by Colin Wilson
A single step further, and the same argument provides a logical explanation for telepathy. In The Psychic Detectives I have cited a case concerning the remarkable ‘telepath’ Dr Maximilien Langsner. In July 1929 four people were shot to death by an unknown killer at a farm in Edmonton, Alberta. The police were called by a farmer’s son, Vernon Booher, whose mother and brother had been among the victims (the other two being hired hands). Langsner, who happened to be in the area at the time, attended the inquest and later told the chief of police that the killer was Vernon Booher and that he had hidden the murder weapon in a clump of prairie grass behind the house. Langsner then accompanied the police to the house and wandered around at the back — the police chief commented that Langsner reminded him of a dowser with a hazel twig. A rifle recovered from a clump of grass proved to be the murder weapon. Vernon Booher was then placed in protective custody as a major witness, while Langsner sat outside his cell. After a while Langsner got up and left. He was then able to tell the police exactly why Vernon had committed the murders. Vernon had come to hate his mother and, after a quarrel, had shot her in the head with his rifle. He then had to kill his brother, who was in the next room, and two farm hands who had heard the shots and knew he was in the house. Confronted with this story, Vernon Booher confessed that he had killed his mother after a quarrel about a girl: he wanted to marry the daughter of a farm-worker and his mother, a highly dominant woman, had enraged him by telling him precisely what she thought of the girl. Booher was hanged in 1929.
We can see that after murdering his mother in a fit of rage, Booher would be in a highly-charged emotional state. If violent emotions can ‘record’ themselves on the walls of an execution shed then it seems logical to suppose that they can also be detected by a good dowser, or ‘psychic’, like Maximilien Langsner. In fact they should be far more powerful and distinct, since he is picking them up directly and not at second hand through a ‘recording’.
If we also take into account the dowser’s ability to ‘select’ the set of impressions he is interested in — so that de Boer could distinguish between various radio stations — then it is possible to see how a ‘sensitive’ might actually pick up one particular scene rather than another. William Denton had already observed that his wife and his sister-in-law might ‘see’ quite different scenes from the history of the object they were holding. And we can also see that if the observer happened to be in a relaxed frame of mind, then he might ‘accidentally’ pick up some ‘recording’ and be quite unaware that he was catching a glimpse of the past. When Joan Forman ‘saw’ the children playing in front of Haddon Hall she was aware that she was seeing ‘a mental picture, as one does in dreams’. But although the two English ladies at Versailles experienced a ‘dreamlike sensation’ they were unaware that they were seeing a mental picture. When Mr Chase saw the two pretty nineteenth-century cottages he was tired — having finished a day’s work — and also relaxed, since he was waiting for a bus on a fine evening. If he had actually tried to walk into one of the gardens he would probably have received a shock as the cottages vanished and were replaced by two houses. If Jane O’Neill had tried to touch the painting of the crucifixion it would probably have disappeared and she would have found herself standing in the modern church at Fotheringhay instead of the church as it was four centuries ago.
Now this, admittedly, is a little difficult to swallow. Surely we can all tell the difference between a reality ‘out there’ and a thought inside our own heads? But the matter may not be that simple. For more than two-and-a-half centuries philosophers have been suggesting that perhaps our senses play a part in creating the world ‘out there’. The argument — as presented by thinkers like Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Kant — runs something like this. Consider a piece of chocolate. You would say that it is sweet, brown, sticky and has a ‘chocolatey’ smell. But if you hold your nose as you eat it, it suddenly has no smell and very little taste — so these things depend on your senses. The brownness depends on your sense of sight; to a colour-blind man it might look grey. The stickiness depends on the temperature of your fingers; if they were as cold as icicles, the chocolate wouldn’t be sticky. All this led Bishop Berkeley to suggest that there may not be a ‘real’ world out there: perhaps our senses are creating the whole thing. Kant went a step further and suggested that perhaps our senses also create space and time and logic.
