THREE

GLIMPSES

All physicists understand that when you are dealing with unobservable phenomena, such as what goes on inside an atom, the first necessity is to formulate a theory that fits the available known facts. Without a theory, facts are merely baffling pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, lying disconnected in the box. In the present chapter, I shall try to suggest a general theory that might impose some order on the bewildering mass of occult phenomena already examined. The essence of this theory can be stated in a few sentences. For various reasons, ‘ordinary consciousness’ is hopelessly sub-normal and inefficient. There is something wrong with it, rather as if a whole batch of cars were sent out of a factory with some tiny but essential component missing. Various religious, ascetic and mystical disciplines have attempted a cure for this deficiency, which Christians call original sin, but the greatest stride forward was taken in the final years of the nineteenth century, when Edmund Husserl began to work out the discipline called phenomenology, a form of analytical psychology based upon the recognition of the intentionality of all our mental acts. This discipline – which even now is only partly understood – is slowly leading to an understanding of the precise mechanisms involved, and therefore of the part that is missing. The basic position of this book is that if the machine could be made to work normally, man would acquire, or learn to use, various powers and faculties that at present are ‘occult’ (latent, hidden) and would discover that they are perfectly natural after all.

All occultism has recognised the existence of a vital force that has never been identified by orthodox science. Mesmer called it ‘animal magnetism’, and Mary Baker Eddy believed that it was the secret of health.

In 1845, there appeared in Germany a bulky work whose lengthy title can be abbreviated: Physico-Physiological Researches on the Dynamics of Magnetism, etc., in Relation to the Vital Force. It was by a respected chemist and physicist, Baron Karl Von Reichenbach, and it caused a sensation. It was the kind of book that today would become an immediate best seller. He stated on an early page:

Through the kindness of a surgeon practising in Vienna, I was introduced in March 1844 to one of his patients, the daughter of the tax collector, Novotny, No. 471 Landstrasse, a young woman of 25 years of age, who had suffered for eight years from increasing pains in the head, and from these fallen into cataleptic attacks … In her, all the exalted intensity of the senses had appeared, so that she could not bear sun or candlelight.

I allowed the father of the girl to make the first preparatory experiment … I directed him to hold before the patient, in the middle of the night, the largest existing magnet, a nine-fold horseshoe capable of supporting about ninety pounds of iron … This was done, and the following morning I was informed that the girl had really perceived a distinct continuous luminosity as long as the magnet was kept open … The fiery appearance was about equal in size at each pole … Close upon the steel from which it streamed, it appeared to form a fiery vapour, and this was surrounded by a kind of glory of rays …

He found four more neurasthenic girls, and they all saw the same light; some of them saw it as a kind of Aurora Borealis, radiating a brilliant reddish-yellow light from the South Pole and bluish-green from the North. Suggestion hardly seemed to account for it; for example, he made an assistant go into the next room and uncover a huge magnet directly behind the girl’s bed; she became uncomfortable and declared there was a magnet around somewhere. He tried blindfolding her; she knew when the magnet was uncovered (i.e. when the armature was no longer joining its two poles). When Miss Novotny was out cold, in a cataleptic condition, and a horse-shoe magnet was brought near her hand, the hand stuck to it as if the flesh had been a piece of metal. But as Miss Novotny’s health improved – no doubt because of all the attention she was getting – she lost her ability to see the ‘aurora’ around magnets.

Reichenbach was no crank. When he heard that certain ‘sick sensitives’ had been able to magnetise needles by holding them, he carefully tested this, and found it to be untrue.

He tried magnetising other substances; crystals were an obvious choice. These affected his patients in the same way. He then tried the effect of unmagnetised crystals, and to his surprise, these also worked. He bought a huge crystal, and drew it gently down the patient’s arm; she felt a pleasant sensation like a cool breeze. Drawn upward, it produced a warmth that was not entirely pleasant. He tried it on a fellow experimental scientist, and to his surprise, this completely healthy man unmistakably felt the action of the crystal. The obvious inference was that magnets and crystals both conduct electromagnetic force; but this quickly proved incorrect. So what was the force they both seemed to possess? Reichenbach decided to call it ‘odic force’ or odyle. And as he went on to try more and more substances – zinc, sulphur, alum, salt, copper – he found that all seemed to have some degree of odic force, although the colours were often quite distinctive. His experiments with the ‘odic force’ of precious and semi-precious stones seemed to confirm the occult and alchemical tradition about their nature, although this aspect did not interest Reichenbach in the least, for there was nothing of the occultist about him.

Human beings possess odic force in an unusual degree, he discovered; it can be seen as a kind of light streaming from the finger ends. And not only by ‘sick sensitives’; Reichenbach discovered that about a third of all people seem to be more or less sensitive to the odic force.

By the time his book appeared in English in 1851, the activities of the Fox sisters and the youthful Daniel Dunglas Home were exciting the world. It seemed perfectly natural to attribute the activities of the ‘spirits’ – or whatever they were – to odic force. The more sceptical were inclined to believe that it was the medium’s own odic force that made the tables move. As to how the odic force could be transmitted across rooms, or even across oceans, the spiritualists were inclined to accept the suggestion that there is some kind of ‘psychic ether’ that carries the ‘waves’ – a hypothesis that has been revived in our own time by Professor C. D. Broad.

Experimenters in other countries tried Reichenbach’s experiments and obtained the same results; for example, Dr. John Ashburner, the English translator of Reichenbach, packs the book with his lengthy notes on his own experiments, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing with Reichenbach. It is not surprising that all this Germanic thoroughness impressed everybody. But even from the beginning, there were critics who declared that Reichenbach’s book was a tissue of absurdities and fallacies. And in England, James Braid, the man who investigated hypnotism, found a simpler explanation for the odic phenomena: hypnotic suggestion. That, he said, was why the patients had to be sick and sensitive. The people who had hailed Reichenbach’s book as the most important contribution to science since Newton’s Principia began to mute their enthusiasm and express misgivings. And in 1859 the great Darwin controversy swept across the world, and odic force was looked back upon as a passing fad, and its discoverer as a misguided crank. Any scientist whose work could be quoted by spiritualists must be a crank.

And yet … Although Reichenbach’s Researches in Magnetism has been long forgotten, and the few libraries who possess a copy usually classify it under electricity, it remains an unforgettable and convincing book. Could it be that he was right after all? The Hindus believe in a force called kundalini, which the yogis attempt to control; it ascends the spine, and moves from ‘centre’ to ‘centre’ in the body. Temple painting in India, Ceylon and Japan often show ‘auras’ emanating from the body, and the colour schemes are strangely reminiscent of Reichenbach. Paracelsus states: ‘The vital force is not enclosed in man, but radiates round him like a luminous sphere … In these semi-natural rays, the imagination of man may produce healthy or morbid effects.’

In Man's Latent Powers (1938), Phoebe Payne describes the ‘psychic aura’ of living things:

I remember well that as a tiny child my absorbing interest in flowers was due not only to their beauty, but to the curiosity of ‘watching their wheels go round’ in the form of their different emanations, some of which showed as a fuzz of luminous mist, while others radiated in a shower of minute sparks or ‘prickles’, and I soon learned to associate a ‘nice smell’ with a flower from which there rose a column of silvery smoke. In the same way, my delight in playing with any kind of animal was partly caused by the fun of experimenting with different effects produced by tickling or clutching at the responsive ‘something’ with which it was surrounded. Throughout my early years I was unaware that not everyone experienced such contacts.

That this sensitivity to the ‘odic force’ is fundamentally of the same nature as the powers of psychics like Hurkos or Croiset is clear from the remark:

As time went on, adaptation to my personal environment only became more difficult, an uncompromising affair in which I suffered defeat most of the time, chiefly because the behaviour of the ordinary world differed so much from the slow tranquillity on the one hand, or the swift creations constantly blossoming into beauty on the other, of what was to me the more real side of life. Added to this was the constant misery of being acutely aware of people’s thoughts, and still more of their emotions, as something objective which they themselves usually did not seem to recognise.

In the year 1939 an eminent Freudian psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, startled and enraged his colleagues by announcing that he had discovered a new form of energy unknown to physics: the vital energy which regulates the health of living creatures. The case of Wilhelm Reich is so strange that it is worth considering at some length; it recalls Reichenbach in many ways.

Reich was born in 1897, and by the mid-1920s he occupied an influential position in the psycho-analytic movement in Vienna. He was a member of the Communist party until expelled in 1933 for expressing the view that fascism is the outcome of sexual repression rather than economic forces.

One of his most interesting concepts was that of ‘character armour’, the tortoise-like shell which neurotics create to cover up inner weakness and anxiety, and which may even express itself in the form of muscular rigidity or paralysis. Reich saw the psychiatrist’s task as the breaking down of his armour.

But clearly, there is something negative about this concept. Anyone’s character can be interpreted as defensive armour, whether he is extrovert or introvert, destructive or creative. And if one becomes too obsessed by Reich’s notion, one is likely to end by seeing everybody as sick. Reich had a concept of a healthy personality: someone who has learned to express sexual impulses with complete freedom. But he was perceptive enough to see that this was also negative. (It is, in fact, merely a restatement of D. H. Lawrence’s position.) The orgasm cannot really be the ultimate goal of the human race. His mind groped for some more positive concept. And in 1939, in Norway, he believed he had found it: orgone energy. ‘Orgone is a visible, measurable and applicable energy of a cosmic nature,’ says Reich in a footnote to Character Analysis (p. 304).

‘Modern natural philosophy, in order to explain the world, has been obliged to recognise an imponderable, universal agent, [and] has even proved its presence … On this main principle of cosmogony, Zoroaster is in agreement with Heraclitus, Pythagoras with Saint Paul, the Kabbalists with Paracelsus. Cybele-Maïa reigns everywhere, the mighty soul of the world, the vibrating and plastic substance which the breath of the creative spirit uses at will … The fluid becomes transformed, it rarefies or densifies according to the souls it clothes or the world it envelops.’

This is not a quotation from Reich, but from Edouard Schuré’s Great Initiates, and he is speaking about the ‘astral light’. Reich rediscovered the ‘astral light’ and called it orgone energy. This is a blue energy which permeates the whole universe, and which forms a field around living beings – Reichenbach’s odyle, Phoebe Payne’s ‘aura’. The reason that the physical contact between child and mother relieves anxiety, for example, is that their orgone fields unite like two drops of water.

In the sexual orgasm, orgone energy becomes concentrated in the genitals; it is the tingling feeling experienced in sexual excitement. Living matter is made up of ‘bions’, which are tiny cells pulsating with orgone energy.

How did Reich come to make this astonishing discovery? It is important to understand that he saw it as a strictly logical development of his Freudian psychology. Neurosis is caused by ‘sexual stasis’, stagnating ‘sexual fluid’, and the orgasm discharges the sex energies and eliminates the neurosis. Reich found himself inclined to belief in some specific biological energy, distinct from physical energies; the biologist Kammerer had postulated a similar energy; it is Shaw’s ‘life force’. But this biological energy is physical, not somehow ‘spiritual’. Sometime around 1933, Reich believed that he had detected the basic unit of living matter, the bion, under the microscope. If living matter is made to swell up, with potassium hydroxide, for example, these bions become clearly visible. If particles of carbon are dropped into a filtered solution of bouillon and potassium chloride, says Reich, the blue bions soon begin to appear, and the heavy carbon particles change their nature and become living matter. When bions degenerate, the result is what Reich calls T-bacilli, which cause cancer.

It was after years of performing experiments to create bions, which Reich claims are quite clearly visible under the microscope, that he stumbled on orgone energy. He had been examining a sea-sand culture under the microscope daily, and his eye developed conjuctivitis. He concluded that this sea-sand culture gave off some powerful form of radiation. Tests for radioactivity were negative, yet he discovered that the sea-sand culture could cause flesh to become swollen and painful. People in a room with many such cultures became headachey and tired. He observed that in the dark the cultures seemed to give off a grey-blue light. Objects could become charged with this blue energy, and would then influence an electroscope. He finally concluded that this new, unknown energy comes from the sun, and that organic substances have the power to absorb this energy and retain it.

