Beyond the Occult (30 page)

Now this is in fact a vitally important step in the argument of this book.
We began by considering ‘visions’ like those of Eileen Garrett and trying to explain them in terms of some mysterious human faculty, the power of falling ‘down the rabbit hole’.
There followed the suggestion that everything that has ever happened is somehow ‘on record’, and that the human mind can extract information from the record by
means of the ‘subjective mind’.
But in the case of the missing doctor it is hard to see how such a faculty could operate, since the fragment of shirt handed to Eileen Garrett had been worn by the doctor on the day
before
he left home.
One possible explanation, of course, is that the doctor had already decided to vanish to La Jolla before he left home and that the decison had somehow been ‘imprinted’ on his shirt.
In this particular case, such an explanation is plausible.
But it would be possible to cite dozens of other cases in which this is not so.
In 1956 a pretty typist named Joy Aken disappeared after leaving her office in Durban, South Africa.
Her family approached a psychic named Nelson Palmer and asked if he could help.
Palmer told them to bring some items of the girl’s underwear to his home.
As he rested his hands on the clothing, Palmer told Joy’s mother that the girl was dead and that her body lay in a culvert.
He then guided a group of searchers to a culvert sixty miles away where the girl’s body — with gunshot wounds in the head — was discovered.
A man named Clarence Van Buuren was later hanged for her murder.
^*

It is clearly impossible that this girl’s clothing could have somehow ‘recorded’ information about her murder since she was not wearing it at the time.
But May Sinclair provides a possible explanation when she states that, ‘it was as if some intelligent entity was directly informing me’.
The intelligent entity could, of course, be Hudson’s ‘subjective mind’.
But that still leaves us with the problem of how the ‘subjective mind’ of a psychometrist could obtain information from a garment that had no connection with a crime.

We have already encountered this same problem in the field of dowsing.
Harvalik’s magnetic gradients provide a perfectly satisfactory explanation for the dowser’s ability to find underground water or minerals, but they totally fail to explain how a map dowser can detect the same things by dangling his pendulum over a map.
(It need not even be a printed map; I have described in
Mysteries
how the Welsh dowser Bill Lewis accurately traced the course of a stream on
a map I had sketched with a pencil, even indicating the point where a pipe ran off at a right angle to carry water to our cottage.) Most books on dowsing prefer to avoid the subject, to escape embarrassment.
Yet most dowsers seem to feel that this odd ability is as ‘normal’ as their power to locate water with a divining rod.
One of the most famous of French dowsers, the Abbé Mermet, ‘explained’ map dowsing by commenting that thought waves can travel round the world with the speed of light, and that therefore it is just as easy to dowse for something on the other side of the globe as in your own back garden; but he did not bother to explain how ‘thought’ can locate — for example — a sunken wreck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Here again the intelligent entity hypothesis seems to offer a more straightforward explanation.

Jung’s attempt to resolve the mystery has something in common with David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’ theory — the notion that the ‘underlying reality’ of the world contains information about the whole universe — as well as with Rudolf Steiner’s Akashic Records.
According to Jung, the ‘collective unconscious’ of the human race also contains knowledge of everything that has ever happened.
He goes on to use this theory to explain a curious ‘psychic’ experience.
One of his patients had relapsed into a state of depression:

At about two o’clock — I must have just fallen asleep — I awoke with a start, and had the feeling that someone had come into the room; I even had the impression that the door had been hastily opened.
I instantly turned on the light, but there was nothing.
Someone might have mistaken the door, I thought, and I looked into the corridor.
But it was still as death.
‘Odd,’ I thought, ‘someone did come into the room!’
Then I tried to recall exactly what had happened, and it occurred to me that I had been awakened by a feeling of dull pain, as though something had struck my forehead and then the back of my skull.
The following day I received a telegram saying that my patient had committed suicide.
He had shot himself.
Later
I learned that the bullet had come to rest in the back wall of the skull.
^*

The straightforward explanation of this experience would seem to be telepathy — perhaps the patient was thinking about Jung as he prepared to blow his brains out.
Jung preferred something more complicated:

The experience was a genuine synchronistic phenomenon such as is quite often observed in connection with an archetypal situation — in this case, death.
By means of a relativization of time and space in the unconscious it could well be that I had perceived something which in reality was taking place elsewhere.
The collective unconscious is common to all: it is the foundation of what the ancients called ‘the sympathy of all things’.
In this case the unconscious had knowledge of my patient’s condition.
All that evening, in fact, I had felt curiously restive and nervous, very much in contrast to my usual mood.

To understand this passage we have to recall that Jung believed that Philemon, Elijah and Salome were ‘intelligent entities’ who had their own independent existence outside his own mind.
He believed, in effect, that he had walked out of his own personal ‘unconscious’ and had met them in the common ground of the collective unconscious.
So if we brush aside the screen of abstractions about ‘the relativization of time and space in the unconscious’, he is really suggesting that his knowledge of his patient’s suicide came from ‘intelligent entities’ — exactly as May Sinclair does.

