Beyond the Occult (24 page)

All this is certainly supported by what we know about the right and left halves of the brain.
Left-brain perception is essentially narrow and concentrated, like a fast-flowing stream.
Right-brain perception is broad and relaxed, like a wide, slow river.
Left-brain perception could also be compared to the headlights of a car, which cut into the darkness and enable you to drive at ninety miles an hour; however, travelling at this speed you are aware of nothing but the objects illuminated by the headlights.
If you want to become aware of the scenery around you then you had better switch off the headlights, open the window, and slow down to a walking pace: then, as your eyes adjust to the darkness, you will become aware of the hedges and the trees.
Bergson achieved this state as he strolled around the countryside of the Auvergne, and all we have learned of mediums and mystics suggests that they make use of the same technique, ‘slowing down’ until their eyes have adjusted to the darkness.

But if relaxation can lead to ‘psychic awareness’, then why are we not all psychic?
The answer has already emerged in the last chapter.
As Toynbee sat on the summit of Pharsalus or Mistra he was in a state of total relaxation.
Then he went a
stage
further
and fell into the ‘time-pocket’ or down Alice’s ‘rabbit hole’.
When this happens it is as if — to return to the previous analogy — the car driver has decided to stop and switch off his engine.
And now, in the silence, he can hear the sound of the wind in the trees, the water running in the ditch, the cry of night birds.
The poet Rilke once experienced such a state as he leaned in the fork of a tree in the garden of the Castle Duino.
He later described the experience (in the third person):

… in this position immediately felt himself so agreeably supported and so amply reposed, that he remained as he was, without reading, completely received into nature, in an almost unconscious contemplation.
Little by little his attention awoke to a feeling he had never known: it was as though almost imperceptible vibrations were passing into him from the interior of the tree … .
It seemed to him that he had never been filled with more gentle motions, his body was somehow being treated like a soul, and put in a state to receive a degree of influence which, given the normal apparentness of one’s physical conditions, really could not have been felt at all … .
Nevertheless, concerned as he always was to account to himself for precisely the most delicate impressions, he insistently asked himself what was happening to him then, and almost at once found an expression that satisfied him, saying to himself that he had got to the other side of Nature.

Rilke goes on to describe his state of strange detachment and explains that ‘all objects yielded themselves to him more distantly and, at the same time, somehow more truly’.
He had somehow left behind the ‘close-upness’ that deprives us of meaning.
And when, on another occasion, he experienced a sense of deep peace as he sat reading in a billiard room in the early morning, he described a sensation of ‘inner space’, ‘a space as undisturbed as the interior of a rose’.

What seems to happen in these moments of ‘inner silence’
is that time slows down.
Most of the mystics record this curious experience — the sense that time has come to a stop, or that hours of experience have been packed into a split second.
What actually happens, presumably, is that our inner metabolism slows down to accommodate some important insight and the result is ‘extended time’.
In his suggestive little book
Stalking the Wild Pendulum
Itzhak Bentov suggested that this power to ‘bring time to a stop’ is well within the abilities of the average person, and outlines an experiment to test this.
The only piece of apparatus required is a clock or watch with a second hand.
The first step is to sit at a table with the watch lying face upward and to sink into a state of relaxation.
The next step is to close the eyes and to withdraw from the external world, sinking into a kind of daydream of any favourite activity — for example lying on a beach.
But it is important to try to imagine this activity as clearly as possible — try to feel the warmth of the sun and hear the sound of waves.
Then open the eyes and allow the gaze to fall casually on the watch, ‘as if you are a disinterested observer of this whole affair.
If you have followed the instructions properly, you may see the second hand stick in a few places, slow down and hover for a while.
If you are very successful, you’ll be able to stop the second hand for quite a while.’

I myself have recently observed this phenomenon occurring spontaneously.
Not long ago I had a new battery put into my wrist-watch, and for a few days afterwards it developed the irritating habit of stopping until I had removed the back and re-adjusted the battery.
On several occasions I glanced at the watch and thought, ‘Oh damn, it’s stopped again’ — then realized that the second hand was in fact moving.
The second hand on my watch moves in little jerks, a second at a time, so I had obviously glanced at it in the fraction of a second when the hand was stationary.
Yet even so it appeared to remain stationary far longer than usual.
My sense of time had somehow slowed down.

In the same way the blur of railway sleepers seen from the window of a moving train often seems momentarily to pause.
This phenomenon was first pointed out to me by the American writer Jesse Lasky when we were travelling together, and at first I failed to understand what he was talking about.
Since then I have frequently observed it.
The sleepers are rushing past so fast that they are nothing more than a blur.
Then, suddenly, one of them becomes as clearly visible as if the train had come to a halt.
The explanation must be that our inner time has slowed down for a moment.

Two things should be noted about Bentov’s description of how to make time ‘stop’.
First, that the withdrawal into an inner world sounds like Eileen Garrett’s description of how she induces states of clairvoyance.
Second, that his insistence on precise visualization sounds like the procedure described by Priestley: ‘… 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… .’
The effort of precise visualization seems to cause the experience of ‘falling down the rabbit hole’.
This, presumably, is the mechanism of Arnold Toynbee’s ‘time-pocket’ experiences.

