Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  Jung is here making a point of crucial importance. He remarks that after his visions of Europe covered with blood an inner voice told him, ‘Look at it well: it is wholly real and will be so. You cannot doubt it.’ And in August 1914 it became real. May Sinclair makes the same point. Sometimes her telepathic ‘visions’ were like fantasies, but on other occasions they had an odd quality of ‘truth’ that left no doubt. ‘I think a study of them shows that a true vision comes into the subconsciousness, not directly from the drawing [which she is trying to guess], but from another mind which has some means of knowing, and sending to consciousness via the subconsciousness … .’ The true visions brought a hunch, and if she asked, ‘Is this right or not?’, ‘this question seemed to receive an answer, “Yes”, as if some intelligent entity was directly informing me.’

  Now this is in fact a vitally important step in the argument of this book. We began by considering ‘visions’ like those of Eileen Garrett and trying to explain them in terms of some mysterious human faculty, the power of falling ‘down the rabbit hole’. There followed the suggestion that everything that has ever happened is somehow ‘on record’, and that the human mind can extract information from the record by means of the ‘subjective mind’. But in the case of the missing doctor it is hard to see how such a faculty could operate, since the fragment of shirt handed to Eileen Garrett had been worn by the doctor on the day before he left home. One possible explanation, of course, is that the doctor had already decided to vanish to La Jolla before he left home and that the decison had somehow been ‘imprinted’ on his shirt. In this particular case, such an explanation is plausible. But it would be possible to cite dozens of other cases in which this is not so. In 1956 a pretty typist named Joy Aken disappeared after leaving her office in Durban, South Africa. Her family approached a psychic named Nelson Palmer and asked if he could help. Palmer told them to bring some items of the girl’s underwear to his home. As he rested his hands on the clothing, Palmer told Joy’s mother that the girl was dead and that her body lay in a culvert. He then guided a group of searchers to a culvert sixty miles away where the girl’s body — with gunshot wounds in the head — was discovered. A man named Clarence Van Buuren was later hanged for her murder.*

  It is clearly impossible that this girl’s clothing could have somehow ‘recorded’ information about her murder since she was not wearing it at the time. But May Sinclair provides a possible explanation when she states that, ‘it was as if some intelligent entity was directly informing me’. The intelligent entity could, of course, be Hudson’s ‘subjective mind’. But that still leaves us with the problem of how the ‘subjective mind’ of a psychometrist could obtain information from a garment that had no connection with a crime.

  We have already encountered this same problem in the field of dowsing. Harvalik’s magnetic gradients provide a perfectly satisfactory explanation for the dowser’s ability to find underground water or minerals, but they totally fail to explain how a map dowser can detect the same things by dangling his pendulum over a map. (It need not even be a printed map; I have described in Mysteries how the Welsh dowser Bill Lewis accurately traced the course of a stream on a map I had sketched with a pencil, even indicating the point where a pipe ran off at a right angle to carry water to our cottage.) Most books on dowsing prefer to avoid the subject, to escape embarrassment. Yet most dowsers seem to feel that this odd ability is as ‘normal’ as their power to locate water with a divining rod. One of the most famous of French dowsers, the Abbé Mermet, ‘explained’ map dowsing by commenting that thought waves can travel round the world with the speed of light, and that therefore it is just as easy to dowse for something on the other side of the globe as in your own back garden; but he did not bother to explain how ‘thought’ can locate — for example — a sunken wreck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Here again the intelligent entity hypothesis seems to offer a more straightforward explanation.