Berkeley’s contemporaries thought it was all rather a joke and Dr Johnson thought he had refuted him by kicking a stone. Yet we now know that these philosophers were not all that far from the truth. Science tells us that the ‘truth’ about the chocolate is a swarm of electrons organized into atoms and molecules by sub-atomic forces. Strictly speaking it has no smell or taste or colour. These things are ‘added’ by our senses — or our brains. As we have already noted, our eyes distinguish between light wavelengths of 16 and 32-millionths of an inch by ‘colour coding’ one of them as red and the other as violet. As Whitehead once commented, the poets ought to sing their praises to the human brain, not to Nature.
In recent years two scientists have advanced a revolutionary theory which is really an updated version of the philosophy of Berkeley and Kant. Their names are Karl Pribram and David Bohm, and the theory has become known as ‘the hologramatic universe’. To understand it we have to know what a hologram is. A hologram is a kind of three-dimensional photograph which hangs in space and looks exactly like a solid object. Such a photograph cannot be taken by ordinary light: it requires a laser beam — light in which all the waves have been made to ‘march in step’ like a squad of soldiers. If two laser beams cross one another, they form an interference pattern — just as, if you throw two stones into a pond, two sets of circular ripples will interact with one another. Now imagine that the two laser beams interact on a glass photographic plate and that one of the two beams has just ‘bounced off’ a human face. The interference pattern on the photographic plate does not look in the least like a human face — rather like a pattern of ripples. But if you shine a laser beam through it the face will suddenly appear suspended in space, looking quite solid and three dimensional. The light has ‘interpreted’ the interference pattern into a face. What is odder still is that if you break off a small corner of the photographic plate and shine a beam of laser light through it, the complete face will still appear in space, although looking rather blurrier than when the whole plate is used. In other words every part of the interference pattern contains the whole face.
Pribram, whose speciality is the brain and its functions, was suddenly struck by an awe-inspiring idea: suppose the world around us is actually a hologram and the reality ‘behind’ it is simply a kind of interference pattern? Kant said that the world is made up of the ‘phenomena’ — the things we see and hear — and the ‘noumena’, the reality that lies behind them. Pribram was suggesting that the noumena is an interference pattern.
At this point Pribram learned that a British physicist had proposed an almost identical idea. David Bohm had been trying to explain some of the paradoxes of quantum theory, particularly the strange fact that two particles, flying apart at the speed of light, can apparently affect one another. That should be totally impossible — unless their ‘apartness’ is somehow an illusion. So Bohm proposed a theory which he outlined in his book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, to explain this paradox. Expressed very simply, Bohm says that the underlying reality of the universe — the noumena — is rather like one of those small pellets which, when dropped into water, unfolds, and you are suddenly looking at a flower. The only fault with this analogy is that in Bohm’s theory, the pellet continues to exist even when the flower has unfolded in the water. And since Bohm backed up his theory with scientific argument, his ‘implicate order’ theory could be regarded as a scientific justification of Pribram’s flash of absurd inspiration. (Readers who find all this difficult to follow may be reassured by Pribram’s admission that he does not understand his own theory.)
In one obvious sense, Bohm and
Pribram are clearly correct. My eyes and brain ‘interpret’ energy with a wavelength of 16 millionths of an inch so that it appears as the colour red. And when I put on a gramophone record my brain reconstructs all those sound waves generated by wavy lines and turns them into a Beethoven symphony. (A young child finds this far more difficult to do: classical music sounds like a chaotic jumble of notes.) Our brains are interpreters of reality, exactly as if they were translating Japanese into English.
Now let us assume, for a moment, that what my wife ‘picked up’ in Bodmin gaol was a ‘tape-recording’ of the anguish of men who knew they were soon going to be hanged. We do not know the mechanism of this recording but it cannot be all that much more complicated than a compact disc. My wife’s objective mind is not sensitive enough to ‘pick up’ this ‘recording’, but her subjective mind has the power to ‘play it back’ and communicates something of its distress to her muscles, which cause a response in the dowsing rod. Some of this flood of information communicates itself to her objective mind, producing the ‘unpleasant atmosphere’.
