Supernatural

by Colin Wilson

  But does this really matter? In some ways, no. I get just as much exercise whether I walk ‘robotically’ or not, and a meal supplies me with just as much energy whether I eat mechanically or not. The real trouble arises if I begin to feel depressed or discouraged. These sun-glasses make the world so much darker. But my vitality—and therefore my health—depends upon enthusiasm. It depends upon a certain eagerness. It depends upon noticing differences.

  Ouspensky tells a story that makes the same point. He describes how he and a friend were crossing the River Neva in St Petersburg.

  ‘We had been talking, but both fell silent as we approached the [Peter and Paul] fortress, gazing up at its walls and making probably the same reflection. “In there are also factory chimneys,” said A. Behind the walls of the fortress indeed appeared some brick chimneys blackened by smoke.

  ‘On his saying this, I too sensed the difference between the chimneys and the prison walls with unusual clearness and like an electric shock. I realised the difference between the very bricks themselves. . . .

  ‘Later in conversation with A, I recalled this episode, and he told me that not only then, but always, he sensed these differences and was deeply convinced of their reality.’

  And Ouspensky goes on to say that the wood of a gallows, a crucifix, the mast of a ship is, in fact, a quite different material in each case. Chemical analysis could not detect it; but then, chemical analysis cannot detect the difference between two twins, who are nevertheless quite different personalities. Ouspensky begins this important chapter with a paragraph that ought to be written in letters 20 feet high:

  ‘It seems to us that we see something and understand something. But in reality all that proceeds around us we sense only very confusedly, just as a snail senses confusedly the sunlight, the darkness and the rain.’1

  A similar experience was reported by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who had been told of it by a marine who had been stationed in the Pacific for several years and had not seen a woman. When he came back to base, he saw a nurse, and immediately had a ‘peak experience’—an experience of sudden overwhelming delight—as it suddenly struck him with a kind of shock that women are different from men. We say ‘Of course women are different from men’, yet these words disguise the fact that we have allowed the robot to obliterate the real difference. We do not see it with that sense of shock and amazement experienced by the marine—although it is true that a man might experience something similar if he walked past an open doorway and caught a glimpse of a woman removing her clothes. And this example makes us aware that we have simply allowed our senses to collapse. You could compare them to a tent that has been blown flat, so it is no longer of much use as a shelter. Because of this collapse of our senses, they cannot do their proper work, which is to show us the differences between things.

  In short, I am suggesting that it is the ‘robot’ who destroys our ‘magical’ powers, and prevents us all from being able to float through the air like Richard Church or Joseph of Copertino.

  Let us look more closely into this fascinating problem.

  You may feel that the idea of floating through the air is just a little too much to swallow. Yet there is another odd faculty which seems to be closely related to it, and which thousands of people have reported: I mean the odd ability to be in two places at once.

  When the Society for Psychical Research was formed in London in 1882, it received hundreds of reports of people who had ‘seen’ other people who were not actually in the room. In many of these cases, the person who appeared was about to die, or had just died, and the person who saw him (or her) was a close relative. So such ‘apparitions’ could be explained either as ghosts, or—if you did not believe in ghosts—as some kind of telepathy. In a typical case, a man sitting in his room in Dublin awoke in the night and saw his father—who was on his deathbed in Wales—sitting in a chair with his face covered by his hands; a moment later, he vanished. The man was so impressed that he rushed over to Wales, and found that his father had been delirious for two days. And when he entered the room, his father remarked that he had been to see him the day before . . .1

  But the Society also received hundreds of reports of people who were not ill or in any danger being seen in other places. These they called ‘phantasms of the living”, and the case cited above is from one of its earliest and most impressive compilations. The following typical case is recounted by the poet W.B. Yeats:

  ‘One afternoon . . . I was thinking very intently of a fellow student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated about writing. 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. My fellow student had seen me, but no one else, and had asked me to come again when the people had gone. I had vanished, but had come again in the middle of the night and given him the message. I had myself no knowledge of either apparition.’1

  What seems to have happened here is that Yeats’s anxiety to deliver the message somehow caused him to ‘project’ his image several hundred miles, where it apparently behaved like a normal person. And in the case of the man who was dying in Wales, we may again surmise that the father’s anxiety (in fact, he wanted to tell his son the whereabouts of an overcoat) again caused him to ‘project’ himself to Dublin. And it is a plausible hypothesis that when people are on the point of dying, they are able to tap some unconscious power which allows them to ‘show themselves’ to some close relative about whom they are anxious. (In the same way, there is strong evidence that people who are drowning, or in some great physical danger, really do see their past lives flashing in front of their eyes within a second or two.)