  Jung’s attempt to resolve the mystery has something in common with David Bohm’s ‘implicate order’ theory — the notion that the ‘underlying reality’ of the world contains information about the whole universe — as well as with Rudolf Steiner’s Akashic Records. According to Jung, the ‘collective unconscious’ of the human race also contains knowledge of everything that has ever happened. He goes on to use this theory to explain a curious ‘psychic’ experience. One of his patients had relapsed into a state of depression:

  At about two o’clock — I must have just fallen asleep — I awoke with a start, and had the feeling that someone had come into the room; I even had the impression that the door had been hastily opened. I instantly turned on the light, but there was nothing. Someone might have mistaken the door, I thought, and I looked into the corridor. But it was still as death. ‘Odd,’ I thought, ‘someone did come into the room!’ Then I tried to recall exactly what had happened, and it occurred to me that I had been awakened by a feeling of dull pain, as though something had struck my forehead and then the back of my skull. The following day I received a telegram saying that my patient had committed suicide. He had shot himself. Later I learned that the bullet had come to rest in the back wall of the skull.*

  The straightforward explanation of this experience would seem to be telepathy — perhaps the patient was thinking about Jung as he prepared to blow his brains out. Jung preferred something more complicated:

  The experience was a genuine synchronistic phenomenon such as is quite often observed in connection with an archetypal situation — in this case, death. By means of a relativization of time and space in the unconscious it could well be that I had perceived something which in reality was taking place elsewhere. The collective unconscious is common to all: it is the foundation of what the ancients called ‘the sympathy of all things’. In this case the unconscious had knowledge of my patient’s condition. All that evening, in fact, I had felt curiously restive and nervous, very much in contrast to my usual mood.

  To understand this passage we have to recall that Jung believed that Philemon, Elijah and Salome were ‘intelligent entities’ who had their own independent existence outside his own mind. He believed, in effect, that he had walked out of his own personal ‘unconscious’ and had met them in the common ground of the collective unconscious. So if we brush aside the screen of abstractions about ‘the relativization of time and space in the unconscious’, he is really suggesting that his knowledge of his patient’s suicide came from ‘intelligent entities’ — exactly as May Sinclair does.

  As Jung learned the techniques of plunging ‘down the rabbit hole’, he began to enter into a curious relationship with these intelligent entities. Another entity called Ka — more demonic than Philemon — made his appearance, and Jung began writing accounts of his encounters in a notebook he called his Black Book. One day as he was writing he asked himself the question, ‘What am I really doing?’, and a female voice inside his head answered clearly, ‘It is art.’ It was the voice of a female patient who had been in love with Jung. When, later, he asked the same question, the same voice replied clearly, ‘It is art.’ Whereupon Jung invited ‘her’ to explain exactly what she meant: as a result she came through with a long statement. Jung then decided that this ‘inner woman’ was an essential part of his own soul and christened it ‘the anima’ — the female component in men. And he came to suspect that her assertion ‘It is art’ was an attempt to persuade him to see himself as a great misunderstood artist and so to bring about his destruction. (Unfortunately he failed to explain precisely why his anima should wish to destroy him.)

  In 1916 the ‘entities’ seemed to escape from his unconscious (or the collective unconscious) into the real world. The air seemed to be full of ghosts. His eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through the room while the blanket was twice snatched from the bed of his youngest daughter. Later the following afternoon the doorbell began ringing frantically, but when they answered it there was no one there.

  Then I knew that something had to happen
. The whole house was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed deep right to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a-quiver with the question, ‘For God’s sake, what in the world is this?’ Then they cried out in chorus, ‘We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought.’

  Jung snatched up his pen and began to write: in three evenings he had written a curious work entitled Seven Sermons to the Dead, written in the rather pompous, inflated style which Jung says is typical of the ‘archetypes’.

  Does this mean that Jung felt he had been dealing with real ‘spirits’? Apparently yes. He says, ‘The intellect, of course, would like … to write the whole thing off as a violation of the rules. But what a dreary world it would be if the rules were not broken sometimes!’

