Beyond the Occult (28 page)

Yet it is perfectly obvious that when we are in a hurry experience turns into a kind of ‘non-experience’.
If I swallow my food too fast, it is difficult to taste it.
If I watch television or read a book in a state of impatience, I fail to take half of it in.
Yet in the course of the past five thousand years man has come to accept this over-stressed consciousness as the real thing.
And the result of the non-stop stress is Proust’s feeling of being ‘mediocre, accidental, mortal’.
Why
should
a cake dipped in tea bring a feeling of ecstatic happiness?
After all it only had the effect of reviving Proust’s childhood, and he already knew he was once a child in Combray.
The real significance of the experience is that the taste of the madeleine
slowed him down
and made him suddenly aware of the sheer delight of living at a much slower pace.
And Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, describing a similar experience, uses the significant phrase, ‘Suddenly I could breathe again … .’
The most important thing that modern man could possibly learn is how to genuinely
relax
.
It has the effect of opening up a whole new mode of consciousness, a consciousness that ‘spreads out sideways’ instead of rushing forward at a breakneck speed.
And it is
this
mode of consciousness that offers access to paranormal experience.

In the early 1920s the wife of the American novelist Upton Sinclair began to go through a ‘middle-age crisis’ in the course of which she started to develop telepathic powers.
In
fact she had been telepathic in childhood, when she would feel instinctively that her mother wanted her and be on her way home before the negro servant could set out to find her.
Upton Sinclair found it a little uncomfortable that his wife should know exactly what he was doing when he was away from her.
In a book called
Mental Radio
he described a series of experiments in the transmission of drawings which demonstrate beyond all doubt that his wife could read other people’s minds.
In the eighteenth chapter of that book May Sinclair described how she achieved the state in which she became telepathic.
First, she said, she needed to be in a state of concentration — not concentration
on
anything in particular, but simply in a high state of mental alertness.
And at the same time she had to go into a state of complete relaxation.
The relaxation would bring her into a state of
hovering on the verge of sleep
.
And once she had achieved this state she was ready to begin telepathy.

Obviously May Sinclair and Mavromatis are talking about precisely the same thing.
And the same conclusion can be drawn: that when we can relax into this broad, unhurried type of consciousness, we can begin to exercise our ‘hidden powers’.

The distinguished psychical investigator Guy Playfair had the same experience.
When in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s he accidentally stumbled on the trick of sinking into hypnagogic states.
The nights were so hot that it was extremely hard to get to sleep, and he often lingered in a ‘borderline’ state.
In these states he experienced visions, ‘as though a colour slide had been projected on an invisible screen in the darkness in front of my closed eyes’.
The ‘slide shows’ became an almost nightly event and, like other ‘hypnagogic dreamers’, he was fascinated by the apparent reality of the scenes that floated in front of his eyes.
He later found that a good method of inducing such states was to ‘think blue’, until his whole field of vision was a sheet of blueness.
(May Sinclair also began by inducing a ‘blank state of consciousness’.) Playfair later learned that experimenters in the paranormal were using this same method to induce
telepathy.
They would slice billiard balls in half and place the halves over the eyes of the subject so that he could see nothing but a field of blank whiteness.
(A pair of goggles with white paper on the lenses is equally effective.)

Playfair began to take part in experiments with a Cambridge researcher, Dr Carl Sargent.
One day, as he was returning to London, he and Sargent agreed to try a telepathic experiment around midnight that night.
He lay in bed and induced a ‘blank’ state, then waited.
Quite suddenly he ‘saw’ a picture.
It was a man standing on a pedestal with a halo of light around him — Playfair thought it might be a statue of Mao Tse Tung.
The next day he checked with Sargent to ask what kind of picture Sargent had been trying to ‘send’.
It was a picture by William Blake called ‘Glad Day’ in which a man with outstretched arms stands on a pinnacle of rock, with a halo of light behind him.
Playfair’s hypnagogic vision was unmistakably a ‘hit’.

