Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  Hudson explained these extraordinary powers by suggesting that human beings possess two minds, which he calls the subjective and the objective mind. The ‘objective mind’ is the part of us that deals with everyday life and copes with practical matters; the subjective mind is concerned with our inner powers and energies. It is as if the mind had two faces; one turned towards the outside world, the other turned towards the inner worlds of memory and intuition. For practical purposes they are rather like a husband and wife; the husband—the objective mind—assertive and aggressive, the wife shy and taciturn, inclined to doubt her own judgement in the face of her husband’s superior forcefulness. Under hypnosis, the husband is put to sleep, and the wife, no longer tongue-tied with self-doubt, can exercise her powers of intuition without fear of criticism. As a result, she can perform far more considerable feats than when her domineering partner is awake. She seems to have remarkable powers over the body, so that a man under hypnosis can not only have a tooth extracted without pain, but will even obey an order not to bleed. He becomes capable of feats of strength that would be impossible if he were awake—an old favourite of stage hypnotists is to tell a man that he is about to become as stiff as a board, then make him lie between two chairs while someone jumps up and down on his stomach.

  Hudson is fascinated by these powers of the subjective mind. He cites a case of an illiterate girl who, when in a fever, began to speak Greek, Latin and Hebrew. A young doctor was so intrigued by this that he investigated the girl’s past life, and discovered that, at the age of 9, she had lived with a Protestant pastor who used to walk around the house reading aloud in these languages. Consciously, the girl had not assimilated a single word; but some hidden tape recorded in the brain had preserved everything.

  Hudson discusses the mystery of calculating prodigies—usually young boys of no particular talent or intelligence who can perform astonishing feats of calculation within seconds—like 5-year-old Zerah Colburn, who once snapped out the answer to the square root of 106,929 before the questioner had finished speaking. He also discusses the curious power of ‘eidetic imagery’—and describes an artist friend who could conjure up a scene at will and then see it projected in detail on a blank canvas.

  Genius, says Hudson, is simply a perfect balance between the objective and subjective minds—as if a husband and wife are in such deep sympathy that the wife has lost all her shyness and pours out her intuitions in the certainty that they will be understood. When this happens, the subjective mind can actually take over, and the result is known as inspiration, a spontaneous outpouring of insights. Hudson cites the example of the great political orator Henry Clay, who was once called upon to answer an opponent in the Senate when he was feeling sick and exhausted. Clay asked the man sitting next to him to tug on his coat-tails when he had been speaking for ten minutes. Two hours later, after a magnificent speech, Clay sank down exhausted, and asked his friend reproachfully why he had failed to interrupt. In fact, the friend had not only tugged his coat-tails; he had nudged and pinched him, and even jabbed a pin deep into his leg. This aspect of the ‘subjective mind’ seems to be what the Spaniards call the duende, the ‘demon’ that sometimes takes over great singers or dancers so they seem to be possessed by a force greater than themselves. They are, in fact, ‘greater than themselves’, for the ego—as we have seen—is a left-brain entity.

  Yet the limitations of the subjective mind are as odd as its talents. Hudson observed that it can reason deductively—from the general to the particular—but not vice versa. Induction is the ability to leap from a collection of facts to the laws underlying them. The subjective mind can be shown any number of trees without noticing that they add up to a wood. It leaves ‘leaping to conclusions’ to its more enterprising and aggressive partner. In fact, the subjective mind is oddly short-sighted and passive. This also explains why it tends to be bad at argument, which involves selecting and reasoning—making choices. Right-brain people—‘subjective-minders’—usually become tongue-tied when someone tells them something in an authoritative voice, even when they can see it is nonsense; they find it hard to put their perceptions into words. This also explains, says Hudson, why psychic powers often evaporate when confronted with scepticism. The subjective mind is intensely suggestive, so a mere hint that it is a fraud turns it into a nervous wreck. Hudson cites the case of a clairvoyant named Bishop, who demonstrated again and again his power to read people’s minds and decipher the contents of sealed envelopes. But when the well-known journalist Henry Labouchere denounced him as a fake, and challenged him to read the number of a bank note sealed in an envelope, he failed miserably. He had done the same thing successfully a thousand times; but the aggressive self-confidence of a left-brainer was enough to shatter his self-confidence and paralyze the powers of the subjective mind.

