Beyond the Occult Read online

  On a snowy day in Washington in 1966, thinking about this curious ability to ‘make real’ other times and other places, I labelled it ‘Faculty X’. But Faculty X should not be regarded as some ‘paranormal’ faculty. It is simply the opposite of that feeling of being ‘mediocre, accidental, mortal’, which all of us feel when we are tired and depressed, and which Sartre calls ‘contingency’. And whenever Faculty X awakens, it tells us that we are not contingent, not mediocre, accidental, mortal. Our powers are far greater than we realize.

  In The Occult, I had pointed out that animals seem to possess all kinds of ‘paranormal’ powers. The wife of the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid told me that her dog knows when her husband will return from a long journey, and goes and sits at the end of their lane several days before he arrives. On one occasion, the dog knew he was going to return before he did — circumstances had caused him to make a sudden decision to return home.

  In his book Man-Eaters of Kumaon, the tiger hunter Jim Corbett describes how he came to develop a faculty which he called ‘jungle sensitiveness’, which told him when he was in danger. I argue that all our remote ancestors possessed such a faculty, and that we have gradually lost it because we do not need it. Yet many people have not lost it. The archaeologist Clarence Weiant described how the Montagnais Indians of eastern Canada are able to contact distant friends and relatives by telepathy. When they wish to make contact, the Indians go into a remote hut in the forest, and build up the necessary psychic energy (‘mana’) through meditation. Then the relative would hear his voice — distance made no difference.

  Now it is obvious that it is simpler to pick up the telephone when we want to contact a distant relative. Yet this does not mean that picking up a telephone is ‘just as good’ as contacting him through clairaudience. The Indian who is able to call upon these faculties from the depths of his own mind has an understanding of nature, a sense of connection with the rest of the universe, and a deeper knowledge of himself that the rest of us have lost.

  What has happened is clear. Even towards the end of the 19th century, the English poet Matthew Arnold was mourning that Victorian man no longer had access to ‘Wordsworth’s healing power’, while Tennyson was complaining that science had destroyed faith and left man in an empty universe, trapped in his own smallness. But the problem had started long before the 19th century — perhaps when Euclid systematized geometry and Archimedes rolled a weight down an inclined plane. This kind of knowledge — which Graves calls ‘solar knowledge’ — gradually eclipsed man’s ‘lunar knowledge’, man’s intuitive awareness of the hidden part of the iceberg.

  This was the problem that I had discussed in the second volume of The Outsider (called in England Religion and the Rebel). Now, in Beyond the Occult, I attempted to bring together this philosophy of ‘Outsiderism’ and the insights I had gained from the study of ‘the occult’. Yet I began to write the book reluctantly, feeling that I was merely regurgitating something I had already expressed in previous books. But I soon realized that I was creating a new synthesis. The problem of human beings is that it is possible to ‘know’ something without really knowing it. The adult Proust thought he ‘knew’ he was a child in Combray, but the madeleine taught him that this ‘adult’ knowledge was superficial. I thought I knew the ideas I had expressed in books like The Outsider and The Occult. Writing about them again made me realize that my knowledge of them was superficial. In order to really know something we must meditate upon it until we have absorbed it into our being. (I have to confess that even writing this introduction has once again made me aware of this truth.)

  Beyond the Occult is an attempt to draw together all the insights I have discussed here, and many more — particularly the insights of those who have had sudden ‘mystical’ experiences. They all teach us the same thing: that our ‘ordinary’ consciousness of ourselves is superficial and deceptive. We are all like Simone de Beauvoir, looking in the mirror and ‘feeling that we can never grasp ourselves as an entire object’.

  Here is a typical example of one of these experiences. A girl describes how, when she was sixteen, she set out to walk up a lane towards a wood. ‘I was not feeling particularly happy or particularly sad, just ordinary.’ As she stood in a cornfield, looking towards the wood, everything suddenly changed.

  Everything surrounding me was this white, bright, sparkling light, like sun on frosty snow, like a million diamonds, and there was no cornfield, no trees, no sky, this light was everywhere … The feeling was indescribable, but I have never experienced anything in the years that followed that I can compare with that glorious moment; it was blissful, uplifting, I felt open-mouthed wonder. Then the tops of the trees became visible once again, then a piece of sky, and gradually the light was no more, and the cornfield was spread before me. I stood there for a long time, trying in vain for it to come back, and have tried many times. I only saw it once; but I know in my heart it is still there — and here — around us.

  The girl — who describes this in a book called Seeing the Invisible (which consists of letters about mysticism, written to the Alister Hardy Foundation) — obviously had an experience which, in some ways, resembled that of Proust. Something ‘triggered’ this marvellous perception of sparkling light. And she remains convinced that ‘it is still there’ — that our everyday consciousness somehow filters it out, just as if we were wearing a pair of dark glasses.

  It is, of course, deeply frustrating that we cannot learn how to contact these depths ‘below the iceberg’ at will. Yet — as I have tried to show — it is not as difficult as it sounds.

