Monday Musings #3–Automatic Writing, Part 2

So, last week we discussed how automatic writing has fallen out of favor, and a bit of thought about the reasons why.  I had planned to leave it at that, but then something came up that made me think even more deeply about the subject.

As you know, my mother used to indulge in automatic writing when I was much, much younger than I am today.  I called her to ask permission to use her as an example in my post, and she surprised me by going into detail on how she heard of it, how she practiced it, and why she decided to stop.

It’s Tom Snyder’s fault.

Tom Snyder was a broadcast journalist and host who had his own late-night show on NBC in the ‘70s, called The Tomorrow Show.  Clips abound on YouTube, but these days is probably best remembered for Dan Aykroyd’s impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live.  Like Letterman after him, he had a bit more leeway in the creative direction of the show thanks to the timeslot (Carson ran for 90 minutes back then, so the earliest it was coming on in any market was midnight).  Long story short—Snyder was able to indulge himself in exploring his own interests.

One of those was the paranormal.

After a segment on automatic writing aired, my mother decided to give it a try.  She’d been practicing at least some meditation for awhile at that point, and this made it easier for her to achieve results.  She simply took up a pen, positioned it as if she were about to write, and cleared her mind.  She ended up filling notebooks with automatic writing, all in a variety of hands unlike her own.

She told me ‘it’s not unlike a Ouija board, but your hand is the planchette.’  This makes sense.  If you accept the notion that Ouija boards work by an intelligence subtly controlling your ideomotor functions, then automatic writing seems to be the next logical step in immersing oneself into messages from elsewhere.

As her writing went on, and she did more of it, she noticed that it would make predictions that would later come true.  She clarified to me that these were never big, bold predictions about national disasters or anything, but rather small things about her life and family.  As the predictions continued, she became more uneasy at the prospect of voluntarily giving control to whatever was doing the writing.

And so, she stopped.  Walked away.  She had become concerned because she had no idea who or what was controlling her hand when she wrote.  (As an aside, I think that The Exorcist came out around this time, as well.)   

So, all this begs the question—was her hand and arm being controlled by an outside force or simply some aspect of her subconscious?  And here’s where we run into one of the many issues we face when we truly consider such paranormal events—there’s no way to know for sure.  Is it possible that my mother’s subconscious took on personalities of its own when she gave it an opening to communicate directly via automatic writing?  Of course it is.  Is it also possible that an intelligence or entity truly took her hand and controlled it, making predictions and whatnot?  On balance, I have to say that it is.

Those of us who read and investigate the paranormal, even from our armchairs, often hear the skeptical refrain ‘you have no proof!”  But here’s a rejoinder to that—the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  It wasn’t too long ago that people thought that maggots were a product of rotting meat.  And that gorillas belonged to the field of cryptozoology.  And that the coelacanth had been extinct for millions of years.

There have been some interesting experiments done that show the level of brain activity during true meditation.  And Otto Persinger showed us that by stimulating parts of the brain, it’s possible to induce hallucinations and even a feeling of the presence of God.  Maybe it’s time to hook these scanners up to some automatic writing practitioners and try to figure out just what’s going on…