Beyond the Occult (44 page)

It seems, then, that there is an overwhelming body of evidence for ‘divided consciousness’ or the existence of ‘two selves’.
And this to a large extent undermines the objection that my everyday self has no experience of being independent of the body.
If the consciousness of ‘real me’ is inextricably blended with the various ‘consciousnesses’ of the body and emotions, that is exactly what we would expect.
It is admittedly difficult for me, as I sit in my chair, to grasp that the ‘me’ who looks out of my eyes is not the ‘real me’.
But a little reflection shows me that I am mistaken.
I experience a certain amount of eyestrain, the result of several hours’ typing, and some physical fatigue, and I look forward to taking my dogs for a walk in the woods and picking blackberries: my present consciousness is narrow and stressful and I am aware that my tiredness is turning me into a kind of robot.
This is not
real
consciousness, and the ‘me’ I am aware of is not the real me.

On the other hand the evidence presented in this chapter
points to some strange conclusions.
We talk about ‘my consciousness’ as if it were a unity, but if Geddes is correct it may actually be a whole collection of ‘consciousnesses’ including those from the head, the heart and the viscera.
And ‘my’ consciousness may be capable of being present in more than one place at once — as Rosalind Heywood discovered.
And what of those curious experiences of the ‘double’ described by Yeats and Beard and Carrington?
Yeats’s double talked to his student friend while Yeats, several hundred miles away, was unaware of what was going on.
But unless the double was some kind of psychic imposter we must presume that
some
level of Yeats’s mind knew what was going on and that it was only ‘everyday Yeats’, like Janet’s hysterical patient, who was unaware.

In his last poem, ‘Under Ben Bulben’, Yeats wrote about how ‘when a man is fighting mad …’

Something drops from eyes long blind,

He completes his partial mind …

We all know that sensation — the ‘holiday feeling’ — when ‘normal consciousness’ seems to expand to something far wider and richer, and our delight in the experience is undermined by a troubled recognition that we ought to be able to
grasp
this once and for all, and never again allow ourselves to be trapped in the poverty-stricken consciousness of everyday life.
It is difficult to know exactly what we can do about it — except remain persistent and keep trying.
But these insights at least make us aware that everyday consciousness is not ‘real consciousness’.
The jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow said about the first time he smoked opium, ‘Lights came on all over my body where I didn’t even know I had sockets.’
And the same thing happens to consciousness in moods of optimism and intensity, when ‘lights’ come on in distant reaches whose existence we had not even suspected.
If Yeats had been in this state when he ‘appeared’ to his fellow student he might well have been aware of the conversation.
And this in turn suggests that the part of us that can gain
access to the ‘information universe’ of psychometry or precognition is some aspect of us which is concealed from everyday consciousness.

It should be possible to see that this theory covers every subject that has so far been discussed in this book: mystical experience, Faculty X, psychometry, ‘time-slips’, dowsing, precognitions (admittedly the most difficult topic considered), synchronicities, astral projection,
doppelgängers
and so on.
It seems in fact to be the comprehensive theory of the paranormal that was so obviously lacking in the earlier researchers like Myers and Flammarion (although Myers made a very creditable attempt in
Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death
).
This was my own view, as I saw it beginning to emerge in books like
Mysteries, Frankenstein’s Castle
and
Access to Inner Worlds:
that the simple, straightforward answer to all the mysteries of the paranormal was the ‘hidden power’ inside all of us.
Civilization has in effect turned us all into ‘hysterical patients’ whose left hand is not aware what the right is doing and whose brains are equally divided.
The recognition that we actually possess these powers is the first step towards developing them.

Subject to certain qualifications, I still believe this to be true.
But the qualifications — as will be seen — have turned out to be far more important than I originally expected.

^*
Robert Cracknell,
Clues to the Unknown
.

^*
Both cases are described more fully in
Mysteries
, pp.
486–8.

^*
Quoted in
The Unfathomed Mind: A Handbook of Unusual Mental Phenomena
compiled by William D.
Corliss, p.
571.

I have so far been able to present this material in a fairly impersonal and logical manner.
Now it becomes necessary to speak again of my own involvement in the ‘search for evidence’.

In the opening chapter I explained how my interest in the ‘occult’ was a natural development of an interest in mystical experience.
And the interest in mystical experience was in turn a development of my interest in those curious states of happiness and affirmation that Chesterton called ‘absurd good news’.
In this state one thing is fundamentally clear: that our ordinary consciousness is bedevilled with certain errors or fallacies that have the effect of making life seem dull and ordinary.
The demon Screwtape told his nephew Wormwood, ‘Thanks to processes which we set at work in human beings centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes.
Keep pressing home on him the
ordinariness
of things … .’

Now this inability to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is at hand is, quite simply, a form of hypnosis.
‘Familiarity’ makes a few mysterious passes in front of our eyes: our minds go blank, and the world is suddenly ‘ordinary’ and rather boring.
And our response to ordinariness is to sink into a state of passivity: it seems self-evident that it is not worth making any effort.
Most people spend their lives in the ‘hypnotized’ state, and die wondering why they were born in the first place.

