The Mind Parasites Read online

  For the most part, the ten ‘old hands’ among us succeeded in forgetting the threat that hung over us, and concentrated on our phenomenological problems. It was less easy to make the others forget. Many of them had left families behind them and they were naturally worried. With a great deal of bullying, we managed to make them work ten hours a day on mind discipline. It was not easy, but after the second day we began to win this particular battle. The sheer tension involved worked in our favour once we had persuaded them to forget the worries they had left on earth. It kept their efforts highly disciplined. We had none of the trouble that we’d had earlier with Merril, Philips, Leaf and Ebner.

  And yet I was still dissatisfied. After fifty hours of flight, we were within forty thousand miles of the moon. And I actually had a sense that the parasites were closer than ever.

  I talked about it with Reich, Flieshman and the Graus after we’d finished our classes. There were certain basic facts about the parasites that we had never got clear. Theoretically, it should make no difference whether we were in outer space or on earth. They were in the mind, so one could not get further away from them. Anyway, they had not bothered us directly since the night when they destroyed most of us. They had realized that we could be defeated indirectly through a world war.

  And yet in a sense, the parasites were in space, for I had found them in my Percy Street rooms keeping a watch on Karel Weissman’s records. How did I explain this paradox? Well, they were both in space and out of it. After all, our minds are both in space and out of it. You cannot localize the mind; it does not occupy space. Yet it moves in space with our bodies.

  Again, I had the feeling of some clue that was missing. We sat there, going over the whole thing slowly, step by step. I said:

  ‘The parasites are in space, in a sense, because they are on earth. They came to earth deliberately to feed on the human race. Now we know that human beings all appear to have separate minds, because when each of us descends into his own mind, he loses direct contact with the others. And yet we also know that, in some deeper sense, human beings share a common mind, a kind of racial mind. We are like all the taps in a city, each one separate, and yet each drawing our water from some main reservoir…’

  Reich interrupted (I am quoting literally from a tape recording we made):

  ‘But you said that you defeated them by drawing on some immense deep source of energy. Would that be the original reservoir itself ?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ I said.

  ‘But, in that case, these things are living in the reservoir, and the energy would also be available to them. How do you account for that?’

  Yes, that was it! We were getting closer. Obviously, the depth of the mind—where they lived—and the reservoir of vital energy that I had drawn upon, were two quite different things. That reservoir might be in the depths of the mind, but it wasn’t the same thing as the depths of the mind.

  ‘Very well,’ Fleishman said, ‘Where does that get us?’

  It was Heinrich Grau who said slowly:

  ‘I think I can see where it gets us. We are talking about some immense, primeval source of energy—what Bernard Shaw called the Life Force. It is the raw vitality that drives us all.’

  His brother Louis interrupted with excitement:

  ‘But why should the parasites bother with individual human beings if they could steal their energy direct from the source? So obviously…’

  ‘Obviously they can’t,’ Heinrich said. ‘They have to get between the source and the human individual.’

  We were not following them. I asked:

  ‘Which means…?’

  ‘Which means that this basic source isn’t available to them—is probably actively hostile to them. In other words, if we could somehow get down to this source, we’d probably have enough energy to destroy the parasites.’

  I explained that this thought had been in my mind earlier, although I hadn’t analysed its implications so clearly. The trouble was that I couldn’t get down to the source. Every time I tried, I had a sense of inadequate will power.

  Reich said: ‘But if the parasites are between you and the source, they’re probably obstructing you somehow.’

  We now began to see that this was a real possibility. The parasites had always used this ‘obstructing’ method against the human race—deliberately distracting the mind when it began to get to grips with its own secrets. We had learned how to prevent this: by penetrating to those depths of the mind from which the parasites normally operated. They had retreated to depths where we could not follow, and were probably using the same old methods against us.

  So far, I had been assuming that some ‘natural’ cause prevented me from penetrating below a certain depth in my mind. A diver can only reach a certain depth in the sea—at which the weight of water he displaces is equal to the weight of his own body. If he wants to go deeper, he has to put heavier weights on his diving suit. But I did not know of any method of making my mind heavier so that I could descend deeper into myself, and I had been assuming that this explained my failure to penetrate deeper. But did it? Now I thought about it, I realized that what prevented me from going deeper was a drain on my sense of purpose. My mind seemed to go blank; my sense of individuality became more precarious. In other words, it was very possible that I was being obstructed.

  I decided to test this again, and the others did the same. I closed my eyes, and made the usual descent through the memory layers. But now I found that it was difficult to pass through them. Everything seemed turbulent and violent, like swimming under the sea after a depth charge has exploded. I recollected that my dreams on the previous night had had this same violent, disturbed quality.

  Why? There seemed to be no parasites around. What was causing the disturbance?

  I tried hard to go lower, and succeeded, with immense difficulty, in sinking to the nursery level. But here it was worse. These wild, innocent energies had gained a kind of nervous force. They are usually characterized by a deep breathing serenity and order, like the gentle heaving of a calm sea. Now the sea was distinctly choppy.

