. This is usually a sleep-like state, in which the organism often shows signs of agitation and breath shortness, sometimes with the emission of hoarse sounds or rales, which may appear to be symptoms of a distressing condition. But the medium's conscious Ego is entirely absent.

The medium's Ego disappears, so to speak, when the state of trance occurs, and reappears at the end of the sitting, when the organism is made to return progressively, and with due caution, to the ordinary state of wakefulness. In general, the medium's conscious Ego does not keep any memory of what happened during the séance, nor of any subjective dream experience: it is a condition of complete blackout. Evidence of this state has been provided to us by various mediums, including Corrado Piancastelli (see the page on The alien spirit) and Urbino Fontanelli (The life history of an Italian medium). This removal of the Ego seems to be necessary so that the control exercised by the medium's Ego over its own organism does not interfere with the use of the psychophysical resources of the same by alien powers. However, it should be borne in mind that some mediums (mainly women) were able to remain more or less conscious for the whole duration of the séances. The condition of temporary suspension of the state of consciousness, which allows the Ego to know and feel that it exists, is not limited to mediumistic trance, but concerns all those states in which consciousness is completely deactivated, such as deep sleep, fainting, coma, general anesthesia, etc. In these cases the Ego becomes only a posteriori aware of the fact that for a certain period of time its existence has been suspended, noticing – upon the return of consciousness – that during the time that has elapsed its organism has continued to live, or has been in a critical condition of suspension of its vital activities, without the Ego itself retaining any memory either of its existence in another possible form, or of the events in which its organism was involved.

These facts obviously lead us to take for granted the complete dependence of the conscious Ego on the functioning of its organism, and in particular of the brain, so it is not surprising that a large number of people believe that the conscious Ego cannot continue to exist once the organism with which it is associated undergoes the post mortem decomposition process. NDEs, on the other hand, arouse our interest precisely because they give us confirmation of a particularly intense experience activity in which the conscious Ego is involved, even when its organism is in critical conditions, in which a suspension of the consciousness and the Ego's existence would coherently be expected. In most NDEs, the sense of the Ego's individual identity does not fail, determining the continuity between its existence as a spiritual entity – that is, disconnected from the organism to which it was bound – with that with which it felt to be during its human life. To undergo substantial changes are the experiences of the Ego, especially when it manages to move into the Spirit dimension. Anyway, we must necessarily recognize that from the point of view of the experience of the conscious Ego there is an essential difference between the condition of feeling bound to an organism, experiencing all the psychic effects that this state entails, and that of being entirely free from such constraints: a condition, the latter, difficult to ascribe to the aims of control and protection of the organism which are sometimes attributed to cerebral activity and to the function of the same Ego.

Returning to the mediumistic trance, the singularity of this condition lies in the fact that the conscious Ego of the medium, by withdrawing, allows the control of its organism to be assumed by other entities which, as we have seen in the case of the medium Piancastelli (in the page on The alien spirit), can be considered as alien to the physical dimension in which we live. If some of these entities seem to us to have their own conscious personality, this is completely different from the conscious Ego of the medium, whose organism they have to borrow, so to speak, so that they can manifest themselves to the sitters. This is a very different situation from those cases in which multiple personalities alternate in the control of the same organism, because usually the medium's personality, when it does not fade away as a result of the trance state, is consistent and does not show dissociation symptoms. It is not even clear whether this temporary suspension of the existence of the medium's Ego, which leaves the control of its organism to other entities, is wanted by the medium, or is accepted more or less passively by it as a consequence of the atmosphere in which the séance takes place and of the influence exerted by the same entities that must take control. The fact is that the conscious Ego proves, at least in cases of this kind, to be a rather evanescent entity, devoid of a consolidated real essence – at least as regards its stability over time – and that it can be replaced in the control of its organism by other entities about whose manifestations, of which it retains no memory, it has no direct information. It seems to me that this kind of weakness of the Ego, which lends itself to being disintegrated and then reintegrated into its functions by forces of an unknown nature, is not in harmony with that condition of intense consciousness which characterizes, for example, the experiences in the Spirit dimension reported in many NDEs.

Particularly sensitive and gifted mediums, such as Roberto Setti (see the page on Cerchio Firenze 77), serenely accepted the mediumistic trance to allow entities presumably belonging to another dimension to communicate with us humans, in the hope that this form of communication could produce positive effects. The conscious Ego is always forced – by the very nature of the events of human life – to recognize its own weakness and, in a certain sense, its inferiority condition, both in relation to the natural energies that have a direct effect on the functioning of its organism, and towards the psyche's dynamics that involve it, be they positive or negative. For this reason the Ego is often willing to invoke and solicit the intervention of higher entities, to whom extraordinary powers and a divine aura are attributed, so that they help it to overcome those tribulations and conflicts that the condition of being bound to an organism entails. At the same time, precisely this state of weakness urges the Ego to increase its knowledge, in order to acquire a better control over all those phenomena on which the proper functioning of its organism depends and, consequently, its well-being too. It is clear that any form of power the Ego can acquire in relation to the control of the dynamics of organic life and of the human psyche, the death of its organism and the consequent end of the experiences of human life, to which it had perhaps become accustomed and adapted with some success, pose to the Ego the question of what might possibly happen to it afterwards: in this case too, the Ego must often recognize its own condition of insecurity, and not infrequently of awe, essentially due to not knowing what kind of experiences it may face, and consequently it may feel the need to call for the help and the benevolence of higher entities of a divine nature.

