Beyond the Occult Read online

  But the most interesting point about the case of Hurkos is that after he left hospital he could not work at any normal job because he was unable to concentrate. It was not until he stumbled upon the idea of using his newly-discovered powers as a stage ‘magician’ that he was again able to start supporting himself and his family. This reveals clearly why man has suppressed his ‘psychic’ abilities; they involve a kind of mental receptivity, an ‘openness’ that would make him far less efficient at everyday living.

  As I wrote The Occult I experienced the pleasurable excitement of someone who sees fact after fact fall neatly into place — I imagine Newton must have felt something of the sort as he wrote the Principia. And this was the example that was at the back of my mind in writing The Occult and its sequel Mysteries. It was breathtaking to realize that so many of the things I had regarded as superstitious absurdities had a sound basis in fact. And if they were factual then they could be incorporated into some sort of scientific framework. And since I had started life as a scientist — my first book, written at the age of thirteen, had been a seven-volume Manual of General Science — it seemed a reasonable assumption that I might be the right person to do it.

  And indeed, when I came to re-read the book in proof, I had a satisfying sensation of having created a comprehensive theory that explained the existence of paranormal faculties from a scientific viewpoint. It was as rigorous and logical as I could make it, and I felt that no one could accuse me of being credulous or gullible. The book had considerable success, and it was pleasant to walk into a big department store in my home town and see a whole rack devoted to copies of the paperback. But even by that time I had begun to be troubled by doubts. The more I learned about the paranormal the more I saw I was being absurdly optimistic in believing that I had covered all the basic facts. It was true that the unconscious mind seemed to provide a fairly convincing explanation for telepathy, clairvoyance and psychometry. But it hardly seemed adequate to explain some of the highly convincing evidence for life after death, and even for reincarnation. And it totally failed to explain the experience of my musician friend who was travelling in a taxi along the Bayswater Road when he suddenly knew that another taxi would jump the traffic lights at the Queens way intersection and hit them sideways-on. The fact that it was late at night and he was exhausted after playing in a concert could help to explain why he was in the right condition to receive the message from his unconscious mind. But how could his unconscious mind know about something that was going to happen in a minute or so? Even if it could somehow ‘see’ the other taxi approaching the traffic light and read the mind of the driver, he could still not know that there would be a collision. There can be no ‘scientific’ explanation for precognition because it is obviously impossible to know about an event which has not yet happened. Yet my reading revealed that there are hundreds of serious, well-documented cases.

  It was at this point that I found an important clue in a book that had been presented to me by its author not long after publication of The Occult. It bore the intimidating title Towards a General Theory of the Paranormal and it led me on to so many fresh clues and new insights that they will require a chapter to themselves.

  *Muz Murray, Sharing the Quest (1986).

  *Quoted by Nona Coxhead in The Relevance of Bliss (1985).

  † Hans L. Martensen, Jacob Boehme, Studies in his Life and Teachings (1949).

  * See my Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries pp. 92–8.

  *See my book The Psychic Detectives. Denton’s major work The Soul of Things has now been republished by Aquarian Press.

  1

  Mediums and Mystics

  In 1964 an experimental psychologist named Lawrence LeShan became increasingly interested in the way the mind can influence the body and decided — with some misgivings — to study the evidence for extra-sensory perception. This was out of sheer conscientiousness, for his training as a scientist had convinced him that it could not exist. ‘I was fairly sure that I would wind up trying to figure out how it was that serious men like William James, Gardner Murphy, and half a dozen Nobel Prize winners had been deluded into believing such nonsense.’

  Careful study changed his mind:

  To my intense surprise, as I began to read the scientific journals and serious books in the field, it became obvious that the material was valid. The standards of research were extremely high, and the evidence scientifically valid. The only alternative explanation to the hundreds of carefully studied ‘spontaneous’ incidents reported, and the hundreds of scientifically controlled laboratory experiments, was that the greatest conspiracy in history had been going on for more than eighty years.

