MAGIC – THE SCIENCE OF THE FUTURE
There is a passage in the Introduction to P. D. Ouspensky’s New Model of the Universe that never fails to move and excite me:
It is the year 1906 or 1907. The editorial office of the Moscow daily paper The Morning. I have just received the foreign papers, and I have to write an article on the forthcoming Hague Conference. French, German, English, Italian papers. Phrases, phrases, sympathetic, critical, ironical, blatant, pompous, lying and, worst of all, utterly automatic, phrases which have been used a thousand times and will be used again on entirely different, perhaps contradictory, occasions. I have to make a survey of all these words and opinions, pretending to take them seriously, and then, just as seriously, to write something on my own account. But what can I say? It is all so tedious. Diplomats and all kinds of statesmen will gather together and talk, papers will approve or disapprove, sympathise or not sympathise. Then everything will be as it was, or even worse.
It is still early, I say to myself; perhaps something will come into my head later.
Pushing aside the papers, I open a drawer in my desk. The whole desk is crammed with books with strange titles. The Occult World, Life after Death, Atlantis and Lemuria, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, Le Temple de Satan, The Sincere Narrations of a Pilgrim, and the like. These books and I have been inseparable for a whole month, and the world of the Hague Conference and leading articles becomes more and more vague and unreal to me.
I open one of the books at random, feeling that my article will not be written today. Well, it can go to the devil. Humanity will lose nothing if there is one article fewer on the Hague Conference ...
When I first read this passage, my own circumstances gave it an added relevance. I was twenty years old, and I had been married for a year. My wife and our son were living in Earls Court, London, our fourth home in a year, and our half-insane landlady was the fourth – and worst – of a series. I was on the dole, and I found this almost as nervously wearing as the various factory jobs I had worked at since I was married. London seemed not merely alien, but somehow unreal. So I understood Ouspensky’s feeling of nausea at the prospect of writing on the Hague Conference, and also that craving for another world of deeper meaning, represented by books on the occult. There is a passage in Louis-Ferdinand Céline that describes the world as rotten with lies, rotten to the point of collapse and disintegration. I had only to look at the advertisements in the London tube, or the headlines of the daily paper, to see that it was obviously true. Lies, stupidity, weakness and mediocrity – a civilisation without ideals.
That was why I read Ouspensky, and all the other books on magic and mysticism that I could find in the local libraries: not only because they were an escape from the world of factories and neurotic landladies, but because they confirmed my intuition of another order of reality, an intenser and more powerful form of consciousness than the kind I seemed to share with eight million other Londoners.
But if, at that time, I had been asked whether I literally believed in magic, I would have answered No: that it was a poetic fiction, a symbol of the world that ought to exist, but didn’t. In short, wishful thinking. In the first sentence of Ritual Magic, E. M. Butler writes, ‘The fundamental aim of all magic is to impose the human will on nature, on man and the supersensual world in order to master them.’ And if that was a fair definition of magic, then I agreed with John Symonds, the biographer of Aleister Crowley, who said, ‘The only trouble with magic is that it doesn’t work.’ Magic, I felt, was no more than a first crude attempt at science, and it had now been superseded by science.
If I still accepted that view, I would not be writing this book. It now seems to me that the exact reverse is true. Magic was not the ‘science’ of the past. It is the science of the future. I believe that the human mind has reached a point in evolution where it is about to develop new powers – powers that would once have been considered magical. Indeed, it has always possessed greater powers than we now realise: of telepathy, premonition of danger, second sight, thaumaturgy (the power to heal); but these were part of its instinctive, animal inheritance. For the past thousand years or so, humankind has been busy developing another kind of power related to the intellect, and the result is Western civilisation. His unconscious powers have not atrophied; but they have ‘gone underground’. Now the wheel has come the full circle; intellect has reached certain limits, and it cannot advance beyond them until it recovers some of the lost powers. Anyone who has read modern philosophy will understand what I mean; it has become narrow, rigid, logical; and it attempts to make up for lack of broader intuitions with a microscopic attention to detail. It has cut itself off from its source.
And what is, in fact, the source of philosophy – or, for that matter, of any knowledge? It is fundamentally the need for power. You have only to watch the face of a baby who has just learned how to open a door by turning the handle, to understand what knowledge is for. In the twentieth century, power has become a suspect word, because it has become associated with the idea of power over other people. But that is its least important application. One of the fundamental myths of magic concerns the magician who seeks political power; he receives a number of warnings, and if he persists, he is destroyed. Political power strengthens the ego; magical power rises from the subconscious, from the non-personal urge. Ouspensky describes the beginning of his ‘search for the miraculous’:
I am a schoolboy in the second or third ‘class’. But instead of Zeifert’s Latin grammar ... I have before me Malinin and Bourenin’s ‘Physics’. I have borrowed this book from one of the older boys and am reading it greedily and enthusiastically, overcome now by rapture, now by terror, at the mysteries that are opening before me. All round me walls are crumbling, and horizons infinitely remote and incredibly beautiful stand revealed. It is as though threads, previously unknown and unsuspected, begin to reach out and bind things together. For the first time in my life, my world emerges from chaos. Everything becomes connected, forming an orderly and harmonious whole ...
This kind of language may be off-putting (‘horizons infinitely remote and incredibly beautiful’), but it is worth bearing in mind that Ouspensky was trained as a scientist, and he is trying to be strictly accurate. He means exactly that: the sudden sense of meanings, far bigger than oneself, that make all personal preoccupations seem trivial. Even Bertrand Russell, the founder of ‘logical atomism’, catches this feeling: ‘I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet – a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things.’*
The power to be derived from this ‘fearful passionless force’ is only incidentally a power over things and people. It is basically power over oneself, contact with some ‘source of power, meaning and purpose’ in the subconscious mind.
The ability to become excited by ‘infinitely remote horizons’ is peculiar to human beings; no other animal possesses it. It is a kind of intellectual far-sightedness that could be compared to a pair of binoculars. We have developed it over two million years of evolution. And at the same time, certain other faculties have fallen into disuse. For example, the ‘homing instinct’. In The Territorial Imperative, Robert Ardrey devotes an interesting chapter (IV) to this phenomenon. A scientist named Johannes Schmidt made the discovery that every eel in the Western world is born in the Sargasso Sea. In the autumn, the eels of Europe and eastern America make their way down the rivers and end in the Sargasso Sea, between the West Indies and the Azores. The following spring, the baby eels make their way to fresh water; two years later, when they are two inches long, the elvers make their way back home alone. Those with 115 vertebrae swim back to Europe; those with 107 vertebrae go west to America. The parents remain behind to die.