He constructed a box to prevent the energy escaping. It had to have metal walls – because organic matter absorbs orgone energy – and layers of organic matter outside, which would absorb any energy that managed to get through the metal. He observed bluish light around the dishes of the culture in this box. And then, to his amazement, he observed the same blue light in the box when the cultures had been removed.

On a holiday in Maine in 1940, Reich observed that stars on the eastern horizon seem to twinkle more than those on the western horizon; he reasoned that if twinkling is due to the diffusion of light in the atmosphere, it should be the same everywhere. Then he observed that there seemed to be blue patches between the stars that flickered and gave off flashes of light. Then the answer came to him. Orgone energy permeates everything, and it causes the flickering of the stars. His ‘box’ had been picking up this energy in its outer, organic layer and sending the energy in through the metal walls, where it became trapped, like heat in a greenhouse. This was the origin of Reich’s ‘orgone box’, which one of his disciples has described as the greatest discovery ever made in medical science. The orgone box is an energy accumulator, says Reich, and if sick people sit inside one, they can quickly be recharged. If they sit too long, the result is headache and a feeling of sickness, like getting sun-stroke.

Reich was totally convinced of the importance of his discovery, but his fellow scientists and doctors would not have it at any price. They said that his photographs of ‘bions’ were simply bacteria that had got in from the air. Reich said that if you stare at the blue sky, you see waves passing rhythmically across it; the scientists said that the ‘waves’ were simply the fatigue of the eye muscles. As to Reich’s belief that the twinkling of stars, the blueness of the sky, the rippling waves above a hot road, the darkness of a thunder-cloud, are all due to orgone energy, they simply pointed out that there are less fanciful explanations for each of these phenomena.

The last years of Reich’s life were tragic. He was convinced of the vital importance of his discoveries, and his Foundation in Maine set out to make them known. He made many converts, but the medical profession reacted as it has reacted to all innovators since Paracelsus. In 1956, Reich was sent to prison for two years and fined £10,000, having been accused by the Food and Drug Administration of selling harmful quack remedies. He died of a heart attack after eight months in prison.

Only careful and unprejudiced examination of his claims by scientists can decide whether Reich was totally deluded during the last twenty-five years of his life, or whether he had really stumbled on an important discovery. All that can be said at the moment is that there is still no sign that any scientist is prepared to make such an examination; his claims have been dismissed out of hand. It will be seen that these claims by no means conflict with the theories advanced in this book – for example, with Dr. David Foster’s notion that cosmic rays may carry information codes. According to Reich, ‘cosmic rays’ are fundamentally orgone energy, and nothing is more likely than that they possess inherent organising powers over matter. Reich points out that we feel emotional energies to be of a different nature from electrical energies, and again he is obviously right. In fact, if we may state the minimum working hypothesis that has emerged in the course of this book, it is this: that there are energies concerned with vital processes that have not yet been identified in the laboratory. Reich argues that cancers develop in organs of the body that have ‘played a dominant role in the muscular armour that repressed sexual excitation’. There is still a tendency among research workers to consider cancer a virus disease, but it is equally certain that it bears a curious relation to a drop in vitality; for example, American research revealed that students who had succumbed to severe nervous depression as a result of overwork showed an unusually high incidence of cancer. The view of George Bernard Shaw, expressed in Back to Methuselah, is closer to Reich’s; Shaw believes that the universe is permeated with ‘life energy’, and that some matter is a good conductor and some is a bad conductor. If I sustain a bad bruise, the ‘conductivity’ of the flesh may be damaged, so that it conducts a lower life-current, which may enable it to develop on its own as a separate entity. Reich would say that the bruised flesh shows a degeneration in its bion structure.

And this raises another interesting question. Most bruises do not turn into cancers. What is the law involved here? The process seems to bear some resemblance to the process involved in mental illness. That is, a person sinks into a condition of vague defeat and depression, but it makes no real difference to his everyday activities, and his mental states vary from day to day. Then one day, some unpleasant event or momentary fear plunges him to a lower level, and he stays there, as if he had fallen down a steep step or over a cliff. And a tremendous, long-term effort is needed to raise him back to his old level. It is as if human evolution is not an uphill slope, but something like a steep flight of steps. As Shaw points out in the Methuselah preface, evolution does not progress steadily, but by sudden leaps. If you are learning to ride a bicycle, you fall off fifty times, and then find yourself suddenly riding it the fifty-first time. As if each time you tried to ride it, you accumulated a little more skill which did not show immediately but went into a ‘reserve supply’, until you are ready to go ‘up the next step’ on the stairway. The significance of this must be discussed later in the chapter, but one point can be made immediately. If we can tumble down the evolutionary stairway through boredom and defeat-proneness, we can also clamber up to new levels by a gentle, cumulative effort; no frenzied leap is required. And evidence indicates unmistakably that these higher levels are the levels upon which man’s ‘latent powers’ cease to be latent.

Reich’s comments about sexual excitement raise a point of vital importance in this discussion. Sexual excitement occurs in two parts: a mental part, where the imagination is important; and a physical part, where the body takes over and explodes into physical climax. We take this for granted; but it is almost unique in the realm of human experience. If I am moved by a piece of music, or by the smells of a spring morning, my ‘imaginative’ excitement increases, then it recedes, without any physical counterpart. This imaginative part is ‘intentional’: that is, a sudden noise can break my concentration and ruin the whole thing. The teenager who experiences an orgasm for the first time recognises the astonishing nature of the occurrence. It is almost as strange as if he sprouted wings and flew. What had before been largely an ‘intentional’, mental excitation has burst into the realm of the physical. And this in itself seems amazing; for after all, the body catches colds, get hungry, feels fatigue, without asking my mind’s permission.

Human beings suffer from this mistaken notion that the body and mind run on parallel tracks, without really influencing one another. But most people who experience early sexual development do so because they are intensely preoccupied with the subject, and this preoccupation ‘adds up’, like efforts to ride a bicycle, until one day the ‘leap’ occurs – in this case, the power of experiencing a physical climax.

Which raises the interesting question: what other powers could we develop if we made a determined effort?

Consider a curious case cited by C. D. Broad, from the Occult Review for 1929. A Mr. Oliver Fox describes how he developed a capacity for – apparently – leaving his body.

In 1902, Fox had a dream, during the course of which it struck him suddenly that he must be dreaming. He went on dreaming; but the knowledge that this was only a dream produced a feeling of great clarity, and the scenery of the dream became unusually vivid and beautiful. He tried to develop this knack of ‘self-awareness’ in dreams; it happened infrequently, but when it did, he always experienced the same feeling of clarity and beauty.

He also discovered that once he was ‘in control’ of the dream, he could float through brick walls, levitate and so on. What was happening was, in fact, the reverse of a nightmare, where your legs refuse to run. He gradually became fairly expert at inducing these dreams, but observed that if he tried to prolong them, he experienced a pain in his head. He assumed this to be in the pineal gland, the unused ‘eye’ in the centre of the brain, which occult tradition declares to be the doorway to ‘other’ states of being. If he ignored the pain and continued the dream, the result was a feeling of ‘bilocation’, as if he had left his body and was floating above it, although still aware of his body.

Eventually he discovered that if he tried determinedly he could overcome the pain. When this happened, there was a kind of ‘click’ in his head – which he identified with the opening of the pineal ‘door’ – and he then felt himself to be wholly located in the scenery of his dream, which, as before, would appear far more beautiful than normal. These dreams were followed by a return to his body, and another dream to the effect that he was back in bed and waking up. (Broad points out that another observer, the Dutch physicist van Eeden, also had false awakening dreams after ‘lucid dreams’ similar to Fox’s.)

Fox then attempted to induce these states while awake, lying on a bed and putting himself into a trance. He would feel his body becoming numb, and the room would seem to take on a golden colour. He had then to use his imagination, and picture himself hurtling towards the ‘pineal doorway’. If he was successful, he felt himself passing out of his body, and the golden colour increased; he would experience a sense of great clarity and beauty, just as in his dreams. Sometimes he was unsuccessful, and would then experience a depressing sense of his ‘astral body’ fading and the golden colour dying away. Once he had passed the ‘pineal doorway’, he would be able to float over scenery which was sometimes familiar, sometimes not, and see people at their ordinary occupations – although they did not seem to see him. Sometimes they seemed to sense his presence, and were frightened.

Van Eeden (also cited in Broad’s Lectures in Psychical Research) actually held conversations during his ‘lucid dreams’ with people he knew to be dead, and had a strong sense of their reality, although they seemed to be deliberately hesitant and vague in answering his questions about life after death.

These stories immediately bring to mind (a) Swedenborg’s conversations with the dead, and (b) John Cowper Powys’s ‘apparition’ to Theodore Dreiser. Raynor C. Johnson remarks in Nurslings of Immortality: ‘It is not, I think, generally known that apparitions have been created deliberately and experimentally. The well-attested cases of this are not numerous, but there are a number of records which show that the concentrated efforts of the will-to-appear to another person have led to the latter perceiving an apparition …’ (p. 101). I have already cited the case from Tyrrell’s Apparitions in which a woman appeared to friends in Kew by an effort of will; it is also observable that she passed into a kind of trance, similar to Fox’s, in which her body slowly became numb.

In Man’s Latent Powers, Phoebe Payne describes man’s ‘etheric body’ as follows:

This body of subtle physical material acts as the vehicle for the circulation of human vitality, and is an infinitely delicate bridge between the psychic worlds and the physical brain consciousness … It is the special qualities of this body … which constitute the main difference between the psychic and the non-psychic person. The etheric counterpart interpenetrates the whole of the physical anatomy, corresponding to it cell for cell, and also extends beyond it to a distance of four to six inches according to the nature and health of the individual. This outlying portion is called the health aura. It is visible to ordinary sight under favourable conditions of lighting … Many people can catch a glimpse of it in a half light by bringing the fingertips of the two hands near together and slowly drawing them apart, when a nebulous emanation can be sensed or seen flowing from one hand to the other … This duplicate subtle body appears often as a fine filmy mesh completely surrounding the ordinary physical body, mainly grey in colour. To trained clairvoyant sight it is an intricate structure of delicate hues.

The mention of fingertips certainly leads one to suspect that the etheric body and ‘odic force’ are somehow connected. And another paragraph suggests that the ‘etheric body’ functions on ‘orgone energy’: ‘In addition to being the bridge that connects man’s subjective experience with the brain and nervous system, the etheric body has the very important function of transmitting vitality from the surrounding atmosphere into the dense physical vehicle and of eliminating used etheric matter.’

Eisenbud treats the etheric body as a serious hypothesis in his book on Ted Serios. For the images that Serios imprinted on the photographic plate could not always be explained as photographs he had seen and memorised; two exceptionally clear shots of Russian Vostok space rockets, apparently in space, could not be traced at all in the literature on the subject, and a shot of Westminster Abbey was taken from an angle that would require an actual cameraman to hover well off the ground. Serios began, of course, as a ‘travelling clairvoyant’, and in the absence of more down-to-earth explanations, Eisenbud is willing to consider the hypothesis that this is how Serios obtained some of the images he fixed on the Polaroid plate. He goes on to make the interesting assertion that about 25 per cent of people have experienced ‘out-of-the-body’ experiences in which the body seems to be seen from a higher point in space. (While researching this present chapter, I mentioned the subject to a neighbour, Mrs. Kay Lunnis, who described a similar experience that occurred when she was seriously ill. At the crisis point of the illness, she had the sensation of seeing her body recede away – below – and then gradually come closer, until she re-entered it.) Eisenbud says: ‘A significant aspect of these experiences is the unanimity of agreement among those who report them – a unanimity all the more striking in that the great majority of the subjects had never heard of the phenomenon before having experienced it – as to the complete qualitative difference between the experience of being out of the body and state of dreaming or reverie.’ He goes on to cite at length an experience sent to the S.P.R. by an armoured car officer who was blown up by a German anti-tank gun in 1944 and hurled through the air covered with burning phosphorus:

… the next experience was definitely unusual. I was conscious of being two persons – one, lying on the ground in a field … my clothes, etc., on fire, and waving my limbs about wildly, at the same time uttering moans and gibbering with fear – I was quite conscious of both making these sounds, and at the same time hearing them as though coming from another person. The other ‘me’ was floating up in the air, about twenty feet from the ground, from which position I could see not only my other self on the ground, but also the hedge, and the road, and the car which was surrounded by smoke, and burning fiercely. I remember quite distinctly telling myself: ‘It’s no use gibbering like that – roll over and over to put the flames out.’ This my ground body eventually did, rolling over into a ditch under the hedge where there was a slight amount of water. The flames went out, and at this stage I suddenly became one person again.

