by Colin Wilson
Their case was written up in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And a psychologist named Tim Bouchard, who had been studying twins at the University of Minnesota, was so interested that he raised a grant to study identical twins who had been separated at birth. John Stroud soon heard about his researches, and some of his identical twins were quickly on their way to America. (Typically, John Stroud and Tim Bouchard soon acquired the same number of identical twins to study — sixteen pairs.) Professor Bouchard quickly realized that the coincidences in the lives of the ‘Jim twins’ were, so to speak, no coincidence. Where twins were concerned, coincidences were the rule rather than the exception. Terry Connolly and Margaret Richardson had married on the same day of the same year within an hour of each other; both had four children who were conceived and born at roughly the same time; both had intended to name their first daughters Ruth but had changed their minds. Two other twins, Dorothy Lowe and Bridget Hamilton, had kept a diary for one year, and had filled in exactly the same days. Male twins Oscar Stohr and Jack Yufe had been taken off in opposite directions by their parents, and while Jack had been brought up an orthodox Jew in America, Oscar had gone to Germany and become a member of the Hitler Youth. When they met at the airport in 1979 both were wearing square wire-rimmed glasses, blue shirts with epaulettes and identical moustaches; both flushed the lavatory before and after using it, stored rubber bands on their wrists and had identical speech rhythms, although one spoke English and the other German. In England, John Stroud brought together Eric Boocock and Tommy Marriott, who were both wearing square wire-rimmed glasses and goatee beards and who both worked as charge hands in Yorkshire factories. He also noted that coincidences continued to pursue Barbara Herbert and Daphne Goodship who, although they were living at opposite ends of the country, often bought the same book at the same time and changed the colour of their hair at the same time without consulting one another.
What can we make of such preposterous coincidences? Obviously there is nothing surprising in discovering that identical twins have the same health problems, the same tastes in clothes and the same speech rhythms. After all, identical (or monozygotic — MZ for short) twins are formed by the splitting of the same ovum and therefore have identical genes. So we have no trouble accepting that Jeanette Hamilton and Irene Read discovered that they both suffered from claustrophobia and dislike of water, both sat with their backs to the sea on beaches, both got a pain in the same spot in their right legs in wet weather, and were both compulsive calculators. But coincidences involving the same jobs, the same dates and the same towns are obviously impossible to explain genetically. Even the assumption that MZ twins remain in telepathic contact fails to explain how they could fall downstairs at the same time or both have miscarriages. All this sounds more like Charles Fort’s ‘cosmic joker’.
But if we can accept the logical consequences of precognition it becomes altogether less difficult to understand. As we have seen, precognition at first seems to suggest that our lives are rigidly predetermined, like a film. But some precognitions enable their subjects to change the future, like the music teacher who avoided a head-on collision or the young man who slowed down just before a patch of ice. (In that case, we may presume that Wilbur Wright’s friend Doug Worley made a fatal mistake in not accepting the squadron leader’s suggestion that he stand down for the day.) So the future cannot be that rigidly predetermined.
But once we begin to think about this matter, we can see that life is far more predetermined than we realize. Human beings undoubtedly possess free will — for, as William James pointed out, we can decide to think one thing rather than another. But even so we habitually overestimate the amount of free will we normally exercise. If we carefully observe ourselves, we realize how many of our actions are merely responses to the things that go on around us. The Russian philosopher Gurdjieff insisted that human beings are ‘machines’ whose ordinary state of consciousness is a form of sleep. His disciple Ouspensky was suddenly struck by the truth of this when, at the beginning of the First World War, he saw military lorries loaded up with crutches — crutches for limbs that were not yet blown off.
In short, the world of matter is rigidly predetermined; every earthquake, every avalanche, every hurricane, is already scheduled in some ‘railway timetable’ of the future. Of course, some natural disasters are ‘man made’, but if we examine these with an open mind we shall have to admit that human free will plays very little part in them: for the most part, we are merely reacting to circumstances. And once we recognize that human free will operates on an extremely small scale, inside our own heads, we also recognize that our lives are far more ‘predetermined’ than we care to admit. The curious enigma of the identical twins underlines that point. The ‘Jim twins’ must have felt that it was entirely a matter off personal choice that they had married girls called Linda, then girls called Betty, that they called their sons James Allan and James Alan and their dogs Toy. Barbara Herbert and Daphne Goodship must have felt the same about falling in love at sixteen, getting married, planning a family and so on. But the whole matter of extraordinary coincidences in the case of MZ twins suggests that the things that happen to them are as ‘inevitable’ as their genetically inherited health problems.
Schopenhauer would certainly accept such an admission as evidence that human life is a shadow-play of illusion. But he would be missing the point: what matters is not the extent to which our lives are predetermined, but the extent to which we can exercise freedom of choice. As I walk down a crowded city street my freedom is limited in a thousand ways. I have to avoid bumping into people, avoid traffic as I cross the street, avoid twisting my ankle on uneven pavements, avoid banging my head on scaffolding … . If I also happen to be tired and hungry then I may well feel that I am a ‘plaything of the gods’, a creature of circumstance. But for the most part I cope with all these limitations perfectly well and go about my business with an unshaken conviction that I possess freedom of choice. And for the most part, I am correct. Freedom depends upon how much I choose to ‘put into’ life.
