Beyond the Occult (5 page)

Beyond the Occult
is an attempt to draw together all the insights I have discussed here, and many more — particularly the insights of those who have had sudden ‘mystical’ experiences.
They all teach us the same thing: that our ‘ordinary’ consciousness of ourselves is superficial and deceptive.
We are all like Simone de Beauvoir, looking in the mirror and ‘feeling that we can never grasp ourselves as an entire object’.

Here is a typical example of one of these experiences.
A girl describes how, when she was sixteen, she set out to walk up a lane towards a wood.
‘I was not feeling particularly happy or particularly sad, just ordinary.’
As she stood in a cornfield, looking towards the wood, everything suddenly changed.

Everything surrounding me was this white, bright, sparkling light, like sun on frosty snow, like a million diamonds, and there was no cornfield, no trees, no sky, this light was everywhere … The feeling was indescribable, but I have never experienced anything in the years that followed that I can compare with that glorious moment; it was blissful, uplifting, I felt open-mouthed wonder.
Then the tops of the trees became visible once again, then a piece of sky, and gradually the light was no more, and the cornfield was spread before me.
I stood there for a long time, trying in vain for it to come back, and have tried many times.
I
only saw it once; but I know in my heart it is still there — and here — around us.

The girl — who describes this in a book called
Seeing the Invisible
(which consists of letters about mysticism, written to the Alister Hardy Foundation) — obviously had an experience which, in some ways, resembled that of Proust.
Something ‘triggered’ this marvellous perception of sparkling light.
And she remains convinced that ‘it is still there’ — that our everyday consciousness somehow filters it out, just as if we were wearing a pair of dark glasses.

It is, of course, deeply frustrating that we cannot learn how to contact these depths ‘below the iceberg’ at will.
Yet — as I have tried to show — it is not as difficult as it sounds.

The conclusions I have reached over the years are as follows.
The romantics of the 19th century had many of these ‘glimpses’, because they knew how to ‘relax’.
(The girl in the anecdote above does not say so, but it is clear that she was deeply relaxed.) But because the romantics were inclined to weakness — like Samuel Beckett —most of them could see no reason for getting out of bed, they failed to grasp the most important clue: that such experiences bring a feeling of strength, and that the best way to achieve them is certainly not to indulge in weakness and self-pity.
Abraham Maslow, who called such moments ‘peak experiences’, discovered that his ‘peakers’ were usually strong and healthy people who coped well with their lives.

In
Beyond the Occult
, I describe an interesting example of how I succeeded in achieving ‘higher consciousness’ for most of an afternoon in 1979.

It was the New Year, and I had gone to a remote farmhouse in Devon to give a lecture to a group of extramural students.
During that evening it began to snow, and by the following morning the snow was so thick that it would have been impossible to drive back home.
I was forced to stay there another night.
The following morning, the weather forecast announced more snow, and it was obvious that I might be unable to leave for a week.
I determined to try to escape, and a group of us began to clear the snow in the farmyard with shovels.
When the farmyard was clear, each of us
tried to drive our cars up the slope that led to the gate; mine was the only car whose tyres would grip the slippery surface.

There was still half a mile of snow-covered farm track between the farmyard and the main road.
I would drive a few yards, then get out and help to shovel snow.
At one point, I even risked driving straight across a field to avoid a long bend in the road.
And finally, after several hours of hard work, I walked back to the farmhouse to eat some lunch and collect my bags.
Then I walked back to the main gate, and began the long drive back home.

Yet even now it was impossible to relax my vigilance, because the narrow country roads were covered in snow, and it was impossible to see the ditch on either side.
It would have been easy to drive off the road and become stranded again, perhaps all night.
So I sat forward in my seat, peering out of the windscreen, and focusing all my concentration.