  LeShan heard that a medium named Eileen Garrett was highly regarded in scientific circles, and decided to work with her. His first professional encounter convinced him that she was no fraud. Previous researchers had been trying to get Mrs Garrett to ‘guess’ the colour of cardboard squares. That sounded dreary, so LeShan decided to try to make it more interesting. He clipped a lock of hair from the head of his twelve-year-old daughter Wendy, persuaded the next-door neighbour to give him a tuft of hair from the tail of their dog, and plucked a fresh rosebud from the garden. These were placed in three clear plastic boxes, and LeShan began the experiment by telling the medium what was in each of them. Then he retreated behind a screen with the boxes, and Mrs Garrett had to put her arm in through a narrow hole. LeShan took a box at random and placed it where she could touch it. She immediately identified it correctly as the box containing the lock of his daughter’s hair, then went on to make incredibly accurate comments about the child. Her first remark was, ‘I think I’ll call her Hilary — she’ll like that.’ In fact when Wendy LeShan was four years old she had developed a crush on a girl called Hilary, and had begged her parents to let her change her name to Hilary. But the incident was long forgotten — it had not even been mentioned in the family for years.

  Mrs Garrett then went on to make a series of weirdly accurate comments on Wendy — for example, that she loved horses and had recently developed an unexpected interest in American history.

  Her insights into the dog were equally impressive, particularly since LeShan knew nothing about dogs and the neighbours had only just moved in. Mrs Garrett announced that the dog had had a severe pain in its paw, and that it seemed to have a Sealyham companion. The neighbours verified that the animal had cut his paw so badly that it had turned septic and necessitated a six-week stay in hospital, and that although a pure-bred Welsh terrier, something about its bone structure made dog fanciers ask whether it had a touch of Sealyham. (LeShan did not even know what a Sealyham was.) As to the rose, Mrs Garrett commented that the soil was too acid for it to grow well — something LeShan had been told by expert gardeners.

  But perhaps his most impressive encounter with Eileen Garrett concerned a missing doctor. The man had gone to a medical conference in a distant town and failed to return home. Knowing that he was working with Mrs Garrett, the doctor’s wife sent LeShan a two-inch square from the shirt the doctor had been wearing the day before he vanished. When LeShan visited the medium he said nothing about the missing doctor. But when she was in a trance he placed the cloth in her fingers and told her that the man to whom it belonged had disappeared. Mrs Garrett replied, ‘He is in La Jolla [California]. He went there due to a psychic wound he suffered when he was fourteen years old and his father disappeared.’

  That evening LeShan telephoned the wife — who lived a thousand miles away — and asked her if anything had happened to her husband between the ages of thirteen and fifteen. She replied that his father had deserted the family when he was fourteen and returned home twenty-five years later. In due course the doctor reappeared of his own accord and verified that he had indeed been in La Jolla.

  The more LeShan investigated mediums, the more he became convinced that they see the world from a viewpoint that differs completely from that of the ordinary person. It is as if they can put themselves into states of mind in
which they cease to be subject to the ordinary limitations of space and time. LeShan cites a case involving Mrs Margaret Verrall, the wife of a Cambridge don, who was one of the most remarkable mediums in the early decades of the twentieth century. When practising ‘automatic writing’ Mrs Verrall recorded the following scene: ‘The cold was intense and a single candle gave poor light. He was lying on the sofa or on a bed and was reading Marmontel by the light of a single candle… . The book was lent to him, it did not belong to him… .’ In a script a few days later she wrote, ‘Marmontel is right. It is a French book, a memoir I think. Passy may help, souvenirs de Passy, or Fleury. The book was bound and was lent — two volumes in old-fashioned binding and print.’

