And now, at last, we seem to be getting closer to a comprehensive theory of the paranormal. The human organism—this brain and body with which we are born—is an enormous computer, containing thousands, probably millions, of circuits that we never use. Absurd and paradoxical as it sounds, man actually is a god. His capacities are superhuman. What seems to have gone wrong is that he has allowed himself to become subject to some kind of law of diminishing returns that has reduced him to a mere fraction of his stature.
The chief problem, of course, is where the computer came from. In Arthur Koestler’s parable about the Arab shopkeeper who prayed for an adding frame, and was given a modern computer, Allah was responsible for the mistake. Another notion is that man is some kind of fallen angel, a view that ‘occultists’ will find plausible enough, but scientific evolutionists will find difficult to swallow. Fortunately, we are not forced to choose between these two views; there is a third possibility. In The Hunting Hypothesis, Robert Andrey writes about a species of finch that has lived on the Galapagos Islands for hundreds of generations—long enough to sub-divide into fourteen species. On the Galapagos there are no predatory hawks as there are on the mainland, where the finch originated. Yet when a baby finch is taken from the Islands to California and sees a hawk for the first time, it instantly reacts with typical alarm. The instinct which meant life or death to its remote ancestors is still there, unimpaired after centuries of disuse.
According to the latest scientific estimates, man in his present form is about three million years old, and his various ancestors stretch back for half a billion years. His computer of a brain—all three of them—is perfectly adequate to store up every vital response he has learned during the whole of that period. Obviously, the majority are never needed—like the finch’s response to hawks. Yet they are there, and can be activated under the right circumstances.
This provides an explanation for such powers as telepathy and second sight. If, as seems highly likely, animals and plants possess such powers, then we must possess them too. The same kind of explanation could even be stretched to fit such problems as psychokinesis and poltergeist activity. If we can accept the existence of unknown forms of energy capable of carrying thoughts from mind to mind, it is easy to imagine such energy being harnessed for other purposes. After all, radio waves can be used to cook a steak, or melt a piece of metal.
The real problem arises when we try to explain precognition. There is no way in which we can possibly grasp the notion that it is possible to see into the future. Our senses and our common sense tell us it is impossible. Yet hundreds of recorded cases of precognition assure us that our senses must be mistaken.
John Bennett believed he had found a solution in the theory of a fifth dimension. In his autobiography Witness,1 he describes how he was fascinated by Einstein’s hypothesis that the ether must be some kind of material substance with the apparently impossible property of travelling in all directions at once at the speed of light. He goes on:
The following evening, at dusk, I was walking back to my office to finish some reports … when the solution struck me like an electric shock. In a moment of time, I saw a whole new world. The train of thought was too rapid for words, but it was something like this: ‘If there is a fifth dimension not like space but like time, and if it is orthogonal [at right angles] to the space-time we know, then it would have the required property. Any matter existing in that direction would appear from our standpoint to be travelling at the speed of light. And moreover it would travel in all directions at once. This must be the solution of Einstein’s riddle. If so, the fifth dimension must be as real as the space and time we know. But the extra degree of freedom given by the fifth dimension opens all kinds of possibilities. It means that time itself is not unique, and that if there is more than one time, there is more than one future. If there are many times, there would be the possibility of choosing between them. In each line of time, there can be a strict causality, but by changing from one line to another we can be free. It is like a railway passenger; so long as he remains on one train his destination is decided in advance. But he can change the train at a junction and so decide his destination.
With these notions flashing through my mind, I saw that my own riddle of free will and determinism could be solved by the addition of a fifth dimension.
The reasoning here may seem obscure, but the conclusion is plain enough. As living creatures, we find ourselves confined in a world that appears to have four dimensions, three of space and one of time. Our science concerns itself with this world. But this ‘real world’, as grasped by reason, leaves no room for life, let alone for freedom. We ought to be totally trapped in cause and effect. Yet I can reach up and scratch my nose or decide not to scratch it; I can decide whether to think about philosophy, sex or my dinner. There is no room for freedom in the real world, yet it exists. Stare at your face in a mirror until you have lost all sense of identity; suddenly, you are seized with horror at this strange face looking at you. You were living in your own inner world of being and freedom and, suddenly, you are stranded in a world of objects in which freedom is an impossibility.
That is the problem Bennett is trying to solve by the addition of a fifth dimension; seen in this light, his solution is plain and sensible enough. If time is a fourth dimension, as Einstein asserts, then my inner freedom is a fifth dimension—a realm that declines to be ‘placed’ in the first four.
This odd idea suggests another interesting conclusion. Einstein said that time must be the fourth dimension because you need it to ‘define’ an event. I can say ‘I’ll meet you on the fifth floor of the building at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Twenty-Second Street’, and I have defined the place in terms of three dimensions; but if I forget to mention the time of the meeting, it may well never take place. If we think of the fifth dimension as our inner freedom, we might say: ‘No event can be entirely defined in terms of four dimensions. For I may decide not to go to the meeting—exercising my freedom—in which case, it will still not take place, even though you have specified the other four co-ordinates.’ And from your point of view, this element cannot be defined or fixed, for I might make any one of a thousand different decisions. Think of a worm crawling across a cabbage leaf; it is virtually a creature of two dimensions; what lies over the next bump on the leaf does not yet exist. Yet as you look down on the leaf from above, you can say with confidence that the worm is shortly going to encounter a large caterpillar hole. Because the hole is already there, a definite place which can be defined in terms of certain co-ordinates.
If we can imagine a being that is able to look down on our freedom from above—from some sixth dimension, so to speak—we can see that whatever we choose to do is also ‘fixed’; like the hole, it is already there.
But surely that destroys the whole idea of freedom? Not quite. Think again of the worm on the leaf. If it continues in a straight line, it will encounter the hole. But it may change its direction. It may decide to sit still. The only thing you can say with certainty is that it will not fly into the air, because it has no wings. So you can easily outline all the possibilities that are open to it. And if it is moving in a straight line, you can choose one of them as by far the likeliest. Yet the worm remains ‘free’.
Such arguments may strike the reader as too abstract to be of value. But is is possible to arrive at similar conclusions from a strictly practical basis. An excellent example can be found in Charles Tart’s book, Psi: Scientific Studies of the Psychic Realm. Tart describes how his colleague, Dr Lila Gatlin, a specialist in information theory, subjected the results of certain precognition tests to statistical analysis. Her studies convinced her that there was something wrong. When people tried to guess what the next target would be, they seemed to be getting results that were below chance. And that was absurd. Tart considered the problem and came up with an interesting theory. If I am asked to guess what number on a dice will turn up next, I will automatically take into account the last throw. For example, if the last throw was a six, then I probably won’t guess six for the next throw, because I will feel that it is less likely than the other five numbers. (This is not true; it has exactly the same six-to-one chance of turning up.) We tend to avoid the past result. But if genuine precognition has taken place—so that the subject has an intuitive glimpse of the next target—is it not possible that he may react in the same way and avoid the future target in the same way that he avoids the past one? As Tart points out, many processes in physics are ‘symmetrical’—if an atomic process creates a negatively charged particle, it will also create a positively charged one.
