The Mind Parasites Page 12

  I learned something else from her. As my mind withdrew from the contact, she glanced at me speculatively. I went on reading, and pretended not to notice her. After a while, she lost interest and went back to her statistics. But it proved that she had been aware of my ‘mental probe’. The men I had tried it on had remained totally unaware. It seemed to prove that a woman, particularly a sexually frustrated woman, has an abnormal sensitivity to such things.

  However, this came later. For the moment, I only tried moving the cigarette butt, and found that, although it could be done, it was hard work. This was because it was dead. It is easier to make a living object do what you want, because its vitality can be used by you, and there is no inertia to overcome.

  Later that afternoon, still absorbed in my new discovery, I tore up some cigarette paper into tiny pieces, and amused myself by making the small flock rush around the table like a snowstorm. This was also exhausting, and I had to give it up after about fifteen seconds.

  That evening, Reich came over from Karatepe, and I told him of my discovery. He was even more excited than I was. Oddly enough, he did not immediately try the experiment himself. Instead, he analysed it and discussed its possibilities. Of course, human beings had known about this possibility of ‘psychokinesis’ for half a century, and Rhine had investigated it at Duke. He defined psychokinesis (or PK) as a phenomenon ‘in which the individual produces an effect upon some object in his environment without the use of his own motor system’. ‘Thus’, he adds, ‘psychokinesis is the direct action of mind upon matter’. Rhine had been put on to the problem by a gambler who remarked that many gamblers believe they can influence the fall of the dice. He conducted thousands of experiments into the matter, and his results revealed what I had myself experienced—that, after a while, the mind gets tired of exercising ‘psychokinesis’. There were far more ‘hits’ at the beginning of the experiment than later on, and the number reduced steadily as the experiment proceeded.

  So human beings have always possessed PK powers in a minor degree. The increase in strength of my mind since I had been practising phenomenological disciplines simply meant that I was able to direct a more powerful stream of mental energy into psychokinesis.

  Reich’s mind soared like a hawk released from its lead. He predicted the day when we would be able to raise the ruins of Kadath to the surface with no machinery of any sort, and when man would be able to travel to Mars by a spontaneous act of will, without the need for a spaceship. His excitement infected me, for I saw that he was correct in saying that this was our greatest advance so far, in a philosophical as well as a practical sense. For, in a certain sense, man’s scientific progress has been progress in the wrong direction. Take the matter of the Karatepe diggings; we had been treating it purely as a mechanical problem, how to raise a city from underneath a billion tons of earth, and this reliance on machines meant that we were ceasing to treat the human mind as an essential element in the operation. And the more this same human mind produces labour-saving machines, the more it blinds itself to its own possibilities, the more it tends to regard itself as a passive ‘reasoning machine’. Man’s scientific achievement over the past centuries had only thrust man deeper and deeper into a view of himself as a passive creature.

  I warned Reich that so much mental excitement might attract the attention of the parasites. At this, he forced himself to be calm. I tore up a few cigarette papers, and moved them across the desk for him, pointing out as I did so that it was all I could do to move these two grammes of paper—so that, in fact, I was better equipped to dig my way to the ruins of Kadath with a pick and shovel than with my mind! Reich now tried moving the papers, and failed. I tried to explain to him the ‘trick’ of getting the mind into gear, but he couldn’t do it. He tried for half an hour, and couldn’t move even the tiniest piece of paper. He finished the evening more depressed than I had seen him for a long time. I tried to cheer him up by pointing out that it was simply a knack that might come at any moment. My brother could swim when he was three years old, but it took me until I was eleven to acquire the knack.

  And, in fact, Reich acquired it about a week later. He rang me up in the middle of the night to tell me about it. He had been sitting up in bed reading a book on child psychology when it happened. Thinking about the way that some children seem to be ‘accident prone’, he had recognized how far this is due to the child’s own mind. And as he thought about these hidden mental forces that we learn to control with such painful effort, he suddenly realized that, in exactly the same way as an ‘accident prone’ child, he had been holding back his own powers of psychokinesis. He concentrated on the page of his book—which was of India paper—and made it turn of its own accord.

