Strange Powers Page 14

  He also mentions some cases—which he described to me personally—of houses that produce mental illness; when the patient moves, he tends to recover. He told me of a street in Bath in which thirteen out of forty houses have produced mental illness in patients. Here, obviously, we are back to the L-fields and T-fields discussed earlier in this book.

  Why am I discussing Arthur Guirdham at such length, when he himself says he is not particularly 'psychic'—only a 'catalyst'? Because I think I can enter into his mind more fully than into those of Robert Leftwich or Mrs Beattie. For the first fifty years of his life, he was apparently non-psychic. If I had met him twenty years ago, I very much doubt whether I would have predicted that he might become so involved in psychic matters. Why? Because—and here I must tread carefully—I am inclined to believe that 'psychic' activities are often an outlet for energies that could find a more normal creative release. Is it entirely coincidence that Crowley was not a very good poet or novelist? Or that so many people on the fringe of 'occultism' have a highly developed desire for attention and recognition? On the other hand, Guirdham was a successful medical man, senior consultant for his area, medical correspondent for a major newspaper. Moreover, he is a naturally good writer. When he sent me his novel The Gibbet and the Cross, I expected it to be a typical 'amateur novel', even, though his other books are well written; fiction and non-fiction call for entirely different talents. I was surprised and impressed by the tight, clean prose, the economy, the sense of knowing exactly where he is going. Crowley's novels reveal his mind: sloppy, self-indulgent, undisciplined. Before a man has learned how to make use of his powers, he's always a bit of a confidence trickster; you can smell it in his work. Guirdham has the economy of a man who has learned the trick of creation. You feel you are in the hands of an honest and single-minded man.

  So whether or not he himself possesses 'strange powers', the issues he raises are perhaps the most important in this volume. One of the chief drawbacks to most manifestations of 'the occult'—whether in witchcraft, astral projection, communication with the dead—is that they are ultimately ambiguous. If the 'spirits' really wanted to convince us of their existence, they could make a far better job of it. Apart from a few really gifted mediums—like Daniel Dunglas Home—or 'magicians', like Gurdjieff, most 'psychics' raise more doubts than they allay. Name almost any important figure of 'occultism', from Cornelius Agrippa to Madame Blavatsky, and the suggestions of genuine powers and of charlatanism just about balance one another out.

  Now Arthur Guirdham, a man whom no one has so far accused of charlatanism, has made claims that seem to be as startling and far reaching as those in Einstein's original paper on relativity. His first book on reincarnation could be dismissed by the skeptic as a piece of gullibility; Mrs Smith happened to engage his intellectual interest with her revelations about Catharism, and he allowed her to convince him that she and he had been associated in the thirteenth century... The second book is not open to this interpretation. It states that half a dozen people, already in loose contact, independently reached the conclusion that they belonged to the Montsegur Cathars. The evidence presented is too detailed to be dismissed as self-deception. This is either deliberate, carefully planned deception, or it is an important breakthrough in our knowledge of the universe. If Guirdham is right, then the psychic laws governing human existence are more complex than Darwin or Mendel ever suspected, and the inter-relations between human beings are deeper than Freud ever suspected.