  It must be emphasized that at the time Jung kept these experiences very much to himself. He had his career to think of. Nothing would have delighted Freud more than for Jung to openly declare himself a believer in ‘the occult’ so that he could say, ‘I told you these weird ideas would drive him mad … .’ The result was that Jung played his cards very close to his chest. In 1920 he rented a cottage near London and was disturbed by knocking noises, unpleasant smells and sounds as if a large animal was rushing around the bedroom — typical ‘poltergeist phenomena’. One night, as the walls echoed to a storm of blows, Jung opened his eyes to find himself looking at half a head — of an old woman — on his pillow. He left hastily and the cottage was pulled down. Yet as late as 1948 he wrote a postscript to an article on ‘spirits’ in which he claimed they were ‘projections of the unconscious’ stating that he could not make up his mind whether spirits really existed ‘because I am not in a position to adduce experiences that would prove it one way or the other.’ This sounds — to put it mildly — slightly disingenuous. And it was not until two years later that he finally dared to relate his experience in the haunted cottage in the introduction to a book called Ghosts: Reality or Delusion?

  Jung also preferred to keep silent about another ‘occult’ interest, the Chinese book of oracles known as the I Ching. This ancient text contains sixty-four ‘oracles’, and is consulted by a chance procedure involving coins or yarrow stalks. The simplest method is to throw down three pennies. A preponderance of heads gives a straight line; a preponderance of tails a broken line. When placed on top of one another, these lines form a hexagram which indicates which of the sixty-four oracles contains the answer to the question. (The question must be clearly formulated in the mind before consulting the oracle.)

  Obviously there is no possible scientific justification for the procedure; yet Jung was studying — and consulting — the I Ching from 1920 onward. He did not admit to it until 1950 when, after an accident that brought him to the verge of death, he obviously felt that it was time to speak frankly. Then he justified his interest in the I Ching by discussing what he called ‘synchronicities’ — those baffling, apparently meaningful coincidences that give us the feeling that fate is trying to tell us something. Jung gives an example from his own experience: after making a note about a mythical creature that was half man and half fish, he had fish for lunch, someone mentioned the custom of making an ‘April fish’ (April fool) of someone, a patient showed him a picture of a fish, he saw an embroidery of fishes and sea monsters, and, finally, a patient told him about a dream of a fish that night. On the day he wrote all this down, he found a large fish on the wall by the lake.

  Writing an introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching Jung was confronted with the problem of how to justify such ‘occult’ notions in scientific terms. He compromised by describing synchronicity as ‘an acausal connecting principle’ — a completely meaningless term meaning a cause that is not a cause. But it sounded more or less scientific, and Jung later tried to justify it by publishing his essay on synchronicity in a book that also contained an essay by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, arguing that the astronomer Kepler had invented the idea of ‘archetypes’.

  Pauli, oddly enough, was himself an amusing example of what Jung meant by synchronicity. He seemed to have some odd power of making things go wrong. One day in Göttingen a complex piece of apparatus suddenly collapsed without apparent cause, and Professor J. Franck remarked jokingly, ‘Pauli must be around somewhere.’ He wrote to ask Pauli where he was at the time and discovered that Pauli was actually on the railway platform in Gottingen, changing trains.

  Having convinced himself — and many other respectable psychologists — that synchronicity was a scientifically justifiable idea, Jung continued to use it to explain anything that he felt might sound suspiciously ‘occult’. We have seen, for example, how he explained his telepathic experience of his patient’s suicide by describing it as ‘a genuine synchronistic phenomenon such as is quite often observed in connection with an archetypal situation’ — an explanation which obviously has no relation to what actually happened but which sounds comfortingly scientific.

  In fact most of the examples Jung mentions in his lecture ‘On Synchronicity’ are not about synchronicity at all. He mentions a student friend who had a dream of a Spanish city: when he went to Spain on holiday he recognized the scene of his dream, even to a carriage with two cream coloured horses. This is obviously precognition. Jung then mentions some of Rhine’s experiments in card guessing — but this, again, is not synchronicity but ESP. It is only then that he comes to a case that fits his own definition of synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence. He was having considerable difficulty with a young female patient ‘who always knew better about everything’ and whose rationalism seemed impregnable. One day, as she was telling Jung about a vivid dream of a golden scarab, there was a tapping on the window: Jung opened it and a gold-green scarab — a rose-chafer — flew into the room. Jung caught it and handed it to the patient. ‘Here is your scarab.’ This ‘punctured the desired hole in her rationalism’ and broke the ice of her resistance.