A parallel example of travelling clairvoyance is cited by Sir Oliver Lodge in his article on ‘Psychic Science’ (in The Outline of Science); it is from Sir Alexander Ogston’s book Reminiscences of Three Campaigns. He describes feeling separated from his body during an attack of typhoid:

In my wanderings there was a strange consciousness that I could see through the walls of the building, though I was aware they were there, and that everything was transparent to my senses. I saw plainly, for instance, a poor R.A.M.C. surgeon, of whose existence I had not known, and who was in quite another part of the hospital, grow very ill and scream and die; I saw them cover his corpse and carry him softly out on shoeless feet, quietly and surreptitiously, lest we should know that he had died, and the next night – I thought – take him away to the cemetery. Afterwards, when I told these happenings to the sisters, they informed me that this had happened just as I had fancied.

A case cited by Thurston Hopkins* raises a further speculation. A Miss Helen Brookes described her experiences of ‘astral projection’ (which she calls ‘exteriorisation’) in dreams. Hovering over some sleeping children, she observed a ‘misty vapour emanating from the tops of their heads … On peering closer, I was able to see what they were doing astrally. For reflected in the vapour were the activities of their astral bodies.’ Miss Brookes speculates that ordinary dreaming is actually the activity of the astral body – a view also held by many primitive people, who believe that a person must be waked cautiously, to allow the spirit to return to the body. Miss Brookes’s account brings to mind Ouspensky’s description of seeing ‘sleeping people’ with their dreams hovering around their faces. He also commented that it was almost possible to read their minds.

Now all this is conceivable; we may or may not feel disposed to accept it, but it does not in any way conflict with our knowledge of the workings of the world. In the same way, if Dante could have looked into the twentieth century, he would have thought radio and television very strange, but their existence would not have contradicted everything he already knew about the universe. There is no scientific evidence for or against the astral body (although there is plenty of evidence for travelling clairvoyance, which seems to point to it).

On the other hand, experience of precognition does contradict what we know, or think we know, about time. By ‘time’, we mean process, something happening. If you could imagine a completely empty universe, with nothing whatever in it, it would also have no time. Time is something that is measured by things happening to physical entities – by a spring unwinding inside a clock, by my body slowly becoming older. As far as we know, it is irreversible. If I am listening to a record, and I want to hear something over again, I can put the stylus back on to earlier grooves. But there is no time machine to carry me back to yesterday, and the very idea is an absurdity. Because if I could go back to yesterday, or even ten seconds ago, I would meet another ‘me’, ten seconds younger. I could, in theory, collect millions of duplicates of myself and bring them all back to the present. No, the trouble lies in our use of language and ideas. I have elsewhere used the following illustration. Suppose people were born on moving trains, and stayed on them all their lives. They might invent a word to express the sensation of objects flowing past the windows of the train – a word like ‘lyme’, for example. And if the train stopped, they would say that ‘lyme’ had been arrested; and if the train reversed, they might say that ‘lyme’ is going backwards. But if someone wrote a book about travelling backwards or forwards in ‘lyme’ it would obviously be the result of sloppy thinking; ‘lyme’ does not exist in itself – it is made up of several things: landscape, a train and myself observing the flow of the landscape past the window. The same goes for time. It does not exist. Only a process exists.

In that case, how the devil can I possibly dream of the future? Common sense tells me that anything can happen. Imagine a swarm of bees, humming around above a flower garden. No calculating machine in the world could predict the position of a particular bee twenty seconds from now, because it depends upon the movements of thousands of other bees, all flying at random.

If precognition is possible, it would indicate that this view is false. But even the dottiest occultist would hesitate to assert that there is no such thing as chance. Gurdjieff asserted that most people’s lives are all chance.

But consider the following experience of J. B. Priestley’s, mentioned in his Man and Time:

The … dream belongs to the middle 1920s. I found myself sitting in the front row of a balcony or gallery in some colossal vague theatre that I never took in properly. On what I assumed to be the stage, equally vast and without any definite proscenium arch, was a brilliantly coloured and fantastic spectacle, quite motionless, quite unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was an unusually impressive dream, which haunted me for weeks afterwards.

Then in the early 1930s I paid my first visit to the Grand Canyon, arriving in the early morning when there was a thick mist and nothing to be seen. I sat for some time close to the railing on the South Rim, in front of the hotel there, waiting for the mist to thin out and lift. Suddenly it did, and then I saw, as if I were sitting in the front row of a balcony, that brilliantly coloured and fantastic spectacle, quite motionless, that I had seen in my dream theatre. My recognition of it was immediate and complete. My dream of years before had shown me a preview of my first sight of the Grand Canyon.

Priestley mentioned that he became fascinated with the Grand Canyon, and later visited it many times; it was this intense interest, he believes, that made him dream about the Grand Canyon in advance. He cites a similar case of ‘intuition’ of the future that makes the same point; it involves two people he knows well. A doctor noticed that he experienced a curious excitement on receiving duplicated official reports that came from the department headed by a Mrs. B. This excitement intensified as he received more of them, although they were in no way personal reports. A year later he met her, fell in love with her and married her. Mrs. B. experienced no similar excitement with regard to the doctor; on the contrary, she did not particularly like him on first acquaintance.

For the most part, the cases quoted by Priestley – and there are hundreds – all involve a happening of some importance. A mother dreams that she has left her one-year-old child by a stream while she goes to get soap to wash clothes; when she returns, he is face down in the water and dead; later in the summer, on a camping holiday, she suddenly recognises the scenery when she is, in fact, about to leave the child alone on the edge of the water as she goes to get the soap. Sensibly, she picks up the child and takes him with her, so there is no way of knowing whether the dream was truly premonitory. But the chances are in its favour.

He cites other cases, less dramatic, but perhaps more important. A woman who had had a strong intuition of some impending disaster, so that she began to cry during the service at St. Martin-in-the-Fields, realised it was connected with her nineteen-year-old son as soon as she saw him, on returning home. Three weeks later, he became ill and died. What happened during his illness is equally curious. He told his mother, ‘A dog is going to bark from a long way off.’ A few seconds later, the dog began to bark. He said, ‘Something is going to be dropped in the kitchen and the middle door will slam.’ Seconds later, an aunt dropped something in the kitchen and the door slammed. The illness had apparently caused his brain to work just ahead of time. Priestley also cites a case in which Sir Stephen King-Hall had a sudden clear premonition that a man would fall overboard in a moment. He decided to act on the hunch and gave orders about mustering the boat crew. As the commodore was asking him what the devil he thought he was doing, there was a cry of ‘Man overboard’ from a ship behind them in the convoy, and then, immediately after, from another ship; their boat was in the water within seconds and both men were pulled aboard. Here it may have been the fact that it was a double emergency that somehow triggered the intuition.

Inevitably, Priestley devotes a great deal of space to the time theories of J. W. Dunne, theories that caused a great deal of excitement in the 1930s and inspired three of Mr. Priestley’s own plays. In An Experiment with Time, Dunne describes how he was puzzled by the accuracy of some of his dreams. He dreamed his watch had stopped at half past four, and when he looked at it, the watch had stopped at half past four; the next morning, checking with a clock, he realised it had stopped only minutes before he woke up and found it had stopped. In a posthumous book, Intrusions, he mentions that a great crowd was yelling ‘Look … Look’ at him as the dream ended. A subsequent attempt to ‘see’ the time by closing his eyes and dozing was equally successful. Later, he dreamed of a volcanic eruption, and then saw in a newspaper that there had been such an eruption in Martinique. The newspaper account mentioned that forty thousand people might be killed; in his dream, Dunne had been convinced that four thousand had been killed. But the newspaper later proved to be quite wrong about the number. It was this that led Dunne to assume that what he had dreamed about was not the eruption itself, but seeing the newspaper headline, with its mistaken figure. (He had obviously misread forty thousand as four thousand.) He then began to experiment, keeping a pencil and paper by his bedside, and writing down unusual dreams on waking. The result convinced him that he often dreamed of things that would happen in the future.

Dunne was an intelligent man, an aeronautical engineer with an amateur interest in physics and mathematics; so he tried to construct a theory that would fit in with Einstein’s ‘relativistic’ notions of time. The result convinced many people at the time, but has steadily lost ground since then. Roughly, what he says is this. If time is something that flows or marches on, then there must be another kind of time by which we measure its speed, so to speak. And there must surely be yet another kind of time by which we measure the speed of this Time Two. However, this puzzling assertion is not really important to his central thesis, which is that human beings also have several levels. There is the ‘me’ who lives and suffers my life. There is another ‘me’ who is conscious of this first ‘me’, and which becomes apparent when I speak of ‘my-self’, Probably, Dunne says, there is also an infinite series of ‘me’s’. It is this second, detached ‘me’ who exists in Time Two, and who is able to look backwards and forwards in time.

To explain this strange assertion, Dunne makes another assumption. Suppose everything that happens to me during my life is laid out in a series of pictures, like a technicolour film starting with my birth and ending with my death. If I go through life dully and passively, like a cow, it would have a singularly monotonous quality. In fact, I ‘pay attention’ to some things and ignore others. So there is one ‘me’ who drifts through life merely ‘seeing’, and another ‘me’ who directs attention at some things I ‘see’ and not at others. Dunne calls this second observer ‘mind’. Normally ‘mind’ has a narrow choice of what to look at – the events of my life. But when I am asleep, it no longer has anything to focus on; and then, says Dunne, it may occupy its time glancing at the past or future.

He decides finally that there is a Universal Mind, of which individual minds are small aspects. And at this point, we may leave him, for he has obviously taken the leap into a kind of mysticism that has no relevance to the present discussion.

Priestley takes Dunne as his starting point, and has some penetrating suggestions. He rejects Dunne’s notion about an infinite number of ‘selves’, pointing out that all we need is three. There is the ‘me’ who merely observes blankly, the ‘me’ who exists as I stare out of the window of a train, half asleep, merely recording passing scenery. If I pull myself together and begin to reflect on what I am seeing – if, for example, I am passing through scenery that interests me and I stare with great intensity, looking for something – then a second ‘me’ comes into existence, the ‘me’ who judges and discriminates. And then there is a third ‘me’ who often observes the other two. For if I am able to observe the second ‘me’, there must be a third ‘me’ to do so. Priestley gives a good example of the three ‘me’s’. On an aeroplane journey, ‘Self 1’ observed unpleasant sounds in the aircraft and felt himself hurled out of his seat; ‘Self 2’, jerked into existence by the accident, observed that something was wrong (i.e., judged the situation instead of observing it passively); ‘Self 3’ thought coolly that he would shortly know what it was like to be fried alive.