  And what do I personally think? My own natural skepticism leads me to wonder if there are not other possible explanations. I must confess that I am basically dubious about Guirdham's dualism. All my life I have been naturally and instinctively a Platonist. That is to say, I have never been able to accept the idea of evil as an independent force; rather, as the outcome of muddle and stupidity. If a moth flies into a candle flame, no evil is involved; no doubt at the next stage in their evolution, moths will learn to develop a sensitivity to heat that will save them from getting singed. A human being who 'commits evil' is one who, for reasons of frustration and impatience, prefers to increase the muddle and chaos in the universe. I do not mind using the word 'evil' about a man who takes pleasure in inflicting pain, for I believe in the existence of free will and of choice; but it still seems to me that he is doing evil out of a kind of inner-muddle. All high-dominance people are possessed by the urge to do something, and if they can see no way to create, then they may destroy out of a kind of childish anger with the universe. It seems to me quite possible—indeed, very probable—that the psychic forces of evil unleashed by human beings may persist after their death, so that a house in which someone has been thoroughly miserable or died horribly may retain the imprint for years afterwards. I am even prepared to admit that such 'forces' might behave like discarnate entities, continuing to try to destroy. But that is still a long way from accepting the Cathar position of evil as a genuinely independent force. Moreover, from Guirdham's books, I am not really clear whether he is a genuine dualist—that is, one who believes that the world of matter was created by the Devil.[1] The Church persecuted Manichees and other dualists because the Book of Genesis states that God looked upon the world and saw that it was good; and the basic vision of the mystics has confirmed this. It asserts that the world is a thousand times more beautiful than our senses tell us, and that our habit of 'cutting out' 99 per cent of our experience—which has enabled us to evolve to our present stage—has also prevented us from realizing how entirely blessed it is to be alive. If I am honest with myself, I have to admit that I do not have any sympathy for Catharism. The manner in which the Church stamped it out was horrible and wicked; but doctrinally, I suspect I am on the side of the Church.

  But then, it does not seem to me that the basic attitudes of Guirdham's books, from A Theory of Disease to We Are One Another and Obsession, are rounded on a dualist point of view. On the contrary, the delight that emerges from his descriptions of nature make it dear that, emotionally anyway, he looks upon the world and finds it good. His previous incarnation, Roger-Isarn, evidently felt the same way, since he lived with 'Puerilia' as his mistress—although he later became a Parfait, and presumably renounced sexual pleasure.

  At this point, I must squarely answer a question that must have occurred to every reader with a logical turn of mind. In The Outsider, I quoted Sartre on this matter of belief. If the telephone rang, and a voice on the other end said: 'This is God speaking. Believe and you are saved; disbelieve and you are damned,' a sensible human being would reply: 'All right, I'm damned.' Even the Bible recommends us to prove everything, and hold fast to what is good.

  Now should I not, according to that formula, totally reject all the claims of Robert Leftwich, Eunice Beattie and Arthur Guirdham—especially Guirdham, since, of the three, he offers least corroboration? Am I not flying in the face of a basic existentialist principle—in fact, a basic philosophical principle?

  This is a question that can only be answered in the manner Newman answered Charles Kingsley's accusations of religious dishonesty: by trying to 'explain myself.

  As a child, I accepted spiritualism. My grandmother was a spiritualist. My mother accepted spiritualism, although she never, as far as I know, attended a spiritualist church. I personally have always had a natural distaste for churches and people worshipping together; for some reason, it arouses in me the same irritable rejection that Einstein always felt when he saw marching soldiers. The whole 'outsider' idea is profoundly ingrained in me (as, indeed, it is in Guirdham—hence his emphasis on the Herd-Personality Impulse). I feel that, ideally, every human being ought to be strong enough to stand totally alone; it is the only way to the realization of our profoundest capacities. So although I accepted the notion of life after death, the whole idea of a spiritualist church was distasteful to me. But I read books like Harry Price's Search for Truth and Conan Doyle's Wanderings of a Spiritualist. I once even attempted to read Swedenborg's True Christian Religion, but concluded he was fee
ble minded.

  My spiritualist phase lasted until I was ten or eleven; then I fell in love with science. I use the phrase deliberately, because that is what it was: a love affair, an absorbing passion, a glimpse of salvation. The original impulse came from a book called The Marvels and Mysteries of Science, and a cheap chemistry set my mother bought me for Christmas when I was eleven. If Guirdham is right about reincarnation, I think I must have been a scientist in a previous existence. I read Holmyard's School Chemistry from beginning to end like a novel, then went on to books like Eddington's Nature of the Physical Worm and Jeans' Mysterious Universe. It was a marvelous feeling. Boredom was at an end. No more over-long school holidays in which I wondered what to do, no more hours of listlessly re-reading tattered comics or wondering how I could raise the money to go to the cinema. I had an interest that stayed with me from the time I opened my eyes in the morning until I went to bed at night.