  The conclusions I have reached over the years are as follows. The romantics of the 19th century had many of these ‘glimpses’, because they knew how to ‘relax’. (The girl in the anecdote above does not say so, but it is clear that she was deeply relaxed.) But because the romantics were inclined to weakness — like Samuel Beckett —most of them could see no reason for getting out of bed, they failed to grasp the most important clue: that such experiences bring a feeling of strength, and that the best way to achieve them is certainly not to indulge in weakness and self-pity. Abraham Maslow, who called such moments ‘peak experiences’, discovered that his ‘peakers’ were usually strong and healthy people who coped well with their lives.

  In Beyond the Occult, I describe an interesting example of how I succeeded in achieving ‘higher consciousness’ for most of an afternoon in 1979.

  It was the New Year, and I had gone to a remote farmhouse in Devon to give a lecture to a group of extramural students. During that evening it began to snow, and by the following morning the snow was so thick that it would have been impossible to drive back home. I was forced to stay there another night. The following morning, the weather forecast announced more snow, and it was obvious that I might be unable to leave for a week. I determined to try to escape, and a group of us began to clear the snow in the farmyard with shovels. When the farmyard was clear, each of us tried to drive our cars up the slope that led to the gate; mine was the only car whose tyres would grip the slippery surface.

  There was still half a mile of snow-covered farm track between the farmyard and the main road. I would drive a few yards, then get out and help to shovel snow. At one point, I even risked driving straight across a field to avoid a long bend in the road. And finally, after several hours of hard work, I walked back to the farmhouse to eat some lunch and collect my bags. Then I walked back to the main gate, and began the long drive back home.

  Yet even now it was impossible to relax my vigilance, because the narrow country roads were covered in snow, and it was impossible to see the ditch on either side. It would have been easy to drive off the road and become stranded again, perhaps all night. So I sat forward in my seat, peering out of the windscreen, and focusing all my concentration.

  Several hours later, I arrived at the main road, where heavy traffic had turned the snow into muddy slush, and it was possible to relax and drive normally again. And it was now that I realized tha
t I was full of a sense of power and concentration. Everything I looked at was obviously fascinating, and I had a sense of meanings stretching around me into the distance. Everything I saw reminded of something else — for example, of Christmases in my childhood. It was as if my normally narrow and limited consciousness had been widened and deepened by the concentration, until the whole world was seen to be fascinating. It taught me that ‘higher consciousness’, ‘positive consciousness’, can be achieved by an act of focused concentration.

  In Beyond the Occult I also quote the experiences of a writer called R H Ward, whose book about psychedelic drugs, A Drug-Taker’s Notes, is a modern classic. Early in the book, Ward describes how he once had a remarkable experience under dental gas. He writes: ‘I passed, after the first few inhalations of the gas, directly into a state of consciousness far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary consciousness.’ He had a sense of enormously extended vision, so that his mind was aware of all kinds of things that would normally have been beyond his natural range of awareness. Like Robert Graves behind the cricket pavilion, he seemed to understand everything. And as he continued ‘rising’, he seemed to pass through a ‘region of ideas’. ‘All was idea, and form did not exist.’ And he adds: ‘It seems to me very interesting that one should thus, in a dentist’s chair and the twentieth century, receive practical confirmation of the theories of Plato.’ In short, Ward had seen the truth of Plato’s notion that the universe consists of two worlds: a world of becoming, and a world of true being. He had also seen the falseness of Heraclitus’s belief that the only world is the world of becoming.

  If we think once more of Dostoevsky in front of the firing squad, we can see that the expectation of death galvanized him to a new level of attention, in which he concentrated the mind as never before — and as I concentrated my mind as I drove through the snow. It is this act of concentration — like pulling back a spring-loaded piston, or the string of a crossbow — that gives the mind the ability to become aware of the immense depths that lie ‘below the iceberg’.

  Part One

  Hidden Powers

  Introduction

  My serious interest in the paranormal began twenty years ago, in the late 1960s, when an American publisher asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about ‘the occult’ — a subject that had achieved immense popularity ever since a book called The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier had sold over a million copies in France in 1960. I accepted in a fairly light-hearted spirit. Like most people, I had always enjoyed reading speculations about Atlantis, the Loch Ness monster and the ghosts of Borley Rectory, and had accumulated a fairly large library of second-hand books and cheap paperbacks on such matters. But I had another reason for accepting. For many years I had been possessed by a strong conviction, amounting to a certainty, that all human beings possess ‘hidden powers’.

  Some of these powers came under the general heading of extra-sensory perception; I had suffered my wife’s birth pangs, and on one occasion experienced her toothache. One close family friend had described how she found herself floating up above her body during a serious illness, while another had foreseen a traffic accident — a collision with another taxi — at least a minute before it happened. But it was not this type of ‘hidden power’ that really interested me. I was even more fascinated by those strange moments of pure joy in which we experience an almost god-like sensation of power or freedom. The following, for example, is taken from a friend’s account of an ‘illumination’ that happened when he was hitch-hiking around the world in 1964:

  I had been through a great deal of emotional turmoil and privation during my travels and arrived at the port of Limassol [in Cyprus] with great relief at having left the scenes of my suffering behind me. One evening I was sitting gazing vacantly at the sea in the afterglow of sunset, having just finished a meal in a little Greek eatery, feeling very tranquil and relaxed, when I began to feel a strange pressure in my brain. It was as if some deliciously loving hand had slipped numbingly under my skull and was pressing another brain on top of mine.