Several hours later, I arrived at the main road, where heavy traffic had turned the snow into muddy slush, and it was possible to relax and drive normally again.
And it was now that I realized that I was full of a sense of power and concentration.
Everything I looked at was obviously fascinating, and I had a sense of meanings stretching around me into the distance.
Everything I saw reminded of something else — for example, of Christmases in my childhood.
It was as if my normally narrow and limited consciousness had been widened and deepened by the concentration, until the whole world was seen to be fascinating.
It taught me that ‘higher consciousness’, ‘positive consciousness’, can be achieved by an act of focused concentration.

In
Beyond the Occult
I also quote the experiences of a writer called R H Ward, whose book about psychedelic drugs,
A Drug-Taker’s Notes
, is a modern classic.
Early in the book, Ward describes how he once had a remarkable experience under dental gas.
He writes: ‘I passed, after the first few inhalations of the gas, directly into a state of consciousness far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary consciousness.’
He had a sense of enormously extended vision, so that his mind was aware of all kinds of things that would normally have been beyond his natural range of awareness.
Like Robert Graves behind the cricket pavilion, he
seemed to understand everything.
And as he continued ‘rising’, he seemed to pass through a ‘region of ideas’.
‘All was idea, and form did not exist.’
And he adds: ‘It seems to me very interesting that one should thus, in a dentist’s chair and the twentieth century, receive practical confirmation of the theories of Plato.’
In short, Ward had seen the truth of Plato’s notion that the universe consists of two worlds: a world of becoming, and a world of true being.
He had also seen the falseness of Heraclitus’s belief that the only world is the world of becoming.

If we think once more of Dostoevsky in front of the firing squad, we can see that the expectation of death galvanized him to a new level of attention, in which he concentrated the mind as never before — and as I concentrated my mind as I drove through the snow.
It is this act of concentration — like pulling back a spring-loaded piston, or the string of a crossbow — that gives the mind the ability to become aware of the immense depths that lie ‘below the iceberg’.

My serious interest in the paranormal began twenty years ago, in the late 1960s, when an American publisher asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about ‘the occult’ — a subject that had achieved immense popularity ever since a book called
The Morning of the Magicians
by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier had sold over a million copies in France in 1960.
I accepted in a fairly light-hearted spirit.
Like most people, I had always enjoyed reading speculations about Atlantis, the Loch Ness monster and the ghosts of Borley Rectory, and had accumulated a fairly large library of second-hand books and cheap paperbacks on such matters.
But I had another reason for accepting.
For many years I had been possessed by a strong conviction, amounting to a certainty, that all human beings possess ‘hidden powers’.

Some of these powers came under the general heading of extra-sensory perception; I had suffered my wife’s birth pangs, and on one occasion experienced her toothache.
One close family friend had described how she found herself floating up above her body during a serious illness, while another had foreseen a traffic accident — a collision with another taxi — at least a minute before it happened.
But it was not this type of ‘hidden power’ that really interested me.
I was even more fascinated by those strange moments of pure joy in which we experience an almost god-like sensation of power or freedom.
The following, for example, is taken from a friend’s account of an ‘illumination’ that
happened when he was hitch-hiking around the world in 1964:

I had been through a great deal of emotional turmoil and privation during my travels and arrived at the port of Limassol [in Cyprus] with great relief at having left the scenes of my suffering behind me.
One evening I was sitting gazing vacantly at the sea in the afterglow of sunset, having just finished a meal in a little Greek eatery, feeling very tranquil and relaxed, when I began to feel a strange pressure in my brain.
It was as if some deliciously loving hand had slipped numbingly under my skull and was pressing another brain on top of mine.