As to time itself, Priestley suggests that there seems to be three varieties. There is the ordinary time that passes as I go about my ordinary tasks; there is the ‘time’ I become aware of in moments of stillness and contemplation – for example, what Arnold Toynbee experienced in the moment when he became aware of all history; and there is a kind of time that I seem to be able to control in moments of great intensity, the time I experience when I am intensely creative. Of the second kind he writes:

… I remember coming to a halt outside a fine large fish shop. As I stared at the scales and the fins and the round eyes, looking indignant even in death, I lost myself and all sense of passing time in a vision of fishiness itself, of all the shores and seas of the world, of the mysterious depths and wonder of oceanic life. This vision was not in any way related to myself. My ego was lost in it. And real poets, I suppose, must be always enjoying such selfless and timeless visions. They came to me only rarely: it might be from the sight of something, like those fishes gleaming on the marble, or after I had heard somebody merely say ‘France’ or ‘Italy’, or from simply reading the words ‘eighteenth century’; but they brought me at once a feeling of immense variety, richness and wonder of life on this earth. (p. 289)

As to Time Three, he goes on to speak of the tremendous speed with which he wrote four of his most successful, and difficult, plays, and comments that looking back on the experience, ‘I felt like a man watching himself run at a headlong pace across a mine field.’ He is inclined to believe that the unconscious mind has its own kind of time, and that this is what is involved in this kind of headlong creativity.

What Priestley now suggests is close to the time theories expressed by Ouspensky in A New Model of the Universe and Ouspensky’s follower, J. G. Bennett, in The Dramatic Universe: that time has three dimensions, like space. He cites the case of the wife of General Toutschkoff, who dreamed three times that her husband had been killed at a place called Borodino. They looked up Borodino on a map but could not find it (it is only a tiny village). But Napoleon invaded Russia; the Battle of Borodino took place, and she was informed of her husband’s death under the precise circumstances of her dream. This certainly suggests that time is predetermined, like a gramophone record. But what of the case of the mother who decided not to leave her child by the stream? Priestley cites several similar cases in which a warning in a dream enabled someone to avoid disaster. This suggests a second kind of time ‘connected in some way with the power to connect or disconnect potential and actual’ (to quote Bennett).

Priestley’s theory, then, is that Time One is the ordinary passing time of everyday living – ‘living and partly living’, as Eliot says. Time Two is ‘contemplative time’, which sometimes becomes apparent to us in dreams. Time Three is the time in which changes can be made. Blake seems to have been describing this when he wrote:

Each man is in his Spectre’s power,

Until the arrival of that hour,

When his Humanity awake

And cast his own Spectre into the lake.

We might say, following Gurdjieff, that man is usually in a sleeping state. In moments of contemplation, such as Toynbee experienced near Mistra, he wakes up – or Faculty X wakes up. But a further awakening is still possible, in which he lives and acts with real freedom, in which he can really ‘do’ things.

Priestley’s final view is that we are faced with a future ‘already shaped but still pliable’, and that even when the body dies, we somehow continue to exist in Times Two and Three. Ouspensky is inclined to accept Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence – the notion that we relive our lives over and over again; but he also believes that slight changes are possible, that some people have ‘an inner ascending line’ that slowly raises them to a higher level. (He distinguishes two other types: those for whom success becomes increasingly easy, and those who have an inbuilt degenerative principle that causes them to ‘sink’ from life to life.) That this view of Ouspensky’s was no casual speculation is proved by his novel The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin, in which the hero, disappointed in love, asks the magician to allow him to go back in time so he can avoid making the same mistakes. But, as in Barrie’s Dear Brutus, he repeats the same mistakes all over again, and comes back to the same point, the meeting with the magician. But this time, he realises what has happened, and asks the magician if things cannot be somehow altered. The magician, obviously Gurdjieff, smiles and says, ‘Ah, that is the question you should have asked earlier In other words, things can be changed if man can learn to be. He must cultivate the tiny grain of freedom he possesses.

Ouspensky’s vision may seem unnecessarily gloomy. And if, in fact, we really possess some of the powers suggested in this chapter, then it is almost certainly true. He suggests that a man is chained to his body, and his destiny, like a galley slave. But if that is so, how is travelling clairvoyance possible? Moreover, Priestley describes a number of dreams in which the dreamer appears to have dreamed someone else’s life. For example, he himself had an extraordinarily convincing dream in which he seemed to be some kind of spy in a foreign city who was shot by security police as he tried to steal some naval secret; Priestley says he thinks the balance of probability is that he somehow relived the last moments of a real man.

The poet Ronald Duncan, in reply to my question as to whether he had had any ‘occult’ experiences, sent me a story entitled Flame of the Forest,* in which he had fictionally embodied his own experience of having ‘lived before’. He comments, ‘As a child I found that I was worried by images which would flash into my mind without any apparent cause. For example, when I was going to tie my shoelace on the way to school, I would, as I bent down, always visualise a street scene in a city where I had never been … I became interested in race memory as a possible explanation, for I constantly had the experience of remembering something which I had not myself experienced.’

The story is told by a Hindu (Duncan spent many years in India as a disciple of Gandhi), who declares that he was born in England as Abercrombie Martyn, and tells how he had been completely dominated by his father, who seemed to want to relive his own life vicariously through his son. Experiences of a certain ford on a certain river kept flashing into his mind, particularly when he bent down to pick things up. He went to India and wandered around as a kind of tramp. One day he found himself by the ford at the river, in a kind of daydream. Suddenly a woman spoke to him – his wife – and he was no longer an Englishman named Abercrombie Martyn but a Hindu named Jitendra Narayan, who had gone to fetch water in a jar, and fallen into a daydream by the river.

Duncan is here trying to catch the essence of certain moments when one’s feeling of certainty and identity dissolves, revealing not a world of confusion or insanity but strangely logical vistas. In the preface to his epic poem Man, he describes how, sitting in his London flat, he was possessed for several days by memories that belonged to the past of the human race; a sense of déjà vu not simply about himself but about his remote ancestors. He explains that he had daubed the bare walls with colour to relieve the monotony; glancing up from his writing later, he realised that he had, without realising it, drawn a bison, matchstick men and prehistoric animals. This happened before he saw similar drawings reproduced from the caves of Lascaux. Duncan also experienced ‘a sense of smell so acute as to be intolerable … while it lasted, I found I could smell every odour in the adjoining flats’. (The experience brings to mind Louis Singer’s parallel experience described in Part One, Chapter 3.) It struck him: ‘I was not 47; some parts of me were possibly 20,000 years old.’ He later came to see the experience as a proof of Jung’s ‘racial memory’.

Equally odd, and (as far as I know) unique in kind, is an experience recounted by Robert Graves in an autobiographical fragment called The Abominable Mr. Gunn.* He describes how, one summer evening, sitting on a roller behind the school cricket pavilion, he suddenly ‘knew everything’: ‘I remember letting my mind range rapidly over all its familiar subjects of knowledge; only to find that this was no foolish fancy. I did know everything. To be plain: though conscious of having come less than a third of the way along the path of formal education, and being weak in mathematics, shaky in Greek grammar, and hazy about English, I nevertheless held the key of truth in my hand, and could use it to open the lock of any door. Mine was no religious or philosophical theory, but a simple method of looking sideways at disorderly facts to make perfect sense of them.’ The ‘vision’ was still there the next morning, although attempts to set it down on paper raised problems of self-expression that undermined it, and it faded the following evening.

What Graves means by ‘knowing everything’ becomes clearer in another episode he recounts: how a boy in the class called F. F. Smilley was suddenly able to do a very difficult mathematical problem instantaneously (it was to find the square root of the sum of two long decimals, divided by the sum of two complicated vulgar fractions). The boy wrote the answer on a sheet of paper, only to be told by the master that it could not be accepted unless he went back and did the ‘working out’. Smilley apparently continued to show this same curious ability for the remainder of the term when, owing to the closure of the school, Graves lost sight of him.

Now, the ability to do enormous sums is fairly common: mathematical prodigies reappear in every age, and they are, as often as not, uneducated young men who otherwise show no particular ability. The boy Zerah Colborn, asked if 4,294,967,297 was a prime number or not, replied after a moment: ‘No, it can be divided by 641.’ (The best brief account of these prodigies can be found in W. W. Rouse Ball’s Mathematical Recreations.) How feats like this are performed by the brain is not known – the prodigies themselves cannot explain the process – but Priestley’s hypothesis about time immediately suggests that what we are dealing with here is one of those lightning creative processes that occur in Time Three. What solves problems is what the philosopher Bernard Lonergan calls ‘insight’ (in his important book of that name). That is, you suddenly seem to be lifted above the ground, as if you could take a bird’s-eye view of a maze, and see the way out instead of ploddingly working it out on the ground by some formula. Lonergan cites Archimedes’ cry of ‘Eureka’ on suddenly grasping the law of floating bodies, as a typical example of insight, and we can see that the essence of such a ‘flash’ is that it distinctly has the quality of a key, just as Graves says. It answers dozens of questions all at one go, and the excitement of this realisation makes the mind see further vistas of questions that it can answer – and so on, with a feeling like ripples expanding across a pool.

If I am asked to work out a mathematical problem, I approach it through analogy with other problems, and then begin to calculate step by step, as if I was climbing a flight of stairs. But if real ‘insight’ comes – which it seldom does, since I am a poor mathematician – the whole thing is speeded up, and it seems possible to reach the top of the stairs in two quick bounds.

It sounds, then, as if this is what happened to Graves. He states clearly that it was not some religious or philosophical idea, but a ‘key’. (I have discussed the experience with him, and he was not able to elaborate on the account as already quoted.) Insight always has the effect of ‘connecting up’ disconnected ideas, like those children’s games where you connect a series of numbered dots and the result is suddenly a rabbit or a gnome on a toadstool: a result you could not possibly have inferred by studying the dots. Now, I think there can be no doubt that ‘insight’, whether it utilises Time Three or not, is a ‘normal’ faculty of the human brain that we have not yet got around to developing. The process of ‘insight’ is described lucidly in an essay by William James called ‘A Suggestion about Mysticism’. His suggestion, ‘stated very briefly, is that states of mystical intuition may be only very sudden and great extensions of the ordinary “field of consciousness”’. He says of such a glimpse, ‘It will be of unification, for the present coalesces in it with ranges of the remote quite out of its reach under ordinary circumstances; and the sense of relation will be greatly enhanced’ (i.e. the sense of having a key to other experiences). He mentions three experiences in which he experienced such a glimpse, and says:

What happened each time was that I seemed all at once to be reminded of a past experience; and this reminiscence, ere I could conceive or name it distinctly, developed into something further that belonged with it, this in turn into something further still, and so on, until the process faded out, leaving me amazed at the sudden vision of increasing ranges of distant fact of which I could give no articulate account. The mode of consciousness was perceptual, not conceptual [my italics] – the field expanding so fast that there seemed no time for conception or identification to get in its work. There was a strongly exciting sense that my knowledge of past (or present?) reality was enlarging pulse by pulse, but so rapidly that my intellectual processes could not keep up the pace. The content was thus entirely lost to retrospection – it sank into the limbo into which dreams vanish as we gradually awake. The feeling – I won’t call it belief – that I had had a sudden opening, had seen through a window, as it were, distant realities that incomprehensibly belonged with my own life, was so acute that I cannot shake it off today.

This is exceptionally clear. James had momentarily ‘wakened up’, in Gurdjieff’s sense, and consciousness ceased to drag itself like a wet fly over a table-top and launched itself into the dimension of pure ‘insight’.

James goes on to recount a story of dream experience that is baffling and difficult to grasp. He says that when he woke up in the morning, the dream he had just been having and some earlier dream seemed to somehow telescope together: ‘… the apparent mingling of two dreams was something very queer that I had never before experienced’. The following night, the confusion increased when he awakened from a deep, heavy sleep to find that three dreams now seemed to be somehow telescoping together. They were distinct dreams, each with its own atmosphere – one of London, one about trying on a coat, one about soldiers. There was a sensation of ‘belonging to three different dream systems at once’. ‘I began to feel curiously confused and scared, and tried to wake myself up wider, but I seemed already wide awake. Presently, cold shivers of dread ran over me: am I getting into other people’s dreams? Is this a “telepathic” experience? Or an invasion of double (or treble) personality?’ The description of misery and confusion that follows – of losing all sense of an anchor, anything to cling on to – is very moving. Then it came to him that he always slept very deeply from midnight until about 2 a.m., and that possibly the three dreams that were ‘telescoping’ were dreams that belonged to his deep sleep on previous nights. This explanation restored his sense of balance. He concludes by saying, ‘To this day I feel that those extra dreams were dreamed in reality, but when, where and by whom I cannot guess.’ This helps to uncover the source of his panic: the feeling that somebody else’s dreams had somehow got into his head, and that our normal sense of security and ‘reality’ is an error. But then, when one wakes from a deep sleep, it is to immediately experience what Priestley calls Self 1, the everyday self that drifts through Time One. What James’s ‘everyday self’ seems to have glimpsed is the bewildering vistas of other ‘dimensions’ of time. This negative experience seems to confirm Priestley’s notion of time, particularly when we bear in mind that James called it ‘the most intensely peculiar experience of my whole life’. Clearly, it seemed to hold significances that he was not able to express on paper.