  Some time later she met a friend, a Mr Marsh, who told her that she had accurately described something that had happened to him. He had borrowed one volume of Marmontel’s memoirs from the London Library and taken it to Paris, where he had read it in bed, on a freezing cold night, by the light of a single candle. The chapter he had been reading was about the discovery of a picture painted at Passy and associated with a certain M. de Fleury.

  An interesting piece of clairvoyance, one might think, but not particularly remarkable… . Until we learn that Mrs Verrall wrote her description on 11 December 1911 and Mr Marsh did not read the book in Paris until 21 February of the following year. Mrs Verrall had accurately foreseen something that would not happen for more than two months.

  But then the episode of the vanishing doctor seems to carry the same implications. The doctor’s wife sent a shirt he had worn on the day before he went off to the conference. And all the evidence indicates that the doctor vanished on a sudden impulse several days later. How could the shirt afford Mrs Garrett a clue to something that was to happen in the future? LeShan decided that the best way of finding out was to ask her — in fact to ask all the ‘sensitives’ he could find what it felt like to ‘know’ something that it was logically impossible to know.

  ‘When I approached them with this question, something fascinating immediately happened. “Oh yes,” they said, “when we are getting the paranormal information the world looks different than at other times.” “Different?” I asked, as this clearly seemed very important. “Different how?”’ Mrs Garrett explained that she somehow shifted her whole field of awareness, and that this involved a kind of turning inward. She did this, she said, by a sort of self-hypnosis. Asked what she meant by this she explained, ‘It is a withdrawal from the conscious self into an area of the non-conscious self. And … within this other mind, life is being worked out on a different level.’ She described the sensation as being like ‘living in two worlds at once’. And she emphasized that her ‘glimpses’ were not something she achieved with conscious effort; they just ‘happened’. ‘You open a door for a moment, and are confronted with it. The door closes, as it opened, and the image is gone.’

  LeShan was struck by the close similarity between what Mrs Garrett told him and various mystics’ descriptions of their sudden ‘illuminations’. Here, for example, is a well-known description of an ‘illumination’ experienced by a modern writer, Warner Allen:

  It flashed up lightning-wise during a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Queen’s Hall, in that triumphant fast movement when ‘the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy’. The swiftly flowing continuity of the music was not interrupted, so that what Mr T. S. Eliot calls ‘the intersection of the timeless moment’ must have slipped into the interval between two demi-semi-quavers. When, long after, I analyzed the happening in the cold light of retrospect, it seemed to fall into three parts: first, the mysterious event itself which occurred in an infinitesimal fraction of a split second; this I learned afterwards from Santa Teresa to call the Union with God; the Illumination, a wordless stream of complex feelings in which the experience of Union combined with the rhythmic emotion of the music like a sunbeam striking with iridescence the spray above a waterfall — a stream that was continually swollen by tributaries of associated Experience; lastly Enlightenment, the recollection in tranquillity of the whole complex field of Experience as it were embalmed in thought-forms and words.*

  Here again we have the opening of a door and a sudden brief glimpse. The comparison of many such ‘illuminations’ with the descriptions of ‘psychics’ like Eileen Garrett, Rosalind Heywood and Phoebe Payne finally convinced LeShan that both the ‘medium’ and the mystic experience the same abrupt shift of viewpoint so they find themselves looking into another world. It might be compared to a man sitting in a boat looking at the surface of the ocean, who suddenly plunges his head beneath the surface and sees an entirely new world down below. And for some odd reason beyond our understanding, this paranormal world below the ‘sea’ is timeless, so that events in the future or the past can be studied just as easily as the present. This is one of the most basic statements of all the mystics: that time is somehow an illusion. And this, LeShan thought, must be the ultimate solution — the only solution — to the mystery of precognition. Of course the statement that time is unreal strikes most of us as nonsense — the philosopher G. E. Moore thought he had disproved it by pulling out his watch — yet if there are really people who can foresee the future then our commonsense view of time as a one-way street must somehow be wrong.

