Beyond the Occult (43 page)

Since the use of such powers involves relaxation it would seem to follow that the first step towards learning to use them would be to learn to relax — so, for example, they ought to be enhanced by transcendental meditation.
Joyce Collin-Smith tells a number of stories about the Maharishi that suggest that this is so.
When he was holding court in an Oxford hotel an aristocratic old lady on the same floor complained to the management about the noise, and the Maharishi was asked if he would mind moving to another floor.
Joyce Collin-Smith was deputed to deliver the message.
The Maharishi replied that he had no intention of moving, then added casually, ‘Don’t worry — she won’t bother us again.’
And to Joyce Collin-Smith’s amazement, she didn’t.
The Maharishi, it seems, could exercise the same peculiar power as Lady Abercrombie.
Joyce Collin-Smith’s account of her ‘initiation’, and the deep relaxation she experienced immediately thereafter, suggest that the Maharishi may have used the same power to positive effect on his followers.

What seems clear is that these powers somehow involve the positive use of the imagination.
This was an observation I made a few years ago when trying out an experiment in psychokinesis recommended to me by the dowser Robert Leftwich.
The apparatus required is extremely simple: a needle, a cork, and a two-inch square of paper.
The paper is first folded diagonally from corner to corner twice, thus making an X, then in half again, vertically and horizontally — so the resulting pattern looks rather like a Union Jack.
This can then be pinched into a paper dart with four ‘fins’.
The needle is stuck in the cork and the paper dart placed umbrella-wise on top of it, so the end product looks like a tiny roundabout.
After tying a handkerchief round his face (to prevent him breathing on it), Leftwich placed his hands around his ‘roundabout’ and concentrated for a moment: the roundabout began to revolve — first clockwise, then counterclockwise.
But when I tried it, the utmost efforts of concentration failed to make it move.
I tried keeping it at the side of my typewriter and trying to “will” it to move whenever I felt relaxed.
And one day, as I stared at it and imagined it moving, it began to move.
It was no fluke; I found that I could make it stop, then revolve the other way.
The trick, obviously, was to use the imagination as well as will power.

In
Mysteries
I have described a similar experiment, suggested by the theatre historian John Kennedy Melling.
I was made to stand in the middle of the room with my eyes closed.
Four people stood around me with their hands raised to the level of my shoulders but not touching me and tried to ‘will’ me to sway in a pre-selected direction.
After a few minutes I began to feel dizzy, then found myself swaying forward — the direction they had chosen — as if an invisible force was pushing me.
The ‘trick’ worked with everyone in the group.
Yet when I tried demonstrating the same thing in front of television cameras at eleven o’clock in the morning it failed utterly.
At that hour and in that setting we were not in the correct mood of ‘in-betweenness’.

If these powers are so easy to demonstrate, why do we not bother to develop them?
The answer seems to be because they are irrelevant.
The snake needs its power to ‘hypnotize’ a rabbit.
But of what earthly use would it be to be able to make strangers wink at you?
Myers’ story of the man who tried to seduce a girl by means of ‘dream telepathy’ seems to underline the point: the man went to an enormous amount of trouble, all to no effect.
But in fact these objections are really an illustration of our human tendency to laziness and inertia.
If such powers exist they are of immense importance and deserve to be investigated and understood: their implications could be as momentous as those of splitting the atom.

The bewildering variety of evidence presented in this chapter all seems to point in the same direction: a human being is not merely a physical body that happens to be ‘alive’.
A more representative picture is that a human being is a presiding entity — let us call it a mind or spirit — whose basic function is the
control
of the physical body and the emotions.
This in turn seems to amount to an assertion that the mind is somehow independent of the body and might therefore be expected to
survive physical death.
But at this point a basic objection arises.
When I fall asleep I ‘disappear’ and have no more memories until I begin to recover consciousness.
In other words, when the body falls asleep
I
fall asleep.
This seems to suggest that ‘I’ am my body.