Therefore, if the Ego can only humbly recognize its own evident condition of weakness and vulnerability towards the  nature's and the psyche's energies that have the power to determine the functioning of our organic life, it is also true that it can feel in its essence a tension that urges it to know and try to control the dynamics that govern physical reality and the same human psyche. In this context, the mediumistic trance also has its role, meant as a technique that allows to obtain physical phenomena, communications and information that concern a different dimension from the one we normally experience in our organic life. Through the medium's organism – whose conscious Ego can be completely absent, or can take part in the events of the séance like every other sitter – some entities appear that speak and that in some cases can take perceptible forms more or less humanized, more or less stable, more or less bizarre. Furthermore, objects, plants, flowers, apparently transported to the séance room from a more or less remote place of origin, can materialize (and dematerialize) and physical forces of varying intensity move even heavy pieces of furniture, or interact with the sitters. These almost theatrical performances, fascinating in their magical spectacularity, are produced by entities that we can define mental, as the energy they use requires the availability of the medium's organism and brain, and to some extent also of those of the sitters. I think it is preferable to refer to mental entities rather than, as more commonly happens, to spirit entities, because in some cases these entities are imbued with psychic elements drawn from the sitters' mind (see, for example, the case of John Ferguson). This does not imply to rule out that such mental entities cannot have their own autonomous existence, nor that the personality they manifest cannot correspond, at least in part, to that of a deceased.

Physical effects and mental powers

Normally, we are used to perceiving the cause that produces a certain physical effect; for example, the displacement of an object requires that a force be physically applied to it that exceeds the resistance of the object's mass and the frictions that make it stationary. For this reason, if we observe the movement of an object without being able to identify the force that produces it, we feel a sense of wonder and almost do not believe our senses: if we then retain that some people are able to move objects with the sole force of will of their mind, we attribute a magical power to them. As we have seen on this page dedicated to his experiments, William Crawford studied the invisible forces emanating from the body of a medium (the young Kathleen Goligher, who only occasionally went into a trance), which managed to move and levitate tables of different weights. When the physical effects occur while the medium is in a full trance – as happened with the mediumship of Roberto Setti or Urbino Fontanelli – no willpower can be attributed to the medium's mind, whose conscious Ego is completely absent. Furthermore, in the page on the forces that can occasionally interfere in human dynamics, we have referred to the fact that some physical phenomena of a kinetic type (PK), such as those found in the so-called poltergeist cases, give the impression of being caused by an immaterial agent, often spiteful and not benevolent towards humans, endowed with a will and energy of its own. At the same time, the physical effects produced by these immaterial entities are often associated with a form of psychic energy – referred to as unconscious – tuned by the mind of a living person, present or connected to the environment in which the phenomena occur.

As I have pointed out in the section on psychical research, and in particular in the page on the Theories about the spirit (or the Subliminal Self), the fact that the interpretation of physical phenomena determined by mediumship has led to a heated and persistent debate among the supporters of spirit hypothesis and those of the super-psi (or super-ESP) theory speaks volumes about the limits of the cognitive resources available to the conscious Ego. The facts remain what they are, and in both cases they escape the control of the conscious Ego: therefore neither a possible dimension of existence of the spirits, nor the human psyche's unconscious dynamics, can be the object of a form of knowledge that sets the conscious Ego in a position to be able to exert its control over the phenomena that occur. The role of the conscious Ego in relation to the cosmic Mind's creativity must be somehow clarified and reconsidered, starting with a distinction between what is meant by human psyche and what the Ego perceives as an effect of the Mind's creative process. The psyche's dynamics are always experienced by the conscious Ego, even if – due to the fragmentation of consciousness in a plurality of human organisms variously spread in space and time – each Ego directly experiences only a fraction of all the possible attunements of the psyche. Under this point of view, speaking of an unconscious psyche seems to me a contradiction, while it is certainly reasonable to refer to the unconscious activity of many brain circuits. The cosmic Mind, on the other hand, can be considered as that creative process of which the conscious Ego experiences some effects through its own mental activity: these effects are interpreted and lived by the Ego in the light of the psyche's attunements that mental activity makes conscious. Therefore, within certain limits, the human psyche reflects and elaborates some aspects of the cosmic Mind, but certainly does not exhaust its creativity, nor can it understand its complexity.

