Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  Vogel, like Playfair, had demonstrated that the projection of a telepathic image is not a hit-or-miss affair, and the experiments of Mavromatis with hypnagogia point unmistakably to the same conclusion.

  A case cited by Brian Inglis in his book The Power of Dreams seems to suggest that hypnagogia is even conducive to precognition. In a letter to the Koestler Foundation, his correspondent describes how she woke up one morning,

  … to find I was not in my own bed, in my flat, but in the bed of a male colleague. Although I had never been in his flat before, I knew immediately where I was; but I did not have any of the feeling of surprise, horror or exhilaration that might be associated with such an event. I should perhaps emphasize that I grasped the situation through tactile rather than visual evidence, as I hadn’t yet opened my eyes.

  When she opened her eyes she realized that she was in her own bed.

  She had paid very little attention to the colleague in question, for she was in love with someone else and she knew the colleague had a girlfriend. Yet that evening, at some official university function, he invited her to slip out to a pub and they ended in a ‘necking situation’ which would probably have ended in his bed. Recalling her ‘dream’ of that morning, she refused to let it go any further. Thinking it over later, it struck her that in those days of inadequate contraception — it was 1956 — she might well have found herself pregnant, faced with a shotgun wedding or single parenthood, and that her hypnagogic illusion had been, in fact, a warning not to yield to a pleasant impulse.

  How precognition can possibly work — in hypnagogia or any other state — is a subject that must be considered in the next chapter. For the moment it is enough to observe that this case reinforces the notion of a link between hypnagogia and the paranormal.

  Another distinguished student of occultism, Rudolf Steiner, stated that the best time to communicate with the dead is before falling asleep or just after waking up. Steiner’s personal experience left him in no doubt that communication with the dead is possible. Brought up in a tiny village in Austria among mountains and woods, Steiner always had a capacity for sinking into deep states of contemplation. He claimed that the peace of nature made him aware ‘not only of trees and mountains … but also of the Beings who lived behind them, the spirits of nature that can be observed in such a region’. In his autobiography he tells how, as a small boy, he was sitting in a station waiting-room when a strange woman came in. Steiner noticed that she bore a strong resemblance to other members of his family. The woman said to the boy, ‘Try and help me as much as you can,’ then walked into the stove and vanished. Not long after Steiner learned that a female relative had died at exactly the same time he had seen the ‘ghost’.

  As a result of such experiences, Steiner formulated his basic doctrine:

  I said to myself: the objects and events seen by means of the senses exist in space. This space is outside man; but within him exists a kind of soul-space, which is the setting for spiritual beings and events. It was impossible for me to regard thoughts as mere pictures we form of things. To me they were revelations of a spiritual world seen on the stage of the soul … . I felt that knowledge of the spiritual world must actually exist within the soul as an objective reality, just like geometry.

  This is a baffling doctrine, for it seems to contradict our everyday experience. If I sink into a state of revery, I do not see ‘revelations of the spiritual world’ and I certainly do not see ghosts. Yet throughout his life Steiner insisted that the world inside us is the spirit world. But by now we should at least be able to catch a glimpse of what he meant. ‘Entering the inner world’ was not merely falling into a state of revery: it was falling down the rabbit hole.

  Like Arnold Toynbee, Steiner had an ability to make imaginative contact with the past. In my book on Steiner I summarized it as follows:

  On the same trip [to Weimar] he visited Martin Luther’s room in the Wartburg, as well as spending time in Berlin and Munich. There can be no doubt that this first journey into the greater world was of immense importance for Steiner. His natural capacity for floating off into mental worlds meant that every historical site and art gallery was a vital imaginative experience. Most of us find historical sites a fairly superficial experience; the guide assures us that such and such an event took place there, and we take his word for it; but we are more aware of the other tourists and the souvenir shops and the ice-cream vans. All his life, Steiner had the ability to enter into the spirit of a place, to conjure up scenes that had taken place in the past. So in front of Goethe’s statue in Weimar he felt that ‘a life-giving air was being wafted over everything’, while his visit to the Wartburg impressed him so much that he felt it was one of the most memorable days of his life.*

  Another mystic, William Blake, held precisely this same view of the inner world. He wrote in his Descriptive Catalogue: ‘This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body [my italics]. This world of Imagination is infinite and eternal … . There exist in that eternal world the permanent realities of everything that we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.’ This last sentence sounds very like the conclusion reached in the last chapter: that we are living in an ‘information universe’ where everything is somehow ‘on record’, and it reminds us that Steiner also believed that the history of the universe is available to inspection by mystics. Steiner borrowed a term from Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy and called this ‘library’ the Akashic Records. Many Theosophists claimed to be able to ‘read’ the Akashic Records. The scholar G. R. S. Mead wrote a book called Did Jesus Live 100 bc?, based on a Jewish document called the Toldoth Jeschu about a certain Rabbi Jeschu who lived about 100 bc, suggesting that Jesus and Jeschu were the same person. In the introduction he admitted that one of his reasons for entertaining this hypothesis was that many friends with ‘clairvoyant faculties’ were unanimous in declaring that the historical Jesus lived a century before the traditional date. ‘They, one and all, claim that, if they turn their attention to the matter, they can see the events of those far-off days passing before their mind’s eye, or rather, that for the time being they seem to be in the midst of them, even as we ordinarily observe events in actual life.’ These friends are identified, in a little book called Occult Investigations by C. Jinarajadasa, as Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater of the Theosophical Society. Another member of the Theosophical Society, W. Scott-Elliott, wrote a history of Atlantis and Lemuria based upon his own investigations of the Akashic Records. Steiner himself produced a kind of history of the universe, called Cosmic Memory, in which he includes accounts of Atlantis and Lemuria.