Tart ended by positing a second dimension of time (and, he adds, probably of space as well). ‘This second dimension acts as a channel for psi information. I theorize that one property of this second dimension of time is that the experienced present of awareness is wider than the experienced present of ordinary consciousness.’ What he is saying is that ordinary consciousness focuses on a very narrow ‘band’ of time, which we call the present. It lasts for a few tenths of a second, which is to say that we do not notice sensations that last for less than that. But we are aware of the ‘second dimension of time’ as a wider band, stretching a little further into past and future.
Tart makes use of another helpful analogy. If you take a sharp pencil and press it on your bare skin without looking at it you will at first feel as if you were being touched by a wide, blunt point. This is because the pencil stretches your skin, and affects more distant ‘receptors’. But after a few moments, you will experience the pencil as a sharp point. This is a process called ‘lateral inhibition’; the receptors have somehow cancelled one another out, to give you a sharper picture. The same technique can be used in space probes, so that a blurry photograph of a volcano on Mars can be sharpened to give more information.
Tart believes that our minds naturally have the ability to probe past and future, but that we also have a ‘lateral inhibition’ mechanism which gives us a sharper focus, so we concentrate on a hard, clear present moment. This enables us to function better. But we can deliberately develop an ability to ‘blur’ the present, so that we again become aware of the future, rather like looking through your eye lashes.
This is, of course, similar to the theory put forward by Bergson and Aldous Huxley (and discussed at the end of Chapter 6): that the nervous system is a filter, designed to keep things out rather than let them in, and that if the filter was removed, we would be flooded with all kinds of useless paranormal information. But Tart has arrived at his theory not through philosophical speculation, but through statistical analysis of laboratory experiments.
There is one obvious objection to Tart’s theory of precognition: it fails to explain how psychics can sometimes foresee an event that may occur weeks or years in the future; his ‘band of perception’ of the second dimension of time is fairly narrow. And clearly, this problem is analogous to the question of how a dowser can accurately trace a stream on a map with the aid of a pendulum. Whatever faculty is at work, it is apparently not limited to narrow bands.
The problem may be that Tart, like Bennett, is still thinking in terms of scientific logic, while ultimately trying to deny the validity of such logic. The real task, of course, is to rebuild the whole philosophy of science on a new foundation. Bennett had the courage to make the attempt in his vast work The Dramatic Universe, whose title suggests its basic thesis: that the universe should be seen as an unfolding drama rather than as a machine; but the obscurity of the book makes it difficult to decide how far he succeeded.
One of the most remarkable and constructive attempts to ‘rebuild science’ in our own time is to be found in the work of Arthur Young, the author of The Reflexive Universe and The Geometry of Meaning. As early as 1927, Young, who later achieved fame as the inventor of the Bell helicopter, recognised that the problem is that logic, by its very nature, can make no allowance for freedom. This struck him when he was considering ‘the Cretan paradox’: that if a Cretan remarks that all Cretans are liars, then he must be telling a lie—in which case, he is telling the truth. But if he is telling the truth, then he is contradicting himself when he says all Cretans are liars. Young reasoned that the problem could be solved only by recognising that we have to take time into account. The Cretan has every right to say what he wants about the past; but his judgment cannot cover the statement he is now making. Judgments, says Young, cannot include themselves. But what he is really saying is that while a man is alive and free, he cannot be ‘pinned down’ as a liar, or anything else. In fact, Young anticipated Sartre, who declared that the human essence is freedom. A man may behave like a coward on a thousand occasions, but it is still untrue to label him a coward, because he may behave like a hero on the thousand and first.
Young’s philosophy is too complex to be summarised here, but it is possible to describe at least its central idea. Young became convinced that the recurrence of the number seven in religious and mythological texts is no accident; that it corresponds to something fundamental in the structure of the universe. There are, he speculates, seven ‘levels of existence’. In purely physical terms, there are sub-atomic particles (electrons, etc.), atoms, molecules, plants, and animals, each more complex than the last. Beyond these lies—potentially—the level we call the human; yet man is still ninety-nine per cent animal; true freedom is still no more than a potentiality. Even so, this is only six ‘levels’. The seventh, he eventually concluded, is that of light, which is capable of creating particles. Light is the first step in the great process. And the evolution of matter—from light to molecules may be conceived as a kind of ‘fall’. Light loses its freedom in creating sub-atomic particles; free electrons lose their freedom in condensing into atoms; atoms lose freedom by forming molecules.
But beyond these first four stages of the ‘fall’, a new ascent begins. Plants represent a new struggle for freedom, and animals a still higher level. The final level is still to come; this is the struggle we are still engaged in.
Like Charlotte Bach, Young believes that all evolution is purposive. He points out that light, in entering the earth’s atmosphere, follows the path that will get it to its destination in the least time; Max Planck observed that in this respect, light behaves like an intelligent being. This tendency of energy to choose the path that will take the least time, Planck called ‘action’; and he made the famous discovery that ‘action’ comes in discrete packets, which he called quanta. Young points out that ‘wholeness’ is also true of human action; we cannot perform any act one and a half times; if you jump out of a window, you either do it or you don’t.
Readers without training in quantum physics may find all this bewildering; but Young’s conclusion is clarity itself. ‘The older concept of a universe made up of physical particles interacting according to fixed laws is no longer tenable. It is implicit in present findings that action rather than matter is basic, action being understood as something essentially undefinable and non-objective, analogous, I would add, to human decision.’ And he takes the bull by the horns when he asserts that inventing the Bell helicopter taught him that evolution is essentially a purposive process.
In a sense, Young is trying to say the unsayable. Nothing is easier than to produce a philosophy that allows no room for freedom, that reduces the universe to material terms—as Hume does in the Treatise of Human Nature or as Professor Jacques Monod has more recently in Chance and Necessity. It has the alluring simplicity of a two-dimensional projection. Conversely, nothing is more difficult than to try to pin down freedom in terms of logic. A good example of the difficulty can be seen in Wittgenstein’s Zettel, where he tries to define the meaning of the word ‘intention’. ‘Intention is neither an emotion, a mood, nor yet a sensation or image. It is not a state of consciousness. It does not have any genuine duration. “I have the intention of going away tomorrow.” When have you that intention? The whole time; or intermittently?’2 The truth is that an intention is a pure expression of my freedom. And although it takes time to carry out an intention, the intention itself does not happen in time. So when Arthur Young says that the basic unit of reality is ‘action’ and compares it to human decision (i.e., intentionality), he has carried the argument to a level where, in a sense, language cannot follow him.