On a later occasion Playfair decided to try telepathy with a whole audience.
He began by filling the room with white noise by turning a radio on to an unused wavelength and picking up the typical hissing noise, and telling his audience to relax — even to fall asleep if they wanted to.
Then he selected one of four postcards at random — it was of Chatsworth House — sat behind a screen, and tried to ‘broadcast’ the picture to his audience.
He did this by staring intently at the picture and mentally repeating the words, ‘castle, bridge, river, trees’.
Finally he turned off the radio and asked the audience what they had ‘picked up’.
Among the first replies were ‘trees, river, bridge’.
Then he.passed the four cards round the audience and asked them to take a vote on which of them he had tried to ‘send’.
Chatsworth House received by far the largest vote — 35 per cent.
The next largest vote was for a Flemish painting of a castle with trees (25 per cent.) The remaining two pictures received a mere 10 and 12 per cent respectively.
It seemed again a fairly conclusive demonstration that telepathy is natural to us when we are relaxed.
^*

In his book
The Paranormal
the psychologist Stan Gooch cites an even more remarkable example.
It concerned a chemist named Marcel Vogel, who also happened to be a psychic.
In 1974 Gooch was present at a lecture given by Vogel, and when Vogel told his audience that he intended to project an image into their minds Gooch’s reaction was, ‘No, don’t attempt that.’
He felt that Vogel was putting his head on the block.
They were asked to close their eyes, and Vogel announced that he was beginning the transmission of an image.
At this point Gooch ‘saw’ in his mind’s eye ‘a triangle on which seemed to be superimposed a rather less clear circle’.
Vogel then said he was giving the image colour: Gooch’s mental image became blue, then red.
Vogel now told them to open their eyes and asked how many had seen an image.
When the first person to raise his hand said that he had seen a triangle, Gooch almost fell off his chair.
Vogel then told them that he had projected the image of a triangle enclosed in a circle, and that he had first coloured it yellow, then red.
(Blue is the ‘complementary’ colour of yellow: if you stare fixedly at a bright yellow object, then look at a blank wall, a blue after-image will appear.) Gooch comments, ‘I spent the rest of that lecture in what I can only describe as a state of joy.
At the close the audience clapped enthusiastically.
But why did they only clap?
We should have stamped and shouted and broken the chairs in honour of this world-beater.’

Vogel, like Playfair, had demonstrated that the projection of a telepathic image is
not
a hit-or-miss affair, and the experiments of Mavromatis with hypnagogia point unmistakably to the same conclusion.

A case cited by Brian Inglis in his book
The Power of Dreams
seems to suggest that hypnagogia is even conducive to precognition.
In a letter to the Koestler Foundation, his correspondent describes how she woke up one morning,

… to find I was not in my own bed, in my flat, but in the bed of a male colleague.
Although I had never been in his flat before, I knew immediately where I was; but I did not
have any of the feeling of surprise, horror or exhilaration that might be associated with such an event.
I should perhaps emphasize that I grasped the situation through tactile rather than visual evidence, as I hadn’t yet opened my eyes.

When she opened her eyes she realized that she was in her own bed.

She had paid very little attention to the colleague in question, for she was in love with someone else and she knew the colleague had a girlfriend.
Yet that evening, at some official university function, he invited her to slip out to a pub and they ended in a ‘necking situation’ which would probably have ended in his bed.
Recalling her ‘dream’ of that morning, she refused to let it go any further.
Thinking it over later, it struck her that in those days of inadequate contraception — it was 1956 — she might well have found herself pregnant, faced with a shotgun wedding or single parenthood, and that her hypnagogic illusion had been, in fact, a warning not to yield to a pleasant impulse.

How precognition can possibly work — in hypnagogia or any other state — is a subject that must be considered in the next chapter.
For the moment it is enough to observe that this case reinforces the notion of a link between hypnagogia and the paranormal.

