Beyond the Occult (46 page)

The worst times were at night.
If I began to think about that unpleasant pounding of the heart it immediately began — as we itch if we think about itching.
This in turn would induce a sudden flash of fear, as if the solid ground had turned into shifting sands.
Then it was necessary to distract myself — to turn over, scratch my nose, anything.
The fear would rise in me like milk boiling over, increasing by a process of negative feedback.
Suddenly the normal security I took for granted would seem an illusion.
Yet even on the second night I discovered the way to master the panic.
I simply had to wake myself up fully — if necessary get out of bed and go to the lavatory.
As soon as I was wide awake it was as if some more sensible level of my being had become aware of what was happening.
Like a schoolmistress entering a room of squabbling children it clapped its hands and there was instant silence.

But what precisely
was
this ‘schoolmistress effect’?
It was as if some
higher
level of my personality had stirred into activity — the equivalent of Clara’s B-4 and Christine’s Jane.
And so my experience of panic attacks seemed to generate an insight into the mechanism of multiple personality.

The trouble with these attacks was that they wasted so
much vitality; I felt permanently tired.
Nevertheless I pressed on with my work for
Crimes and Punishment
, realizing that work was the best form of therapy.
And one day, quite suddenly, I grasped the basic issue.
The experience sounds utterly trivial yet it enabled me to begin to win the battle against the panic.
It was five o’clock one afternoon and I had to take some letters to the post-box at the end of our lane.
It seemed an utterly pointless, boring activity, but I knew it had to be done so I clambered into the Land-rover and drove down the lane.
At the end of the lane I stopped the Land-rover before venturing out on to the wider road, and as I did so a car shot past so close that it almost removed my bumper.
It made me realize that if I had been slightly more bored and indifferent I might have braked a split second later and caused a collision.

Now the truth is that it was not a
very
close thing.
Yet it was enough to bring a flash of insight.
My problem was simply that I had become self-divided.
My sensible rational self could see that I had to do a great many necessary tasks — like taking letters to the post.
My emotional self heaved a groan of boredom and dug in its heels.
So my rational self had to drag it along behind like some kind of anchor, and every task cost twice as much effort.
What made it worse was that
I
sympathized with its reluctance, for I agreed that going to the post-box was just a dreary chore.
And that, of course, was the problem.
The near accident made my rational self realize that this boredom could be an expensive self-indulgence.
If there
had
been a collision it would have involved me in a hundred times as much effort as going to the post.
And as soon as I used my imagination to conjure up the endless inconvenience of exchanging addresses and insurance companies and getting the Land-rover repaired I instantly felt a surge of relief that it hadn’t happened.
And my rational self turned on my emotional self and said irritably, ‘You see, you bloody idiot, the problems you cause by dragging your heels all the time?’
And the emotional self dropped its eyes and looked abashed.
And for the rest of that day it behaved extremely well.

From then on the attacks began to fade — although it was several months before they vanished entirely.
In retrospect I realized that what had seemed an entirely pointless and horrible episode had been, in fact, one of the most valuable experiences of my life.
To begin with the long struggle to control the anxiety meant a far greater command over my spontaneous reactions.
If someone dropped a plate on the floor, I didn’t even start; if someone bored me, my eyes no longer betrayed my feelings.
But what was far more important was the insight into the stupid behaviour of the emotional self.
This is not confined to panic attacks and states of nervous depression.
Since we all spend our time doing a great many things that we do not really want to do, we all waste an immense amount of energy overcoming the ‘reluctance’ of the emotional self.
Every time the sun goes behind a cloud the emotional self heaves a groan of discouragement and the heart sinks.
And this is why, as William James said, ‘most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding.’
For we allow ourselves to be
taken in
whenever the emotional self sighs with boredom and says, ‘Is it really worth the effort?’

This also explains, of course, Maslow’s observation that healthy people are always having peak experiences.
Because they are highly motivated they put far more effort into living and receive a far richer return than people who have to drag the emotional body behind them like a badly-behaved child.
They can
see
the fallacy behind the feeling that things are ‘just not worth the effort’.
They go through life in a state of optimistic expectation.
When the sun comes out it merely confirms their feeling that life means well by us; but when the sun goes in they accept it as a part of life’s interesting variety.

Obviously this is what is fundamentally wrong with the human race.
Psychiatrically speaking we are all neurotics, if by neurotic we mean that we ‘live far within our limits’ — that we all possess powers which we habitually fail to use.
Is it
surprising that most of us fail to catch a glimpse of our ‘hidden powers’ when we are not even capable of making proper use of our ordinary vital energies?

It seemed to me fairly clear that the first step towards reactivating these ‘hidden powers’ would be to make a determined effort to overrule the habitual ‘reluctance’ of the emotional self and to maintain a higher level of optimism.
And in fact this insight had often been confirmed by experience.
I had frequently noted that I became accident-prone when I had allowed myself to become tired and discouraged, and that some instinct for avoiding accidents seemed to be aroused when I was feeling fully alive.
I remember a Monday morning when I had driven into our local fishing village, Mevagissey, to collect the cleaning lady from the bus.
My mind was seething with ideas which I intended to get on to paper the moment I arrived home.
The end of our narrow private lane joins the public road at an acute angle, and it is necessary to slow down and change into a lower gear to negotiate it, then to accelerate up a slope.
As I was about to do this the thought entered my head, ‘What if the post-van is coming down the lane?’
In all our years in the house I had never met the post-van in the lane.
Nevertheless I slowed down as I turned the corner.
And the post-van stopped within an inch of my bumper.

