Strange Powers Read online

  I said I hoped he hadn't come home early especially for me. He said No, he usually managed to do a full day's work in half a day; and since his job involved driving around and making calls, no one was any the wiser if he came home early. He said most people wasted their energy; he always threw himself into whatever he did, and did it with maximum speed and efficiency.

  I talked about my idea of putting him into a book. He said he had also written a book—and promptly produced me the typescript—and asked me whether there was money in writing. I said not much, and gave him a brief run-down on the money one is likely to make from a book. He didn't seem too downcast. 'How much do you think I make?' Looking out of the window at his enormous back garden, I made a guess: 'Ten thousand a year?' He chuckled and shook his head. 'Just over two thousand. And out of that, I usually manage to save twelve hundred a year.' 'What for?' 'I intend to retire when I'm fifty.' 'And what then?' 'I want to buy a caravan. Perhaps I shall go and live in France. I want to be able to spend the rest of my life developing myself, working out my ideas, writing books... '

  Somehow, it was difficult to talk to him about 'occultism'—although he had an excellent library of occult books. (He is listed in various trade publications as a dealer; this, apparently, was a sideline.) Not that he was evasive. He seemed to talk with complete frankness. He had a brisk, good-humored air, and always seemed to be smiling.

  His conversation seemed to drag him along hectically from subject to subject. His accent was somewhat public school, and public school English has a slightly explosive sound, as if the words are being fired from a gun; Leftwich's nervous energy emphasized this, so his conversation was like a series of small detonations. He is obviously a highly sociable man, intensely interested in people—he mentioned getting into conversations on trains with strangers several times. If I'd met him casually, I wouldn't have dreamed that he was associated with any form of 'occultism'. He might have been a house master at Harrow. And his obsession with order and tidiness deepened this impression. He explained his daily routine: up at 6.30, shredded wheat for breakfast, a vegetarian lunch, no tea, his last meal at six, a glass of orange juice at nine, and off to bed by ten... (I may have some of the details wrong, but that was the general impression.}

  We talked about dowsing, and he explained that this was simply a kind of offshoot of this bask faculty to 'make things happen'. For example, he had me place a coin under the carpet, on a certain line, while he looked the other way. Then he took a dowsing rod—two curved staves attached together at one end—and walked across the room. The rod dipped violently as he came over the coin. He explained that I could place some other object under the carpet—for example, a letter—and that if he then 'dowsed' for that, his rod would ignore the coin and only dip when it came over the letter. He also demonstrated to me that he could make the rod dip for everything but the penny; he walked across the room with it twisting violently in his hands, until he stood over the coin, when it became quiescent. I recalled T. C. Lethbridge's remark that everyone possesses the dowsing faculty potentially, but that in some people it is so weak as to be unnoticeable; Lethbridge uses the comparison of a portable radio, which will not play if the battery is flat. The implication is that a man needs to have a highly charged battery to be a good dowser. Leftwich certainly gave the impression of being highly charged.

  His children came home from school—both under ten. We walked in the garden, and he remarked, with characteristic frankness, that he doesn't feel he is cut out to be a husband and father; he is fond of his children, but doesn't feel he has any vocation in that direction. This 'figured', as the Americans say. The really philoprogenitive parent has a strong 'negative capability'; Leftwich obviously finds the world too interesting to be negative. In a way, he made me think of a young dog on a country walk, intensely curious about everything, rushing backwards and forwards. He certainly didn't look or behave like a man close on fifty.

  Altogether, I found him a paradoxical character, full of apparent contradictions. The sexual asceticism is obviously genuine—the Tolstoyan view that sex is intended for reproductory purposes, not as a plaything. On the other hand, he always has been, and continues to be, strongly interested in women; he seems to find them more stimulating than men because of their more natural intuitive powers. His conversation is full of flashes of intuitive insight into the workings of the mind, the function of religion, human potentiality; yet in another way, his ideas seemed to be oddly materialistic, skeptical. In the manuscript he presented me with, there is a section on 'The Cause of Human Action', and he analyses religious feeling in a thoroughly simplistic, 'reductionist' manner. 'Many readers will insist that religious folk usually possess the quality of kindness as a natural basic attribute, but profound thought combined with absolute sincerity usually reveals the true cause for the supposed goodness. They undoubtedly appear most kind to onlookers, but their motives ... (frequently unknown to themselves) are fundamentally of a selfish nature.' He goes on to mention a man who helped an old lady repair her radio set; when pressed, the man admitted that he enjoyed creating a favorable impression, and also enjoyed showing off his (limited) electrical knowledge to someone who would be impressed by it.

  One senses immediately a certain lack of logic here, even if it is difficult to pin down. What were the man's motives supposed to have been—to entitle him to a clean moral bill of health? The old lady's son might have repaired her radio out of love of his mother; a kindly neighbor might have done it out of pity. Robert Leftwich's friend apparently admitted that helping her aided his inferiority complex. But unless he went into the house to steal her savings, it hardly matters why he did it. Under the pleasure in creating a favorable impression there was obviously the sense of responsibility for a fellow creature, which is what is at issue. But even if he had repaired the radio wholly out of some neurotic compulsion, this still would not prove that there is no such thing as a disinterested feeling of responsibility for other people. What is interesting is why Robert Leftwich should want to insist that most people do 'disinterested' acts out of 'selfish' motives. The answer is fairly clear, and I do not think it is particularly discreditable to him. He is deeply and intensely interested in himself, and there is no reason why he shouldn't be: he is an interesting man, bursting with ideas. He is also detached enough to feel a mild guilt about this. If all 'disinterested' conduct can be reduced to self-interest, there is no need to feel guilty...