When we look at the world through the spectacles of science, we are missing out a vitally important element: human freedom. This means that it is almost impossible to construct a ‘scientific’ theory of evolution, because the most essential element keeps getting left out. Yet the moment I approach the matter through intuition, the dilemma vanishes. Intentionality can be strong or weak. When a bored man lights his fiftieth cigarette of the day, it is weak; when Romeo climbs into Juliet’s bedroom, it is strong. The effectiveness of an intention depends upon its strength. If I hold up my hand and waggle my fingers, my intention is instantly translated into action, because my muscles are obedient to even a weak intention. But if I try to control the pounding of my heart when I am feeling nervous, it may only make things worse. This is not because it is impossible; people can learn to control their heartbeat and even their blood pressure with the use of bio-feedback machines. It is because intentionality needs to be far stronger for such a difficult matter. On the other hand, heightened intentionality can bring an astonishing degree of control—as when Bennett told himself ‘Be surprised’, and was overwhelmed with astonishment.
This, as Charlotte Bach and Arthur Young have pointed out, is what evolution is really about: using our freedom to increase our freedom. And since the essence of freedom is ‘mystical’, then evolution is basically a mystical rather than a scientific concept.
It is now possible to see why science feels so embarrassed when faced with the concept of the paranormal. It finds it hard enough to come to terms with the basic tenet of existentialism: that man is free. It finds it almost impossible to cope with the main implication of occultism: that man possesses far more freedom than he realises. Yet this is, unmistakably, the message that comes from all fields of paranormal research. When Proust discovered that a cake dipped in tea could make the past as real as the present, he had discovered a new dimension of human freedom. (This is why he spoke of ‘ceasing to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal’.) The same was true for Felicia Parise when she discovered that she could move a plastic bottle by concentrating on it. And for Jane O’Neill when she saw Fotheringhay church as it was five centuries ago. And for Tom Lethbridge when he used a pendulum to locate buried metal. And for Sylvan Muldoon and Robert Monroe when they found themselves hovering above their physical bodies. All paranormal experience carries the same message: man’s everyday view of himself is somehow profoundly mistaken.
But even if we are prepared to acknowledge this much, we are still left with another major objection: the whole realm of the paranormal seems to be so mad and disconnected. It is as if someone took two hundred pages at random out of textbooks on physics, chemistry, biology, psychology and a dozen other sciences, bound them together in one volume, and called the result ‘An Outline of Modern Scientific Knowledge’. It is tempting to regard the whole field of the paranormal as a realm of weird phenomena and peculiar people—Uri Geller, Daniel Dunglas Home, Madame Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, Rasputin, Nostradamus, Cagliostro—all demonstrating utterly inconsequential powers like spoon-bending, levitation and automatic writing. Understandably, most scientists find it easier to condemn the whole thing as a kind of fantasy.
In this book I have attempted to show that one simple hypothesis can bring a certain amount of order into the confusion: the notion that the mind of man possesses many levels. We are familiar enough with the notion of unconscious levels, and the fact that such functions as digestion and body temperature operate on these levels. It is no more difficult to grasp the proposition that ‘paranormal powers’ could also operate on other levels of consciousness. The most controversial consequence of this assumption is that these powers are not waiting to evolve; they are already fully evolved, and are simply waiting for us to achieve a level at which we can make use of them. This is, admittedly, a paradoxical state of affairs; but when so much evidence points in this direction, it would be absurd to ignore it.
Which brings us once more to the question that human beings have always recognised as the greatest of all: the problem of death. It is all very well for Proust to say that he ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal; the fact remained that he was mortal and met the same end as everybody else. Therefore, presumably, his ‘insight’ was untrue.
Spiritualism denies this and asserts that there is now abundant evidence to show that the spirit survives the death of the physical body. Paranormal research is less dogmatic; it agrees that the evidence seems to point in this direction, but denies that it is as conclusive as the spiritualists would like to believe.
Stan Gooch summarises the problem in his book The Paranormal. After describing his own experience of trance mediumship and even of ‘memories of previous lives’, he points out that most of the evidence seems to come from the most unreliable witness of all: the unconscious mind. For the unconscious mind has a remarkable ability to invent detailed and apparently factual stories—as demonstrated in our dreams. He goes on: ‘I believe the strong tendency of the unconscious to produce stories is connected with a desire of the unconscious—the “female principle”—to divert and entertain.’ As a human being, he admits to a desire to believe in life after death; as a scientist, he finds the case unproved.
The evidence for ‘survival’ falls into three main groups: so-called ‘communication with the dead’; people who have experienced ‘death’ and returned to tell the tale; and doctors and nurses who have observed ‘deathbed hallucinations’.
The ambiguity of the first kind of evidence can be seen in the case that started the spiritualist movement. The ‘spirit’ that made its presence known by rappings in the home of the Fox sisters identified itself as a murdered peddler named Charles B. Rosma, who had been buried in the basement. No person of that name could be traced, but digging in the basement uncovered fragments of hair and bone in quicklime. More than half a century later, in 1904, workmen repairing an old wall close to the cellar discovered an almost complete human skeleton and a peddler’s tin box.
Against this evidence we must place the testimony of the second of the Fox sisters, Margaret, who in 1888 publicly ‘confessed’ that she and her two sisters had produced the knockings fraudulently. She said that the knockings were produced by dropping an apple or cracking their joints, and gave a demonstration in front of a theatre audience. But then, Margaret, and Kate, the youngest of the sisters, were on bad terms with their elder sister Leah by that time and had been embittered by poverty and illness after the death of their husbands. Leah was still a successful medium. The confession was clearly motivated by a desire to hurt and to earn money (their ‘confession’ made them one thousand five hundred dollars), and perhaps to regain some of the lost limelight. Above all, the knockings were often described as loud and distinct bangs and could not have been produced in the manner described by Margaret. So again we have to record another ‘unproven’ verdict.
This, as Stan Gooch points out, is the case in the great majority of instances of ‘communication with the dead’. There are, he admits, a few that are slightly more convincing. After the death of F. W. H. Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, in 1901, his Cambridge neighbour Mrs Verrall began to receive ‘communications’ in automatic script that purported to come from Myers and his two collaborators, Sidgwick and Gurney. The most convincing part about these scripts is that similar messages were also received by other mediums in other countries as far apart as India and America; moreover, the various parts of the scripts fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle. (The case became known as the ‘cross correspondences’.) But then, it must be admitted that many of the scripts were extremely obscure, being in Greek and Latin as well as English. It would take a very large volume to summarise all the evidence—the communications went on for decades—and few people would have the patience to arrive at an assessment. If Myers really wanted to prove that he was still alive, he chose a most unsatisfactory method.
