by Colin Wilson
These experiments also seem to have convinced Ouspensky that the future is, in some sense, predetermined. On one occasion he asked himself whether communication with the dead was a possibility and immediately ‘saw’ someone with whom he urgently wanted to communicate. But what he ‘saw’ was not the person but his whole life, in a kind of four-dimensional continuum. At that moment Ouspensky realized that it was pointless to feel guilt about his own failure to be more helpful to this particular person because the events of his life were as unchangeable as the features of his face. ‘Nobody could have changed anything in them, just as nobody could have changed the colour of his hair or eyes, or the shape of his nose … .’ In other words, what happened to the man was his ‘destiny’.
It was also during these experiments that Ouspensky had a clear premonition that he would not be going to Moscow that Easter, as he fully intended to. He was able to foresee a sequence of events that would make his visit impossible. And in due course this sequence occurred exactly as he had foreseen it in his mystical state. Ouspensky, therefore, had no doubt that precognition is a reality.
Priestley borrowed Ouspensky’s idea for his third ‘time play’, I Have Been Here Before, in which a thoroughly unsatisfactory character who has committed suicide out of self-pity produces a determined effort the ‘second time round’, and makes an altogether better job of his life.
In his book On Time, Dr Michael Shallis, an Oxford don, recounts two personal anecdotes which seem to offer support for Ouspensky’s theory. Dr Shallis remembers how, when he was twelve, he came in through the back door of his house and called to his mother, who was upstairs, to say that he was back: as he did so he was overwhelmed by the feeling that this had happened before, and that his mother would call down that they were going to have salad for dinner — which she did. Now this case could be labelled ‘doubtful’, for it is my own experience that such feelings may be the reactivation of some half-forgotten memory, or perhaps some malfunction in the computer known as the brain, which tells us that an experience is ‘familiar’ when it is actually not. (His mother’s information about the salad could have been coincidence — or perhaps they always had salad on that day of the week.) But Dr Shallis’s second case seems altogether odder.
Shallis was giving a tutorial on radioactivity when he was again swamped with the déja-vu feeling. He felt that the next thing that ‘had’ to happen was that he should suggest that he needed a certain book from his office, and then go to fetch it. He decided that he would break the pattern by resisting the urge to go and get the book. Yet even as he made this resolution he heard his voice saying, ‘I think I had better show you some examples of this. I will just pop down to my office and get a book.’ This certainly seems, on the face of it, an example of the ‘predetermination’ Ouspensky speaks about.
In fact J. B. Priestley came to accept the Ouspensky theory as altogether more realistic than Dunne’s ‘serial time’. But he still had some basic reservations. In his book Man and Time (1964) he illustrates these with a case borrowed from Dr Louisa Rhine. A mother described a dream in which she was camping with some friends on the shores of a creek. She took her baby down to the creek, intending to wash some clothes. Then she remembered that she had forgotten the soap and went back to the tent, leaving the baby throwing stones into the water. When she came back the baby was lying face down in the creek: she pulled him out and found he was dead.
That summer she went camping with some friends, and they chose a spot on the banks of a creek. She decided to do some washing and took her baby down to the water: then she recalled she had forgotten the soap and started back for it. As she did so the baby started to throw stones into the water and her dream flashed into her mind. She realized that everything was exactly as it had been in the dream, even to the baby’s clothes. So she picked up the baby and took him back to the tent with her … .
Here, clearly, is a case where the ‘precognition’ enabled her to avert a catastrophe, and it seems to demonstrate clearly that the future is not rigidly determined. And this view could be supported by many other cases, two of which can be found in a classic study of precognition, The Future is Now by Arthur W. Osborn. An eldest son was visiting his family who were on holiday in a cottage in Hobart, Tasmania. Before he left to drive back to Kingston his mother warned him that she had had a premonition that he would have an accident on the way home, and to drive carefully. Halfway home the young man remembered his mother’s warning and slowed down to twenty-five miles an hour. A few seconds later the car skidded on a patch of ice — the only one on the entire journey — and landed in the ditch after hitting the embankment. The car was badly damaged, but he was unhurt: if he had still been travelling at twice that speed he would have been killed or seriously injured.