Now our brains can certainly distinguish between their own thoughts — or imaginings — and the world ‘out there’. But the powerful impressions my wife experienced in the gaol were not her own thoughts or imaginings. They were as real, in their way, as the light that registers on her eyes and the sounds that make her eardrums vibrate. If she were sensitive enough to see these energy frequencies, is it not possible that she might have mistaken them for reality, just as a hologram can be mistaken for the real thing?
All this sounds most satisfyingly logical. We might even feel justified in claiming that we have placed ‘the paranormal’ on truly scientific foundations. With the aid of the ‘tape-recording’ theory we can explain all kinds of baffling phenomena, from ghosts and ‘visions’ to telepathy, psychometry and clairvoyance. Yet there is still one problem that defies all attempts at logical explanation: glimpses of the future. Consider the following story:
In 1935 Wing Commander Victor Goddard — who later became Air Marshal Sir Victor Goddard — decided to visit a disused First World War airfield at Drem, near Edinburgh. It proved to be in a state of dilapidation, with disintegrating hangars and cracked tarmac. Cattle grazed on the old airfield. Later that day Goddard took off in his Hawker Hart biplane from Turnhouse, Edinburgh, to head for home. But he soon encountered thick cloud and heavy rain, and as he tried to descend below the cloud ceiling the plane spun for a few moments out of control. He managed to straighten out close to the ground — so close that he almost hit a woman who was running with a pram. Ahead of him was the Firth of Forth, and Goddard decided to head for Drem airfield to get his bearings.
It was still raining heavily as he crossed the airfield boundary. Then an odd thing happened: he suddenly found himself in bright sunlight. And Drem airfield was no longer an overgrown field, but a neat, orderly place, with four yellow planes parked in front of open hangar doors and mechanics in blue overalls walking around. Both these things surprised Goddard, for in those days all RAF planes were painted with aluminium and mechanics wore khaki overalls. Moreover the mechanics did not even glance up as the plane roared a few feet overhead: Goddard had the feeling that they did not see him. He also had the feeling of ‘something ethereal about the sunlight’.
When he landed he told his immediate superior about his ‘hallucination’, and was advised to lay off the whisky. So Goddard said nothing about his ‘vision’ in his official report. It was not until four years later, when war broke out, that he received an even greater shock. Next time he saw Drem it had been transformed into the airfield of his vision. The ‘trainers’ were now painted yellow and the mechanics wore blue overalls. A monoplane he had failed to recognize four years earlier he now identified as a Miles Magister.
Recordings from the past are a reality, as every film and gramophone record demonstrates. But a recording from the future sounds preposterous. Even if we assume it was a hallucination, and not a ‘time-slip’ into the future, it remains just as impossible.
David Bohm would not agree: he has stated, ‘The implicate order is there all at once, having nothing to do with time.’ Neither would Eileen Garrett: she said about her experiences of precognition, ‘The experience remains as “real” as any other and suggests that there must be a timeless and spaceless communion between our intuitive selves and the eternal laws of nature’ — a comment that becomes twice as significant if we substitute ‘right brain’ for ‘intuitive selves’. She has also said that ‘on clairvoyant levels there exists a simultaneity of time’. All of which, of course, leaves us just as bewildered as ever. Yet one of her statements about clairvoyance seems to throw a little light on this baffling process. ‘In clairvoyant vision I do not look out at objects … as in ordinary seeing, but I seem to draw the perceived object towards me, so that the essence of its life and the essence of mine become, for the moment, one and the same thing.’ Now this sounds very like Maria de Zierold’s comment that she seemed to become the objects she psychometrized, which in turn reminds us that Bergson said that we can know objects by somehow ‘getting inside them’. And that in turn reminds us that Bergson also said that we can only know time ‘intuitively’. As soon as we think about it we shatter it into unreal fragments. Is it possible that in trying to explain Goddard’s experience in ‘logical’ terms, we are already erecting an insuperable barrier between ourselves and the reality? But Eileen Garrett has not yet finished her remarks on clairvoyance. She goes on, ‘Thus, to my sense, clairvoyance occurs in states of consciousness whose relations exist as a fact in nature, on levels of being that transcend the present perceptive capacities of our sensory faculties’ [my italics]. Stated in simple terms, this means that clairvoyance is a glimpse of a reality that exists on another level of being. We are back to Kant’s ‘noumena’ and David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’. Eileen Garrett even goes on to use an analogy that sounds like an ‘interference pattern’.