It can, I think, be seen that James’s experience of ‘expanding horizons of fact’ is nothing less than a sudden total awakening of Faculty X, which is, as I have said, a sense of the objective reality of other times and places, instead of the usual subjective worm’s-eye view in which we are trapped all our lives. It is like standing on a mountaintop and seeing far more than you are able to see from the valley. In fact, Priestley’s image of the mist rising on the Grand Canyon expresses it admirably. It can be understood why Graves felt he ‘knew everything’ while this glimpse lasted. Equally interesting is the fact that, although James believes that such experiences are bound to be momentary, Graves’s lasted for about twenty-four hours. This is of immense importance. For the experience that suddenly happened to Graves was a kind of mental counterpart of Home’s ability to float in the air. And it lasted. If it could last for a day, there is no reason why it should not last all the time.

It is necessary to try to gain further insight into the nature of this ‘glimpse’. It is quite clearly what the mystics have always talked about. And the mystics have asserted that it is ‘ineffable’, that it cannot be talked about or analysed. In this book we have gone a long way towards analysing it, and perhaps may go further still.

Warner Allen, in his interesting book The Timeless Moment, describes how he experienced the fundamental mystical ‘glimpse’:

When the writer was on the threshold of fifty, it occurred to him as it must have occurred to many another ordinary journalist, no less hostile to the apparent sloppiness of fashionable mysticism than he was, that he had lived for nearly half a century without discerning in life any pattern of rational purpose. His views on the matter might have been roughly summed up in a vague notion that the universe was shrouded in impenetrable darkness by the powers of Life and Death, for fear life should lose its savour as a brave adventure, if the mystery of death and suffering was solved, and uncertainty was exchanged for the assurance of future beatitude. A curiously vivid dream shook his faith in this tentative explanation of human ignorance … This quest of truth led through paths of unforeseen darkness and danger, but within a year … an answer came.

It flashed up lightning-wise during a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Queen’s Hall, in that triumphant fast movement when ‘the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy’. The swiftly flowing continuity of the music was not interrupted, so that what Mr. T. S. Eliot calls ‘the intersection of the timeless moment’ [with time] must have slipped into the interval between two demi-semiquavers, When, long after, I analysed the happening in the cold light of retrospect, it seemed to fall into three parts: first, the mysterious event itself, which occurred in an infinitesimal fraction of a split second; this I learned afterwards from Santa Teresa to call the Union with God; then Illumination, a wordless stream of complex feelings in which the experience of Union combined with the rhythmic emotion of the music like a sunbeam striking with iridescence the spray above a waterfall – a stream that was continually swollen by tributaries of associated Experience; lastly, Enlightenment, the recollection in tranquillity of the whole complex of Experience, as it were, embalmed in thought-forms and words.

That this is the experience William James is talking about becomes almost certain when we consider James’s preliminary remark that his own experiences were extremely brief: ‘In one instance I was engaged in conversation, but I doubt whether the interlocutor noticed my abstraction.’ Allen’s second phase – the wordless stream of complex feelings that was ‘swollen by tributaries of associated Experience’ – makes it clear that this is that outward expansion of associations described by James. In short, the pleasure and excitement of the music energised Warner Allen’s mind until suddenly, like a spark flying upward, it achieved ‘insight’, the bird’s-eye view.

This is the mystical experience that Chesterton described as a feeling of ‘absurd good news’, the joy that burst on Faust as he heard the Easter bells, the overwhelming feeling of insight that often accompanies the sexual orgasm.

Charlotte Brontë describes a similar glimpse in Shirley, a sudden ecstatic ‘vision of life as she wishes it. No – not as she wishes it; she has not time to wish: the swift glory spreads out, sweeping and kindling its splendour faster than Thought can effect his combinations, faster than Aspiration can utter her longings.’ Here, the language is so similar to James’s that one could almost believe he was unconsciously quoting it.

In A Drug Taker’s Notes, R. H. Ward describes his own experiences with lysergic acid, but then concludes that they were not genuine ‘mystical’ experiences. By way of contrast, he quotes a mystical experience of a friend of his:

Last night as I was walking home from the station I had one of those strange experiences of ‘rising up within oneself’, of ‘coming inwardly alive’ … A minute or so after I had left the station, I was attacked … by indigestion … I thought to myself, though I suppose not in so many words, ‘I could separate myself from this pain; it belongs only to my body and is real only to the physical not-self. There is no need for the self to feel it.’ Even as I thought this the pain disappeared; that is, it was in some way left behind because I, or the self, had gone somewhere where it was not; and the sensation of ‘rising up within’ began. (… I have the impression that movement encouraged this sensation …)

First there is the indescribable sensation in the spine, as of something mounting up, a sensation which is partly pleasure and partly awe, a physical sensation and yet one which, if it makes sense to say so, is beginning to be not physical. This was accompanied by an extraordinary feeling of bodily lightness, of well-being and effortlessness, as if one’s limbs had no weight and one’s flesh had been suddenly transmuted into some rarer substance. But it was also, somehow, a feeling of living more in the upper part of one’s body than the lower, a certain peculiar awareness of one’s head as … the most important and intelligent of one’s members. There was also a realisation that one’s facial expression was changing; the eyes were wider open than usual; the lips were involuntarily smiling. Everything was becoming ‘more’, everything was going up on to another level …

I found that I could think in a new way. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say that I could think-and-feel in a new way, for it was hard to distinguish between thought and feeling … This was like becoming possessed of a new faculty. [My italics.]

He describes the feeling of delight associated with ordinary objects, and this has much in common with Aldous Huxley’s description of his sensation of the ‘is-ness’ of things under mescalin. However, the experience certainly seems to have involved an awareness of those ‘other dimensions of time’. For example, he explains that the thought of death not only ceased to be something to fear, but that death seemed positively to become ‘Dear, beauteous death …’ He adds that he felt as though he could easily give up his own life because ‘it was self-evident that we live in other ways than corporeally’. Significantly, it was important to avoid negative emotions – distrust, fear, contempt – because they immediately began to ‘bring him down’. And even more significant, he felt that if his present state of mind could somehow be conveyed to a friend dying of cancer, she would be cured, because ‘like any other ugliness or evil, [cancer] could not exist as such in the presence of God’. At the same time, he felt that it did not matter that this physical organism of hers died.

This experience calls for many comments. Although he says that he ‘separated himself’ from the pain of indigestion, it is clear that the indigestion vanished; it was a negative thing, and the ‘upward leap of the mind’ dismissed it, This method of achieving a higher state of mind – deliberately reminding yourself that ‘you’ are quite different from your body – is familiar to mystics; for example, the modern Hindu saint Sri Ramana Maharshi experienced his first ‘ecstasy’ as a result of thinking about the death of his body, then suddenly grasping, as a fact, that ‘he’ was a ‘deathless self’ quite distinct from the body.* Certainly, the sensation of something ‘mounting up’ in the spine corresponds to the Hindu description of the rise of kundalini. The reference to the flesh feeling as if it had been ‘transmuted into a rarer substance’ seems to confirm what Jung says of alchemy as a symbol of higher states of mind. The feeling that cancer could be cured by this state of mind certainly echoes the belief of Christian Science which, as we have seen, receives abundant confirmation in occult tradition.

Another example will reinforce the point I am making here. In Arrow in the Blue, Arthur Koestler describes two experiences in which he achieved this sudden ‘transcendence’. In the first, he was reading a pamphlet about atrocities in Palestine, and feeling himself ‘choke and seethe with impotent anger’. He admits that he suffers from ‘chronic indignation’ as others do from chronic indigestion. While still in this state, he picked up a book by Hermann Weyl on Einstein, and read the comment that relativity had led the human imagination ‘across the peaks and glaciers never before explored by any human being’. And then: ‘I saw Einstein’s world-shaking formula – Energy equals Mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light – hovering in a kind of rarefied haze over the glaciers, and this image carried a sensation of infinite tranquillity and peace. The martyred infants and castrated pioneers of the Holy Land shrank to microscopic insignificance … The fate of these unfortunates had to be viewed with the same serene, detached, meditative eye as that of stars bursting into novae, of sunspots erupting, of rocks decaying into swamps, and primeval forests being transformed into coal. This change in perspective was accompanied by an equally pronounced physiological change. The sensation of choking with indignation was succeeded by the relaxed quietude and self-dissolving stillness of the “oceanic feeling”.’ This is a phrase used by Freud in his Civilisation and Its Discontents, and Freud tries to explain it away in terms of father-fixations, etc.

The second experience makes the point even more clearly. Koestler was in a Spanish jail during the Civil War, sentenced to death, and he began scratching mathematical formulae on the wall to pass the time. He went on to work out Euclid’s classic proof that there is no ‘largest prime number’. As he did so, he experienced a deep satisfaction, due to the sudden thought that Euclid was establishing a truth about infinity using finite means.

The significance of this swept over me like a wave. The wave had originated in an articulate verbal insight; but this evaporated at once, leaving in its wake only a wordless essence, a fragrance of eternity, a quiver of the arrow in the blue. I must have stood there for some minutes, entranced with a wordless awareness that ‘this is perfect – perfect’; until I noticed some slight mental discomfort nagging at the back of my mind – some trivial circumstance that marred the perfection of the moment. Then I remembered the nature of that irrelevant annoyance: I was, of course, in prison, and might be shot. But this was immediately answered by a feeling whose verbal translation would be: ‘So what? is that all? have you nothing more serious to worry about?’ – an answer so spontaneous, fresh and amused as if the intruding annoyance had been the loss of a collar stud. Then I was floating on my back in a river of peace, under bridges of silence …

This makes it quite clear that the experience we are now discussing is Priestley’s second level of time, Time Two, which he experienced looking at the fish.

But is it necessary to postulate these different ‘times’? Surely, all we need postulate is different levels of the personality. Let us say, for the sake of convenience, that human beings have two ‘poles’, a personal and an impersonal pole. The personal pole is evident if I am suddenly in danger. Let us say that I nearly have a street accident, and instantly feel ‘contingent’. For a brief moment, the only thing I care about is self-preservation. Most people are excessively personal – they brood too much on their ills and their worries and resentments. When this happens, the vision becomes narrow. I have elsewhere suggested a convenient term for this narrowness: mono-consciousness. If I am sitting in a stuffy room, bored and dull, I am stuck in one single reality – the reality that surrounds me. If rain patters on the window, the sudden delight I experience is due to being suddenly reminded of the existence of another reality ‘out there’. This is duo-consciousness, and it is what happens to Faust when he hears the Easter bells: the delighted feeling – yes, something else exists. We are normally trapped in this stuffy room of subjectivity, but when duo-consciousness comes, it is as if I can breathe deeply. I then realise the immensely important fact that my soul can suffocate just as easily as my body; it can die for lack of a kind of oxygen. It is exactly like the relief of the sexual orgasm, as described by D. H. Lawrence, for example. And it is accompanied by an odd sensation of invulnerability, an insight to the effect: ‘I need never suffocate again now I know this …’ and as if I had obtained a magic talisman capable of forever protecting me from suffocation. It is a sudden knowledge of my own strength.

The various experiences described above sound as if they are ‘visitations’, sudden ‘descents of the dove’ that human beings can do nothing to control. Shelley addresses the ‘spirit of beauty’ and asks:

Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,

This dim, vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?

And that is, indeed, the most fundamental problem of human existence. Why does it? Why do our certainties, our ecstasies and intensities, evaporate so easily; leaving us with a feeling like a hangover?

