by Colin Wilson
The worst times were at night. If I began to think about that unpleasant pounding of the heart it immediately began — as we itch if we think about itching. This in turn would induce a sudden flash of fear, as if the solid ground had turned into shifting sands. Then it was necessary to distract myself — to turn over, scratch my nose, anything. The fear would rise in me like milk boiling over, increasing by a process of negative feedback. Suddenly the normal security I took for granted would seem an illusion. Yet even on the second night I discovered the way to master the panic. I simply had to wake myself up fully — if necessary get out of bed and go to the lavatory. As soon as I was wide awake it was as if some more sensible level of my being had become aware of what was happening. Like a schoolmistress entering a room of squabbling children it clapped its hands and there was instant silence.
But what precisely was this ‘schoolmistress effect’? It was as if some higher level of my personality had stirred into activity — the equivalent of Clara’s B-4 and Christine’s Jane. And so my experience of panic attacks seemed to generate an insight into the mechanism of multiple personality.
The trouble with these attacks was that they wasted so much vitality; I felt permanently tired. Nevertheless I pressed on with my work for Crimes and Punishment, realizing that work was the best form of therapy. And one day, quite suddenly, I grasped the basic issue. The experience sounds utterly trivial yet it enabled me to begin to win the battle against the panic. It was five o’clock one afternoon and I had to take some letters to the post-box at the end of our lane. It seemed an utterly pointless, boring activity, but I knew it had to be done so I clambered into the Land-rover and drove down the lane. At the end of the lane I stopped the Land-rover before venturing out on to the wider road, and as I did so a car shot past so close that it almost removed my bumper. It made me realize that if I had been slightly more bored and indifferent I might have braked a split second later and caused a collision.
Now the truth is that it was not a very close thing. Yet it was enough to bring a flash of insight. My problem was simply that I had become self-divided. My sensible rational self could see that I had to do a great many necessary tasks — like taking letters to the post. My emotional self heaved a groan of boredom and dug in its heels. So my rational self had to drag it along behind like some kind of anchor, and every task cost twice as much effort. What made it worse was that I sympathized with its reluctance, for I agreed that going to the post-box was just a dreary chore. And that, of course, was the problem. The near accident made my rational self realize that this boredom could be an expensive self-indulgence. If there had been a collision it would have involved me in a hundred times as much effort as going to the post. And as soon as I used my imagination to conjure up the endless inconvenience of exchanging addresses and insurance companies and getting the Land-rover repaired I instantly felt a surge of relief that it hadn’t happened. And my rational self turned on my emotional self and said irritably, ‘You see, you bloody idiot, the problems you cause by dragging your heels all the time?’ And the emotional self dropped its eyes and looked abashed. And for the rest of that day it behaved extremely well.
From then on the attacks began to fade — although it was several months before they vanished entirely. In retrospect I realized that what had seemed an entirely pointless and horrible episode had been, in fact, one of the most valuable experiences of my life. To begin with the long struggle to control the anxiety meant a far greater command over my spontaneous reactions. If someone dropped a plate on the floor, I didn’t even start; if someone bored me, my eyes no longer betrayed my feelings. But what was far more important was the insight into the stupid behaviour of the emotional self. This is not confined to panic attacks and states of nervous depression. Since we all spend our time doing a great many things that we do not really want to do, we all waste an immense amount of energy overcoming the ‘reluctance’ of the emotional self. Every time the sun goes behind a cloud the emotional self heaves a groan of discouragement and the heart sinks. And this is why, as William James said, ‘most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding.’ For we allow ourselves to be taken in whenever the emotional self sighs with boredom and says, ‘Is it really worth the effort?’
This also explains, of course, Maslow’s observation that healthy people are always having peak experiences. Because they are highly motivated they put far more effort into living and receive a far richer return than people who have to drag the emotional body behind them like a badly-behaved child. They can see the fallacy behind the feeling that things are ‘just not worth the effort’. They go through life in a state of optimistic expectation. When the sun comes out it merely confirms their feeling that life means well by us; but when the sun goes in they accept it as a part of life’s interesting variety.