In the second incident, a friend of Osborn’s — a music master at a public school — was standing behind a pupil who was playing the piano when the music paper seemed to vanish and he saw a portion of the road he would be driving up that afternoon. As he watched a car came round a bend on the wrong side of the road, driving very fast. Then the scene faded and the music paper was restored to normal. That afternoon, approaching the bend, he suddenly recollected his ‘vision’. Without even thinking he pulled over to the other side of the road. As he did so a car came round the bend on the wrong side, driving very fast, just as he had ‘seen’ it.
These cases are puzzling, for they seem to suggest that far from being predetermined, the future can be altered. And since the premonition was the direct cause of the alteration, it looks as if the warning was deliberately given so that the future could be altered — which begins to sound very much like May Sinclair’s ‘intelligent entity’. This seems to suggest two alternative theories: (1) that the future is not predetermined, but that it is nevertheless possible for us to catch glimpses of what it holds. This sounds so self-contradictory that it suggests the alternative theory (2) that the future is, to some extent, predetermined, but that it can be changed by deliberate effort on the part of human beings.
There is, however, a third possibility, which can best be illustrated by a famous story. This also concerns Air Marshal Goddard, who caught his strange glimpse of Drem airfield in the future. In 1946 Sir Victor Goddard was attending a party given in his honour in Shanghai. He was talking to some friends when he overheard someone behind him announcing that he — Goddard — was dead. He turned round and found himself looking into the face of a British naval commander, Captain Gerald Gladstone. Gladstone immediately recognized him, and looked appalled. ‘I’m terribly sorry! I do apologize!’ ‘But what made you think I was dead?’ ‘I dreamt it.’
Gladstone went on to describe his dream. He had seen the crash of a transport passenger plane, perhaps a Dakota, on a rocky coast: it had been driven down by a terrible snowstorm. In addition to its RAF crew the plane also carried three civilians, two men and a women: they had emerged from the plane, but Air Marshal Goddard had not. Gladstone had awakened with a strong conviction that Goddard was dead, and throughout that day he expected to hear the news.
Goddard was not too worried: he was due to fly to Tokyo in a Dakota, but there would be no civilians on board. He and Gladstone spent a pleasant half hour or so discussing Dunne’s theory of time. But during dinner there were alarming developments. A Daily Telegraph journalist asked if he could beg a lift to Japan. Then the Consul General told Goddard that he had received orders to return to Tokyo immediately and asked if he could travel too; he also asked if they could find room for a female secretary. With deep misgivings, Goddard agreed. And when the plane took off from Shanghai, he personally had no doubt whatever that he was about to die.
The Dakota was caught in heavy cloud over mountains — another detail Captain Gladstone had ‘seen’ — then ran into a fierce snowstorm. Finally the pilot was forced to crash-land on the rocky coastline of an island off the shore of Japan. But Gladstone proved to be mistaken about Goddard’s death: everyone on board survived.
We
can see that in this case, Gladstone’s premonition made no practical difference to Goddard: there was nothing he could do, short of refusing to go to Tokyo. So, unlike the ‘dreamers’ in the earlier anecdotes, he was unable to take evasive action. Yet Gladstone’s premonition of his death was unfulfilled. The logical conclusion seems to be that the future is to some extent predetermined, but not rigidly so. Perhaps the very fact that Goddard knew — or thought he knew — about the crash somehow altered the course of events so that the fatal accident did not take place.
This is, of course, a conclusion that human beings find extremely disturbing. The very thought of predetermination is enough to arouse the suspicion, which we feel in our worst moments, that life is no more than a dream. Yet this is, in a sense, absurd. We accept spatial ‘predetermination’ every day without feeling worried by it. On the contrary I would feel very uneasy if I didn’t know whether the next bus would take me to Piccadilly or Pontefract. Moreover I recognize that spatial predetermination makes no difference to my free will: I can choose whether to go north, south, east or west.