  The normally sceptical reader will find it hard to swallow these accounts of ‘earth history’ by Steiner, Scott-Elliott and ‘Bishop’ Leadbeater. Yet this is in itself no reason for rejecting the idea of ‘cosmic memory’. William Denton devoted the third volume of The Soul of Things to ‘astronomical examinations’ which consist largely of the ‘visions’ of his son Sherman of the planets Mars, Venus and Jupiter. After the first two volumes, with their impressive evidence about ancient Greece and Rome, it is a keen disappointment. Venus has giant trees like toadstools which are full of sweet jelly. Mars has men with four fingers and blonde hair, while Jupiter is peopled by blue-eyed blondes who can float in the air. It is clear that Sherman’s unconscious mind had been pulling his leg. Yet the evidence based upon psychometric examination of objects in the first two volumes remains very impressive indeed. The lesson to be learned is that in these ‘borderland’ areas of the mind, ‘clairvoyant’ perceptions can easily blend into dreams which possess all the amazing reality of hypnagogic imagery.

  Steiner’s explanation of ‘cosmic memory’ is that:

  … in the spiritual sense, what is ‘past’ has not really vanished, but is still there. In physical life men have this conception in regard to space only. If you stand in front of a tree, then go away and look back … the tree has not dis
appeared. In the spiritual world the same is true in regard to time. If you experience something at one moment, it has passed away the next as far as physical consciousness is concerned; spiritually conceived, it has not passed away. You can look back at it just as you can look back at the tree.

  A comment like this ceases to be baffling if we recall Toynbee’s experiences in Greece in 1912: he was somehow able to look back on past events as if they were actually happening in the present moment. In everyday life, our physical senses hurry us along so that experiences quickly fade and disappear. Yet we know that they are all stored in memory, and that some chance occurrence — like Proust’s cake dipped in tea — can revive them in all their reality. Steiner is declaring that if we can learn to retreat deep inside ourselves — ‘down the rabbit hole’ — we can contact not only our own past memories but those of the race. He also declares that it is through this ability to enter his own ‘inner world’ that he is able to converse with the dead. In a lecture called ‘The Dead Are With Us’ he explains:

  Besides waking life and sleeping life there is a third state, even more important for intercourse with the spiritual world … . I mean the state connected with the act of waking and the act of going to sleep, which lasts only for a few brief seconds … . At the moment of going to sleep the spiritual world approaches us with power, but we immediately fall asleep, losing consciousness of what has passed through the soul.

  If we wish to ask a question of the dead, we should ‘carry it in the soul’ until the moment of sleep, and then put the question. It must be imbued with deep feeling and with will, so it is committed to the subconscious mind. Then the answer will come from inside us. In his autobiography Steiner describes two occasions on which he became ‘intimately acquainted’ with the souls of the dead. On the first occasion he had been introduced into the family of a fellow student but had not met the father, who was an invalid and a recluse. Yet when the father died Steiner knew so much about his life and personality that he was asked to deliver the funeral oration. Eight years later, in Weimar, Steiner took lodgings in the house of a widow named Anna Eunicke, whose husband had recently died: once again, Steiner claimed that he was able to get to know the dead man intimately.

  Unfortunately there is no corroborative evidence of Steiner’s claims. But this is not so in the case of another mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, who also claimed to be able to enter the ‘spirit world’ at will, and whose Spiritual Diary makes it clear that he used hypnagogic states to gain access to that world. In 1761 the widow of the Dutch ambassador told Swedenborg that a silversmith was dunning her for payment for a tea service which she was convinced her late husband had already paid for. A few days later Swedenborg told her that he had spoken to her husband in the spirit world and that he had a message from him: the receipt for the tea service would be found in a secret drawer in his bureau together with some secret correspondence. Both the receipt and the correspondence were found where Swedenborg said they would be. On another occasion Swedenborg was asked by the Queen of Sweden to give her regards to her dead brother. When he next saw her he told her that her brother apologized for not answering her last letter, and would now do so through Swedenborg. As Swedenborg delivered the message the Queen turned pale and said, ‘No one but God knows this secret.’

  We may of course prefer to dismiss the notion that Swedenborg derived his information from the dead: what is clear is that he was able to obtain information ‘paranormally’, and that he made use of hypnagogic states to enter this ‘inner world’.* His own words echo those of Steiner: ‘Nay, there is another kind of vision which comes in a state between sleep and wakefulness. The man then supposes that he is fully awake, as it were, inasmuch as all his senses are active … .’ Swedenborg called this state ‘passive potency’, underlining Eileen Garrett’s point that the mind needs to be in a strange state that is at once passive and active.

