Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  One of the central scenes of the novel occurs when the hero is seated in a Stratford garden, basking in the peace and serenity, and enjoying the sense of timelessness that Jane Wolfe experienced after a month of meditation in Sicily. He finds himself wondering idly what this garden would have looked like in the age of Shakespeare—then suddenly realises that he knows the answer; that he possesses a faculty that can tell him exactly what he wants to know. In writing this scene, it struck me as quite obvious that if one could retreat into a deep enough state of serenity, all such questions would become answerable. Yet I was fully aware that ‘insight’ can deal only with questions of a logical nature, not with those involving particularities or facts (e.g., no amount of insight could normally tell me the name of Cleopatra’s great-grandmother: I have to turn to the history books).

  When I thought about this question, it seemed to me that the answer lay in something we know intuitively about states of deep serenity. And this ‘something’ is probably the notion I have already discussed in connection with Buchanan and psychometry: the feeling that the world contains an infinitude of information, and that we possess, although we seldom use, the senses to make use of it. If psychometry works—and there is an impressive body of experimental evidence that it does—it must be because objects somehow record everything that has ever happened to them. But we have already noted that our brains also record everything that has ever happened to us. At this point we should observe that, no matter how much information we have access to, we can make use of it only by cross-checking it with information inside us (e.g. faced with a broken-down car, a man who knew nothing about cars would be helpless, even if he had a massive handbook on cars; before he can make use of it, he needs to have certain basic information about cars inside his brain). But with an infinitude of information outside us, and something like an infinitude inside us, we possess the basic necessities for answering almost any question.

  I am still by no means certain that this ‘paradigm’ is the answer. How, for example, can it explain something that happened to a musician friend of mine, Mark Bredin, as he was travelling back late one night by taxi along the Bayswater Road? Suddenly, he felt certain that, at the next traffic light—Queensway—a taxi would jump the lights and hit them, side-on. But it seemed absurd to tap the driver on the shoulder and say ‘Excuse me, but . . .’ So he said nothing. At the next traffic light, a taxi ignored a red light, and hit them sideways-on . . . Could it have been some kind of extrasensory perception that told him of the approach of the taxi along Queensway at a certain speed, and that the impatient driver would arrive just as the light was turning red?

  All that does seem clear is that Bredin was tired and very relaxed but that, after a concert, his senses were still alert. The great roaring machine of everyday awareness, with all its irrelevant information, had been switched off and he could become aware of normally-unperceived items of knowledge.

  It was after writing The Occult, and while I was working on my book Mysteries, that I became aware that the problem was probably complicated by another factor. My discovery that I could use a dowsing-rod, and that it reacted powerfully in the area of ancient standing stones, made me clearly aware of this ‘other’ me, the non-ego, who lives in the right hemisphere. I also became increasingly interested in the work of that remarkable man, the late Tom Lethbridge, a retired Cambridge don who studied the use of the pendulum in dowsing for various materials. After exhaustive experiments, Lethbridge concluded that the pendulum responds, at various lengths, to every known substance in our world i.e. that in the hands of a good dowser a fourteen-inch pendulum will go into strong gyrations over sand, while a twenty-five-inch pendulum will detect aluminium. But, having established this to his own satisfaction, Lethbridge was astonished to discover that the pendulum would respond equally definitely to feelings and ideas i.e. that a ten-inch pendulum would respond to the thought of light or youth, while a twenty-nine-inch pendulum would respond to danger or yellow. This seemed to connect with another baffling phenomenon, which I myself have witnessed: map dowsing. It sounds preposterous, but some dowsers are able to locate whatever they are looking for over a map as well as over the actual area of ground. ‘Professor’ Joad, a confirmed sceptic, described in a Brains Trust programme how he had seen a map dowser accurately trace all the streams on a map from which they had been removed. I have seen a map dowser, Bill Lewis, accurately trace the course of an underground waterpipe on a sketch map drawn by my wife.