If the Ego sets limits to the evolution of its consciousness, preventing it from expanding beyond the boundaries within which the human psyche forces it to remain, it will not be able to have even a faint idea of the boundless creativity of the cosmic Mind, but it will always remain entangled in the interpretative forms that the psyche's interpersonal dynamics impose on it – convinced of the validity of one or another – even when it does not get any advantage from them. The fact that the Spirit dimension is completely separate from that of organic life, to the point that the forms of knowledge that the Ego can experience there cannot even be remembered when it returns under the psyche's dominion, acquires a meaning if we consider the constraints that the organism imposes on the Ego, and the limits that are assigned to the development of its consciousness. For this reason the Ego can experience the Spirit dimension only when it manages to escape what we could compare to a gravitational attraction, or to a magnetic force, that the organism exerts on it, binding its consciousness to a limited gamma of psychic attunements. The Ego's normal condition can be compared to that of a person who, always living within a walled city, can observe in detail the streets, buildings, monuments, the behavior of the inhabitants, and everything that happens there. But if it were raised to a considerable height, it would see not only the whole city, but all of the landscape in which it is located, with other nearby cities, and all those aspects of the world which, in its former condition, it had no direct knowledge of. Certainly, living inside the city intensely involves that person in the reality of that city: but while, being very high up and expanding one's horizon, it would be possible to observe with a telescope different details both of the city and of the world that surrounds it, always living confined within the city can lead to believe that beyond its walls there is only nothingness.

By living, the conscious Ego learns to direct its mental activity, in a way analogous to how one learns and perfects in playing a musical instrument, improving the quality of its performances through commitment and practice: the mind available to the Ego is still a fragment of the cosmic Mind, and reflects its substance to a certain extent, within the limits deriving from the fact that a small part certainly cannot understand the whole, nor have the same powers that the whole has. Physical phenomena deriving from mediumship attest the power of personalized aspects of the mind to exert a direct influence on some events of the physical reality, as we experience it through our organism. This personalization cannot be attributed to the medium's conscious Ego, which is completely absent in the case of trance: not infrequently, however, psychic elements and memories present in the minds of the sitters contribute to the construction of more or less coherent personalities, which can be recognized as autonomous and to which the power to produce various physical phenomena is attributed. Our interpretative uncertainty regarding the issue of whether such entities have their own autonomous existence, or whether they are virtual elaborations of what are considered as unconscious powers of the psyche, arises from the fact that we know very little about the mind's functioning, and in particular about the way in which the creative power of the cosmic Mind is individualized and manifests itself. We can imagine, for example, that there is some sort of an alien technology – much more advanced than ours – capable of recording the mental activity of a living person, and then reproducing some elements on request, tuning them to the psychic expectations of some of the sitters. Furthermore, this technology may be able to control forms of energy that escape our organic perception, and therefore our control, transforming them in such a way as to exert dynamic effects on our physical reality. This example, imaginary and devoid of real validations, serves only to highlight the infinite possibilities with which the creative power of the cosmic Mind can manifest itself, even in its splitting into a plurality of individualized forms – each with their own personality – of which we only know those accessible to our consciousness.

The individuality that we experience in the physical dimension of our organic life is determined by the splitting of the cosmic Mind which, after creating space-time, fragments itself through the formation of countless galaxies, stars and worlds, separated from each other by wide spaces that we perceive as more or less empty of matter. The creation of life on our planet implies, since its initial stages, the isolation from the external environment of a plurality of structures, within each of which a higher level of organization and information is established, which also provides defense systems against the disruptive dynamics of the external environment. Each of these organic structures is separate from the others, and each needs resources drawn from the environment in order to survive. The reproductive processes determined by the cosmic Mind – or at least by that part of it that manifests its creativity on planet Earth – involve a remarkable increase of these individual organic structures which, within an environment of limited dimensions, can enter into competition for the acquisition of the resources they need: once they are within a certain range of interference, relations of collaboration or conflict can be established between them, or – if environmental conditions allow it – each maintains its own independence. The attribution of these dynamics to the creativity of a cosmic Mind does not imply that we humans can know this Mind, nor that we can be sure that it is endowed with a consciousness and will of its own: however the fact that our Ego has a consciousness and a will, which manifest themselves through mental activity, can be considered as a valid clue and a reflection of what the creative intent of the cosmic Mind has produced here on planet Earth. In its essence, the cosmic Mind should be considered as creativity in its pure state, which, with the flow of time, determines transformations of physical states that cannot be interpreted as mere automatisms, since they involve – as we have seen – an increase in information that is unpredictable a priori.

As a consequence of the creation of a plurality of individual organisms, human consciousness is also fragmented: each conscious Ego not only experiences its connection with the organism to which it is bound, but feels itself originated from that organism, to the point of believing that its existence as a conscious entity cannot last beyond the life of its organism. These effects of the fragmentation of consciousness determined by the creative activity of the cosmic Mind would be irrefutable, if the Ego did not feel somehow uncomfortable in this temporary existential condition that denies it any possibility of an autonomous existence, not tied to the life of a vulnerable organism, doomed to dissolution. However, the data coming from the NDE accounts inform it about the possibility of experiencing another existential condition – which we call the Spirit dimension – detached from the organism, and much more congenial to what the Ego can perceive as its own authentic essence, to the point of feeling that it is like being back at home when it gets to to that dimension. The Spirit dimension seems to be separate from that in which the cosmic Mind's creativity, which uses the alphabet of physics to write its own stories, manifests itself: however, the Spirit is perceived by the conscious Ego as a unitary and not bipolar energy which, in the form of an absolute and unconditional love, permeates every aspect of the universe. It is as if the conscious Ego, once transferred into the Spirit dimension, could see, experience and interpret the universe under its spiritual aspect, while, as long as it is in the dimension of organic life, it must experience and interpret it from the point of view which is allowed by its own psychic attunements, which reflect the fragmentation of consciousness determined by the cosmic Mind's creativity. These two dimensions are usually separate, but in some way they connect with each other precisely by virtue of the activity of the conscious Ego in the course of its human life.