What seems equally puzzling is that in the majority of cases of ‘phantasms of the living’, the ‘projector’ has no idea of whether he has succeeded or not.
S.
H.
Beard had no idea of whether he had ‘appeared’ to Miss Verity and her sister yet his ‘apparition’ stroked the sister’s hair and took her hand.
Yeats ‘appeared’ to his student friend, and later reappeared in the middle of the night and gave him a message, while his body was sleeping, oblivious, in bed.
Hereward Carrington succeeded in ‘appearing’ to his woman friend yet had to ask her if the experiment had been successful.

Equally strange is an anecdote in Robert Monroe’s
Journeys Out of the Body
in which he described ‘projecting’ himself into the study of the paranormal investigator Andrija Puharich, with whom he was in correspondence.
He spoke to Puharich and says that he replied and apologized for neglecting their project.
Later Monroe discovered that his memories of Puharich’s study were accurate, yet Puharich had no memory of speaking to him.
This implies either that the ‘visit’ was basically a dream or that Monroe’s ‘astral body’ was able to communicate directly with Puharich’s ‘astral body’ without Puharich’s physical self being aware of it.

Other cases seem to suggest that human consciousness may be somehow ‘divided’.
D.
Scott Rogo has cited the case of a woman who was lying in bed, fully awake, when she saw a ‘roll of mist’ near the ceiling.

I could feel its presence and its motion as though I, Helen,
was
the mist, and the knowledge came with the words, ‘Oh, I am up on the ceiling.’
I was not asleep.
I was not dreaming.
I could see it there, though not with my bodily eyes … .
There was no fear, no questioning — simply a quiet acceptance of the fact that I was outside my body,
hovering over it.
There was a sensation of pushing against the ceiling, lightly, and of being stopped by it, as a toy balloon which has got away would be stopped … it ended when I was aware of being back in my body.
^*

It seems that the centre of this woman’s consciousness remained in her body, although she was also aware that ‘the mist’ was herself.
We should also note that she saw herself with ‘the eyes of the mind’ — as Goethe did — another shred of evidence to support Flammarion’s view that it is the mind that perceives ‘paranormally’, not the physical senses.

In that case we would presume that Yeats’s friend saw him with ‘the eyes of the mind’, and that when he spoke to Yeats his mind was communicating directly with a
subconscious
level of Yeats’s mind — or as Hudson would say, with Yeats’s subjective rather than his objective mind.

A glimmer of daylight begins to appear.
In an earlier chapter we tentatively identified Hudson’s ‘two minds’ with the two hemispheres of split-brain physiology.
(It should be emphasized that the identification itself is not important: what matters is the established fact that we have two ‘selves’, not whether they are really located in the left and right cerebral hemispheres.) We also concluded that in a certain sense, all human beings are ‘split-brain patients’ whose rational ego is out of touch with the intuitive non-ego.
On this level at least it is an established fact that human beings experience ‘divided consciousness’.
Rational consciousness is narrow and, as we realize in states of deep relaxation, only a fragment of our possible total consciousness.
Pierre Janet observed that the consciousness of hysterical patients became increasingly narrow until in some cases they actually experienced ‘tunnel vision’.
He also discovered that he could sit beside one of these hysterical patients and converse with both aspects of the patient’s mind.
If he said in a low voice, ‘Raise your left hand,’ the patient would obey.
If he then said, in his normal voice, ‘Why have you got your left hand
in the air?’
the patient would look up in amazement.
This phenomenon is no more mysterious than the fact that we can bruise ourselves when we are in a hurry and not even notice we have done it until later.
‘Divided consciousness’ is a matter of everyday experience.
And if we consider that the rational ego is the product of millions of years of evolution, we can begin to understand why it has lost contact with the instinctive self and why our ‘normal’ human consciousness is little better than tunnel vision.

