Beyond the Occult (22 page)

The first step towards achieving normal consciousness is to grasp the precise mechanisms of ‘upside-downness’.
When Maupassant’s hero glimpsed the black birthmark between the girl’s shoulders he instantly turned ‘upside-down’, and the result was impotence.
Five minutes before he had been quite certain that he wanted the girl: now he suddenly felt it was a mistake.
But at least this was only a temporary reversal.
The character in Thomas Mann’s ‘Disillusionment’ is in a permanent state of ‘upside-downness’, for he has
decided
that life is one long disappointment.
He has ratified the ‘upside-down’ state with his intellect.
It is rather as if the emperor decided that he had never had any right to the throne after all, and that the grand vizier and his descendants should be emperors in perpetuity.
(This is why writers like Sartre, Graham Greene and Samuel Beckett are so dangerous — they have ratified ‘upside-downness’ with the intellect, and their negative vision is passed on to adolescent students with all the authority of a modern classic.)

Another example of the ‘upside-down’ mechanism is to be found in Arthur Koestler’s autobiography
Arrow in the Blue
.
He had spent an afternoon playing poker and lost far more
than he could afford.
At a party that evening he got drunk, then discovered that his car radiator had frozen and the engine block had burst.
A girl he did not like offered him the hospitality of her flat.
When he woke up the next morning with a hangover, lying beside a girl he found unattractive, and remembered that he had no money and no car, he experienced a wave of violent indignation with life in general that led to the decision to join the Communist Party.
There was no logic in the decision: simply the desire we all feel, when goaded beyond endurance, to go and do something spectacular.
It took another seven years of bitter experience to make him realize that he had walked into an intellectual cul-de-sac, and to undo the consequences of a single day’s ‘upside-downness’.

The way in which this subsequent reversal took place is equally instructive.
In 1937 Koestler was a foreign correspondent in Spain; he was recognized as a member of the Communist Party and thrown into a fascist prison.
Executions took place every day, and Koestler had no doubt that his turn would come soon.
The crisis caused what he described as ‘a loosening up of psychic strata close to rock bottom’.
He passed the time scratching mathematical problems on the wall of his cell with a broken bed-spring, and one day tried hard to remember Euclid’s proof that there is no greatest prime number — in other words that the number of primes (numbers that cannot be divided exactly) is infinite.
As he scratched the proof on the wall he experienced a sense of enchantment, and recognized the reason:

… the scribbled symbols on the wall represented one of the rare cases where a meaningful and comprehensible statement about the infinite is arrived at by precise and finite means … .
The significance of this swept over me like a wave.
The wave had originated in an articulate verbal insight; but this had evaporated at once, leaving in its wake only a wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue.
I must have stood there for some minutes, entranced, with a wordless awareness that
‘this is perfect — perfect’; until I noticed some slight mental discomfort nagging at the back of my mind — some trivial circumstance that marred the perfection of the moment.
Then I remembered the nature of this annoyance: I was, of course, in prison and might be shot.
But this was immediately answered by a feeling whose verbal translation would be, ‘So what?
is that all?
Have you nothing more serious to worry about?’
— an answer so spontaneous, fresh and amused as if the intruding annoyance had been the loss of a collar-stud.
Then I was floating on my back in a river of peace, under bridges of silence.
It came from nowhere and flowed nowhere.
Then there was no river and no I.
The I had ceased to exist.

The experience was a turning point in Koestler’s life, the beginning of his rejection of Marxism.

It is interesting that the essence of the experience is a purely rational and logical insight.
He is in prison, waiting to be shot — an experience that would turn anyone into an ‘upside-downer’.
But the crisis arouses deep reserves of vital energy.
And when the mathematical insight brings a sudden recognition of the sheer power of reason, the result — as in the case of Maslow’s young mother — is an almost blissful sense of objectivity, of the power of the human mind to grasp the world clearly and rationally.

Another example from Koestler’s autobiography makes the point even more effectively.
Koestler tells how he was sitting on a park bench in Vienna with a pile of books beside him; he was reading a pamphlet about atrocities against Jewish pioneers in Palestine and was overcome with a feeling of impotent rage.
Then he picked up a book on Einstein and read the comment that relativity had led the imagination ‘across the peaks of glaciers never explored before by any human being’.
The phrase brought an image of Einstein’s relativity formula hovering in a kind of haze over snow-covered peaks, and the feeling of rage dissolved into a ‘sense of infinite tranquillity and peace’.