Interferences

Regardless of the causes to which it is believed that they can be attributed, certain physical phenomena objectively verified, of mediumistic origin or caused by unknown entities, or subjective experiences such as NDEs or other spiritual experiences (obtained through a mental training or the intake of psychoactive substances), prove the existence of occasional interference between two dimensions, one of which is not normally perceived by us in the course of our human life. In the case of subjective experiences such as the NDEs, the interference is obviously given by the direct experimentation by the conscious Ego of two dimensions, one of which was well known to it as determined by the mental activity of its own organism, while the other surprises and amazes it because it is perceived as separate from the organism and free from its needs and conditioning. Instead, in the case of physical phenomena of mediumistic origin, in order for the interference to occur, the mental activity of a particular organism (the medium's) is always needed, which is subtracted from the control of their conscious Ego and used by unknown processes – yet belonging to a mental dimension – for the production of these anomalous phenomena. Only in some rare cases of haunting phenomena can we ask ourselves if the forces that determine them do not have an autonomy of their own, independent of the mind of any subjects with mediumistic faculties who have a particular relationship with the haunted environment and with those who observe and suffer the effects produced by the presumed haunting entities. As always, however, the phenomenon is interpreted according to the psychic attunements of those who experience or study it, even if its physical effects can be objectively observed, described and recorded. I therefore think that our mind is the focal point of the interference between the different dimensions in which the Ego can be involved as a conscious subject, and that the functional activity of the brain – considered exclusively in its organic aspect – is unable to exploit the mind's full potential and the possible experiences of the conscious Ego in other dimensions.

When the conscious Ego faces that kind of phenomena that we call paranormal, it often feels stimulated to investigate, study and interpret them, but despite its efforts of attention and concentration, the only result it obtains from its own mind's activity consists in finding the limits of the psyche, which suggests all sorts of absurdities and tries to convince it of their plausibility. As we have seen, the communications attributed to spirit entities are in many cases absurd and contradictory, and lack the coherence that the NDEs related to the Spirit dimension instead show. At the same time, the impression that certain mediumistic communications actually come from the personality of a deceased person is in some cases well founded and certainly reasonable. But if we are able to recognize the objective reality of certain physical phenomena, we are necessarily forced to investigate their causes on the basis of the physics laws that we know, or to give up any possibility of knowledge. In the end, everything we take for granted – out of habit – in terms of cognitive resources and problem solving in normal life activities, is undermined by our attempts to interpret paranormal phenomena. It is true, however, that even advanced scientific knowledge has to deal with problems for which the resources of the human mind – with reference to the most gifted minds in terms of intellectual abilities – show their limits. The conscious Ego thus experiences the reliability and unreliability of a condition in which its knowledge abilities depend on the performance of an organic structure that processes the data at its disposal on the basis of operational programs developed over time by other organic structures, more or less similar to its own.

The mystery of the cosmic Mind's creativity in the (limited) dynamics concerning our planet Earth is reflected in the human mind: in ascertaining all the possible events of natural origin that can cause even extreme suffering to the conscious Ego, due to the vulnerability of the organism to which it is bound, we cannot help but wonder what is the relationship between the weakness – at least at a statistical level – of the Ego and the creative power of the Mind. All the more reason, all those psychic dynamics – determined by mental activity – for which some human beings act towards other humans in a cruel, violent and oppressive way cause the Ego an almost unbearable discomfort: both the chronicles of history and those of current events are certainly not lacking of evidence of this way of functioning of the human psyche, showing the weakness of the Ego's condition in the face of what threatens or seduces it, relying on what the psychophysical system to which it is bound forces it to experience. Even some paranormal phenomena, regardless of the causes to which our mind attributes them, manifest themselves in a vexatious and hostile way towards the Ego of living people: see, for example, some of the cases cited in the book Dei fenomeni di infestazione (On haunting phenomena) by Ernesto Bozzano, downloadable from the Library. Due to these and other experiences, including some distressing NDEs, sometimes characterized by the presence of infernal environments and entities, the Ego becomes entangled in psyche's attunements that convince it of the reality of dimensions in which it could experience suffering and torments, even once death did free it from the bond of its organism. Obviously, a healthy Ego with a sufficiently evolved consciousness can only firmly reject such an eventuality.

