by Colin Wilson
We worked away all morning with our shovels — in one place I avoided a loop in the road by driving straight across a field — and by midday I had reached the gateway that led out on to the main road. We all walked back to the farm for lunch, then I picked up my bag and tramped back to the car. The snow on the main road had been flattened by traffic, but the surface was treacherous. In places, where no cars had disturbed the fresh snow, it was impossible to make out where the road ended and the ditch began. In other places the snow had built up at the side of the road into six-foot banks. It was necessary to drive for mile after mile with extreme caution, knowing that the slightest error might land me in the ditch and leave me stranded in the open countryside for another night.
When, several hours later, I finally arrived on a broad main road where traffic had turned the snow into slush, I experienced an enormous sense of relief. Then as I drove on towards home I realized that instead of fading, this ‘glow’ of relief and delight was remaining constant. The intense and continuous ‘attention’ of the past few hours, the perpetual sense of crisis, had somehow ‘fixed’ my consciousness in a higher state of awareness, so that everything I looked at seemed somehow more real. It was not unlike the state I often experienced as a child on Christmas Day — the feeling that the world is self-evidently wonderful and exciting, and that no problem is too great for human will and persistence. There was a feeling that if only I could maintain this vision, I would never experience any serious problems for the rest of my life. The state lasted for the remainder of the drive home, and was still easy to recreate the next morning. In fact I only have to spend a minute or so thinking about the experience to feel a renewal of the basic insight — although, of course, without that ‘heightened pressure’ of consciousness.
In fact a number of experiences of this sort have convinced me that it is absurd to embark on a long train journey or car ride without taking advantage of the free time to make a deliberate effort to raise the pressure of consciousness by constant effort. The initial effort may be difficult, involving winding myself up into a heightened state of determination in which it becomes self-evident that further effort will lead to further results. Earlier this year (1987) I made a more continuous and sustained effort than I had ever attempted before. I was travelling by train from Cornwall to Northampton, a total journey of eight or nine hours, with a change of stations in London. It took me more than an hour to concentrate my attention into a state of awareness where I was suddenly noticing more as I stared out of the window. That is to say the effort was being passed on to my subconscious mind, which was helping me to sustain it. In effect I had finally convinced Stan to wake up and start being helpful. Long before I had reached London I had forced myself into a mildly euphoric state in which the main sensation was of a certain feeling of latent strength. In such states I become aware that our normal low-pressure consciousness views the world with a basic feeling of rejection — the feeling we might get if we came upon the decaying corpse of a rat in the garden shed. In states of high-pressure consciousness we actually look at things with a kind of friendliness, as if they had something interesting to tell us.
By the time I had crossed London and was on the train to Northampton I was feeling tired, and ready to relax. But it struck me as a pity to waste the rest of the journey, especially since I had never travelled on this particular line before and was therefore unfamiliar with its scenery. So I stared out of the window and continued to make a sustained and determined effort. It came easily, except that I was aware of an underlying fatigue of attention. Every time I felt tired, it was exactly as if a window — or a door — had started to close, cutting off my view of reality. It was an exhilarating sensation to push the window open again and experience an actual thrill of interest as I looked at wagons standing in a siding or a well-kept back garden. That sense of being continually told something was very strong.
I arrived at my destination at about half-past four in the afternoon feeling pleasantly fatigued but still full of energy. It was a publisher’s conference at which I was due to make an after-dinner speech. But I regretted my effort as I sat at dinner and experienced such a flood of fatigue that I could probably have slept instantaneously simply by closing my eyes. At one point the heat of the room and the smell of food produced a kind of nausea and a desire to go outside for fresh air. Then I remembered the vision of the train journey and the recognition that my will had control over my senses. A curious effort of inwardness, very difficult to describe (but quite familiar to anyone who has ever overcome a feeling of sickness by thinking of something else), and I was suddenly wide awake and prepared to stand up and organize my thoughts.
A major insight of that journey was that our minds are simply out of training, like the body of an overweight man who decides to enter for the London Marathon. These, and other experiences like them, have left me in no doubt that it is possible to push our minds up to a higher level of perception and to keep them there for a long time. It is, as James points out, merely a matter of habit. A modern city dweller deals habitually with a complexity of experience that would give a backwoodsman a nervous breakdown.
But it seems to me that the most important insight of the Northampton experience was the clear recognition that our senses are normally in a state of ‘rejection’. We look at the world rather as an overworked executive looks at a stranger who is probably about to ask him a favour. Yet we only become aware of this in those moments of ‘acceptance’ when we find ourselves looking at everything with sympathetic interest. This, I realized, was what the German poet Rilke had meant by the phrase ‘dennoch preisen’ — to praise in spite of. Rilke had been impressed by Baudelaire’s poem ‘Carrion’, describing how the poet and his mistress come upon the horrible rotting carcass of a dog in a public park, because it made poetry out of something normally considered too disgusting to mention. Rilke saw, in a flash of insight, that this is the real business of the poet: to raise himself to a level of mental intensity where everything in the world, even a rotting carcass, becomes fascinating.