  And at this point I became fascinated by another equally strange phenomenon, that of ‘multiple personality’. There are dozens of recorded cases of patients who slip in and out of a series of totally different personalities. One of the most widely publicised was described in the book The Three Faces of Eve. In Mysteries I have described in detail the equally strange cases of Christine Beauchamp and Doris Fischer. In her book Sybil Flora Schreiber has described the case of a girl who had 16 different personalities. Such cases actually look like old-fashioned accounts of ‘demonic possession’. The resident personality, so to speak, is suddenly expelled from the body, and a stranger takes over. When the ‘resident personality’ comes back, he (or she) has no memory of what has taken place in the meantime.

  What interested me about such cases is that the various personalities seem to have a definite pecking order or hierarchy, with the most powerful at the top, the next most powerful next to the top, and so on. (The ‘resident personality’ is usually about halfway down the ladder.) Moreover, the ‘top’ personality knows all about all those underneath; the next one down knows about all those underneath, but not about the one above. And so it goes on, with the bottom-most personality knowing only about himself/herself.

  I made another interesting observation. In many cases, the ‘top’ personality is a more mature and balanced individual than the patient has ever had the opportunity to become. For example, Jung’s cousin, who was such a case, was a teenager; yet her ‘top’ personality was a mature woman at least ten years older.

  In 1973, my own experience of ‘panic attacks’, brought on by overwork and stress, suggested a further insight: that we are basically all multiple personalities, although, in well-balanced human beings, the others never actually unseat the resident personality. In my panic attacks, I found that I could gain a measure of control by calling upon what seemed to be a higher level of my own being, a kind of ‘higher me’. This led me to wonder how many ‘higher me’s’ there are. And whether the solution of some of these mysteries of paranormal powers—like precognition—may not lie in this higher level of ‘myself’. In short, whether, as Aldous Huxley once suggested, the mind possesses a superconscious attic as well as a subconscious basement—a superconscious mind of which we are unaware, as we are unaware of the subconscious. My own picture of the ‘ladder of selves’ seemed to suggest that the attic has several storeys.

  Lethbridge had begun to formulate a similar theory to explain the accuracy of his pendulum: that there is a part of the mind that knows the answer to these questions, but which can communicate only indirectly. This, of course, sounds more like the right cerebral hemisphere than the ‘superconscious mind’. But then, the right cerebral hemisphere might well be the ‘seat’ of the superconscious mind, if such a thing exists.

  Of course, we are all aware that we develop into a series of different people over the course of a lifetime. But we say this is ‘only a manner of speaking’. Is it, though? Some people experience a total personality change when they get behind the wheel of a car; they feel as if a more reckless and impatient ‘self’ has taken over their body. A person involved in lovemaking for the first time may find that he/she is ‘taken over’ by another self, with its own biological purposes, and that he/she suddenly becomes oddly self-confident and purposeful. A mother holding her first baby is startled to feel a kind of archetypal mother inside herself taking over her responses and her mind . . .

  This leads me to speculate that we may all begin life as a whole series of selv
es, encapsulated like those Japanese paper flowers, waiting for the right moment to unfold. Someone who never loses their virginity, a woman who never becomes a mother, never allows that particular self to enter the world of the living. Yet a priest who becomes a saint may allow still higher ‘selves’ to unfold, while the rest of us remain trapped in a routine of getting and spending. A Queen Elizabeth or Florence Nightingale may develop areas of her being which remain unconscious in the satisfied housewife.

