Beyond the Occult (26 page)

But at least this analogy makes us aware that there is nothing illogical about the notion of events being ‘recorded’ on matter.
If tinfoil can record Edison’s voice with the aid of a few vibrations, then the walls of a house may well be able to record some tragedy that has taken place there by means of emotional ‘vibrations’.
And if Joan Forman is correct in believing that these vibrations are of the same frequency as
our brainwaves, then each of us has a ‘gramophone’ to play back the ‘time-recordings’.

Harvalik’s experiments place all this on a commonsense foundation.
They demonstrate that the human body is, among other things, a complicated electronic device for measuring energy.
Of course we already know that our ears detect sound waves and our eyes detect light waves.
But Harvalik demonstrated that our bodies can also detect radio waves far below the red end of the spectrum, and radioactivity, which is far above the violet end.
It is true that Caspar Hauser was able to
see
heat waves, and that Yuliya Vorobyeva can apparently see X-rays.
Even master dowser Wilhelm de Boer cannot actually see radio waves and gamma rays.
But his divining rod can detect them, which is the next best thing.

Equally important is Harvalik’s demonstration that the dowser can ‘programme’ himself to select the signals he is interested in — so that de Boer could trace the Washington radio station on 570 kc then turn his attention to some other radio or TV station broadcasting on a different wavelength.
Of course de Boer could only pinpoint the direction of the broadcast.
But since we know that dowsers can improve with practice there is obviously no reason why he should not eventually be able to listen in to the programmes.
The same applies to Harvalik’s discovery that he could detect the brainwaves of people who walked towards him across a lawn.
With a great deal more practice, there seems to be no logical reason why he should not be able to detect what they are thinking about.

I have myself taken part in a demonstration that involved a kind of telepathy.
In 1972 I was researching the dowsing abilities of the ‘psychic’ Robert Leftwich.
In one experiment I held the dowsing rod while Leftwich stood with his back towards me; I was then ordered to walk forward down my drive.
The aim was to detect an underground water-main: I knew its position but Leftwich didn’t.
As I walked over the pipe, my dowsing rod twisted in my hands and Leftwich shouted, ‘Stop, you’re on it.’
He had somehow picked up the
signal from my brain.
Harvalik’s experiments place these observations on a scientific basis.
We now know that nothing particularly ‘occult’ was taking place — merely the detection of magnetic gradients by the piece of electronic apparatus known as the human body.
Then could this not also apply to Buchanan’s psychometry’?

While I was engaged on the writing of the present chapter, my wife took two guests to look at the old gaol in Bodmin, which is open to the public.
My wife is an excellent dowser; the other two were novices.
There were two places in the gaol where even the novices obtained a powerful response from the rods: the condemned cell and the execution shed.
All three sensed an unpleasant atmosphere in these places while they were dowsing.
It is possible of course that the rods may have been responding to underground water, and that the unpleasant atmosphere was pure imagination.
But if we can accept the psychometric hypothesis then there is obviously an alternative explanation: the walls of the condemned cell and the execution shed have ‘recorded’ a great deal of human anguish over the centuries.
The narrow range of our everyday left-brain consciousness prevents us from becoming aware of these ‘recordings’.
But the right brain — Hudson’s subjective mind — is a ‘record-player’ that can ‘play back’ these ‘recordings’, and even though it is not capable of communicating its knowledge to the objective mind it can register the information through the medium of the dowsing rod, causing the muscles to convulse.

A single step further, and the same argument provides a logical explanation for telepathy.
In
The Psychic Detectives
I have cited a case concerning the remarkable ‘telepath’ Dr Maximilien Langsner.
In July 1929 four people were shot to death by an unknown killer at a farm in Edmonton, Alberta.
The police were called by a farmer’s son, Vernon Booher, whose mother and brother had been among the victims (the other two being hired hands).
Langsner, who happened to be in the area at the time, attended the inquest and later told the chief of police that the killer was Vernon Booher and that he had hidden the murder weapon in a clump of prairie grass
behind the house.
Langsner then accompanied the police to the house and wandered around at the back — the police chief commented that Langsner reminded him of a dowser with a hazel twig.
A rifle recovered from a clump of grass proved to be the murder weapon.
Vernon Booher was then placed in protective custody as a major witness, while Langsner sat outside his cell.
After a while Langsner got up and left.
He was then able to tell the police exactly why Vernon had committed the murders.
Vernon had come to hate his mother and, after a quarrel, had shot her in the head with his rifle.
He then had to kill his brother, who was in the next room, and two farm hands who had heard the shots and knew he was in the house.
Confronted with this story, Vernon Booher confessed that he had killed his mother after a quarrel about a girl: he wanted to marry the daughter of a farm-worker and his mother, a highly dominant woman, had enraged him by telling him precisely what she thought of the girl.
Booher was hanged in 1929.

We can see that after murdering his mother in a fit of rage, Booher would be in a highly-charged emotional state.
If violent emotions can ‘record’ themselves on the walls of an execution shed then it seems logical to suppose that they can also be detected by a good dowser, or ‘psychic’, like Maximilien Langsner.
In fact they should be far more powerful and distinct, since he is picking them up directly and not at second hand through a ‘recording’.

