Beyond the Occult (40 page)

Are we, then, in any better position?
The answer, on the whole, is yes.
The Victorians had accumulated an impressive body of material — about clairvoyance, about hypnosis, about psychometry and crisis apparitions — but most of it was anecdotal and was simply ignored by Victorian scientists and philosophers.
Flammarion, for example, tells a well-authenticated story about an operation performed upon a certain Madame Plantin, who was under hypnosis, by a Dr Cloquet, while Madame Plantin’s daughter, also under hypnosis, looked on.
The hypnotized woman was able to describe
her mother’s internal organs in specific detail (‘The right lung has shrunk… .
The liver is white and discoloured’) and added the information that she would die early the following day.
Mme Plantin died as predicted and an autopsy revealed the accuracy of her daughter’s descriptions of her organs.
Flammarion adds with understandable bitterness, ‘Nevertheless, I have seen grave “scholars” burst out laughing while listening to these “cock-and-bull stories.’”
Nowadays para-psychologists can point to laboratory evidence to support their claims about telepathy, psychometry and clairvoyance, and the sceptics are reduced to picking holes in the evidence instead of bursting into shouts of laughter.

Does this mean that laboratory evidence is better than anecdotal evidence?
Obviously not.
It is extremely difficult to persuade paranormal events to manifest themselves in the laboratory, although a few exceptionally gifted psychics have succeeded.
The sheer richness of the anecdotal evidence assembled by Flammarion and Myers convinces through its inner consistency.
So many people, from dukes to dustmen, have seen dying relatives at the moment of death that only the most dogmatic rationalist could dismiss it all as pure invention.
By comparison, laboratory evidence seems unexciting and rather flimsy.
Its real importance is that it forms such powerful support for the anecdotal evidence, which points quite clearly towards certain basic conclusions, the most important of which is that all human beings possess certain paranormal powers which can be developed by effort and practice.
Our powers are normally limited by the fact that we seem to be tied down to the physical body and its habits.
Paranormal powers seem to indicate that this assumption is untrue.
Our tendency to identify ourselves with our bodies is largely a matter of laziness and habit.
And the habit can be broken.

Where ‘out-of-the-body experience’ is concerned, the theory was tested by an eminent psychical researcher, Professor Arthur Ellison.
He was inspired by
The Projection of the Astral Body
to attempt to carry out Muldoon’s instructions:

The principle was to loosen the grip of the physical body on the astral body by … imagining oneself, in the astral body, consciously rotating about an axis from head to feet, observing first the ceiling, then the wall, then the floor and other wall … .

For one hour of every night for a month I tried these methods on retiring to bed.
At last I had success.
The first sign was that in accordance with the book, I found myself in a cataleptic state — unable to move a muscle … .
I used my will — or was it my imagination?
— to make myself float upwards, and the experience was quite fascinating.
I felt as though I were embedded in the mud at the bottom of a river, and the water was slowly seeping into the mud and reducing its viscosity, so that eventually I was borne upwards by the water.
Slowly I floated upwards, still cataleptic, like an airship released from its moorings.
I reached the ceiling and floated through it into the darkness of the roof space.
Then I passed through the roof tiles, and the sky, clouds and Moon became visible.
I increased my ‘willing’ (or ‘imagining’), and my velocity of ascent up into the sky increased.
I have the memory of the wind whistling through my hair clearly to this day.

Ellison goes on to emphasize, ‘From the moment of getting into bed to this point up in the sky I had no break of consciousness.’
So although he is willing to concede that the whole thing could have been a dream, there was certainly no moment at which he fell asleep.

The second — and last — time he tried it he determined that he would try to float beyond what Muldoon calls ‘cord activity range’ — far enough to break loose of the ‘cord’ that seems to attach most ‘astral projectors’ to their physical bodies.

This time it took only three or four nights to repeat the projection.
However, on this occasion I stopped the vertical movement at ceiling height and changed direction.
Still cataleptic, I floated horizontally, feet first, towards the
first floor window of the room.
Floating smoothly through the top of the window frame, I was aiming to describe a smooth parabola down onto the lawn where, I hoped, I should be outside ‘cord activity range’ and the real work of acquiring evidence could begin.
It did not happen like that.
As I cleared the window and started the descent to the lawn I had one of the most intriguing experiences to date.
I felt two hands take my head, one hand over each ear, move me (still cataleptic) back into the bedroom and down into the body.
I heard no sound and saw nothing.

By this time, Ellison admits, he was so tired during the day from lack of sleep that he ceased the experiments.
But his curiosity remained, and he decided to continue the investigations in the laboratory.
The basic aim of the experiment was the same as Charles Tart’s experiment with Miss Z.: to get the ‘astral projector’ to read a number during the ‘out-of-the-body’ state.
However there was one obvious flaw in Tart’s experiments: since Tart himself knew the number, Miss Z.
might have picked it up from him by telepathy.
Ellison decided that this flaw could be eliminated in his experiment if he made sure that he himself did not know the number.
So he constructed an electronic box that generated random numbers.
When he pushed a button a three-digit random number would appear at the other side of the box, hidden from both Ellison and the ‘astral projector’.
The ‘astral projector’ would be asked to read this number and repeat it: Ellison would then enter the number on a dial and the box itself would tell him whether it corresponded to the number on the back of the box.
It seemed foolproof.