All this is obviously of immense importance.
If Bentov and Priestley are correct, then we have greater control over our inner world than we realize.
The effort of ‘withdrawal’ into an inner world causes a slowing down of ‘psychological time’ and a suddenly intensified sense of reality.
And this of course is logical enough.
The sense of unreality is caused by being in a hurry; the more we rush, the less real the external world becomes.
So it follows that a deliberate effort of relaxation — Priestley’s ‘little click’ may be the actual switch from left-brain to right-brain consciousness — should have the effect of intensifying the sense of reality and producing something like the ‘time-slip’ experience.

It should by now be clear that most of the experiences we have so far discussed in this book — experiences of mediums and mystics, experiences involving ‘time-slips’ and clairvoyance and psychometry — all point towards the same basic
conclusion: that we are living in an
information universe
.
Mediums and psychics are always obtaining pieces of information that they have ‘no business knowing’.
This leaves no possible doubt that the information is somehow ‘there for the asking’, as if stored on microfilm in a library, but that most of us do not know how to ask.
Denton believed that this information includes every event that has ever occurred in the history of the universe, and that everyone can gain access to it if he goes about it in the right way.

The simplest and most straightforward way to gain entry to this library of information, apparently, is to ‘fall down the rabbit hole’.
But there are other ways.
Sometimes the information has been so strongly ‘recorded’ that under certain circumstances we can pick it up without our normal senses.
That is what seems to have happened to Mr Chase, who saw the two thatched cottages so clearly that he had no doubt that they were real.
The same explanation seems to apply to the vision of fifteenth-century Paris seen by Ivan Sanderson and his wife (which as we know may well have been a vision of a group of old houses that had once stood on the spot).
In his book
The Undiscovered Country
Stephen Jenkins describes how, on a track near Mounts Bay in Cornwall, he had a sudden vision of a host of armed men among the bushes.
As he tried to run towards them a sensation like a curtain of heated air wavered in front of them, and they vanished.
And in
The Mask of Time
Joan Forman describes how, in the courtyard at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, she saw a group of four children playing near the entrance to the Hall, shrieking in helpless merriment, almost hysterical with mirth.
She was particularly struck by a nine-year-old girl wearing a lace cap and a dress of grey-green silk.
As soon as Joan Forman stepped forward the vision (which she compared to a dream) was gone.
But inside the hall she saw the portrait of the nine-year-old girl — identified as Lady Grace Manners.
It seems likely that the sheer force of their merriment somehow ‘recorded’ the scene, exactly as if someone had taken a photograph.

One of the most remarkable examples of this kind of
‘recording’ occurred at Edgehill in Northamptonshire, where one of the great battles of the Civil War was fought.
After the battle people in the area were disturbed by sounds of cannon and shouting and the clash of arms.
In 1642 a pamphlet was published about it:
A great Wonder in Heaven, shewing the late Apparitions and Prodigious Noyse of War and Battels, seene on Edge-Hill, neere Keinton, in Northamptonshire
.
It described how, on four successive Saturday and Sunday nights, visitors to the battlefield had witnessed sights and sounds of battle; these included a Justice of the Peace and a number of army officers, who recognized old comrades among the combatants.
King Charles I was so intrigued that he sent a commission led by Colonel Lewis Krike to investigate: they witnessed the phenomena and testified before the king, swearing statements about what they had seen.
The sounds continued at intervals for three centuries, so that a twentieth-century clergyman, the Rev.
John Dering, was able to collect accounts from many living witnesses who had heard the battle sounds.

Lethbridge’s theory about the magnetic field of water is obviously inadequate to explain these phenomena: to begin with a hill would presumably be less damp than the lowlying country surrounding it.
But another incident described by Stephen Jenkins seems to offer a clue.
In April 1973, near Acrise in Kent, Jenkins paused to take a map-reading and found, to his surprise, that he was unable to do so.
His sense of direction seemed to be affected and he experienced a curious light-headedness.
He walked on a few yards and the problem immediately vanished.
When he went back to the previous spot, it returned again.
A year later, on Yes Tor in Dartmoor, he had a very similar experience.
Standing by a stone he called the Wedge, he set out to walk to the nearby Merlin Stone.
His companion called him back — he was walking off in the wrong direction, south-east instead of south.
He took his bearings and tried again; this time he went west.
Even when the mist cleared he was still unable to orient himself.
The experience puzzled him, and in the following year he took a group of three pupils to the site near Acrise
and asked them to take a map-bearing — without mentioning his own previous experience.
They all experienced the same disorientation, and were unable to do it.

Jenkins concluded that the solution to the riddle lay in the fact that the spot was a crossing point of two ley lines — lines of earth magnetism.
The earth is, of course, a weak magnet, and there is evidence that birds and animals use these magnetic forces for homing.
(The homing pigeon, for example, has a piece of tissue between its eyes which contains the mineral magnetite: if a bar magnet is strapped to the pigeon’s back, it is unable to find its way home.) There are certain areas on the earth’s surface known as magnetic vortices, and birds who fly into these lose their sense of direction and fly around helplessly.
So Stephen Jenkins could be correct in believing that at the nodal point of two ley lines, his own inner compass became affected by a kind of magnetic vortex.