The green turtle of the Caribbean performs an equally spectacular feat, swimming 1,400 miles from Brazil to Ascension Island, in the mid-Atlantic, at breeding time. The tiny deer mouse of Wyoming, no bigger than the end of one’s finger, can be transported a mile away from home – about a hundred miles in terms of human size and unerringly find his way back to the fifty-yard patch that constitutes home. Homing pigeons return over hundreds of miles. It was once believed that this was the result of hard work by the human trainer, until someone discovered accidentally that baby pigeons return home just as unerringly without any training – and often make better time than the ‘trained’ adults!
In a few cases, science has been able to explain the homing instinct. Vitus B. Droscher mentions some examples in Mysterious Senses. The blackcap bird navigates by means of the stars – as Dr. Franz Sauer discovered by putting them in a planetarium. Salmon, strangely enough, navigate by a highly developed sense of smell. The eel probably does the same, although this does not explain how baby eels know their way back to rivers they have never seen. Bees and ants navigate by the sun. One scientist at Cambridge University suspects that pigeons navigate by taking an astronomical reading of their latitude and longitude by means of the sun and comparing it with the latitude and longitude of their home territory.
So perhaps there is no need to posit some mysterious ‘sixth sense’ by which animals find their way home. No doubt there are always ‘natural’ explanations. But in some cases, it is difficult to imagine what it could be. Scientists in Wilhelmshaven took cats, confined in a bag, on a long drive round the town. They were then released in the centre of a maze with twenty-four exits. Most cats made straight for the exit that lay in the direction of their home. A German zoologist, Hans Fromme, has discovered that the migratory instinct of robins is thrown into confusion when the robins are first placed in a steel strong room. The inference is that robins navigate by sensitivity to some electromagnetic vibration; the current hypothesis is that it originates in the Milky Way, but this is no more than a guess.
But even if this could be definitely proved, would it really constitute an ‘explanation’ of the homing instinct? We are dealing with degrees of sensitivity that are so far beyond our human perceptions that they are, to all intents and purposes, new senses. Or rather, old senses.
There must have been a time when human beings possessed a homing instinct of the same efficiency, for our primitive ancestors hunted their food in huge forests or featureless prairies. There is even more reason for supposing that man once possessed an unusually developed sense of impending danger, for our primate ancestors would otherwise have become extinct in the great droughts of the Pliocene era, more than five million years ago, when they were struggling for survival against creatures in every way more ‘specialised’ than they were. Man no longer has a great deal of use for the homing instinct or a highly developed premonition of danger. These faculties have fallen into disuse. But they have not vanished. There seems to be evidence that in circumstances where they are necessary, they become as efficient as ever. Anyone who has read the various books by Jim Corbett, author of Man-eaters of Kumaon, will recall a number of occasions when he was saved by his ‘sixth sense’.
One example will suffice. In Jungle Lore, Corbett describes how he was about to take a bath one evening when he noticed that his feet were covered with red dust. There was a place that lay on his route home where he might have walked through the dust; but he could think of no reason why he should have done so. Eventually he remembered the circumstances. He had walked over a culvert whose parapet was eighteen inches high. As he approached this, he had crossed the road to the other side, walking through the red dust at the side of the road. He crossed the culvert on the right-hand side, then re-crossed the road to the left again as he continued on his way home.
Corbett was baffled; he could not imagine why he had absent-mindedly crossed the road like this. The next day he retraced his footsteps. In the sandy bed of the culvert, on the left-hand side, he discovered the pug marks of a tiger that had been lying there. ‘The tiger had no intention of killing me; but if at the moment of passing him I had stopped to listen to any jungle sound, or had coughed or sneezed or blown my nose, or had thrown my rifle from one shoulder to the other, there was a chance that the tiger would have got nervous and attacked me. My subconscious being was not prepared to take this risk and jungle sensitiveness came to my assistance and guided me away from the potential danger.’
How do we explain Corbett’s jungle sensitiveness? As a ‘sixth sense’? Or simply as some form of subconscious observation? I would argue that it makes no real difference. When Sherlock Holmes deduces that Watson has sent a telegram from the clay on his shoes and the ink stain on his finger, this is obviously what we mean by logical, scientific thinking. It is possible that Corbett’s reasons for crossing the road were equally logical, although subconscious. An hour before he set out for home, he may have heard the tiger cough, and subconsciously registered the direction in which it was travelling. A few other small signs – the absence of birds near the culvert, a broken twig – and his subconscious mind was already reaching its conclusions in the best Holmes tradition. But if Corbett remained consciously unaware of all this, then we are dealing with a faculty that may be called a sixth sense, a subconscious faculty by comparison with which our powers of conscious observation are clumsy and inaccurate. We find this difficult to grasp because we use the conscious mind as an instrument of learning. Driving my car has become so natural to me that it might almost be called an instinct; but I had to learn to do it consciously first. But it would obviously be absurd to suppose that pigeons learned navigation by the sun in the same manner. There was no conscious process of learning; it was all done at the instinctive level.
We may be able to explain the pigeon’s homing instinct in terms that Sherlock Holmes would understand; but it is important to realise that the subconscious mind works with a speed and accuracy beyond our conscious grasp, and that it may work upon data that are too subtle for our clumsy senses. How, for example, do we explain the power of water diviners? I have seen a man with a twig in his hand walking around the field in which our house is built, tracing the course of an underground spring, and distinguishing it clearly from a metal waterpipe. (We later consulted the plans of the house and found that he was completely accurate about the waterpipe.) He denied the suggestion that this was a ‘supernormal’ faculty, and insisted that he could teach anyone to divine water in less than an hour: ‘Everyone possesses the faculty; it’s merely a matter of training.’ As far as I know, no scientist has ever attempted to explain the power of water diviners, although they are accepted as a commonplace in any country district. And when they are finally understood, it will no doubt prove to be something as simple and startling as the salmon’s sense of smell, or the robin’s sensitivity to stellar radiation. There is no need to draw a sharp distinction between scientific ‘commonsense’ and powers that would once have been classified as ‘magical’. In the animal kingdom, ‘magical’ powers are commonplace. Civilised man has forgotten about them because they are no longer necessary to his survival.