On the trial run it looked as if Ellison had taken a wise precaution.
His subject was a girl who claimed to be able to achieve ‘astral projection’.
To save time Ellison looked at the numbers while the girl tried to tell him what they were (presumably she ‘projected’, took a look at the numbers, and returned to her body).
It was an amazing success: on a number of occasions the girl got the number completely
right.
Then Ellison tried the ‘blind’ procedure and immediately the girl began to experience difficulties, saying the numbers were too small to read.
This seemed to show that she had been reading his mind.

The next subject was a famous American clairvoyant who said he did not need to ‘project’ his astral body — the numbers would appear in his mind.
He scored an amazing eight out of twenty.
But when Ellison tried it the next day the box recorded that he also had scored eight out of twenty, and he realized that the electronic nought on the box was turning into a figure eight due to some malfunction of the micro-circuit: when Ellison cleaned it his score dropped to its usual zero.

The next subject was a famous British psychic.
This time Ellison and his assistant did test runs before the experiment: they scored nought, as usual.
Then the psychic tried, and scored eight.
Ellison and his assistant tried again, and also scored eight.
Again they cleaned the component, and he and his assistant achieved their usual zero score.
The psychic tried again, and scored eight.
Ellison cleaned the component and tried again: he scored zero.
It looked as if the ‘cosmic joker’ was having a joke at Ellison’s expense — either that or, as he himself suspected, the psychic might have been somehow acting upon the circuit by psychokinesis (mind over matter) to get a high score.

A similar attempt by the American researcher Dr Karlis Osis produced a more positive result.
He constructed an ingenious box in which the circuitry superimposed various images to give an apparently normal picture.
But the subject had to stand in a particular position in front of the box in order to see the picture.
A psychic named Alex Tanous was asked to ‘project’ himself and look into the box from the correct position.
Tanous was able to see the picture correctly, indicating that some part of him had left his body and was looking through the glass window into the box.

It can be seen at once that these experiments, while interesting, are not half as convincing as Ellison’s own experience of ‘astral projection’.
To be truly convinced we
need to be able to experience some sense of ‘the human equation’ — or better still, to have direct experience.
When Ernest Hemingway was blown up by a shell in the First World War he experienced a sensation that he described as follows, ‘… my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner.
It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead any more.’
But while this may have convinced Hemingway that he had died briefly, it is open to the obvious objection that it may just have been a ‘feeling’ caused by physical crisis.

There are nevertheless cases in which there seems to be a certain amount of hard evidence that physical consciousness can survive the ‘death’ of the body.
One of the most striking occurred at the Hartebeespoort Snake and Animal Park near Pretoria in South Africa.
Its owner, Jack Seale, was releasing a twelve-foot black mamba into its cage when an over-officious research assistant asked if he had checked it for parasites.
Seale’s attention was distracted for a moment and the snake turned and sank its fangs into his ankle.
Seale knew that his chances of survival were minimal: no one has ever been known to survive the bite of a full-grown black mamba.
When he saw venom squirting out of his ankle he knew the mamba must have injected a massive dose.

Seale had about 10 ccs of serum on the premises, but he required at least four times that amount.
So after injecting himself with all he had, he was driven to Pretoria General Hospital.

Luck was with him.
The surgeon on duty was a friend to whom he had often expounded his favourite theory about snakebite treatment.
Mamba venom is a neurotoxin that paralyses the central nervous system.
Jack Seale had always believed that if the snakebite victim was connected to a heart-lung machine he stood a good chance of remaining alive.
This notion was based on an observation he had made a few years before.
A Pretoria researcher, Gert Willemse, was trying to determine exactly how much venom it would take to kill a rabbit when Jack Seale arrived.
Willemse
decided to take a tea break after injecting the rabbit with a massive dose of venom.
He left it connected to a heart-lung machine, and when they returned an hour later they were amazed to see that the rabbit was still alive.

As the surgeon forced his mouth open and inserted an air tube down his throat, Jack Seale thought, ‘Thank God, thank God … .’
Then he died.
(It was later discovered that the snake had injected enough venom to kill fifty men.) A few hours later he returned to consciousness to hear a harsh rasping sound and a ‘peep, peep, peep’ noise: it gradually dawned on him that he was listening to his own breathing and heartbeat.
When he tried to move he discovered he was completely paralysed.
The monitors showed that his brain was dead; they failed to record the fact that consciousness had returned.

For the next eight days Jack Seale remained completely paralysed, yet able to hear everything that went on.
When two young nurses inserted a catheter he heard one of them remark that he had the smallest dick she’d ever seen: she was much embarrassed when he reminded her of this later.
A doctor shone a torch into his eye and expressed the opinion that he had been brain-damaged: Seale heard that too.
Later he heard them tell his wife that even if he recovered he would be brain-damaged for life.
And on the third day he heard a doctor say, ‘That poor woman is going to be stuck with a vegetable for the rest of her life.
The best thing we can do is to pull the plug … .’
After further discussion they decided to leave him on the machine because the case was clinically interesting.

On the eighth day he succeeded in moving a finger.
A doctor told the nurse it was an involuntary nerve spasm.
Seale moved the finger again.
The doctor said, ‘Mr Seale, if you can hear me, move your finger twice.’
Seale concentrated all his will power and moved the finger twice.
There was immediate pandemonium as the room filled up with doctors, nurses and interns.
Nine hours later his eyelids fluttered.
According to Jack Seale’s account, normal consciousness then returned ‘layer by layer’.
And eight days
later he was allowed to leave the hospital.
One of the first things he did was to catch the snake that had bitten him and milk it of its venom.
For months he found it impossible to sleep without the light on, since waking up in darkness immediately brought back the sense of living death — as in Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial’.
His comment on the ordeal was, ‘I know what it feels like to die.
It’s not such a terrifying thing … .’