This explains why the romantics of the nineteenth century
made such frenzied efforts to escape from ‘ordinariness’, even if it meant becoming alcoholics, drug addicts or suicides.
Rimbaud wrote, ‘I say that one must be a
visionary
— that one must make oneself a VISIONARY.’
And he spoke of a ‘reasoned derangement of the senses’: ‘I accustomed myself to simple hallucination: I really saw a mosque in place of a factory, angels practising on drums, coaches on the roads of the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake … .’

But the real aim of all the romantics was to achieve those moments when consciousness seems to heave a sigh of relief and expand into a marvellous sense of the sheer richness of things: when it becomes aware — as Hesse’s Steppenwolf puts it — of ‘Mozart and the stars’.
In this sense we are all romantics: the romantic impulse is one of the most fundamental drives of the human race.
We make the mistake of thinking that we enjoy holidays because they allow us to recuperate, to recruit our energies.
This is untrue.
We enjoy holidays because they
fill us with courage
.
They remind us that the world is a richer and more interesting place than we had come to believe, and that the stakes we are playing for are unbelievably high.
Ordinary consciousness tends towards depression, which is another name for discouragement.
By making us again aware of the sheer variety of the world, holidays fill us with new courage and determination.
Whenever we experience this feeling it suddenly seems that it would be absurdly easy to use it to change our lives.
It all seems so obvious that it is difficult to see where the problem lies.
All we have to do is to
remember
this insight, to refuse to be taken in by the ordinariness which we now know to be a deception.
Yet somehow this simple lesson is appallingly difficult to put into practice.
A single snap of the hypnotist’s fingers and we are back in a state of yawning passivity.

This was the problem at the heart of my first book
The Outsider
.
People who have glimpsed this freedom are no longer contented to accept ‘ordinariness’ as inevitable.
They struggle and worry and fret, and seem permanently dissatisfied with their achievement.
Their friends and relatives find it hard to understand what is the matter with them; they seem
determined to make themselves unhappy and uncomfortable.
I pointed out that in earlier centuries such people were tolerated as religious ‘Outsiders’.
St Augustine’s
Confessions
and the Journals of George Fox describe the same deep self-dissatisfaction that we find in more recent ‘Outsider’ documents like Amiel’s Journals and the novels of Dostoevsky.
It also seemed clear that if some of the romantic ‘Outsiders’ had spent less time indulging in self-pity and more in trying to achieve some kind of self-discipline, they would have stood a better chance of surviving.

By the time I wrote
Religion and the Rebel
I had discovered the work of Arnold Toynbee, and it reinforced my conviction.
Toynbee called the ‘Outsiders’ ‘the creative minority’ and spoke of a mechanism of ‘withdrawal and return’.
The religious ‘Outsider’ used to retreat into the wilderness and emerge finally with his own ‘message from God’.
Such men not only made an impact on their society; they often changed its entire direction.
The gradual erosion of religious faith — due to the rise of science — meant that modern ‘Outsiders’ became more than ever a prey to ‘ordinariness’ and the lack of self-confidence it entails.
Toynbee, who was deeply religious, hoped for some kind of great revival of Christianity; although he was realistic enough to recognize that it was unlikely.
He concluded that all he could do was to ‘cling and wait’.

To me, it seemed self-evident that some religious revival was not the answer.
For better or for worse (probably for better) people have outgrown Christianity, and the movement of history suggests that
the same will happen to the other major religions.
But that is no cause for pessimism.
The essence of religion has always been the feeling of ‘absurd good news’, not the dogmas of the theologians, so the essence of religion remains unaffected.
The problem is how to grasp this essence.
Besides, the decline of religion was not due to some demonic conspiracy but to the fact that human beings were learning to think for themselves.
It would obviously be no solution to try to put back the clock.
In which case the only clear alternative is to go forward in the same direction.
We have to learn to think more, not less.

The next major clue came in 1959 when I received a letter from the American psychologist Abraham Maslow.
Maslow felt that Freud and his followers had ‘sold human nature short’, and his own investigations had led him to conclude that there were ‘higher ceilings of human nature’.
His major key was the concept of the ‘peak experience’, by which he meant precisely what Chesterton meant by the feeling of ‘absurd good news’.
Peak experiences, he insisted, were not ‘mystical’; they were simply a kind of bubbling-over of sheer vital energy and optimism and a recognition that the world is not ‘ordinary’ but exciting and strange.
I was much impressed by his example — cited earlier — of the marine who had come back from years in the Pacific, and who had a peak experience when he saw a nurse back at base.
He said that it suddenly struck him with tremendous force that
women are different from men
.
He said that men take women for granted, as human beings like themselves, whereas the truth is that they are almost mystically different.

