Beyond the Occult (27 page)

Now let us assume, for a moment, that what my wife ‘picked up’ in Bodmin gaol was a ‘tape-recording’ of the anguish of men who knew they were soon going to be
hanged.
We do not know the mechanism of this recording but it cannot be all that much more complicated than a compact disc.
My wife’s objective mind is not sensitive enough to ‘pick up’ this ‘recording’, but her subjective mind has the power to ‘play it back’ and communicates something of its distress to her muscles, which cause a response in the dowsing rod.
Some of this flood of information communicates itself to her objective mind, producing the ‘unpleasant atmosphere’.

Now our brains can certainly distinguish between their own thoughts — or imaginings — and the world ‘out there’.
But the powerful impressions my wife experienced in the gaol were
not
her own thoughts or imaginings.
They were as real, in their way, as the light that registers on her eyes and the sounds that make her eardrums vibrate.
If she were sensitive enough to
see
these energy frequencies, is it not possible that she might have mistaken them for reality, just as a hologram can be mistaken for the real thing?

All this sounds most satisfyingly logical.
We might even feel justified in claiming that we have placed ‘the paranormal’ on truly scientific foundations.
With the aid of the ‘tape-recording’ theory we can explain all kinds of baffling phenomena, from ghosts and ‘visions’ to telepathy, psychometry and clairvoyance.
Yet there is still one problem that defies all attempts at logical explanation: glimpses of the future.
Consider the following story:

In 1935 Wing Commander Victor Goddard — who later became Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard — decided to visit a disused First World War airfield at Drem, near Edinburgh.
It proved to be in a state of dilapidation, with disintegrating hangars and cracked tarmac.
Cattle grazed on the old airfield.
Later that day Goddard took off in his Hawker Hart biplane from Turnhouse, Edinburgh, to head for home.
But he soon encountered thick cloud and heavy rain, and as he tried to descend below the cloud ceiling the plane spun for a few moments out of control.
He managed to straighten out close to the ground — so close that he almost hit a woman who was running with a pram.
Ahead of him was the Firth of Forth,
and Goddard decided to head for Drem airfield to get his bearings.

It was still raining heavily as he crossed the airfield boundary.
Then an odd thing happened: he suddenly found himself in bright sunlight.
And Drem airfield was no longer an overgrown field, but a neat, orderly place, with four yellow planes parked in front of open hangar doors and mechanics in blue overalls walking around.
Both these things surprised Goddard, for in those days all RAF planes were painted with aluminium and mechanics wore khaki overalls.
Moreover the mechanics did not even glance up as the plane roared a few feet overhead: Goddard had the feeling that they did not see him.
He also had the feeling of ‘something ethereal about the sunlight’.

When he landed he told his immediate superior about his ‘hallucination’, and was advised to lay off the whisky.
So Goddard said nothing about his ‘vision’ in his official report.
It was not until four years later, when war broke out, that he received an even greater shock.
Next time he saw Drem it had been transformed into the airfield of his vision.
The ‘trainers’ were now painted yellow and the mechanics wore blue overalls.
A monoplane he had failed to recognize four years earlier he now identified as a Miles Magister.

Recordings from the past are a reality, as every film and gramophone record demonstrates.
But a recording from the future sounds preposterous.
Even if we assume it was a hallucination, and not a ‘time-slip’ into the future, it remains just as impossible.

David Bohm would not agree: he has stated, ‘The implicate order is there all at once, having nothing to do with time.’
Neither would Eileen Garrett: she said about her experiences of precognition, ‘The experience remains as “real” as any other and suggests that there must be a timeless and spaceless communion between our intuitive selves and the eternal laws of nature’ — a comment that becomes twice as significant if we substitute ‘right brain’ for ‘intuitive selves’.
She has also said that ‘on clairvoyant levels there exists a simultaneity of time’.
All of which, of course, leaves
us just as bewildered as ever.
Yet one of her statements about clairvoyance seems to throw a little light on this baffling process.
‘In clairvoyant vision I do not look
out
at objects … as in ordinary seeing, but I seem to draw the perceived object towards me, so that the essence of its life and the essence of mine become, for the moment, one and the same thing.’
Now this sounds very like Maria de Zierold’s comment that she seemed to
become
the objects she psychometrized, which in turn reminds us that Bergson said that we can know objects by somehow ‘getting inside them’.
And that in turn reminds us that Bergson also said that we can only
know
time ‘intuitively’.
As soon as we think about it we shatter it into unreal fragments.
Is it possible that in trying to explain Goddard’s experience in ‘logical’ terms, we are already erecting an insuperable barrier between ourselves and the reality?
But Eileen Garrett has not yet finished her remarks on clairvoyance.
She goes on, ‘Thus, to my sense, clairvoyance occurs in states of consciousness whose relations exist as a fact in nature,
on levels of being that transcend the present perceptive capacities of our sensory faculties’
[my italics].
Stated in simple terms, this means that clairvoyance is a glimpse of a reality that exists on another level of being.
We are back to Kant’s ‘noumena’ and David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’.
Eileen Garrett even goes on to use an analogy that sounds like an ‘interference pattern’.