  I knew this was as far as I could go, so I allowed myself to surface quickly. Reich was already back. His experience, of course, had been identical with my own. As we waited for the others to return, we discussed the problem. Were we, perhaps, experiencing some great psychic disturbance that affected the whole human race? Or…

  With a sense of helpless frustration, I crossed to the port, and looked down on the great, glowing surface of the moon that spread below us. It was now a mere eight hours away. I glanced at the controls, to verify that they were compensating for the gravitation pull of the satellite. And as I did so, the fantastic idea flashed into my mind. Gravity… the moon. I turned to Reich, and said:

  ‘This is probably just a stupid guess, but… could they be using the moon as some kind of base?’

  ‘A base?’ he said blankly. ‘How could they? There aren’t any people there. And they don’t inhabit empty space, as far as we know.’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s just an idea… to explain why our minds seem so disturbed.’

  Holcroft came in at this moment, and I told him briefly what we had discovered. He closed his eyes, sat on a bed, and quickly verified that the subliminal layers of the mind were in an unusual state of disturbance. And although he had not heard my question, he turned and pointed through the front port at the moon.

  ‘It’s that. It’s somehow affecting us as it affects the tides.’

  I asked him: ‘How do you know?’

  He shrugged. ‘I can tell. I can feel its pull.’

  This was possible. Lunatics… men whose minds are affected by the gravitational pull of the moon. But why? Why should the moon affect the mind?

  I asked Holcroft: ‘Do you think there are parasites there?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I don’t see how there can be. And yet… it’s somehow connected with them.’

  We decided that the others had better b
e brought into this discussion. It was the kind of problem where anyone’s ideas might shed light. So I asked them all to come in. Then I explained it as briefly as I could.

  It was a nuclear physicist called Berger who came up with the only useful suggestion.

  ‘Do you know the work of the philosopher Gurdjieff? He always said that human beings were food for the moon. He compared the human race to a flock of sheep that are being fattened for the moon…

  I asked Holcroft:

  ‘Does that make sense to you?’

  He said seriously:

  ‘I think it does. There can be no doubt whatever that the moon exerts a curious pull on the human mind. This is nothing to do with gravity. We also believe that the moon was never a part of the earth or the sun—that it came from somewhere else. Perhaps it was a comet that the earth captured. Its chemical composition is quite unlike the earth’s. Now supposing that the moon does steal human energy… or affect it in some way.’

  Reich said: ‘You mean that it might be the base of the parasites?’

  ‘No, I don’t think it is. But I believe that the parasites might make some kind of use of the moon all the same. I feel it’s emitting some kind of disturbing energy-psychic energy. It’s a kind of giant transmitter, and the earth’s a giant receiver…’

  The others now began contributing fragments of moon legends that I had never heard. They told me about the Hörbiger cult, to which Hitler had belonged, with its belief that the earth captures a new moon every ten thousand years or so. According to Hörbiger, the present moon is earth’s seventh. The other six all ended by falling on the earth and causing tremendous cataclysms that destroyed most of mankind. The flood recorded in the Bible was due to the fall of the sixth moon.

  Others in the group mentioned other moon theories—Velikovsky’s, Bellamy’s, Saurat’s—which seem to indicate that this notion of the moon as a hostile force had preoccupied many different minds.

  Most of these theories sounded too absurd to take seriously. The fact remained that I was conscious that the moon was producing a definite disturbance in the preconscious levels of my mind. Reich also pointed out that the parasites seemed to have most power during the night. I had always assumed that this was because the mind is tired at the end of the day. Yet when I had occasionally slept during the day, and stayed awake all night, I had been dimly aware of an increased feeling of vulnerability during the night.

  I asked Holcroft:

  ‘Do you think it possible that the parasites somehow use this curious energy emitted by the moon—use it to interfere with human thought processes?’

  But Holcroft knew as little about this as the rest of us.

  Still, one thing was very clear. We had to find out whether we could get beyond the range of this disturbing influence. If, as Holcroft suggested, the moon was a gigantic transmitter and the earth a receiver, then we had to get right out of range of them both. That meant that our present course had to be changed, for it would take us in a huge arc within ten thousand miles of the moon.

  I radioed Colonel Massey back in Annapolis, and explained that we wanted to change our route, and go on into outer space, aiming roughly between the present positions of Jupiter and Saturn. Massey said that he saw no reason why not: we had fuel for another fortnight. This meant that we could risk going on for another three quarters of a million miles before turning back. If he’d known earlier, he said, we could have carried enough fuel to take us halfway to Mars. I said that I thought half a million miles should be far enough from earth. That is more than twice the distance between earth and the moon.

  Following Massey’s instructions, I made the necessary changes in the robot control. Then I rejoined the others for supper. It was a curiously cheerful meal—considering our situation. We were hurtling beyond the moon, and penetrating regions of space where no human being had ever ventured—except the crew of the ill-fated Proclis. Somehow, anxieties about the earth dropped away from us, as business worries vanish on the first day of a holiday.