Husserlian psychology teaches that the correct approach is to examine the problem with the practical eye of a garage mechanic wondering why a car is not ‘pulling’.

And at this point, I must make an attempt to present my own analysis of the totality of man, and try to pull the themes of this book into some sort of unity.

My most basic insight is this: that there is something wrong with human beings. When you have a bad cold, you have a continual sense of oppression; you don’t seem to be able to draw a really deep breath; you feel as if you are suffocating. And you are certainly aware that this state is not normal. But all human beings are suffering permanently from a kind of spiritual head cold, and they are not aware of it. Sometimes, when they are unusually worried or tired, the sense of suffocation becomes so oppressive that it turns into panic, and this can be the beginning of severe mental illness.

And then there are the occasional moments when the head clears; a kind of bubble seems to burst at the back of the nose, and you can suddenly breathe and see and hear with a new freshness. Something inside us wakes up, and is delighted by the world it finds itself in. The universe is seen to be infinitely interesting and complex.

In all these moments of intensity, ‘newness’, we are aware of a sense of inner contraction, as if one’s consciousness were a fist that had become clenched.

And this is the vital clue. We know that our bodies are made up of a swarm of electrons, buzzing around like bees, held together by inner forces of attraction. But the same is true of the ‘astral body’, or whatever you choose to call the living, thinking, feeling ‘me’; it is also a swarm of particles, like bees. But it differs from the physical body in one important respect. Your physical body always has the same size and shape, more or less. But this ‘mental body’ can expand into a vague, diffuse cloud, or contract until it seems to be a glowing ball of intensity. It was A. E. Housman who pointed out that the test of true poetry is that it makes the hair prickle. It also causes this ‘mental body’ to contract. The skin seems to become tighter. Sartre describes it in his novel Nausea: ‘I felt my body harden and the nausea vanish; suddenly it was almost unbearable to become so hard, so brilliant.’ He also says, ‘I feel my body at rest like a precision machine.’ These images capture the feeling of ‘contraction’: hardness, almost as if the skin had changed into chrome-plated steel.

The same thing happens in the sexual orgasm: a feeling of inner contraction. It is the first step towards what Shaw calls ‘the seventh degree of concentration’. This is what Proust experienced when he tasted the madeleine dipped in tea and suddenly ceased to feel ‘mediocre, accidental, mortal’.

The feeling was not an illusion. He had accidentally stumbled upon a perfectly normal power of the human soul: Faculty X. We are not ‘mediocre, accidental, mortal’, even though most of the time we feel we are.

I have pointed out that there is an impressive mass of evidence for the existence of the astral body. But for present purposes, it makes no difference whether it really exists, or whether it is regarded as a figure of speech. To verify the reality of the ‘inner contraction’, you only have to take the trouble to observe yourself next time you experience sudden intense delight.

Once this is recognised, the analysis may be carried further. It will be seen that a certain degree of ‘contraction’ produces the sense of poetry, Shelley’s spirit of beauty, the ‘peak experience’. A further contraction produces a sense of ‘being’, of being able to act, that Priestley calls the third dimension of time. This is the state of insight, when all the faculties seem to be speeded up. It explains why men become racing drivers and mountain climbers, or go into the desert like T. E. Lawrence: because they want to face an emergency that forces them to ‘contract’ to this new level of control.

At a certain point of concentration, a chain reaction begins to develop. Readers who have studied atomic physics will know that this is the principle of the atom bomb. Uranium 235 is an isotope that disintegrates continually because of its radioactivity. In small masses, the disintegration proceeds slowly. But if more than a certain ‘critical mass’ is brought together, the distintegration suddenly accelerates wildly, because the ‘bullets’ of energy thrown out by the atoms score direct hits on the nuclei of other atoms, causing them to disintegrate; and the exploding atoms shoot out still more bullets, which strike still more nuclei. The result is an atomic explosion. In an atomic bomb, two small masses of Uranium 235 are suddenly hurled together, creating a critical mass, which explodes.

There is an analogous principle in concentration. At a certain point, one’s mental being – the ‘swarm of bees’ – seems to reach a certain critical mass, and a chain reaction develops. Something of the sort seems to have happened to Robert Graves as he sat on the garden roller.

And at this point, an interesting phenomenon occurs. States of sudden intense happiness often seem to disintegrate as if from their own inner pressure. In the same way, if two small masses of Uranium 235 are brought together to form a critical mass, the result will not be a massive explosion, because the reaction that ensues will blow them apart again, scattering the uranium before it can explode. In an atomic bomb, they have to be held together. This explains why mystical intensity – such as was experienced by Warner Allen in Queen’s Hall ‘between two notes of a symphony’ – is usually so brief. It causes its own disintegration. But why, if the mystic wants to keep it so badly?

The answer is of fundamental importance. Because the ‘muscles’ that could hold it are flabby and undeveloped. We only make use of these muscles involuntarily, when suddenly stirred by beauty or by a sense of crisis. And this in itself is preposterous – as if you only used the muscles in your leg when someone tapped you on the knee, causing a reflex action.

We possess the muscles for compressing consciousness and producing states of intensity, but we use them so seldom that we are hardly aware of their existence.

My simile of the atom bomb can be carried further. An atom bomb can be used as the detonator of a hydrogen bomb; the fusion of hydrogen – which is what produces the sun’s heat – requires temperatures and pressures as intense as those in the heart of the sun. These can be produced momentarily if an atom bomb, which works on ‘fission’ (disintegration), is exploded inside a mass of compressed hydrogen, which then fuses into the more complex helium atom, producing an explosion a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb. Human consciousness is theoretically capable of this kind of power. Man is literally a god: a god suffering from laziness, amnesia and nightmares.

The Catholics call this ‘fault’ of human consciousness Original Sin; Heidegger calls it ‘forgetfulness of existence’. But it is important to understand that it is not a basic flaw. As odd as it may sound, we suffer from the ‘spiritual head cold’ because we want to. A man who wants to think locks himself into a quiet room, and perhaps closes all the windows. This has its advantages and disadvantages; it allows him to concentrate, but it cuts out the fresh air and the sound of the birds. When I have to concentrate – for example, when I am writing these pages – I lock myself into an inner room, and close all the windows. If I now decide to go for a walk, I cannot simply open all these windows again. It takes time to ‘unwind’, to relax.

This is why most human beings spend their lives in a highly uncomfortable state of ‘generalised hypertension’ without knowing what to do about it.

When we are worried, there seem to be two possible courses. One is to do something about it, to look for a way out. The other is to go on feeling worried, to accept it passively as we accept a bad cold or a toothache.

There is a third course, but most of us are unaware of it. When a man wants something badly, or wants to avoid something badly, he makes an immense effort of concentration, an inner convulsion. The mental body ‘contracts’, and the result is a new sense of power, control and freedom. Graham Greene’s ‘whiskey-priest’, on the point of being shot by a firing squad, realises that ‘it would have been so easy to be a saint’. Why? Because the threat of immediate extinction causes the inner convulsion, a greater effort of will than he has made in years, perhaps in the whole of his life. And he realises, with a shock, that if he had made this same effort of will earlier, he need not have wasted his life.

Man possesses the power to contract his ‘astral body’ by an act of will. He is not aware that he possesses this power. The proof of his ignorance is his capacity for boredom. Boredom is the expansion of the ‘astral body’, in which the swarm of bees becomes a vague, diffuse cloud. In this state, we experience a kind of ‘nausea’, and the sense of meaning vanishes. Life ‘fails’; the inner energies drop. The next stage in human evolution will be the deliberate development of this ‘muscle’ of the will, and a corresponding development of the sense of meaning.

It can be seen that, according to this scheme of evolution, Priestley’s three orders of time become unnecessary. Time One is the way I experience time when I am passive and unfocused. Time Two is the way I experience it when my mind becomes self-governing, which is what happens when it focuses on meaning. Time Three is the way I experience time when the creative chain reaction begins, when I experience a sense of total control of my mental processes and unwavering perception of meaning.

There are some interesting points to observe about these three time experiences. The most tiring of the three is Time One, a passive living-in-the-present. If I feel exhausted, the best way to recover is to find something that deeply interests me and concentrate on it. If I am exhausted and bored, the curious result is that I continue to run down still further, like a car whose ignition has been left switched on. This principle has been used in the brainwashing of spies. The spy is placed in a completely black and silent room, and as soon as he becomes acutely bored, his will relaxes, his sense of meaning ebbs away, a feeling of misery and panic begins to build up, and his vital forces disintegrate. He begins to feel increasingly ‘mediocre, accidental, mortal’. In this state, he is easy prey for an interrogator.

On the other hand, if I am bored and tired, and then something happens that arouses my deepest interest, I ignore the fatigue; I concentrate; and my vital batteries begin to recharge at a fast rate.

The Time Three experience is the most interesting because it involves the most total control. If I am deeply involved in the contemplation of something else – like Toynbee at Mistra, or Priestley outside the fish shop – I am still basically passive, my mind turned outward: this is Time Two. But in times of intense mental activity and concentration, I am aware of being in charge of a chain reaction. That is, the more deeply I concentrate, the more I focus meaning; and the more I focus meaning, the more intensely I concentrate.

I have myself experienced the sense of ‘power over time’ on two occasions. On the first of these, I was working in a hospital in a job that bored me. Weeks of inactivity and minor irritations had reduced me to a passive state where I felt almost incapable of concentration. At this time I was deeply interested in Nijinsky (who had died recently), particularly in his attempt to create a new kind of choreography with tense, heiratic movements. When I was alone I used to practise ballet exercises; and if there was suitable music on the radio I would experiment with these ‘Nijinsky movements’. One evening, the ‘Liebestod’ from Tristan came on; its unexpectedness produced a shock of pleasure and concentration. I made an effort to retain this concentration; it seemed as difficult as balancing on one toe, but the movement helped. As my attention began to waver, the climax of the ‘Liebestod’ induced a new effort of concentration, and quite suddenly, for a space of a second or two, I had a sense of absolute and total control over time, as if I could order it to stand still. The past ceased to be something that receded from me, like the scenery going past a train; it felt as if I could relive it as easily as I could put on a gramophone record for a second time. The metabolic processes of the body seemed to be as much within my control as the muscles in my arms and legs.

The second occasion was related to the first in that I was again listening to Tristan in the gods at Covent Garden. The sheer length of the opera ends by inducing a sense of freedom, for the unwonted concentration leads to ‘second wind’. It was in this second wind that I decided to try to re-create the sensation of timelessness; accordingly, I again began to make an all-out effort of concentration in the last ten minutes. This time there was no need for physical movement to reinforce the effort; after a few moments there was again the sensation of floating, or being suspended, and again the feeling that I could arrest the time-processes of the body.

This should make clear why I am inclined to reject the notion of a three-dimensional time. Is not Priestley making the same mistake as Dunne in treating time as though it were a real entity, like the sea, when in fact it is a process, like a wave in the sea? And as a process, it is a function of what I have, for convenience, agreed to call ‘the astral body’, to distinguish the living, conscious ‘me’ from the physical shell that will eventually die.

What happened in these two cases should be fairly clear. Instead of allowing the aesthetic experience to operate upon passive sensibilities, I made an effort to accelerate the process by concentration. This may seem the wrong attitude: for surely doesn’t music, like poetry, require a wide-open attitude, Keats’s ‘negative capability’? But phenomenologists know that this is an error. All perception is an intentional act, even if we are not consciously aware of it. If you relax too much, as in watching television, you begin to feel bored and depressed. I convulsed the muscle of concentration in an all-out effort, and the result was a glimpse of the kind of control over the body that will be possible at the next stage of human evolution.

This, incidentally, can be done at any time, without preparation (although it is a good idea to try it early in the day, when you are feeling fresh). By way of checking this, I just broke off my writing and looked at a coloured picture in a Country Life volume on England. It showed a half-ruined monastery against a background of Yorkshire hills. To my ordinary, ‘un-boosted’ perception, it was just a picture that produced little or no response. I half closed my eyes and concentrated hard, as if preparing for some enormous effort; there was an instant shock of response to the picture, a sense of brooding meaning, as if the hills and the sky were saying something. It remained when I relaxed again.