In the clairvoyant experience, one follows a process.
Light moves in weaving ribbons and strands, and in and out of these, fragmentary curving lines emerge and fade, moving in various directions.
The perception consists of a swiftly moving array of these broken, shifting lines, and in the beginning one gathers meaning out of the flow as the lines create patterns of significance which the acutely attentive clairvoyant perception senses.
^*

This certainly sounds as if Eileen Garrett is glimpsing the underlying ‘interference pattern’ of reality.
And if we merely recall that every fragment of the ‘interference pattern’ contains a complete image of the whole, then we can suddenly catch an intuitive glimpse of how Eileen Garrett could ‘know’ that a missing doctor was in La Jolla, California.

One more fact emerges very clearly.
Whatever happened to Goddard, his was not a passive vision of the future.
It involved the sudden activation of
an unknown power of his own mind
.
And this is something that cannot be overstressed.
In this chapter we have tried to understand ‘time-slips’, psychometric visions and dowsing in terms of an ‘information universe’, of ‘recordings’ that can be ‘picked up’ by some dormant human faculty.
All this seems to emphasize the notion that we are merely passive observers.
But the theme that has emerged from the first page of this book is that man possesses
‘hidden powers’
.
He is not a passive creature.
The ‘passive fallacy’ is one of the greatest mistakes human beings can make; it condemns us to miss the whole meaning of life.
Buckminster Fuller once remarked, ‘I seem to be a verb,’ and this recognition is the first step in understanding the paranormal.
Eileen Garrett underlines the same point when she writes:

I have referred to an inner condition of ‘alertness’ which is
the
essential factor in many of these activities.
It is a realization of superior vital living.
I enter into a world of intensely vibrant radiation; I am extra competent, I participate fully and intimately in events that move at an increased rate of movement, and though the events that I observe are objective to me, I do more than observe them — I
live
them.

The conclusion is obvious.
Clairvoyance has something to do with being
more alive
.

^*
The story is told in detail in
Mysteries
, pp.
361–3.

^*
J.
B.
Priestley,
Over the Long High Wall
, p.
60.

^*
Christopher Bird,
The Divining Hand
, p.
273.
I am indebted to this book for the above account of Harvalik.

^*
For a fuller account of this story see
Mysteries
, pp.
151–2.

^*
All these quotations are from Eileen Garrett
Adventures in the Supernormal, A Personal Memoir
(1949), chapters XV and XVI.

In his autobiographical book
Rain Upon Godshill
J.
B.
Priestley describes a disturbing dream:

One night last year I dreamed myself into some foreign city and though I had no name and did not know what I looked like, I
felt
I was a younger and smaller man, really somebody else, a student or something of that kind; and I crept into a room where there were a number of tiny models of some military or naval invention; and I had just taken one of these from the table when two uniformed officers rushed in, and as I was running out of the opposite doorway one of them fired several times at me, wounding me severely, and as I staggered out into the street I could feel my life ebbing away.
I was actually wounded during the war but not in this fashion, and have never in waking existence felt my life fast ebbing away, and I do not believe I could invent that vast throbbing gush of weakness.
No doubt most of the dream was my own invention, though I am not given to melodrama of this kind, but I will swear that that swaying progress from the office into the street and the blind weakness that washed over me there were somebody’s last moments and that my consciousness had relived them.

It hardly matters whether the dream really involved the last moments of a man who had been killed: what is interesting here is Priestley’s feeling that it was
all totally real
and not the usual disconnected fantasy we experience in dreams.
Everyone has experienced something of the sort: a dream that seems so real and alien that it seems to be an intrusion into our minds from
elsewhere
.

I personally find that most of these ‘intrusions’ happen when I am hovering on the point of sleep, or as I am waking up in the morning.
Strange images float through my mind, voices make extraordinary but meaningless statements, people I have never seen before introduce themselves and vanish.
Such voices and visions are known technically as ‘hypnagogic phenomena’
^*
(or hypnopompic if they occur on waking), and they often leave behind a powerful sense of their independent reality.