  That night, I slept more deeply and peacefully than for several weeks.

  I woke up and looked at my watch; it was half past seven. I tried to remember why I was feeling so happy. Had I had a pleasant dream, perhaps? I could recollect no dreams. I got up and walked to the rear port. The moon was an immense crescent, with its mountains clearly visible. Nearly a quarter of a million miles behind it lay the great blue-green crescent of the earth, like an immense sun. The sun itself was a blinding white, as if about to explode, and the stars all looked many times larger than on earth. The sense of delight in me rose to such a pitch of intensity that I had deliberately to suppress it.

  I closed my eyes, and sank into my mind. It was calmer than yesterday, although the turbulence was still present. And now it seemed obvious to me that this turbulence was due to the moon. But its power had weakened. The result was a delightful feeling of inner calm and freedom, as if one were convalescing from an illness.

  I went and woke up Reich and Holcroft. I noticed that they looked healthier and happier than I had seen them for many weeks. They were experiencing the same freedom. None of us said much, but we all felt the same enormous hope.

  Nothing happened that day. We merely sat around, watching the moon recede, and observing in ourselves the steady growth of freedom. In a sense, it was the most eventful day of my life, and yet there is almost nothing I can say about it.

  And it is at this point that the language problem arises. Words begin to fail because our normal language has never had to describe these experiences. I can only try to suggest a parallel. Imagine a country of tiny dwarfs, who have various words and phrases for size: large, big, enormous, immense, vast, and so on, and who, when they wish to describe the idea of immensity, say: ‘As vast as a man.’ What would then happen if one of the dwarfs was snatched up by an eagle, and carried into the air above Mount Everest? How could he ever find a word to explain that the mountain was so large that even a man is tiny in comparison?

  This is my problem. I shall not try to take refuge in cant phrases about the impossibility of describing it in words. Nothing is indescribable in words if you take the time and the trouble. If your present language framework is inadequate, then you must carefully create a larger one.

  Still, this is impracticable at the moment. An adequate description of what happened in the next ten days would require a long book, full of analogies. I must try to do my best with the inadequate linguistic resources available to me.

  What was happening, then, was that we were moving beyond the range of the mind parasites. We understood this on the first day.

  They were still present in my mind. I could tell as soon as I closed my eyes and sank into myself. I was now aware of them in the regions below the nursery. They were still beyond my reach, but I could sense their panic. They didn’t like being half a million miles away from earth. As the gap widened, their panic increased. I knew then that they were creatures of low intelligence. If they had been able to think logically, they would have realized that we would be back on earth within a fortnight. They would have no difficulty surviving during this time. But they felt a wholly irrational panic, the kind of thing a child feels on leaving home. They had been on earth for a long time, swimming in the dense seas of human vitality, moving freely from one human being to another, always with a wide choice of prey. Now they felt their psychic links with the earth stretching and growing weaker, and they were frightened.

  Some of us were less happy about this. We mistook the fear of the parasites for our own—which was natural, since we felt it rising from instinctive depths of our own minds. The more experienced ones among us had to maintain a constant vigil to make sure that none of our new recruits succumbed to panic. We now understood the nature of the ‘space fever’ that had so far frustrated all man’s efforts to penetrate far into space.

  But as the days passed, we knew that we had defeated the parasites; that it would only be a matter of time before they surrendered to the pa
nic. Every day added 120,000 miles to the distance between us and the earth. It was simply a question of how far we would have to go before they cracked.

  I now found that I could descend into my mind with extraordinary ease. I could do it without effort, without even closing my eyes. At last I was beginning to understand what Teilhard de Chardin meant when he said that man’s true home is the mind. I was able to move around in my mind as simply and as freely as a man with a motor car can move around the country. I could also pass through the ‘nursery’ region, and float down into the ‘nothingness’. But now I was aware that it was far from being a ‘nothingness’. It certainly had some of the attributes of empty space—stillness, lack of all tension. But it was like the stillness at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, where the pressure is so enormous that no creatures can live. The ‘nothingness’ was pure life energy—although words are now becoming so inaccurate that they are almost meaningless.

  I sometimes spent many hours in this sea of darkness, doing nothing, merely hovering. This is hard to grasp, because we are so accustomed to movement, and the parasites have so confused our habitual thought processes. But stillness is natural to man: stillness and utter calm. Every poet knows this, for in stillness he begins to understand the greatness of his own inner powers—or ‘soul’, as Wordsworth would have said. If you throw a pebble into a stormy sea, it has no effect. If you throw it into a still pond, you can see every ripple, and hear them lapping against the bank. The parasites have always kept man’s mind stormy, by harnessing the disturbing energies of the moon, and this is why man has never been able to make use of his enormous powers. Poets and so-called ‘men of genius’ are the only ones who even suspect the existence of such powers.