  The odd thing is that this passion for science, which led me to write a six-volume Manual of General Science at the age of thirteen, soon spread to other subjects. I read Toad's Guide to Philosophy and The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature and Robert O. Ballou's Bible of the World. A book on ballet by Arnold Haskell convinced me for a time that I wanted to be a dancer. By the age of sixteen, I felt that science was too narrow; I now read histories of art and music with the same avidity that I had read Holmyard's Chemistry. But the interest in spiritualism and the occult had gone completely into abeyance. It was facts that interested me. Like Eliot, I felt strongly that 'human kind cannot bear very much reality', that most people never escape beyond the narrow horizon of the personal and the subjective. Spiritualism struck me simply as wishful thinking, It was too personal—all tied up with people and their emotions and their desire to cling to the past. It seemed to me that the universe is bigger and colder and stranger, and that it doesn't care much about people or their emotions. The only way to evolve is to become more like the universe, to try to be less 'personal'.

  I became an obsessive. Not only because of this craving for every possible sort of knowledge, but because I was afraid I might spend the rest of my life working at jobs I hated. This is something Arthur Guirdham and Robert Leftwich might find it difficult to conceive—although Mrs Beattie wouldn't: the feeling that it may be as hard to escape into a more rewarding, more creative way of life as to escape from Sing Sing. I had no qualifications; when I left school, all I could do was to offer myself as unskilled labor, at the equivalent of ten new pence an hour. Becoming a writer offered the only chance of escape. So I ground away: at stories, at my novel, at essays on Shaw, Nijinsky, Hemingway...

  To become an obsessive is to develop a kind of armor, like a crab. The armor insulates you and protects you. It also imprisons you. When you sunbathe on the beach, you can take off your clothes, but not your armor. But then, a prison can also be a useful place, if you have a lot of work you want to get done without interruption...

  When an obsessional pattern is established, you get so used to living with inner-tension that you find it impossible to relax. I could only truly relax by inducing a state of wider consciousness through poetry or musk. I once sat cross-legged at the top of a small mountain in the Lake District, trying to make myself see Grasmere as Wordsworth saw it; but it didn't work; the relaxation wouldn't come. It felt like a kind of inner constipation.

  When The Outsider was a success, I knew I could make some kind of a living from writing. I moved to the country. But the relaxation still wouldn't come. Not immediately, anyway. It only came very slowly, taking about five years. I might be looking out of a window as it rained; and suddenly the rain would seem to be falling into my mind. T. E. Lawrence described being taken through an Arab palace; the walls of each room contained a different perfume, which his guide professed to be able to smell. Finally, the guide took him to a room with broken windows, through which the 'cold, eddyless wind of the desert' could blow freely. He said: 'But this is the sweetest smell of all.' Lawrence understood this; but he died before he had learned to relax enough to experience it. But I now began to experience it; there were odd moments when my windows opened, and the wind blew in.

  I was thirty when Joy presented me with a daughter, and I discovered I could wake her up by thinking about her in the middle of the night, or by looking out of the windows when she was asleep in her pram. And the first time I held her, I had a strong sense that she knew I was her father. Suddenly, I could understand what it would be like to be a fish, with nerves along your sides that register the pressure of the water, or the approach of an enemy. One day, fixed after mowing the lawn, I was about to drop heavily on to the bed and pull off my shoes. Something made me look round; Sally was lying near the edge of the bed; my weight would probably have broken her ribs.

  My first child had been born when I was twenty, but there had been no telepathic link; I was still in my carapace—as, I think, Arthur Guirdham's professional duties obliged him to stay in his carapace until he came close to retirement.