Gooch also cites a more straightforward case described by Nils Jacobsen. In 1928, Jacobsen’s uncle was run over by a lorry and died in hospital without recovering consciousness; the family naturally assumed that the death was due to concussion, since he sustained head injuries. Six years later, a ‘spirit’ purporting to be the dead uncle contacted his family through a medium and mentioned that he had not died of concussion but of some ailment originating in a lower bone. A check of the hospital records showed this to be true—a blood clot from the bone had caused a stoppage in the brain. If it could be established that no one knew this, then it would certainly be convincing proof that the information originated with the dead man. But, as Gooch points out, the surgeon who performed the post mortem knew, and a member of the family could have picked it up from him telepathically. So again, the evidence cannot be regarded as airtight.
The other two categories of proof are, by their hearsay nature, even less convincing. Raymond A. Moody’s book Life After Life contains many remarkable accounts by people who have been pronounced dead, then recovered and described ‘after death’ experiences. The book is dedicated to Dr George Ritchie, a Virginian psychiatrist who is himself the author of one of the most circumstantial accounts. In December 1943, Ritchie, an army private, was in hospital in Texas with an upper respiratory infection. He began to spit blood, his temperature rose, and he lost consciousness. He woke up feeling confused, convinced that he had to catch a train to the medical school in Virginia; then he looked around and saw his own body on the bed. Outside in the corridor, a ward boy walked straight through him. He tried tapping a man on the shoulder and went through him; he leaned back against a guide wire and fell through it. Now finally convinced that he was insubstantial, he went to his own body and tried to get back into it; this proved to be impossible.
So far, Ritchie’s account has been circumstantial and convincing; from this point on, it ceases to be either. He describes how the room suddenly became brighter—‘like a thousand arc lights’—and a presence he identified as Jesus appeared. What follows sounds like a religious fantasy. Jesus took him on a flight through the air and into a great city; they walked through a red-light quarter, and Ritchie was able to witness the consequences of sin at first hand. They saw a bodiless alcoholic who kept trying to grab a bottle of whisky, but his hand went through it. Eventually, after more adventures of this kind, Private Ritchie was allowed back into his own body, a chastened and a wiser man.
Sceptics might be forgiven for concluding that this was a cynical and not-particularly subtle invention in the revivalist tradition of Twelve Nights in a Bar Room. But prima facie evidence makes it seem unlikely; Ritchie is a psychiatrist, with a position in a major hospital; if he wanted to invent a tale with a moral, he could easily have made it more convincing. If we find it impossible to accept the story as he tells it, the likeliest explanation is that his unconscious was setting out to divert and entertain. From which emerges an important and sobering lesson: that nothing is easier than to invent a story of paranormal experience that sounds circumstantial and convincing, and that if the conscious mind is too honest to do it, the unconscious will happily take the responsibility.
Does that mean that all such experiences must be dismissed as dreams? Such an attitude would not be as sensible as it sounds. Where ‘proof’ is concerned, every one of us has to rely on his own subjective judgment; and we exercise this judgment every day of our lives. If something strikes us as true, the best thing is to stand by that judgment, while bearing in mind that we could be mistaken. And if people I know believe that they have had a paranormal experience, then it is up to me to make up my mind (a) whether they are being totally honest, (b) whether they have been deceived by the unconscious mind.
I can illustrate this through an experience that happened to my mother. In 1955, our family doctor failed to diagnose a stomach pain as appendicitis; the appendix ruptured and she was rushed into hospital with peritonitis. For the rest of that year, she was in and out of hospital, having operation after operation. During this time I was writing my first book in London; on visits to the hospital in Leicester I saw her becoming steadily weaker. She says that she finally became convinced she was dying and felt quite resigned to it—even happy.
Nothing else mattered. And suddenly I looked at the side of the bed, and there was this old fellow with a white beard, and he looked like a biblical character. I remember glancing down and noticing that he had sandals on. He’d got a kind of scroll in his hands, like those you see on a gravestone, and he unwound it, and started to talk to me. The words were most beautiful—I just wish I could remember the words, but I can’t. He looked as though he was reading the words to me. Then he looked at me and said: ‘Now look, you can’t go yet, there’s too much for you to do. You’re needed here.’ I felt ever so happy. I wish I could remember what he said. But he promised me something—he said I’d got to stay here for some reason. After he’d gone, I felt much better. And I knew I didn’t have to die, if what he said was true. I knew it was true, because his voice was so gentle.
It is almost impossible to evaluate an experience like this. She is emphatic that it was not a dream. ‘I was wide awake and I saw him. I thought it might have been your great grandad, but Aunt Con says he didn’t have a little white goatee beard like this fellow.’ Could he have been, as she suggests, some ‘biblical character’? This seems unlikely, since his last words to her before he vanished were ‘Shangri-la’—presumably pronounced as a kind of benediction—and it seems unlikely that a disembodied spirit would mention a place invented by the novelist James Hilton.3
On the other hand, the ‘promise’ came true; she was in hospital again the following May when my book The Outsider was published, and the nurse brought her in the early reviews, which launched it to best-sellerdom. After this, her life, like my own, changed considerably. The comment ‘You’re needed here’, also proved to be prophetic; in the late 1960s, my father became ill with cancer and had to be nursed through the last seven years of his life.
Clearly, the experience with the old man meant a great deal to my mother. She has frequently said, ever since then, that she now has no fear of death. Although she agrees that it could have been some kind of hallucination, she nevertheless feels that it was sent to tell her something that was true. I am inclined to believe that her illness allowed her some precognitive glimpse of the future, and that the biblical figure was the method adopted by her subconscious mind to bring it to her attention and revive her will to live.
In 1960, Dr Karlis Osis, director of research at the Parapsychology Foundation in New York, decided to conduct a full-scale investigation into ‘hallucinations’ of this type. He decided that the people who would know most about ‘crisis apparitions’ would be doctors and nurses; accordingly, he sent out ten thousand questionnaires. From the replies, he obtained more than 35,000 observations of dying patients. One interesting point to emerge was that fear was not the most frequent emotion experienced by the dying, although there was a great deal of pain and discomfort. But in a large number of cases, the patient seemed to experience a state of great happiness, usually starting about two hours before death. And in many of these cases, the patient was convinced that he had seen something—frequently a deceased relative. In the majority of cases, the patient was fully awake and in an un-drugged state; oxygen starvation to the brain was also ruled out as a cause.
