Beyond the Occult (6 page)

The obvious explanation for this is that our brains are ‘wired up’ to calculate numbers, and some brains are better at it than others — after all, an ordinary abacus could calculate in billions and trillions if necessary.
But that explanation simply fails to fit the facts.
For example, there are certain numbers known as primes — numbers that cannot be exactly divided by any other, like 5, 7, 13, 17 and so on.
But there is no simple method of finding out whether a number is a prime except by dividing all the smaller numbers into it.
So if a number is extremely large there is no quick way of discovering whether it is a prime or not; even a modern computer would have to do it ‘the hard way’.
Yet there are certain calculating prodigies who can do it almost instantaneously.
The Canadian ‘lightning calculator’ Zerah Colburn was asked whether a certain ten-digit number was a prime or not; after a moment’s thought he replied that it was not, because it could be divided by 641.
Yet what he did was a logical impossibility.
The psychiatrist Oliver Sacks has described a pair of subnormal twins in a New York mental hospital who amuse themselves by swapping
twenty-four-figure
primes — an even greater impossibility.
The brain cannot be ‘wired’ to perform such feats instantaneously.
The twins must be arriving at their results by some non-logical process akin to mystical vision.
(Derek Gibson experienced the feeling: ‘There is nothing I could not answer… .’)

Once again we confront the question, how
could
such powers have developed in the normal course of our evolution?
Man began as an amoeba, then turned into a fish, then became an amphibian, then developed into a kind of rodent, then into an ape, then into a human being.
There is no room in this process for a power of recognizing twenty-four-digit primes.
It is easy enough, of course, to explain how we might develop such a power at some
future
date.
After all the very word evolution implies an extension of our powers.
What is so baffling is that we already appear to possess this power in a latent form.
G.
K.
Chesterton would probably say that it proves that man is a fallen angel rather than a ‘risen ape’.
Whatever the explanation, it seems to fly in the face of common sense.

Yet if we are willing to use a little imagination we can begin to see at least the outline of an answer.
As you are reading these words, try to recall what it was like when you first learned to read — the misery, the exasperation, of trying to understand row upon row of squiggly little symbols; recall how you occasionally felt as though you were suffocating and your head was bursting.
Yet now you read almost as naturally as you breathe.
That is because you have disciplined all those bursting energies, put them into harness and tamed them as a rider tames a wild colt.
Now the discipline has become quite unconscious and you do not even notice it — unless the print is too small or you are feeling tired and impatient.
For thousands of years civilized man has been imposing a similar discipline on his senses, so that he no longer notices that he is wearing a saddle and harness.

In effect he has learned to look at the world through a kind of microscope which shows him the immediate present with extreme clarity, so he can handle it with remarkable precision.
But since his attention only has room for a small
number of things at a time, he is obliged to ‘forget’ 99 per cent of his experience, or at least place it in a kind of cold storage.
(Sherlock Holmes told Watson that he couldn’t care less whether the earth went round the sun or vice versa; he said his mind was like an attic that could only store a certain number of facts, so if he admitted some new piece of information he had to throw out an old one.) Animals almost certainly have a far wider and more interesting form of consciousness — probably something closer to the consciousness of a slightly drunken man for whom the whole world is a marvellously warm and glowing place.

The most obvious characteristic of mystical experience is that it happens to
relaxed
people.
Muz Murray was relaxing outside a Cypriot café, Boehme was staring at a pewter dish, Derek Gibson was following a familiar route in the early morning.
In this state it seems that the harness often slips off and allows us to experience something closer to the free, untrammelled consciousness of the animal or child with its ‘glory and freshness’.
So instead of being aware of just one or two things, we glimpse the whole panorama of existence.
The mentally subnormal twins who can swap twenty-four-digit primes must somehow
hover
above the whole ‘number field’, like birds looking down on the landscape and seeing hills and lakes and villages all at a glance.

In short, our chief limitation lies in our
assumption
that our narrow, tightly-harnessed consciousness is normal and natural, whereas it is in fact highly abnormal and highly unnatural.
The basic problem of human beings is simply an inability to ‘get it all together’.
We possess all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle but it is so huge that we never see it as a whole.
The moment we learn to
grasp
this fact we have also begun to learn how to achieve the ‘moments of vision’
at will
, and how to gain control of our ‘hidden powers’.

When I began systematic research for my book
The Occult
, I must admit that my attitude was basically sceptical.
As a child I had been fascinated by spiritualism, ghosts and magic, and had devoured all the books in the ‘occult’ section of our local library, from poltergeists to voodoo.
But around the age of eleven my mother presented me with a chemistry set and an uncle produced a book on astronomy, and I fell under the spell of the potent magic of science.
Suddenly the ‘occult’ seemed absurd and slightly disgusting.
Later on, when I
decided I wanted to become a writer rather than a scientist, my attitude became less censorious and I began to experience a certain nostalgia for the interests of childhood — such as murder and the supernatural.
At twenty-four, as the author of a successful book, I once again began to accumulate a library on the ‘supernatural’.
But I was inclined to treat it as light summer reading.
I had no doubt whatever that most ‘occultists’ are indulging in pure wishful thinking.