But are we not talking about something totally different? Time is quite different from space, in the sense that something that has not yet happened is not predetermined — something quite different may happen. But a moment’s thought shows us that this is also untrue. Astronomers can predict the movements of stars for centuries ahead, and if they had sufficient knowledge could do so for millions of years. As I now look out of the window I can see the wind blowing washing on the line and also swaying the syringa bush. To me, the next movement of the bush or the clothes seems purely a matter of chance: in fact they are just as predetermined as the movements of the stars — as the weatherman could tell you. What is true is that living beings introduce an element of genuine chance into the picture: my wife may decide to water the garden instead of hanging out the washing. But the bushes, although alive, can introduce very little chance into the picture. Moreover even free will can be described in terms of statistics. The sociologist Durkheim was surprised to discover that it is possible to predict the suicide rate with considerable precision. This seems to imply that with sufficiently detailed knowledge, we could predict exactly who will kill himself next year. This is not quite true, of course, for human beings possess some degree of free will: yet it serves to remind us that in a basic sense, time is just as ‘predetermined’ as space.
To some readers this may seem to be an extremely gloomy picture. But if we grasp its true meaning we shall see that the contrary is true. In The Man Who Was Thursday, the anarchist poet Gregory talks about the delights of chaos:
Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired … ? It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! Oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!
But Gregory’s opponent rejects this.
The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or Baghdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.
This is obviously true: the fact that there are laws of nature — and railway timetables — means that we can become masters of the chaos that surrounds us. When we are tired and discouraged, laws may seem an obstacle; when we are feeling excited and optimistic, we see that what matters is not the law but our freedom to take advantage of it.
Now where ‘predetermination’ is concerned, the real problem is that there are no timetables to tell me what will be happening next week so that I can avoid being in a place where there will be an earthquake or a hurricane. Yet even this is not a rigid law for, as we have seen, people are always foreseeing the future with an accuracy that leaves no doubt that in addition to powers of dowsing, telepathy, psychometry and clairvoyance, human beings also possess remarkable powers of precognition.
In April 1912 a man named J. Connon Middleton dreamed for two nights running of a ship floating keel upwards, with passengers swimming frantically around. He was deeply concerned, since in ten days’ time he was due to sail to New York on the Titanic for a business conference. But he felt unable to cancel his trip on account of a mere dream, and was greatly relieved when the conference was cancelled a week before he was due to sail. A marine engineer named Colin Macdonald also had strong premonitions of disaster about the Titanic and declined three increasingly tempting offers to sign on as its second engineer. The engineer who took the job was drowned when the Titanic went down on 14 April 1912.
The newspaper editor W. T. Stead was less sensible. He was interested in ‘the occult’, and had been warned by two fortune-tellers that he would meet his death on a ship sailing to America. He even wrote a story about an ocean liner that sank because it did not have enough boats, and concluded with the words, ‘This is exactly what might take place, and what will take place, if liners are sent to sea short of boats.’ But Stead was one of those who drowned because the Titanic did not have enough lifeboats.
But the most remarkable example of apparent precognition of the sinking of the Titanic occurred fourteen years earlier. In 1898 an American writer named Morgan Robertson wrote a novel called The Wreck of the Titan about a giant ‘unsinkable’ liner that struck an iceberg and sank — just as the Titanic did. His Titan was 70,000 tons; the Titanic was 66,000. Both were triple-screw vessels capable of 25 knots. The Titan had 24 lifeboats; the Titanic had 20. Both ships were on their maiden voyages from Southampton to New York. Morgan Robertson was a peculiar writer in that his creative activities were semiautomatic. He felt himself to be the tool of some other writer who ‘took over’ when he felt inclined: at other times he was incapable of writing a line. During these ‘dry periods’ he could only wait until his invisible companion chose to manifest himself. It seems a logical conclusion that The Wreck of the Titan was a genuine piece of precognition rather than a ‘coincidence’.