In order to find out whether these ‘hallucinations’ were peculiar to Christian culture, Dr Osis began parallel studies of deathbed observations in America and India. The results were strikingly similar; the difference in culture made no difference. The other obvious possibility—that visions of dead relatives might be wish-fulfillment—was rejected because in many cases the dying patient strenuously objected to being ‘taken away’ by the unseen visitor.
In one interesting case, a woman died soon after childbirth in a Clapton hospital; she had not been told that her sister had died in the meantime. Shortly before her death, she stared in astonishment, and told the doctor that her deceased father had entered the room with her sister (whom she still believed to be alive). The case cannot be regarded as conclusive, since she may have learned of her sister’s death telepathically, perhaps through the doctor or nurses. But here again, the most striking thing is the access to true information of someone on the point of death.4
Perhaps the real significance of the work of Dr Karlis Osis is that, by bringing together such a mass of deathbed observations, he has given the notion of life after death a new kind of statistical likelihood. Most people have heard of at least one dying person who thought he saw dead relatives; but such cases seem to be the exception. A volume describing the final moments of well-known people (i.e. sufficiently well-known to be written about) might also provide some interesting information. Wordsworth, on the point of death, thought he saw his dead sister Dorothy enter the room (although he may have been mistaking his niece for Dorothy). Emanuel Swedenborg predicted the exact date of his death many weeks in advance; a servant girl present at his deathbed reported: ‘He was pleased, as if he was going to have a holiday, to go on some merry-making.’ William Blake—as might be expected—‘died in a most glorious manner’. Blake had always possessed the faculty of seeing disembodied spirits and ‘elementals’, and accounts by his contemporaries show that he meant he saw them literally, not through imagination. His friends Varley and Linnell used to sit beside him for hours as he stared into space and drew portraits of people he claimed to be able to see quite clearly. At Felpham, on the coast of Sussex, he remarked that ‘voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen’. Of his death, his wife wrote: ‘Just before he died his countenance became fair—his eyes brightened, and he burst out in singing of the things he saw in heaven.’
Tolstoy seems to have recorded some similar insight at the end of his story The Death of Ivan Ilyich, describing a man’s death from cancer: ‘He sought his accustomed fear of death but did not find it … There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light. “So that’s what it is,” he suddenly exclaimed aloud, “What joy!”’ The episode has the ring of a personal insight.
It would probably be true to say, then, that there is an impressive amount of evidence for ‘survival’, none of it watertight, yet convincing through sheer bulk. Why is it, then, that so many Christians remain unconvinced by the evidence offered by spiritualism?
It is, I think, basically a sense of the irrelevance of ‘survival’. What is wrong with human existence is its dreamlike quality—what Camus called its absurdity. Death is simply the final absurdity. So it is no answer to believe that life continues on the other side of death. It may be true; but it is still no answer.
It is our fundamental instinct for evolution, for meaning, that produces this sense of absurdity. If I read a book like War and Peace or The Old Wives’ Tale, I realise that I am drawn on by a desire to see the characters fulfilling themselves. But even this seems to be largely a matter of biological drives. A woman wants to see the heroine fall in love, marry the man of her choice, and become the mother of a contented family. A man wants to see the hero achieve success and sexual fulfilment, but not necessarily to become a married man with a family. So even the basic notion of fulfilment differs from person to person. Louisa M. Alcott and the Marquis de Sade might belong to different species as well as different sexes. And when, in a long novel, we have seen the various fulfilments take place, we still experience a desire to go on, to go further. Instead, the characters get old and die. It feels as if something important has been left out, as if human life ought to contain another element not present in a novel. But it doesn’t. In life, as in the novel, we are left asking: What then?
A glimpse of something that looks like the answer occurs in the ‘mystical experience’, or even in sex. This is a new sense of power, of control. In the sexual orgasm—as described, for example, by D. H. Lawrence—everything seems to become more real, as if our feet were at last on some kind of solid ground. And then it suddenly becomes possible to see what is wrong with the notion of life after death that comes from study of the cross correspondence cases or the careers of famous mediums. For the question is precisely what survives death. These ‘glimpses’ seem to tell us that man is really a god. The personality is essentially a kind of illusion: my idea of what constitutes ‘me’. This changes throughout the course of my own lifetime; so it seems absurd that the personality called F. W. H. Myers should still be communicating half a century after his death.
Again, there is a feeling that many people—perhaps all—contain a seed of destiny, of meaning, when they are born, and that their lives are an attempt to allow this meaning to emerge. A picture of Beethoven at twelve suggests that the Ninth Symphony is already inside him, waiting to get out. Even I, as a writer, feel that I have spent my life persuading something to emerge and that every word I have written has been an attempt to give it form, and existence in the light of consciousness. The notion of life after death seems meaningless except as a continuation of that purpose. I never cease to feel that human existence is like crawling through a very low tunnel, with hardly any freedom of movement. Sometimes, when we suddenly become aware of how little freedom we possess, we experience a panic that springs from a terrible claustrophobia. The ultimate fulfilment we can envisage is to emerge into the daylight. If this is what is meant by life after death, then it is certainly to be welcomed; but I find nothing about it in the cases reported to the Society for Psychical Research.
I woke up one night having a dream that seemed to summarise the problem of human existence. I was being wheeled along in a bathchair outside the British Museum, pushed by two attendants; I had no memory of how I’d got there. I turned around and asked: ‘Would you mind telling me what we’re supposed to be doing?’ They looked at me in amazement, and one of them said: ‘We thought you knew.’
The basic absurdity seems to lie in the notion of time; and this explains why we feel dissatisfied with the idea of life ‘after’ death; it still implies being trapped in time, and therefore stuck in the same narrow tunnel. The ‘answer’ we require is not to be assured of life after death, but to understand the nature of time, and to be able to stand above it.
An interesting clue was thrown off by Dr Steve Rosen in a paper on time delivered at the Parascience Conference in London in 1976;5 he mentioned that we three-dimensional creatures perceive a line as stationary; but if we can imagine creatures who consisted of mere points, they would see the line as a succession of points, along which they had to move; it would be their equivalent of time. Perhaps, he suggested, our notion of ‘moving time’ is due to our ‘dimensional inferiority’; creatures in a higher dimension would perceive time as a stationary line.
We have already glanced at this type of speculation earlier in this chapter. But expressed in this manner, it points the way to the next logical step. Human beings are apparently both types of creatures. On one level, we are trapped in time; in another, we are capable of precognition, which suggests that we see the line as stationary. Some higher rung of the ladder of selves sticks out into the timeless realm.
But since I am down here, on the time level, this realisation seems to be of no particular use to me. What can I do about it? This depends very much on my attitude towards my time-existence. And here again, Arthur Young’s philosophy becomes relevant. Inanimate forms of existence, from light to inorganic molecules, are trapped in time; their existence is time. Plants and lower animals are obviously more trapped in time than human beings are. The plant’s life consists of growing, performing its functions, and dying. Animals, too, are trapped in this world of necessity, responding to a perpetual present.