  But there are other cases in which people seem to have used this power more or less deliberately. One evening in the the late 1920s, the novelist John Cowper Powys had spent the evening dining with the great American writer Theodore Dreiser. Powys suddenly looked at his watch: ‘I must hurry.’ But as he left Dreiser’s New York apartment he remarked: ‘I’ll appear before you later this evening.’ Then he rushed off to catch his train to upstate New York. Dreiser assumed the comment was a joke. But two hours later, as he sat reading, he looked up and found Powys standing by the door. He stood up, saying: ‘John, come in and tell me how you did it.’ At that moment, Powys vanished. Dreiser rushed to the telephone and rang Powys’s home. Powys answered, and, when Dreiser told him what had happened, replied: ‘I told you I’d be there.’

  Dreiser adds that Powys later declined to discuss how he had done it. But that may not be because Powys wanted to be secretive. It may be, quite simply, that he did not know. He probably ‘felt it coming on’ during the evening, an odd state of mind which he recognised as the ability to ‘project’ himself. And it is almost certain that he did not know he had done it until Dreiser rang him up.

  Perhaps the strangest case on record is that of an attractive French schoolmistress named Emilie Sagée who lost 18 jobs in sixteen years because of her peculiar habit of being in two places at once. The way she lost her eighteenth job is typical. In 1845, she was a teacher at a school for young ladies at Neuwelcke, near Wolmar, on the shores of the Baltic. One day as she was writing on the blackboard, a second Emilie appeared standing beside her. As she turned to see what the pupils were murmuring about, her ‘double’ vanished. On another occasion, she was on her knees beside a girl called Antoinette von Wrangel, pinning her dress, and as the girl looked in the wardrobe mirror, she saw two Emilies, and fainted.

  The last straw was when another teacher had left her pupils alone for five minutes. Suddenly, they were astonished to see Emilie seated in the teacher’s chair. Stranger still, there was another Emilie out in the garden. Two of the bolder pupils tried to touch the apparition, and said it felt like muslin. One of them even walked through her. Then the apparition vanished, although the other Emilie could still be seen in the gard
en. Later, a friendly pupil asked Emilie what had happened. She explained that she had looked into the classroom through the garden window, seen that the teacher was absent, and felt worried that the girls would misbehave. It seems that, in some strange way, her worry had projected her ‘double’ into the room.

  When parents heard these stories they began withdrawing their children from the school, and Emilie was sacked. She then went to live with her sister-in-law, and everyone in the family got used to seeing her double wandering around the house. But the strain seems to have been too much for her; one day she left the house and vanished, never to be seen again. The likeliest explanation is that she drowned herself.

  One of the most famous cases recorded by the Society for Psychical Research concerns a young student named S.H. Beard, who was engaged to a girl named Miss Verity. In November 1881, Beard was sitting in his room in London reading a book about the power of the will. It suddenly entered his head that he would like to ‘appear’ to Miss Verity, who lived at 22 Hogarth Road, Kensington. He concentrated his mind and tried to visualise the house, and the bedroom on the second floor where his fiancée slept. Suddenly he became aware that he could not move his limbs; he felt ‘frozen’. And at that moment, in Hogarth Road, Miss Verity woke up and found him standing by her bed. She screamed, and it awoke her 11-year-old sister. As the two girls stared at the apparition, it vanished. Beard himself did not know he had succeeded until Miss Verity told him about it next time he saw her.