Einstein himself had said something very similar.
He
declared that his supreme aim was the ‘perception of this world by thought, leaving out everything that is subjective’.
He also wrote that ‘one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is to escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness,
from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires
[my italics].
A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains … .’
Here we can see precisely the same feeling that swept Koestler away as he worked out Euclid’s proof on the wall of his prison cell: a longing to escape from the stifling world of personal emotions and anxieties and into a world of objective contemplation.

What is so interesting about Toynbee’s experiences is that he apparently achieved this objectivity without any effort.
What was the secret?
His account of his experience at Mistrà suggests the answer.
He had sat ‘musing and gazing … through most of a long summer’s day’, so was in a state of contemplative calm, the same calm that Wordsworth declared to be the essential condition for poetry.
And although he was meditating on ‘the cruel riddle of Mankind’s crimes and follies’ he was not, like Koestler, in a state of seething indignation.
It was this freedom from negative emotion, this calm intellectual contemplation, that provided the basic condition for the leap of imagination that placed him above human history.
Nietzsche had had a similar experience above Lake Silvaplana in Switzerland, when he was seized with the inspiration for
Thus Spake Zarathustra
.
He wrote in his journal: ‘Six thousand feet above men and time … .’
Both Toynbee and Nietzsche had fulfilled the basic condition: they were ‘the right way up’.

^*
Arnold Toynbee,
A Study of History
, volume 10, pp.
126–144.

^*
The Occult
, p.
58.

^*
Eileen Garrett,
Adventures in the Supernormal
(1949), p.
172, cited in LeShan,
Towards a General Theory of the Paranormal
, p.
34.

^*
Helen Keller,
The Story of My Life
.

One day in 1968 Mr P.
J.
Chase of Wallington, Surrey was waiting for a bus, and since the next bus was not due for some time he strolled a short distance along the road.
Soon he found himself standing in front of two pleasant thatched cottages with attractive gardens; these had a profusion of flowers, and Mr Chase particularly noticed some hollyhocks.
A date above the door of one of the cottages indicated that it had been built in 1837.

The next day Mr Chase mentioned the cottages to someone at work — his place of work was not far from the bus-stop.
The other man thought about it and shook his head.
There were no such cottages on the site, he insisted — only two brick houses.
The following evening Mr Chase walked back to the site, and discovered that his workmate was correct; there were only two brick houses.
But an old resident of the area verified that there
had
been two cottages on the site; they had been demolished some years earlier.

Mr Chase recounted this story to the historian Joan Forman, and she has published it in a book called
The Mask of Time
.
The sensible reaction to such an anecdote is that it is pure invention — the kind of thing that happens in ghost stories, but not in real life.
Yet the evidence of ‘time-slips’ is too strong for that.
Undoubtedly the most famous ‘time-slip’ concerned two principals of an Oxford college, Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who on 10 August 1901 visited the Trianon park at Versailles and were surprised to see many people in eighteenth-century costume.
Both felt
oddly depressed and experienced a ‘dreamlike’ sensation.
It was when they compared notes that they decided that something rather strange had happened.
Three years later they returned and found everything changed: the place had been ‘modernized’ — yet the changes they noted had not taken place in the past three years.
Careful study of books on the period convinced them that they had somehow revisited the age of Marie Antoinette — and had probably actually seen her in person.
The story of their strange experience,
An Adventure
, caused a sensation.
Nevertheless, when Dame Joan Evans became the literary executor of the two ladies she decided to allow the book to go out of print on the grounds that what they had seen was almost certainly a fancy-dress party organized by a fashionable lady called Mme de Greffuhle, a friend of the novelist Proust.
In fact later investigation showed that the fancy-dress party had taken place seven years before the Trianon visit, and that Mme de Greffuhle left Versailles for the country during the month of August.
So the most famous ‘time-slip’ of all remains unexplained.