  A far more impressive example is noted in Jung’s short book on synchronicity. In 1914 a mother took a photograph of her son in the Black Forest and left it to be developed in a shop in Strasbourg, but the outbreak of war made it impossible to collect it. In 1916 she bought a film in Frankfurt and took a photograph of her baby daughter. When the film was developed it proved to be a double exposure, with the photograph of her son underneath that of her daughter — somehow, her original film had got back into circulation among new films. Jung took the story from a book called Chance by Wilhelm von Scholz, who suggests that these coincidences are arranged ‘as if they were the dream of a greater and more comprehensive consciousness which is unknowable’. Another psychiatrist, Herbert Silberer, encapsulated his own feeling in the title of a book, Chance: the Kobold-tricks of the Unconscious (a kobold being a mischievous hobgoblin).

  Odd coincidences certainly produce in us the ‘creepy’ feeling that fate is nudging us in the ribs, attempting to make us realize that life is more meaningful than we thought. In the opening sentence of ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ Poe writes, ‘There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character, that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them.’ This sentence was itself one of a series of synchronicities that occurred when I began to write an article on the subject of synchronicity. The decision to write the article, in an encyclopaedia of unsolved mysteries, arose when I was about to write an article on whether Joan of Arc was really burnt at the stake. While looking for something on a library shelf I noticed a series of bound volumes of the International History Magazine and decided that it might be worth spending some time looking through them for unsolved mysteries. I opened the first volume at random and found myself looking at an article on Joan of Arc which raised the question of whether she survived her execution. Soon after this I noticed a newspaper
cutting that my wife had left outside my study — she told me she had cut it out because it contained an interesting reference to Ernest Hemingway. In fact it proved to be an article about strange coincidences concerning lost manuscripts. These ‘coincidences’ made me decide to add an article on synchronicity to the encyclopaedia. But first I had to write an article on the case of the disappearance of the New York ‘cigar girl’ Mary Rogers, on which Poe based his Marie Roget story. Its opening sentence, quoted above, confirmed the decision to write the synchronicity article.

  It is obviously important to distinguish between ordinary coincidence and synchronicity, which might be defined as a coincidence so outrageous that it cannot be shrugged off as coincidence. Here are two personal examples which I would dismiss as coincidence. In 1967 my wife and I were flying to Phoenix, Arizona when I commented suddenly, ‘The famous meteor crater ought to be around here somewhere.’ My wife looked out of the window and said, ‘There it is.’ In fact we were flying over it. In 1974 we were flying to Beirut across the Mediterranean and I said, ‘We ought to be flying somewhere near Santorini at some point.’ We looked out of the window and discovered we were flying over it at that moment.

  Here is an example — which occurred in the past twenty-four hours — which seems to me to stretch the definition of the word ‘coincidence’ without breaking it. During the morning, tidying a pile of books and magazines in a corner of the bedroom, I found a copy of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research containing a review of a book — which I have recently read — debunking the whole field of the paranormal. In the course of the piece the reviewer mentions the researcher S. G. Soal, who is attacked in the book, and mentions that there is no positive evidence that he cheated. Later, in my morning post, I found a review of my book Afterlife by D. Scott Rogo in which he reproached me for citing that well-known fraud, S. G. Soal. I wrote a letter to Mr Rogo citing the SPR Journal review. An hour later, searching for a book in my untidy study, I came across a volume lying open under a pile of books: it was about parapsychology in South Africa and was open at an article by Basil Shackleton — the ‘psychic’ with whom Soal worked — in which he gave reasons for not believing Soal to have been a cheat.