Živorad Mihajlović-Slavinski – Apparitions, spirit doubles and bilocation
Most people have never experienced encounters with phenomena mentioned in the title of this chapter, so they view them as hallucinations or sensory deceptions to which superstitious men are prone.
For persons who have had such experiences they are irrefutable truths, or phenomena that they cannot explain, but which they do not forget for as long as they live.
What makes the experiences of this latter group easier to believe is the fact that there are data that come from famous people, prominent artists or scientists whose statements cannot be easily discarded.
I presented some of those data in this chapter.
It is difficult to differentiate those phenomena, for the boundaries between them are often blurred.
Gurney, one of the explorers of phenomena related to Entities, mentions three criteria that attest to them being more than just hallucinations.
The first is that the phenomenon influences more than one person.
The second, that an apparition transmits to the person who sees it information that is later confirmed as accurate, or of which the person had no previous knowledge.
And finally, that person—the “receiver”—sees a person (apparition) that she has never seen before, yet is able to describe it so well that its identity can be positively determined.
Apparitions are abnormal or supernormal phenomena or perceptions that cannot be ascribed to any natural cause.
As a synonym, the word “ghosts” is often used, although apparition has a wider meaning: ghosts are apparitions of deceased persons, while apparitions also encompass ghosts of animals and unearthly beings.
Apparitions of dead people contributed decisively to the conviction that the human soul continues to exist after the death of its physical body.
Apparitions of sick persons and persons in the middle of a severe crisis suggest that, because of the difficult situation they are facing, their soul leaves the body and functions outside of it.
British and American Societies for Psychic Research have gathered numerous cases of apparitions.
Many documented cases were dealt with by three authors in the book Phantasms of Living.
The most famous of the three authors is Frederick Myers.
Based on analysis of many cases, they concluded that the main activator of such phenomena is a certain urgent message regarding an immediate danger, serious disease that quickly worsens, or death of a person whom others see as an apparition.
Cases that deal with famous persons are talked about and noted down most often.
For instance, it is often cited in texts on this subject that Napoleon’s first wife Josephine appeared as an apparition in front of Napoleon on the island of Saint Hellene to foreshadow his imminent death.
Mozart saw the apparition of a man who ordered him to compose The Requiem and visited him often to check how it was going.
Mozart finished the composition just in time for it to be performed at his own funeral.
When apparitions of living persons who presently dwell in remote places appear, we call it bilocation.
Although the Christian church usually avoids discussing occult phenomena, bilocation has a special significance for it, as it supposedly proves the sanctity of some of its priests.
Many written documents report such events.
One of the most famous bilocations is the case of St. Anthony of Padua.
The event happened in 1226.
While he was preaching a sermon in a church in Limoges, he remembered that he was supposed to celebrate Mass in a monastery on the other side of the town.
In front of the believers gathered in the church, he pulled the hood over his head and kneeled for several minutes.
At that moment, he appeared in front of a group of monks in the monastery’s chapel, read the promised text and then disappeared.
Similar stories circulated in connection with some other saints.
In his report to American Society for Psychic Research, William James mentioned the experiment of a professor at Harvard University, whom he called Professor X, in which he projected his astral double into his friend’s room, which was about one kilometer away.
The friend confirmed that he had seen the apparition.
In the biography of a famous medium from the nineteenth century, D. D. Home, who was known for appearing in the form of his ethereal (astral) double, it is stated that Count Alexis Tolstoy, who was waiting for Home at the train station, met his double.
The double appeared three hours before Home himself arrived (in his physical body).
The experiences of the greatest German poet Goethe are probably most famous and most often quoted.
Here is one lengthy description of one of his experiences.
Apparitions where a person meets his own double, and sometimes even engages in conversation with it, are a special kind of phenomena.
I will cite here one more of Goethe’s experiences, which was quoted in Phantasm of Living by Stainton Moses:
“Wolfgang Goethe was walking one rainy summer evening with his friend K, returning from the Belvedere at Weimar. Suddenly the poet paused as if he had seen someone and was about to speak to him. K. noticed nothing. Suddenly Goethe exclaimed: ‘My God! If I were not sure that my friend Frederick is at this moment in Frankfurt I should swear that it is he!’
The next moment he burst out laughing. ‘But it is he – my friend Frederick. You here at Weimar? But why are you dressed so – in your dressing gown, with your nightcap and my slippers – here on the public road?’ K., as I have just said, saw absolutely nothing and was alarmed, thinking that the poet had lost his wits. But Goethe, thinking only of what he’d seen, cried out again:
‘Frederick, what has become of you? My dear K., did you notice where that person went who came to meet us just now?’ K., stupefied, did not answer. Then the poet, looking all around, said in a dreamy tone: ‘Yes, I understand…it is a vision. What can it mean though? Has my friend suddenly died? Was it his spirit?’”
Thereupon Goethe returned to the house and found Frederick there already.
His hair stood on end.
‘Avaunt, you phantom!’ he exclaimed, pale as death.
‘But my friend,’ remonstrated Frederick, ‘is this the welcome that you give to your best friend?’
‘Ah, this time,’ exclaimed the poet with such emotion, ‘it is not a spirit, it is a being of flesh and blood.’
The friends embraced warmly.
