Beyond the Occult (36 page)

Now all this sounds very convincing — and quite incomprehensible.
In our universe, light cannot go backwards into the past.
Besides, if the future can influence the past in this way, then we find ourselves facing all the paradoxes we considered earlier — of a ‘multiple universe’ in which there are millions of ‘parallel times’.
For if the event has
already
taken place while it is still several years in the future, then it must have taken place in a parallel universe … .

The sensible alternative here is surely the one we have already considered: that the explosion was, so to speak, listed in the timetable for the future, but that, like a train, it may not run on time.
And in that case, precognition is simply another form of the faculty we call extra-sensory perception or clairvoyance — the faculty that warned tiger-hunter Jim Corbett that a man-eater was lying in wait for him.
It may even be the same as the faculty that enables calculating prodigies to decide that some vast twenty-digit number is a prime when even a computer could not do it in the same time; the same faculty that enabled Robert Graves’s school-friend to ‘see’ the answer to a difficult mathematical problem at a single glance.
If this is true then we have to make the assumption that the future is a great deal more ‘fixed’ than
we would like to believe.
But at least it provides us with a sensible and logical explanation of precognition.

A further case from Priestley’s archives reinforces the argument.
A woman correspondent told him how, during Matins in St Martins-in-the-Fields, she began to cry uncontrollably, but with no idea of what was upsetting her.
Two days later, as she travelled home by train, it happened again.
And as she got off the train and was met by her husband and son she suddenly knew that her sense of foreboding was related to her son.
Three weeks later he became ill, and died within a few months.

The same mother tells how, during her son’s illness, he suddenly remarked, ‘A dog is going to bark a long way off.’
A few seconds later she heard the faint bark of a dog.
Then he said, ‘Something is going to be dropped in the kitchen and the middle door is going to slam.’
Within seconds both things had happened.
When she told the doctor about it he said that he had known of this happening before, and that her son’s brain was working ‘just ahead of time’.

Now in the case of this woman’s two ‘precognitions’ of her son’s death, it is significant that she was sitting quietly — on the first occasion in a church, on the second in a train.
Her subconscious ‘computer’ had a chance to scan the future and became aware of the tragedy in store for her.
It was not that the tragedy had already taken place in some parallel universe or some other time dimension.
And the case of the barking dog and the slamming door reinforces this interpretation.
As ‘precognitions’ they are pointless: it can make no possible difference to know that a dog will bark in a moment or that the door will slam.
On the other hand we can also see that there is a more ‘scientific’ explanation.
When the dog barked in the distance — say, a couple of miles away — its sound waves took about ten seconds to reach the bedroom.
(Sound travels at about twelve miles a minute.) So the dog had already barked when the boy made the prediction.
Now this cannot be true of the door slamming below — the sound would have reached him almost instantaneously.
Yet we can easily conceive that the same ‘superconscious computer’ that
enabled him to ‘hear’ the dog before its sound reached his bedroom also anticipated the slamming of the door.

The ‘super-computer’ theory has its drawbacks, yet it is the only realistic alternative to the ‘serial universe’ theory.
This theory, as we have seen, is the notion that, in some sense, all future events have already taken place.
And since they have obviously not taken place in
our
universe, we have to assume the existence of ‘parallel universes’ or parallel times.
Dunne landed himself in this intellectual cul-de-sac, with an infinite number of times — Time 1, Time 2 and so on — and an infinite number of selves.
J.
B.
Priestley pointed out sensibly that we do not need an infinite number of selves to explain our experience of time: three is enough.
First there is the ‘me’ who merely observes the world — who gazes blankly out of a window.
If I become suddenly interested in something that is going on, a second ‘me’ comes into existence, the self-aware ‘me’.
And since I can also observe that change from ‘me-gazing-blankly’ to ‘me-gazing-intently’, there must be a third ‘me’, a kind of eternal observer who looks on the world with cool detachment.

We have already encountered a very similar notion at the end of
chapter 4
, when discussing the ‘three value systems’: physical, emotional and intellectual.
And we can immediately see that these three ‘systems’ correspond closely to Priestley’s three selves.
The ‘me-gazing-blankly’ is the ‘me’ that confronts the world when I awaken from a deep sleep or when I am so tired that I am incapable of thought: the ‘physical me’.
The ‘me’ that proceeds to take an active interest in the world around me is the ‘me’ that experiences desires, the emotional self.
(For example, the stimulus that arouses a cat into a state of attention may be a movement that indicates a mouse or a bird: in the case of a man, it may be the sight of a pretty girl.) The ‘me’ that observes the world with detachment is the intellectual self.
(It may be worth mentioning, in passing, that Rudolf Steiner made a similar threefold distinction.
The consciousness of plants is purely physical, and would be regarded by human beings as a form of sleep.
Animal consciousness involves desires and hopes and
fears — in short, emotions.
Only man, according to Steiner, possesses
self
-awareness, the ability to look on his body and emotions with detachment.)

So in rejecting Dunne’s ‘infinite selves’ theory in favour of Priestley’s more sensible ‘three selves’, we have also rejected the view that future events have already taken place — that our lives are some kind of movie that has already been made.
Instead we recognize that the future is fairly rigidly predetermined but not absolutely so, and that human beings have a certain limited power to alter it.
But since most human beings habitually follow the path of least resistance, most lives are, to all intents and purposes, predetermined.

