Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  So it seems that Graves is speaking of a power related to that of mathematical prodigies, the ability of the mind to see the answer to a problem in a single flash. And how, precisely, does such an ability work? Is it some form of lightning calculation, that is, a process of ordinary reason in which everything is speeded up, as in the famous Trachtenberg speed system of mathematics? Apparently not. We know this from the case of Zerah Colburn, the Canadian calculating prodigy, who was asked whether a certain immense number was a prime (i.e. could not be divided by any other number), and who replied instantly: No, it can be divided by 641. Now there is no mathematical method of determining whether a certain number is a prime—except the painful method of trial and error, dividing it by every smaller number and deciding that none of them works (shortcuts exist: if it can’t be divided by 3 it can’t be divided by 6, 9, 12, 15 . . .). Obviously, Colburn ‘saw’ the answer, as Graves’s fellow pupil F.F. Smilley did—from ‘above’, as it were: a kind of bird’s eye view. And Graves’ ‘secret’ was, presumably, some similar method of grasping the answer to any problem by instantaneous intuition . . .

  We have seen in Chapter 2 that man is a double being, with two selves who live one in each half of the brain. The being you call ‘you’—your ego—resides in the left cerebral hemisphere. A few inches away, in the right hemisphere, there is another ‘you’; but it is dumb.

  When I work out a sum on paper, I am using my left hemisphere—with a certain amount of occasional assistance from the right, by way of sudden insights. And this, on the whole, seems to be the way the human brain works: the left is the ‘front man’, the ego that deals with the world; and the right has to express itself via the left. And, on the whole, the right has a fairly hard time of it; for the left is always in a hurry, always working out problems, and it tends to treat the right with impatience. This is why civilized Man seems to possess so little intuition.

  It seems probable that calculating prodigies have not yet fallen victim to this bullying dominance of the left. The ‘shades of the prison house’ have not yet begun to close. They see the answer to a problem, and pass it on instantaneously, unimpeded by the usual red tape of the bureaucrat who lives in the left brain.

  For this, I must stress, is the real problem of civilized Man. We have evolved to our present level through the use of language and concepts. We use these so constantly that we ‘identify’ with the left half of the brain. This does no real harm, for in a sense the ‘personality’ is the linguistic part of us. The trouble arises from the attitude of the ego to the non-ego who lives in the right cerebral hemisphere. We tend to treat it as an idiot, as a kind of inarticulate and not-very-bright younger brother who is always being ignored and told to shut up. If we took the trouble to listen to it, we might learn a great deal. Occasionally, it may become so alarmed at our carefully calculated stupidities that it takes the law into its own hands and interferes. Here I can cite a personal example. The hill that leads up from Pentewan to Mevagissey is long, and has several abrupt curves. One day, I was driving up this hill with the sun in my eyes, almost completely blinded. At a certain point I reasoned that I must be approaching a bend, and tried to turn the steering-wheel. My hands ignored me: they kept the wheel steady. My right brain knew I had not yet reached the bend, and simply cancelled my order to turn the steering-wheel.

  Even this last sentence illustrates our basic mistake. I say ‘my hands’, ‘my right brain’, as if they were both my property, like my clothes. But the being who calls himself ‘I’ is a usurper. It is his brother, who lives next door, who is the rightful heir to the throne. I say this because the left, for all its naive egoism, cannot live without the intuitions and insights of the right—there are many creatures in the world who live perfectly well without language or ideas. But the ideal state is one of close co-operation between the two halves, with the left treating the right as a wise counsellor and trusted adviser, not as the village idiot.