I felt a thrilling liquidity of being and an indescribable sensation, as if the whole universe was being poured into me, or perhaps rather as if the whole universe was welling up out of me from some deep centre.
My ‘soul’ thrilled and swelled and my consciousness passed out across the ocean and the land in all directions, through the sky and out into space.
Within moments I was among the stars and planets and strange entities of space.
Somehow I was aware of great beings, millions of miles high, moving in space, through which the stars could be seen.
Wave after wave of revelation swept through my whole being, too fast for my normal mind to record other than the joy and wonder of it.
^*

I had never experienced anything as overwhelming as this.
But ever since childhood I had been prone to drift into those moods of intense happiness and affirmation that the psychologist Abraham Maslow calls peak experiences.
One of the most vivid had occurred when I was nineteen and was hitch-hiking my way across France to Strasbourg.
A lorry-driver had given me a lift to a little
routier
, and I had eaten a hot meal and drunk a glass of wine.
So far I had found it rather a strain being in a foreign country with very little money; but as I walked out of the
routier
and looked across
the rolling countryside to the mountains in the distance, I experienced a feeling of joy that was so complete that all the problems of my life vanished into insignificance.
It was like a
shift of viewpoint
, as if I had suddenly left my body and was looking down on my own life.
No doubt the wine had something to do with it, but that is beside the point, for what I experienced was not just a ‘feeling’ but a
seeing
.
Once again, as on so many other occasions, I could see that the real problem of human beings is that we live too
close up
to life, like a short-sighted painter who has to paint with his nose within an inch of the canvas, and that close-upness deprives us of meaning.
We accept this as inevitable — for, after all, we are men, not birds, and modern life requires constant attention to detail.
But the ‘moments of vision’ reveal that this assumption is a mistake.
Apparently we possess a faculty that can instantly ‘distance’ us from present reality — just as the short-sighted painter could, if he wanted, stand back from the canvas and put on a pair of strong glasses.
If we could learn to call on this faculty at will our lives would be transformed, for we waste 90 per cent of our time in coping mechanically with minor problems and vastly overestimating them.
And if many people could learn to do it our earth itself would be transformed, for most of the ugliness and evil of our lives is due to stress and ‘close-upness’.

Perhaps the most important aspect of these ‘moments of vision’ is that they suggest that there is a way of acquiring knowledge that is quite unlike the ordinary method of ‘learning from experience’.
When the visionary faculty is switched on the mind seems to be able to penetrate reality — rather in the manner of X-rays — and to grasp meanings that normally elude it.

In 1969 a man named Derek Gibson was travelling to work by motorcycle when he noticed that the sound of his engine had faded to a murmur:

Then everything suddenly changed.
I could clearly see everything as before with form and substance, but instead of looking
at
it all I was looking
into
everything.
I saw
beneath the bark of the trees and
through
the underlying trunks.
I was looking
into
the grass too, and all was magnified beyond measure.
To the extent that I could see moving microscopic organisms!
Then, not only was I seeing all this, but I was literally
inside
it all.
At the same time
as I was looking into this mass of greenery I was aware of every single blade of grass and fold of the trees as if each had been placed before me one at a time and entered into.

My world became a fairyland of vivid greens and browns, colours not seen so much as felt.
Instantly also my mind was not observing but was living what it was registering.
‘I’ did not exist.
Power and knowledge surged through my mind.
The words formed in me — I can remember clearly — ‘Now I know’, ‘There is
nothing
I could not answer.
I am a part of all this.’
^*

A similar revelation had come to the Protestant mystic Jacob Boehme in the year 1600.
This is how his biographer Bishop Hans Martensen describes it:

Sitting one day in his room, his eye fell upon a burnished pewter dish, which reflected the sunshine with such marvellous splendour that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the principles and deepest foundations of things.
He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order to banish it from his mind he went out into the green fields.
But here he noticed that he could gaze into the very heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and that actual nature harmonised with what he had inwardly seen.
^†

It seems obvious that Derek Gibson and Jacob Boehme had the same basic experience, and that therefore it is some perfectly normal faculty that might be activated at any time in any one of us.
It is as if the human race is colour-blind — as
most animals are — and a few men suddenly develop colour vision.