Another distinguished student of occultism, Rudolf Steiner, stated that the best time to communicate with the dead is before falling asleep or just after waking up.
Steiner’s personal experience left him in no doubt that communication with the dead is possible.
Brought up in a tiny village in Austria among mountains and woods, Steiner always had a capacity for sinking into deep states of contemplation.
He claimed that the peace of nature made him aware ‘not only of trees and mountains … but also of the Beings who lived behind them, the spirits of nature that can be observed in such a region’.
In his autobiography he tells how, as a small boy, he was sitting in a station waiting-room when a strange woman came in.
Steiner noticed that she bore a strong
resemblance to other members of his family.
The woman said to the boy, ‘Try and help me as much as you can,’ then walked into the stove and vanished.
Not long after Steiner learned that a female relative had died at exactly the same time he had seen the ‘ghost’.

As a result of such experiences, Steiner formulated his basic doctrine:

I said to myself: the objects and events seen by means of the senses exist in space.
This space is outside man; but within him exists a kind of soul-space, which is the setting for spiritual beings and events.
It was impossible for me to regard thoughts as mere pictures we form of things.
To me they were revelations of a spiritual world seen on the stage of the soul … .
I felt that knowledge of the spiritual world must actually exist within the soul as an objective reality, just like geometry.

This is a baffling doctrine, for it seems to contradict our everyday experience.
If I sink into a state of revery, I do not see ‘revelations of the spiritual world’ and I certainly do not see ghosts.
Yet throughout his life Steiner insisted that the world inside us
is
the spirit world.
But by now we should at least be able to catch a glimpse of what he meant.
‘Entering the inner world’ was not merely falling into a state of revery: it was
falling down the rabbit hole
.

Like Arnold Toynbee, Steiner had an ability to make imaginative contact with the past.
In my book on Steiner I summarized it as follows:

On the same trip [to Weimar] he visited Martin Luther’s room in the Wartburg, as well as spending time in Berlin and Munich.
There can be no doubt that this first journey into the greater world was of immense importance for Steiner.
His natural capacity for floating off into mental worlds meant that every historical site and art gallery was a vital imaginative experience.
Most of us find historical sites a fairly superficial experience; the guide assures us
that such and such an event took place there, and we take his word for it; but we are more aware of the other tourists and the souvenir shops and the ice-cream vans.
All his life, Steiner had the ability to enter into the spirit of a place, to conjure up scenes that had taken place in the past.
So in front of Goethe’s statue in Weimar he felt that ‘a life-giving air was being wafted over everything’, while his visit to the Wartburg impressed him so much that he felt it was one of the most memorable days of his life.
^*

Another mystic, William Blake, held precisely this same view of the inner world.
He wrote in his
Descriptive Catalogue:
‘This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity;
it is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body
[my italics].
This world of Imagination is infinite and eternal … .
There exist in that eternal world the permanent realities of everything that we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.’
This last sentence sounds very like the conclusion reached in the last chapter: that we are living in an ‘information universe’ where everything is somehow ‘on record’, and it reminds us that Steiner also believed that the history of the universe is available to inspection by mystics.
Steiner borrowed a term from Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy and called this ‘library’ the Akashic Records.
Many Theosophists claimed to be able to ‘read’ the Akashic Records.
The scholar G.
R.
S.
Mead wrote a book called
Did Jesus Live 100
bc?
,
based on a Jewish document called the
Toldoth Jeschu
about a certain Rabbi Jeschu who lived about 100
bc,
suggesting that Jesus and Jeschu were the same person.
In the introduction he admitted that one of his reasons for entertaining this hypothesis was that many friends with ‘clairvoyant faculties’ were unanimous in declaring that the historical Jesus lived a century before the traditional date.
‘They, one and all, claim that, if they turn their attention to the matter, they can see the events of those far-off days passing before their mind’s eye, or rather, that for the time being they seem to be in the midst of
them, even as we ordinarily observe events in actual life.’
These friends are identified, in a little book called
Occult Investigations
by C.
Jinarajadasa, as Annie Besant and C.
W.
Leadbeater of the Theosophical Society.
Another member of the Theosophical Society, W.
Scott-Elliott, wrote a history of Atlantis and Lemuria based upon his own investigations of the Akashic Records.
Steiner himself produced a kind of history of the universe, called
Cosmic Memory
, in which he includes accounts of Atlantis and Lemuria.