  I felt a thrilling liquidity of being and an indescribable sensation, as if the whole universe was being poured into me, or perhaps rather as if the whole universe was welling up out of me from some deep centre. My ‘soul’ thrilled and swelled and my consciousness passed out across the ocean and the land in all directions, through the sky and out into space. Within moments I was among the stars and planets and strange entities of space. Somehow I was aware of great beings, millions of miles high, moving in space, through which the stars could be seen. Wave after wave of revelation swept through my whole being, too fast for my normal mind to record other than the joy and wonder of it.*

  I had never experienced anything as overwhelming as this. But ever since childhood I had been prone to drift into those moods of intense happiness and affirmation that the psychologist Abraham Maslow calls peak experiences. One of the most vivid had occurred when I was nineteen and was hitch-hiking my way across France to Strasbourg. A lorry-driver had given me a lift to a little routier, and I had eaten a hot meal and drunk a glass of wine. So far I had found it rather a strain being in a foreign country with very little money; but as I walked out of the routier and looked across the rolling countryside to the mountains in the distance, I experienced a feeling of joy that was so complete that all the problems of my life vanished into insignificance. It was like a shift of viewpoint, as if I had suddenly left my body and was looking down on my own life. No doubt the wine had something to do with it, but that is beside the point, for what I experienced was not just a ‘feeling’ but a seeing. Once again, as on so many other occasions, I could see that the real problem of human beings is that we live too close up to life, like a short-sighted painter who has to paint with his nose within an inch of the canvas, and that close-upness deprives us of meaning. We accept this as inevitable — for, after all, we are men, not birds, and modern life requires constant attention to detail. But the ‘moments of vision’ reveal that this assumption is a mistake. Apparently we possess a faculty that can instantly ‘distance’ us from present reality — just as the short-sighted painter could, if he wanted, stand back from the canvas and put on a pair of strong glasses. If we could learn to call on this faculty at will our lives would be transformed, for we waste 90 per cent of our time in coping mechanically with minor problems and vastly overestimating them. And if many people could learn to do it our earth itself would be transformed, for most of the ugliness and evil of our lives is due to stress and ‘close-upness’.

  Perhaps the most important aspect of these ‘moments of vision’ is that they suggest that there is a way of acquiring knowledge that is quite unlike the ordinary method of ‘learning from experience’. When the visionary faculty is switched on the mind seems to be able to penetrate reality — rather in the manner of X-rays — and to grasp meanings that normally elude it.

  In 1969 a man named Derek Gibson was travelling to work by motorcycle when he noticed that the sound of his engine had faded to a murmur:

  Then everything suddenly changed. I could clearly see everything as before with form and substance, but instead of looking at it all I was looking into everything. I saw beneath the bark of the trees and through the underlying trunks. I was looking into the grass too, and all was magnified beyond measure. To the extent that I could see moving microscopic organisms! Then, not only was I seeing all this, but I was literally inside it all. At the same time as I was looking into this mass of greenery I was aware of every single blade of grass and fold of the trees as if each had been placed before me one at a time and entered into.

  My world became a fairyland of vivid greens and browns, colours not seen so much as felt. Instantly also my mind was not observing but was living what it was registering. ‘I’ did not exist. Power and knowledge surged through my mind. The words formed in me — I can remember clearly — ‘Now I know’, ‘There is nothing I could not answer. I am a part of all this.’*


  A similar revelation had come to the Protestant mystic Jacob Boehme in the year 1600. This is how his biographer Bishop Hans Martensen describes it:

  Sitting one day in his room, his eye fell upon a burnished pewter dish, which reflected the sunshine with such marvellous splendour that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the principles and deepest foundations of things. He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order to banish it from his mind he went out into the green fields. But here he noticed that he could gaze into the very heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and that actual nature harmonised with what he had inwardly seen.†

  It seems obvious that Derek Gibson and Jacob Boehme had the same basic experience, and that therefore it is some perfectly normal faculty that might be activated at any time in any one of us. It is as if the human race is colour-blind — as most animals are — and a few men suddenly develop colour vision.

  It also seems clear that there is a close link between these ‘mystical’ experiences and the faculty labelled extra-sensory perception. For example, the Russian newspaper Izvestia reported in June 1987 the case of a woman named Yuliya Vorobyeva, 37, who was pronounced dead after receiving a 380-volt electric shock in March 1978. She recovered after two days in the morgue, but was unable to sleep for the next six months. Then she sank into a long sleep, and awoke to discover that she had acquired paranormal powers. ‘I went shopping one morning. I got to the bus-stop and a woman was standing there. Suddenly I was struck by horror — I thought I could see right through this woman like a television screen.’ When Izvestia’s reporter interviewed her she looked at his stomach and told him correctly what he had had for lunch. Within seconds of meeting a doctor she was able to tell him that one ear was weaker than the other, and that the same was true of his eyes.