I myself collected a similar experience at first hand from Mrs Jane O’Neill, a Cambridge schoolteacher.
^*
When she and a friend visited Fotheringhay church — where Mary Queen of Scots was executed — in the autumn of 1973 she was greatly impressed by a picture of a crucifixion behind the altar.
Later, when it happened to come up in discussion, her friend denied seeing the picture.
Jane O’Neill rang the Fotheringhay postmistress, who arranged the flowers in the church every Sunday, and was told that no such picture existed.
When the two women revisited the church a year later Jane O’Neill found its interior quite different.
Some historical research revealed that the church
she
had seen in 1973 was the one that had been pulled down in 1553.

Jane O’Neill’s ‘time-slip’ had been only one of a series of similar experiences that followed a severe shock earlier that autumn: she had been the first at the scene of a bad motorway accident near Heathrow and had helped to pull injured passengers from the wreck.
On her way home later
that night she had begun to ‘see’ injured passengers in front of her — a phenomenon known as ‘eidetic imagery’.
On holiday in Norfolk soon afterwards she continued to ‘see’ things — but this time, apparently, they were visions from the past, and in each case she felt exhausted afterwards.
So her ‘vision’ in Fotheringhay church was almost certainly a piece of eidetic imagery which she mistook for present-day reality.
What is strange is that her vision corresponded so closely to the church as it had been before its demolition.

Now in the case of Jane O’Neill we can at least form some rough idea of what happened.
A bad shock has the effect of ‘loosening the psychic strata’ and shaking us out of habit patterns.
It makes us more vulnerable, yet in a sense more alive — more sensitive to the reality that surrounds us, instead of taking it for granted.
In this state of ‘wide-openness’ one becomes like a highly sensitive camera that can take photographs in a semi-darkness that would defeat an ordinary camera.
So Jane O’Neill’s experience in the church is not dissimilar to Toynbee’s experience above Pharsalus — with this single difference: she mistook her ‘vision’ for reality.
And the same explanation seems to fit Mr Chase’s two thatched cottages and the experience of the two ladies at Versailles.

But if we are to accept this explanation, then we must make one absolutely basic assumption: that ‘information’ about the past is somehow ‘stored’ exactly like a tape-recording, and that our minds have some natural method of ‘retrieving’ this information.
For the most part it seems to happen accidentally when the mind is ‘wide-open’ and in a state of relaxation.
Then there is the experience that Toynbee describes as falling into a ‘time-pocket’ and that Eileen Garrett calls ‘a fundamental shift in one’s awareness’.
The mind suddenly relaxes
below
its usual threshold of relaxation and falls ‘down the rabbit hole’.
What it then seems to encounter is some more solid and permanent level of reality than our changing world.
There is a feeling of timelessness, as if what is ‘glimpsed’ is happening
now
.
In one of his last books J.
B.
Priestley speaks of his own experiences of such ‘glimpses’:

… on these occasions I have been recalling a person or a scene as clearly and as sharply as I could, and then there has been, so to speak, a little click, a slight change of focus, and for a brief moment I have felt as if the person or scene were not being remembered but were really there
still existing
, that nobody, nothing, had gone.
I can’t make this happen; either it happens or it doesn’t… .
^*

This is obviously Toynbee’s experience of the reality of history, Faculty X, and again there is the ‘little click, a slight change of focus’, a kind of shift of awareness as if diving down inside oneself.
And this is followed by the sense of being in touch with some more permanent reality.
Sometimes, what is ‘glimpsed’ is logical and rational, like the battle of Pharsalus or the inside of Fotheringhay church.
Sometimes it makes no sense at all.

The biologist Ivan Sanderson records such an experience in the final chapter of
More ‘Things’
, a book concerned mainly with zoological oddities: the chapter is called ‘An Hallucination?’
After stating that he has never been interested in ‘the occult’, he tells how he and his wife were living in Haiti, engaged on a biological survey.
One day, on a drive to Lake Azuey, they made the mistake of taking a short cut that landed them up to their axles in mud and had to spend most of the night walking back.
Sanderson and his wife were walking together, their assistant Frederick G.
Allsop walking ahead, when:

… suddenly, on looking up from the dusty ground I perceived absolutely clearly in the now brilliant moonlight,
and casting shadows appropriate to their positions
, three-storied houses of various shapes and sizes lining both sides of the road.
These houses hung out over the road, which suddenly appeared to be muddy with patches of large cobblestones.
The houses were of (I would say) about the Elizabethan period of England, but for some reason, I
knew
they were in Paris!
They had pent roofs,
with some dormer windows, gables, timbered porticos and small windows with tiny leaded panes.
Here and there, there were dull reddish lights burning behind them, as if from candles.
There were iron-frame lanterns hanging from timbers jutting from some houses and they were all swaying together as if in a wind, but there was not the faintest movement of air about us … .