*Lawrence LeShan, The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist, p. 100.
*The World as Will and Idea, Book IV, Haldane and Kemp translation, p. 402.
†Dylan Thomas, Lament.
*See Arthur J. Deikman, ‘Bimodal Consciousness’ in The Nature of Human Consciousness, ed. Robert Ornstein, p. 72.
3
Down the Rabbit Hole
On 10 January 1912 the historian Arnold Toynbee had a remarkable experience as he sat on one of the twin summits of the citadel of Pharsalus in Greece thinking about a battle that had taken place on those slopes in 197 bc. As he looked out over the sunlit landscape, he suddenly slipped into what he later called a ‘time-pocket’. Instead of the sunlit hillside there was a heavy mist, and he knew that in that mist, two armies were groping their way towards one another: the Romans and the army of Philip V of Macedon. Then the mist parted, revealing the right wing of the Macedonian phalanx charging downhill and carrying the Romans before them. In doing so they opened up a dangerous gap between themselves and their left wing — a gap of which a Roman officer instantly took advantage, wheeling his men at the double to attack the exposed wing in the rear. These uncouth young Latin peasants knew nothing of mercy: even as the Greeks threw down their arms and surrendered, they were hacked to the ground. Toynbee’s hallucination was so complete that he averted his eyes from the massacre, and as he did so caught sight of a group of fleeing horsemen of whose identity he was ignorant. A moment later, quite suddenly, the whole scene vanished into thin air, and he again found himself looking at the sunny pastoral landscape.
Compare this with an experience described by the great mountaineer Frank L. Smythe in his book The Mountain Vision (1941). Crossing the Scottish hills from Morvich to Loch Duich on a bright, sunny day, with a magnificent view of cloud-dappled hills and the distant sea, he entered a grassy defile near Glen Glomach and became instantly aware of an aura of evil in the place. It was as if somet
hing terrible had once happened there. On impulse, Smythe decided to stop for lunch and try to fathom this unpleasant feeling. He seems to have possessed some kind of rudimentary psychic faculty — at least enough to know that he should try to empty his mind and sink into a receptive state. Suddenly:
… a score or more of ragged people, men, women and children, were straggling through the defile. They appeared to be very weary, as though they had come a long way. The pitiful procession was in the midst of the defile when all of a sudden from either side concealed men leapt to their feet and, brandishing spears, axes and clubs, rushed down with wild yells on the unfortunates beneath. There was a short fierce struggle, then a horrible massacre. Not one man, woman or child was left alive; the defile was choked with corpses. I got out of the place as quickly as I could. Screams seemed to din in my ears … .
Smythe’s book was reviewed in The Scotsman and a few days later Smythe wrote a letter to the editor in which he mentioned that his researches had revealed that two massacres had taken place on the road near Glen Glomach: one in 1715, when General Wade had laid an ambush and slaughtered a number of Highlanders, and one in 1745, after Culloden. Yet he admitted that neither of these two fitted his ‘vision’, for the weapons were of an earlier period. What Smythe had seen was apparently a ‘tape-recording’ of a past event somehow ‘imprinted’ on the scenery by the violence of the emotions involved. (A later researcher, T. C. Lethbridge, called such recordings ‘ghouls’ and believed that they are somehow imprinted on the electrical field of water and are therefore to be found most often in damp places.)
Yet it seems clear that Toynbee’s ‘time-slip’ was not quite of this nature. He was intimately acquainted with the history of the battle, and this undoubtedly played an important part in his ‘vision’. However this seems to suggest that all that happened was that Toynbee experienced an unusually vivid surge of imagination, which is also unacceptable: there is the odd detail of the fleeing horsemen whom he could not identify. Moreover Toynbee goes on to describe several other similar experiences, some of which happened on the same trip to Greece, when he was twenty-three. His account (in the tenth volume of his Study of History*) makes it clear that he was often in a curious semi-mystical state on this trip and that his state of mind produced a number of near-hallucinations. Two months later, on 19 March, he rounded the shoulder of a mountain in Crete and found himself looking at the ruins of a baroque villa, probably built for one of the last of the Venetian governors about three centuries ago. As he stood looking at this deserted house he ‘had an experience which was the counterpart, on the psychic plane, of an aeroplane’s sudden deep drop when it falls into an air-pocket’. He was ‘carried down a time-pocket’ to a day two hundred and fifty years ago when the house was suddenly evacuated and deserted. Now in this case he knew nothing about the house that he suddenly found in front of him. So the experience of falling into a ‘time-pocket’ must have been in many respects similar to Frank Smythe’s experience near Glen Glomach. It was aided by his knowledge of history, but was not actually caused by it.
