by Colin Wilson
The next subject was a famous British psychic. This time Ellison and his assistant did test runs before the experiment: they scored nought, as usual. Then the psychic tried, and scored eight. Ellison and his assistant tried again, and also scored eight. Again they cleaned the component, and he and his assistant achieved their usual zero score. The psychic tried again, and scored eight. Ellison cleaned the component and tried again: he scored zero. It looked as if the ‘cosmic joker’ was having a joke at Ellison’s expense — either that or, as he himself suspected, the psychic might have been somehow acting upon the circuit by psychokinesis (mind over matter) to get a high score.
A similar attempt by the American researcher Dr Karlis Osis produced a more positive result. He constructed an ingenious box in which the circuitry superimposed various images to give an apparently normal picture. But the subject had to stand in a particular position in front of the box in order to see the picture. A psychic named Alex Tanous was asked to ‘project’ himself and look into the box from the correct position. Tanous was able to see the picture correctly, indicating that some part of him had left his body and was looking through the glass window into the box.
It can be seen at once that these experiments, while interesting, are not half as convincing as Ellison’s own experience of ‘astral projection’. To be truly convinced we need to be able to experience some sense of ‘the human equation’ — or better still, to have direct experience. When Ernest Hemingway was blown up by a shell in the First World War he experienced a sensation that he described as follows, ‘… my soul or something coming right out of my body, like you’d pull a silk handkerchief out of a pocket by one corner. It flew around and then came back and went in again and I wasn’t dead any more.’ But while this may have convinced Hemingway that he had died briefly, it is open to the obvious objection that it may just have been a ‘feeling’ caused by physical crisis.
There are nevertheless cases in which there seems to be a certain amount of hard evidence that physical consciousness can survive the ‘death’ of the body. One of the most striking occurred at the Hartebeespoort Snake and Animal Park near Pretoria in South Africa. Its owner, Jack Seale, was releasing a twelve-foot black mamba into its cage when an over-officious research assistant asked if he had checked it for parasites. Seale’s attention was distracted for a moment and the snake turned and sank its fangs into his ankle. Seale knew that his chances of survival were minimal: no one has ever been known to survive the bite of a full-grown black mamba. When he saw venom squirting out of his ankle he knew the mamba must have injected a massive dose.
Seale had about 10 ccs of serum on the premises, but he required at least four times that amount. So after injecting himself with all he had, he was driven to Pretoria General Hospital.
Luck was with him. The surgeon on duty was a friend to whom he had often expounded his favourite theory about snakebite treatment. Mamba venom is a neurotoxin that paralyses the central nervous system. Jack Seale had always believed that if the snakebite victim was connected to a heart-lung machine he stood a good chance of remaining alive. This notion was based on an observation he had made a few years before. A Pretoria researcher, Gert Willemse, was trying to determine exactly how much venom it would take to kill a rabbit when Jack Seale arrived. Willemse decided to take a tea break after injecting the rabbit with a massive dose of venom. He left it connected to a heart-lung machine, and when they returned an hour later they were amazed to see that the rabbit was still alive.
As the surgeon forced his mouth open and inserted an air tube down his throat, Jack Seale thought, ‘Thank God, thank God … .’ Then he died. (It was later discovered that the snake had injected enough venom to kill fifty men.) A few hours later he returned to consciousness to hear a harsh rasping sound and a ‘peep, peep, peep’ noise: it gradually dawned on him that he was listening to his own breathing and heartbeat. When he tried to move he discovered he was completely paralysed. The monitors showed that his brain was dead; they failed to record the fact that consciousness had returned.
For the next eight days Jack Seale remained completely paralysed, yet able to hear everything that went on. When two young nurses inserted a catheter he heard one of them remark that he had the smallest dick she’d ever seen: she was much embarrassed when he reminded her of this later. A doctor shone a torch into his eye and expressed the opinion that he had been brain-damaged: Seale heard that too. Later he heard them tell his wife that even if he recovered he would be brain-damaged for life. And on the third day he heard a doctor say, ‘That poor woman is going to be stuck with a vegetable for the rest of her life. The best thing we can do is to pull the plug … .’ After further discussion they decided to leave him on the machine because the case was clinically interesting.