Jung would prefer, of course, to call it a synchronicity, and in the practical sense it obviously makes no difference which we choose to call it. For it is surely obvious by this time that we are speaking about the same thing. We could say that when Rebecca West reached out and found the Nuremberg trial she wanted she was exercising a kind of clairvoyance with respect to space; when she opened Gounod’s memoirs and saw a reference to Delpeche — about whom she had been speaking before she ordered the book — she was exercising a kind of clairvoyance with respect to time. And if this is correct then we could regard synchronicity, far from being a proof of predetermination, as a proof of human free will. It is as if our ‘other self’ (or ‘unknown guest’ as Maeterlinck preferred to call it) had a railway timetable of future events and so could engineer ‘significant coincidences’.
Some recent discoveries about identical twins seem to reinforce this argument. They were made in the late 1970s by an English social worker named John Stroud. In 1979 he was approached by a thiry-nine-year-old woman from Dover, Barbara Herbert, who was searching for her twin sister. Their mother, a Finnish student in London, had abandoned them at the beginning of the Second World War and they had been separately adopted. Barbara discovered her true identity when she applied for a copy of her birth certificate to join a pension scheme. She wrote to a Finnish newspaper, and eventually learned that her mother had committed suicide in 1943. With John Stroud’s help she traced the midwife who had delivered her and even took the registrar general to court in an attempt to learn who had adopted her sister. Eventually she learned that her twin was called Daphne Goodship and that she lived in Wakefield, Yorkshire. Daphne agreed to come to King’s Cross station to meet
her twin. When they finally met, both were wearing a beige dress and a brown velvet jacket. And this proved to be only the first of an astonishing series of coincidences. Both were local government workers, as were their husbands; both had met their husbands at a dance at the age of sixteen and married in their early twenties in the autumn — elaborate weddings with choirs; both had suffered miscarriages with their first baby, then had two boys followed by a girl; both had fallen downstairs at the age of fifteen and both had weak ankles as a consequence; both had been girl guides; both had taken lessons in ballroom dancing; both had lived in Silchester; both read a particular woman’s magazine and had the same favourite authors … . Altogether John Stroud listed thirty coincidences. Some could be explained by the fact that they were identical twins — fear of heights, physical mannerisms, dislike of the sight of blood, food preferences. But accidents like falling downstairs or miscarriages could hardly be explained in terms of their genes.
By a coincidence that seems typical in such matters, the subject of identical twins had become a subject of national attention in America at the same time, when identical male twins appeared on the Johnny Carson chat show and told their incredible stories. When Jim Lewis, of Lima, Ohio, was nine years old he learned that he had an identical twin who had been adopted at birth. Thirty years later — at exactly the same age as Barbara Herbert — he decided to see if he could find him. Unlike British courts, American courts are inclined to be helpful in such cases, and Jim Lewis soon learned that his twin was called Jim Springer and lived in Dayton, Ohio. And as soon as they met they discovered a string of the same kind of preposterous coincidences that had amazed Barbara and Daphne. Both had married a girl called Linda, then divorced and married a girl called Betty; both had called their sons James Allan, although Jim Lewis spelt Alan with only one 1; both had owned dogs named Toy; both had worked part time as deputy sheriffs; both had worked for the McDonald’s hamburger chain; both had been filling-station attendants; both spent their holidays at the same seaside resort in Florida and used the same beach — a mere 300 yards long; both drove to their holidays in a Chevrolet; both had a tree in the garden with a white bench around it; both had basement workshops in which they built frames and furniture; both had had vasectomies; both drank the same beer and chain-smoked the same cigarettes; both had put on ten pounds at the same point in their teens, and lost it again; both enjoyed stock-car racing and disliked baseball.