In the light of all the testimonies of non-ordinary experiences of which we are aware, it seems to me that only those relating to the Spirit dimension are truly congenial to the authentic essence of the conscious Ego, who – not surprisingly – feels that that dimension represents its natural home. From this point of view, adventures and wanderings in other dimensions, including that of human life, should be considered as temporary excursions – in some respects interesting and in others tiring and sometimes painful – destined to be soon, if not fully forgotten, at least reworked as distant and almost dreamlike experiences. But as long as the conscious Ego is bound to the dimension of human life through its own organism, it feels ensnared and conditioned by the psyche's dynamics that day after day transmit to it disturbing uncertainties about what awaits it after the death of its organism, even to the point of persuading it of its future annihilation. It is no wonder that the Ego – after being conditioned by cultural programs of psychic origin and having obeyed the mental commands determined by the functioning of its own brain for a long time – becomes entangled in the dynamics of the human psyche to the point of completely losing the awareness of its own identity, up to accepting to identify itself with its role as a human automaton. Conditioned as it is by the needs of organic life, the conscious Ego perceives its existence within the limits of what the organism allows it to experience through its brain activity: even if at times it succeeds in sensing the presence of a spiritual counterpart with whom it feels somehow connected, nevertheless it continues to live as if it were separated from this spiritual Self, with whom it hopes to be reunited – if everything goes well – only after its organism's death.

Only by overcoming the barriers of the psyche that imprison it, the conscious Ego is sometimes able to intuit and perceive its identity with the spiritual Self, while it is still connected to its own organism: however, it is a very rare condition, a state of grace, happiness and detachment from the involvement in the usual psychic dynamics determined by human events and the ups and downs to which our organism is usually subject. Often this state of grace is transitory, given that the psyche's dynamics can regain the upper hand, even if the conscious Ego tries to maintain a sufficient detachment towards them, and the very nature of the spiritual Self distances the latter from the human psyche: it is as if the spiritual Self could reunite with the conscious Ego only if the latter, while remaining connected to its own organism, manages to create a mental space free from the interference of the psyche. In any case, it is a condition that is difficult to describe in words, precisely because language is by its nature imbued with psychic elements and therefore has insuperable limits. So it is not surprising that in some cases the readers of these pages may be perplexed by certain claims, and may wonder about their meaning. To describe the state of identification between the conscious Ego and the spiritual Self, the expression that seems most appropriate to me, despite its imprecision, is that of an amused bliss, for which every aspect of organic life can represent a pleasant curiosity, while those that the psyche usually forces us to consider as painful events or real tragedies, do not even reach the threshold of consciousness, and therefore it is as if they did not exist at all. In such condition the conscious Ego feels good, feels that everything is fine, and manages to transfer this sensation to its own organism, towards which it feels a benevolent attention, remaining at the same time detached and not worried about its fate.

In the human condition there is a kind of ineluctability linked to everything that causes discomfort, suffering and pain to the Ego, and that forces it to face and try to solve problems of all kinds: the reality of this condition is taken for granted, and the interest in human life is usually attributed to the balance between the positive aspects that the psyche's dynamics offer to the Ego in terms of pleasure, joy and happiness, and the negative ones that the Ego would gladly do without. But given that this balance is often negative, also because the way in which the Ego experiences time forces it to identify with the psyche's dynamics that involve it in a certain period, without allowing it to compensate them with those it experienced in the past, the meaning of human life is sometimes attributed to a task or mission entrusted to the Ego in a transcendent dimension, as can be deduced from the reports of many NDEs. Or it is believed that this life is sort of a school in which the Ego is sent to learn what it does not know, through a teaching method that, with all evidence, also includes pain and suffering, whenever the Ego can't avoid them. It is evident that consciousness plays a fundamental role in this state of affairs, through which all the effects of the psyche's dynamics determined by the functioning of the organism are transmitted to the sensitivity of the Ego, which normally cannot help but feel, register and endure them. Once consciousness has been suppressed, the organism can suffer all sorts of wounds and traumas without the Ego feeling the slightest pain, and although usually the absence of consciousness also implies a loss of self-awareness for which the Ego's very existence, in fact, fades away, experiences such as NDEs show that in certain cases the Ego can continue to exist in a released way from the events that involve its organism.

It should not be forgotten that some interpretations of the psyche's dynamics relating to the pain and suffering associated with organic life, rely on the (somewhat bizarre) idea that the conscious Ego is undergoing a punishment for certain previous actions due – as it is hypothesized – to a free choice: the weirdest aspect of this interpretative theory, also originating from the psyche, is that the punishment endured by the Ego bound to an organism is sometimes meant as a consequence of a previous incarnation of the same Ego, albeit bound to a completely different organism. The absurdity of this interpretation – considered reasonable by some cultures – is evident. As we have seen, in fact, in the Spirit dimension there is neither a vindictive nor a punitive intent of any kind: these conceptions are instead a typical prerogative of the human psyche, which in this form exerts its power of control over the conscious Ego, as long as the latter is bound to its own organism. On the other hand, it is undeniable that even human organisms – like every other living organism – are a product of the cosmic Mind, in its manifestation localized on our planet: therefore, to the extent that the conscious Ego identifies itself with its own organism, it cannot but suffer the consequences of the demands imposed by organic life, which, considered in its natural state, proves to be completely insensitive to the needs of an individual organism, destined in any case to death, and often to forms of suffering the more afflictive the more intense are the sensitivity and consciousness of the Ego associated with that organism (and this can also apply to other organic forms besides the human one). Let us therefore avoid bothering the Spirit, or involving a transcendent spiritual Self, when we are dealing with phenomena determined solely by organic life and the psyche's dynamics.