The American psychiatrist Wilson Van Dusen came to believe that the hypnagogic states can be a vital key to self knowledge.
He observed that ‘even very average people who explore this region can run into strange people and strange symbolic conversations that look like visitations from another world.’
He taught himself to fall into these semi-waking trances and was often startled and amused by the comments he heard.
On one occasion a voice commented, ‘I didn’t want anything to happen to my sphere so I read Chekhov.
Your sphere will have a repair letter on it.’
This is typical of those authoritative yet apparently meaningless statements made by hypnagogic voices.
Yet the hypnagogic stranger could also give sensible answers.
On another occasion Van Dusen asked him (or it) whether he should change his job and circumstances.
He received an image of a river that had worn a deep gorge over the centuries, and the words, ‘Wear down like a river.’
He took this as a clear indication that he should stay where he was — that moving from place to place would only reduce his long-term effectiveness.
On yet another occasion, about to ‘wake’ himself out of the hypnagogic state, he heard a voice ask, ‘Don’t you like my sister?’
He asked, ‘Who is your sister?’, and received the reply, ‘Heaven.
Talk to me now.’
He asked, ‘Tell me of your nature,’ and was told, ‘Handsome breath.’
This seemed meaningless, but on reflection Van
Dusen saw that ‘handsome breath’ could mean noble spirit, and that the notion of noble spirit, whose sister is heaven, made good sense — perhaps profound sense.
His feeling that the hypnagogic states were capable of revealing something of importance was increased when, awakening from the trance, he saw the gigantic image of a mandala, intricately carved of wood, with a four-fold design representing the four-fold nature of the real self.
The centre of the design was ‘an empty hole through which the fearsome force of the universe whistled’.
Jung believed that the mandala is one of the great ‘archetypal’ images of the psyche.

As a psychiatrist working in a state mental hospital (Mendocino), Van Dusen came to believe that hypnagogic hallucinations could help him to understand the delusions of the insane.
And here again he experienced that baffling sense of the ambiguity of this unknown region — the feeling that it may after all possess its own independent reality.
One of his patients was a woman who had murdered ‘a rather useless husband’.
She had a hallucination of the Virgin Mary which told her to drive to southern California and stand trial for murder.
By way of authentification, the Virgin revealed that there would be an earthquake at Mendocino on the day she left and another at her destination when she arrived.
On the evening she left Van Dusen was talking to the chaplain when an earth tremor made the brick building sway.
He later read in the newspaper that there had been an earthquake in the south at the time the woman was due to arrive.

Van Dusen was also greatly intrigued by the hallucination of a schizophrenic gas-pipe fitter.
He saw, quite clearly, a spritely little woman describing herself as ‘An Emanation of the Feminine Aspect of the Divine’, and, through him, Van Dusen could carry on conversations with the lady.
One of her more charming habits was to hand over her panties when Van Dusen or the fitter said something she approved of.
But if this seemed to be a proof of her dreamlike insubstantiality, her intellectual acuteness suggested otherwise.
The fitter was far from bright but the lady’s knowledge of religion and myth seemed to be considerable.
The fitter described a
Buddhist wheel mandala made of intricately woven human bodies that rolled through the office.
Van Dusen spent an evening studying Greek myths, paying special attention to their more obscure parts, and asked her about them the next day.
He records, ‘She not only understood the myth, she saw into its human implications better than I did.’
Van Dusen asked her to write Greek letters, and the lady obliged.
Van Dusen couldn’t see them of course, but the fitter — whose sparse education had not included Greek — was able to copy the letters, which were the real thing.
When Van Dusen engaged her in a discussion on religion he became aware that her understanding was greater than his own and that she seemed to have a considerable knowledge of history.
After his conversation the gas-pipe fitter turned round as he was leaving the room and asked for just one clue to what they had been talking about.

Experiences like this seem to confirm the uneasy feeling that what goes on inside our heads may not be as personal as we think.
Another American psychologist, Dr Jean Houston, has recorded a similar experience.
One of her subjects lay on a settee wearing an eye-mask, and recorded what he ‘saw’ as a result of a dose of LSD.
He said that he was on the Athens water-front having a conversation with Socrates.
‘What does he have to say?’
asked Dr Houston.
‘I don’t know.
He’s talking in Greek and I don’t understand Greek.’
‘I do,’ said Dr Houston, who had studied it for six years.
‘Repeat the words.’
Whereupon the patient proceeded to repeat classical Greek.