In fact, his survival depends upon ‘forgetting’ them. High development of the instinctive levels is incompatible with the kind of concentration upon detail needed by civilised man. An illustration can be found in the autobiography of the ‘clairvoyant’ Pieter van der Hurk, better known as Peter Hurkos.* In 1943 Hurkos was working as a house painter when he fell from the ladder and fractured his skull. When he woke up – in the Zuidwal Hospital in the Hague – he discovered that he now possessed the gift of second sight; he ‘knew’ things about his fellow patients without being told. This almost cost him his life. Shaking hands with a patient about to be discharged, he suddenly ‘knew’ that the man was a British agent, and that he would be assassinated by the Gestapo in two days’ time. As a result of his prediction, Hurkos came close to being executed as a traitor by the Dutch underground; he was fortunately able to convince them that his clairvoyance was genuine.
The chief drawback of this unusual power was that he was no longer able to return to his old job as a painter; he had lost the faculty of concentration. ‘I could not concentrate on anything in those days, for the moment I began to carry on an extended conversation with anyone, I would see visions of the various phases of his life and the lives of his family and friends.’ His mind was like a radio set picking up too many stations. From the social point of view he was useless until he conceived the idea of using his peculiar powers on the stage.
Again, science has nothing to say about the powers of Peter Hurkos, or of his fellow Dutchman Gerard Croiset, although these powers have been tested in the laboratory and found to be genuine. Foretelling the future, or solving a murder case by handling a garment of the victim, is obviously a very different matter from Corbett’s jungle sensitivity or the homing instinct. But it is worth bearing in mind that until the mid-1950s Schmidt’s observations on eels – published as long ago as 1922 – were ignored by scientists because they failed to ‘fit in’. Ardrey remarks that the Eel Story was classified with Hitler’s Big Lie. That is, no one was willing to tackle the problem until science had reached a stage where it could no longer advance without taking it into account. No doubt the same thing will happen to the observations made on Hurkos by the Round Table Institute in Maine, and those on Croiset by the Parapsychology Institute of Utrecht University.
At this point it is necessary to say something of the course of evolution over the past million years or so. Some eleven million years ago, an ape called Ramapithecus seems to have developed the capacity to walk upright. He began to prefer the ground to the trees. And during the next nine million years, the tendency to walk upright became firmly established, and Ramapithecus turned into Australopithecus, our first ‘human’ ancestor. What difference did the upright posture make? First of all, it freed his hands, so that he could defend himself with a stone or a tree branch. Secondly, it enlarged his horizon.
As far as I know, no anthropologist has regarded this as significant – perhaps because there are many taller creatures than man. But the elephant and the giraffe have eyes in the sides of their heads, so that their horizon is circular. The ape sees straight ahead; his vision is narrower but more concentrated. Could this be why the apes have evolved more than any other animal? Narrow vision makes for boredom; it also makes for increased mental activity, for curiosity. And when the inventiveness and curiosity were well developed, a certain branch of the apes learned to walk upright, so that his horizon was extended in another way. To see a long distance is to learn to think in terms of long distances, to calculate. Man’s ability to walk upright and use his hands, and his natural capacity to see into the distance instead of looking at the ground, became weapons of survival. He developed intelligence because it was the only way to stay alive. And so, at the beginning of human evolution, man was forced to make a virtue of his ability to focus his attention upon minute particulars. No doubt he would have preferred to eat his dinner and then sleep in the sun, like the sabre-toothed tiger or the hippopotamus; but he was more defenceless than they were, and had to maintain constant vigilance.
In the course of time, this ability to ‘focus’ his attention and calculate became so natural that thinking became one of man’s leisure activities. And it ‘paid off’ to an incredible extent. In a few thousand years, man evolved more than the great reptiles had evolved in several million. He created civilisation, and in doing so, entered a new phase of self-awareness – the phase that human children now enter at the age of six or seven.
Self-consciousness brings heavy losses and enormous gains. The greatest loss is that instinctive ‘naturalness’ that small children and animals possess. But the vital gain is the sense of force, of power, of control. Man became the wilful animal, the most dangerous animal on the earth, never contented to live in peace for long, always invading the neighbouring country, burning the villages and raping the women. And this endless ego-drive has, in the past ten thousand years, separated him further and further from the apes in their dwindling forests and the swallows that fly south in the winter.
He is not entirely happy with this civilisation that his peculiar powers have created. Its main trouble is that it takes so much looking after. Many men possess the animals’ preference for the instinctive life of oneness with nature; they dream about the pleasure of being a shepherd drowsing on a warm hillside, or an angler beside a stream. Oddly enough, such men have never been condemned as sluggards; they are respected as poets, and the soldiers and businessmen enjoy reading their daydreams when the day’s work is over.
A poet is simply a man in whom the links with our animal past are still strong. He is aware that we contain a set of instinctive powers that are quite separate from the powers needed to win a battle or expand a business.
And he is instinctively aware of something far more important. Man has developed his conscious powers simply by wanting to develop them. He has travelled from the invention of the wheel to the exploration of space in a few quick strides. But he had also surpassed the animals in another respect: in the development of those ‘other’ powers. No animal is capable of the ecstasies of the mystics or the great poets. In his nature poetry, Wordsworth is ‘at one’ with nature in a quite different sense from the hippopotamus dozing in the mud. Self-consciousness can be used for the development of man’s instinctive powers, as well as those of the intellect. The poet, the mystic and the ‘magician’ have this in common: the desire to develop their powers ‘downward’ rather than upward. In the Symposium, Socrates expresses the ideal aim: to do both at the same time – to use increased knowledge to reach out towards a state of instinctive unity with the universe. In the two and a half thousand years since then, civilisation has been forced to devote its attention to more practical problems, while the artists and mystics have continued to protest that ‘the world is too much with us’, and that triumphant homo sapiens is little more than a clever dwarf. If man is really to evolve, then he must develop depth, and power over his own depths.
And now, for the first time in the short history of our species, a large percentage of the human race has the leisure to forget the practical problems. And in America and Europe, there is a simultaneous upsurge of interest in ‘mind-changing drugs’ and in the ‘occult’.
