Strange Powers Read online

  This is a point of vital importance. The mind possesses a power to focus reality. Everyone has experienced this on the first day of a holiday, when everything seems clearer and fresher than usual. In the mood of holiday excitement, we seem to see things in sharper focus, and we also experience a stronger sense of the reality of other times; if I happen to read something about Michelangelo or Beethoven in this mood, they no longer seem remote figures of history; I can grasp that they were real men, like myself. This power to 'focus reality' is the ability to project a beam of interest. All creatures have this ability—you have only to see the way a dog hangs around the house of a bitch on heat to see that dogs can be as single-minded as humans—but animals can only direct it at the present moment. When you take your dog for a country walk, you can watch his beam of interest switching from object to object—a rabbit hole, a gap in the hedge, an old bone. If an aeroplane goes overhead, he does not look up into the sky; that is too remote. And if you meet a friend on your walk, and stop to have a leisurely conversation about a neighbor who died ten years ago, your mind has gone into a realm where your dog cannot follow you; you have, casually and without effort, directed your beam of interest to another time and another place.

  Human beings can not only direct their beam of interest to distant realities; they can direct it to realities that never existed. A novel like Wells's Time Machine or David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus demonstrate this extraordinary power of the human mind to evoke a non-existent reality as vividly as if the novel were a volume of travels in Central Africa. And a man like H. P. Lovecraft, bored and dissatisfied with his life in Providence, Rhode Island, can create a fictional 'reality' that reveals that he has trained his mind to focus on a self-created mental world. What is interesting here is that Lovecraft led a rather unsatisfying, unfulfilled existence; it would have been understandable if, like an undernourished child, he had drifted aimlessly and died without having achieved anything. In fact, he learned to generate some of the 'psychological vitamins' he needed by an act of imagination; in spite of a thoroughly frustrating life, he managed to grow into a remarkable human being. This is as startling as if a half-starved man put on weight by imagining five-course meals. Man's power to direct his 'beam of interest' at distant realities obviously has some fascinating implications; it gives him a new kind of power over his own life.

  This power is not yet highly developed in human beings. I have called it 'Faculty X'; for it is, in effect, a new faculty, the faculty that distinguishes man from all other animals: the faculty that may be considered the real aim of human evolution.

  But this Faculty X is not an alternative to the animal's intuitive powers. Man discarded his sixth sense because he couldn't afford to keep it; civilization used up all his surplus energies, and he had none left over to operate a sixth sense. But Faculty X represents a new level of power over himself; psychic energies are freed: it could be compared to the flood of manpower that occurs at the end of a war, when the army is demobilized. Once again he can afford to develop his 'psychic radar', his sixth sense. This is why I believe that, as man develops Faculty X, his so-called psychic powers will also increase—second sight, telepathy, the ability to dowse, even astral projection.

  Why do I think so? My own psychic powers are certainly unremarkable. My temperament is basically scientific. Like Wells, I experienced a tremendous sense of imaginative release through the vision of science; at the age of eleven, the atomic table of the elements struck me as more poetic than anything written by Shakespeare. And although I abandoned science for literature at the age of sixteen or so, the temperament remains; it is ideas and facts that excite me, and the process of fitting them into larger and larger patterns. Such a temperament is not likely to be very 'psychic'. I cannot dowse; I have never seen a ghost; I have never had any experience of foreknowledge or pre-vision; and my few unimportant telepathic experiences are summarized in a couple of pages of The Occult. But I still note that a kind of 'jungle sensitivity' appears when I am healthy and 'on top of things'.