  I gathered from him the next day that he had not bothered to sleep; he had simply spent the night practising PK. He discovered that the ideal material for these exercises was the ashes of burnt cigarette papers. These are so light that the slightest effort of the mind can move them. Moreover, the slightest puff of breath will send them spinning, and the mind can catch them in motion and utilize their energy.

  After that, Reich developed his PK powers far more quickly than I did, having a more powerful brain, as far as simple cerebral discharge is concerned. Within a week, I saw him perform the incredible feat of causing a bird to veer in its flight, and circle twice around his head. This act produced rather amusing consequences, for some secretaries saw him from a window, and one of them later told the press about it. When a reporter asked Reich about this ‘omen’ of a black eagle circling his head (the story had grown in the telling), he had to declare that his family had always been bird lovers, and that he had used a special high pitched whistle to attract it. During the next month or so, his secretary had a full time job answering letters from societies of bird watchers who wanted him to come and lecture. After this, Reich took care to practise PK in the privacy of his room!

  The fact is that I was not greatly interested in my powers of psychokinesis at this stage, for I failed to grasp their implications. It cost me such an effort to transport a sheet of paper across the room by PK that it was easier to get up and fetch it. So when I read the last act of Shaw’s Back to Methuselah, in which his ‘ancients’ can grow themselves extra arms and legs merely by willing, I felt that Shaw had passed well beyond the bounds of possibility.

  The business of mapping these mental realms was in every way more exciting and rewarding, for it brought a far more exciting kind of control. Human beings are so used to their mental limitations that they take them for granted. They are like sick men who have forgotten the meaning of health. My mind could now command prospects that were beyond anything I had dreamed of before. For example, I had always been bad at mathematics. Now, without the slightest effort, I grasped the theory of functions, multi-dimensional geometry, quantum mechanics, game theory or group theory. I also read through the fifty volumes of the composite Bourabaki for bedtime reading—I found that I could skip whole pages at a time because the reasoning seemed so obvious.

  I found that the mathematical studies were valuable in many ways. If I turned my mind to my old love, history, it became so easy to ‘realize’ a period, to grasp all its details with an imaginative intensity that made it into a reality, that I found it too exciting to bear. My mind would soar to a pitch of exalted contemplation that was only too likely to attract the attention of the parasites. So I stuck to mathematics, a safer study. Here my mind could turn intellectual somersaults, hurtle like a bullet from one end of the mathematical universe to the other, and still remain emotionally sober.

  Reich was interested enough in my experience with the secretary at the next table to carry out some experiments in this direction. He discovered that about fifty per cent of the women, and thirty-five per cent of the men at A.I.U. were ‘sexually overcharged’. This undoubtedly had something to do with the heat, and with poor domestic facilities. Now one might have expected that this intensity of sexual emotion would mean that A.I.U. would have a
low industrial suicide rate. In fact, it had an exceptionally high one. And when Reich and I discussed this, we saw the reason. The sexual intensity and the high suicide rate were directly related—and related, of course, to the activity of the parasites. Sex is one of man’s deepest sources of satisfaction; the sexual urge and the evolutionary urge are closely connected. Frustrate this deep urge in some way, and it overflows; it tries to find satisfaction in all kinds of basically unsatisfactory ways. One of these is promiscuity—of which there was a great deal at A.I.U. It is once again a matter of ‘focusing’ emotion. A man believes that a particular woman will afford sexual satisfaction, and persuades her to become his mistress; but the parasites interfere, and he is unable to ‘focus’ his energies in the sexual act. He is now rather bewildered. She has ‘given’ herself, according to the common meaning of the phrase, and yet he remains unsatisfied. It is as baffling as eating a large meal and finding your hunger unsatisfied by it. There are two possible outcomes. He decides that the trouble lies in his choice of woman, and promptly looks around for someone else. Or he decides that the ordinary sexual act is unsatisfying, and tries to devise ways of making it more interesting: that is to say, he explores the sexual perversions. Reich discovered, by a little discreet questioning, that a great many of the unmarried executives at A.I.U. had a reputation for ‘peculiar’ sexual tastes.