The psychedelic cult differs from the drug cults of the early twentieth century, or even the laudanum drinking of De Quincey and Coleridge, in being more positive in character. It is less a matter of the desire to escape from a ‘botched civilisation’ than a definite desire to get somewhere, to ‘plug in’ to subconscious forces of whose existence we are instinctively certain. The same is true of the increased sexual permissiveness; it is not simply a matter of disintegrating morals, but the recognition that sexual excitement is a contact with the hidden powers of the unconscious. D. H. Lawrence describes Lady Chatterley’s sensations after lovemaking: ‘As she ran home in the twilight the world seemed a dream; the trees in the park seemed bulging and surging at anchor on a tide, and the heave of the slope to the house was alive.’
All Lawrence’s work is concerned with the need for civilisation to take a new direction, to concentrate upon the development of these ‘other’ powers instead of continuing to develop the intellect. It is not a matter of sinking into a kind of trance, a passive state of ‘oneness with nature’, like the cows Walt Whitman admired so much. The nature of which Lady Chatterley is aware as she runs home sounds more like those late canvases of Van Gogh in which everything is distorted by some inner force – by Russell’s ‘breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things’.
In the same way, Ouspensky’s preference for reading a book on magic instead of writing an article on the Hague Conference indicates something more positive than the poet’s distaste for politics. At fourteen, Ouspensky is plunged into a state of ecstatic excitement by a book on physics, because it is a contact with the world of the impersonal. But science is a dead end for an imaginative youth; he doesn’t want to end up injecting guinea pigs in Pavlov’s laboratory. He has a feeling that all the ways of life offered by the modern world lead him in the opposite direction from the way he wants to go. In moments of depression he is inclined to wonder if this craving for distant horizons is not some odd illusion, ‘the desire of the moth for the star’. But an instinct leads him to search persistently in books on magic and occultism; later, the same desire leads him to wander around in the East, searching in monasteries for ‘esoteric knowledge’. (It is ironical that he should have discovered what he was looking for when he returned to Moscow and met Gurdjieff.*)
This sense of ‘meanings’ that are not apparent to ordinary consciousness is experienced by everyone at some time or another. One may ignore such hints for years, until some event brings them all into focus; or the ‘focusing’ may happen gradually and imperceptibly. Science declares that life began with the action of sunlight on carbon suspended in water, and that man has reached his present position by a process of natural selection. In that case, the laws of human existence are physical laws, and can be found in any textbook of science. But there occur moments of absurd certainty that seem to transcend the usual law of probability. Mark Bredin, a musician of my acquaintance, described how he came away from a rehearsal late at night and took a taxi home. He was very tired; there was little traffic about along the Bayswater Road. Suddenly, with total certainty, he knew that as they crossed Queensway, another taxi would shoot across the road and hit them. He was so certain that he was tempted to warn the driver, then decided that it would sound silly. A few seconds later, the other taxi rushed out of Queensway and hit them, as he had known it would. He attributes the flash of ‘second sight’ to extreme tiredness, when the conscious mind was relaxed and the subconscious could make itself heard.
We may reject the story as exaggeration, or explain it in terms of coincidence’. But the word ‘coincidence’ solves nothing. For again, everyone has noticed how often absurd coincidences occur. Some years ago, I made an attempt to keep notes of unlikely coincidences, and I find a typical example in my journal for January 1968. ‘I was reading Hawkins’s Stonehenge Decoded, the last section on the standing stones of Callanish, which Hawkins describes as a kind of Stone Age computer. I finished the book, and immediately picked up Bell’s Mathematics, Queen of the Sciences. It opened at Chapter 6, and I found myself looking at a footnote on Stone Age mathematics. The chances against coming across it immediately after the piece on Callanish were probably a million to one. Again, last night I was reading an account of the Domenech murder case at Moher, in Galway, and noted that the victim had been at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where I had lectured recently. Ten minutes later I opened Wanda Orynski’s abstracts of Hegel, and saw that the introduction is by Kurt Leidecker of Mary Washington College …’
There is nothing very startling about these coincidences except the odds against them. I can add another one from the past week. An article in The Criminologist referred to a Nebraska murder case without mentioning the name of the murderer; I spent ten minutes searching through a pile of old True Detective magazines because I could recall that the man whose name I was trying to remember (Charles Starkweather) was featured on the cover of one of them. I took the magazine back to my armchair and finished the article in The Criminologist. It ended with a reference to a murderess named Nannie Doss, of whom I had never heard. I opened the True Detective magazine half an hour later, and discovered that the first article was on Nannie Doss. Oddly enough, as I looked at her photograph, and a caption mentioning the word ‘Nannie’, I experienced a sudden sense of total certainty that this was the woman I had been wondering about, although it took a few seconds longer to locate her surname in the text.
Similar coincidences are described in a remarkable book, The Cathars and Reincarnation, by Arthur Guirdham (which I shall discuss in detail later).* He describes how, one day in 1963, he began to discuss a village called Little Gaddesden, and tried to recall the name of a pub there. Later the same day, he took a book on the Pyrenees out of the public library, and on starting to read it at home, almost immediately came across the name of Little Gaddesden and the pub whose name he wanted to recall. The coincidence – one of several – occurred at the beginning of his strange involvement with a patient whose memories of a previous existence constitute one of the best-authenticated cases of reincarnation that I have come across. (See Part Three, Chapter 2.)
To suggest that such matters are not entirely coincidence is not to suggest that ‘hidden forces’ were trying to draw my attention to Stone Age mathematics or Guirdham’s to the name of a pub. Probably all that is at work is some ‘vital sense’ of the same order as the eel’s homing instinct. The more the mind is absorbed, interested in a subject, the more frequently these useful coincidences seem to occur, as if the healthy mind has a kind of radar system. Distraction or depression will prevent the radar from working, or may prevent one paying attention until too late. The following is from a recent account of a murder case, written by the father of the victim:
It was a squally day of cold-front weather with alternations of bright sunshine and sudden rain or hailstorms. My wife and I were at the front of the house, in between the rain squalls, with two painters who were attempting to make some progress on the eaves and window frames. It was necessary to trim down a hedge outside one of the rooms ... At 4 p.m. my wife said: ‘Where’s Fiona?’ Irrationally and unaccountably, we both felt an excess of acute anxiety and fear ...