Human beings are also animals, but we have developed the ability to turn our heads slightly, so that we are no longer merely part of the process that goes on around us. Man has struggled for mental freedom and has ended by creating a whole world that exists on another level. It began by being a realm of the gods; and, according to Julian Jaynes, man did not even need consciousness to respond to this realm. But his aim was to create consciousness, to create a mirror in which he could see his own face. According to Sir Julian Huxley, one of the most important events in the history of humanity was the invention of art. The moment he learned to tell stories, man moved up to a level from which he could contemplate his everyday life as something separate, as another type of story. He learned to draw, to create music, to study nature scientifically; every new development enabled him to take another step backward from the mirror. Even the invention of wine, around 8000 BC, may have been crucial in his development, since it has the same power to enable us to contemplate our lives from ‘above’, to rise above ‘contingency’.
But the creation of self-consciousness involved a basic danger. It introduced ‘Hamlet’s disease’. A simple, stupid creature, who plods on through life doing whatever has to be done, never loses a sense of movement, of freedom. The moment man learned to look at his face in a mirror, he lost this natural freedom. He was, admittedly, free to move forward; but he was also free to stand still, brooding on his own problems and unable to make up his mind. His new freedom brought a sense of inferiority; Hamlet may feel contempt for Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, but he admires their lack of self-doubt, just as T. E. Lawrence envied a soldier with his girl or a man patting a dog. We are now in the realm of the ‘Outsider’.
Essentially, the power to create is the power to grasp the world in concepts; but we end by viewing the world through our concepts, as through the bars of a cage. They colour everything we see, as the world of a bad-tempered man is coloured by his anger. This is as true of men of genius as it is of idiots. Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, were men enslaved by concepts. Dante’s cage, admittedly, was a large one, as large as the Catholic Church. But Shakespeare, for all his creative genius, was a slave to a pessimism that regarded human existence as meaningless, a tale told by an idiot. We find the same contradiction in Balzac: a vast world, seething with vitality, yet poisoned by a philosophy of despair, in which the greatest men are doomed to the same defeat as the stupidest.
The same thing applies to our science and the philosophy we have modelled upon it. Concepts have made us master of the atom; they have also reduced us to a bundle of conditioned reflexes. Science shows us a meaningless world of mechanical forces.
This explains the ‘existential dread’ that has haunted the Western mind for the past two centuries. Trapped in a dark universe of his own creation, man’s evolutionary drive is reduced to a hunger for security. This world around us may be meaningless, but at least it seems to be solid and stable. Perhaps death will snuff us out as if we had never existed; but we can bury our heads in the triviality of everydayness.
Philosophers have always recognised that the trouble lies in our concepts: that we live and breathe and see through them. Kant even thought that space and time were human creations, mere conditions of seeing. But Edmund Husserl was the first major philosopher to realise that concepts can enslave us only as long as we are unaware of their existence. As soon as the philosopher has identified and ‘stained’ them, as a biologist stains germs, they become harmless. Moreover, he recognised that the ability to be enslaved by concepts is a proof of the tremendous creativity of the human mind. And if we can once grasp that creativity, we can use our concepts to set us free. They may limit reality, but they can also help us penetrate deeper into reality—even to the realm of the ‘keepers of the keys of being’.
Gurdjieff was another who recognised that our major problem is a totally false way of seeing and grasping the universe. He states in Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson that man possesses two types of consciousness: one intuitive and direct, one based upon all kinds of false premises about reality of which we are not even aware. His own aim, he says, is to ‘corrode without mercy all the rubbish accumulated during the ages’. But Gurdjieff also recognised that these false concepts’ chief ally is the robot, which can be overruled by a sense of urgency. ‘The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences an organ … of such properties that every one … should constantly sense … the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or his attention rests.’
I had always recognised that this was the essence of the problem; that this was why ‘Outsiders’ subjected themselves to danger or hardship: to attempt to destroy the stultifying force of habit. But it was not until my panic attacks of 1973 that I suddenly grasped the precise nature of the mechanism that steals our freedom. From the moment we are born, our senses are continually being bombarded with meanings; I can recall, as a child, going for a walk on a sunny morning and feeling as if my senses were being assaulted by sights and sounds and smells. For the child, the whole world is an Aladdin’s cave, a gigantic toyshop; he has only to smell newly-cut grass or autumn leaves to be convulsed by a kind of passion of longing.
It is not desirable to be so vulnerable; we develop ‘filters’ to cut out the meaning, like closing the windows of a classroom on a spring day to prevent the pupils from being distracted. As we get older, we become so accustomed to living in this sparsely furnished classroom that we keep the windows closed most of the time. Old people scarcely live in the real world at all; they stay inside their own heads. As a result they cease to experience the bombardment of meaning, until they also cease to feel desire.
My panic attacks came about because I was overtired and overworked. The result was that, quite unconsciously, I closed my windows and kept them closed. I ignored everything that was not connected with my work. The attacks were a form of suffocation, fainting spells due to lack of oxygen. They were triggered by a mechanism of self-consciousness, in the same way that thinking about itching produces a compulsion to scratch yourself.
As I slowly began to achieve insight into the process and to learn to reverse it, I realised that I had stumbled on a solution to the problem that had obsessed Gurdjieff and Husserl. I recognised, for example, that this could be the answer to the question posed by Bernard Shaw in Back to Methuselah, of how human beings could increase their lifespan. Most people actually die prematurely, of a kind of oxygen starvation. Meaning exists outside us; it is all around us, like the air. It stimulates our vitality and awakens our powers. Yet we allow ourselves to suffocate slowly, because we are unaware of the mechanism that opens the windows. If we could learn to control that mechanism, it would be the key to evolution.
It linked with a discovery I had made in my teens and then half forgotten. Through an essay by T. S. Eliot, I came upon the Bhagavad Gita, and through that, the whole Hindu and Buddhist philosophy of enlightenment and liberation. It produced a tremendous sense of mental relief after years of the usual adolescent fatigue and depression (complicated, in my case, by a kind of manic intellectuality). I learned to meditate—or concentrate—for an hour at a time, sitting cross-legged on the floor. And I instantly made a delightful discovery. My general level of vitality rose steeply, and I found myself constantly bathed in a kind of glow of meaning. Sights and smells and colours became somehow sharper. It was almost as if I had suddenly got rid of an oppressive catarrh that had destroyed my sense of smell. This intensified sense of meaning would fade as I became tired; but half an hour’s meditation would quickly restore it. I found this new sense of meaning so fascinating that I decided to leave my home town and the office where I had worked and wander around England and France. It seemed absurd to live in such an astonishing world and stay in an office.