  A week after we had started discussing these sexual matters, Reich came into my room one night with a book, which he threw on my table.

  ‘I’ve found a man we can trust.’

  ‘Who?’ I snatched up the book and looked at its title. Theories of the Sexual Impulse, by Sigmund Fleishman, of the University of Berlin. Reich read passages aloud to me, and I saw what he meant. There could be no possible doubt that Fleishman was a man of exceptional intelligence who was baffled by the anomalies of the sexual impulse. But again and again he used phrases that sounded as if he suspected the existence of the mind parasites. He had recognized that sexual perversion is the result of some kind of polluting of man’s sexual springs, and that there is an element of absurdity about it, like drinking whisky to quench your thirst. But why, he asked, should man in the modern world find sexual satisfaction so elusive? It is true that he tends to be sexually over-stimulated by books, magazines, films. But the urge to propagate the race is so strong that this should not make a great deal of difference. Even women, whose main instinct has always been to marry and raise children, seem to be succumbing to this rising tide of sexual abnormality and the number of divorce cases in which the husband accuses the wife of infidelity has been rising rapidly… How can we explain this weakening of the evolutionary impulse in both sexes? Could there be some unknown factor, either physical or psychological, that we have failed to take into account?

  As Reich commented, there were actually places in the book that sounded as if the author was blaming God for a piece of bungling in creating the human sexual impulse, and making it dependent on a sort of mutual frustration.

  Yes, it was very obvious that Fleishman was our man, and that in this particular field, we might find others who were struck by the anomalies in the sexual impulse. One of our problems, of course, was how actually to contact the various possible allies—neither of us had time to rush around the world seeking out such people—but in this case it was made unexpectedly easy. I wrote to Fleishman, discussing certain points in his book, and professing an interest in the whole subject. I said vaguely that I might soon be taking a trip to Berlin, and would hope to call on him. Within a week, I received a long reply from him, in the course of which he said: ‘Like everyone else in the world, I have been following your investigations with bated breath. Would you think me rude if I suggested coming to see you?’ I replied telling him that he would be welcome at any time, and suggesting that very weekend. He sent me a telegram of acceptance. Three days later, Reich and I met him off the plane, at Ankara, and brought him back to Diyarbakir in the firm’s rocket. Everything about him pleased us. He was a lively, intelligent man in his mid-fifties with a delightful sense of humour, and the typical German breadth of cultural interest. He could talk brilliantly about music, primitive art, philosophy and archaeology. He struck me as one of those few men who have a natural resistance to the mind parasites.

  We gave him a good lunch at Diyarbakir, during which time we talked of nothing but the diggings and the problem posed by the ruins. In the afternoon, we flew out to Karatepe by rocket. (A.I.U. found our presence there such excellent publicity that we were allowed privileges that would have been unthinkable when Reich was only their consultant geologist.) The first tunnel was almost completed. We showed Fleishman what there was to see of it, then the rest of the ‘exhibits’—the corner broken off the Abhoth block, the electronic photographs of the inscriptions on other blocks, and so on. He was fascinated by the whole problem—of a civilization older than the remains of Pekin Man. His own theory was interesting and plausible enough: it was that the earth had once been the site of an attempted settlement from another planet, probably Jupiter or Saturn. He agreed with Schrader’s theory that all the planets had held life at some time. and probably—as we know in the case of Mars—intelligent life. He ruled out Mars because the size of the planet—its mass is a tenth of ours—and its low gravity ruled out the possibility of ‘giants’; Jupiter and Saturn both have sufficient mass—and gravitation pull—to produce ‘giants’.