  Significantly, the left brain has a strong sense of time; the right has absolutely none. It strolls along at its own pace, with its hands in its pockets. This does not mean that the right lacks the ability to calculate time—on the contrary, when you tell yourself that you must wake up at six o’clock precisely and you open your eyes on the stroke of six, this is the work of the right. But it declines to take time too seriously. And it is right to feel sceptical. The left is stupidly obsessed by time. An anecdote told by William Seabrook of Aleister Crowley illustrates the point. When Crowley was on the island of Sicily, a film star named Jane Wolfe came to pay him a visit; she was in a state of permanent nervous tension. Crowley told her that she must begin her cure with a month of meditation on the cliff top. The idea dismayed her, but she agreed. She lived in a lean-to shelter and a boy brought up water, bread and grapes every day at dusk. For the first few days she was bored and irritable. By the 19th day she felt nothing but boredom. Then, quite suddenly, she passed into a state of deep calm and peace, with no desire to move. What had happened was simply that her over-dominant left brain—accustomed to the Hollywood rat race—had gradually realised that it could stop running; then the right took over, with its sense of timelessness and serenity. What is being suggested is that time is an invention of the left brain. Time, as such, does not exist in nature. Nature knows only what Whitehead calls ‘process’—things happening. What human beings call time is a psychological concept; moreover, it is a left-brain concept.

  Now the left brain, as we know, sees things in rigid categories, and nature does not operate within such categories. Consider Zeno’s paradox of the arrow. At any moment it is either where it is or where it isn’t. It can’t be where it isn’t; but if it is where it is, then it can’t be moving. The paradox of Achilles and the tortoise depends on the same kind of logic. But the arrow does move; Achilles does overtake the tortoise, although it is ‘logically’ impossible. According to the left brain, there is no logical way of deciding whether a large number is a prime except by trial and error, but Zerah Colburn’s right brain solved it instantly; and, in the same way, Peter Fairley’s right brain knew in advance which horses would win at the races. (Significantly, Fairley had suffered temporary blindness just before he developed this ability; it seems probably that the shock was responsible for ‘short-circuiting’ the usual left-brain processes.)

  This chapter is, of course, written in language, and it makes use of concepts; consequently its aim is, to some extent, self-defeating. How can I convey in words the notion that time itself is merely a concept? The above examples can at least take us in the right direction. For most people have known what it is to suddenly ‘know’ the answer to a problem without thinking it out. Everyone has had the experience of trying hard to remember something, and then having it stroll into his brain when he was no longer trying—almost as if another person had knocked on the door of the left brain and said: ‘Is this what you were looking for?’

  Which brings me to the most important step in this argument: that everyone has experienced the most basic ‘right-brain’insight, the curious ability that in The Occult I labelled ‘Faculty X’. This is simply that odd ability to suddenly grasp the reality of some other time or other place. I have elsewhere cited the example of the experience that led Arnold Toynbee to begin his Study of History. Toynbee was sitting at the summit of the citadel of Mistrà, in Sparta, looking at the ruins that had been left by the wild highlanders who had overwhelmed it in 1821, when he was suddenly struck by the reality of what had happened—as if the highlanders were, at that very minute, pouring over the horizon and overwhelming the city. He goes on to describe half a dozen more occasions when the ‘historical imagination’ has suddenly ‘brought the past to life’ and made it real, and ends by describing a semi-mystical experience that occurred as he was passing Victoria Station, London, during World War I, when he found himself ‘in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come’.

  Chesterton once said: ‘We s
ay thank you when someone passes us the salt, but we don’t mean it. We say the Earth is round, but we don’t mean it, even though it’s true.’ We mean something only when we feel it intensely, here and now. And this is what happens in flashes of Faculty X: the mind suddenly conjures up the reality of some other time and place, as Proust’s hero suddenly became aware of the reality of his childhood as he tasted the cake dipped in herb tea.