Although the Ego, meant as a conscious subject, normally perceives its own unitary identity, if we consider it on the basis of the functions it performs in the elaboration of mental states and in the decisions relating to the actions to be carried out by its organism, we can distinguish in it at least three components: 1) an organic Ego, whose goal is to meet the needs and well-being of its own organism; 2) a psychic Ego, which is involved in the dynamics of the human psyche to the point that it often fully identifies with them; 3) a spiritual Ego, which feels to be to some extent alien to both its own organism and the human psyche, and yearns for something it cannot find in this life. These three components are present more or less in every person, although in different proportions, which can vary in the same individual with the passing of time: in particular, the spiritual Ego is often in the minority, and sometimes almost entirely missing. The psychic Ego, as we have already noticed, is subject to the influence of two components that often come into conflict with each other: on the one hand, it feels the need to conform to the socio-cultural programs that have been transmitted to it and which in part leverage on the urges of the organic Ego, on the other it feels the call and fascination of those autonomous psyche's dynamics that drive it, through the tension caused by desires or fears, to adopt behaviors that can also be in contrast with those required by the introjected programs. The alchemy of people's character resulting from these dynamics, also as a consequence of the disharmonies shown by the programs developed by the various cultures, covers a very wide range, as it is easy to see within any human group, and in particular in those societies that naively claim to be multicultural.

But precisely mediumistic phenomena and some paranormal manifestations complicate this framework: in fact, it would seem that, in addition to the spiritual Ego, there are energetic entities connected with the psychic Ego – both of living and of deceased people – who are able to interfere, in particular circumstances, with the reality of our physical dimension, and to communicate, in one form or another, with living people. The existence of a spiritual Ego has been deduced from the accounts of the numerous NDEs that refer to a Spirit dimension that is really and intensely experienced: as we have seen, this dimension, which is not always easily and immediately reachable by the conscious Ego, presents aspects that make it substantially different and separate from that of organic life, above all because the Spirit energy that manifests in it has nothing in common with the energy of the human psyche. The Egos of the NDErs report – practically in 100% of cases – to have felt at home in that dimension, that is, in the most congenial abode to their authentic essence, and to have not felt the slightest desire to return to our organic life. In most cases these NDErs, when they found themselves in the critical condition from which their NDE originated, did not have a highly developed spiritual Ego, nor did they show any particular psychic feature that differentiated them from the normality of living humans, such as, for instance, an accentuated interest in mediumistic or paranormal phenomena. The impression reported by most of them – an impression that in many cases is manifested as an absolute certainty – is that at the death of the organism the conscious Ego of every human is destined to experience the Spirit dimension, that is, to return to its natural home.

Instead, the interferences that are found in many mediumistic phenomena and in haunting cases show a very different condition, in which alien forms of mental energy manifest themselves producing physical effects that determine particular psychic reactions in the humans involved in these dynamics: it does not matter much if our psychic faculties attribute to these forms of mental energy a spirit or alien or any other origin, since we move on a terrain for which the cognitive resources of our human mind are inadequate. The fact remains that the effects of these interferences extend the field of action of the psyche, giving a form of reality – in some cases subjective, but in many other cases objective – to elements that usually remain excluded from our perception, even if they can be part of our mental imagery. It seems reasonable to recognize that if human beings develop and manifest themselves, with the peculiar features that distinguish each of us, as particular mental forms produced by the cosmic Mind, the latter's creativity may have given rise to mental forms of a different nature, which can occasionally interfere with the physical reality of our world. It is however important to understand that the effects of these interactions on the conscious Ego, bound to an organism, almost always fall within the scope of the interpretations, fears or desires determined by the human psyche: only occasionally do they show elements that refer to the Spirit dimension. The interpretations provided by the human psyche can lead us to believe in a heaven and a hell, in angelic or demonic entities, and in other contrasts determined by the bipolar nature of the psyche that the Ego constantly experiences during its organic life. The Spirit energy, on the other hand, not being bipolar, does not present any intrinsic conflict.