This becomes perfectly obvious if we consider ‘positive’ precognitions — precognition of some desirable event. The wife of Arthur W. Osborn, the author of The Future is Now, tells of her first glimpse of her future husband:
I had written a paper on Robert Browning, but as I was recovering from an illness I arranged for someone else to read it. The paper was read in a moderately large hall to an audience of about 300 persons. I sat at the back of the hall.
After the lecture questions were requested, and several people asked them. But there was one man sitting near the front who asked a rather critical question and tended to challenge my authority for a certain statement I had made. I could only see the man’s back, but I felt a sense of personal significance as between him and myself, though he was a complete stranger to me. It was of a joyous nature in spite of the extreme embarrassment his question was causing me. I have always regarded the experience as one of recognition. I just knew him. It would not have mattered who or what he was — the relationship was there. I learned later that this man had only that day arrived from England on his first visit to Australia.
We might object that this was not a case of true precognition. Although she could not see her future husband’s face, Mrs Osborn may well have found his voice attractive and recognized instinctively that he was ‘her type’. But the same objection cannot be raised against an example cited by J. B. Priestley:
Dr A. had begun to receive official reports from Mrs B., who was in charge of one branch of a large department. These were not personal letters signed by Mrs B., but the usual duplicated official documents. Dr A. did not know Mrs B., had never seen her, knew nothing about her except that she had this particular job. Nevertheless, he felt a growing excitement as he received more and more of these communications from Mrs B. This was so obvious that his secretary made some comment on it.
A year later he had met Mrs B.
and fallen in love with her. They are now most happily married. He believes — and so do I after hearing his story — that he felt this strange excitement because the future relationship communicated it to him; we might say that one part of his mind, not accessible to consciousness except as a queer feeling, already knew that Mrs B. was to be tremendously important to him.
Priestley cites this case in Man and Time. In a later book he admitted that he himself was Dr A. Mrs B. was his future wife Jacquetta Hawkes, who was Archaeological Adviser for the Festival of Britain, in which Priestley was also involved (even to the extent of writing a novel about it). If Priestley is being entirely accurate, he had no reason whatever to feel excitement at receiving duplicated letters from Jacquetta Hawkes, and it sounds like a genuine case of ‘positive precognition’. And it is very clear that any sense of ‘predestination’ that Priestley experienced was a feeling of pleasurable anticipation rather than of trapped inevitability.
The same applies to another case cited by Priestley, of a man who experienced an odd feeling of anticipation whenever he passed a certain cottage on the bus; he had no idea of who lived there but felt that there was somehow a connection between himself and the cottage. Later he met and married the woman who lived there, and it was she who rescued him from periodic nervous breakdowns.
Priestley calls these cases of FIP — the Future Influencing the Present, and at first it is not clear what he means by this, or why he bothers to distinguish it from ordinary precognition. But his meaning becomes very clear when he mentions a case of a man who suffered periodic attacks of nausea and vomiting. During these attacks he would lie in a darkened room with a blinding headache. Towards the end of each attack he experienced a succession of brilliant colours — reds, blues, greens and purples. Then they would all seem to fly apart, and he would vomit. After this he would recover. Years later, in the Second World War, the man was in Malaya, and as Japanese fighters machine gunned their convoy he made a dive for a small ravine. A bomb exploded and the world burst into jagged splinters of red, blue, green and purple: then he was violently sick. The attacks of nausea and vomiting ceased from that moment on.
Priestley is convinced that ‘the explosion, so to speak, went in two different Time directions’, the future and the past. And its effect was so powerful that it influenced the man’s past self.
Now all this sounds very convincing — and quite incomprehensible. In our universe, light cannot go backwards into the past. Besides, if the future can influence the past in this way, then we find ourselves facing all the paradoxes we considered earlier — of a ‘multiple universe’ in which there are millions of ‘parallel times’. For if the event has already taken place while it is still several years in the future, then it must have taken place in a parallel universe … .
The sensible alternative here is surely the one we have already considered: that the explosion was, so to speak, listed in the timetable for the future, but that, like a train, it may not run on time. And in that case, precognition is simply another form of the faculty we call extra-sensory perception or clairvoyance — the faculty that warned tiger-hunter Jim Corbett that a man-eater was lying in wait for him. It may even be the same as the faculty that enables calculating prodigies to decide that some vast twenty-digit number is a prime when even a computer could not do it in the same time; the same faculty that enabled Robert Graves’s school-friend to ‘see’ the answer to a difficult mathematical problem at a single glance. If this is true then we have to make the assumption that the future is a great deal more ‘fixed’ than we would like to believe. But at least it provides us with a sensible and logical explanation of precognition.
A further case from Priestley’s archives reinforces the argument. A woman correspondent told him how, during Matins in St Martins-in-the-Fields, she began to cry uncontrollably, but with no idea of what was upsetting her. Two days later, as she travelled home by train, it happened again. And as she got off the train and was met by her husband and son she suddenly knew that her sense of foreboding was related to her son. Three weeks later he became ill, and died within a few months.