  LeShan first outlined these ideas about mystics and mediums in a small book called Towards a General Theory of the Paranormal (1969), and when he presented me with a copy in the early 1970s I was immediately struck by the similarity of these views to a theory I had put forward in The Occult: that poets seem to be natural ‘psychics’. I had cited a number of cases — some of them gathered at first hand — of poets who had had experiences of ‘second sight’ or precognition. The poet and historian A. L. Rowse had described how he was leaning out of an old-fashioned Victorian window at Christ Church when it entered his head, ‘Suppose the thing should fall?’ Being in a black mood he said to himself, ‘Let the damned thing fall!’ As he withdrew his head a moment later the sash window fell with a crash that would probably have broken his neck if he had still been leaning out. I theorized that the poet is a person who has the power to sink into moods of reflective calm in which he withdraws into himself, and in such moods he becomes aware of the voice of the unconscious mind. Or, as LeShan expresses it, ‘The sensitive opens a channel of communication to some part of his non-conscious self which normally operates in this way.’

  LeShan was also willing to entertain a notion first put forward by the psychical researcher Frederick Myers in the 1880s: that the part of the ‘non-conscious self which has paranormal powers is not the unconscious mind as described by Freud — a kind of dark basement, full of guilts and repressions — but some kind of superconscious mind, a kind of ‘attic’, as much above ‘everyday awareness’ as the subconscious basement is below it. And this was also the view held by Mrs Garrett:

  There are certain concentrations of consciousness in which awareness is withdrawn as far as possible from the impact of all sensory perceptions… . Such withdrawals of consciousness from the outer world are common to all of us in some measure … .

  What happens to us at these times is that, as we withdraw from the environing world, we relegate the activities of the five senses to the field of the subconscious, and seek to focus awareness (to the best of our ability) in the field of the superconscious — the timeless, spaceless field of the as-yet-unknown.

  Most of us — as Mrs Garrett remarks — have some experience of this kind of thing: for example, we can occasionally become so deeply absorbed in a book that if someone slams a door it almost gives us a heart attack. We also slip into this same world of ‘deep absorption’ on the edge of sleep (a subject that will be explored in chapter 5). But these excursions are usually brief: we either fall asleep or quickly return to the normal world. What Mrs Garrett seems to be suggesting is that the psychic has the power to change her viewpoint so as to slip into this state at will. But once it has been attained sh
e has no further power: the will goes to sleep. It is no use trying to obtain results: they can only be obtained by not trying. Eileen Garrett remarked, ‘I knew from experience that conscious effort was the one thing which would produce no results that could be described as supernormal.’

  In an essay called ‘Mysticism and Logic’ Bertrand Russell asserts that all mystics seem to agree on four basic points: (1) that there is a better way of knowing than through the senses, (2) that there is a fundamental unity or oneness in the universe, (3) that time is an illusion, (4) that evil is a mere appearance. Russell considers these statements and ends by dismissing them as nonsense — his own final conclusion being that ‘scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human pursuit’. Most normal people will be inclined to agree with him. Yet as soon as we begin to study accounts of mystical experience one thing becomes very clear: that they are all talking about exactly the same thing. What follows are a few typical accounts, taken from Nona Coxhead’s The Relevance of Bliss. The first is a description by a medical journalist, Wendy Rose-Neill:

  I had always found gardening a relaxing activity, and on this particular day I felt in a very contemplative frame of mind. I remember that I gradually became intensely aware of my surroundings — the sound of the birds singing, the rustling of leaves, the breeze on my skin and the scent of the grass and flowers.

  I had a sudden impulse to lie face down on the grass and as I did so, an energy seemed to flow through me as if I had become part of the earth underneath me. The boundary between my physical self and my surroundings seemed to dissolve and my feeling of separation vanished. In a strange way I felt blended into a total unity with the earth, as if I were made of it and it of me. I was aware of the blades of grass between my fingers and touching my face, and I was overwhelmed by a force which seemed to penetrate every fibre of my being.