  This brings us to what Hudson considered the most important thing about the subjective mind: that it is responsible for all so-called psychic phenomena—including ghosts and poltergeists. This suggestion naturally infuriated the spiritualists; but Hudson argued his case with impressive skill and conviction. He points out that a hypnotist can induce a blister in a good hypnotic subject by suggesting that he had been burnt by a hot iron, and argues convincingly that the stigmata of the saints—bleeding nail holes and wounds—can be explained in the same way. He discusses some of the remarkable cures that have been brought about by hypnosis, and concludes that the subjective mind has immense healing powers. In fact, he became convinced that the miracles of the New Testament were a manifestation of these powers. By way of testing this hypothesis, he decided to try to cure a relative who suffered from rheumatism and nervous convulsions. The method, apparently, was to persuade his own subjective mind that it could be done, even though the relative lived a thousand miles away. He informed two friends that he intended to begin the treatment—so that they could bear witness if it worked—and started on May 15, 1890. He decided to try to communicate the healing suggestions by an effort of will just as he was on the point of going to sleep. Some months later, one of the two ‘witnesses’ met the relative, whose health had improved remarkably; the improvement had started, he said, in mid-May. Hudson claimed that he and close associates had made more than a hundred similar experiments, and that not one of them had been a failure.

  Hudson explained these theories in a book called The Law of Psychic Phenomena, which appeared in 1893 and became an immediate bestseller—by 1925 it had gone through forty-seven printings. It was Hudson’s sheer bad luck that, within ten years of its publication, Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind had become even more celebrated.

  Just before the outbreak of the First World War, the Belgian dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck made another highly creditable attempt to explain the nature and origin of man’s ‘hidden powers’; the title of his book, The Unknown Guest, is a three-word summary of his answer. Inside every one of us, says Maeterlinck, there is an unknown entity that lives ‘in a sort of invisible and perhaps eternal palace, like a casual guest, dropped in from another planet, whose interests, habits, ideas, passions, have nothing in common with ours’. In fact, the ‘unknown guest’ is a kind of ‘second self—like Hudson’s subjective mind. Maeterlinck recognised that the ‘unknown guest’ is not only responsible for telepathy and premonitions of danger, but for such inexplicable powers as precognition of the future. He cites the case of the wife of the Russian general Toutschkoff, who woke up one night dreaming that she was at an inn in an unknown town, and that her father came into the room to tell her: ‘Your husband has been killed at Borodino.’ When the dream had been repeated a third time, she woke her husband to ask: ‘Where is Borodino?’ He had no idea, and they had to look it up on a map. But later that year, Napoleon invaded Russia, and her husband was killed at Borodino. Her father came into the room, just as in the dream, to tell her the news.

  Now in fact modern scientific research has placed this notion of ‘the unknown guest’ on a scientific basis.

  For s
ome reason that no physiologist yet understands, human beings have two brains. Or rather, the brain they possess is ‘double’—almost as if a mirror had been placed down the middle, so that one half reflects the other. We seem to have two hearing centres, two visual centres, two muscle-control centres, even two memories. Why this should be so is baffling—one guess being that one of the brains is a ‘spare’ in case the other gets damaged. What seems even odder is that the left half of the brain controls the right side of the body, and vice versa.

  From our point of view, the most interesting part of the brain is the bit at the top—the cerebral cortex. This is the most specifically human part; it has developed at an incredible speed over the past million or so years—so fast (in geological time) that some scientists like to speak of ‘the brain explosion’.

