Beyond the Occult (66 page)
Completing the Picture
We must now face squarely the question that has become increasingly persistent during the second part of this book: how far does it
matter
whether there is a ‘psychic world’, whether spirits exist, whether reincarnation is a reality, whether mediums really contact the dead?
We have seen, for example, that Eileen Garrett became increasingly bored and exasperated with spiritualism.
Daskalos also warns against it, pointing out that trying to contact the dead can distract them from more important things.
Steiner told an audience, ‘The spiritualists are the worst materialists of all.’
Adam Crabtree insists that it makes no difference whether he believes in the reality of the spirits he exorcizes or treats them as psychological fictions: all that matters is curing the patient.
And this seems, on the whole, a sensible attitude.
The world we live in is dangerous enough, with terrorists and muggers and serial killers, without spreading further alarm and despondency among the nervous by talking about ill-disposed spirits and devils.
This was my own attitude when I finished writing
Poltergeist
.
The sheer weight of evidence left me in no doubt that there were such things as spirits.
This in turn implied that life after death was a reality and
that the spiritualists had been right all along.
Yet I continued to feel that this is, in some basic sense, irrelevant.
What is interesting about the paranormal is its suggestion that we possess ‘hidden powers’.
Human beings tend to suffer from the ‘passive fallacy’, the notion that we are mere products of the material world and that the material world is the ultimate reality.
For a large proportion of our lives our consciousness is little more than a mirror that reflects this ‘reality’.
It is only in moments of concentration and excitement that we grasp that the real purpose of consciousness is to
change
the world.
Synchronicities, flashes of clairvoyance or precognition or mystical insight, make us aware that our power to change the world is far greater than we imagine.
This is the most important insight to arise from the study of the paranormal; this is the essence of ‘the occult vision’.
By comparison ghosts and spirits seem interesting but not particularly important.
I would now regard that view as an oversimplification.
Dull states of everyday consciousness tell us that the material world is ‘all there is’.
States of more intense awareness reveal that this world is
not
‘all there is’.
There are hidden realms of reality beyond the grasp of everyday consciousness.
And if ‘spirits’ are a part of these hidden realms then it would obviously be a mistake to dismiss them as unimportant.
The problem is to try to discover precisely what part they play.
Some important clues are offered in Ouspensky’s chapter on experimental mysticism in
A New Model of the Universe
, and these must now be considered more fully.
Ouspensky explained that the first problem about the ‘mystical realms’ to which he gained access was that it was almost impossible to describe them because
everything was connected
.
‘In order to describe the first impressions … it is necessary to describe
all
at once.’
This is a vital clue.
The more tired and dull I feel the more things appear to be ‘separate’.
If someone points to something and says, ‘Don’t you see what it
means?’
I shake my head: it ‘means’ nothing but itself.
On the other hand when I am in a state of intensified vitality everything ‘means’ something apart from itself: everything seems to remind me of something else.
I see that everything in the universe
implies
something else, and that that implies something else, and that that implies something else, so that a kind of network of relations seems to extend out to infinity.
Consciousness is like a pool, and everything I look at makes ripples spread across its surface.
When I am dull and tired it is exactly as if the surface has frozen solid.
We have all experienced these states that Ouspensky is trying to describe, for example when we see the solution to some problem ‘in a flash’, or when we experience that odd sense of joy as we smell the first odours of spring.
It is the ‘bird’s-eye view’.
But as we have seen, the ‘everyday self’ looks out from the left brain and operates with language and logic.
So if the flood of intuition is too intense the left brain is left plodding hopelessly behind and the result is a sense of utter frustration.
I first noticed this as a child: too much happiness bored me.
If I went for a walk on a sunny morning and began to experience an increasing sense of sheer joy, there came a point at which I grew tired of it and deliberately brought my mind back down to earth.
Thinking about this later I always found it difficult to understand why I wanted that happiness to come to an end.
Now the solution is obvious.
When we experience a sudden insight we want to
grasp
it, to turn it into words.
But the left brain is like an amanuensis who has to take everything down in longhand.
If the intuitions come too fast he wants to shout, ‘Slow down, slow down!’
And if the speaker refuses to slow down he throws down his pen in disgust.
As we saw in the section about Helen Keller (p.
116) our human task is to capture things in
words
, to become the masters of reality through the use of words and concepts.
So too much intuitive insight is quite pointless.
Ouspensky goes on to remark that beyond this realm of marvellous insights (which he compares to a world of
very complicated mathematical relations
), he passed through a ‘transitional state’ that was not unlike the hypnagogic state on the edge of sleep.
In this state he heard ‘voices’.
‘The voices spoke about every possible kind of thing.
They warned me.
They proved and explained to me everything in the world, but somehow they did it too simply.’
He began wondering whether the voices came from his imagination, so he tried asking them questions.
One of his questions concerned alchemy, and a voice which claimed to be a famous person
told him that the answer would be found in a certain book.
When he finally obtained the book he found that it contained ‘certain hints very closely connected with my question, though they did not give a complete answer to it.’