Until the child was mentioned, both parents were preoccupied with other things, and the alarm signals of the unconscious were unobserved; then, with the question ‘Where’s Fiona?’ they sound clearly, like a telephone that cannot be heard until the television is turned down. The child had been the victim of a sex killer.*
My own experience of ‘premonitions’ has not been extensive; in fact, I can call only one to mind. On July 16, 1964, an ordinary palmist at a fairground in Blackpool looked at my hand, and warned me that I would have an accident over the next month; she said it would probably be a car accident, and I would not be badly hurt. In mid-August 1964 I decided to take a guest out in a speedboat, although I had a strong premonition of danger. The sea proved far rougher than expected, and when I attempted to land on a rocky beach, a huge wave picked up the boat and dashed it on the rocks, completely wrecking it. No one was hurt, although we spent a bad half hour dragging the badly holed boat out of the heavy sea.
I have had two experiences of apparently telepathic response to another person. My first wife and I had been separated for some months in the summer of 1953, although there were still strong emotional links. One evening, in a cafe in central London, I suddenly felt sick, and had to rush out. I continued vomiting for several hours – in fact, until the early hours of the next morning. A doctor in the hospital where I was then working diagnosed the trouble as food poisoning, although I had eaten the same food as the other porters, and they were all well enough. I learned a few days later, however, that my wife had been suffering from food poisoning – from a bad tin of corned beef – at the time I was sick; her retching had begun and ended at exactly the same time as mine.
In 1965 I had lectured at St. Andrews University in Scotland, and was driving to Skye. I was feeling particularly cheerful when I set out because the weather was fine, and I was looking forward to stopping at a secondhand bookshop in Perth. But within half an hour of leaving St. Andrews, I began to feel unaccountably depressed. Half an hour later, I asked my wife why she was subdued: she explained that she had had a toothache ever since we left St. Andrews.
It was unfortunately a Saturday, too late to find a dentist in Scotland. On Sunday morning, the gum was now badly swollen. My own depression continued all day. In Kyle of Lochalsh, on Monday morning, we were told that a travelling dentist would arrive at a caravan sometime during the day; I left my wife waiting while I took my daughter for a walk round the town. Suddenly the feeling of oppression lifted. I said, ‘Mummy’s just had her tooth out.’ We arrived back in time to meet my wife coming out of the caravan, minus an impacted wisdom tooth.
When my children were babies, I quickly became aware of the existence of telepathic links. If I wanted my daughter to sleep through the night, I had to take care that I didn’t lie awake thinking about her. If I did, she woke up. In the case of my son, I had to avoid even looking at him if he was asleep in his pram. When my wife asked me to see if he was still asleep, in the garden or porch, I would tiptoe to the window, glance out very quickly, then turn away. If I lingered, peering at him, he would stir and wake up. This happened so unvaryingly during his first year that I came to accept it as natural. After the first year, the telepathic links seemed to snap, or at least, to weaken. But when they began to learn to speak, I observed that this was again a delicate and intuitive business – not at all a matter of trial and error, of learning ‘object words’ and building them up into sentences, but something as complex as the faculty with which birds build nests.* And again there was a feeling perhaps illusory – that the child could pick up and echo my own thoughts, or at least respond to them when attempting to express something.
But, among adults at least, thought-transference must be less usual than feeling-transference. And both of them seem to depend upon the right conditions, a certain stillness and sensitivity. On a still day you can sometimes hear the voices of people miles away
In the above-mentioned experiences of telepathy – if that is what it was – the ‘transference’ was unconscious and automatic, like the crossing of telephone lines. This gives rise to the speculation whether hatred might be transmitted in the same unconscious manner. My own experience of this has been a doubtful one, and I mention it here only for the sake of completeness. I found myself thinking about it seriously when I read the following in Wilson Knight’s book on John Cowper Powys: ‘Those who have incurred his anger have so invariably suffered misfortune that he has, as it were, been forced into a life of almost neurotic benevolence ... Powys’s early ambition to become a magician was no idle dream.’ (p. 62)
Before moving to Kensington in the autumn of 1952, my wife and I had lived in Wimbledon, in the house of an old man who suffered from asthma; my wife was his nurse. During the six months we lived in the house, he became increasingly querulous and difficult, until there was a perpetual atmosphere of tension like an impending thunderstorm. I am not given to nursing grudges, but the feeling of being steeped in pettiness, of being prevented from concentrating on more important things, produced climaxes of loathing in which I wished him dead. In August we returned from a week’s holiday to find that he had died of a heart attack.
It was when the situation repeated itself three months later that I found myself speculating idly whether thoughts can kill. The landlady was insanely suspicious, and violent scenes soon became a daily occurrence. Two months later, she visited a doctor, who diagnosed a cancer of the womb. She died shortly after we left the house. I now recalled the peculiar nature of those paroxysms of loathing. On certain occasions, the anger had increased to a pitch that in a paranoid individual would lead to an explosion of violence. But the explosion would be purely mental: a burst of rage and hatred, followed by relief, as if I had thrown a brick through a plate-glass window.
These mental explosions always had a peculiar feeling of authenticity, of reality. By this I mean they seemed somehow different from paroxysms of feeling induced by imagination. I cannot be more specific than this, but I suspect that most people have experienced the sensation.
In his Autobiography, Powys writes: ‘The evidence of this – of my being able; I mean, and quite unconsciously too, to exercise some kind of “evil eye” on people who have injured me – has so piled up all my life that it has become a habit with me to pray to my gods anxiously and hurriedly for each new enemy.’ (p. 480)
The case of Powys is interesting because of the peculiar nature of his genius. Until he was in his mid-fifties, Powys spent much of his life lecturing in America, and three novels written in his early forties are interesting without being remarkable. Then, in his sixties, there appeared a series of immense novels – in bulk and in conception – beginning with Wolf Solent and A Glastonbury Romance. The most remarkable thing about these novels is their ‘nature mysticism’ and their incredible vitality; it is clear that he has tapped some subconscious spring, and the result is a creative outpouring that has something of the majesty of Niagara Falls. A Glastonbury Romance (1933) is probably unique in being the only novel written from a ‘Cod’s-eye’ point of view. The simplest way of illustrating this is to quote its first paragraph:
At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway-station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in the astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.
