Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  Now here — as in many other cases — the doppelgänger is obviously a ‘thought projection’, some kind of telepathic image transmitted accidentally or deliberately (but usually accidentally) by someone who happens to be thinking of another person or another place. Another poet, W. B. Yeats, describes in his autobiography how, ‘one afternoon … I was thinking very intently of a certain fellow student from whom I had a message … . In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some hundreds of miles away where the student was. On the afternoon when I had been thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a crowd of people in a hotel and seeming as solid as if in the flesh … .’ The student had asked him to come again when he was alone, and Yeats apparently reappeared in the middle of the night and gave him a message. Yeats adds, ‘I myself had no knowledge of either apparition.’

  When the Society for Psychical Research was first formed in 1882 one of its leading members, Frederick Myers, realized that there were so many cases of this type that they deserved to be collected and classified. Phantasms of the Living, a massive 1,300 page work by Myers and his friends Edmund Gurney and Frank Podmore, is the first attempt at a cool, scientific evaluation of doppelgängers, and the sheer quantity of its material can leave no possible doubt of the reality of the phenomenon. The immense variety of the ‘apparitions’ is bewildering, but one thing soon becomes apparent: the great majority are related to serious crises — illness or sudden death. This one is typical:

  In 1877 I was living in Dublin, and was very anxious about my father, who was dangerously ill with congested lungs, in Wales. Awaking suddenly one night I distinctly saw him sitting on a chair near me, with his face covered by his hands. When I jumped out of bed he vanished. So startled was I that, next day, I crossed to Wales and found that he had been delirious for two days. When I entered the room he at once said he had gone the day before to tell me where he had left a topcoat [in Dublin] … [Case 499].

  In another case (634) a child suddenly told her adoptive parents that there was a young woman looking at her and talking to her. Her description made it clear that she was seeing her real mother (whom she could not remember). The alarmed parents took her to a neighbour’s house, hoping the ‘hallucination’ would vanish, but it came with them and stayed for most of the afternoon before suddenly vanishing as if ‘in a flash of fire’. The adoptive parents heard later that the child’s mother had died in a fire at the same time she had appeared to her daughter.

  Wilbur Wright has made the interesting suggestion that all human beings possess these powers of ‘projection’ but that most of us never have the occasion — or the desire — to use them. They can however be released by the stimulus of sudden danger or the prospect of death — hence the enormous number of ‘crisis apparitions’ in the literature of the paranormal. It also seems very clear that some of these peculiar powers can be released if the desire is strong enough. One clergyman relates (Case 641) how a young lady fell violently in love with him, and how he soon began to have the odd feeling that she was with him when he was alone. Then the girl began to tell him where he had been and what he had been doing. At first he thought that someone had told her, but she began to describe the circumstances and surroundings with such accuracy that it was obvious she had really been there. She then admitted that she only had to think about him intently to begin to see him. When it first happened she thought it was her imagination — until the clergyman later admitted the total accuracy of her ‘visions’. As soon as he realized that the girl had the power to ‘project’ herself into his life he took care to avoid her. But the psychic link remained. Ten years later, walking on the cliffs at Ramsgate with his wife, he suddenly felt so oppressed that he had to sit down. Suddenly the girl was standing in front of him, introducing her husband and asking to be introduced to his wife. Once again he terminated the acquaintance as soon as he decently could.

  On a visit to Milwaukee in the autumn of 1987 I collected the following remarkable case from James Pease, the director of the Bauer Contemporary Ballet Company. In 1972 his wife Susie Bauer went to New York to continue her dance studies. Pease relates:

  My brother Mitchell moved into the Milwaukee apartment with me to share expenses. Susie and I were quite miserable.

  One night about a week after she had left Milwaukee she went into her bedroom with a bottle of wine, put a record on the stereo and sat down on the floor leaning against her bed. She was unhappy, and felt trapped by the decision she had made: and, in an attempt to tune out her thoughts, she immersed herself in the music.