  If you could lift off the top of the skull and look down on the cerebral cortex, you would see something resembling a walnut, with two wrinkled halves. The bridge between them is a mass of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum or commissure.

  This mass of millions of nerve fibres is obviously important. Which is why brain specialists were puzzled when they came across freaks who possessed no commissure, and appeared to function perfectly well without it. In the 1930s, brain surgeons wondered if they could prevent epileptic attacks by severing the corpus callosum, and so preventing the spread of the ‘electrical storm’ from one hemisphere to the other. They tried severing the commissure in monkeys and it seemed to do no harm. So they tried it on epileptic patients, and it seemed to work. The fits were greatly reduced—and the patient seemed much the same as before. One scientist remarked ironically that the only purpose of the commissure appeared to be to transmit epileptic seizures. Another suggested that it might be to prevent the brain from sagging in the middle.

  In 1950, Roger W. Sperry, of the University of Chicago (and later of Cal Tech) began investigating the problem. He discovered that severing the commissure appeared to have no noticeable effect on cats and monkeys. But it would prevent one half of the brain learning what the other half knew. So if a cat was taught some trick with one eye covered up, and then asked to do it with the other eye covered, it was baffled. It could even be taught two different solutions to the same problem (say, pressing a lever to get food) with each side of the brain. There could be no doubt about it; we literally have two brains.

  Sperry and his associate Michael Gazzaniga then studied a human patient whose brain had been split to prevent epileptic attacks. He seemed to be perfectly normal, except for one oddity—which they expected anyway. He could read with his right eye, but not with his left. It had been known since the 19th century that, in human beings, the two halves of the brain seem to have different functions: ‘right for recognition, left for language’. People who had damage to the right cerebral hemisphere were unable to recognise simple patterns, or enjoy music, but they could still speak normally. People with left-brain damage were able to recognise patterns, but their speech was impaired. Obviously, then, the left deals with language, and you would expect a split-brain patient to be unable to read with his right eye (connected, remember, to the opposite side of the brain). Sperry’s patient was also unable to write anything meaningful (i.e. complicated) with his left hand.

  They noticed another oddity. If the patient bumped into something with his left side, he did not notice. And the implications here were very odd indeed. Not only did the split-brain operation give the patient two separate minds; it also seemed to restrict his identity, or ego, to the left side. When they placed an object in his left hand, and asked him what he was holding, he had no idea. Further experiments underlined the point. If a split-brain patient is shown two different symbols—say a circle and a square—with each eye, and is asked to say what he has just seen, he replies ‘A square’. Asked to draw with his left hand what he has seen, and he draws a circle. Asked what he has just drawn, he replies: ‘A square’. And when one split-brain patient was shown a picture of a nude male with the right-brain, she blushed; asked why she was blushing, she replied truthfully: ‘I don’t know.’

  One ‘split-brain’ patient tried to hit his wife with one hand while the other defended her. Another tried to unzip his flies with one hand while the other tried to do them up. A patient who was given some wooden blocks to arrange into a pattern tried to do it with his right hand, and the left hand continually tried to interrupt him; finally, he had to sit on his left hand to make it behave.

  The implications are clearly staggering. The person you call ‘you’ lives in the left cerebral hemisphere. This is the half of the cerebrum that deals with language and logic. It could be regarded as a scientist. The right half seems to work in terms of patterns and insights; it is basically an artist. And it seems to be a ‘second self’. It was natural for the patient to try to solve the wooden block pattern with his right hand (connected to the left brain), because the doctor had asked him to do the puzzle, and the conscious, everyday self lives in the left brain. If he had not been a split-brain patient, the right brain would have quietly helped him to solve the puzzle by ‘putting ideas into his head’, and he would not even have been aware of it.