In the course of that wanderjahre, I developed another interesting trick. This consisted simply of looking at something and reminding myself that it contained immense depths of meaning: that if I could hear what it had to tell me, I would sit spellbound for hours. This would have the same effect as a piece of good news or good luck; a bubble of delight would rise in me, and a little of that vast, hidden meaning would overflow into my senses.
Then I married, begot a son, and settled down to the old routine of working at a regular job and trying to write books in my spare time. I never wholly lost the trick of inducing that inner expansion; but it became overlaid by practical affairs.
In the midst of my panic attacks, I realised that it was important to try to re-develop the trick of inner expansion. And as I re-learned it, I suddenly realised how closely it was connected with the central argument of my book The Occult, and with the notion of Faculty X.
I have already mentioned how, in a novel called The Philosopher’s Stone, I had written a scene in which the hero sits on the lawn of an Elizabethan house, and allows himself to sink into a state of total serenity. He wonders idly what the house would have been like in the time of Shakespeare; and then, suddenly, sees the answer to his question. The Elizabethan parts of the house are still there; it is merely a matter of adjusting his perceptions to register them.
The episode was intended as fictional speculation; now I realised that it expressed the plain truth about Faculty X. We all possess the power to ‘see’ a house as it was a century ago; but it lies outside the range of our everyday senses. These create a kind of self-sustaining whole, which is called the personality, and which appears to have an independent existence. If anxiety causes me to narrow my senses still farther, a new—and less vital—personality will be formed. We have examined this phenomenon in the second Chapter of Part Two and seen how Janet could actually carry on a conversation with the ‘wider’ personality, while the narrower one heard nothing. In precisely the same way, the ‘meanings’ of the world around us carry on a conversation with our wider personality, while the person I think of as ‘I’ remains unaware.
So what is at issue in this present stage of human evolution is not simply a new scientific paradigm—although, God knows, that is needed urgently enough—but also a new, conscious ability to relax into that wider personality. Western man is in danger of suffocating himself with his drives and obsessions; he needs to learn the difficult trick of bringing them under control.
Again, my experience of panic attacks suggests the basic method. We spend too much of our time in a state of unproductive tension, as if expecting a blow; we are full of pockets of mistrust and negation. After my unpleasant experience on the night train, when I came close to total loss of control and inner chaos, I realised that the answer is to relax beyond normal relaxation. Anyone can go and lie in the sun, or sit in an armchair with a drink, and allow the superficial tensions to dissolve. But it is more difficult to press on beyond this point, into still deeper states of relaxation. And here I should point out again that it makes no difference whether we describe this process in terms of climbing or descending. We could speak of ‘gliding’, and of the attempt to get the glider off the ground, or of descent into oneself, as if in a kind of elevator, through layer after layer of meaning.
Now if we combine this insight with the recognition that ‘man is a grandfather clock driven by a watch spring’, we can see that the chief problem is to achieve the power to climb or descend. When I am tired and bored, I am stuck in the present, like a fly on flypaper, and I have no power to escape this time-trap. As soon as I become absorbed in anything, an inner dynamo begins to hum, and I can feel my strength increase. And the simplest way to cause that dynamo to turn is to focus on something I want: fame, sex, security, possessions, powers, whatever.
Man has discovered an interesting method of increasing his power to ‘focus’; it is called art. We can see, for example, that Poe used his own peculiar obsession—the death of beautiful women—to escape the boredom and futility of his life as a hack journalist. But even hard pornography qualifies as a crude form of art, for its purpose is to focus sexual desire. Novels of violence focus our aggressions. Landscape painting focuses our longing for the impersonality of nature. A great painting or symphony may focus so many complex desires that it is impossible to express its aim in words; nevertheless, it is perfectly easy to recognise it as a means by which we concentrate and intensify our feelings. And, by so doing, descend more deeply into ourselves.
This leads to a further interesting recognition. All our drives and desires aim at this same ‘concentration and intensity’. It is true that food and drink are basic necessities of life; but we prefer to eat a good meal or drink a fine wine because they bring the added pleasure of ‘focusing’. The same is obviously true in the case of sex; biologically speaking, its purpose is the continuance of the species, but human beings have turned it into one of their most effective means of achieving ‘intensity’. The desire for possessions springs from the need for security, but it is not security that makes a man buy an expensive sports car; it is a craving for the intensity of speed.
All this may seem obvious enough when it is pointed out; yet it is something that we normally fail to grasp. We imagine we want food or sex or possessions ‘for their own sake’. In fact, we want them because, like a work of art, they enable us to focus and intensify our desires and thereby to raise the pressure of consciousness.
When human beings find themselves in a state in which they lack purpose, through boredom or frustration, they tend to look inside themselves for any form of desire, and to cling to this as their salvation. This leads to the psychological state known as obsession; James describes the case of a woman who had to eat all the time, another who had to walk all day, another who became a dipsomaniac, another who had to keep pulling out her hair. The need for motive, for desire, is so central to mental health that we cannot exist without it. And Maslow pointed out that when people are highly motivated, with plenty of desires and satisfactions, they become subject to ‘peak experiences’—sheer overflows of vital energy.
In short, the common denominator of human desire is the need for heightened pressure of consciousness. This—and not sex or territory or aggression—is the key to the human evolutionary drive.
How does this recognition relate to the main theme of this book—man’s ‘paranormal’ powers?
What I have tried to show is that the usual notion of evolution is mistaken. According to this view, man has taken several millions of years to reach his present position, and if he wants to evolve further, he can expect it to take another million years or so. Yet the evidence of paranormal research seems to show that he already possesses certain ‘superhuman’ powers, such as telepathy, psychokinesis, precognition. He is more ‘evolved’ than he realises.
If I were asked to draw a picture of a typewriter keyboard, with the positions of all the keys, I would be unable to do it. Yet my fingers know where all the keys are located. The knowledge, which began in my consciousness, has been passed on to an unconscious level. So it is quite conceivable that other kinds of knowledge have also been ‘forgotten’ by human consciousness, yet exist on deeper levels of the mind.
To activate these levels would require an immense amount of energy, a pressure of consciousness far higher than we possess at the present moment. The chief problem, then, at the present stage of evolution, is how to raise the pressure of individual consciousness.
The main problem with human beings is their lack of motivation. Because they think of themselves in terms of fairly simple desires, they are easily undermined by boredom. Yet the answer is simpler than it looks. It lies in a concept that could be called ‘the feedback point’.
The feedback point is the stage at which the pleasure—or profit—from any activity is greater than the effort we put into it. So, for example, a child may have to be persuaded to learn to read; but, if he is intelligent, he is soon doing it for pleasure. Similarly, if I start a business, the feedback point arrives when I am making enough profit to start re-investing and expanding.