Another similar experience occurred in the ruins of the open-air theatre in Ephesus when suddenly ‘the empty theatre peopled itself with a tumultuous throng as the breath came into the dead and they lived and stood upon their feet.’ What Toynbee was watching, apparently, was the episode when Saint Paul and his two companions ran into trouble with the silvermakers’ guild of Ephesus, who were afraid that Christianity would undermine their thriving business of making silver images of the goddess Diana. According to the Acts of the Apostles the indignant crowd in the theatre shouted and threatened for two hours before the town clerk succeeded in persuading them to go home. Watching this crowd, Toynbee thought he could actually pick out Paul’s two companions Gaius and Aristarchus, and an ineffectual Jew called Alexander. And as the shouts of ‘Great is Diana’ were dying down, the life flickered out of the scene and Toynbee was ‘carried up again instantaneously to the current surface of the Time-stream from an abyss nineteen centuries ago’.
A month later, on 23 April 1912, Toynbee had an experience that makes it clear that he believed he was seeing ‘visions’ and not merely using his ‘historical imagination’. He had clambered up to the citadel of Monemvasia in Laconia, and scrambled through a breach in the ramparts. Lying around among the thorn bushes were a number of bronze cannons whose wooden carriages had rotted away, and once again Toynbee fell into a ‘time-pocket’, going back to the evening of the day in 1715 when the fortress, previously held by the Venetians, had fallen to the Turks. But when Toynbee later checked on this vivid impression he was puzzled to learn that the fortress had not been taken by storm, either in 1715 or in 1821, when the Turks surrendered to the rebel Greeks: on both occasions the surrender had been negotiated peacefully. So Toynbee had to conclude that what he had ‘seen’ was the victors breaching the walls and dislodging the cannons to put the fort permanently out of action so that it could not constitute a threat in the future. His puzzlement leaves no doubt that he felt he had actually seen it, not merely imagined it.
The best-known of Toynbee’s ‘time-slips’ happened in May 1912 as he was musing on the summit of the citadel of Mistrà, above the plain of Sparta. Mistrà had been a ruin since it had been overrun in the Greek war of independence in the 1820s. Gazing down at the ruins and nibbling a bar of chocolate Toynbee was suddenly carried back to that day when the invaders had poured into Mistrà and massacred most of the inhabitants; from that day onward it had remained a ruin. Again, time stood still and the past became a reality. Toynbee was overwhelmed by a ‘horrifying sense of the sin manifest in the conduct of human affairs’ — a vision that was to lead him to write the monumental A Study of History.
What was the precise nature of Toynbee’s ‘visions’? A sceptic would dismiss them as ‘mere imagination’, but Toynbee’s own account makes it clear that he believed them to be more than that. Details like the unknown horsemen riding away at Pharsalus, the glimpse of Paul’s companions in the theatre at Ephesus, the impression of violence in the fortress of Monemvasía, all suggest that it was closer to a kind of dream: in fact Toynbee refers to himself as ‘the dreamer’ in speaking about Pharsalus. He admits that these visions lasted only a fraction of a second yet says that the sense of reality was so poignant that he seemed to have slipped back into the past; he compares himself to a palaeontologist who can reconstruct a whole dinosaur from a fragment of bone. Yet this is not a ‘time-slip’ in the sense of Frank Smythe’s experience, for Smythe knew nothing about the massacre in the valley. Toynbee’s experience was based on his intimate knowledge of history. In some odd way, he had caused history to ‘come alive’, not in the sense of a daydream but as something far more vivid and real.
I have suggested elsewhere* that what we are dealing with here is a latent human faculty whose existence we only dimly recognize. It is a curious ability to grasp intuitively the reality of some other time or place. In Dr Johnson’s novel Rasselas the hero contemplates the beautiful scenery of the Happy Valley where he was born and wonders why he cannot be happy like the cows. He reflects sadly, ‘I can discover within me no power of perception that is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted. Man surely has some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be gratified before he can be happy.’
His problem is easy to understand. The Happy Valley is pleasant enough. But he is stuck there, in the present moment, unable to escape, like a fly on a sweet but sticky fly paper. And when man experiences only one reality at a time, he is bored. A child experiences happiness when he is sitting beside a warm fire on a winter’s night with the rain beating on the windows, or when he is lying on a beach on a summer day with the great cold expanse of the sea stretching in front of him. For he is in effect in two places at once: in the warm room, and out there in the freezing rain; or on the sunny beach, and out there on the cold and fathomless sea. This is why chil
dren love to hear ghost stories when they feel comfortable and secure: it is a way of being in two places at once. Dr Johnson’s Prince Rasselas is not only stuck in the present moment, but in a state of mind that might be called ‘mono-consciousness’. The child listening to a ghost story is in ‘duo-consciousness’.
But there are times when duo-consciousness becomes so intense that it ceases to be an exercise in imagination and takes on a compelling quality of reality. This is the ‘latent sense’ that Johnson talks about. It seems to be an unknown or unrecognized faculty, and as such I have suggested calling it Faculty X.
It is interesting to note the similarity of this faculty — as illustrated by Toynbee — to Eileen Garrett’s ‘super-sensory perceptions’. When she held a fragment of the shirt that belonged to the vanishing doctor she immediately knew that he was in La Jolla: she was in two places at once. Elsewhere, she talks about the power to ‘see through barriers’, and gives an example that obviously qualifies as Faculty X: