Beyond the Occult (4 page)

To begin with, most modern philosophers seem united in denying that man has a central ‘self’ (or soul).
The Scottish philosopher David Hume started this revolution in the 18th century when he declared that, ‘when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other … I never catch myself at any time’.
Sartre declared that man has no ‘self’; what he thinks of as ‘himself’ is really created by the outside world, ‘the gaze of others’.
And this is the position that has been accepted by French philosophers ever since.
Derrida, who is celebrated for his theory of ‘deconstruction’, believes that the ‘self’ is a delusion that has been created by ‘metaphysical’ philosophers, whom he rejects with contempt.

Sartre’s close ally Simone de Beauvoir expressed the same notion when she wrote (in
Pyrrhus and Cinéas
):

I look at myself in vain in a mirror, tell myself my own story, I can never grasp myself as an entire object, I experience in myself the emptiness that is myself, I feel that I am not.

In other words, man is a purely superficial creature; the sense of selfhood is like a mere reflection on the surface of a pond.
Sartre carried this view to its logical conclusion when he declared that there is no such thing as the ‘unconscious mind’.

Yet as soon as we begin to study the paranormal, we immediately encounter the existence of all kinds of powers that contradict Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Far from being a mere reflection on the surface of a pond, man seems to be like an iceberg whose most important part is hidden below the surface.
Of course, Freud and Jung had already told us about the ‘unconscious’ (the word was actually invented by Leibniz).
But it would seem that even they underestimated its powers.
Even the anecdotes I have recounted above seem to indicate that the part of the ‘self’ hidden below the water line possesses virtually magical powers.

Of course — as Dostoevsky recognized — the ultimate contradiction of the view that we possess ‘no self’ would be an actual proof of life after death, for without a self, there would be nothing to survive death.
This ultimate proof eludes us; but the existence of other paranormal powers seems to leave no doubt of the truth of the ‘iceberg’ view of the human mind.
Moreover, it seems clear that some of these powers that lie below the surface seem to contradict the ‘scientific’ view of man.
Science tells us that the future has not yet happened; therefore we can only guess what is going to happen.
Yet when he was deeply relaxed, Mark Bredin had a clear premonition of what would happen when his taxi reached the next traffic light.

Robert Graves, the friend to whom
The Occult
was dedicated, drew my attention to another curious example of these unknown powers.
It is described in one of his autobiographical stories called ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’.
In Graves’s class at prep school there was a boy called F F Smilley, who was apparently a mathematical prodigy, a ‘lightning calculator’.
When the master (Mr Gunn) had given the boys a difficult mathematical problem, Smilley simply
wrote down the answer.
He explained that he had not had to work it out, because it had just ‘come to him’.
Mr Gunn accused him of looking up the answer in the back of the book.
Smilley denied this, and pointed out that the answer in the back of the book had two figures wrong.
Mr Gunn regarded this as impertinence, and sent Smilley to the headmaster to be caned.
After that, he bullied Smilley into doing problems ‘the normal way’.

In the same story, Graves records a curious anecdote about himself.
One summer evening, as he was sitting behind the cricket pavilion (and presumably in a deeply relaxed state of mind, like T E Lawrence and Mark Bredin), he received a ‘sudden celestial illumination’.

It occurred to me that I knew everything.

I remember letting my mind range rapidly over all the familiar subjects of knowledge; only to find that this was no foolish fancy.
I did know everything.
To be plain: though conscious of having come less than a third of the way along the path of formal education…!
nevertheless held the key to truth in my hand, and could use it to open any lock of any door.
Mine was no religious or philosophical theory, but a simple method of looking sideways at disorderly facts so as make perfect sense of them.

This, of course, is precisely what existentialism wants to do — and precisely what I am trying to do in this introduction: to ‘look sideways’ at the disorderly facts of human existence and try to find some way of making sense of them.
Graves, apparently, did it when he was fifteen.
He says that he tried out his insight ‘on various obstinate locks’ and found that they all opened smoothly.
The insight was still intact when he woke up the next day.
But when he tried to record it in the back of an exercise book ‘my mind went too fast for my pen’.
He had another try later, but the insight had vanished.

Nevertheless, together with Smilley’s curious abilities, it convinced Graves that we possess a peculiar power which is not generally recognized by science, a ‘supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer’.

It is worth looking a little more closely into this mystery.
There are certain numbers called ‘primes’, which cannot be divided by any other number without leaving a ‘remainder’ — numbers like 3, 5, 7, and 11.
Nine is not a prime because it can be divided exactly.
The actual number of primes is infinite, but if a number is very large, there is no way of telling whether it is a prime or not — except by the long and painful process of dividing every smaller number into it.
Yet a Canadian ‘calculating prodigy’ named Zerah Colburn was asked whether a certain ten-digit number was a prime, and replied after a moment: ‘No, it can be divided by 641.’

There is no logical way of doing this.
The psychiatrist Oliver Sacks has described a pair of subnormal twins in a New York mental hospital who amuse themselves by swapping 24-figure primes.
Obviously, the twins somehow rise into the air, like birds, over the whole number-field, and instantly see which number is a prime and which is not.

I would suggest that the ability that enabled Mark Bredin to ‘know’ that his taxi would be struck by another taxi is closely related to the ability of Zerah Colburn and Sacks’s twins, and that both are related to T E Lawrence’s feeling on the morning when ‘the senses awoke before the intellect’.