  I can give an example of this. One morning every week, I drive into Mevagissey, a couple of miles away, to buy groceries and pick up our cleaning lady. One morning a few months ago—the exact date was 8 January 1973—I was meditating as I drove in: by which I mean that I was thinking seriously, trying to deepen an insight, to do with the way we respond to crisis. The answer came to me, accompanied by a sense of control and relaxation. The narrow lane that leads up to our house makes an acute angle with an almost equally narrow country road, and getting around this corner, without having to stop and reverse, is a matter of some skill. As I was about to swing into the drive, the thought entered my head: 'Wait. The post van may be coming out.' I had no reason to think so, for in more than ten years living in this house, I haven't met the post van in the lane more than twice. But I went into first gear, and took the corner very cautiously—and the post van pulled up within a few inches of my bonnet. Two weeks ago, the same thing happened again; before I made the difficult turn into the drive, I had a faint, nagging discomfort, like a very distant bell—and once again, met the post van. I am not saying there might have been a violent head-on collision if I hadn't had this 'warning' feeling; but some psychic radar knew the post van was there, and was taking no chances. In both cases, I was feeling wide-awake, psychologically healthy, not anxious or passive.

  Having said which, I have defined the underlying theme that I wish to explore in this book. Writers on the 'supernatural' have often noted that some mediums seem to be sturdy, healthy people, not at all like the usual image of the 'sensitive'. Not many months ago, I watched Harry Edwards give one of his final demonstrations of 'spirit healing' before his retirement (at the age of eighty), and afterwards had the pleasure of a conversation with him, which he allowed me to tape. I was struck by his utter normality and 'factualness'; he looked, and sounded, more like a healthy farmer than a spirit healer. I was startled when I read, a few weeks later, that he was nearly eighty; I would have placed his age at sixty-five. Everything about him seemed to confirm my theory that 'psychic powers' are a natural consequence of psychological health.

  Since writing The Occult, I have met three people who seem to confirm my supposition that unusual powers may be a kind of by-product of complete 'normality'; and since all three seem to me to deserve more space than I could reasonably offer them in my second projected volume of The Occult, I have decided to devote this short book to them; it should be regarded as a postscript to the first volume.

  I have one intense regret. In The Occult I quoted Witches, by T. C. Lethbridge, on the subject of dowsing. Subsequently, I became aware of his other three books, Gogmagog, Ghost and Ghoul and Ghost and Divining-Rod, and I realized that Lethbridge is a very important figure indeed. A man with a thoroughly scientific turn of mind, he takes dowsing as his starting point, and goes on to develop a convincing theory of ghosts and what he calls ghouls—unpleasant feelings experienced at spots where some tragedy has taken place. I sent him a copy of The Occult together with a letter asking him if I could come and see him; his wife replied to say that he had died the previous autumn (1971). As a tribute to a remarkable man, I dedicate this book to his memory.

  One

  Robert Leftwich

  It was sometime in the first half of 1971 that the encyclopaedia Man, Myth and Magic—which was being published in weekly parts—appeared with a back cover headed: 'Psychic Sales Manager'. Robert Leftwich, said the unsigned article, began to develop his psychic powers while still at school, and since adulthood, his range of psychic experiences has greatly widened. The article began: 'Robert Leftwich is a man of apparently limitless physical and mental energy. He literally bounds from place to place and from subject to subject with a vigor which is little short of astonishing.' His interests and accomplishments were then listed: '... he is sales manager of a large firm of pumping and hydraulic engineers [and] also an enthusiastic philosopher, writer, antiquarian book specialist, dowser, archaeologist and occulti
st. In the latter field he has located and apparently exorcised a ghost in his own home,[1] developed powers of thought transference and partial recognition, successfully experimented with most branches of extra-sensory perception, and projected his "astral body" consciously over distances.' It quoted him as saying that he did not consider himself unique: 'Anyone can develop his latent mental powers if he tries hard enough.'

  It was this that interested me so much. Leftwich sounded like a walking illustration of the ideas I had developed in The Occult.

  By this, I do not mean I considered him an example of Faculty X. This is a point I had better clear up immediately. Faculty X could be defined as a highly developed power to envisage the reality of other times and places. In The Occult I cited a number of cases: for example, Arnold Toynbee's sudden feeling, as he sat among the ruins of the citadel of Mistra, that the intervening years had become unreal, and that the barbarians who destroyed Mistra might suddenly pour over that horizon...