  In the mid-sixties, I made one interesting and basic discovery: that an immense effort of will serves exactly the same purpose as total relaxation, and achieves it rather more efficiently. In 1966, on my way to America—and a twelve-week lecture tour—I was feeling low and depressed. As the train passed a spot where, twelve years earlier, I had experienced a powerful surge of insight, I suddenly felt a kind of rage, a desire to grab my self-pity by the throat and choke it to death. A furious effort of concentration for just about five minutes produced a sense of strength and freedom, which lasted for most of the tour. But as soon as sheer fatigue began to affect me, after ten weeks of non-stop flying and talking, I became accident-prone; everything began to go wrong...

  And in New York in 1967, I noticed the reverse. Paramount had taken an option on one of my novels for a fairly large sum, and I intended to use some of it to take my family to the University of Seattle, where I had a job as writer in residence. But as the date for leaving England approached, there was still no contract. Half a dozen film deals had already fallen through; I found it hard to believe that this one would come off. But although the consequences would have been fairly serious if the deal had fallen through—we didn't have enough money to get from New York to Seattle—I declined to allow myself to worry. Staying with friends on Long Island, I rang my American agent—who told me that the contracts had been sent weeks ago. Some incompetent underling had sent them surface mail instead of airmail, and they were probably halfway across the Atlantic. I still declined to allow myself to get depressed—it is the writer's occupational disease, and I have always tried to bully myself out of it. The next day, my agent rang back to say that he had got a new set of contracts, and Paramount had agreed to pay up the moment he handed them over. I set out from Long Island on an August afternoon; the heat in the train to Manhattan was almost unbearable; but I was feeling cheerful. Although Grand Central station was crowded, I managed to get a taxi immediately. Half an hour later, I signed the contract; my agent said he'd try to get the cheque to me within forty-eight hours. I left the office, found another empty taxi outside, arrived at Grand Central five minutes before the next train out to Long Island, and was back home within a couple of hours. There was a strange, sleepwalking sense of smoothness about that whole afternoon.

  Chance? Of course, in a sense. But I also felt that a kind of alertness and attention were allowing me to take advantage of chance. It was like being in a canoe on a fast current; the paddle doesn't have much to do, but its occasional strokes keep you clear of rocks.

  Human beings have a deeply ingrained habit of passivity, which is strengthened by the relatively long period that we spend under the control of parents and schoolmasters. Moments of intensity are also moments of power and control; yet we have so little understanding of this that we wait passively for some chance to galvanize the muscle that created the intensity.

  But whether you use the negative methods of relaxation (which is fundamentally 'transcendental
meditation') or the positive method of intense alertness and concentration, the result is the same: a realization of the enormous vistas of reality that lie outside our normal range of awareness. You recognize that the chief obstacle to such awareness is that we don't need it to get through an ordinary working day. I can make do fairly well with a narrow awareness and a moderate mount of vital energy. I have 'peak experiences' when I occasionally develop more awareness and more energy than I need for the task in hand; then I 'overflow', and realize, for a dazzled moment, what a fascinating universe I actually inhabit. It is significant that Maslow's 'peakers' were not daydreaming romantics, but healthy, practical people...

  That is my 'general theory'. My increasing sense of the vistas of reality that lie outside my everyday preoccupations leads me to take a far more tolerant attitude towards assertions that do not fit into my range of experience. The cybernetician David Foster came up with an interesting theory (which I described in The Occult) to the effect that the universe shows every sign of being run on a series of 'cybernetic codes'. A kind of plastic biscuit with holes in the edge codes my wife's washing machine; and an acorn is the plastic biscuit that codes an oak tree. This suggests to Dr Foster that acorns and human genes are coded by some conscious intelligence, not simply by the operation of Darwinian selection. He thinks that cosmic rays would be of sufficiently high frequency to do the coding—although this doesn't prove that they do. Now I don't know whether David Foster is fight. All I can say is that there is something about his theory that corresponds to my own glimpses of 'vistas of reality'.