If we also take into account the dowser’s ability to ‘select’ the set of impressions he is interested in — so that de Boer could distinguish between various radio stations — then it is possible to see how a ‘sensitive’ might actually pick up one particular scene rather than another.
William Denton had already observed that his wife and his sister-in-law might ‘see’ quite different scenes from the history of the object they were holding.
And we can also see that if the observer happened to be in a relaxed frame of mind, then he might ‘accidentally’ pick up some ‘recording’ and be quite unaware that he was catching a glimpse of the past.
When Joan Forman ‘saw’ the children playing in front of Haddon Hall
she was aware that she was seeing ‘a mental picture, as one does in dreams’.
But although the two English ladies at Versailles experienced a ‘dreamlike sensation’ they were unaware that they were seeing a mental picture.
When Mr Chase saw the two pretty nineteenth-century cottages he was tired — having finished a day’s work — and also relaxed, since he was waiting for a bus on a fine evening.
If he had actually tried to walk into one of the gardens he would probably have received a shock as the cottages vanished and were replaced by two houses.
If Jane O’Neill had tried to touch the painting of the crucifixion it would probably have disappeared and she would have found herself standing in the modern church at Fotheringhay instead of the church as it was four centuries ago.

Now this, admittedly, is a little difficult to swallow.
Surely we can all tell the difference between a reality ‘out there’ and a thought inside our own heads?
But the matter may not be that simple.
For more than two-and-a-half centuries philosophers have been suggesting that perhaps our senses play a part in
creating
the world ‘out there’.
The argument — as presented by thinkers like Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant — runs something like this.
Consider a piece of chocolate.
You would say that it is sweet, brown, sticky and has a ‘chocolatey’ smell.
But if you hold your nose as you eat it, it suddenly has no smell and very little taste — so these things depend on your senses.
The brownness depends on your sense of sight; to a colour-blind man it might look grey.
The stickiness depends on the temperature of your fingers; if they were as cold as icicles, the chocolate wouldn’t be sticky.
All this led Bishop Berkeley to suggest that there may not be a ‘real’ world out there: perhaps our senses are
creating
the whole thing.
Kant went a step further and suggested that perhaps our senses also create space and time and logic.

Berkeley’s contemporaries thought it was all rather a joke and Dr Johnson thought he had refuted him by kicking a stone.
Yet we now know that these philosophers were not all that far from the truth.
Science tells us that the ‘truth’ about the chocolate is a swarm of electrons organized into atoms
and molecules by sub-atomic forces.
Strictly speaking it has no smell or taste or colour.
These things are ‘added’ by our senses — or our brains.
As we have already noted, our eyes distinguish between light wavelengths of 16 and 32-millionths of an inch by ‘colour coding’ one of them as red and the other as violet.
As Whitehead once commented, the poets ought to sing their praises to the human brain, not to Nature.

In recent years two scientists have advanced a revolutionary theory which is really an updated version of the philosophy of Berkeley and Kant.
Their names are Karl Pribram and David Bohm, and the theory has become known as ‘the hologramatic universe’.
To understand it we have to know what a hologram is.
A hologram is a kind of three-dimensional photograph which hangs in space and looks exactly like a solid object.
Such a photograph cannot be taken by ordinary light: it requires a laser beam — light in which all the waves have been made to ‘march in step’ like a squad of soldiers.
If two laser beams cross one another, they form an interference pattern — just as, if you throw two stones into a pond, two sets of circular ripples will interact with one another.
Now imagine that the two laser beams interact on a glass photographic plate and that one of the two beams has just ‘bounced off’ a human face.
The interference pattern on the photographic plate does not look in the least like a human face — rather like a pattern of ripples.
But if you shine a laser beam through it the face will suddenly appear suspended in space, looking quite solid and three dimensional.
The light has ‘interpreted’ the interference pattern into a face.
What is odder still is that if you break off a small corner of the photographic plate and shine a beam of laser light through it, the complete face will still appear in space, although looking rather blurrier than when the whole plate is used.
In other words every part of the interference pattern contains the whole face.

Pribram, whose speciality is the brain and its functions, was suddenly struck by an awe-inspiring idea: suppose the world around us is actually a hologram and the reality
‘behind’ it is simply a kind of interference pattern?
Kant said that the world is made up of the ‘phenomena’ — the things we see and hear — and the ‘noumena’,
the reality that lies behind them
.
Pribram was suggesting that the noumena is an interference pattern.

At this point Pribram learned that a British physicist had proposed an almost identical idea.
David Bohm had been trying to explain some of the paradoxes of quantum theory, particularly the strange fact that two particles, flying apart at the speed of light, can apparently affect one another.
That should be totally impossible — unless their ‘apartness’ is somehow an illusion.
So Bohm proposed a theory which he outlined in his book
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
, to explain this paradox.
Expressed very simply, Bohm says that the underlying reality of the universe — the noumena — is rather like one of those small pellets which, when dropped into water, unfolds, and you are suddenly looking at a flower.
The only fault with this analogy is that in Bohm’s theory, the pellet continues to exist even when the flower has unfolded in the water.
And since Bohm backed up his theory with scientific argument, his ‘implicate order’ theory could be regarded as a scientific justification of Pribram’s flash of absurd inspiration.
(Readers who find all this difficult to follow may be reassured by Pribram’s admission that he does not understand his own theory.)

In one obvious sense, Bohm and Pribram are clearly correct.
My eyes and brain ‘interpret’ energy with a wavelength of 16 millionths of an inch so that it appears as the colour red.
And when I put on a gramophone record my brain reconstructs all those sound waves generated by wavy lines and turns them into a Beethoven symphony.
(A young child finds this far more difficult to do: classical music sounds like a chaotic jumble of notes.) Our brains are interpreters of reality, exactly as if they were translating Japanese into English.