Obviously this is what is fundamentally wrong with the human race. Psychiatrically speaking we are all neurotics, if by neurotic we mean that we ‘live far within our limits’ — that we all possess powers which we habitually fail to use. Is it surprising that most of us fail to catch a glimpse of our ‘hidden powers’ when we are not even capable of making proper use of our ordinary vital energies?
It seemed to me fairly clear that the first step towards reactivating these ‘hidden powers’ would be to make a determined effort to overrule the habitual ‘reluctance’ of the emotional self and to maintain a higher level of optimism. And in fact this insight had often been confirmed by experience. I had frequently noted that I became accident-prone when I had allowed myself to become tired and discouraged, and that some instinct for avoiding accidents seemed to be aroused when I was feeling fully alive. I remember a Monday morning when I had driven into our local fishing village, Mevagissey, to collect the cleaning lady from the bus. My mind was seething with ideas which I intended to get on to paper the moment I arrived home. The end of our narrow private lane joins the public road at an acute angle, and it is necessary to slow down and change into a lower gear to negotiate it, then to accelerate up a slope. As I was about to do this the thought entered my head, ‘What if the post-van is coming down the lane?’ In all our years in the house I had never met the post-van in the lane. Nevertheless I slowed down as I turned the corner. And the post-van stopped within an inch of my bumper.
In California I had a chance to test the hypothesis again. I had spent the morning lecturing at a university in Los Angeles and had agreed to meet my wife and children in Disneyland. I had forgotten just how big the place is. When I arrived around midday the crowds were enormous, and my heart sank. But I had just given a good lecture and was feeling confident and optimistic. So I deliberately relaxed and told my feet to go and find them. They took me a hundred yards down the road and turned left. My family were eating at a Mexican food stall a few yards away. Again I felt that success was due to my state of mind — a certain relaxed optimism.
In Mysteries I tried to apply these lessons in my theory of the ‘ladder of selves’. Physically speaking we all evolve through a number of stages between birth and death — Shakespeare’s ‘seven ages of man’. But it also seems obvious that we evolve through a series of personalities. How often have we met a child after several years and been amazed that he no longer seems to be the same person? But our personal evolution is not as inevitable as our physical growth: it is the result of effort. If life becomes too difficult we cease to make efforts and cease to evolve. This, it seemed to me, is what had happened to Clara Fowler and Doris Fischer and Christine Sizemore. They remained stuck on a fairly low rung of the ‘ladder of selves’ and the ‘other side’ had revolted and tried to seize control.
It was a good theory, and I still feel that it is fundamentally correct — that our personal evolution is a matter of effort and optimism. But it still left a number of basic problems unexplained. Why are the personalities often so completely different? Flora Rheta Schreiber’s Sybil i
s about another sexually-abused child who later split into fourteen different personalities, including a writer, a painter, a musician, a builder and a carpenter. Some liked one another, others loathed each other: they behaved exactly like a real family. The oddest thing of all is that medical tests showed they all had different brain patterns. Yet brain patterns are as individual as fingerprints.
An even stranger case came to light in 1977. A young man named Billy Milligan was arrested for rape. Psychiatric examination revealed that Billy was a multiple personality — again as a result of childhood abuse — who was a compound of twenty-three different people. One of these was a Yugoslav who spoke Serbo-Croat, a language Milligan had never learned. The personality who had committed the rapes was actually a lesbian. Daniel Keyes’ book The Minds of Billy Milligan finally made it quite clear that my theory of the ‘ladder of selves’ simply failed to cover the highly complex facts.
But what was the alternative? It was not until I had finished Mysteries that I came upon the strangest — and apparently most absurd — theory that I had encountered so far. It was in a book with the unpromising title The Secret Science Behind Miracles by Max Freedom Long. But it soon became clear that Long was a careful investigator and that the book was based upon long experience of its subject — the Kahunas, or magician-priests, of Hawaii. Long came to Hawaii as a young schoolteacher in 1917 and soon became intrigued by references to the old Huna religion, which had been displaced and outlawed by Christianity. He was particularly fascinated by a sinister practice known as the death prayer. When a man had been cursed by the death prayer he began to experience a prickling sensation in his feet, which gradually became numb: the numbness then spread upward until he died. It sounded absurd, but when Long checked at the Queen’s Hospital in Honolulu he found that there were usually one or more victims per year and that they all died, in spite of medical aid. He also heard an apparently absurd story about a Christian minister who learned the death prayer and used it to kill a Kahuna magician. Long went to the trouble of investigating the story and was able to read the minister’s diary, in which he described how he had finally decided to take drastic action as members of his flock died off one by one.
Little by little Long succeeded in compiling a dictionary of Huna words and deduced from them something of the philosophy of the Kahunas. Their most basic belief, apparently, was that man does not have one soul, but three. One of them is called the low self, dwells in the solar plexus and corresponds roughly to what Freud called the unconscious. Next there is the middle self, which is our normal human consciousness. Lastly there is a high self which is as much above everyday consciousness as the low self is below it. This is the self which is capable of clairvoyance and precognition.
I recognized immediately that although this sounded absurdly complicated, it corresponded closely to some of my own conclusions about paranormal powers. The distinction between the low self and the middle self sounds very much like the distinction between Hudson’s subjective and objective minds or the left and right cerebral hemispheres — the middle self certainly corresponded precisely to our left-brain personality. As to the high self, it seemed to fit my hypothesis about a part of us that has direct access to ‘the information universe’. Frederick Myers had called it ‘the subliminal mind’, and in his introduction to Myers’ classic Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death Aldous Huxley had explained it by describing it as a kind of ‘attic’ of human consciousness, as far above the everyday living quarters of the personality as the Freudian basement is below it. So Long’s threefold division of the human mind struck me as obviously plausible. I was willing to pay respectful attention to anything else he had to say.
Long was finally able to obtain more detailed knowledge of Kahuna doctrines from a doctor, William Tufts Brigham, who had been studying them for years. According to Brigham, low selves or low spirits may become separated from the middle and high selves after death. And they can be used by Kahuna magicians for evil purposes — such as causing death. Brigham had had direct experience of this. On an expedition up a mountain a Hawaiian boy became ill and showed symptoms of suffering from the death prayer. When questioned the boy revealed that before he left his native village the local Kahuna had warned him that if he ever worked for the hated white men he would die. He had forgotten the threat until now. The natives regarded Brigham as a magician in his own right, and he felt that he had to make some effort to save the boy. Standing above him he addressed the ‘spirits’ who were slowly paralysing his body, praising and flattering them and declaring that the boy was an innocent victim and that the man who deserved the blame was the Kahuna who sent them. For a full hour he kept his mind concentrated upon this idea. Then, suddenly, the tension vanished and the boy said he could feel his legs again. The paralysis soon vanished completely. But when Brigham made enquiries at the boy’s native village he learned that the Kahuna was dead. He had come out of his hut in the early hours of the morning and told the villagers that the white magician had redirected the spirits, and that since he had failed to take any ritual precautions he must bear the consequences. A few hours later he was dead.
So according to Brigham the Kahunas performed their magic by means of spirits. And Long seemed to believe that the Kahuna system of psychology offered a satisfactory explanation of the mystery of multiple personality. He begins by describing one of the earliest known cases of dual personality, a girl named Mary Reynolds who woke up one morning in 1811 to find that she had lost every vestige of memory — she was exactly like a newborn child and had to be taught to speak all over again. Five weeks later the original Mary woke up with no memory of what had happened. And for the rest of her life the two Marys alternated in the same body, so that her relatives never knew which of them would open her eyes in the morning. Moreover the two Marys were opposites in character. The original Mary was a dull girl, prone to nervous depression; Mary Two, like Sally Beauchamp, was merry and mischievous. Mary One hated nature; Mary Two loved it … .
After describing the Christine Beauchamp (Clara Fowler) case, Long goes on to speak of a case which he had heard described by a certain Dr Leapsley, who lived in Honolulu.* It concerned the twenty-eight-year-old daughter of a California attorney. From the age of four she had been subject to changes of personality similar to those of Mary Reynolds. This happened regularly every four years. The secondary personality had been a ‘baby’ when it first arrived, like Mary Two. Neither personality had any knowledge of the other or of what happened when the other was ‘in the body’. So when the original inhabitant of the body woke up at the age of eight she had no memory of anything that had happened since she was four. At the age of twelve she ‘fell asleep’ again, and woke up to find herself sixteen … . The primary personality was quiet, studious and shy; the secondary personality was an aggressive tomboy.
Dr Leapsley and two colleagues were called in and were able to gain her trust and place her under hypnosis. The secondary personality was ordered to leave the body, but this (predictably) had no effect. The doctors tried ordering the two personalities to amalgamate, but still nothing happened. Then one day when the girl was under hypnosis she went into a deep trance from which she could not be awakened. Suddenly a third voice spoke from her mouth. It had a distinctly masculine quality — it almost seemed to be the voice of an old man. This personality seemed to know all the details of the lives of both girls. And in answer to the doctors’ questions it explained that it was their ‘guardian’ and that they were, quite literally, two different girls who were using the body.
The doctors argued that the girl’s life was being ruined by this alternation of personalities: she was unable to marry or live a normal life. The guardian disagreed with them. The purpose of life, it said, was personal evolution, and the girl was learning and maturing, even though she had to share her body with a stranger.
Finally, in desperation, one of the doctors told the guardian that unless the secondary personality agreed to go away they would keep
the girl hypnotized indefinitely. To this the guardian replied that unless they accepted the present situation it would withdraw both girls and leave them with a corpse. The doctors knew they were beaten, and the girl continued to live as a dual personality.
For Long the case was a proof of the Huna belief in the high self, the superconscious mind: the guardian, he says, was the girl’s superconscious. The secondary personality, according to Long, was an ‘invader’, an independent spirit.
Most people will reject this view out of hand. Science and commonsense seem to agree that personality has a great deal to do with the body. Professor John Taylor states, ‘We recognize personality as a summation of the different contributions to behaviour from the various control units of the brain.’ And it is true that a person with a brain tumour may begin to behave in a completely uncharacteristic way: if, for example, the tumour presses on the amygdaloid nucleus the gentlest person may become aggressive and violent. Yet it must be admitted that even in these cases the basic personality remains unchanged: there is nothing like the complete alteration of personality that occurred with Clara Fowler or Billy Milligan. The various photographs of Doris Fischer’s personalities in the article by Walter Franklin Prince* make them look like different people.
Yet the notion that the mind and the brain are two quite different entities has begun to gain a foothold in modern science. Dr Wilder Penfield is one eminent brain physiologist who reluctantly came to this conclusion. It was Penfield who, in 1933, discovered that a person can be made to re-live past memories in total detail by stimulating a part of the brain — the temporal cortex — with an electric current. Penfield’s outlook was basically reductionist: he believed that consciousness is a product of the brain as heat is a product of fire. But an experiment performed in 1959 changed his mind. The patient was wide awake and his brain was being stimulated by an electric current so that he experienced a kind of mental film of his childhood: yet while this was going on he was also fully conscious of the room around him. So two ‘streams of consciousness’ were flowing simultaneously without mingling. This convinced Penfield that, ‘The patient’s mind … can only be something quite apart from the neuronal reflex action.’ Much the same view is taken by Sir Karl Popper and Sir John Eccles in their classic work The Self and Its Brain, as the very title implies. But if the mind — or self — exists apart from the brain (and body), then what characteristics does it possess? Is it merely some anonymous ‘life force’ which has no more individuality than heat or light? That is possible, for when my mind goes blank my personality seems to disappear. Yet every mother knows that her babies show signs of personality long before they can do anything but drink milk and sleep. So perhaps my personality is merely inactive when my mind goes blank. And if the mind — or personality — can exist apart from the body, then this is a return to the religious notion of the soul and of life after death.