The abstractness of the language here gives a false impression of a book that is anything but abstract; but it also reveals Powys’s desire to see his characters and events from some ‘universal’ point of view in which the algae in a stagnant pond and the grubs in a rotten tree are as important as the human characters.
One should note the presupposition of this first paragraph, which is present in all Powys’s work: that there is a kind of ‘psychic ether’ that carries mental vibrations as the ‘luminiferous ether’ is supposed to carry light.
This I would define as the fundamental proposition of magic or occultism, and perhaps the only essential one. It will be taken for granted throughout this book.
What is so interesting about Powys is that he deliberately set out to cultivate ‘multi-mindedness’, to pass out of his own identity into that of people or even objects: ‘I could feel myself in to the lonely identity of a pier-post, of a tree-stump, of a monolith in a stone-circle; and when I did this, I looked like this post, this stump, this stone’ (Autobiography, p. 528).
It was an attempt to soothe his mind into a state of quiescent identity with the ‘psychic ether’, with the vast objective world that surrounds us. Everyone has had the experience of feeling sick, and then thinking about something else and feeling the sickness vanish. ‘Objectivity’ causes power to flow into the soul, a surge of strength, and contact with the vast, strange forces that surround us. In a famous passage in The Prelude, Wordsworth describes a midnight boating excursion when a huge peak made a deep impression on his mind, and how for days afterwards:
… my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion, No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams. (Book 1)
Wordsworth, like Powys, had acquired the ability to pass beyond his own personality and achieve direct contact with the ‘psychic ether’, But as he grew older, he lost this ability to transcend his personality and the poetry loses its greatness. Powys never lost his power of summoning a strange ecstasy. In the Autobiography he describes how, lecturing on Strindberg in an almost empty theatre in San Francisco, there stirred within him:
… that formidable daimon which, as I have hinted to you before, can be reached somewhere in my nature, and which when it is reached has the Devil’s own force … I became aware, more vividly aware than I had ever been, that the secret of life consists in sharing the madness of God. By sharing the madness of God, I mean the power of rousing a peculiar exultation in yourself as you confront the Inanimate, an exultation which is really a cosmic eroticism … (p. 531)
And again, in the Roman amphitheatre in Verona:
Alone in that Roman circle, under those clouds from which no drop of rain fell, the thaumaturgic element in my nature rose to such a pitch that I felt, as I have only done once or twice since, that I really was endowed with some sort of supernatural power ... I felt it again, only five years ago, when I visited Stonehenge ... The feeling that comes over me at such times is one of most formidable power ... (p. 403)
There is reason to believe that Powys did not understand the mechanisms of this power. A strange story was related of Powys and his friend Theodore Dreiser:
Dreiser said that when he was living in New York, on West Fifty-seventh Street, John Cowper Powys came occasionally to dinner. At that time Powys was living in this country, in a little town about thirty miles up the Hudson, and he usually left Dreiser’s place fairly early to catch a train to take him home. One evening, after a rather long after-dinner conversation, Powys looked at his watch and said hurriedly that he had no idea it was so late, and he would have to go at once or miss his train. Dreiser helped him on with his overcoat, and Powys, on his way to the door, said, ‘I’ll appear before you, right here, later this evening. You’ll see me.’
‘Are you going to turn yourself into a ghost, or have you a key to the door?’ Dreiser laughed when he asked that question, for he did not believe for an instant that Powys meant to be taken seriously.
‘I don’t know,’ said Powys. ‘I may return as a spirit or in some other astral form.’
Dreiser said that there had been no discussion whatever during the evening, of spirits, ghosts or visions. The talk had been mainly about American publishers and their methods. He said that he gave no further thought to Powys’s promise to reappear, but he sat up reading for about two hours, all alone. Then he looked up from his book and saw Powys standing in the doorway between the entrance hall and the living room. The apparition had Powys’s features, his tall stature, loose tweed garments and general appearance, but a pale white glow shone from the figure. Dreiser rose at once, and strode towards the ghost, or whatever it was, saying, ‘Well, you’ve kept your word, John. You’re here. Come on in and tell me how you did it.’ The apparition did not reply, and it vanished when Dreiser was within three feet of it.
As soon as he had recovered somewhat from his astonishment Dreiser picked up the telephone and called John Cowper Powys’s house in the country. Powys came to the phone, and Dreiser recognised his voice. After he had heard the story of the apparition, Powys said, ‘I told you I’d be there, and you oughtn’t to be surprised.’ Dreiser told me that he was never able to get any explanation from Powys, who refused to discuss the matter from any standpoint.*
Why should Powys refuse to discuss it from any standpoint? Because he had no idea of how he had done it and could not describe the process. It depended on the nature of the psychic link between himself and Dreiser: ‘I used to be aware ... of surging waves of magnetic attraction between Dreiser and myself ... which seem super-chemical and due to the diffusion of some mysterious occult force The appearance was probably in Dreiser’s own mind; another person in the room would not have seen it.
It may sound contradictory to say that Powys had no idea of how he had projected his ‘apparition’; but it is not. For we are now concerned with the fundamental question of conscious control of the subconscious mind. All my physical functions, from digestion to excretion, are controlled by my subconscious depths. If I am of a nervous disposition, I may find it impossible to urinate in a public lavatory with other people standing near; no amount of conscious effort can destroy the inhibition; I need to relax and let my subconscious do the work. Stendhal suffered from an embarrassing sexual disorder which he called le fiasco. Whenever his sexual excitement reached the point at which he was prepared to make love, he would experience an embarrassing collapse of the ability to do so. No amount of conscious desire to oblige his disappointed partner could make any difference. If I try to remember a name I have forgotten, I again rely on my subconscious to ‘throw it up’, although in this case I may be able to dispense with its help: I may look up the name in my address book, or get at it by some trick of association of ideas.
There is no reason why a man should not learn the basic ‘tricks’ of telepathy, or even ‘astral projection’, as he might train his memory to greater efficiency or get rid of urinatory inhibition by auto-suggestion. He would still not be able to explain it, even to his closest friend.