  Faculty X is another name for insight, the sudden flash of understanding, of direct knowledge. And it enables us to see precisely how the left and right co-operate. At school, I may learn some mathematical formula, like those for doing long division or extracting square roots; but I use it mechanically. If one day I forget the formula, and have to work it out for myself, I achieve insight into the reasons that lie behind it. But I can quite easily forget this insight, and go back to a mechanical use of the formula. The left brain deals with surfaces, with forms; the right brain deals with insights, with what lies beneath the surface. The left brain is a labour-saving device, an energy-saving device—exactly like using some simple mnemonic to remember the colours of the spectrum or the black notes on the piano. It is when you are full of energy—perhaps on a spring morning—that the right brain produces that odd glowing sense of reality. When you are very tired, the left brain takes over. Constant mental fatigue can produce the state Sartre calls ‘nausea’, in which the left brain scans the world but lacks all insight into its meaning—the right has gone off duty: reality seems crude and meaningless.

  But here is the most difficult part of the argument to grasp. It is the right brain which presents us with ‘reality’. The left presents us only with immediacy, what happens to be here and now. The left ‘scans’ the world; the right adds meaning and value. And your eyes, which are now scanning these words, are actually telling you lies. For they are presenting an essentially unreal world to you as the only reality. ‘This is real,’ I say, knocking on the table with my knuckles; but my knuckles are only scanners, like my eyes.

  If, as you read these lines, you can penetrate to the meaning I am trying to convey, you will do it by a mental leap, from left to right. And if you can make that leap, you will also be able to grasp how Peter Fairley could know the winners of a race that had not yet taken place, or how Zerah Colburn could ‘know’ that 4,294,967,297 is divisible by 641. Somehow, the right ‘thinks’ vertically, by taking a kind of upward leap and simply looking down on the answer. You will object that this still doesn’t explain how it could ‘look down on’ the future, but this is because you are still thinking in left-brain terms. How would you, in fact, go about predicting some future event, assuming that someone made it worth your while to do so? You would ploddingly try to assemble thousands of present ‘trends’, and try to work them out according to the law of probabilities. And because there are so many billions of possibilities, we say the future is unpredictable. The right brain appears to know better . . .

  Let me try to summarize the argument so far. We have begun by dismissing ‘time’ in the Wellsian sense, the kind of time in which you could travel with the aid of a time machine. Like ‘zyme’, this time is a logical error. What really happens out there is ‘process’, and it would be absurd to speak of travelling in process. Time is actually a clock ticking inside the head—and, what is more, in only one side of the head. Our senses, which are built to ‘scan’ the world, chop up process into seconds and minutes. They force us to see the world in these rigid terms of spatial and temporal location. Kant was quite right when he said that we see the world through ‘categories’. Think of the Kantian categories as a weird pair of prismatic spectacles you wear on your nose, spectacles which turn everything you see into the strangest angles and corners. This is space and time, as our brains grasp it.

  All this, of course, fails to answer a basic question: how future time—that is, process which has not yet taken place—can be predictable. The only scientific explanation is the one we have considered, the statistical assessment of ‘trends’. But it seems fairly clear that Peter Fairley was unable to spot winners by this method, for he knew nothing about racing, let alone about the complex possibilities presented by all the horses in the race. Anyway, experiment has shown that this cannot be the explanation. The well-known psychical investigator S. G. Soal performed a series of experiments in telepathy with a man named Basil Shackleton, and both were disappointed that the results seemed to be negative. Then a careful look at the results revealed an interesting thing: Shackleton was guessing the next ESP card that would be chosen. This was confirmed by substituting cards with animal pictures—zebras, giraffes, and so on. Now there could be no possible doubt. If Soal uncovered a card of a zebra, and Shackleton (sitting in the next room) named it as a giraffe, it was almost certain that the next card Soal turned over would be a giraffe. Other experimenters—like J. B. Rhine and Charles Tart—have produced similar results.

  So it looks as if we are faced with a basic fact: that, whether it is impossible or not, precognition actually takes place—precise and detailed precognition of the future—which suggests clearly that the ‘Kantian’ theory is basically correct: there is something wrong with what our senses—and left brain—tell us about the world.