This enables me to state my belief about human evolution very clearly. Certain of our functions are automatic – breathing, digesting, responding to crisis; this means that I may sink into a completely will-less state, and they will continue unaffected. Other functions ought to be automatic, but they aren’t yet. For example, a girl is often surprised at the intensity of her love for her first baby; her everyday personality may have given her no reason to expect that she would respond so deeply to motherhood. This is an example of our sense of meaning becoming automatic, being taken care of by our instincts. Unfortunately we do not have the same built-in response to spring mornings and the thousands of other natural phenomena to which we occasionally react with delight. A man who has just been released from prison may have a ‘peak experience’ when he looks at the sunset, but most of the city dwellers take it for granted; or worse still, they look at it, say, ‘Yes, it is beautiful.’ and don’t feel a thing.

We have a deeply ingrained habit of passivity which is more dangerous than cigarette smoking or drugs. Why ‘dangerous’? Because it produces an inner condition of boredom and stagnation that makes us long for crisis, for excitement, and which explains, for example, the steady rise in the crime rate, and the increasingly violent and motiveless nature of crimes. If poisons accumulate in my bloodstream, my body has an automatic method of getting rid of them: I develop boils, which burst and release the poisons. But if I allow myself to sink into a state of inner stagnation, I have no automatic defence system against it; I have to seek out some challenge or excitement to restore the vital balance. The sex criminal who goes out looking for a girl to rape is seeking a remedy for his sickness, like a sick dog chewing grass. At this point in evolution, when the earth is overcrowded, man needs to develop an automatic system for dealing with these poisons that arise from stagnation, from the endless triviality of civilised life. He must develop the ‘mental muscle’ I have spoken of: Faculty X. This is less difficult than it sounds; anything can become a habit if we really want it to. We must first recognise the necessity.

What is the relation of Faculty X to other ‘occult’ faculties – powers of mediumship, for example? I can best illustrate the difference with an example.

During the First World War, the playwright Harley Granville-Barker deserted his first wife, the actress Lillah McCarthy, for an American heiress named Helen Huntingdon. The new Mrs. Barker hated her husband’s former theatrical contacts and made him give up the theatre. In 1925, Bernard Shaw was asked to second a vote of thanks to Barker at a public meeting. He took the opportunity to say that Barker’s retirement from the theatre was a public scandal, and went on to urge him to come back. Suddenly Shaw experienced a violent pain in his back, ‘as if my spine had been converted into a bar of rusty iron which grated on the base of my skull’. He could not even bend down to enter a taxi, and had to walk home. One month later, to the very hour, he decided that he must force himself to go for a walk, and the pain vanished as suddenly as it had come. It was later that he told this story to Lady Colefax, who had been sitting next to Helen Granville-Barker at the meeting. Lady Colefax told him that while he was speaking, Mrs. Barker was leaning forward in her seat staring at his back, ‘every muscle in her body rigid with hate’.

It seems likely, then, that Helen Huntingdon was a witch, whether consciously or unconsciously; she possessed some of the powers of the ‘evil eye’ that John Cowper Powys found so disconcerting in himself. This hypothesis might seem to be further confirmed by her extraordinary influence over her husband. Barker was undoubtedly one of the greatest men of the theatre in the first decade of this century; he was also a major playwright. He and his first wife had always been happy together and there was no sign of a break before he met the American heiress. In 1914, Barker was thirty-seven. Helen Huntingdon was fifty. Whether she ‘bewitched’ him in the true sense of the word (bearing in mind Graves’s remark that young men sometimes use ‘magical’ powers to seduce girls), or whether he simply fell in love with her in the normal way, she certainly retained an iron hold over him to the end of his life.

Lillah McCarthy described how she went to Shaw, numb with misery:

I was shivering. Shaw sat very still. The fire brought me warmth … How long we sat there I do not know, but presently I found myself walking with dragging steps with Shaw beside me … up and down Adelphi Terrace. The weight upon me grew a little lighter and released the tears which would never come before … he let me cry. Presently I heard a voice in which all the gentleness and tenderness of the world was speaking. It said: ‘Look up, dear, look up to the heavens. There is more in life than this. There is much more.’*

It might seem a quibble to say that Shaw also used a form of witchcraft to comfort her. But he certainly used the authentic magical method: to allow his intuitions to operate; to avoid the obvious, rational way of comforting her with words and arguments, but to allow a telepathic link to grow up between them. A lesser man might have felt constrained to hold out false hopes. Shaw somehow lanced the emotional boil, then tried to restore her sense of objectivity. ‘There is more in life than this. There is much more.’ This is the ‘secret in the poet’s heart’ of the last lines of Candida, as Eugene walks out into ‘Tristan’s only night’.

And here, I think the distinction becomes very clear. Helen Huntingdon seems to have possessed ‘magical’ powers, but she used them in the service of narrow personal ends. Shaw used them in the service of Faculty X, the expansion of the human faculties beyond the merely personal. This is ultimately the only correct use of the occult powers. Most of the examples described in this book – from calling porpoises to raising the shade of Apollonius of Tyana – are the misuse of such powers.

But I must repeat that it is incorrect to use the term ‘occult powers’ as if they were different in kind from our normal faculties. They are simply another part of the spectrum; they are ‘occult’ only in the sense that human beings have half-forgotten them in the process of developing the rational powers. But the next stage of evolution, the development of a still higher range of rational powers, will involve the redevelopment of these faculties.

This point has been interestingly confirmed by researches into the ‘pineal eye’, the organ in the brain that the Hindus declare to be the seat of the ‘occult powers’. (And even the thoroughly rational Descartes identified it as the point where man’s soul and his body interact.) The pineal organ was assumed to be a vestigial eye, ‘the third eye’, although no one could quite decide what use an eye would be in the middle of the brain. In the present century, scientists began to recognise an odd connection between the ‘pineal eye’ and sexuality. Otto Huebner, a German doctor, discovered that a young boy with over-developed genitals had a tumour of the pineal organ. An American, Virginia Fiske, found that if rats were constantly exposed to light, their pineal organs decreased in size while their sexual organs increased. It was finally established that the pineal organ is a gland, not a vestigial eye, and that it produces a hormone that was labelled melotonin. And a great deal more research established that melotonin is produced by the action of a certain enzyme upon a chemical called serotonin.

And here the real mystery begins – one that has only been partially solved at the time of writing. This chemical serotonin seems to have a great deal to do with evolution of species. The primates, men and apes, have more serotonin than any other species, far more. It seems to be manufactured in the pineal eye, and one of its functions is to inhibit sexual development and to increase intelligence. This seems to explain why most intelligent human beings seem to be late developers, sexually, and why early developers are seldom, if ever, remarkable for intelligence.

One of the fascinating sidelights on this discovery is that the bó-tree, the tree under which the Buddha is said to have achieved enlightenment, produces figs (called ficus religiosus in honour of Gautama) with an exceptionally high serotonin content. Which leads to the interesting speculation that the Buddha’s diet was the ideal one on which to achieve rational enlightenment on the human condition.

In 1948 the ‘mind-changing’ properties of LSD 25 were discovered accidentally, when a Swiss chemist named Hofmann working with ergot (a fungus found in rye plants) began to suffer from hallucinations; it was discovered that this was caused by a component of the ergot that was later named LSD 25, and whose properties were closely allied to those of mescalin, a chemical derived from the Mexican plant peyotl. Both mescalin and LSD may produce intensified consciousness, a feeling of oneness with the universe, beautiful patterns of colours and lights, new vividness of perception. They do this, apparently, by somehow ‘blocking’ man’s rational faculty. I have said that we close our mental doors and windows in order to think clearly. These chemicals open them, and leave them propped open. The exact way in which they did this was not known; but it now seems fairly certain that the LSD molecule produces its effect by destroying the serotonin molecule.

A team of scientists in the Fairfield Hills Hospital in Newtown, Connecticut, made the interesting discovery that schizophrenic patients had exceptionally low serotonin levels in the brain, and for a while it was hoped that medicine had at last discovered a cure for schizophrenia – serotonin. But no one has discovered, so far, how to convey the serotonin to the place where it matters: the pineal gland. I would also speculate that this notion that schizophrenia is due to serotonin deficiency may be putting the cart before the horse. Schizophrenia is a state of low vitality in which our subconscious ‘robot’ takes over most of the vital functions, which means that the ‘I’ walks around in a kind of dream, alienated from existence. It may well be that the serotonin deficiency is the result of this drop in vitality and stagnation of the will.

I have described elsewhere* my own experience with mescalin. It made rational thought difficult, and seemed to flood me with tides of emotion and intuitive insight. (For example, I had a strong intuition that the area where I live – in Cornwall – had been connected with witchcraft in the past; I have not been able to verify this.) There was certainly a strong sense of universal benevolence; but, as far as I was concerned, this did not compensate for the loss of the ability to ‘focus’ with my mind, the feeling that the ‘muscles’ of concentration had been paralysed. It was clear to me that mescalin produced its effects by switching off the brain’s normal ‘filtering’ mechanisms, allowing the senses to become flooded with the richness of the physical world; in doing this, it immobilised Faculty X. The ‘illuminations’ produced by mescalin were the reverse of the mental intensity that sometimes develops in me when I am working well. In fact, the mescalin experience was the reverse of ‘intensity’; it was a lowering of the mental pressure, a diffusion of the beam of concentration. I find that when I am in a state of intense insight, this ‘beam of concentration’ narrows until it has a laser-like intensity, and there is a ‘feedback’ relation between the concentration and the perception of meaning. Mescalin destroyed all possibility of feedback; it simply opened the senses and let everything in.

All this would suggest, then, that serotonin is a chemical that is connected with concentration and with Faculty X. It also explains precisely why ‘occult powers’, such as mediumship, telepathy, E.S.P., are in some ways the opposite of Faculty X. They are certainly related to the state of ‘receptivity’ produced by mescalin or LSD; and Faculty X is related to the state of concentration that depends on serotonin. I do not write ‘produced by serotonin’, because I believe that our serotonin production may depend on the amount of concentration we habitually engage in. John N. Bleibtreu writes in his biochemical study The Parable of the Beast: ‘So far … all that we really know is that minute quantities of serotonin affect mental states, alter perceptions, and that new dimensions of conventional reality accompany changes in the level of serotonin in the brain,’ and he adds that serotonin is crucial to rational thought. This would seem to support my guess that concentration is accompanied by a rise in the serotonin levels of the brain and increased activity of the pineal gland, and that serotonin is the Faculty X chemical.

But observe the corollary to this. If serotonin production depends on the amount of concentration we habitually engage in, then it can be increased by an increased habit of concentration. (Conversely, the chief danger of psychedelic drugs, and probably of marihuana, is that their habitual use would cause a drop in the brain’s serotonin production.) It seems that the next step in human evolution depends simply upon acquiring habits of mental intensity to replace our usual habit of passivity. The antelope can run like the wind, the salmon smell its home river from three thousand miles away, the electric eel deliver a shock of six hundred volts, the dolphin swim with the speed of an express train, the robin navigate by picking up vibrations from the Milky Way. In each case, a faculty we all possess has been developed into a super-faculty by effort. The faculty that distinguishes all the primates, man in particular, from these creatures is the ability to focus meaning, to learn. The most impressive thing about man is his ability to master such a variety of skills, and to master them to such an incredible degree. Acrobats turn somersaults on high wires; Houdini escapes from an iron safe full of water; William Rowan Hamilton knows Latin, Greek and Hebrew at the age of five; Zerah Colborn multiplies enormous figures in his head within seconds; athletes continually establish new world records. A century ago the Matterhorn was regarded as unclimbable; now mountaineers stroll up it for a Sunday excursion. There seems to be nothing that man cannot do if he sets his mind to it. Once he has a clear idea of what he wants to do, he seems to be unconquerable. His problem has never been will-power, but imagination: to know what he ought to turn his will towards. And this constitutes the greatest cause for optimism at this point in history – Nostradamus and Edgar Cayce notwithstanding. Evolution proceeds in leaps, and man has now reached the interesting point where he is prepared to understand it consciously, and move forward with a full understanding of what he is doing. Our trouble in the past has been poor communication between intelligence and instinct, which has meant that the intelligent people lacked power and vitality, while the instinctive people lacked vision and long-distance purpose. Intelligence and instinct can be united by the development of Faculty X. Once man understands this, nothing can hold him back.