  All this seems to provide a possible explanation for Alan Vaughan’s experience, when ‘Z’ drove the Nantucket ‘spirit’ out of his head. He obviously felt an immense and boundless relief, an explosion of sheer delight. Could this have lifted him, as it were, to a higher rung on the ‘ladder of selves’? For one thing is perfectly clear: the ‘lower’ we feel, the more we are subject to time. At the beginning of a railway journey, I may feel so concentrated and absorbed that I can simply look out of the window, and experience all kinds of interesting insights and sensations. Later on, I feel less absorbed, but can nevertheless find pleasure in a book. If the journey is far too long, and the train breaks down, and I get cold and hungry, all my concentration vanishes, and time now drags itself slowly, ‘like a wounded snake’. The less absorbed I become, the slower time passes. It seems, therefore, reasonable to assume that if I could reach some entirely new level of delight and concentration, time would virtually disappear. In such a state, I might well know what was passing in other people’s minds, and know the future. At all events, it seems clear that psychological time is closely related to our control over our own inner states. It seems likely that someone who had achieved a perfect level of collaboration between the right and left hemispheres, instead of the present mutual misunderstanding and confusion, would be able to slow time down or speed it up at will. Therefore, whatever we know or do not know about time, one thing seems certain: that increased understanding of our own latent powers will bring increased insight into the nature of time.

  It could also bring insight into the oddest of all mysteries connected with time: the problem of synchronicity.

  The word was coined by the psychologist C. G. Jung to describe what he called ‘meaningful coincidence’. As an example, he offers the amusing case of M. Fortgibu, as recounted by the French scientist Camille Flammarion, in his book The Unknown. This is Flammarion’s own account:

  ‘Emile Deschamps, a distinguished poet, somewhat overlooked in these days, one of the authors of the libretto of the ‘Huguenots’, tells of a curious series of fortuitous coincidences as follows:

  ‘In his childhood, being at a boarding-school at Orleans, he chanced to find himself on a certain day at table with a M. de Fortgibu, an émigré recently returned from England, who made him taste a plum-pudding, a dish almost unknown at that time in France.

  ‘The remembrance of that feast had by degrees faded from his memory, when, ten years later, passing by a restaurant on the Boulevard Poissonière, he perceived inside it a plum-pudding of most excellent appearance.

  ‘He went in and asked for a slice of it, but was informed that the whole had been ordered by another customer. ‘M. de Fortgibu,’ cried the dame du comptoir, seeing that Deschamps looked disappointed, ‘would you have the goodness to share your plum-pudding with this gentleman?’

  ‘Deschamps had some difficulty in recognizing M. de Fortgibu in an elderly man, with powdered hair, dressed in a colonel’s uniform, who was taking his dinner at one of the tables.

  ‘The officer said it would give him pleasure to offer part of his pudding to the gentleman.

  ‘Long years had passed since Deschamps had even thought of plum-pudding, or of M. de Fortgibu.

  ‘One day he was invited to a dinner where there was to be a real English plum-pudding. He accepted the invitation, but told the lady of the house, as a joke, that he knew M. de Fortgibu would be of the party, and he caused much amusement by giving the reason.

  ‘The day came, and he went to the house. Ten guests occupied the ten places at table, and a magnificent plum-pudding was served. They were beginning to laugh at Deschamps about his M. de Fortgibu, when the door opened and a servant announced:

  ‘“M. de Fortgibu.”

  ‘An old man entered, walking feebly, with the help of a servant. He went slowly round the table, as if looking for somebody, and he seemed greatly disconcerted. Was it a vision? or was it a joke?

  ‘It was the time of the Carnival, and Deschamps was sure it was a trick. But as the old man approached him he was forced to recognize M. de Fortgibu in person.

  ‘“My hair stood up on my head,” he said. “Don Juan, in the chef d’œuvre of Mozart, was not more terrified by his guest of stone.”

  ‘All was soon explained. M. de Fortgibu had been asked to dinner by a friend who lived in the same house, but had mistaken the door of his apartment.

  ‘There is really in this story a series of coincidences which confounds us, and we can understand the exclamation of the author when the remembrance of a thing so extraordinary occurred to him: “Three times in my life have I eaten plum-pudding, and three times have I seen M. de Fortgibu! A fourth time I should feel capable of anything . . . or capable of nothing!”’