  I could easily spend the remainder of this chapter raising questions about precisely how our senses could be mistaken. Such an approach would be interesting; but I doubt whether it would be very conclusive. Besides, much of my time would be taken up in summarising Edmund Husserl’s book The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness; and those who are interested would do better to read it for themselves. Instead, let us, for the sake of argument, assume that this part of the case is proved—that there is something wrong with our left-brain conception of time—and look more closely into the other half of the equation: the curious power that, under certain circumstances, seems to enable us to foresee the future.

  In a fascinating and lucid book, The Case Against Jones, John Vyvyan cites two interesting cases, one of precognition, one of retrocognition.

  The first concerns a priest named Canon Guarnier, who dreamed with exceptional clarity of an Italian landscape—a mountain road, a white house, a woman knitting with her daughter looking on, three men dressed in aprons and pointed hats sitting at a table, a sleeping dog, three sheep in a field . . . The scene was detailed and vivid. Three years later, on his way to Rome, Guarnier’s carriage stopped to change horses, and he found himself looking at the identical scene, accurate in every detail. ‘Nothing is changed; the people are exactly those I saw, as I saw them, doing the same things in the same attitudes, with the same gestures . . .’

  The other case concerns the novelist George Gissing, who fell into a fever at Crotone in southern Italy. After a nightmare, he fell into a ‘visionary state’, in which he saw a series of pictures of Roman history. These are described in considerable detail—too long to quote here. But Gissing himself had no doubt that he had somehow witnessed real scenes of history, not simply imaginative pictures. ‘If the picture corresponded to nothing real, tell me who can, by what power I reconstructed, to the last perfection of intimacy, a world known to me only in ruined fragments.’

  This, of course, is no proof that it was not imagination. What strikes me in reading Gissing’s account—for example, of seeing Hannibal’s slaughter of two thousand mercenaries on the seashore by Crotone—is its similarity to Toynbee’s ‘visions’ of the past. Wells’s account of Gissing’s death—in the Experiment in Autobiography—makes it clear that Gissing saw these visions again on his deathbed. Like John Vyvyan, I am certainly inclined to disbelieve that it was mere hallucination. His insistence on the clarity of the scene recalls Guarnier’s dream, and the experiences of Jane O’Neill and of Misses Moberly and Jourdain.

  I formulated the theory of Faculty X in my book The Occult (1971). But four years before this, I had made use of the concept in fiction, in a novel called The Philosopher’s Stone, which is centrally concerned with this notion of ‘mental time travel’. In thi
s novel I suggested that the pre-frontal lobes of the brain (I didn’t then know about the rôles of the right and left brains) are somehow connected with ‘poetic’ experience: Wordsworth’s feeling as a child that meadow, grove and stream were ‘apparelled in celestial light’. No one seems certain of the precise purpose of the pre-frontal lobes, but we know that, when an adult’s pre-frontal lobes are damaged, it seems to make little difference to his functioning, except that he becomes coarser. In children, on the other hand, pre-frontal damage causes an obvious drop in intelligence: that is, children use the pre-frontal lobes. Could this explain why children experience the ‘glory and the freshness of a dream’, while adults live in an altogether drearier world—that adults have ceased to use this ‘visionary’ function of the prefrontal lobes?

  In The Philosopher’s Stone I posit a brain operation that is able to restore the ‘glory and the freshness’ to the pre-frontal lobes. Whoever has this operation experiences a kind of revelation. The world becomes alive and exciting and infinitely fascinating, a place of constant ‘magic’.

  The underlying assumption here is that the rational intellect—the left brain—is to blame for the dullness of everyday consciousness, with its accompanying sense of triviality and futility. The dullness and rationality are necessary if we are to deal with the complexities of adult life; but we somehow forget the reality that lies behind our systems of abstraction. And since our vitality is fed by the sense of reality—and purpose—this forgetfulness causes a gradual withering-away of some essential faculty, just as blindness would cause a gradual forgetfulness of the reality of colour. The pre-frontal operation remedies this forgetfulness, generating a sudden enormous sense of the purpose of human existence.