The same mother tells how, during her son’s illness, he suddenly remarked, ‘A dog is going to bark a long way off.’ A few seconds later she heard the faint bark of a dog. Then he said, ‘Something is going to be dropped in the kitchen and the middle door is going to slam.’ Within seconds both things had happened. When she told the doctor about it he said that he had known of this happening before, and that her son’s brain was working ‘just ahead of time’.
Now in the case of this woman’s two ‘precognitions’ of her son’s death, it is significant that she was sitting quietly — on the first occasion in a church, on the second in a train. Her subconscious ‘computer’ had a chance to scan the future and became aware of the tragedy in store for her. It was not that the tragedy had already taken place in some parallel universe or some other time dimension. And the case of the barking dog and the slamming door reinforces this interpretation. As ‘precognitions’ they are pointless: it can make no possible difference to know that a dog will bark in a moment or that the door will slam. On the other hand we can also see that there is a more ‘scientific’ explanation. When the dog barked in the distance — say, a couple of miles away — its sound waves took about ten seconds to reach the bedroom. (Sound travels at about twelve miles a minute.) So the dog had already barked when the boy made the prediction. Now this cannot be true of the door slamming below — the sound would have reached him almost instantaneously. Yet we can easily conceive that the same ‘superconscious computer’ that enabled him to ‘hear’ the dog before its sound reached his bedroom also anticipated the slamming of the door.
The ‘super-computer’ theory has its drawbacks, yet it is the only realistic alternative to the ‘serial universe’ theory. This theory, as we have seen, is the notion that, in some sense, all future events have already taken place. And since they have obviously not taken place in our universe, we have to assume the existence of ‘parallel universes’ or parallel times. Dunne landed himself in this intellectual cul-de-sac, with an infinite number of times — Time 1, Time 2 and so on — and an infinite number of selves. J. B. Priestley pointed out sensibly that we do not need an infinite number of selves to explain our experience of time: three is enough. First there is the ‘me’ who merely observes the world — who gazes blankly out of a window. If I become suddenly interested in something that is going on, a second ‘me’ comes into existence, the self-aware ‘me’. And since I can also observe that change from ‘me-gazing-blankly’ to ‘me-gazing-intently’, there must be a third ‘me’, a kind of eternal observer who looks on the world with cool detachment.
We have already encountered a very similar notion at the end of chapter 4, when discussing the ‘three value systems’: physical, emotional and intellectual. And we can immediately see that these three ‘systems’ correspond closely to Priestley’s three selves. The ‘me-gazing-blankly’ is the ‘me’ that confronts the world when I awaken from a deep sleep or when I am so tired that I am incapable of thought: the ‘physical me’. The ‘me’ that proceeds to take an active interest in the world around me is the ‘me’ that experiences desires, the emotional self. (For example, the stimulus that arouses a cat into a state of attention may be a movement that indicates a mouse or a bird: in the case of a man, it may be the sight of a pretty girl.) The ‘me’ that observes the world with detachment is the intellectual self. (It may be worth mentioning, in passing, that Rudolf Steiner made a similar threefold distinction. The consciousness of plants is purely physical, and would be regarded by human beings as a form of sleep. Animal consciousness involves desires and hopes and fears — in short, emotions. Only man, according to Steiner, possesses self-awareness, the ability to look on his body and emotions with detachment.)
So in rejecting Dunne’s ‘infinite selves’ theory in favour of Priestley’s more sensible ‘three selves’, we have also rejected the view that future events have
already taken place — that our lives are some kind of movie that has already been made. Instead we recognize that the future is fairly rigidly predetermined but not absolutely so, and that human beings have a certain limited power to alter it. But since most human beings habitually follow the path of least resistance, most lives are, to all intents and purposes, predetermined.
What then follows is a simple extension of the ‘information universe’ theory of chapter 5. Psychometry seems to indicate that everything that has ever happened is somehow ‘on record’ and is accessible to some remarkable faculty possessed by human beings: the ‘hidden power’. We can see that this in itself seems to suggest some kind of super-computer. A piece of film only has to record one set of events. A meteorite or a stone from Cicero’s villa would be like a billion photographs superimposed on one another, yet the ‘super-computer’ of a psychic seems to be able to disentangle them. Our theory of precognition merely demands that the same super-computer should be able to make a highly sophisticated set of predictions. The main thing a computer needs to make predictions is sufficient information about the present state of affairs. Psychometry appears to indicate that the super-computer of the ‘hidden self’ has — potentially — the whole past of the universe at its disposal.
Its problem is then how to convey its ‘predictions’ to the ‘everyday self’. And here the main problem is obvious: we are simply too preoccupied with our immediate concerns. Everyday life demands a fairly constant state of alertness, and this prevents us from paying attention to the still small voice of the other self. Which explains why so many ‘intrusions’ seem to occur when people are in a state of relaxation, or hypnagogia, or even dreaming.