And now I come to the most important point in this book: the attempt at a general theory. Let us, for the moment, forget the evidence for telepathy, precognition, reincarnation and life after death, and stick to logic and facts revealed by science.

The vitalist theory of evolution, for which I have argued in this book, affirms that spirit and matter are antagonists. There is a war going on, and we are in the front line.

Our universe is apparently expanding. Astronomers have calculated that if it has always expanded at its present rate, then it must have started about ten billion years ago – ten thousand million years. Our sun is about six billion years old (and is expected to last about another six billion). This earth we inhabit is probably around five billion years old. For the first billion years of its existence, it remained a roaring furnace, sweeping around the sun and slowly cooling. And, at some point, the force of life managed to establish a foothold in the realm of atoms. T. E. Hulme, a disciple of Bergson, described life as ‘the gradual insertion of more and more freedom into matter’, and went on: ‘In the amoeba, then, you might say that impulse has manufactured a small leak, through which free activity could be inserted into the world, and the process of evolution has been the gradual enlargement of this leak.’

Life began by moulding atoms into the molecules known as amino-acids, and then used these to create living cells. The modern Darwinian school of biology would have us believe that this ‘complexification’ was an accident – which is like asking us to believe that a pile of rusty car parts in a scrap yard might be blown together into a new Rolls-Royce.

For another billion years or so, these minute living cells floated in the warm seas, birthless and deathless. No change took place. It was not until a mere half billion years ago that true evolution began. Life somehow managed to overcome its most basic problem – forgetfulness. Evolution cannot proceed without the accumulation of knowledge, and a single amoeba cannot accumulate much knowledge. It was not until the life-force invented the trick of coding knowledge into the reproductory processes that new advances became possible. The Pre-Cambrian creatures shed old cells and grew new ones in the same way that my body replaces all its old cells every eight years. With the invention of death and reproduction, they shed old bodies and grew new ones. Variety replaced monotony as the basic law of existence.

Life invented death. There is no escaping this extraordinary fact, although a more conservative view might be that life simply learned to make use of death for its own purposes. The implications are the same. Life is not at the mercy of death. It is in control of death. Half a billion years ago, it learned the secret of reincarnation.

The aim of all this manoeuvring was to establish a firmer bridgehead in the universe of matter. Individual creatures tend to stagnate when they have discovered a comfortable ritual of habit. A young creature fights and struggles and learns; an old creature vegetates. Death was invented to replace the vegetables with fighters and learners, to get the old soldiers out of the front line and replace them with shock troops.

The next major step in this war – or process of colonisation – was the invention of consciousness: that is to say, of a group of faculties set apart from the instinctive drives. And their purpose? To observe and record and keep files. Consciousness might be described as the life-force’s secret police organisation. And, like the secret police in any totalitarian state, it is the servant of the government – a powerful and formidable servant, but a servant nevertheless. Consciousness was a late evolutionary development because it was a long time before life could afford the energy for such an experiment. The instincts pay attention only to what deeply concerns them. The job of consciousness is to pay attention to everything, to keep watch on the surface movements of the world of matter. Most of the information it accumulates in this way is repetitive and useless, but occasionally its non-stop vigilance pays off, and a few random observations coalesce to form a new piece of knowledge.

Consciousness has one immense disadvantage: it divides life against itself. When life was confined to the instinctive levels, its drives were simple: its aim was to increase its foothold in the realm of matter. Consciousness is concerned with superficial problems. The secret police know nothing about the ultimate aims of the government, about its economic and foreign policies. This does not matter so long as the government retains a firm control. But the success of consciousness has been so spectacular that it has become a kind of government department in itself. And this is dangerous. The danger has been immeasurably increased in the past few centuries. The invention of writing gave immense impetus to human evolution, and changed man’s vision of himself. There is no evidence that Isaac Newton was more intelligent than Moses or Confucius, but he had subtler methods of storing and utilising his knowledge. As a result of three centuries of Newtonian science, man has become king of his earthly castle. He no longer takes life and death for granted, as his ancestors did. He looks out on the universe with the eye of a master. But consciousness is not the master; it is the servant. It lacks the power and drive of the instinctive life forces. Left to itself, it tends to become passive and bewildered, alienated from the world of instinct and the world of matter. It is a master who has lost all feeling of mastery.

Human evolution has advanced too fast; its processes have become too complicated for its own good. But they can be simplified. Consciousness can be turned inward, to the understanding of the vital processes and the evolutionary drives.

The chief enemy of life is not death, but forgetfulness, stupidity. We lose direction too easily. This is the great penalty that life paid for descending into matter: a kind of partial amnesia.

But it is the next step in the argument that is the crucial one. The universe is full of all kinds of energies. Matter is energy – the most resistant and uncompromising kind of energy. And if life has succeeded in achieving some degree of conquest of matter, is it absurd to suppose that it has not succeeded with more malleable forms of energy?

We are back to David Foster’s notion of an intelligent universe, but now it is unnecessary to ask, Who does the coding? We know the answer. The force of life itself, which has been conducting its campaign for colonisation for more than a billion years.

All this arises logically from the recognition that life is not an ‘emanation’ of matter but an opposed force. Shaw’s Lilith says, ‘I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy, Matter, to obey a living soul. But in enslaving Life’s enemy, I made him Life’s master …’ And earlier in the same act of Back to Methuselah, he expresses the intuition that life may exist on higher energy levels: ‘In the hard-pressed heart of the earth, where the inconceivable heat of the sun still glows, the stone lives in fierce atomic convulsion, as we live in our slower way. When it is cast to the surface it dies like a deep sea fish …’ Alfred North Whitehead, another vitalist philosopher, also expressed this notion that life permeates the universe as water might fill a sponge.

The great unsolved mystery is that of individuality. If life is somehow a unity, how is it that each of its units feels so separate and unique? Chesterton expressed it in the magnificent last chapter of The Man Who Was Thursday: ‘Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe?’ Not only why, but how? Perhaps there are creatures in the world, as Sir Alister Hardy suggests, who possess a ‘communal consciousness’. Perhaps there are gnats, hovering in a cloud, who are as aware of one another’s existence as of their own. But we cannot even conceive of this. A crowd of pot-smokers practising ‘togetherness’ are deceiving themselves, as a child might deceive herself that her doll was alive. Human individuality is so absolute that we can no more imagine ourselves without it than we can imagine one and one making three.

The ‘how’ is unanswerable; we can only assume that the force of life began its conquest of matter by somehow splitting itself into units, each of which felt ‘separate’ from the rest of the universe. Chesterton answers the ‘why’: ‘So that each thing that obeys the law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.’ Which means simply that without individuality, life would not build up the same desperate force. The man of the crowd is a weakling; people who need people are the stupidest people in the world. And so the basic paradox of human nature seems to be inherent in the force of life itself: without challenge or crisis, it takes things easy, and collapses into mediocrity. So far, all life on earth has had to be driven forward, as slaves once had to be whipped into battle. It has never possessed positive purpose – only the negative one of staying alive and avoiding pain. ‘Evil is physical pain,’ said Leonardo, going to the heart of the matter. The old theological question ‘Why evil?’ is answered by the recognition that without evil, there would be universal mediocrity, terminating in death. It is only at this point in the earth’s history that this has ceased to be wholly true. With the development of art, science, philosophy, man has acquired the possibility of a positive purpose, a purpose towards which he can drive forward, instead of being driven from behind. (It is true that religion has always been an expression of this purpose; but religion was content with paradox: the assertion that ‘the world’ must somehow be denied by ‘the spirit’, without trying to understand why this should be necessary.) If positive purpose could be established as the human driving force, it would be a turning point in evolution, for it is many times stronger than the negative purpose of avoiding pain. A man can do things out of love or enthusiasm that would be impossible out of fear. His chief problem at the moment is to escape the narrowness of everyday triviality and grasp the nature of his goal; this, in turn, will require the development of what Blake called ‘imagination’, but which it would be more accurate to call Faculty X.

Our universe seems to be based on the principle of individuality, in which each unit of life is a kind of oasis. We have only to concede that individuality transcends the physical body – that is, to recognise that, like death, it is a tool of life, not an accidental consequence – to see that logic is in favour of some form of ‘life after death’, as well as of reincarnation. The whole purpose of life’s campaign against matter is to establish continuity, to overcome ‘forgetfulness’; this is the purpose behind instinct and racial memory and the DNA code. These are all forms of survival of bodily death; if other forms did not exist, it would be, to say the least, an extraordinary waste of opportunity.

Nathaniel Hawthorne felt that Home’s feats of mediumship and levitation were interesting but irrelevant. Why? Because he was an artist, and the artist loves the physical world. Like Camus watching the great birds in the sky at Djemileh, he wants to feel the weight of his life squarely on his own shoulders, and the talk of an after-life seems a false promise. The artist sees dearly that the ‘solution’ to the curious pointlessness of most human existence is not another life, but the occasional moments of ecstatic intensity and control when this universe seems infinitely interesting and the idea of eternal life, in this universe, entirely delightful. This is an idea that can be found in Russian mysticism – in Fedorov, Dostoevsky, Rozanov – that eternal life means life on this earth, not in another world. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, oddly enough, hold a similar doctrine: that after the Day of Judgement, the earth will turn into Paradise. All this explains why the poet is distrustful of the after-life; he is less inclined than most human beings to devalue this one.

The theory I have propounded resolves the contradiction. The poet is right to be mistrustful about ‘other worlds’ as a solution to the problems of this one. If my reasoning is correct, then the ‘other world’ is not intended to be a solution. We are in the front line; the general is back at headquarters; the ‘other worlds’ that exist between us and the headquarters are support units and supply depots, not a higher level of existence. There is probably more freedom on these levels, the possibility of broader vision, wider consciousness – but of less actual achievement. The possibility of achievement lies back here, where we are. We see the ‘answer’ to the riddle of physical existence in all moments of great intensity. ‘God is fire in the head,’ said Nijinsky; when the brain blazes like a bonfire, we no longer need to ask why we are alive. The aim is total control. With this control established, life would become a unity; there would no longer be a distinction between ‘other worlds’ and this one. And is this not suggested by the sudden birth of spiritualism in the nineteenth century? The nineteenth century was the Age of Romanticism; for the first time in history, man stopped thinking of himself as an animal or a slave, and saw himself as a potential god. All of the cries of revolt against ‘God’ – Sade, Byron’s Manfred, Schiller’s Robbers, Goethe’s Faust, Hoffmann’s mad geniuses – are expressions of this new spirit. Is this why the ‘spirits’ decided to make a planned and consistent effort at ‘communication’? It was the right moment. Man was beginning to understand himself.

I do not regard myself as an ‘occultist’ because I am more interested in the mechanisms of everyday consciousness. In the past, man’s chief characteristic has been his ‘defeat-proneness’; even the giants of the nineteenth century were inclined to believe that insanity is a valid refuge from the ‘triviality of everydayness’. But the answer lies in understanding the mechanisms. Once they are understood, they can be altered to admit more reality. The operation requires concentration and precision, the virtues of a skilled watchmaker.

We return to the assertion of the opening chapter: man’s future lies in the cultivation of Faculty X.

* Ghost Stories, 1955.

* Argosy, March 1968.

* Collected Stories, p. 90.

* See Ramana Maharshi, by Arthur Osborne (London, Rider, 1954), p. 18.

* Quoted in Harley Granville-Barker, by C. B. Purdom (London, Rockliff, 1955), p. 175.

* See Beyond the Outsider, Appendix I.