Now, long before I became interested in ‘the occult’, I had been fascinated by another example of the powers that lie ‘below the iceberg’.
(I say ‘below the iceberg’ rather than ‘below the visible part of the iceberg’ because it has always seemed to me that man’s hidden powers are located in the sea below the iceberg as much as in the iceberg itself.) As everyone knows, Proust’s vast novel
À la recherche du temps perdu
sprang from a single incident in his childhood, just as Graves’s theories in
The White Goddess
sprang from his experience behind the cricket pavilion.
One day, feeling tired and depressed, Proust’s hero is offered by his mother a small cake (called a madeleine) dipped in herb tea.
As he tastes it he experiences an exquisite sensation of sheer happiness.
‘I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.’
After eating another bite, he recalls what has caused this feeling of power and happiness: the madeleine has revived memories of his childhood in a small country town called Combray, where his Aunt Leonie used to give him a
taste of her own madeleine dipped in the same herb tea.

Why should this make him feel so happy?
Because it has reminded him of the depths below the iceberg.
He had been feeling bored and depressed — in other words, superficial.
Now he catches a glimpse of the depths of his own mind, and of its hidden powers.
He also realizes that if only he could learn the ‘trick’ of bringing back this feeling, he would never be unhappy again.
This is why he sets out to revive it by writing his enormous autobiographical novel.
Yet this deliberate intellectual activity fails.
When he catches other glimpses of this magical feeling of power and strength, it is always by accident, when he is thinking of something else.

In the tenth volume of his
A Study of History
, Arnold Toynbee describes several occasions on which he also had these strange glimpses into the reality of the past — not his own past, but that of history.
On each of these occasions, he actually seemed to see the past, as if he had been transported by a time machine.
On one of these occasions, he seemed to see the battle of Pharsalus, which had taken place in 197
bc
, and saw some horsemen — of whose identity he was ignorant — galloping away from the massacre.
It seems clear from his descriptions that he felt this was not ‘imagination’, but some kind of glimpse of the past like Mark Bredin’s glimpse of the future.
(In
Beyond the Occult
I cite many other examples of more distant ‘glimpses’ of the future which proved to be accurate.)

On a snowy day in Washington in 1966, thinking about this curious ability to ‘make real’ other times and other places, I labelled it ‘Faculty X’.
But Faculty X should not be regarded as some ‘paranormal’ faculty.
It is simply the opposite of that feeling of being ‘mediocre, accidental, mortal’, which all of us feel when we are tired and depressed, and which Sartre calls ‘contingency’.
And whenever Faculty X awakens, it tells us that we are not contingent, not mediocre, accidental, mortal.
Our powers are far greater than we realize.

In
The Occult
, I had pointed out that animals seem to possess all kinds of ‘paranormal’ powers.
The wife of the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid told me that her dog knows when her husband will
return from a long journey, and goes and sits at the end of their lane several days before he arrives.
On one occasion, the dog knew he was going to return before he did — circumstances had caused him to make a sudden decision to return home.

In his book
Man-Eaters of Kumaon
, the tiger hunter Jim Corbett describes how he came to develop a faculty which he called ‘jungle sensitiveness’, which told him when he was in danger.
I argue that all our remote ancestors possessed such a faculty, and that we have gradually lost it because we do not need it.
Yet many people have not lost it.
The archaeologist Clarence Weiant described how the Montagnais Indians of eastern Canada are able to contact distant friends and relatives by telepathy.
When they wish to make contact, the Indians go into a remote hut in the forest, and build up the necessary psychic energy (‘mana’) through meditation.
Then the relative would hear his voice — distance made no difference.

Now it is obvious that it is simpler to pick up the telephone when we want to contact a distant relative.
Yet this does not mean that picking up a telephone is ‘just as good’ as contacting him through clairaudience.
The Indian who is able to call upon these faculties from the depths of his own mind has an understanding of nature, a sense of connection with the rest of the universe, and a deeper knowledge of himself that the rest of us have lost.

What has happened is clear.
Even towards the end of the 19th century, the English poet Matthew Arnold was mourning that Victorian man no longer had access to ‘Wordsworth’s healing power’, while Tennyson was complaining that science had destroyed faith and left man in an empty universe, trapped in his own smallness.
But the problem had started long before the 19th century — perhaps when Euclid systematized geometry and Archimedes rolled a weight down an inclined plane.
This kind of knowledge — which Graves calls ‘solar knowledge’ — gradually eclipsed man’s ‘lunar knowledge’, man’s intuitive awareness of the hidden part of the iceberg.

This was the problem that I had discussed in the second volume of
The Outsider
(called in England
Religion and the Rebel
).
Now, in
Beyond the Occult
, I attempted to bring together this philosophy
of ‘Outsiderism’ and the insights I had gained from the study of ‘the occult’.
Yet I began to write the book reluctantly, feeling that I was merely regurgitating something I had already expressed in previous books.
But I soon realized that I was creating a new synthesis.
The problem of human beings is that it is possible to ‘know’ something without really knowing it.
The adult Proust thought he ‘knew’ he was a child in Combray, but the madeleine taught him that this ‘adult’ knowledge was superficial.
I thought I knew the ideas I had expressed in books like
The Outsider
and
The Occult
.
Writing about them again made me realize that my knowledge of them was superficial.
In order to really know something we must meditate upon it until we have absorbed it into our being.
(I have to confess that even writing this introduction has once again made me aware of this truth.)