  Meanwhile Mitchell and I had finished our, ahem, gourmet dinner in front of the television. Mitch was sitting on the couch; I was in an easy chair with my back to the archway leading to the dining room.

  Suddenly I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of what I thought to be Susie standing at the edge of the archway over my left shoulder, as if she was entering the room. It took a few microseconds to recall that Susie was in New York and couldn’t be entering the living room. My double-take at this apparition was violent enough to cause Mitch to turn his head from the TV and ask what was going on. I replied something like, ‘I could have sworn that I just saw Susie starting to come into the room,’ shrugged it off and we continued to watch the tube.

  A minute or two later the phone rang. It was Susie calling from New York and she seemed quite upset. Her exact words were, ‘I was just there,’ and I responded, ‘I know.’ She went on to tell me how we had arranged the furniture — with perfect accuracy — where we were sitting, where the beer cans were, what dinnerware we had used, and where the dirty dishes were located, and that Mitch had used an end table as a TV table. She described Mitch as sitting back into the sofa with his feet up on the end table (all true) and that I had just reached for my beer when she became frightened because she thought I had seen her. I had to think about that for a moment and then realized that it was true.

  Susie described the experience as going into a trance and feeling herself lifted out of herself, hovering above her body as if from the ceiling. Looking down on herself, she thought how ridiculous it was to feel so miserable about a circumstance of her own making, that if she didn’t want to be there she should do something about it. Suddenly she found herself walking past the bedroom of our apartment in Milwaukee, across the entrance room … and as she entered the dining room, turned and approached the archway to the living room, she became conscious of the ‘fact’ that she couldn’t be there. When she thought I had noticed her, she became frightened at what would happen, and opened her eyes sitting on the floor of her bedroom in New York … .’

  Pease adds that after the experience Susie ‘felt completely uncomfortable, as if she was in a body she didn’t know’, and that it took about a day to get over this feeling of ‘wrong-bodiness’.

  Susie Bauer’s experience seems to suggest that most of us could, if we wanted to, experience ‘bilocation’ at will. The following strange case from Phantasms of the Living (number 642) makes the same point and also suggests that the ability might be put to sinister use. It concerns a nineteen-year-old girl who began having dreams about a man with a mole on the left side of his mouth, who caused her a feeling of repugnance. The dreams always began with a sensation of some ‘influence’ coming over her, accompanied by a feeling of ‘Here it is again’. The dreams were not unpleasant in themselves, she said, but were always dreadful to her because ‘a kind of struggle between two natures within me seemed to drag my powers of mind and body two ways.’ (This modest Victorian young lady is obviously saying that the man was arousing her sexual feelings.) She would wake up shivering, with her teeth chattering.

  Two years later, at a dance in a private house in Liverpool, the girl began experiencing the ‘influence’ again — feeling ‘cold and stony’ while her head began to burn. She stood up, ‘knowing what I was going to see’, and found herself looking into the face of the man of her dreams. He was already acquainted with her companion, so he was introduced to her
and went with them to the refreshment room. He asked her where they had met and she insisted that she had never seen him before. He seemed annoyed and puzzled. Later that evening the girl asked her sister if she recalled her description of the man she had seen in her dreams and asked her if she thought there was anyone like him at the party. The sister had no difficulty in identifying the man.

  From then on this man began to pursue the girl: she found that he seemed to be at every party she went to. He began to talk about dreams, then asked her if she had ever travelled to various places. In fact she had dreamed that she had been in these places with the man and had even described them at the time in a dream notebook she kept. She was often tempted to admit that she had dreamt about him, but felt instinctively that if she did so, ‘I should be as completely his slave and tool as I had been in dreams’. So she continued to deny everything and eventually wrote to ask her parents to recall her.