Goethe’s vision of his own
doppelgänger
riding to meet him was an example of divided consciousness: his ‘other self’ apparently sent the image to comfort him in his misery.
Helen’s vision of herself floating near the ceiling as a roll of mist is another example.
One of the most amusing examples can be found in the autobiography of a remarkable English ‘psychic’, Rosalind Heywood.
She describes how one sleepless night she lay beside her husband and decided to wake him up to make love to her:

Before I could carry out this egoistic idea I did something very odd — I split in two.
One Me in its pink nightie continued to toss self-centredly against the embroidered pillows, but another, clad in a long, very white, hooded garment, was now standing, calm, immobile and impersonally outward-looking, at the foot of the bed.
This White Me seemed just as actual as Pink Me
and I was equally conscious in both places at the same time
[my italics].
I vividly remember myself as White Me looking down and observing the carved end of the bed in front of me and also thinking what a silly fool Pink Me looked, tossing in that petulant way against the pillows.
‘You’re behaving disgracefully,’ said White Me to Pink Me with cold contempt.
‘Don’t be so selfish, you know he’s dog-tired.’

Pink Me was a totally self-regarding little animal, entirely composed of ‘appetites’, and she cared not at all whether her unfortunate husband was tired or not.
‘I shall do what I like,’ she retorted furiously, ‘and you can’t stop me, you pious white prig!’
She was particularly furious
because she knew very well that White Me was the stronger and could stop her.

A moment or two later — I felt no transition — White Me was once more imprisoned with Pink Me in one body, and there they have dwelt as oil and water ever since.

A moment’s thought shows that this experience makes good sense.
We all change through a number of levels of maturity from the cradle to the grave.
‘I’ am not now the person I was at six or twelve or eighteen, yet in a sense I feel that I am more ‘myself’ now than I was at eighteen.
Past ‘selves’ have been discarded: yet at six and twelve and eighteen I was also quite convinced that the self I was aware of was the ‘real me’.
It seems logical to assume that even at fifty-six the self I am aware of is not the ‘real me’.
I am inclined to feel that if I could live to be two hundred and keep the full use of my faculties I might develop into something more like the ‘real me’, but the present ‘me’ is certainly not it.

What seemed to happen to Rosalind Heywood was that as a psychic, she was able to separate momentarily into ‘present me’ and ‘real me’.
Without the benefit of such an experience most of us assume that ‘present me’
is
‘real me’.
We should note that Rosalind Heywood’s Pink Me was ‘a totally self-regarding little animal entirely composed of appetites’ — that is of emotions.
She corresponds roughly to what in an earlier chapter we labelled ‘the emotional body’, while White Me was the mind or intellect.

There are other such experiences of ‘separation’ in the literature of paranormal research.
In
The Personality of Man
G.
N.
M.
Tyrrell cites a number of cases, including one of a soldier in the Great War who, in a state of intense physical stress, separated from his physical body.
He then watched his body go on talking to a companion who later said he had chatted with great wit and humour.
This seems to be quite clearly an example of the ‘two selves’.

Tyrrell also goes on to cite the case of Sir Auckland Geddes, already described (p.
268).
And in this case we
encounter another interesting clue to the nature of dual consciousness.
As his body became paralysed Geddes felt that his ‘consciousness was separating from another consciousness which was also me’.
One consciousness was attached to his body while the other was attached to his ego.
He also noted that his body consciousness showed ‘signs of being composite, that is, built up of “consciousness” from the head, the heart and the viscera’.
Then these various ‘organ consciousnesses’ became more individual as body-consciousness began to disintegrate and ego-consciousness found itself outside the body.
Ouspensky made the same observation during his states of ‘experimental mysticism’ when he noted that each organ of his body seemed to have its own individual consciousness, with which he could communicate.
We may also recall Jack Seale’s comment as the effects of his snake bite began to wear off: ‘normal consciousness returned
in layers’
[my italics].
His body had been totally paralysed: in fact it was ‘dead’.
It seems probable that the ‘layers’ corresponded to the various ‘organ consciousnesses’ described by Geddes and Ouspensky.