On the eighth day he succeeded in moving a finger. A doctor told the nurse it was an involuntary nerve spasm. Seale moved the finger again. The doctor said, ‘Mr Seale, if you can hear me, move your finger twice.’ Seale concentrated all his will power and moved the finger twice. There was immediate pandemonium as the room filled up with doctors, nurses and interns. Nine hours later his eyelids fluttered. According to Jack Seale’s account, normal consciousness then returned ‘layer by layer’. And eight days later he was allowed to leave the hospital. One of the first things he did was to catch the snake that had bitten him and milk it of its venom. For months he found it impossible to sleep without the light on, since waking up in darkness immediately brought back the sense of living death — as in Poe’s ‘The Premature Burial’. His comment on the ordeal was, ‘I know what it feels like to die. It’s not such a terrifying thing … .’
Medically speaking the case only proves that consciousness can remain intact when the body is technically dead. Yet for those who insist that life is inseparably connected with the body there remains the puzzle of how Jack Seale remained conscious when monitors indicated brain-death. It takes very little to deprive us of consciousness — a whiff of anaesthetic, a blow on the head, a rush of blood from the brain if we stand up too quickly. Yet Jack Seale’s consciousness survived total bodily death. Consciousness seems to be rather less fragile than we generally assume.
The major problem is plain enough. When we close our eyes and fall asleep, we simply disappear: the next sign of consciousness we experience is when we begin to dream. So there seems to be no realistic evidence whatsoever of a part of us that ‘migrates’ during sleep. It is certainly quite logical to believe that death is merely a permanent ‘disappearance’. To some extent this objection was countered by one of the first and most remarkable of the ‘dream researchers’, Frederik Van Eeden, who began studying his own dream experiences in the late 1890s. After a while he began to experience ‘lucid dreams’ — that is dreams in which he was aware he was dreaming.
In January 1898 … I dreamt that I was lying in the garden before the windows of my study, and saw the eyes of my dog through the glass pane. I was lying on my chest and observing the dog very keenly. At the same time, however, I knew with perfect certainty that I was dreaming and lying on my back in my bed. And then I resolved to wake up slowly and carefully and observe how my sensation of lying on my chest would change into the sensation of lying on my back. And so I did, slowly and deliberately, and the transition — which I have since undergone many times — is most wonderful. It is like the feeling of slipping from one body into another, and there is distinctly a double recollection of the two bodies. I remembered what I felt in my dream, lying on my chest; but returning into the day-life, I remembered also that my physical body had been quietly lying on its back all the while. This observation of a double memory I have had many times since. It is so indubitable that it leads almost unavoidably to the conception of a dream body.
(This could also explain Susie Bauer’s experience of ‘wrong-bodiness’ when she returned to her physical body.)
We are so accustomed to identifying the ego with consciousness that it is very hard to grasp the notion of a double consciou
sness — that is a part of us with its own consciousness that can migrate elsewhere. Yet this is a concept we encounter repeatedly in accounts of ‘out-of-the-body experiences’. One of the most eminent scientific men to describe such an experience was Sir Auckland (later Lord) Geddes, professor of anatomy at Dublin University. In a paper presented before the Royal Medical Society in 1937 Geddes describes how he had been suffering from food poisoning and how, seated in his chair, he became paralysed. At this point he realized that ‘my consciousness was separating from another consciousness which was also me’. One consciousness was attached to his body, which remained seated in the chair, while the other was attached to his ego. (Note that he says ‘attached to’, not identical with, his ego.) This second consciousness seemed to be outside his body. In this state, he says, he could see the whole house and garden and then things in London and Scotland. He felt that he was ‘free in a time dimension of space, wherein “now” was in some way equivalent to “here” in the ordinary three-dimensional space of everyday life’, an observation that seems to bear out the notion that some part of human consciousness can rise ‘above’ time. Geddes was discovered soon after his heart had stopped beating and given a camphor injection that restored him — reluctantly — to everyday consciousness.
Oddly enough that reluctance seems to be a recurrent feature of such ‘near death’ experiences. In 1871 a professor of geology from Zurich, Albert Heim, fell seventy feet from a snow-covered ledge and experienced a slowing-down of time accompanied by a delightful feeling of peace and serenity:
Mental activity became enormous, rising to a hundredfold velocity … . I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me… . Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light, without anxiety and without pain… . Elevated and harmonious thoughts dominated and united individual images, and like magnificent music a divine calm swept through my soul… .
All this took place in a three-second fall.
In her autobiography The Passionate Years the American socialite Caresse Crosby describes a similar experience when, as a child, she came close to drowning. Her two brothers held on to her ankles as she fell into the foaming river.
When my head had plunged beneath the water’s surface, I took one long frightened gulp and I never got another breath of air, my lungs expelled once and refilled with tide water. The blood rushed from my toes to my nose and suddenly my head seemed to expand and explode, but softly as though it were a cotton ball fluffing out and out and out. Into my ears poured strange sea lullabies and little by little, there beneath a flood a dazzling prismatic effulgence cleared my vision — not only did I see and hear harmony, but I understood everything. And slowly, as a bubble rises to the surface, I rose to the surface, rose up through the wooden platform, rose to where I could dominate the whole scene spread out beneath me. I watched my father at work on his boat, my brothers deathly frightened hanging on to my spindly heels and I, my hair like seaweed pulled flat against the submerged bottom of the float. Thus, while I drowned I saw my father turn and act, I saw my frightened brother run homeward, I saw the efforts to bring me back to life, and I tried not to come back.
It was the most perfect state of easeful joy that I ever experienced, then or since. There was no sadness or sickness from which I wished to escape, I was only seven, a carefree child, yet that moment in my life has never been equalled for pure happiness. Could I have glimpsed, while drowned (for I was drowned), the freedom of eternal life? One thing I know, that Nirvana does exist between here and the hereafter — a space of delight, for I have been there.
Albert Heim’s own experience of ‘ecstasy’ on the point of death led him to begin collecting similar experiences from other mountaineers who had been involved in climbing accidents: he discovered that 95 per cent of them had had experiences similar to his own.
Lyall Watson became so intrigued by such experiences that he devoted a book to them, The Romeo Error (the error in question being Romeo’s assumption that Juliet is dead when she is alive). He also recorded many experiences that indicated that people on the point of death often experience ‘ecstasy’. Watson had himself had an ‘out-of-the-body experience’ when his minibus overturned on a safari in Kenya and came to rest on the edge of a gully.
I found myself standing outside the small bus, looking at the head and shoulders of a young boy in the party who had been pushed halfway through the canvas roof on the last roll and would be crushed if the vehicle moved any further — as it seemed bound to do. Then, without pause, I recovered consciousness in the front seat of the bus, rubbed the red dust out of my eyes, climbed through the window, and went round to help the boy free himself before the battered vehicle settled itself into its final resting position. My memory of the details ‘seen’ while still unconscious is still vivid and there is no doubt in my own mind that my vantage point at that moment was detached from my body … .
In this case we observe that Watson experienced no sense of floating free of his body and looking down from above. He simply found himself standing beside the bus, as if his mind had been shaken free of its normal limitations. This raises the interesting question of whether the notion of an ‘astral body’ is really necessary. It may be simply that in these states of ‘detachment’, the mind continues to see itself in its usual guise, as a human being. Camille Flammarion, the most encyclopaedic of French ‘occultists’, had no doubt that clairvoyant faculties are not some extra ‘sense’ but simply the normal ability of the mind to escape the limitations of the body. Writing about Friederike Hauffe, the ‘Seeress of Prevorst’ who could read a book placed open on her stomach, or about the young girl described by Lombroso who could read with her ear, he writes, ‘The result of this research is the affirmation that the human being can see without eyes, with the spirit.’ And by way of supporting this assertion he goes on to offer almost sixty pages of impressive examples, beginning with a document by the Archbishop of Bordeaux describing a young priest of somnambulist tendencies who used to get up in the middle of the night and write his sermon — with his eyes closed — then re-read it and make corrections. Thomson Jay Hudson would immediately object that this is merely an example of the power of the subjective mind: that in his ‘sleep-walking’ state the priest could visualize the page on which he was writing and remember it so accurately that he could even go back and make corrections. There is no need for ‘vision without eyes’.
But other cases cited by Flammarion cannot be explained in the same way. Alexis Didier was one of the most famous hypnotic subjects of the nineteenth century, and his feats occupy many pages of Eric J. Dingwall’s Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena. He became a somnambule by accident. One day at the theatre, he volunteered to go on stage to be hypnotized and made such an impression that his employer decided to give up commerce and become his manager. By far his most spectacular feat was playing cards while blindfolded. This sounds, of course, like an ordinary stage magician’s trick — a conclusion also reached by the famous stage magician Robert Houdin (after whom Houdini named himself). But a session with Didier left Houdin shattered and convinced. The latter had brought a pack of marked cards with him to guard against trickery, but it proved to be quite unnecessary. Houdin shuffled, and as he laid the first card down on the table Didier identified it as a king. As the game proceeded he proved to be correct. Although Houdin played with his own hand under the table, Didier would advise him which card to play next. This, of course, sounds like telepathy. But Didier played his own cards without turning them over, and they always proved to be in perfect agreement with the ones Houdin had just played.
Didier also demonstrated psychometric abilities under hypnosis. Alexandre Dumas handed him a ring: Didier described its history and that of the man who had given it to Dumas, then went on to describe Tunis, where the ring had originated, although Didier only knew it by name.
Another of Didier’s feats was to project himself mentally to places mentioned by those who were test
ing him, an ability known as ‘travelling clairvoyance’. Again this sounds like a matter of ordinary telepathy, but Didier often proved otherwise by describing things of which his companion was unaware. A certain Captain Daniell asked Didier to ‘travel’ to his father’s house. After Didier had correctly described ornaments, furniture and other details, Daniell told him he had been wrong about only one thing, the colour of the curtains. But when he checked later Daniell found that Didier was correct.
On another occasion a highly sceptical magistrate named Séguier went to see Didier and asked him where he — Séguier — had been at two o’clock that day. ‘In your study,’ said Didier. ‘It is cluttered with papers — twists of tobacco — drawings — and little machines. There is a pretty little bell on your desk.’ Séguier denied the last observation emphatically. But when he got home he found the bell, which his wife had placed there that afternoon. This seems to demonstrate that Didier made use of telepathy and ‘travelling clairvoyance’. The telepathy told him where Séguier had been at two o’clock that afternoon but it was ‘travelling clairvoyance’ that showed him the bell that had been placed on the desk since Séguier left home.
‘Travelling clairvoyance’ was demonstrated most clearly in a case of theft. In 1849 a clerk named Dubois vanished from his place of work, the Mont-de-Piété, with two hundred thousand francs; a lawyer friend of the manager decided to go and consult Didier. Without prompting, Didier told his visitor the sum stolen and the name of the thief: Dubois. He added that Dubois was at present in Brussels, in the Hôtel des Princes. The lawyer hurried there, only to find that the clerk had left a few hours earlier. Didier now stated that he saw the clerk in a casino at Spa and that he would have no money left by the time he was arrested. The lawyer rushed off to Spa (in Belgium), and again missed the clerk by hours. Back in Paris, Didier told him that the clerk had been to Aix-la-Chapelle but was now back in Spa gambling away the remaining money. This time the clerk was arrested but — as Didier had foretold — he was penniless.