Beyond the Occult (3 page)

This sense of meaninglessness was also expressed by a Greek
philosopher who died 50 years before Plato was born.
Heraclitus argued that the world of ‘becoming’ is the only reality: everything changes constantly.
Permanence is an illusion of the senses.
Therefore man can make no real ‘mark’ on the world, for any ‘mark’ we make vanishes again as quickly as the tide washes away words written in the sand.
This view also implies, of course, that there is no such thing as good or evil, and that ‘values’ are an illusion.

This is certainly the feeling we get when we are exhausted with effort, and life seems to be an endless vista of problems and complications.
Yet the truth is that it is impossible to be a genuine follower of Heraclitus.
According to Heraclitus, death is inevitable, and it is therefore no use making any efforts.
Yet if Heraclitus had fallen into the river, he would have struggled to get out again.
And if someone had put a knife to his throat and asked: ‘Shall I cut your windpipe and save you the trouble of living?’
he would have shouted: ‘No!’

Still, Heraclitus has undoubtedly put his finger on our most basic problem: that everything we do is soon undone by time.
Life is basically repetition.
In
The Myth of Sisyphus
, Camus writes:

Rising, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, according to the same rhythm … But one day, the ‘why?’
arises, and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

Camus calls this sudden revelation ‘the Absurd’, a word he borrowed from his friend Sartre, who also coined a word for man’s reaction to the Absurd: ‘nausea’.
Nausea is the sudden recognition that we are ‘unnecessary’, and that the world of matter that surrounds us is the only reality.
‘Meaning’ is an illusion.

Yet, like Heraclitus, both Sartre and Camus contradicted themselves.
Sartre recorded that he had never felt so free as when he was working for the French Resistance, and was likely to be arrested and shot at any moment.
And, on the evening before his execution, the hero of Camus’s novel
L’Étranger
is overwhelmed by a feeling of happiness and affirmation that sounds like Van Gogh’s starry night.
He writes: ‘I had been happy and I was happy still.’

This, obviously, brings us back to Dostoevsky facing the firing squad.
He suddenly knows that life is not pointless and meaningless.
And we all know the same thing whenever we are faced with any serious problem or crisis.
We know that the statement ‘Life is meaningless’ or ‘Nothing is worth doing’ is the self-indulgence of a philosopher who is both lazy and weak.

But moments of crisis are not the only moments in which we recognize that the philosophy of Heraclitus and Samuel Beckett is nonsense.
The same thing happens in all moments of sudden happiness — the feeling we experience on a spring morning, or when setting out on holiday.
In
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, T E Lawrence describes such an experience:

We started on one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun, while the intellect, tired of the thinking of the night, was yet abed.
For an hour or two, on such a morning, the sounds, scents, and colours of the world struck man individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought: they seemed to exist sufficiently by themselves, and the lack of design and carefulness in creation no longer irritated.

This is the basic poetic vision, the sheer affirmation experienced by Wordsworth and Shelley and William Blake.
And Lawrence has also identified the problem: the ‘tired intellect’ which questions everything.
Elsewhere he referred to it as his ‘thought-riddled nature’.
It is the ‘thought-riddled nature’ that causes Outsiders to see life as meaningless.
They are in the position of someone who wears sunglasses and complains that the world is dark.
But if thought has caused this problem, surely it is capable of identifying and overcoming the problem?

Let me again define this problem.
It is the feeling that ‘nothing is worth doing’, that life is so complicated and the world in such a state of endless flux that all our
actions are futile.
It is the feeling that we cannot do.
Yet this feeling vanishes — and is seen to be an illusion — every time we experience the ‘spring morning feeling’ described by T E Lawrence.
Optimism gives us the certainty that action is worthwhile, and that the use of the intellect can bring freedom.
We only have to look around us to see the truth of this assertion.
We are living in a world that has been completely transformed, in the course of little more than a century, by science and optimism.
In fact, since the days of the caveman, human effort and optimism have steadily transformed the world.
Individual men have died in failure and misery, yet the efforts of the human race have altered our lives until we are no longer mere animals, living and reproducing and dying.
We are slowly learning to become something a little more like gods.

This, then, is the basic philosophy I reached after
The Outsider
.
Dr Johnson once said: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’
The pessimism of Heraclitus and Samuel Beckett is basically due to a lack of concentration.
Our sense of futility, the feeling that life is just ‘one damned thing after another’, is an illusion due to fatigue.

But how can we rescue ourselves from this feeling?
First of all, we have to study it and understand it, as I tried to study and understand it in
The Outsider
.
Our most important ally in this battle is the imagination.
If you can imagine the feelings of Dostoevsky as he stood in front of the firing squad, then you are already learning to overcome the petty annoyances and childish weaknesses that make most people unhappy.
The truth is that we have no right to be unhappy.
It is an insult to the spirit of life.
A man who is dying of AIDS knows that, if only he could be cured, he would live his life on a far higher level of purpose and optimism.