It also seems clear that there is a close link between these ‘mystical’ experiences and the faculty labelled extra-sensory perception.
For example, the Russian newspaper
Izvestia
reported in June 1987 the case of a woman named Yuliya Vorobyeva, 37, who was pronounced dead after receiving a 380-volt electric shock in March 1978.
She recovered after two days in the morgue, but was unable to sleep for the next six months.
Then she sank into a long sleep, and awoke to discover that she had acquired paranormal powers.
‘I went shopping one morning.
I got to the bus-stop and a woman was standing there.
Suddenly I was struck by horror — I thought I could see right through this woman like a television screen.’
When
Izvestia
’s reporter interviewed her she looked at his stomach and told him correctly what he had had for lunch.
Within seconds of meeting a doctor she was able to tell him that one ear was weaker than the other, and that the same was true of his eyes.

Significantly, Vorobyeva also states that she can see ultra-violet rays from the sun.
This could offer a clue to her ‘X-ray vision’.
The human eye is only able to see light of wavelengths of between 16 and 32-millionths of an inch (violet and red respectively).
Nature has apparently decided that it would serve no purpose for the eye to detect energy of wavelengths longer than 32 millionths (heat and microwaves), or shorter than 16 millionths (ultra-violet and X-rays).
But we might regard these limits as more or less arbitrary.
In 1828 a youth named Caspar Hauser walked into Nuremberg with bleeding feet, and it soon became clear that he had been kept captive in a darkened room since birth.
Physicians who examined him discovered that as a result he was able to read aloud from the Bible in a completely dark room and see the heat from a stove long before it had become red hot.
^*
Vorobyeva seems to have developed the power to ‘see’ energy from beyond the other end of the spectrum, including ultra-violet and X-rays; one result — according to
Izvestia
— is that she can see through the asphalt surface of a road to the soil underneath.

It is easy enough to understand why human beings do not possess X-ray eyes.
They would simply complicate our lives
without enhancing our power of survival
.
If we are to live with maximum efficiency our lives need to be as simple as possible.
If a human being could somehow get inside a frog’s head he would be astounded at the crude simplicity of its world.
Experiments have shown that the frog’s eyes pass on only very limited information to its brain — a simplified picture of its surroundings, moving shadows which might be enemies and edible objects like flies.
Everything else is ignored.
Humans are more complicated because they need to be in order to survive; but anything that has no survival value is filtered out by the senses.

There is strong evidence that we have also ‘filtered out’ various powers that our ancestors once possessed.
The tiger-hunter Jim Corbett, author of
Man Eaters of Kumaon
, explains how he has developed a faculty which he calls ‘jungle sensitiveness’, which has often saved his life when a tiger has been lying in wait.
But such a faculty would obviously be useless to a stockbroker.
There is also much evidence — which we shall consider later — that animals and primitive peoples possess far more highly developed powers of extra-sensory perception than civilized human beings.
We do not need them; therefore we have discarded them — or rather put them into cold storage, to be recovered as needed (as, for example, by Jim Corbett when stalking tigers).
Caspar Hauser and Yuliya Vorobyeva seem to suggest that our brains are ‘wired up’ to perceive X-rays and infra-red rays but that we only rarely have to call these powers into operation.

But now we come to the most baffling part.
It is easy enough to see why man has discarded ‘jungle sensitiveness’ and other simple forms of ESP: they are no longer essential to his survival.
But ‘moments of vision’ like those experienced by Muz Murray and Derek Gibson are an entirely different matter.
Powers like these cannot have been essential to our survival at
any
point in our evolution.
In fact they seem to be a contradiction of the theory of evolution.
If you
think of the evolution of tiny micro-organisms into amoebas, then into fishes, then into land animals, you can see that there was
no
point in our evolution when we needed the power to see into the heart of trees or to float out among the stars and planets in space.
And the same applies to many more mundane faculties.
Children known as calculating prodigies can perform incredible feats with numbers.
A five-year-old boy named Benjamin Blyth asked his father what time it was and was told, ‘Half past four’.
A few minutes later the child said, ‘In that case I have been alive …’ and named the exact number of seconds since his birth: about 158 million.
His father worked it out on a sheet of paper and said, ‘No, you were wrong by 172,800 seconds.”No I wasn’t,’ said the child, ‘you forgot the two leap years.’