Before this point arrives, I may waste enormous amounts of money or energy and be dogged by discouragement. Under these circumstances, we have to be forced or persuaded to go on making an effort. If I try to force a child to learn something he hates, I may drive him to the point of exhaustion and rebellion and achieve only minimal results.
It should be clear that life on earth has still not reached the feedback point. Life has been driven to evolve largely by pain and inconvenience. And these are effective only up to a point. Beyond this, they produce discouragement and death, and nature has to begin all over again. This explains why evolution is such a murderous and wasteful process.
Yet there is at least one field in which nature has discovered a less wasteful method: reproduction. Giving birth to offspring and bringing them up to the point where they can look after themselves is a lengthy and exhausting process; yet most creatures seem to enjoy it. Sex is ‘subsidised’ by a deep and powerful instinct, which has turned it into a pleasure; consequently, nature has no need to use the big stick to persuade its creatures to reproduce. Sex has passed the ‘feedback point’. And, as the human race has discovered, this can also involve certain problems, like overpopulation.
Consciousness has also been a response to pain and inconvenience. Like claws and fangs, it has developed as an aid to survival. And it has not yet reached its feedback point. On the contrary, most creatures seem to find it something of a burden. It separates us from our instincts and makes us clumsy and awkward.
But the past two or three thousand years have seen an important development in the history of consciousness. There came a point at which a few human beings realised that the pursuit of knowledge can be a self-rewarding activity. They discovered that thinking could be enjoyed ‘for its own sake’—or rather, that the activity of thought could produce a sensation of inner freedom. Plato’s dialogues show us young people enjoying the discussion of ideas as much as the food and wine. Even so, most Athenians remained suspicious of the value of ‘pure thought’, and Socrates was executed for trying to persuade the youth of Athens that it was a higher activity than fighting. Nevertheless, the human race had glimpsed an important discovery: that inner freedom can be increased by thought. Or, to put it another way, that we can use consciousness to increase consciousness.
All this brings us to the most interesting part of the story—and down to our own time. The nineteenth-century movement called Romanticism marked a new stage in the development of individual self-consciousness. Large numbers of poets, musicians and artists began to experience strange moods of godlike freedom which aroused enormous longing; this came to dominate their lives to the exclusion of comfort and security. The odd thing is that most of them had no great faith in the urges that drove them to turn their backs on society. They were tormented with guilt; many committed suicide or went insane, others died of various illnesses caused by exhaustion and discouragement. They raged against the apparent futility of existence and against the destiny that seemed to condemn them to failure and misery.
As far as these romantic Outsiders could see, this craving for freedom was impelling them towards self-destruction. Wagner thought art was an illness and went to a hydropathic establishment to be cured of it. Thomas Mann says of him: ‘This nature felt itself every minute on the verge of exhaustion; only by exception did it experience the sensations of well-being.’ Mann’s own works are devoted to the proposition that the artist has turned his back on life and can expect nothing but loneliness and defeat.
All this shows a total failure to grasp what is happening to human consciousness. The romantics had stumbled on the discovery that the aim of human evolution is increased pressure of consciousness (or, as we would now say, expansion of consciousness). But the realisation remained on an intuitive level and was contradicted by all their conscious ideas and assumptions; hence the self-division and the high mortality rate.
The interesting thing is that romanticism has not died out. It is more alive today than it was in 1850. Moreover, it is no longer confined to a few hundreds—or thousands—of poets and intellectuals. Modern ‘romantics’ could be counted in millions. Many of them are not particularly intelligent; many are as self-destructive as their nineteenth-century counterparts. Some regard themselves as liberals, some as mystics and occultists, some merely as rebels who want to ‘do their own thing’. All share a common recognition: that what really concerns them is freedom; not merely physical freedom, but inner freedom.
Does this mean that we are at a turning point in human history? I am inclined to doubt it. But it means that human consciousness is developing towards a new recognition: that the way ahead lies through more consciousness, not less. Modern man has a strong compulsion to fly back to nature, back to instinct. He is gradually learning that this is not the answer.
Man is approaching the ‘feedback point’ in the evolution of consciousness: the point where consciousness becomes self-sustaining. All my own work has been concerned with this contradiction: that in spite of the strange lightning flashes of inner freedom, which reveal that our basic aim is more consciousness, man continues to be suspicious of consciousness, suspecting that it will land him in a bleak and cold universe. So he continues to resist the movement of his own evolution.
Yet if the ecstasies of the romantics mean anything, they mean that man has a far greater control of his inner being than he ever realised. He is enmeshed in all kinds of curious misconceptions about himself and his fundamental nature: the chief of which is that he is a poor, helpless creature, born into a universe he fails to understand. The evidence we have examined in this chapter shows this to be untrue. The evidence of paranormal research shows that there is a part of our being that knows far more than the conscious mind. And the evidence of mystics through the ages suggests that there is a part of our being that knows even greater secrets than this.
Our natural tendency is to try to return to these intuitive depths; and in the chapter called ‘Revelations’, we have considered various methods of achieving this end. Yet most of these methods turn out to be ultimately unsatisfying, since all involve various degrees of loss of control. Only Gurdjieff recognised clearly that the answer must lie in increased control over the robot—‘understanding the machine’.
This is precisely the kind of statement that worries us. Control seems to suggest some ugly, assertive will-to-power and ultimate breakdown. But we are forgetting what all the evidence of this book unmistakably suggests: that we already possess this control. It already exists, on deeper, or higher, levels of our being. How we have come to lose it is something of a mystery; the only thing that seems clear is that it has to do with the development of consciousness. ‘Conscious’ man is a pygmy, a mere fragment of his true self. That he once possessed such a conception seems clear from the occult traditions of alchemy and cabbalism. Our problem is that we know this intuitively and are inclined to suspect that the evolutionary excursion into reflective consciousness was a mistake. I am as much inclined to this instinctive mistrust as anyone. Yet the evidence tells me clearly that I am wrong. Consciousness is intentional; its destiny is to become more intentional. Through a gradual deepening of intentionality, it will reestablish contact with our ‘lost’ levels. The higher levels are there, as I discovered from the ‘schoolmistress effect’. They can be summoned when we need them. But unless we know they are there, we make no attempt to summon them.
What will happen seems to me perfectly clear. Human beings will one day recognise, beyond all possibility of doubt, that consciousness is freedom. When this happens, consciousness will cease to suffer from mistrust of its own nature. Suddenly, the ‘profits’ will be clear and self-evident. Instead of wasting most of its energies in retreats and uncertainties and excursions into blind alleys, consciousness will recycle its energies into its own evolution. The feedback point will mark a new stage in the history of the planet earth.
When that happens, the first fully human being will be born.