I was marvelling at this, and looking about me, when my wife came to a dead stop and gave a gasp.
I ran smack into her.
Then she went speechless for a time while I begged to know what was wrong.
Finally she took my hand and, pointing, described to me
exactly what I was seeing
.
At which point
I
became speechless.

Finally pulling myself together, I blurted out something like, ‘What do you think’s happened?’
but my wife’s reply startled me even more.
I remember it only too well; she said, ‘How did we get to
Paris
five hundred years ago?’

We stood marvelling at what we apparently
both
now saw, picking out individual items and pointing, questioning each other as to details, and so forth.
Curiously, we found ourselves swaying back and forth and began to feel very weak, so I called out to Fred, whose white shirt was fast disappearing ahead.

I don’t quite remember what happened then but we tried to run towards him and, feeling dizzy, sat down on what we were
convinced
was a tall, rough curbstone.
Fred came running back asking what was wrong but at first we did not know what to say.
He was the ‘keeper’ of the cigarettes, of which we had about half a dozen left, and he sat down beside us and gave us each one.
By the time the flame from his lighter had cleared frcm my eyes, so had fifteenth-century Paris, and there was nothing before me but the endless and damned thorn bushes and cactus and bare earth.
My wife also ‘came back’ after looking into the flame.
Fred had seen nothing… .

A young native later commented to Sanderson, ‘You saw things, didn’t you?
You don’t believe it, but you could
always
see things if you wanted to.’
Presumably he meant that Sanderson was ‘psychic’.
This could certainly help to explain the vision of ancient houses.
Their situation may also have played its part: they were tired, plodding along a road in bright moonlight, feeling a little nervous, so their senses were ‘wide-open’.
Sanderson’s wife may have seen the ancient houses by ‘tuning in’ to her husband — husbands and wives are often telepathic.
But all that still leaves the mystery of what fifteenth-century houses were doing in twentieth-century Haiti.
It is true that Haiti was occupied by the French, but this was two centuries later.
Is it possible that there
were
once old ‘Elizabethan’ houses on that bare country road?
That, on the whole, seems the likeliest explanation.
Yet it seems unlikely that they could have vanished without leaving any trace.
And if this explanation has to be abandoned, then the vision of fifteenth-century Paris in twentieth-century Haiti remains incomprehensible.

In
The Mask of Time
Joan Forman makes a creditable attempt to explain ‘time-slips’ in scientific terms.
Her suggestion is that events are ‘recorded by a material medium (stone seems to be a common recorder) … at a time when energy patterns were being created in the neighbourhood’.
The culprit, she thinks, could be ‘Schumann waves’, ultraviolet energy of very short wavelength, which are present between earth and the ionosphere and which operate on the same frequency as our ‘brainwaves’.

A similar explanation of haunted houses had been advanced towards the turn of the century by Sir Oliver Lodge, who suggested that powerful tragic emotions, like those associated with murders or suicides, might be ‘recorded’ in the walls of houses where such events have occurred.
Half a century later a retired Cambridge don named T.
C.
Lethbridge came independently to the same conclusion.
Lethbridge had often experienced ‘unpleasant sensations’ in certain spots, as if something ‘nasty’ had happened there and left traces behind.
Lethbridge called these sensations ‘ghouls’, and believed that they were basically ‘recordings’.
In one case he and his wife Mina were
visiting Ladram beach to collect seaweed and both experienced an ‘unpleasant feeling’ near a stream that ran down the cliff: when Mina went to make a sketch at the clifftop she had the feeling that someone was urging her to jump.
Lethbridge later discovered that a man
had
committed suicide from that spot and assumed that Mina was somehow ‘picking up’ a ‘recording’ of his emotions just before he jumped.
On another occasion Lethbridge and his mother had been walking in the great wood near Wokingham when both had experienced acute depression; they discovered later that they had been walking close to the corpse of a man who had committed suicide.