In the clairvoyant experience, one follows a process. Light moves in weaving ribbons and strands, and in and out of these, fragmentary curving lines emerge and fade, moving in various directions. The perception consists of a swiftly moving array of these broken, shifting lines, and in the beginning one gathers meaning out of the flow as the lines create patterns of significance which the acutely attentive clairvoyant perception senses.*
This certainly sounds as if Eileen Garrett is glimpsing the underlying ‘interference pattern’ of reality. And if we merely recall that every fragment of the ‘interference pattern’ contains a complete image of the whole, then we can suddenly catch an intuitive glimpse of how Eileen Garrett could ‘know’ that a missing doctor was in La Jolla, California.
One more fact emerges very clearly. Whatever happened to Goddard, his was not a passive vision of the future. It involved the sudden activation of an unknown power of his own mind. And this is something that cannot be overstressed. In this chapter we have tried to understand ‘time-slips’, psychometric visions and dowsing in terms of an ‘information universe’, of ‘recordings’ that can be ‘picked up’ by some dormant human faculty. All this seems to emphasize the notion that we are merely passive observers. But the theme that has emerged from the first page of this book is that man possesses ‘hidden powers’. He is not a passive creature. The ‘passive fallacy’ is one of the greatest mistakes human beings can make; it condemns us to miss the whole meaning of life. Buckminster Fuller once remarked, ‘I seem to be a verb,’ and this recognition is the first step in understanding the paranormal. Eileen Garrett underlines the same point when she writes:
I have referred to an inner condition of ‘alertness’ which is the essential factor in many of these activities. It is a realization of superior vital living. I enter into a world of intensely vibrant radiation; I am extra competent, I participate fully and intimately in events that move at an increased rate of movement, and though the events that I observe are objective to me, I do more than observe them — I live them.
The conclusion is obvious. Clairvoyance has something to do with being more alive.
*The story is told in detail in Mysteries, pp. 361–3.
*J. B. Priestley, Over the Long High Wall, p. 60.
*Christopher Bird, The Divining Hand, p. 273. I am indebted to this book for the above account of Harvalik.
*For a fuller account of this story see Mysteries, pp. 151–2.
*All these quotations are from Eileen Garrett Adventures in the Supernormal, A Personal Memoir (1949), chapters XV and XVI.
5
Intrusions?
In his autobiographical book Rain Upon Godshill J. B. Priestley describes a disturbing dream:
One night last year I dreamed myself into some foreign city and though I had no name and did not know what I looked like, I felt I was a younger and smaller man, really somebody else, a student or something of that kind; and I crept into a room where there were a number of tiny models of some military or naval invention; and I had just taken one of these from the table when two uniformed officers rushed in, and as I was running out of the opposite doorway one of them fired several times at me, wounding me severely, and as I staggered out into the street I could feel my life ebbing away. I was actually wounded during the war but not in this fashion, and have never in waking existence felt my life fast ebbing away, and I do not believe I could invent that vast throbbing gush of weakness. No doubt most of the dream was my own invention, though I am not given to melodrama of this kind, but I will swear that that swaying progress from the office into the street and the blind weakness that washed over me there were somebody’s last moments and that my consciousness had relived them.