Frederick explained that he had arrived at Goethe’s lodging soaked by the rain, had dressed himself in the poet’s dry clothing and having fallen asleep in his chair, had dreamed that he had gone out to meet him and that Goethe had greeted him with the words:
‘You here! At Weimar? What! With your dressing gown, your nightcap and my slippers here on the public road?’
From that time on the great poet believed in a future life.
A special kind of bilocation phenomenon are apparitions in which a person sees his own double and sometimes even starts a conversation.
Here is another experience of Goethe which he described in his work About My Life (Aus Meinem Leben):
“I rode now on the footpath toward Drussenheim, and there one of the strangest presentiments surprised me. I saw myself coming to meet myself, in the same way, on horseback, but in a garment such as I had never worn. It was of light grey mingled with gold. As soon as I had aroused myself from this dream, the vision entirely disappeared. Remarkable, nevertheless, it is that eight years afterwards I found myself on the same road intending to visit Frederika once more, and in the same garment which I had dreamed about and which I now wore, not out of choice but by accident. This wonderful hallucination had a quieting effect on me.”
The experience of French writer Guy de Maupassant is quite interesting.
It happened in 1889, while he was sitting at his desk, sick.
He heard the door opening, turned around and, to his great surprise, saw himself entering the room.
Then the apparition sat in a chair in front of him, and after covering its face with its arms, began dictating that which Maupassant was writing.
When he finished the dictate, he stood up and the hallucination disappeared.
The greatest Irish poet, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature (1925), W. B. Yeats, had an unconscious experience of bilocation.
In other words, he experienced it, but was not aware of it until it was confirmed later.
Here are his words concerning that experience from his autobiography:
“One afternoon I was thinking very intently of a certain fellow student from whom I had a message…In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some hundreds of miles away where the student was. On the afternoon when I had been thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a crowd of people in a hotel and seeming as solid as if in the flesh…”
Then that young man, his student, asked him to come again when he was alone and it did happen.
Yeats reappeared about midnight and gave him a message.
In Yeats’s own words, “I myself had no knowledge of either apparition.”
August Strindberg describes his experience with bilocation in his autobiography entitled Legends.
During his stay in Paris, he was very sick for some time.
While he was lying in bed, he felt a strong desire to be in Germany with his wife’s family.
For a moment he felt as if he were in their house, and could plainly see his mother-in-law playing the piano.
After a short while, he received a letter from Germany from his mother-in-law, in which she asked him:
“Are you all right? While I was playing the piano the other day, I saw you standing in front of me.”
There are proven cases where persons demonstrated the power of bilocation consciously and intentionally.
We have a description of such an event by American novelist Theodore Dreiser.
One evening, another famous writer, John Cowper Powys, visited him in his apartment in New York.
Powys was a famous British poet, essayist and novelist.
His novels were full of extremely vivid descriptions of times, places and personalities.
I
n them, experiences of higher states of mind and mystical experiences had a special place.
Powys often came to Dreiser’s home to have dinner and stimulating discussions.
At that time he lived in a small town about 30 miles from New York, so he usually left Dreiser’s place early in order to arrive home on time by train.
One evening, after a long and interesting conversation, Powys looked at his watch and said: “I must hurry or I will be late for the last train.”
As he was leaving Dreiser’s apartment, he said: “I will appear in front of you tonight, at this very place. You will see me.”
Dreiser thought that Powys was joking, so he asked him, “Will you turn into a ghost, or do you have a key to my apartment?”
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I don’t know,” answered Powys, “I can return as a ghost, or take on an astral form.”
Dreiser remarked that they had not discussed ghosts, apparitions or visions that night.
The topic of their discussion had been American publishers and their publishing methods, which were of professional interest to both of them.
Later that evening, Dreiser was alone in his room, reading.
He heard a strange noise and when he looked up, he saw Powys by the entrance door.
The apparition resembled Powys in every aspect.
It was tall, dressed in a comfortable tweed suit, but it emitted a pale white light.
Dreiser stood up from his armchair and said: “John, you kept your word, you came. Come in and tell me, how did you manage to do it?”
Powys did not answer, and when Dreiser approached the distance of approximately one meter from him, he disappeared.
As soon as he recovered from the shock, Dreiser grabbed the phone and called Powys’ house.
Powys answered the phone and when Dreiser excitedly described what just happened, Powys answered: “I told you I would come. You shouldn’t have been surprised.”
According to Dreiser, Powys declined to talk about how he had done it.
Had he done it consciously?
By all appearances, he had.
It is certainly a phenomenon modern science cannot explain.
In his informative book Les Phénomènes d’Autoscopie (Phenomena of Autoscopy), Dr. Sollier compared many such experiences, and determined that they manifest in different degrees of intensity—from a vague impression that an apparition, ghost or one’s astral double is in one’s vicinity, to a quite clear vision that resembles looking at one’s own reflection in the mirror.
In the latter cases, the apparition appears suddenly and does not last for long.
If man becomes very agitated at that moment, the apparition vanishes.
In most cases, the double is silent, but sometimes, as in Maupassant’s experience, man and his double can exchange words, even have a difference of opinion. ~Živorad Mihajlović-Slavinski, Invisible Influences, Page 43-47
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