by Colin Wilson
Denton’s theory was astonishing enough, yet in another sense quite logical. For every object does carry its history imprinted in it. To begin with light falling on the surface of a stone must destroy some of its outermost molecules, producing a kind of blurred photograph. (E. T. Bell’s science-fiction novel Before the Dawn was based on the idea of a machine that could ‘unscramble’ these pictures and so read the history of ancient rocks.) If strong human emotions can be ‘imprinted’ on scenery, then presumably so can other kinds of energy. Denton was merely suggesting that the human mind possesses its own powers of ‘decoding’ these ancient recordings.
However when Thomson Jay Hudson came to write The Law of Psychic Phenomena in the early 1890s he dismissed Denton’s claim that we all possess a natural ‘telescope into the past’. He felt that Denton’s results could all be explained by the extraordinary powers of the subjective mind. As an example he cited the case of a piece of Roman mosaic pavement which Denton knew to be from the villa of the orator Cicero. Denton’s wife decribed a Roman villa, a squad of Roman soldiers and a fleshy man in a toga with a commanding presence. In order to guard against any cheating — even unconscious cheating — Denton went through an elaborate double-blind procedure before he handed over the Roman fragment. He first of all wrapped it in brown paper then mixed it up with many other specimens in identical wrapping, so that he himself had no idea which was which. This was in case he gave his wife some unconscious hint or even transmitted information to her telepathically. (The word telepathy was invented by Frederick Myers in the early 1880s but the idea of ‘thought transference’ was familiar long before that.)
That sounded convincing enough, but Hudson was unimpressed. He pointed out that the memory of the subjective mind seems to be practically limitless. So it would know precisely what each parcel contained even if Denton mixed them with his eyes closed. Denton’s own historical knowledge would provide the ‘pictures’ from the past, and his wife would have no difficulty picking them up from him by means of telepathy … . So that disposed of Denton’s belief that every event is ‘recorded’ on its surroundings.
As it turned out Hudson could not have chosen a worse example. Denton had himself been puzzled by the fact that his wife had not seen Cicero: the man she had seen was fleshy, but Cicero had been tall and thin. It was when Denton came to republish the book fifteen years later, in 1888, that he revealed a discovery he had made in the meantime. Cicero’s villa had previously been owned by the dictator Sulla, and Sulla corresponded very accurately to Mrs Denton’s image of a broad, fleshy man with an aloof, majestic air, yet whose face also revealed ‘a good deal of geniality’. Hudson might still object, of course, that Denton already knew that Sulla had owned the villa before Cicero and had simply forgotten. But if we accept Denton’s word that he learned about it for the first time after the 1873 edition of The Soul of Things, then Hudson’s objections collapse and the ‘recording’ theory remains unshaken.
Since the 1880s psychometry — as Buchanan christened the ‘recording’ theory — has been generally ignored by science. Even ‘psychical researchers’ seem to find it embarrassing and prefer not to mention it. Yet it is probably the best authenticated of all ‘psychic faculties’ and there are hundreds of impressive examples in the history of psychical research. In 1921 a sceptical French novelist named Pascal Forthuny discovered — to his amazement and embarrassment — that he was an excellent psychometrist. He was present at the Metapsychic Institute in Paris when Dr Gustav Geley, a leading French investigator, was about to test a clairvoyant. Someone asked for a letter to be passed across the room to the clairvoyant: Forthuny grabbed it on the way, clapped it against his forehead, and began a mocking improvization: ‘I see a crime … a murder… .’ When he was finished he was told that the letter was from the French ‘Bluebeard’ murderer Landru. Forthuny was equally accurate with two more objects, a fan and an officer’s cane, describing their history in striking detail. He was later subjected to a series of scientific tests by Geley’s assistant, Dr Eugene Osty, whose book on the subject leaves no doubt of the genuineness of Forthuny’s remarkable powers.