Until the late 1960s, I had considered myself a kind of ‘existentialist’ philosopher, who was attempting to rescue existentialism from the pessimism of Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger.
But at this point, I came upon a new subject of study that turned my thoughts in an entirely different direction.
An American publisher asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about ‘the occult’.
It was not a subject that interested me greatly.
As a child I had been fascinated by ‘spiritualism’ and the question of whether there is life after death.
But as soon as I began to study chemistry, physics, and astronomy, this interest seemed to evaporate like a dream.
After the request from the publisher, I began to give the
matter some new thought.
I also began to ask people of my acquaintance whether they had ever had any ‘paranormal’ experiences, and I was surprised by the number who said yes.

One friend was a concert pianist called Mark Bredin.
He told me how he had been returning, very late at night, from a concert in central London, and travelling in a taxi along the Bayswater Road.
Suddenly, he knew with absolute certainty that the next traffic light, a taxi would try to ‘jump’ the light, and would hit them sideways.
He wondered if he ought to warn his driver, but felt that he might be regarded as slightly mad.
And at the next traffic light, a taxi tried to ‘beat’ the light at Queensway and hit them sideways.

It seemed to me that there was a certain parallel between Mark’s experience and that of T E Lawrence in the early dawn.
Both had been tired, and the ‘intellect’ was therefore asleep.
But what peculiar power could make Mark aware of something that would happen in the future?
I had already recognized that the mind possesses the power to escape from pessimism and defeat by meditating on a firing squad.
But this was something altogether more strange and unusual.

Another friend, the historian A L Rowse, told me how he had been leaning out of a window in Oxford.
The window frame was very heavy, and it occurred to him that if it fell, it might easily kill him.
Since he was in a bad mood, he thought: ‘Let the damn thing fall!’
A few moments later, just after he had withdrawn his head, the window fell.

Rowse also told me how, one quiet afternoon, he had a sudden premonition that if he went into the college library, he would find two young men embracing.
He crossed two quadrangles and walked into the library — and saw the two young men embracing.

Even stranger was an experience described to me by a middle-aged friend named Kay Lunnis, who spent several days a week in our house, helping to look after our children.
Kay described how she had once been seriously ill, and had felt herself rise up above her body so she could look down on it; then she had descended and re-entered her body.

A few years earlier I would have at least considered the possibility
that this was some kind of hallucination due to fever.
But in gathering material for
The Occult
, I had come across far too many cases of ‘out-of-the-body experiences’ to doubt that it was possible.
Another friend, Lyall Watson, had described how, when his vehicle overturned in Kenya, he suddenly found himself hovering above the bus, and looking at the head and shoulders of a boy who had been hurled halfway through the canvas roof.
It occurred to him that if the bus rolled any further, the boy would be crushed.
A few minutes later, he recovered consciousness in the driving seat, got out of the vehicle, and rescued the boy, who was in exactly the position he had seen a few moments earlier.
Now, if these friends were telling the truth — and I was strongly inclined to believe that they were — then human beings possess at least two ‘powers’ that were unsuspected by Heraclitus, Schopenhauer, and Samuel Beckett: the power to ‘see’ the future, and the power to ‘leave the body’.

Now quite clearly, if this were true, then it should be taken into account in any attempt to create a ‘philosophy of human existence’.
Such a philosophy demands that we try to understand ‘what man is’.
And if, in certain moments, man can see into the future, then he is certainly more than Heraclitus assumed.

Inevitably, I also had to reconsider the question of life after death.
Another friend, Professor G Wilson Knight, was a convinced spiritualist, and told me a circumstantial story that seemed to prove beyond all doubt that his mother had survived death.
Now Dostoevsky had once remarked that if there is such a thing as life after death, it would be the most important thing that human beings could possibly know.
And Dostoevsky was the most profound of the ‘existential’ philosophers.
In
The Brothers Karamazov
, Ivan Karamazov argues that the world is so full of suffering that no ‘religion’ can justify it; Ivan says that he wants to ‘give God back his entrance ticket’.
Here he is expressing the philosophy of Heraclitus and Ecclesiastes and Sartre — that in a world dominated by brute matter, ‘man is a useless passion’ who is doomed to defeat.
Yet Dostoevsky recognized that if there is life after death, this fact would change everything.

This, then, is why I regarded the evidence of the paranormal as
so important.
According to modern Western philosophy, which begins with Descartes, it is the philosopher’s duty to ‘doubt everything’ until he has achieved some area of ultimate certainty — no matter how small — on which he can take his stand.
Unfortunately, this method has failed to yield any kind of certainty.
It led Bishop Berkeley to doubt the existence of the material world and David Hume to doubt cause and effect, and even the existence of the ‘self’.
It led Sartre to conclude that ‘it is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die’, and Camus to regard human life as ‘absurd’.
The most fashionable of modern French philosophers, Jacques Derrida, is quite simply a descendant of Heraclitus, who believes that there is no such thing as ‘underlying meaning’ (which he calls ‘presence’) in the universe; the only reality is the endless flux of matter.

When
The Occult
appeared in 1971, it soon became apparent that many people who had regarded me as a kind of maverick existentialist now believed that I had turned to more trivial topics, and abandoned the rigour of my ‘Outsider’ books.
To me, such a view was incomprehensible.
It seemed obvious to me that if the ‘paranormal’ was a reality — as I was increasingly convinced that it was — then any philosopher who refused to take it into account was merely closing his eyes.