He concluded that the ‘voices’ were basically the same as those heard by mediums.
Yet oddly enough he was disappointed that in these mystical states he found nothing resembling the ‘astral world’ described by people like Steiner and Madame Blavatsky.
He reached the conclusion that this is because such worlds do not exist.
Yet his experiences of ‘voices’ seem to contradict this.
So does his description of an episode already mentioned in which he tried to make contact with the dead.
Ouspensky explains that he was thinking of a person about whom he felt some guilt for having let him down in the last years of his life.
(It sounds from Ouspensky’s comments as if he was talking about his father.) So during one of his mystical experiments Ouspensky expressed a wish to see this person and ask just one question.
‘And suddenly, without any preparation, my wish was satisfied, and I
saw
him.
It was not a visual sensation, and what I saw was not his external appearance, but
the whole of his life
, which flashed quickly before me.
This life — this was he.’
It sounds as if Ouspensky is saying that he merely experienced a sudden flash of insight, but this is not so.
He goes on to say that although they held no conversation, ‘nevertheless, I know that it was
he
, and that it was he who communicated to me much more about himself than I could have asked.’
But what the dead man communicated was as baffling as everything else in Ouspensky’s mystical experiences.
Ouspensky says:
The man whom I had known and who had died had never existed.
That which existed was something quite different, because his life was not simply a series of events, as we ordinarily picture the life of a man to ourselves, but a thinking and feeling
being
who did not change by the fact of his death.
The man whom I had known was the
face
, as
it were, of this being — the face which changed with the years, but behind which there stood the unchanging reality … .
I saw quite clearly that the events of the last years of his life were as inseparably linked with him as the features of his face… .
Nobody could have changed anything in them, just as nobody could have changed the colour of his hair or eyes, or the shape of his nose.
In other words Ouspensky saw the man as a ‘four-dimensional continuum’ — like Wilbur Wright’s image of the sun as a four-dimensional golden tube — and recognized that in some respects this four-dimensional totality was unchangeable, at least by
other
people.
‘We are no more responsible for the events in one another’s lives than we are for the features of one another’s faces.
Each has his own face … and each has his own fate, in which another man may occupy a certain place, but in which he can change nothing.’
This led Ouspensky to realize that ‘we are far more closely bound to our past and to the people we come into contact with than we ordinarily think, and I understood quite clearly that death does not change anything in this.
We remain bound with all with whom we have been bound.
But for communication with them it is necessary to be in a special state.’
These words are so close to Steiner’s comments on death and life after death that it is hard not to feel that they are expressing precisely the same insight.
Ouspensky goes on to try to describe his insight using the image of a branch:
If one takes the branch of a tree with the twigs, the cross-section of the branch will correspond to the man as we ordinarily see him; the branch itself will be the life of the man, and the twigs will be the lives of people with whom he comes into contact … .
Each man is for himself such a branch, other people with whom he is connected are his offshoots.
But each of these people is for himself a main branch and [other men are] the offshoots … .
In this
way the life of each man is connected with a number of other lives; one life enters, in a sense, into another, and all taken together forms a single whole, the nature of which we do not understand.
All this enables us to see that the simple notion that human beings survive death and continue to exist in ‘another world’ is somehow a gross oversimplification of the reality.
Our physical universe, with its immensely high gravity which drags down our thoughts so that ‘everything is separate’, gives us a completely false picture of reality.
This is why Steiner said, ‘The spiritualists are the greatest materialists of all.’
He meant that they are trying to reduce a four-dimensional reality to a simple three-dimensional image
which is fundamentally a falsification
.
Even the question, ‘Is there life after death?’
is the wrong question, for all the misunderstandings are
inbuilt
into it.
Ouspensky would obviously not reply, ‘Yes, there is life after death.’
Instead he would point out that our whole notion of what constitutes life — and therefore death — is fundamentally false, so that the question is very nearly meaningless.
(The question, ‘Is there a God?’
has the same inbuilt misconceptions.)
All this enables us to see why the question, ‘Do spirits exist?’
is at once relevant and highly misleading.
The evidence of poltergeist activity leaves no doubt that spirits exist and that to some extent these spirits are not subject to the laws of space and time that govern human beings.
But to assume that such spirits offer a clue to the fundamental nature of the universe is a misunderstanding.
Until we can begin to grasp the insights glimpsed by Ouspensky in his mystical experiments and to catch some kind of a glimpse of the ‘total picture’, questions about spirits are highly misleading and had better be left in abeyance.
The best way to begin to grasp this ‘total picture’ is to begin with the mystical glimpses of ordinary people.
Consider for example the experience of an American scientist, C.
Daly King, waiting on a New Jersey railway platform:
On the platform there were several small housings for freight elevators, news-stands and so on, constructed of dun-coloured bricks.
He was emotionally at ease, planning unhurriedly the schedule of his various calls in the city and simultaneously attempting to be aware, actively and impartially, of the movements of his body’s walking and actively to be conscious at the same time of all the auditory sensations arising through his ears.