In California I had a chance to test the hypothesis again.
I had spent the morning lecturing at a university in Los Angeles and had agreed to meet my wife and children in Disneyland.
I had forgotten just how big the place is.
When I arrived around midday the crowds were enormous, and my heart sank.
But I had just given a good lecture and was feeling confident and optimistic.
So I deliberately relaxed and told my feet to go and find them.
They took me a hundred yards down the road and turned left.
My family were eating at a Mexican food stall a few yards away.
Again I felt that success was due to my state of mind — a certain relaxed optimism.

In
Mysteries
I tried to apply these lessons in my theory of the ‘ladder of selves’.
Physically speaking we all evolve
through a number of stages between birth and death — Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man’.
But it also seems obvious that we evolve through a series of personalities.
How often have we met a child after several years and been amazed that he no longer seems to be the same person?
But our personal evolution is not as inevitable as our physical growth: it is the result of effort.
If life becomes too difficult we cease to make efforts and cease to evolve.
This, it seemed to me, is what had happened to Clara Fowler and Doris Fischer and Christine Sizemore.
They remained stuck on a fairly low rung of the ‘ladder of selves’ and the ‘other side’ had revolted and tried to seize control.

It was a good theory, and I still feel that it is fundamentally correct — that our personal evolution is a matter of effort and optimism.
But it still left a number of basic problems unexplained.
Why are the personalities often so completely different?
Flora Rheta Schreiber’s
Sybil
is about another sexually-abused child who later split into fourteen different personalities, including a writer, a painter, a musician, a builder and a carpenter.
Some liked one another, others loathed each other: they behaved exactly like a real family.
The oddest thing of all is that medical tests showed they all had different brain patterns.
Yet brain patterns are as individual as fingerprints.

An even stranger case came to light in 1977.
A young man named Billy Milligan was arrested for rape.
Psychiatric examination revealed that Billy was a multiple personality — again as a result of childhood abuse — who was a compound of twenty-three different people.
One of these was a Yugoslav who spoke Serbo-Croat, a language Milligan had never learned.
The personality who had committed the rapes was actually a lesbian.
Daniel Keyes’ book
The Minds of Billy Milligan
finally made it quite clear that my theory of the ‘ladder of selves’ simply failed to cover the highly complex facts.

But what was the alternative?
It was not until I had finished
Mysteries
that I came upon the strangest — and apparently most absurd — theory that I had encountered so
far.
It was in a book with the unpromising title
The Secret Science Behind Miracles
by Max Freedom Long.
But it soon became clear that Long was a careful investigator and that the book was based upon long experience of its subject — the Kahunas, or magician-priests, of Hawaii.
Long came to Hawaii as a young schoolteacher in 1917 and soon became intrigued by references to the old Huna religion, which had been displaced and outlawed by Christianity.
He was particularly fascinated by a sinister practice known as the death prayer.
When a man had been cursed by the death prayer he began to experience a prickling sensation in his feet, which gradually became numb: the numbness then spread upward until he died.
It sounded absurd, but when Long checked at the Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu he found that there were usually one or more victims per year and that they all died, in spite of medical aid.
He also heard an apparently absurd story about a Christian minister who learned the death prayer and used it to kill a Kahuna magician.
Long went to the trouble of investigating the story and was able to read the minister’s diary, in which he described how he had finally decided to take drastic action as members of his flock died off one by one.

Little by little Long succeeded in compiling a dictionary of Huna words and deduced from them something of the philosophy of the Kahunas.
Their most basic belief, apparently, was that man does not have one soul, but three.
One of them is called the low self, dwells in the solar plexus and corresponds roughly to what Freud called the unconscious.
Next there is the middle self, which is our normal human consciousness.
Lastly there is a high self which is as much
above
everyday consciousness as the low self is below it.
This is the self which is capable of clairvoyance and precognition.

I recognized immediately that although this sounded absurdly complicated, it corresponded closely to some of my own conclusions about paranormal powers.
The distinction between the low self and the
middle self sounds very much like the distinction between Hudson’s subjective and objective minds or the left and right cerebral hemispheres — the middle self certainly corresponded precisely to our left-brain personality.
As to the high self, it seemed to fit my hypothesis about a part of us that has direct access to ‘the information universe’.
Frederick Myers had called it ‘the subliminal mind’, and in his introduction to Myers’ classic
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
Aldous Huxley had explained it by describing it as a kind of ‘attic’ of human consciousness, as far above the everyday living quarters of the personality as the Freudian basement is below it.
So Long’s threefold division of the human mind struck me as obviously plausible.
I was willing to pay respectful attention to anything else he had to say.