  There seems, then, to be a remarkable unanimity of opinion that entering ‘psi states’ involves a withdrawal from the external world and a relaxation into an ‘inner world’ that goes far deeper than ordinary relaxation. What continues to be difficult to grasp is this notion that entering our ‘inner’ world can somehow give us access to a wider reality — after all, the world ‘out there’ is ‘out there’ and not inside us. But then if Mavromatis is correct when he suggests that ‘hypnagogic images may be meaningful phenomena belonging to another mind’ — that is, they seem ‘alien’ because they are alien — then the ‘inside’ of our own minds may be our point of contact with a wider reality. Mrs Upton Sinclair made the same suggestion when she wrote that ‘if clairvoyance is real, then we may have access to all knowledge. We may really be fountains, or outlets of one vast mind.’ If telepathy is real, ‘then my mind is not my own … . I and the universe of men are one.’ Upton Sinclair expanded these comments:

  What telepathy means to my wife is this: it seems to indicate a common substratum of mind, underlying our individual minds, and which we can learn to tap. Figure the conscious mind as a tree, and the subconscious mind as the roots of that tree: then what of the earth in which the tree grows, and from which it derives its sustenance? What currents run through that earth, affecting all the trees of the forest? If one trees falls, the earth is shaken, and may not the other trees feel the impulse?

  In other words we are apparently getting hints of a cosmic consciousness, or cosmic unconsciousness; some kind of mind-stuff which is common to us all, and which we can bring into our individual consciousness. Why is it not sensible to think that there may be a universal mind-stuff, just as there is a universal body-stuff, of which we are made, and to which we return?

  Comments like this immediately induce the modern reader to think of Carl Jung and the ‘collective unconscious’. But Sinclair was writing Mental Radio in the late 1920s, when Jung’s name was scarcely known outside Switzerland. In fact Jung had already developed his own peculiar technique for falling ‘down the rabbit hole’, although at that time it was known only to a few of his patients and colleagues. It was only revealed to the general public in 1960, with the publication of his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. In it Jung tells how, after the break with Freud in 1913 — which shook him to his foundations — he began to experience severe states of self-doubt and depression. On a train journey in October 1913 — when no one had any reason to expect war — he experienced a hallucination that all Europe was submerged by a flood and covered with floating rubble and drowned bodies; finally the water turned into blood. Since the ‘vision’ lasted an hour, he suspected he was close to insanity. ‘I was living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of stone were tumbling down on me.’ As the hallucinations persisted Jung tried to hold his tensions in check with yoga exercises, but he often found himself whispering aloud: the forces of the unconscious were trying to break loose. The idea of surrendering to these forces aroused resistance and fear. Then one day he decided to take the risk:

  I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths. I could not fend off a feeling of panic. But then, abruptly, at not too great a depth, I landed on my feet in a soft, sticky mass. I felt great relief, although I was apparently in complete darkness. After a while my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, which was rather like a deep twilight. Before me was the entrance to a cave, in which stood a dwarf with a leathery skin, as if he were mummified. I squeezed past him through the narrow entrance and waded knee deep through icy water to the other end of the cave where, on a projecting rock, I saw a glowing red crystal. I grasped the stone, lifted it, and discovered a hollow underneath. At first I could make out nothing, but then I saw there was running water. In it a corpse floated by, a youth with blond hair and a wound in the head. He was followed by a gigantic black scarab and then by a red, newborn sun, rising up out of the depths of the water. Dazzled by the light, I wanted to repl
ace the stone upon the opening, but then a fluid welled out. It was blood. It seemed to me that the blood continued to spurt for an unendurably long time. At last it ceased, and the vision came to an end.

  Jung came to believe that the youth was Siegfried, and that he symbolized the Kaiser’s Germany, determined to have her own way. But he also symbolized Jung himself, trying to impose his will upon the forces of the unconscious. Siegfried had to be killed and the unconscious allowed to well up like blood.

  From then on Jung discovered the secret of ‘falling down the rabbit hole’. The method involved imagining a steep descent. ‘The first time I reached, as it were, a depth of about a thousand feet; the next time I found myself at the edge of a cosmic abyss. It was like a voyage to the moon, or a descent into empty space.’ He found himself in a crater and felt he was in the land of the dead. Then he saw two figures: a white bearded old man and a young girl. They identified themselves as Elijah and Salome and Jung had a long conversation with Elijah ‘which, however, I did not understand’.

  This inevitably recalls Wilson Van Dusen’s conversation with the Emanation of the Eternal Feminine, and the gas-pipe fitter’s request to be given just one clue as to what they had been talking about. It also recalls Van Dusen’s remark about hypnagogic states: ‘Even very average people who explore this region can run into strange people and strange symbolic conversations that look like visitations from another world.’ Clearly Jung had stumbled upon his own method of entering this ‘third state of consciousness’. In fact Jung encountered a figure called Philemon, another old man, who seemed to him to have an independent existence:

  Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in a forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air … . It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, the reality of the psyche.