Forthuny seems to demonstrate that objects can ‘record’ the emotional history of their owners — illnesses, personal tragedies and so on. But what of Denton’s belief that everything records its own life history, including rocks and meteorites? It sounds scientifically indefensible, yet another series of tests a few years earlier suggest that Denton may have been correct after all.
Just before the First World War Dr Gustav Pagenstecher, a German doctor who had settled in Mexico City, was treating an insomniac patient named Maria Reyes de Zierold. Drugs were useless but hypnosis seemed to work. And one day, under hypnosis, she told him that her daughter was listening outside the door. He opened the door and found this was true. Of course the explanation might have been simply that Maria’s senses were exceptionally acute under hypnosis. But Pagenstecher also observed that baffling phenomenon first observed in the nineteenth century by Alfred Russel Wallace, ‘community of sensation’. Maria could see, hear and taste through Pagenstecher’s senses. She could see him and describe what he was doing even when he was behind her or in the next room. He also discovered that she had remarkable powers of psychometry: a meteorite produced a detailed description of falling through space; a seashell led her to describe an underwater scene. One of her most convincing demonstrations concerned a sea bean picked up on the beach by Dr Walter Franklin Prince, who was sent to investigate by the American Society for Psychical Research. Maria described a tropical forest with a river nearby. Prince was convinced she was wrong, but Pagenstecher said he would prefer to believe Maria. When they took the sea bean to an expert, they learned that it was actually a nut from a tree that grew in tropical forests and that it had been carried down to the beach by a river … .
Maria de Zierold offers us an interesting glimpse of her procedure. As she held the object she ‘identified’ with it, exactly as she had earlier identified with Pagenstecher: if it was moistened with alcohol, she tasted the alcohol; if a lighted match was held underneath it, she felt the burning sensation. And once she had ‘entered into’ the object she became aware of its life history.
This has some exciting implications. Bergson had said that we have two ways of knowing an object: by analysis, which means grasping it from outside, and by intuition, which means going inside it. The latter sounds nonsensical, since we cannot really ‘enter into’ an object. Yet if Maria’s evidence is to be accepted, this is not true. When she ‘shared’ Pagenstecher’s consciousness she felt that she was connected to him by a kind of ‘luminous cord’ with some ‘electric’ quality. When she ‘entered into’ an object it became connected to her by the same kind of cord. If Maria de Zierold’s descriptions are to be taken seriously, it would seem that Bergson was correct and we can ‘enter into’ objects.
But how about ‘reading’ the life history of the object? Again this sounds absurd, since an object is not alive. A possible explanation could lie in the suggestion of Bergson’s contemporary philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. He argued that everything in the universe is, in some sense, alive and capable of ‘feeling’. The universe should be regarded as a single living organism. (Whitehead’s philosophy is known as the philosophy of organism.) Both Whitehead and Bergson insisted that the underlying reality of the universe is an underlying web of connections. But in order to survive human beings have to focus upon one thing at a time, so we have learned to ‘screen out’ the connections. Moreover our survival depends upon our sense of individuality — feeling ourselves to be quite separate from the rest of the universe — and so, once again, man has learned to ‘screen out’ the sense of one-ness with Nature and to become intensely aware of himself in isolation. Both mysticism and paranormal research strongly support the view of Bergson and Whitehead that this isolation is an illusion.
All this is certainly supported by what we know about the right and left halves of the brain. Left-brain percept
ion is essentially narrow and concentrated, like a fast-flowing stream. Right-brain perception is broad and relaxed, like a wide, slow river. Left-brain perception could also be compared to the headlights of a car, which cut into the darkness and enable you to drive at ninety miles an hour; however, travelling at this speed you are aware of nothing but the objects illuminated by the headlights. If you want to become aware of the scenery around you then you had better switch off the headlights, open the window, and slow down to a walking pace: then, as your eyes adjust to the darkness, you will become aware of the hedges and the trees. Bergson achieved this state as he strolled around the countryside of the Auvergne, and all we have learned of mediums and mystics suggests that they make use of the same technique, ‘slowing down’ until their eyes have adjusted to the darkness.