  All of which is only to say that, in Maslow's terms, Leftwich still operates, to some extent, on the self-esteem level. In fact, with typical honesty, he admits this. He is one of Maslow's self-actualizes who has not yet actualized himself; this, he explained, was the reason that he wanted to retire at fifty and spend the rest of his life seeking self-enlightenment, deepening his insight, exploring further depths of self-control.

  When I left him, on that July afternoon, to drive to London, my feelings about him were ambivalent. I found him likeable, because of that child-like openness and frankness, and the enormous zest he puts into living. But I could imagine someone who didn't like him finding him an intolerable egoist; and this, in turn, would probably lead them to dismiss his 'powers' as wishful thinking. This, I was fairly certain, would be a mistake. His dowsing abilities are clearly extraordinary; he has even demonstrated them in front of a television audience. Obviously, he can 'do something' with his mind which enables him to tune in to things that are beyond the normal human radius. When he came to Cornwall, he demonstrated one of his abilities with both me and my wife. He stood with his back to us, holding the divining rod. One of us was told to walk forward until we crossed a spot where we knew there was an underground pipe. As we crossed the pipe, the rod in Robert's hand twisted to indicate water. He had 'tuned in' to our minds. At The Beacon House, he had showed me photographs and business letters in connection with divining minerals from an aeroplane, and it was apparent that he had been successful. There could be no doubt that he possessed unusual powers. What I now wanted to und
erstand was the nature of these powers, how he came to possess them, and their relation to his total personality.

  At this point, I must temporarily leave Robert Leftwich, and speak more generally of the subject of dowsing.

  In its simplest form, there is nothing 'supernatural' about dowsing—any more than there is about radio, or the way iron filings shape themselves along a magnet's field of force. Dowsing has been scientifically tested. (Descriptions of experiments can be found in Sir William Barrett's book The Divining Rod (1926).) In 1968, Robert Leftwich performed under controlled test conditions on a TV program compered by Brian Inglis, successfully completing the first part of the experiment involving six drums, five of which contained salt. In the second part, he located three cans of water that had been buried in a certain area of waste ground. Although he converted a skeptic—Professor John Cohen—Leftwich himself was disappointed; five cans of water and a knife had been buried, and he failed to locate all these.

  T. C. Lethbridge asserts {in Ghost and Divining-Rod) that all objects have a field of force around them, like a magnetic field, and that the exact size of this field indicates the nature of the object: for example, a piece of brass or copper has a field exactly 61 inches across at ground level. Lethbridge adds that if you try to get above the field—by climbing on something—you cannot do it; the field extends upwards. He says: 'You cannot do so without a fireman's ladder,' and adds 'and perhaps you cannot do so then,' indicating that he hasn't tried it. In fact, if Robert Leftwich can dowse from an aeroplane, it seems probable that the field extends upwards for a very great distance—although, admittedly, he was dealing with vast quantifies of mineral deposits. Lethbridge remarks that the size of the object seems to make no difference to the size of the field; a brass pinhead or a brass coin would still create a 61-inch field. This again suggests the need for further investigation, for it seems unlikely that a brass mountain would have a 61-inch field.

  The dowser 'picks up' this field, as if he were a radio receiver. In an article 'More In Heaven and Earth', published in the magazine of the British Society of Dowsers, Leftwich suggests that dowsing depends on 'high frequency electromagnetic waves' sent out from the dowser's brain like radar waves. In a second article in the same journal, he suggests that objects also emit waves, which are picked up by the dowser, and his final view would seem to be that the brain can emit 'radar' waves and that objects possess their own force field, hovering around it like the smell of gorgonzola cheese. (I will discuss his most recent thoughts on dowsing later in this chapter.)

  Now this matter of 'fields' is of considerable interest, and it seems likely that this will be the direction of the real breakthrough in 'occult' researches. In 1845, Baron Karl yon Reichenbach published a book whose shortened title is The Dynamics of Magnetism. He was not discussing iron magnets, but the human magnetic field. Like the physician Anton Mesmer, Reichenbach believed that magnets {iron ones) might have healing properties. Neurasthenic patients—what he called 'sick sensitives'—were able to see light radiating from the poles of magnets—bluish from the north pole, reddish from the south. They lost this power when their health improved. As Reichenbach tested an increasing number of materials on his 'sick sensitives'—crystals, other metals—he found that they all seemed to possess a field of force. He called this force 'odile'; it became notorious as 'odic force'. He said that human beings possess odic force to an unusual degree, and it can be seen in the dark, streaming from the finger ends in the form of a light emanation.