As I began to study the subject systematically this attitude soon changed.
I was struck first of all by the impressive consistency of reports of telepathy, ‘second sight’ and precognition.
If they were really lies or delusions they ought to possess as much variety as a shelf-full of novels: in fact, they all sounded remarkably similar.
The same was true of reports of magic and contact with ‘spirits’: you would expect to find very little in common between the beliefs of an African witch-doctor, an Eskimo shaman and a Siberian medicine-man.
In fact they are practically interchangeable.
Invented ghost stories — by writers like Dickens or M.
R.
James — are full of a most weird diversity of occurrences; real ghost stories all sound alike.
It was soon obvious to me that I was not studying a subject full of imaginative inventions or impostures, but a fairly narrow range of facts, just as in astronomy or cybernetics.
As a result I soon became convinced that the evidence for poltergeists, premonitions and second sight is as sound as the evidence for atoms and electrons.
I wrote in
The Occult
, ‘I sympathize with the philosophers and scientists who regard it as emotional nonsense, because I am temperamentally on their side: but I think they are closing their eyes to evidence that would convince them if it concerned the mating habits of albino rats or the behaviour of alpha particles.’

For someone trained as a scientist, the domain of the paranormal was like travelling to a foreign country.
I found myself in a strange and exciting world that was also reassuringly consistent.
It could be explored exactly like a foreign country, by wandering around and studying what was to be seen.
Admittedly parts of it had to be treated with
suspicion, like any modern tourist trap.
But in deciding what to believe and what not to believe I applied exactly the same standards that I would apply in science.
If something had been observed independently by a number of trustworthy observers, then I was inclined to accept it as fact.
But some of these facts certainly left me feeling baffled.
For example, a German doctor named Justinus Kerner spent three years studying a ‘psychic’ lady called Friederike Hauffe and had no doubt whatever that she could read a book that was placed, face downwards, against her bare stomach.
By any normal scientific standards that sounds absurd; yet it was observed many times by nineteenth-century investigators.
Professor Cesare Lombroso, a confirmed scientific ‘materialist’, studied a girl who could see through her ear and smell through her chin.
The possibility that she was cheating vanished entirely when her sense of smell transferred itself to the back of her foot: if pleasant smells were brought close to her heel, she smiled, while unpleasant ones made her react with disgust.
Lombroso also came across the case of a girl who developed X-ray vision and asserted that she could see worms in her intestines — she counted thirty-three.
Under treatment she excreted exactly thirty-three worms.

Another curious phenomenon that I came to accept as a fact was called ‘community of sensation’.
When Alfred Russel Wallace — co-founder of the theory of evolution — was a young teacher he became interested in hypnotism and experimented with a number of his pupils.
When one of these pupils was in a trance he could share Wallace’s sense of taste and smell.
When Wallace sucked a lump of sugar, the boy went through sucking motions; when Wallace tasted salt, he grimaced; when Wallace stuck a pin in himself, the boy jumped and rubbed the appropriate part of his body.
Years later, when Wallace was chairman of a scientific committee, he received a paper from a young Irish professor named William Barrett who had taken part in similar experiments and seen a young girl distinguish between various substances that the hypnotist put into his own mouth.
So Wallace had no doubt that Barrett was telling the truth.
The rest of the
committee lacked Wallace’s experience, and the paper was never published.
But Wallace was so convinced that such matters deserved to be investigated that he became a founder member of the Society for Psychical Research.
Since that time ‘community of sensation’ has been observed again and again by open-minded investigators.
For example, Dr Gustav Pagenstecher, a German physician working in Mexico City, began to treat a patient called Maria de Zierold soon after the First World War and discovered that he could cure her insomnia with hypnosis.
When in a trance Maria de Zierold’s senses were apparently transferred to the hypnotist so that she could taste substances he put into his mouth, feel the burning of a match he held underneath his hand and hear the ticking of his watch.
And even though her eyes were closed she could see him quite normally and describe the things he was doing, even in the next room.
On the whole, then, most open-minded enquirers would agree that ‘community of sensation’ is a scientifically established fact.
Only scientists continue to regard it as a myth.

The same applies to psychometry, the ability possessed by certain people to hold some object in their hands and ‘read’ its history.
In 1843 an American doctor named Joseph Rodes
Buchanan met Bishop Leonidas Polk, who told him that he could always distinguish brass, even in the dark, because when he touched it he felt a ‘brassy’ taste in his mouth.
Buchanan decided to try this out on his pupils and was fascinated to discover that many of them could detect various substances with their fingertips, even when the substance had been swathed in thick brown paper.
But his greatest surprise came when some of his best ‘sensitives’ showed themselves able to hold a sealed letter in their hands and describe the person who had written it in precise detail.
They were also able to ‘sense’ the writer’s mood.
A disciple of Buchanan named William Denton, a professor of geology in Boston, began his own series of tests with geological specimens — rocks, meteorites, prehistoric bone fragments and so on — and found that his best ‘sensitives’ had very precise ‘visions’ of the place where the object originated.
Both Denton and Buchanan wrote long books describing their experiments, which excited widespread interest at the time.
But scientists quickly lost interest in these wonders, particularly when ‘psychometry’ (Buchanan’s coinage, meaning ‘soul-measurement’) was taken up by spiritualists and occultists.
Hundreds of well-documented cases
^*
leave little doubt that psychometry is one of the commonest ‘paranormal faculties’.
But science continues to ignore the subject, and even serious investigators of the paranormal seem to regard it with a kind of embarrassment.
(For example, Brian Inglis does not even refer to it in his comprehensive history of the paranormal,
Natural and Supernatural
.)