But if relaxation can lead to ‘psychic awareness’, then why are we not all psychic? The answer has already emerged in the last chapter. As Toynbee sat on the summit of Pharsalus or Mistra he was in a state of total relaxation. Then he went a stage further and fell into the ‘time-pocket’ or down Alice’s ‘rabbit hole’. When this happens it is as if — to return to the previous analogy — the car driver has decided to stop and switch off his engine. And now, in the silence, he can hear the sound of the wind in the trees, the water running in the ditch, the cry of night birds. The poet Rilke once experienced such a state as he leaned in the fork of a tree in the garden of the Castle Duino. He later described the experience (in the third person):
… in this position immediately felt himself so agreeably supported and so amply reposed, that he remained as he was, without reading, completely received into nature, in an almost unconscious contemplation. Little by little his attention awoke to a feeling he had never known: it was as though almost imperceptible vibrations were passing into him from the interior of the tree … . It seemed to him that he had never been filled with more gentle motions, his body was somehow being treated like a soul, and put in a state to receive a degree of influence which, given the normal apparentness of one’s physical conditions, really could not have been felt at all … . Nevertheless, concerned as he always was to account to himself for precisely the most delicate impressions, he insistently asked himself what was happening to him then, and almost at once found an expression that satisfied him, saying to himself that he had got to the other side of Nature.
Rilke goes on to describe his state of strange detachment and explains that ‘all objects yielded themselves to him more distantly and, at the same time, somehow more truly’. He had somehow left behind the ‘close-upness’ that deprives us of meaning. And when, on another occasion, he experienced a sense of deep peace as he sat reading in a billiard room in the early morning, he described a sensation of ‘inner space’, ‘a space as undisturbed as the interior of a rose’.
What seems to happen in these moments of ‘inner silence’ is that time slows down. Most of the mystics record this curious experience — the sense that time has come to a stop, or that hours of experience have been packed into a split second. What actually happens, presumably, is that our inner metabolism slows down to accommodate some important insight and the result is ‘extended time’. In his suggestive little book Stalking the Wild Pendulum Itzhak Bentov suggested that this power to ‘bring time to a stop’ is well within the abilities of the average person, and outlines an experiment to test this. The only piece of apparatus required is a clock or watch with a second hand. The first step is to sit at a table with the watch lying face upward and to sink into a state of relaxation. The next step is to close the eyes and to withdraw from the external world, sinking into a kind of daydream of any favourite activity — for example lying on a beach. But it is important to try to imagine this activity as clearly as possible — try to feel the warmth of the sun and hear the sound of waves. Then open the eyes and allow the gaze to fall casually on the watch, ‘as if you are a disinterested observer of this whole affair. If you have followed the instructions properly, you may see the second hand stick in a few places, slow down and hover for a while. If you are very successful, you’ll be able to stop the second hand for quite a while.’
I myself have recently observed this phenomenon occurring spontaneously. Not long ago I had a new battery put into my wrist-watch, and for a few days afterwards it developed the irritating habit of stopping until I had removed the back and re-adjusted the battery. On several occasions I glanced at the watch and thought, ‘Oh damn, it’s stopped again’ — then realized that the second hand was in fact moving. The second hand on my watch moves in little jerks, a second at a time, so I had obviously glanced at it in the fraction of a second when the hand was stationary. Yet even so it appeared to remain stationary far longer than usual. My sense of time had somehow slowed down.
In the same way the blur of railway sleepers seen from the window of a moving train often seems momentarily to pause. This phenomenon was first pointed out to me by the American writer Jesse Lasky when we were travelling together, and at first I failed to understand what he was talking about. Since then I have frequently observed it. The sleepers are rushing past so fast that they are nothing more than a blur. Then, suddenly, one of them becomes as clearly visible as if the train had come to a halt. The explanation must be that our inner time has slowed down for a moment.