  Such an experience is not the prerogative of poets and historians. In 1960, I interviewed a lady who lived at 29 Hanbury Street, the site of Jack the Ripper's murder of Annie Chapman in 1888. She told me an amusing anecdote of a young woman who visited the house, and asked to go to the lavatory; her hostess escorted her to the lavatory in the back yard, and stood waiting. She said: 'From where you're sitting, you can see the exact spot where Jack the Ripper cut open that woman.' The girl shrieked, jumped off the lavatory, and rushed clumsily across the yard—somewhat incapacitated by the knickers that were still around her ankles. Now she knew the murder had taken place in the previous century, so it was not sudden fear that the Ripper might revisit the scene that made her scream. It was a sudden imaginative vision of a murder that wiped out the intervening years, the realization that she was looking at the spot that had been seen by the Ripper and his victim.

  But this flash of Faculty X had to be stimulated by a particular set of circumstances—a rather sinister slum yard on a winter evening... Places are great stimulators of Faculty X. It is rarer to be able to achieve the same 'free vision' through reading or study—although all lovers of poetry know the experience of gradually raising themselves into a curious state of freedom through the reading of favorite poems. This demands what Keats called 'negative capability', the power to lose all sense of one's own personality, to 'open up' and become little more than a sensitive receptor.

  The reason this is so rare becomes clear if one accepts the concept of the 'hierarchy of needs' or values, developed by the psychologist Abraham Maslow.[1] Maslow suggested that our sense of values develops in a certain order. A man who is starving can conceive of nothing more desirable than a good meal every day. If he achieves this, he begins to think about security, a roof over his head. If he achieves this, he begins to think about sex, love, marriage, children. And if the sexual needs are securely satisfied, the next level of need to emerge is self-esteem, the desire to be liked, respected. (This is the stage at which men join rotary clubs and women hold coffee mornings.) Finally, there is the creative level: the need to do a job well for the pleasure of it. It need not be artistic creation; it might be collecting stamps or landscape gardening. A woman who is good at bringing up children might adopt children when her own are grown up, and Maslow would regard this as an expression of creativity rather than sexual (maternal) instinct. Now obviously, the true development of Faculty X requires a negative capability, an absorption in 'other realities' for their own sake, which is unlikely to appear at any level of the hierarchy except this creative level. On other levels, it may appear as an accidental flash; but it is not likely to be cultivated. (And note that the self-esteem level already possesses a considerable degree of impersonal absorption—or can possess it; for example, a rotarian might derive equal pleasure from the respect of his fellow rotarians, and from the social good that he does by his efforts.) So psychic powers, even in a highly disciplined person, do not necessarily imply Faculty X.

  All the same, Leftwich's conviction that anyone can develop psychic powers appealed to me as an important step in the direction of Faculty X. And the descriptions of his own powers, as outlined in the article, were certainly fascinating. At school, Leftwich told his interviewer, he discovered how to avoid memorizing the whole of long prose extracts or poems. He would memorize a particular passage; then, when the master went round the class, picking out boys at random to recite passages, Leftwich would will him to select him for the passage he'd learned. As an adult, he had 'more or less willed himself into his present job'. Other powers he had developed included dowsing, astral projection, and the dispersal of clouds by an act of will. He tells an anecdote of astral projection: 'The wife of a friend of mine was scoffing at the subject one evening, and I suggested that she devise a test for me. She told me that she had a mole on a certain part of her body. If I could tell her where it was, she would be more favorably disposed to my arguments. The following evening, I relaxed and quite easily left the body and willed myself into her home some miles away. She was in her bathroom, preparing to get into the bath, and I had no difficulty in spotting the mole—she was extremely alarmed when I told her the following day.' He added that while watching her 'astrally', the sexual urge was only stimulated when the Mind returned to the Body.

  The article went on to speak of his dowsing ability, and ended with a note on his convictions. His religious leanings are towards Buddhism. 'Despite his comfortable surroundings, his personal life is almost as austere as that of a Buddhist monk. He is a strict vegetarian, a teetotaler, a non-smoker, and even abstains from tea and coffee, explaining that any form of stimulant is capable of interfering with his powers. He also says that sexual excess can disrupt the mind and cause the mental processes to function inefficiently—and that for this reason sexual activities are best limited to occasions when conception is desired.'