  For a decade and a half, scientists busily discussed and tested odic force. Then Darwin published The Origin of Species (1859). For a while, everything else was forgotten. And as scientists had to defend themselves against attacks from the Church, they laid more and more emphasis on the scientific attitude—i.e. only believing what can be proved by observation. Reichenbach and his odic force was one of the earliest victims of this new attitude; twenty years after the publication of his book, his name—and ideas—had become a joke. Perhaps it was partly his own fault for choosing a term like odic force; if he had called it 'biomagnetic vibrations' or something of the sort, scientists might havecontinued to believe in it.

  Almost a century later, in the late 1930s, a cranky and slightly paranoid man of genius, Wilhelm Reich, concluded that the universe is permeated by a kind of vital energy called orgone energy. At first, Reich was inclined to believe that this energy—which gave him conjunctivitis when he had been examining sea-sand culture under a microscope—was emitted by 'bions', pulsating living cells, which he had observed some years earlier. One night, looking at the night sky through an improvised tube, he observed a flickering in the dark spaces between the stars, and concluded that the atmosphere is full of 'orgone energy'. His theory, roughly, is that this vital energy is present throughout the universe, and that it can actually create living cells even in a sterile fluid. Reich constructed a kind of greenhouse for concentrating this orgone energy—a box made of alternate layers of steel and asbestos (i.e. metal and organic material). I myself have sat in one of these boxes in the study of Reich's brother-in-law, the late Robert Ollendorff, and experienced a distinct feeling of warmth—although the walls were cold—and noted that my temperature rose by three degrees in a few minutes.

  With ideas like this, it was inevitable that Reich should be ridiculed by the scientific establishment. He was; not only ridiculed, but attacked and persecuted. When he died in prison in 1957, he had become distinctly paranoid and was suffering from delusions. The general view was that it was good riddance; he was a crank with messianic delusions, and was probably better dead.

  Now, nearly two decades after Reich's death, there is reason to wonder whether both he and Reichenbach had stumbled on something that orthodox science had overlooked—something as fundamental as Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity.

  In 1935, before Reich discovered orgone energy, two respectable American scientists, Dr Harold Saxton Burr and F. S. C. Northrop, both of Yale, published a paper called 'Electro-dynamic Theory of Life,' suggesting, quite simply, that living things produce electrical fields that can be measured. And for the next three decades, Burr and his colleagues continued to investigate these 'life fields' (or L-fields, as Edward Russell has proposed we call them). The first problem was to develop a voltmeter sensitive enough to measure very small fields; but once this was done, it was plain sailing. The voltmeters were connected up to a couple of large trees for years, and they showed that the electrical field of the trees varied between day and night, and with electrical storms and sunspots. Animals were more problematic, since they cannot be made to stand still for years; but Burr soon discovered that there are variations in the body's magnetic field when we are ill, when wounds are healing, when women ovulate. (This latter discovery apparently provides a more or less infallible guide for parents who want children. And the discovery of body variations in periods of illness indicates a method for the early detection of cancer.)

  In the sixties, European and American doctors became increasingly interested in the ancient Chinese medical practice known as acupuncture. By all western standards, this ought to be unscientific nonsense; but it works. It was originally based on the observation that when someone is ill, his skin often develops 'tender points', and that pressure applied to these points seems to improve the illness. The theory behind acupuncture is that the universe is permeated with various vital forces—like the 'lines of power' mentioned in John Michell's The View Over Atlantis—and that the same vital forces permeate the human body, with definite crossing points like 'leys'. This vital energy is called Qi or Ch'i (breath). A television film shown in England early in 1973 showed doctors performing operations that would usually require anesthesia, with the patient fully conscious, and a few wooden slivers sticking out of various points of the body. The patient was able to watch his own stomach being cut open, see it sewn up, and apparently take it all very calmly. (Recovery also seemed to be incredibly fast—some patients were eating large meals a few
hours after serious operations.)

  In Russia, acupuncture is used nearly as much as in China. And a Russian scientist, Victor Adamenko, developed a device called a tobioscope to establish acupuncture points. Adamenko's starting point was a device invented thirty or so years ago by two scientists, Semyon and Valentina Kirlian. This consists of a Tesla coil—a transformer for high-frequency alternating currents, used in radio—which is connected to two metal plates. Between these plates, an object—alive or otherwise—is placed in contact with a piece of film, then the high-frequency current is switched on. The result is a photograph of the 'field' of the object. For example, if a newly-cut flower is placed between the plates, light can be seen streaming from the cut stem in the form of 'sparks', while leaves and buds show flare patterns. Photographs of the human body show the same flare patterns, and Stanley Krippner, an American scientist who examined these photographs in Russia (and wrote about them in an article in the Saturday Evening Post, 18 March 1972), comments that they change if the subject is hypnotized, takes drugs or drinks alcohol. This suggests that they are nodes of energy. And since acupuncture theory has it that these 'meridional' points can be blocked with too much energy, it seems possible that the camera is recording such points. (Everyone must have noticed that some point of the skin may suddenly 'prickle'—sometimes as if a needle is being driven in; you only have to start thinking about this to get 'prickles' on the skin—presumably due to some kind of discharge of nervous energy, like static.)