  So what is it like to be a split-brain patient? The unexpected answer is that most of them do not even notice it. And if we reflect for a moment, we can see that this makes sense. If I try to solve some puzzle—say a Rubik cube—after a few glasses of alcohol, my ‘insight’ refuses to function. This is because alcohol seems to interfere with the connection between right and left. It has, in fact, given me a kind of instant split-brain operation. Yet I hardly notice this. My conscious self is so accustomed to coping with reality that it hardly notices when the ‘other self withdraws its help. But if I attempted to write this book after several glasses of alcohol—or when I was so tired that the ‘two selves’ had lost contact—I would instantly realize that something was wrong. For writing is an act of close co-operation between the two selves. The right takes a ‘bird’s eye view’, surveying all the possibilities; the left chooses between them and decides which of them to turn into words. If the right fails to do its half of the job, the left stares blankly at the sheet of paper and wonders what to say.

  Is the right cerebral hemisphere ‘the unknown guest’? That might be going too far. We still know so little about the brain and its working that it would be better to preserve an open mind. But we can safely say that the right hemisphere is the entrance to the ‘invisible palace’ of the unknown guest.

  There is another point of vital importance to be made. All mental illness is caused by the conflict between ‘the two selves’. The left ego is the master of consciousness, the right is the master of the unconscious. And the relation between the two is not unlike the relation between Laurel and Hardy in the old movies. Ollie is the left-brain, the boss. Stan takes his cues from Ollie. When Ollie is in a good mood, Stan is delighted. When Ollie is depressed, Stan is plunged into the depths of gloom. Stan is inclined to over-react.

  When Ollie wakes up on a wet Monday morning, he thinks: ‘Damn, it’s raining, and I’ve got a particularly dreary day in front of me . . .’ Stan overhears this and sinks into depression. And—since he controls the energy supply—Ollie has that ‘sinking feeling’, and feels drained of energy. This makes him feel worse than ever. As he walks out of the gate he bumps into a man who tells him to look where he’s going, then trips over a crack in the pavement, then misses a bus just as he arrives at the stop, and thinks: ‘This is going to be one of those days . . .’ And again, Stan overhears, and feels worse than ever. And once more, Ollie feels that sinking feeling. By the end of the day, he may be feeling suicidal—not because things have been really bad, but because of a continual ‘negative feedback’ of gloom between the right and left.

  Consider, on the other hand, what happens to a child on Christmas Day. He wakes up full of pleasurable anticipation; Stan instantly sends up a flood of energy. When he goes downstairs, everything reinforces the feeling of delight—Christmas carols on the
radio, the Christmas tree with its lights, the smell of mince pies in the oven. Each new stimulus causes a new rush of delight; each new rush of delight deepens the feeling that ‘all is well’, and that the world is a wonderful and exciting place after all.

  What, then, is hypnosis? The first thing we have to recognise is that all creatures are, to a large extent, machines. The body is an elaborate machine; so is the brain. But a machine can be operated by anyone who has access to it and knows how it works. It seems fairly obvious that the hypnotist somehow puts the left brain—Ollie—to sleep, and gains direct access to Stan. And Stan can make the machine do some remarkable things. If the hypnotist tells him that he will become as stiff as a board, and will lie on two chairs, with his head on one and his heels on the other, while a heavy man jumps up and down on his stomach, he will do it without hesitation.

  Which raises an interesting question: if Stan possesses these powers, why will he not exercise them when Ollie tells him to do so? The answer is that he knows Ollie too well, and does not trust him as he trusts the hypnotist. Yet it should also be obvious that if we could somehow persuade Stan to trust Ollie, we would gain access to all the ‘hidden powers’ that Stan controls. And man would suddenly become a kind of superman. This is why it is so important for us to understand the basic mechanisms of hypnosis . . .

  Robert Temple’s story about how he wanted to embrace a tree reminds us that most of us spend a great deal of time in a semi-hypnotised condition. Our ‘everyday consciousness’ is only half-awake. It becomes fully awake only when we are full of excitement or sense of purpose. (Doctor Johnson said: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’) As soon as our attention begins to flag, we sink into a kind of light hypnosis. And when our minds ‘go blank’, we are virtually in a trance.