Two things should be noted about Bentov’s description of how to make time ‘stop’. First, that the withdrawal into an inner world sounds like Eileen Garrett’s description of how she induces states of clairvoyance. Second, that his insistence on precise visualization sounds like the procedure described by Priestley: ‘… on these occasions I have been recalling a person or a scene as clearly and as sharply as I could, and then there has been, so to speak, a little click, a slight change of focus, and for a brief moment I have felt as if the person or scene were not being remembered but were really there still existing… .’ The effort of precise visualization seems to cause the experience of ‘falling down the rabbit hole’. This, presumably, is the mechanism of Arnold Toynbee’s ‘time-pocket’ experiences.
All this is obviously of immense importance. If Bentov and Priestley are correct, then we have greater control over our inner world than we realize. The effort of ‘withdrawal’ into an inner world causes a slowing down of ‘psychological time’ and a suddenly intensified sense of reality. And this of course is logical enough. The sense of unreality is caused by being in a hurry; the more we rush, the less real the external world becomes. So it follows that a deliberate effort of relaxation — Priestley’s ‘little click’ may be the actual switch from left-brain to right-brain consciousness — should have the effect of intensifying the sense of reality and producing something like the ‘time-slip’ experience.
It should by now be clear that most of the experiences we have so far discussed in this book — experiences of mediums and mystics, experiences involving ‘time-slips’ and clairvoyance and psychometry — all point towards the same basic conclusion: that we are living in an information universe. Mediums and psychics are always obtaining pieces of information that they have ‘no business knowing’. This leaves no possible doubt that the information is somehow ‘there for the asking’, as if stored on microfilm in a library, but that most of us do not know how to ask. Denton believed that this information includes every event that has ever occurred in the history of the universe, and that everyone can gain access to it if he goes about it in the right way.
The simplest and most straightforward way to gain entry to this library of information, apparently, is to ‘fall down the rabbit hole’. But there are other ways. Sometimes the information has been so strongly ‘recorded’ that under certain circumstances we can pick it up without our normal senses. That is what seems to have happened to Mr Chase, who saw the two thatched cottages so clearly that he had no doubt that they were real. The same explanation seems to apply to the vision of fifteenth-century Paris seen by Ivan Sanderson and his wife (which as we know may well have been a vision of a group of old hou
ses that had once stood on the spot). In his book The Undiscovered Country Stephen Jenkins describes how, on a track near Mounts Bay in Cornwall, he had a sudden vision of a host of armed men among the bushes. As he tried to run towards them a sensation like a curtain of heated air wavered in front of them, and they vanished. And in The Mask of Time Joan Forman describes how, in the courtyard at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire, she saw a group of four children playing near the entrance to the Hall, shrieking in helpless merriment, almost hysterical with mirth. She was particularly struck by a nine-year-old girl wearing a lace cap and a dress of grey-green silk. As soon as Joan Forman stepped forward the vision (which she compared to a dream) was gone. But inside the hall she saw the portrait of the nine-year-old girl — identified as Lady Grace Manners. It seems likely that the sheer force of their merriment somehow ‘recorded’ the scene, exactly as if someone had taken a photograph.
One of the most remarkable examples of this kind of ‘recording’ occurred at Edgehill in Northamptonshire, where one of the great battles of the Civil War was fought. After the battle people in the area were disturbed by sounds of cannon and shouting and the clash of arms. In 1642 a pamphlet was published about it: A great Wonder in Heaven, shewing the late Apparitions and Prodigious Noyse of War and Battels, seene on Edge-Hill, neere Keinton, in Northamptonshire. It described how, on four successive Saturday and Sunday nights, visitors to the battlefield had witnessed sights and sounds of battle; these included a Justice of the Peace and a number of army officers, who recognized old comrades among the combatants. King Charles I was so intrigued that he sent a commission led by Colonel Lewis Krike to investigate: they witnessed the phenomena and testified before the king, swearing statements about what they had seen. The sounds continued at intervals for three centuries, so that a twentieth-century clergyman, the Rev. John Dering, was able to collect accounts from many living witnesses who had heard the battle sounds.