  The key to this strange story seems to be an admission that the man had made. He had seen her before the dreams began, at a Birmingham music festival, and on that occasion she had fainted. At the time she had thought that this was due to ‘the heat and the excitement of the music’. Later, thinking it over, she realized that the swoon had been preceded by the same feeling of the ‘influence’ creeping over her. The inference seems to be that the man immediately recognized her as the kind of person over whom he could exercise a certain power and had somehow succeeded in establishing some kind of telepathic contact in her dreams, in which he sexually ‘enslaved’ her. (Gurdjieff is credited with the same power: in God is My Adventure Rom Landau has described how, sitting at the next table to an attractive female novelist, Gurdjieff began to inhale and exhale in a peculiar way. Suddenly the novelist went pale, declaring later, ‘I suddenly felt as if I had been struck right through my sexual centre — it was beastly.’) It is also worth noting that the girl was, to some extent, ‘psychic’. Elsewhere in the book Phantasms of the Living she describes how she dreamed accurately of the death of her brother in a cavalry charge during the Indian Mutiny. Her aunt pointed out that her brother was in the infantry, but in due course news of his death in a cavalry charge was confirmed.

  Early investigators, like Myers and the French astronomer Camille Flammarion (whom we have already met in connection with the manuscript pages that blew out of his window), felt that it was enough to collect vast numbers of such cases — where possible supported by signed statements from witnesses — to convince any intelligent reader of the reality of these ‘strange powers’. Flammarion’s 1,000 page Death and Its Mystery is another amazing treasure house of paranormal incidents. What neither Myers nor Flammarion recognized was that no sceptic is going to read through so many pages and so grasp their sheer consistency. What is basically necessary is some kind of a theory to connect the cases, and it is this that is lacking in their books.

  Are we, then, in any better position? The answer, on the whole, is yes. The Victorians had accumulated an impressive body of material — about clairvoyance, about hypnosis, about psychometry and crisis apparitions — but most of it was anecdotal and was simply ignored by Victorian scientists and philosophers. Flammarion, for example, tells a well-authenticated story about an operation performed upon a certain Madame Plantin, who was under hypnosis, by a Dr Cloquet, while Madame Plantin’s daughter, also under hypnosis, looked on. The hypnotized woman was able to describe her mother’s internal organs in specific detail (‘The right lung has shrunk… . The liver is white and discoloured’) and added the information that she would die early the following day. Mme Plantin died as predicted and an autopsy revealed the accuracy of her daughter’s descriptions of her organs. Flammarion adds with understandable bitterness, ‘Nevertheless, I have seen grave “scholars” burst out laughing while listening to these “cock-and-bull stories.’” Nowadays para-psychologists can point to laboratory evidence to support their claims about telepathy, psychometry and clairvoyance, and the sceptics are reduced to picking holes in the evidence instead of bursting into shouts of laughter.

  Does this mean that laboratory evidence is better than anecdotal evidence? Obviously not. It is extremely difficult to persuade paranormal events to manifest themselves in the laboratory, although a few exceptionally gifted psychics have succeeded. The sheer richness of the anecdotal evidence assembled by Flammarion and Myers convinces through its inner consistency. So many people, from dukes to dustmen, have seen dying relatives at the moment of death that only the most dogmatic rationalist could dismiss it all as pure invention. By comparison, laboratory evidence seems unexciting and rather flimsy. Its real importance is that it forms such powerful support for the anecdotal evidence, which points quite clearly towards certain basic conclusions, the most important of which is that all human beings possess certain paranormal powers which can be developed by effort and practice. Our powers are normally limited by the fact that we seem to be tied down to the physical body and its habits. Paranormal powers seem to indicate that this assumption is untrue. Our tendency to identify ourselves with our bodies is largely a matter of laziness and habit. And the habit can be broken.