As Jung learned the techniques of plunging ‘down the rabbit hole’, he began to enter into a curious relationship with these intelligent entities.
Another entity called Ka — more demonic than Philemon — made his appearance, and Jung began writing accounts of his encounters in a notebook he called his Black Book.
One day as he was writing he asked himself the question, ‘What am I really doing?’, and a female
voice inside his head answered clearly, ‘It is art.’
It was the voice of a female patient who had been in love with Jung.
When, later, he asked the same question, the same voice replied clearly, ‘It is art.’
Whereupon Jung invited ‘her’ to explain exactly what she meant: as a result she came through with a long statement.
Jung then decided that this ‘inner woman’ was an essential part of his own soul and christened it ‘the anima’ — the female component in men.
And he came to suspect that her assertion ‘It is art’ was an attempt to persuade him to see himself as a great misunderstood artist and so to bring about his destruction.
(Unfortunately he failed to explain precisely why his anima should wish to destroy him.)

In 1916 the ‘entities’ seemed to escape from his unconscious (or the collective unconscious) into the real world.
The air seemed to be full of ghosts.
His eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through the room while the blanket was twice snatched from the bed of his youngest daughter.
Later the following afternoon the doorbell began ringing frantically, but when they answered it there was no one there.

Then I knew that something had to happen.
The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits.
They were packed deep right to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe.
As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the question, ‘For God’s sake, what in the world is this?’
Then they cried out in chorus, ‘We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.’

Jung snatched up his pen and began to write: in three evenings he had written a curious work entitled
Seven Sermons to the Dead
, written in the rather pompous, inflated style which Jung says is typical of the ‘archetypes’.

Does this mean that Jung felt he had been dealing with real ‘spirits’?
Apparently yes.
He says, ‘The intellect, of course, would like … to write the whole thing off as a
violation of the rules.
But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not broken sometimes!’

It must be emphasized that at the time Jung kept these experiences very much to himself.
He had his career to think of.
Nothing would have delighted Freud more than for Jung to openly declare himself a believer in ‘the occult’ so that he could say, ‘I told you these weird ideas would drive him mad … .’
The result was that Jung played his cards very close to his chest.
In 1920 he rented a cottage near London and was disturbed by knocking noises, unpleasant smells and sounds as if a large animal was rushing around the bedroom — typical ‘poltergeist phenomena’.
One night, as the walls echoed to a storm of blows, Jung opened his eyes to find himself looking at half a head — of an old woman — on his pillow.
He left hastily and the cottage was pulled down.
Yet as late as 1948 he wrote a postscript to an article on ‘spirits’ in which he claimed they were ‘projections of the unconscious’ stating that he could not make up his mind whether spirits really existed ‘because I am not in a position to adduce experiences that would prove it one way or the other.’
This sounds — to put it mildly — slightly disingenuous.
And it was not until two years later that he finally dared to relate his experience in the haunted cottage in the introduction to a book called
Ghosts: Reality or Delusion?

Jung also preferred to keep silent about another ‘occult’ interest, the Chinese book of oracles known as the
I Ching
.
This ancient text contains sixty-four ‘oracles’, and is consulted by a chance procedure involving coins or yarrow stalks.
The simplest method is to throw down three pennies.
A preponderance of heads gives a straight line; a preponderance of tails a broken line.
When placed on top of one another, these lines form a hexagram which indicates which of the sixty-four oracles contains the answer to the question.
(The question must be clearly formulated in the mind before consulting the oracle.)

Obviously there is no possible scientific justification for the procedure; yet Jung was studying — and consulting — the
I Ching
from 1920 onward.
He did not admit to it until 1950
when, after an accident that brought him to the verge of death, he obviously felt that it was time to speak frankly.
Then he justified his interest in the
I Ching
by discussing what he called ‘synchronicities’ — those baffling, apparently meaningful coincidences that give us the feeling that fate is trying to tell us something.
Jung gives an example from his own experience: after making a note about a mythical creature that was half man and half fish, he had fish for lunch, someone mentioned the custom of making an ‘April fish’ (April fool) of someone, a patient showed him a picture of a fish, he saw an embroidery of fishes and sea monsters, and, finally, a patient told him about a dream of a fish that night.
On the day he wrote all this down, he found a large fish on the wall by the lake.

Writing an introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the
I Ching
Jung was confronted with the problem of how to justify such ‘occult’ notions in scientific terms.
He compromised by describing synchronicity as ‘an acausal connecting principle’ — a completely meaningless term meaning a cause that is not a cause.
But it sounded more or less scientific, and Jung later tried to justify it by publishing his essay on synchronicity in a book that also contained an essay by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, arguing that the astronomer Kepler had invented the idea of ‘archetypes’.

Pauli, oddly enough, was himself an amusing example of what Jung meant by synchronicity.
He seemed to have some odd power of making things go wrong.
One day in Göttingen a complex piece of apparatus suddenly collapsed without apparent cause, and Professor J.
Franck remarked jokingly, ‘Pauli must be around somewhere.’
He wrote to ask Pauli where he was at the time and discovered that Pauli was actually on the railway platform in Gottingen, changing trains.

Having convinced himself — and many other respectable psychologists — that synchronicity was a scientifically justifiable idea, Jung continued to use it to explain anything that he felt might sound suspiciously ‘occult’.
We have seen, for example, how he explained his telepathic experience of his
patient’s suicide by describing it as ‘a genuine synchronistic phenomenon such as is quite often observed in connection with an archetypal situation’ — an explanation which obviously has no relation to what actually happened but which sounds comfortingly scientific.