Maslow made the important observation that
all
healthy people seem to have peak experiences with a fair degree of frequency.
This deepened in me the insight that the main trouble with ‘Outsiders’ is that they tend to shrink from their own experience and to accept it half-heartedly.
If we could grasp the lesson of the ‘holiday experience’ we would get on with what we have to do with cheerful determination, which would have the effect of reinforcing the lesson of the ‘holiday experience’ and making it still easier to put into practice.
Maslow made an important observation that confirmed this: as his students talked among themselves about peak experiences, they began having more of them.
I noted the lesson: the best way to induce peak experiences is to recall past peak experiences and to try to recreate their very essence, the feeling of delight and courage.

It can be seen that Yeats was talking about a peak experience when he wrote:

Something drops from eyes long blind,

He completes his partial mind,

For an instant stands at ease,

Laughs aloud, his heart at peace… .

The peak experience is essentially an experience of ‘completing the partial mind’.

I have described in the opening chapter how as I came to research
The Occult
I became increasingly convinced of the reality of the ‘paranormal’.
I defy anyone to make a serious study of the subject and not to end up totally convinced.
Scepticism is only another name for a certain lazy-minded dogmatism.
And as I wrote the book it became quite clear that ‘occultism’ is simply a recognition of man’s ‘hidden powers’ — that is, a recognition that everyday consciousness is merely the ‘partial mind’.
At the same time I realized what had always repelled me about spiritualism and ‘occultism’.
The ‘believers’ treat them as a religion, something towards which they direct their faith — generally another name for credulity.
Their attitude is essentially passive.
The result is that their credulity is reinforced, and they are further than ever from thinking for themselves.
What attracted me about ‘occultism’ was the same healthy element that lies at the heart of religion — that obsession with the mystery of human existence that created saints and mystics rather than ‘true believers’.

The next major clue came from that curious byway of psychology, the study of multiple personality.
It had fascinated me ever since I came across the Christine Beauchamp case in a popular book by Dingwall.
In 1898 Dr Morton Prince of Boston began treating a girl called Clara Fowler for nervous exhaustion.
One day he decided to hypnotize her and to his astonishment, a completely different personality emerged under hypnosis, a bright, mischievous child who called herself Sally.
She insisted that she was not Clara (or Christine, as Prince preferred to call her in his book about the case) although they shared the same body.
Sally was tough and healthy and found it hard to understand why Clara was
so feeble.
Eventually a third personality appeared under hypnosis, a self-possessed, schoolmistressy girl whom Prince called B-4.
It gradually transpired that B-4 had first made her appearance when Clara had a bad shock.

She was a nurse at the time, and a friend of her father’s named William Jones had come to call on her at the hospital.
Finding a ladder outside, he had put it against Clara’s window and climbed up.
The sight of Jones’ face peering through her first-floor window had given Clara such a bad shock that she went into a nervous decline, and B-4 suddenly appeared and took over.

Sally and B-4 loathed one another, and Clara herself had no suspicion of the existence of either.
Unfortunately Prince had let a genie out of the bottle when he ‘released’ Sally.
Being stronger than Clara, Sally could push her out of the body — out of the driving seat, so to speak — and do as she liked.
She loved playing practical jokes on the timid Clara, such as taking a long walk in the country then vacating the body and leaving poor Clara to walk back home.
On one occasion Sally even went off to another town and got a job as a waitress.
During these pranks Clara suffered total amnesia, and would wake up to find herself having to cope with some embarrassing situation.

Prince achieved some kind of success by finally integrating Clara and B-4 under hypnosis.
Yet, as he admitted years later, he never wholly succeeded in getting rid of Sally.

A case like this seems to defy all common sense: it certainly seems to defy all our comfortable, logical notions about what it means to be an ‘individual’.
Of course it is not difficult to understand the vague outline of Clara’s illness.
She was always a timid sort of person.
When she was thirteen her mother had died an unpleasant death and her father, an irresponsible alcoholic, was largely to blame.
An experience like that is enough to make anyone decide that they do not want to face life.
It is conceivable that Clara left home because her father was sexually interested in her: she never said as much, but we know that the majority of contemporary cases of multiple personality are caused by
sexual abuse in childhood.
(A recent study of multiple personality by the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, directed by Brendan O’Regan, concluded that
all
such cases have their origin in childhood sexual abuse.)

Clara Fowler placed all her affection and trust in the family friend William Jones, who seemed to be everything that her father was not.
But he also seems to have conceived designs on her, and when he appeared outside her window — somewhat the worse for drink — and later made suggestive remarks, her courage collapsed completely and B-4 suddenly appeared and took over.
But why should another ‘person’ take over?
Most people who allow themselves to become defeated by some traumatic experience simply have a nervous breakdown.
Does the answer lie in the observation that we seem to become different persons at different stages in our lives?
Is it possible that Clara
was
Sally when she was six years old, but that she then became nervous and shy so that Sally remained suppressed?