Psychic Ego and spiritual Ego

We are now able to outline a fairly clear picture of what the Ego's expectations (or hopes) may be, while it is still experiencing this organic life, in relation to a possible continuation of its existence as a conscious subject and a sensitive experimenter, even after the death of its organism. On the one hand we have a lot of precise accounts on the Spirit dimension, directly experienced as a real condition of complete and absolute bliss to which the Ego feels it belongs by virtue of its true and eternal spiritual essence; on the other we have heterogeneous communications from mental entities, more or less entangled in psychic dimensions which at times show aspects similar to those of the Spirit dimension, while at other times they manifest themselves as links to particularly intense experiences determined by the human psyche, or as wanderings in psychic dimensions that are perceived by the conscious Ego as alluring or nasty and painful, but in any case endowed with an apparent reality, at least until some event intervenes that modifies the condition that the Ego is experiencing. Some of these psychic dimensions are directly experienced during those NDEs defined as distressing, or even characterized by some kind of hellish content: but even in some positive NDEs, the experimentation of the Spirit dimension can be preceded by a sort of journey into alternative psychic dimensions – more or less connected with the reality of our world – which sometimes show elements of the infernal imaginary, whose afflictive reality the conscious Ego of the experimenter cannot doubt. Alongside those – and they are not a few – who have no doubts about the reality of the Spirit dimension, for having experienced it directly, there is also someone who has no doubts about the reality of hell, always for the same reason. However, we can say that the reports of NDEs related to a hellish environment are very few, and do not show the same elements of coherence as those relating to the Spirit dimension.

At this point everyone can make their own evaluations, in the light of the orientation of their Ego, since it is certainly legitimate to have expectations and hopes regarding the continuation of the Ego's conscious existence and ability to experience, even when the adventure of this human life will have ended. As for me, I have no doubts: my Ego feels attracted to the Spirit dimension, which it considers as a welcoming and safe base in which to be able to rest to process its own memories, make new experiences, regenerate and acquire a deeper knowledge, until possibly feel ready for new excursions into other dimensions. Although I am aware and certain that the realization of this program does not depend only on my Ego's will, it nevertheless seems important to me to have very clear ideas about what I believe to be the right evolutionary path, thanks to which my psychic Ego merges with the spiritual Ego, leaving behind the organism's needs and vulnerabilities, and the conflicts determined by the human psyche's bipolarity. I think that many other Egos will agree with this orientation of mine, but I am not sure whether or not this applies to everyone's Ego. The formation and development of the conscious Ego within our organism is a complex and in some ways obscure process, as I have already pointed out: every human organism whose brain is functioning gives rise to an organic Ego that soon manifests itself also as a psychic Ego, which allows itself to be guided by those particular attunements of the psyche with which it identifies and to which it submits. These components of the Ego should also be associated with a spiritual component coming from another dimension, capable of making its voice heard, especially towards the psychic Ego and the dynamics to which it is subject: however, as we have seen, the effectiveness of this spiritual component is very variable from person to person, so much so that at times one can doubt its very presence.

The Spirit does not manifest itself directly in the physical dimension of this world: it does so only through the spiritual component of the Ego, which, tied to an organism and forced to experience the psychic tensions that human life entails, almost always does not feel at ease for the entire duration of this life, which it has to face as if it were in apnea, deprived as it is of the possibility of directly feeding on the Spirit's energy. But while the needs of the organism and mainly the desires, fears, pleasures and sufferings that the dynamics of the human psyche entail, intensely involve the conscious Ego, to the point that it very often fully identifies itself with its own psyche's attunements, the Ego's spiritual component manages to actively manifest itself much more rarely: it is as if it remained in a state of narcosis for a good part of life, and for many people throughout their lives. The fact is that, although the Ego's sensitivity can be disturbed by the worries and sufferings of life, at the same time it can experience satisfaction and more or less intense forms of enjoyment and happiness for certain psychic experiences determined by organic life. Instead, the awakening of the spiritual Ego can represent in itself a form of suffering, both because it feels that it is not in the most congenial dimension to its true essence, and because even the most intense forms of happiness that can be experienced in the human condition – only for a more or less long, but still limited, period of time – pale, and therefore lose importance, when compared to the condition of perfect bliss that the Ego can experience in the Spirit dimension. Therefore it is understandable that the psychic Ego almost always clearly prevails over its spiritual counterpart, regardless of whether it may come to find itself under the dominant influence of one or the other polarity of the psyche.

However, understanding the functioning of the psychic Ego means recognizing that all the contradictory and conflicting dynamics of the human psyche, which manifest themselves through the functioning of the brain especially in the sphere of interpersonal relationships, cannot be different from what they are, both in their aspects experienced by the Ego as positive, as well as in the negative ones. Any interpretation one tries to give to the human condition, any search for meaning and value, any form of interpersonal communication regarding the evolution of the Ego and consciousness – including that used in these pages – must deal with the tuning differences determined by the fragmentation of consciousness into a plurality of separate organisms, each of which has its own Ego subjected to the personal dynamics of its own psyche. It is important to well understand that this state of affairs does not depend on the Ego, which experiences its effects, whether pleasant or unpleasant, but cannot control it except within the limits determined by the resources at its disposal: the same distribution of such resources, not balanced and often unjust, at least apparently, represents an enigma that the Ego tries to solve, often unsuccessfully. Life under the rule of the human psyche can be interpreted as a lottery in which many are willing to pay the price of the ticket in the hope of winning some prizes, and the winners are presented as role models to follow, because they certainly could not have won the prize if they hadn't bought the ticket: obviously, the one who benefits the most from this game is the lottery organizer. It is the same human psyche which, through the tension created between its positive and negative pole, determines the flow of life and the transformations that derive from the conscious elaboration of the energetic dynamics with which it involves each individual Ego.