What then follows is a simple extension of the ‘information universe’ theory of
chapter 5
.
Psychometry
seems
to indicate that everything that has ever happened is somehow ‘on record’ and is accessible to some remarkable faculty possessed by human beings: the ‘hidden power’.
We can see that this in itself seems to suggest some kind of super-computer.
A piece of film only has to record one set of events.
A meteorite or a stone from Cicero’s villa would be like a billion photographs superimposed on one another, yet the ‘super-computer’ of a psychic seems to be able to disentangle them.
Our theory of precognition merely demands that the same super-computer should be able to make a highly sophisticated set of predictions.
The main thing a computer needs to make predictions is sufficient information about the present state of affairs.
Psychometry appears to indicate that the super-computer of the ‘hidden self’ has — potentially — the whole past of the universe at its disposal.

Its problem is then how to convey its ‘predictions’ to the ‘everyday self’.
And here the main problem is obvious: we are simply too preoccupied with our immediate concerns.
Everyday life demands a fairly constant state of alertness, and this prevents us from paying attention to the still small voice of the other self.
Which explains why so many ‘intrusions’ seem to occur when people are in a state of relaxation, or hypnagogia, or even dreaming.

Wilbur Wright, whom we met at the beginning of this
chapter, was understandably obsessed by this problem of dream precognition and in the early 1980s decided to undertake the kind of exhaustive study of parapsychology and modern physics that might provide him with the answer.
The results of his study challenge comparison with Dunne and Ouspensky and establish him as one of the major time-theorists of the twentieth century.
^*
He writes:

I was obliged to recognize that events yet to happen, of which we gain knowledge by paranormal means, must,
per se
, have existence in some domain outside our three-dimensional universe.

What sort of universe, I wondered, could accommodate a Time mechanism in which events existed permanently in potential, but were activated only when matter in motion integral with the advancing Present Moment coincided with their spatial location?
And given such Fixed Time Events, how was it possible for a facet of our human subconscious to view them?

Wright underlines his point by citing the case of Robert Morris snr, an American agent for a Liverpool shipping firm, whose son, Robert Morris jnr, was one of the framers of the American Constitution.
The story of his father’s peculiar death is told in the biography of Morris jnr.
On the night before the arrival of a ship in the harbour of Oxford, Maryland, Morris snr dreamed that he received a mortal wound from a salvo fired in his honour.
But when he told Captain Mathews of the
Liverpool
that he had decided not to come on board, the captain accused him of superstition.
Morris replied that his family was reputed to have the gift of precognition.
So the captain assured him that no salute would be fired.
However, when Morris was enjoying the party on board, the captain told him that the crew felt upset at not firing the customary salute.
Morris replied, ‘Very well, but do not fire until I or someone else gives the signal.’
In
due course Mathews accompanied Morris in the boat that was to row him ashore.
A fly settled on his nose, and he brushed it off.
The gunner, thinking this was the signal he was waiting for, fired the salute.
The wadding from one of the guns struck Morris’s elbow, breaking the bone: a few days later, he died of the infection.
^*

The story seems to add support to the case of Doug Worley who, you will recall, was convinced that he was due to die whatever he did.
Yet as Wilbur Wright points out, such a view involves us in contradictions.
Morris did his best to avoid his death: were these attempts also part of his fate?
Was his precognitive dream also predetermined?

Wilbur Wright’s solution is that there must be ‘a series of versions of each individual event, differing only in detail while preserving the main ambient flow of the events… .
All future human events, we can postulate, exist as possibilities …’ unlike the future of the heavenly bodies, which is routinely predictable.
And since any future possibility will either be advantageous or inimical to us, we could say that our problem is to decide which to choose.
The
I Ching
, Wright points out, could be regarded as a binary computer whose purpose is to decide which of two possibilities we should choose: in other words a kind of do-it-yourself ‘timetable of the future’.
He then goes on to suggest, like Ouspensky, that time has three dimensions, of which we are aware of only one: duration.
These three dimensions constitute what he calls the ‘Fixed Time Field’.
He believes that a ‘migratory’ aspect of our minds can catch glimpses of this ‘Fixed Time Field’ in the same way that an astronaut can look down on both sides of the earth at once.

In fact most writers on time, from Dunne onward, have tried to solve the mystery by evoking the notion of other ‘dimensions’, with which they usually associate the name of Einstein, with his four-dimensional ‘space-time continuum’.
Wilbur Wright points out that if we could see the sun from this four-dimensional point of view it would look like a golden cylinder stretching through space, rather like those
photographs of a horse in motion which show a whole series of overlapping horses.

There is a great deal to be said for this theory of other dimensions.
At the very least it helps us to break some of our bad old habits of thinking.
There is an astonishing experiment in modern physics that helps to underline the point.
Human beings are accustomed to the fact that if they turn round through 360° (through a full circle) they find themselves facing in the direction they started from.
Not so an electron.
By passing it through a certain kind of magnetic field its ‘axis of spin’ can be tipped through 360°, which ought to restore it to its original position.
But it doesn’t.
The electron has to be turned through yet
another
full circle before it behaves as it did before.
We cannot distinguish the difference between the two circles: the electron can.
Which seems to suggest that in the sub-atomic world, a ‘full circle’ is not 360°, but 720°.
In our world we have somehow lost half the degrees we ought to have.
Or to put it another way, there may be another dimension in the sub-atomic world.