Serious emotional upset can also stimulate the ‘psychic faculties’. The case of the playwright Strindberg provides an interesting example. The break-up of his second marriage precipitated an emotional crisis in which he came close to insanity. He suffered delusions of persecution, all of which are described at length in his autobiographical volume Inferno. The result was an unlooked-for development of psychic powers that parallels the case of Peter Hurkos. In Legends, he describes an involuntary astral projection:
[In the autumn of 1895] I was passing through a dangerous illness in the French capital, when the longing to be in the bosom of my family overcame me to such a degree that I saw the inside of my house and for a moment forgot my surroundings, having lost the consciousness of where I was. I was really there behind the piano as I appeared, and the imagination of the old lady had nothing to do with the matter. But since she understood these kind of apparitions, and knew their significance, she saw in it a precursor of death, and wrote to ask if I were ill. (1912 edition, p. 86)
What is so interesting about this brief account is that Strindberg’s power of astral projection was connected with the imagination. He clearly imagined the room in which his mother-in-law was sitting, playing the piano, and the intensity of his imaginative vision somehow ‘projected’ him into the real room. He had used the ‘psychic ether’ as he might have used a telephone or closed-circuit television.
In the same volume he describes an event that may have even deeper significance. In the early hours of the morning, in a period of emotional strain he was sitting in a wine shop, trying to persuade a young friend not to give up his military career for that of an artist.
After arguments and endless appeals, I wished to call up in his memory a past event that might have influenced his resolve. He had forgotten the occurrence in question, and in order to stimulate his memory, I began to describe it to him: ‘You remember that evening in the Augustiner tavern.’ I continued to describe the table where we had eaten our meal, the position of the bar, the door through which people entered, the furniture, the pictures ... All of a sudden, I stopped. I had half lost consciousness without fainting, and still sat in my chair. I was in the Augustiner tavern, and had forgotten to whom I spoke, when I recommenced as follows: ‘Wait a minute. I am now in the Augustiner tavern, but I know very well that I am in some other place. Don’t say anything ... I don’t know you anymore, yet I know that I do. Where am I? Don’t say anything. This is interesting.’ I made an effort to raise my eyes – I don’t know if they were closed – and I saw a cloud, a background of indistinct colour, and from the ceiling descended something like a theatre curtain; it was the dividing wall with shelves and bottles.
‘Oh yes!’ I said, after feeling a pang pass through me. ‘I am in F’s wine shop.’
The officer’s face was distorted with alarm, and he wept.
‘What is the matter?’ I said to him.
‘That was dreadful,’ he answered. (pp. 92–93)
We may, of course, dismiss the whole thing as Strindberg’s imagination, excited by emotional stress. On the other hand, this event is consistent with the theory of ‘psychic faculties’ that I have tried to outline, and has the ring of truth. (Strindberg is a remarkably honest man, in spite of his neuroses, as the reader discovers when it is possible to check his version of events against someone else’s.) Again, he was exhausted – physically and emotionally. He was pushing himself to his limits as he exerted his powers of persuasion. And, as he remarks in the same book: ‘In the great crises of life, when existence itself is threatened, the soul attains transcendent powers.’
One of the most interesting and consistent accounts of these powers is to be found in a book called Psychic Self Defence (1930), by ‘Dion Fortune’, a Freudian psychologist whose real name was Violet Firth. At the age of twenty (in 1911) she was working in a school, under a domineering principal, who took a dislike to her, and (so Violet Firth believed) directed a stream of psychic malevolence at her, using yogic and hypnotic techniques. The result was traumatic, a feeling of bewilderment and misery greater than would be caused by an actual physical attack. A need for self-analysis led her to study psychology (on which she wrote a number of books); later, she came to feel that even the theories of Freud and Jung fail to do justice to the complexity of the human mind, and became a student of occultism. (She had always possessed some degree of mediumistic powers.) She joined the Order of the Golden Dawn (a magical society that will be discussed in the second part of this book), and had further psychic clashes with Mrs. Mathers, the wife of its founder. As a result of these alarming experiences,* she came to believe that the human mind can repel the hostile psychic forces that emanate (often unconsciously) from malevolent people. Even more interesting is the implication that a healthy and optimistic mind repels ordinary misfortune, and that ‘accident proneness’ or general bad luck are the result of a psyche made vulnerable by defeat or stagnation.
And at this point, I must outline my own basic theory of these powers of the mind.
In Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, there is a scene in which the hero looks at the peaceful pastoral scenery of the Happy Valley where he lives, and wonders why he cannot be happy like the sheep and cows. He reflects gloomily: ‘I can discover within me no power of perception that is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted. Man has surely some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy.’ (Chapter 2)
The italics are my own. The ‘latent sense’ is man’s evolutionary appetite, the desire to make contact with reality. But that is not all. Who has not experienced this strange frustration that comes in moments of pleasure and fulfilment? As a child, I had this feeling about water. If my parents took me on a bus excursion, I used to crane out of the window every time we went over a bridge; something about large sheets of water excited a painful desire that I found incomprehensible. For if I actually approached the water, what could I do to satisfy this feeling? Drink it? Swim in it? So when I first read the passage from Rasselas, I understood immediately what Johnson meant by ‘some latent sense ... or desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy’.
I labelled this ‘latent sense’ Faculty X. And I came to see that Faculty X has something to do with ‘reality’. In Swann’s Way Proust describes how he tasted a madeleine dipped in tea, and was suddenly reminded of his childhood in Combray – reminded with such an intensity that for a moment he was actually there. ‘An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses ... And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory ... I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal …’
Five minutes earlier, he could have said, ‘Yes, I was a child in Combray,’ and no doubt described it in detail; but the madeleine suddenly meant that he could say it and mean it. Chesterton says, ‘We say 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 say something and mean it only when Faculty X is awake, that painful reaching-beyond-the-senses. Faculty X is the key to all poetic and mystical experience; when it awakens, life suddenly takes on a new, poignant quality. Faust is about to commit suicide in weariness and despair when he hears the Easter Bells; they bring back his childhood, and suddenly Faculty X is awake, and he knows that suicide is the ultimate laughable absurdity.
Faculty X is simply that latent power that human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as this place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it – fragmentary and uncertain though it is – that distinguishes man from all other animals.
But if the oppressive reality of this place and time is an illusion, so is my sense of being uniquely here, now. ‘I am not here; neither am I elsewhere,’ says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. So that if Faculty X can make Strindberg clearly aware of the reality of a place several hundreds of miles away, is it not conceivable that it might ‘transport’ him there in another sense?