The existence of the organic Ego is, of course, limited to the life of the organism, while the psychic Ego could continue to exist, as a mental form endowed with its own identity, even after death, experiencing as if they were real various aspects of the human psyche which continue to involve it, in a route that escapes its control ability, in the same way that it is unable to control many aspects of the reality of this organic life. These forms of existence seem to be characterized by the intrinsic bipolarity of the human psyche, and by the uncertainties and sufferings that derive from it, due to which the psychic Ego runs the risk of being entangled in an unsatisfactory condition, from which it cannot free itself with the resources at its disposal: it is, as can be seen, a situation that reflects the same distress that can torment the Ego in the course of human life, always related to the psyche's dynamics in which the Ego can be involved, even when it does not like them at all. Yet, as we have already seen, many NDEs seem to show how the Ego's transfer into the Spirit dimension often occurs quickly and without encountering significant obstacles, and – a fact of particular interest – is determined by the awakening of a spiritual component, the existence of which the Ego may not even have been aware during its organic life. According to these NDEs, it would seem that the process of transferring into the Spirit dimension occurs almost automatically once the experience of organic life is over, being determined by the attraction exerted by the Spirit on a spark of a spiritual nature associated with each Ego, regardless of whether the psychic Ego has become aware of it or not during life. It is therefore not clear why, in some cases, the Ego must remain entangled in the dynamics of the psyche even after the death of its organism, for periods that can be perceived as very long, unless this depends on a precise orientation of the same psychic Ego, that would prevent the spiritual Ego from carrying out its task.

We therefore return to the issue, hard to understand and probably impossible to solve for our (limited) intelligence, of the relationship between the Spirit and the human psyche, or better, and more generally, between the Spirit and the cosmic Mind: in fact, as we have seen, both the evolution of life on our planet and the development of the human psyche are nothing more than local manifestations of the cosmic Mind's creativity, belonging to that physical and mental dimension that the conscious Ego experiences during its human life. The Spirit, on the other hand, seems to be a creative energy that not only exerts its effects in a separate dimension, but implements this creative function in a coherent, unitary and loving way, so that every aspect of its creation is in perfect harmony with any other aspect. As a matter of fact, we can certainly recognize that the creative power of the Spirit energy does not extend to the physical and mental dimensions that we experience during human life, otherwise the normal condition of the conscious Ego would be to feel an ineffable, complete and permanent state of bliss already during this lifetime. On the other hand, it cannot even be argued that the Spirit remains completely alien to the dynamics of our organic life, at least because more or less developed, consolidated and coherent sparks of spiritual Egos are sent into this dimension to connect with an organism and deal with the complex dynamics to which the psychic Ego is subjected. This form of meddling, if we can call it so, of the Spirit in the dimension dominated by the human psyche must certainly have its own meaning and importance, which, however, we cannot fully understand as long as we remain bound to our organism: in fact, even those who have directly experienced the Spirit dimension during an NDE never succeed in transferring to the psychic Ego the forms of knowledge, perfect and absolutely convincing in their evidence, that their spiritual Ego did receive in that dimension. Instead, all the interpretations relating to the Ego's role in the service of the Spirit that we are able to elaborate in the course of our human life, are due to the elaboration by the psychic Ego of the influence exerted by the spiritual Ego, and therefore they always remain partial, incomplete, imprecise and unsatisfactory.

We do not know what is the precise reason that induces the Spirit to send these sparks of spirituality into a dimension that is still dominated by the bipolar energy of the human psyche: when it has to deal with the needs of organic life and with the dynamics that involve the psychic Ego, the spiritual Ego often enters a semi-lethargic state that significantly limits its ability to influence the psychic Ego, to the point that many people seem even devoid of any spiritual component. Even in that small percentage of humans in whom the spiritual Ego is able to exert an effective influence on the psychic Ego, the difficulties of facing both the problems determined by the needs of organic life and the conflicts deriving from the bipolar character of the human psyche, makes so that the effectiveness of the spiritual intervention on the events of this world remains almost always marginal, limited to the attraction exerted on a certain number of people by the psyche's positive polarity, which seems to feed on spiritual energy. If the Spirit's intent were truly to colonize and, so to speak, to conquer the dimension of the human psyche by means of love, transforming this world into an earthly paradise, it would have to resort to more effective resources, and – above all – it should directly intervene more often, provided that such an intervention is allowad to it. If the dynamic interactions between these cosmic energies require these transformative processes to occur over time, then we are still in the early stages of an evolutionary path that will take many thousands of years before leading to any satisfactory results, always assuming that the psyche's negative polarity can be neutralized once and for good. Much more plausibly, the task of the spiritual Ego consists in making the psychic Ego more aware of the impermanent and transitory character of human life, integrating this experience into the understanding of the existence of an even more real dimension, detached from the temporal flow, in which the Ego will be able to continue to exist as an experiential subject endowed with its own sensitivity, once freed from the constraints that this life imposes on it.

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