  Reich countered with his own theory: that the total population of earth had been destroyed several times through catastrophes involving the moon, and that after each destruction, man had painfully to evolve once again from earlier stages. If, as seems almost certain, these moon catastrophes involved great floods, it would explain why these ancient civilizations—millions of years older than Holocene man—were buried so deeply.

  So the day passed by in wide-ranging discussions. In the evening, we went to see an excellent performance of The Pirates of Penzance by the A.I.U. operatic society, then had a leisurely meal in the director’s restaurant. Reich had arranged for a bed to be made up in his own sitting-room, and it was there that we now went. But still we avoided the actual subject of the mind parasites, remembering the danger of discussing them late at night. But we did persuade Fleishman to talk at length about his theory of the sexual impulse. By midnight he was well into his stride, and had put before us a brilliant exposition of the whole problem. Sometimes we pretended to misunderstand him, forcing him to be more explicit. The results were rewarding beyond our hopes. Fleishman, with his sweeping scientific intelligence, had grasped the whole problem. He saw that man’s sexual impulse is basically romantic, just like his poetic impulse. When a poet receives ‘intimations of immortality’ from the sight of mountains, he knows perfectly well that the mountains are not really ‘cloud-capped gods’. He knows that his own mind is adding their majesty to them—or rather, is seeing them as a symbol of the hidden majesty of his own mind. Their greatness and aloofness remind him of his own greatness and aloofness. And when a man falls romantically in love with a woman, again it is the poet in him that sees her as an instrument of evolution. The sheer power of the sexual impulse is the power of the god-like in man, and a sexual stimulus can arouse this power as a mountain can arouse his perception of beauty. We must see man, said Fleishman, not as a unity, but as a constant struggle between his higher and lower selves. Sexual perversion, as found in De Sade, represents these two locked together in conflict—locked together so tightly that you cannot prise them apart. It is the lower self deliberately using the energy of the higher self for its own purposes.

  At this point, Reich interrupted. ‘How, in that case, do you account for the steep rise in sexual perversion in this century?’

  ‘Ah, precisely’, Fleishman said gloomily. ‘Man’s lower self seems to be getting artificial support from somewhere. Perhaps our civilization is decadent, tired out, and its “higher” impulses are exhausted’. Yet no, he could not believe that. Neither could he believe that the modern neurosis is d
ue to man’s inability to get used to being a civilized animal—in fact, a highly industrialized animal. Man has had plenty of time to get adjusted to big cities. No, surely the explanation must lie elsewhere…

  At this point, I yawned, and said that I would like to continue the discussion over breakfast, if they wouldn’t mind. We had a long and interesting day planned for Fleishman… Reich agreed with me. All this was too fascinating to discuss when we were tired. So we said goodnight, and all retired.

  Next morning, at breakfast, we were glad to see that Fleishman was in sparkling spirits. He was obviously finding his week-end highly stimulating. When he asked us what we had planned for the day, we told him that it was something we would prefer to discuss after breakfast. Then we went back to Reich’s room, and Reich continued the discussion exactly where we had broken off the night before. Reich quoted back Fleishman’s remark: ‘Man’s lower self seems to be getting artificial support from somewhere’. Then he left it to me to tell the story of Karel Weissman, and our discovery of the parasites.

  It took two hours, and we knew from the beginning that Fleishman had been an excellent choice. For perhaps twenty minutes he suspected an elaborate hoax. Karel’s diaries convinced him otherwise. From then on, we saw the light breaking on him. When his excitement mounted, Reich quickly warned him that this was the most certain method of warning the parasites, and explained why we had waited until morning before telling him. Fleishman saw our point. From then on he listened quietly and seriously, and from the set of the lines of his mouth, it was clear that the parasites had found another formidable enemy.