Thomson Jay Hudson would have no difficulty in explaining this: in fact he does so in the fourth chapter of
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
, citing a peculiar case described by the poet Coleridge in his
Biographia Literaria
.
An illiterate servant girl who was suffering from ‘nervous fever’ began to speak quite clearly in Greek, Latin and Hebrew.
Whole sentences were noted down, and they made sense.
Some of the Hebrew came from the Bible; other things seemed to be from Rabbinical texts.
A young doctor became so fascinated by the mystery that he set out to uncover the girl’s past life.
At her
birthplace he traced an uncle who was able to tell him that she had been taken in by an old Protestant pastor.
He then tracked down the pastor’s niece, who had also been his housekeeper, and learned that the old man was in the habit of walking up and down a corridor outside the kitchen reading aloud in Greek, Latin and Hebrew.
The girl’s ‘subjective mind’ had ‘recorded’ what she had heard, although she had no conscious memory of these languages, and the words had come back to her in her delirium.

In the case of Jean Houston’s patient this explanation sounds reasonable enough — perhaps he had spent some time in childhood in the house of a pastor who read aloud Plato’s dialogues in Greek.
But where Van Dusen’s Emanation of the Feminine Aspect of the Divine is concerned, the explanation seems dubious.
Perhaps the gas-pipe fitter
had
learned the Greek alphabet unconsciously.
Perhaps he had also ‘absorbed’ volumes on religious myth and symbolism without realizing it.
But since he was perfectly conscious while Van Dusen was ‘conversing’ with the erudite lady it is hard to understand why he was unaware that all this knowledge originated in his own mind … .

The most thorough research so far conducted into hypnagogic states was carried out at Brunel University by Dr Andreas Mavromatis.
He managed to teach himself — and his students — to relax deeply, then to drift in the state between sleeping and waking without relaxing into sleep.
This seems to be the most difficult part of the technique but can be achieved by practice.
I myself achieved it by accident after reading Mavromatis’s book
Hypnagogia
.
Towards dawn I half woke up, still drifting in a pleasantly sleepy condition, and found myself looking at a mountain landscape inside my head.
I was aware of being awake and of lying in bed, but also of looking at the mountains and the white-coloured landscape, exactly as if watching something on a television screen.
Soon after that I drifted off to sleep again.
The most interesting part of the experience was the sense of looking
at
the scenery, being able to focus it and shift my attention, exactly as when awake.

Mavromatis’s most interesting experience occurred when he was half dozing in a circle of students, one of whom was ‘psychometrizing’ some object which he held in his hand — trying to describe its history.
As the student began to describe his impressions Mavromatis also began to ‘see’ various scenes.
Soon after this he became aware that he was seeing the scenes that were being described by the student.
Mavromatis then began to alter his hypnagogic vision — a faculty he had acquired by practice — and discovered that the student began to describe these altered visions.

As far as Mavromatis was concerned this established beyond all doubt that hypnagogic states encourage telepathy.
He verified this conclusion at evening classes with students by asking them to ‘pick up’ various scenes he envisaged.
Although the results were mixed, some were too accurate to be dismissed as mere chance.
All this finally led him to the amazing conclusion (which he hides away modestly in the last sentence of an appendix) that ‘some seemingly “irrelevant” hypnagogic images might … be meaningful phenomena belonging to another mind.’

Now this is an immensely exciting conclusion, for it suggests that deliberately-induced hypnagogia might be the open sesame to the whole field of the paranormal.
The real problem with psychical research is that it is almost impossible to ‘do’ it in the laboratory.
In the late 1930s Professor J.
B.
Rhine made an important breakthrough when a gambler told him that he could will the dice to make him win.
Rhine tested him and found that his score was far above average, and that many other people could achieve the same high scores by concentrating on the dice and willing double sixes to appear.
But once Rhine had proved that dice can be influenced by the mind it was difficult to think of where to go next.
Like Uri Geller’s demonstrations of his ability to bend keys by stroking them, Rhine’s experiment was interesting but induced the response, ‘So what?’
If, as Mavromatis believes, the hypnagogic experience is a kind of gateway into the world of paranormal powers, it could well be the breakthrough that psychical research has been hoping for since the 1880s.

In fact Mavromatis’s suggestion has already been anticipated many times in this book — for example by Thomson Jay Hudson, who believed that the best time for ‘healing’ experiments was when falling asleep or when first waking up in the morning.
Hudson recognized that the real problem is that the ‘objective mind’, with its inborn scepticism, seems to block the powers of the ‘subjective mind’.
And the findings of split-brain research bring us an even clearer insight into the problem.
One of its most significant discoveries is that the left brain (the ‘you’) works much
faster
than its non-dominant partner.
The left is always in a hurry; the right takes its time.
And in civilized society the problem is compounded by the sheer pace of the rat race.