  I decided I ought to try and contact Leftwich. Although The Occult had contained a number of accounts of 'psychic' experiences by various friends—A. L. Rowse, Robert Graves, Louis Singer, Ronald Duncan—I had never actually met anyone who claimed to have positive psychic abilities, i.e. the power to make things happen, rather than simply experience them. Fortunately, Leftwich's address was mentioned in the article—which said that his house is the highest house in Sussex. So I wrote to him, asking him about this power to disperse clouds,[1] and whether he could give me a few more details about the techniques for developing it. An answer came back fairly promptly—apparently he had read my book, and was interested in the suggestion that I might put him into the sequel. He said that the dispersal of clouds was extremely difficult, but that it was quite easy to demonstrate psychokinesis, the mind's power to directly influence matter. In the envelope, he included a small square of paper, which had been folded from corner to corner, and also across the middle—giving an effect like a Union Jack with a St George's Cross and a St Andrew's Cross. He told me to fold this in the form of a paper dart with four fins, balance it on a needle stuck in a cork, and try willing it to go round. He mentioned that it was best to tie a handkerchief over the nose and mouth, so as not to breathe on it.

  I decided to try it. I folded the paper into a dart, stuck a needle on a cork, and put the paper dart on top of it, so it looked like a fairground roundabout. Then I tied a handkerchief round my face, cupped my hands round the dart, and concentrated on it, trying to push the dart with my gaze, as it were. I concentrated 'till I was red in the face, but it didn't budge. My face began to get hot and sticky under the handkerchief. I decided to put the roundabout on my workbench, which is waist high, so I could crouch below the level of the bench and breathe normally. That didn't work either. I put it back on my desk, beside my typewriter, and went on with my writing, periodically looking up quickly to try to catch it off guard. It was all no good.

  It was the next day, I believe, that I tried again. Having wasted so much effort earlier, I now no longer tried to do it by sheer willpower. Instead, I tried to persuade it to move, so to speak. To my surpri
se, it began to do so. It was a warm day, with the sun streaming in the window, and it struck me that perhaps the heat from the palms of my hands was causing warm air to rise; I moved them back further, so the fingertips were only just touching. Using 'imagination' rather than sheer force, I got it to stop and move in the opposite direction. My wife came down to bring me a cup of tea, and I demonstrated it to her. I no longer bothered about the handkerchief over my face, being certain that the 'roundabout' was far enough away from my face not to be affected; anyway, my breath was going downwards, below the edge of my desk, a foot away. As amazing as it seemed, it actually worked. I left it on my table, and practised periodically later in the day, sometimes not even cupping my hands around it. When I told Leftwich about it in a letter, he replied that the element of imagining it moving was crucial.

  Some weeks later—in July 1971—I had to drive to Hastings, then to London. Crowborough lay on my route, so I asked Leftwich if it would be convenient to call on him. He said it would. So, on a very hot Monday morning, I set out for Crowborough. I wasn't sure what kind of a person I was going to meet: whether he would prove to be alarming, or impressive, or perhaps just a fraud. Somehow, I pictured him as a rather quiet, pipe-smoking man—although I knew he didn't smoke.

  I expected the highest house in Sussex to stand alone on a remote hilltop outside the town; in fact, it faced into a tree-lined road. It was smaller than I'd expected, but very pretty, and obviously very old, built of grey stone. The lawns were large and smooth. It was only about three in the afternoon, but I knew he'd be home—I'd rung him the night before. He heard the car, which I parked beside his own, and came out to meet me. A very rapid, firm handshake, and 'Nice to see you. Come on in.' I realized that the photographs in Man, Myth and Magic had bestowed a false air of repose on him. He had a way of talking and moving rapidly, although without any suggestion of nervous tension. We went through the back garden and into the house. His sitting room had an air of polished neatness. My own house, while not chaotic, is never exactly tidy; the floor is usually covered with books, toys and children's records, and if you move the armchair you are likely to knock over a wine bottle that has been there since the night before. Robert Leftwich's beautifully tidy room made me feel a little uncomfortable.