  A month later he decided to try it again. By now Miss Verity and her sister had moved to Kew. Once again he made the attempt, writing later: ‘I also put forth an effort which I cannot find words to describe. I was conscious of a mysterious influence of some sort permeating my body, and had a distinct impression that I was exercising some force with which I had been hitherto unacquainted, but which I can now at certain times set in motion at will.’ Half an hour later he ‘came to’ and realised he had been asleep—or in a trance. The next day he discovered once again that he had been successful. But it was not Miss Verity who had seen him this time, but her married sister. She had seen him walking from one room to another, and later he had walked into her bedroom, touched her hair, taken her hand in his own and stared intently at the palm before he vanished. The sister woke Miss Verity, who was in the same bed, to tell her what had happened.

  All these stories seem to make the same point made by Richard Church. We take it for granted that we live in a ‘solid’ world of space and time, advancing from moment to moment according to unchangeable laws, and that we are stuck in the place where we happen to be at the moment. We are, in a sense, ‘trapped’. We feel this particularly strongly when we are bored or miserable—that we are helplessly at the mercy of this physical world into which we happen to have been born. Yet these odd experiences all seem to show that this is untrue. The ‘real you’ is not trapped in space and time. With a certain kind of effort of will it can rise above space and time, and be ‘elsewhere’. Later in this book we shall discuss the strange fact that human beings have two brains, and that we all have two different ‘selves’ who live one in each of them (see page Pp. 60ff). Brain physiologists have no idea of why we need two more-or-less identical brains in our heads—one tongue-in-cheek suggestion is that one of them is a ‘spare’ in case the other gets damaged. My own belief is that we have two brains, so we can be in two places at the same time. Human beings are supposed to be capable of being in two places at the same time. Yet we have not quite discovered the ‘trick’. When we do, we shall be a completely different kind of creature—no longer the same kind of human being who lives out his life so incompetently on this long-suffering planet, but something far more powerful and purposeful. This is what I mean when I say that I believe man is on the point of an evolutionary leap.

  But, as I have already explained, I had arrived at this conviction long before I began to take an interest in ‘the occult’. It was already the foundation of my first book The Outsider, written almost twenty years earlier. What convinced me was the curious change in human consciousness that began to take place around the year 1750. What happened, quite simply, was that man suddenly learned to daydream. He began to use his imagination in a completely new way. In fact, you could almost say that the human beings who existed before 1750 had very little imagination at all.

  You probably believe that, if you could take a time machine back to the age of Shakespeare, you would find life far more fascinating than today. In fact, you would find it incredibly boring and depressing. The streets would have stunk of dung, urine, dead rats and rotting vegetation—an open sewer ran down the middle of most of them, and rich people wore high platforms on their shoes to keep them from getting their feet dirty in the thick mud. But what would really have depressed you would have been the people themselves. We think of the modern New Yorker or Londoner as a fairly unlovely product of our technological civilisation. But he is a noble and sensitive soul compared to the average Elizabethan. As reflected in the literature of the period, the Elizabethan was self-centred, stupid—most of them were illiterate—and utterly materialistic. He was also appallingly cruel; a mother starving with a child at her breast meant nothing to him, and his favourite entertainment was to attend a public execution, in which a man was often branded with hot irons, then half-hanged, then taken down while still alive and torn open so his intestines spilled out. The Elizabethans also loved to attend the playhouse, and their favourite plays were full of blood and violence—like Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great or Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy—which ended with the stage piled with corpses.

  It would be pointless to blame them for this—when life is an endless struggle, people become hard and ruthless. But it is important to recognise that these people were very different from ourselves in one basic respect—that they lacked what we would call imagination. Most of us have learned the trick of ‘putting ourselves in other people’s shoes’, of imagining what it would be like to be someone else. So newspapers can always guarantee a large sale if they have some ‘human’ story about a child who has lost his dog, a baby in need of a heart transplant, a ‘tug of love’ between divorced parents. The Elizabethans would have found this baffling; to hold their attention, a story had to be either farcical or cruel. Don Quixote, one of the most popular novels of the following century, kept its readers in a state of delight by showing its hero being beaten unconscious in every other chapter.