It would be a mistake to think of Faculty X as an ‘occult’ faculty. It is not; it is the power to grasp reality, and it unites the two halves of man’s mind, conscious and subconscious.
Think: what happens if a piece of music or a smell of woodsmoke suddenly reminds me of something that happened ten years ago? It is like touching the leg of a dead frog with an electric wire. My mind convulses and contracts, suddenly grasping the reality of that past time as though it were the present. The same thing happens to Marcel in Proust’s novel Swann’s Way when he tastes a madeleine dipped in tea – his past floods back as a reality. What happens is that our normally lazy and diffused consciousness focuses, as I might clench my fist. The tune or smell only provides the stimulus; my inner strength does the rest – an inner strength of which I am normally unaware.
A few years ago, psychologists performed a classic experiment with a cat. A wire was connected to the nerve between the cat’s ear and its brain, and the other end of the wire was connected to a dial for measuring electrical impulses. When a loud noise sounded near the cat’s ear, the needle of the dial swung over violently. Then a cage of mice was placed in front of the cat. It watched them intently. The same loud noise was sounded close to its ear. But the needle did not stir. The cat was so intent on the mice that it ignored the sound – and somehow it ‘switched off’ the physical impulse between the ear and the brain. It chose to focus on something else.
All living creatures have this power to ‘focus’ on something that interests them, and ‘switch off’ everything else. Someone accustomed to a modern city probably cuts out as much as 99 per cent of the stimuli that fall on the senses. We all know about this. But what we have not yet grasped is the extraordinary power we possess in being able to focus upon particular aspects of reality. This power is Faculty X, but at the moment, we hardly make use of it, unaware of its potentialities.
It is worth asking the question: What is consciousness for? When you are deeply asleep, you have no consciousness. When you are very tired, your consciousness is like a dim light that hardly illuminates anything. When you are wide awake and excited, consciousness seems to increase in sheer candle-power. Its purpose is to illuminate reality, to reach out into its recesses, and thus to enable us to act upon it and transform it. It is obvious that our basic aim should be to increase its candle-power. When it is low, reality becomes ‘unreal’; as it becomes stronger, reality becomes ‘realler’: Faculty X.
One of the clearest examples of the working of Faculty X can be found in the tenth volume of Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History, in which he explains how he came to write that work. He speaks of the sense of ‘reality’ that suddenly comes to historians: ‘The writer of the present Study had an authentic minor personal experience of the kind on the 23rd May, 1912, as he sat musing on the summit of the citadel of Mistra, with the sheer wall of Mount Taygetus bounding his horizon in the western quarter of the compass, towards which he was bound, and the open vale of Sparta stretching away in the opposite eastern quarter, from which he had made his way that morning …’
‘The sensuous experience that activated his historical imagination was not a sound of liturgical chanting; it was the sight of the ruins among which he had wound his way upwards to the peak; and this spectacle had been appalling, for in this shattered fairy city Time had stood still since that spring of A.D. 1821 in which Mistra had been laid desolate ... One April morning, out of the blue, the avalanche of wild highlanders from the Mani had overwhelmed her; her citizens had been forced to flee for their lives and had been despoiled and massacred as they fled; her deserted mansions had been sacked; and her ruins had been left desolate from that day to this …’
What struck Toynbee on this occasion was not simply the question of ‘the cruel riddle of Mankind’s crimes and follies’, but the total reality of the scene conjured up by his imagination. He mentions half a dozen other experiences in which there was this same hallucinatory effect of reality. Reading how one of the proscribed leaders of the Italian Confederacy was refused help by his wife, and committed suicide in front of her eyes, he was ‘transported, in a flash, across the gulf of Time and Space from Oxford in A.D. 1911 to Teanum in 80 B.C., to find himself in a back yard on a dark night witnessing a personal tragedy …’ He records similar experiences – all very brief – when reading Bernal Diaz describing the Spaniards’ first sight of Tenochtitlan, Villehardouin describing his first sight of Constantinople during the Crusades, a Greek soldier describing how he tried to save a girl from rape. And finally, an experience in which the dividing line between Faculty X and mystical experience becomes blurred:
On each of the six occasions just recorded, the writer had been rapt into a momentary communion with the actors in a particular historic event through the effect upon his imagination of a sudden arresting view of the scene ... But there was another occasion on which he had been vouchsafed a larger and a stranger experience. In London in the southern section of the Buckingham Palace Road, walking southward along the pavement skirting the west wall of Victoria Station, the writer once, one afternoon not long after the date of the First World War ... had 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. In that instant he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide. The experience lasted long enough for him to take visual note of the Edwardian red brick surface and white stone facings of the station wall gliding past on his left, and to wonder – half amazed and half amused – why this incongruously prosaic scene should have been the physical setting of a mental illumination. An instant later, the communion had ceased, and the dreamer was back again in the everyday cockney world which was his native social milieu ...*
These pages of Toynbee are among the clearest descriptions of the operation of Faculty X that exist, and they underline the point I have tried to make. When I am half asleep, my sense of reality is restricted to myself and my immediate surroundings. The more awake I am, the further it stretches. But what we call ‘waking consciousness’ is not usually a great deal better than sleep. We are still wrapped in a passive, sluggish daydream. But this is not because there is some natural limit to consciousness, but only because we remain unaware that it can be stretched. We are like dogs who think they are on a chain when in fact they are free.
Faculty X is not a ‘sixth sense’, but an ordinary potentiality of consciousness. And it should be clear from what I have written above that it is the key not only to so called occult experience, but to the whole future evolution of the human race.
* Letter to Constance Malleson, 1918, quoted in My Philosophical Development, p.261.
* See Psychic, by Peter Hurkos (London, Barker, 1961).
* London, Neville Spearman, 1970.
* ‘Murder: A Father’s Story’, by Michael Whitaker, The Sunday Times, March 29, 1970.
* A closely similar view of child learning is held by Noam Chomsky, the linguistic philosopher.
* W. E. Woodward. The Gift of Life (New York, Dutton, 1947). Quoted by Professor Wilson Knight in The Satumian Quest, p. 128.
* See Part Three, Chapter 3.
* A Study of History (Oxford, 1954.), Vol. X, pp. 130–140.