I am searching for the remaining figures and they will be posted on freedomexercises.org.  My humble apologies.

On the Nature of Accumulation of the Vital Energies

Although not discussed as such, many of the work exercises given to the student for development of a soul through the loss of the concept of ‘having a self’, are concerned with proper accumulation of vital and cosmic energies. Previously, I introduced the term, atons, to describe these energies. Though, the existence of the atonic energies is little known and studied by present day scientists, scientific study of these energies by western scientists can be found towards the close of the 19th Century and the early portions of the 20th Century.

Here I am going to discuss two interesting, early attempts to study and define the atonic energies . The first article by Duncan MacDougall, M.D. of Haverhill, Massachusetts, is included below, appearing in 1907 in Vol. II of American Medicine. The article is titled, ‘Hypothesis concerning soul substance together with experimental evidence of the existence of such substance.

If personal continuity after the event of bodily death is a fact, if the psychic functions continue to exist as a separate individuality or personality after the death of brain and body; then such personality can only exist as a space-occupying body, unless the relations between space objective and space notions in our consciousness, established in our consciousness by heredity and experience, are entirely wiped out at death and a new set of relations between space and consciousness suddenly established in the continuing personality. This would be an unimaginable breach in the continuity of nature.

It is unthinkable that personality and consciousness continuing personal identity should exist, and have being, and yet not occupy space It is impossible to represent in thought that which is not space-occupying, as having personality; for that would be equivalent to thinking that nothing had become or was something, that emptiness had personality, that space itself was more than space, all of which are contradictions and absurd.

Since therefore it is necessary to the continuance of conscious life and personal identity after death, that they must have for a basis that which is space-occupying, or substance, the question arises has this substance weight, is it ponderable?
The essential thing is that there must be a substance as the basis of continuing personal identity and consciousness, for without space occupying substance, personality or a continuing conscious ego after bodily death is unthinkable.

According to the latest conception of science, substance, or space-occupying material, is divisible into that which is gravitative, solids, liquids, gases, all having weight, and the ether which is nongravitative. It seemed impossible to me that the soul substance could consist of the ether. If the conception is true that ether is continuous and not to be conceived of as existing or capable of existing in separate masses, we have here the most solid ground for believing that the soul substance we are seeking is not ether, because one of the very first attributes of personal identity is the quality of separateness. Nothing is more borne in upon consciousness, than that the ego is detached and separate from all things else–the nonego.

We are therefore driven back upon the assumption that the soul substance so necessary to the conception of continuing personal identity, after the death of this material body, must still be a form of gravitative matter, or perhaps a middle form of substance neither gravitative matter nor ether, nor capable of being weighed, and yet not identical with ether. Since however the substance considered in our hypothesis is linked organically with the body until death takes place, it appears to me more reasonable to think that it must be some form of gravitative matter, and therefore capable of being detected at death by weighing a human being in the act of death.

My first subject was a man dying of tuberculosis. It seemed to me best to select a patient dying with a disease that produces great exhaustion, the death occurring with little or no muscular movement, because in such a case the beam could be kept more perfectly at balance and any loss occurring readily noted.

The patient was under observation for three hours and forty minutes before death, lying on a bed arranged on a light framework built upon very delicately balanced platform beam scales.

The patient’s comfort was looked after in every way, although he was practically moribund when placed upon the bed. He lost weight slowly at the rate of one ounce per hour due to evaporation of moisture in respiration and evaporation of sweat.

During all three hours and forty minutes I kept the beam end slightly above balance near the upper limiting bar in order to make the test more decisive if it should come.

At the end of three hours and forty minutes he expired and suddenly coincident with death the beam end dropped with an audible stroke hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce.
This loss of weight could not be due to evaporation of respiratory moisture and sweat, because that had already been determined to go on, in his case, at the rate of one-sixtieth of an ounce per minute, whereas this loss was sudden and large, three-fourths of an ounce in a few seconds.

The bowels did not move; if they had moved the weight would still have remained upon the bed except for a slow loss by the evaporation of moisture depending, of course, upon the fluidity of the feces. The bladder evacuated one or two drams of urine. This remained upon the bed and could only have influenced the weight by slow gradual evaporation and therefore in no way could account for the sudden loss.

There remained but one more channel of loss to explore, the expiration of all but the residual air in the lungs. Getting upon the bed myself, my colleague put the beam at actual balance. Inspiration and expiration of air as forcibly as possible by me had no effect upon the beam. My colleague got upon the bed and I placed the beam at balance. Forcible inspiration and expiration of air on his part had no effect. In this case we certainly have an inexplicable loss of weight of three-fourths of an ounce. Is it the soul substance? How other shall we explain it? [Note: the density of moist air at 37 res is about 1.1 gm/liter or approximately 1/30 of an ounce, a negligible amount in this experiment.]