  This last comment recalls Richard Church’s feeling, described in Chapter 1, when he realised that the blows of the wood-chopper’s axe were not synchronising with its sound: the sudden exultant feeling that time is somehow a cheat, and that man is far more free than he realises – a recognition that allowed Church to float off the ground and fly. The word ‘synchronicity’ was coined by Jung in connection with the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes, which the Chinese consult as an ‘oracle’. The method of ‘consulting’ the I Ching consists of throwing down three coins at random half a dozen times and noting whether there are more heads or tails. Two or three tails gives a line with a break in the middle, as in the diagram below; three heads gives an unbroken line. The six lines, placed on top of one another, form a ‘hexagram’:

  The above hexagram is number 58, ‘The Joyous—Lake’, with a ‘Judgement’: ‘The Joyous, Success—Perseverance is favourable.’ But from the logical point of view it is obviously impossible to explain how throwing down coins at random can provide an answer—even if the question has been very clearly and precisely formulated in the mind before the coins are thrown.

  If, against all reason, it actually works, then we must conclude that there is some ‘hidden mechanism’ that causes it to work. Such a mechanism could only involve a connection between the mind and the external world, so that the one could influence the other. One obvious possibility is ‘extra-sensory perception’ (ESP). Dame Rebecca West has described how she was in the London Library, trying to check up on an episode in one of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, and how she discovered, to her annoyance, that the trials were not arranged in alphabetical order. After an hour of fruitless searching, she addressed a librarian who was approaching her and started to complain, reaching out as she did so to illustrate her point by showing him a typical volume. The one she picked opened at the page she had been looking for.

  This certainly sounds like some form of ESP, some unconscious knowledge of where the passage was located. But what about the chance that caused the librarian to be standing in front of the book at the right moment? We have here such a complex situation that it is difficult to think of an answer in terms of some ‘passive’ faculty like ESP.

  Another story concerning Rebecca West underlines this point. Again in the London Library, she was waiting for a copy of Gounod’s Memoirs to arrive. She was approached by an American who recognised her, and who asked if it was true that she possessed some lithographs by the artist Delpeche. They were still talking about Delpeche when the Memoirs arrived; she opened it casually, and found herself looking at the name Delpeche—a passage in which Gounod described how Delpeche had been kind to his mother. The assistant was already on his way to collect the Memoirs when the artist approached her, so again we have a complex situation tha
t cannot be explained in terms of ESP. We are forced to fall back on ‘coincidence’.

  But some synchronicities seem so preposterous that this explanation seems increasingly hollow. The best example I can give is a personal one. When writing an article about synchronicity (for An Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries), I began to experience a series of absurd synchronicities, the oddest of which was as follows. I was describing an experience of the ‘Ufologist’ Jacques Vallee, who became interested in a Los Angeles religious cult known as the Order of Melchizedec—Melchizedek being one of the obscurer Biblical prophets. (We have already encountered him in connection with Dion Fortune.) Vallee had searched for information about the prophet, but without much success. In the midst of this search, he took a taxi to Los Angeles airport, and asked his lady taxi driver for a receipt. She gave him a receipt signed ‘M. Melchizedec’. He thought this an amusing coincidence, which suggested that there were more Melchizedecs around than he had assumed. But when he checked the Los Angeles telephone directory—a vast compilation in several volumes—he found only one Melchizedec—his taxi driver.

  Vallee said it was as if he had stuck a notice on some universal notice board: ‘Wanted—Melchizedecs’, and some earnest guardian angel had asked: ‘How about this?’ ‘No, no, that’s no good—that’s a taxi driver . . .’

  Vallee points out that there are two ways in which a librarian can store information. One is in alphabetical order. But a simpler system would be to place each book on the nearest shelf as it arrived, and have some straightforward method of retrieving it—like a ‘beeper’ on the spine of every book, which would respond to a radio signal by making a noise to signal its position. Vallee is suggesting that this may be how the universe is constructed—on a system known as a ‘random data base’—and that it could explain apparent ‘synchronicities’.