  Where ‘out-of-the-body experience’ is concerned, the theory was tested by an eminent psychical researcher, Professor Arthur Ellison. He was inspired by The Projection of the Astral Body to attempt to carry out Muldoon’s instructions:

  The principle was to loosen the grip of the physical body on the astral body by … imagining oneself, in the astral body, consciously rotating about an axis from head to feet, observing first the ceiling, then the wall, then the floor and other wall … .

  For one hour of every night for a month I tried these methods on retiring to bed. At last I had success. The first sign was that in accordance with the book, I found myself in a cataleptic state — unable to move a muscle … . I used my will — or was it my imagination? — to make myself float upwards, and the experience was quite fascinating. I felt as though I were embedded in the mud at the bottom of a river, and the water was slowly seeping into the mud and reducing its viscosity, so that eventually I was borne upwards by the water. Slowly I floated upwards, still cataleptic, like an airship released from its moorings. I reached the ceiling and floated through it into the darkness of the roof space. Then I passed through the roof tiles, and the sky, clouds and Moon became visible. I increased my ‘willing’ (or ‘imagining’), and my velocity of ascent up into the sky increased. I have the memory of the wind whistling through my hair clearly to this day.

  Ellison goes on to emphasize, ‘From the moment of getting into bed to this point up in the sky I had no break of consciousness.’ So although he is willing to concede that the whole thing could have been a dream, there was certainly no moment at which he fell asleep.

  The second — and last — time he tried it he determined that he would try to float beyond what Muldoon calls ‘cord activity range’ — far enough to break loose of the ‘cord’ that seems to attach most ‘astral projectors’ to their physical bodies.

  This time it took only three or four nights to repeat the projection. However, on this occasion I stopped the vertical movement at ceiling height and changed direction. Still cataleptic, I floated horizontally, feet first, towards the first floor window of the room. Floating smoothly through the top of the window frame, I was aiming to describe a smooth parabola down onto the lawn where, I hoped, I should be outside ‘cord activity range’ and the real work of acquiring evidence could begin. It did not happen like that. As I cleared the window and started the descent to the lawn I had one of the most intriguing experiences to date. I felt two hands take my head, one hand over each ear, move me (still cataleptic) back into the bedroom and down into the body. I heard no sound and saw nothing.

  By this time, Ellison admits, he was so tired during the day from lack of sleep that he ceased the experiments. But his curiosity remained, and he decided to continue the investigations in the laboratory. The basic aim of the experiment was the same as Charles Tart’s experiment with Miss Z
.: to get the ‘astral projector’ to read a number during the ‘out-of-the-body’ state. However there was one obvious flaw in Tart’s experiments: since Tart himself knew the number, Miss Z. might have picked it up from him by telepathy. Ellison decided that this flaw could be eliminated in his experiment if he made sure that he himself did not know the number. So he constructed an electronic box that generated random numbers. When he pushed a button a three-digit random number would appear at the other side of the box, hidden from both Ellison and the ‘astral projector’. The ‘astral projector’ would be asked to read this number and repeat it: Ellison would then enter the number on a dial and the box itself would tell him whether it corresponded to the number on the back of the box. It seemed foolproof.

  On the trial run it looked as if Ellison had taken a wise precaution. His subject was a girl who claimed to be able to achieve ‘astral projection’. To save time Ellison looked at the numbers while the girl tried to tell him what they were (presumably she ‘projected’, took a look at the numbers, and returned to her body). It was an amazing success: on a number of occasions the girl got the number completely right. Then Ellison tried the ‘blind’ procedure and immediately the girl began to experience difficulties, saying the numbers were too small to read. This seemed to show that she had been reading his mind.

  The next subject was a famous American clairvoyant who said he did not need to ‘project’ his astral body — the numbers would appear in his mind. He scored an amazing eight out of twenty. But when Ellison tried it the next day the box recorded that he also had scored eight out of twenty, and he realized that the electronic nought on the box was turning into a figure eight due to some malfunction of the micro-circuit: when Ellison cleaned it his score dropped to its usual zero.