  The ‘great change’ began in the middle of the 18th century—or, to be more precise, in the year 1740. A year earlier, a 50-year-old printer named Samuel Richardson had been asked by a publisher to write a kind of Teach Yourself book about the art of letter-writing. Being a natural preacher, Richardson decided to write letters that would teach his readers about religion and morality as well as paragraphing and punctuation, so he interspersed business letters and character references with letters full of reproach, good advice and moral observations. And as he was writing, he recalled a story he had heard twenty years before, about a pretty ‘lady’s companion’ named Pamela who had been driven to the point of suicide by the determined efforts of her employer’s son to seduce her, but ended by marrying him. The young man’s relatives had at first regarded her with extreme disapproval, but her ‘dignity, sweetness and humility’ had at last won their hearts.

  The story of Pamela was at first intended to form part of the Familiar Letters, but Richardson’s wife and a young lady guest found it so fascinating that he soon decided to turn it into a separate book. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, appeared—anonymously—on London bookstalls on November 6, 1740, and quickly became the literary sensation of the season. The reason is simple: although Richardson had intended it as a kind of sermon on the importance of chastity, its readers were more interested by the young master’s attempts to deprive Pamela of her virginity—as, for example, when he hides in a cupboard as she gets undressed, then leaps on her and throws her on the bed. (She is saved by the intervention of the housekeeper.) Or later, when he tries
to rape her as a brothel madame holds her hands, but is deterred when she has a kind of seizure. This kind of thing kept them reading breathlessly through 800 or so pages.

  In effect, Pamela was a kind of magic carpet that transported the reader into the lives of its characters. In our age of the television soap opera, this has become a commonplace; in the 1740s it seemed stunningly original. There had been plenty of novels about faraway places with strange-sounding names, of which Robinson Crusoe is still far and away the best. But no one had thought of writing about the kind of people who might live next door. Moreover, unlike most of the novels of the period, Pamela was a long book; the reader could get lost in it for days at a time. It was, in effect, a kind of holiday from being yourself.

  The Pamela craze swept across Europe. It produced an immense appetite for novels, and lending libraries sprang up in every town in the same way that cinemas sprang up in the first decade of the 20th century. Europe became a nation of readers. And sensitive young people made the interesting discovery that if you found the real world boring and disappointing, there was nothing to stop you from turning your back on it and spending your days living other people’s lives.

  And it was at this point that the young Wordsworth rowed out into the middle of the lake and was overwhelmed by a sense of ‘huge and mighty forms that do not live’. If he had been born half a century earlier—at about the time Richardson was writing Pamela—that experience would have been impossible: he would have beheld the hills of the Lake District with the same practical eye as the local farmhands. But half a century of novel-reading had taught people to use the imagination, and it was because he possessed a lively imagination that Wordsworth could experience these strange moods of total freedom and of ‘unknown modes of being’.

  There was, of course, one basic problem about these magical excursions into ‘other worlds’—they made the real world seem so appallingly dull. Every young person has experienced this feeling after an hour or so absorbed in a favourite book—or videotape. It is like walking out into a cold wind after a hot bath. The reaction of many of these ‘romantics’—as they called themselves—was to spend still more time in the magic world of books. And this inevitably made them hate the real world even more. Many committed suicide; many more died tragically of illnesses like tuberculosis, brought on by misery and deprivation. And many simply plodded on sadly, accepting that life is one long disappointment, yet dreaming of better things. One of the most moving episodes in Richard Church’s Over the Bridge describes how a long-haired young man with dirty nails came to tune their piano. He smoked continuously as he worked. When he had finished, Richard’s brother Jack asked him if he could give him a few hints on how to play a Beethoven piano sonata—Jack had been wrestling unsuccessfully with it for weeks. ‘The result was like the opening of a weir.’ The scrawny musician tossed back his hair, cracked his knuckles, and proceeded to play. And the two boys listened in rapt silence as the magnificent music flowed through the room. When it was over, the musician wiped his face with a dirty handkerchief. He was sweating, and emitting an odour of mice or bats. And Jack, too moved even to thank him, hurried from the room to ask his father if he could have piano lessons.