by Colin Wilson
If Peter Fairley could really predict which horse would win a race, then there is clearly something wrong with our human notion of time; for the idea that the future has already taken place—which it must have done if you are to ‘know’ it—is self-contradictory, a paradox. But then, our minds are a paradox in precisely the same sense. You and I apparently exist in a solid, three-dimensional Universe: we are physical objects. Then where, precisely, is my mind? Inside my head? ‘Realist’ philosophers have tried hard to explain mind in physical terms—the brain and the nervous system—but they end with a static model, rather like a computer. And a computer needs to be worked by somebody. When I struggle with an intellectual or emotional problem, I am aware of an element that I call ‘me’ trying to get the best out of the computer. This being can look on quite detachedly while ‘I’ am flooded with a powerful emotion. It applies the accelerator or brake to my moods and feelings. It seems to exist in a dimension apart from this physical world we live in.
To me, these considerations suggest that these two paradoxical concepts—time and the mind—are closely connected. Our bodies exist in the realm of one-way time, but our minds do not. As Wells points out, when I become absent-minded, my mind goes ‘elsewhere’. But on the whole, these visits to other times and places are far less vivid than our everyday lives. Yet this is not so much a limitation of our minds as of the ‘computer’ they use, the brain.
For example, there is an important experience of the philosopher J.B. Bennett described in his autobiography Witness. Bennett tells how, when he was staying at the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainebleau, he woke up one morning feeling exceptionally weak from dysentery, but nevertheless forced himself to get up. Later that morning he took part in some Gurdjieff exercises— incredibly difficult and complex physical movements. One by one, the other disciples dropped out; but, in spite of extreme fatigue and discomfort, Bennett forced himself to go on. Then, quite suddenly, ‘I was filled with an influx of an immense power. My body seemed to have turned into light.’ All fatigue vanished. When he went outside, he decided to test this power by digging at a rate he could not ordinarily maintain for more than a few minutes; he was able to continue for half an hour without fatigue. He walked out into the forest, and decided to try to test his control over his emotions. He willed himself to feel astonishment. ‘Instantly, I was overwhelmed with amazement, not only at my own state, but at everything I looked at or thought of.’ The thought of ‘fear’ fill him with immense dread; the thought of ‘joy’ filled him with rapture; the thought of ‘love’ flooded him with a tremendous tenderness and compassion. Finally, bewildered by this new ability to feel anything he liked, he willed it to go away, and it instantly vanished.
Now what is involved here is obviously what William James calls ‘vital reserves’. James points out that we can feel exhausted, push ourselves beyond the exhaustion, and suddenly feel full of energy again. It is the phenomenon of ‘second wind’. It seems that we possess vast energy reserves that we fail to make use of. But a sudden emergency will bring them into operation. Bennett’s tremendous effort not to drop out of the Gurdjieff exercises somehow pushed him into a heightened state of ‘second wind’, and brought a completely new level of control over his ‘computer’. It is a pity that he did not try the experiment of recalling some event from his past; I suspect that he would have been able to ‘replay’ it in the most accurate detail.
In fact, as Dr Wilder Penfield discovered, our brains contain the stored ‘memory tapes’ of everything we have ever seen or felt, and these tapes can be ‘replayed’ by stimulating the temporal cortex of the brain with an electric probe. If we could achieve Bennett’s state of ‘second wind’, the electric probe would be unnecessary; all the memory tapes of the brain would become instantly accessible to us . . .
But that, you will object, is still not time travel; it is merely playing back a recording. True. But, if Joseph Rodes Buchanan and William Denton were correct about ‘psychometry’, then the brain also has the power to play back the history of any object it chooses to scan—for example, a five billion-year-old meteorite. Buchanan’s ‘sensitives’ could hold a sealed letter and describe not only its contents but also the state of mind of the person who had written it. And this, you may point out, is still not time travel. True. But it is something very like it. And I would remind you that we have already agreed that time travel, in Wells’s sense, is an absurdity. You cannot literally go back ‘before’ the Battle of Hastings, because the Battle of Hastings has already happened, and it cannot be unhappened. Yet, if Buchanan and Denton are correct, then it should be possible for a ‘sensitive’ to literally relive a day in the life of a soldier who fought at the battle of Hastings. And Dunne’s experiment with time seems to suggest that it might be possible to do the same for the future, and ‘relive’ a day that has not yet taken place. And this, I think, would qualify as time travel.
What I am now suggesting is a view of the human mind that has been forcing itself upon me for many years. My starting-point, in books like The Outsider and Religion and the Rebel, was the experiences of certain poets and mystics. The romantic poets of the 19th century seemed to differ from their predecessors in one important respect: they seemed to have an altogether greater capacity for sustaining imaginative intensity. We live our lives confined by space and time and the trivial necessities of everyday life; consciousness is basically a device for perceiving what goes on around us. Poets and mystics seem to be able to use it for a quite different purpose—to build up a kind of internal world whose intensity rivals that of the physical reality that surrounds us. When I came—almost by accident—to turn my attention to the realm of the ‘occult’ or paranormal, it struck me that the ‘psychic’ is only another type of poet: a person for whom the physical world is only one aspect of reality.
Now this view seems to me, on reflection, logical and reasonable enough. Consciousness is tied to the physical world for a simple reason: if it weren’t, we would have been extinct long ago. As H.G. Wells pointed out, all animals are ‘up against it’ from the moment they are born. In the Victorian age, children began work at six in the morning and finished at eight in the evening. Life is still brutal and hard for well over a half of the human race. I am lucky that I can sit at my desk, in a comfortable room, and address my mind to this interesting problem of the nature of time; you are lucky that you can sit down and read it. If you and I had to work a fourteen-hour day in a factory we would long for a little leisure to relax and allow the mind to wing its way through the worlds of imagination.
Because of this harsh physical necessity, consciousness has accustomed itself to sticking to the material world: which means, in effect, that it has never had a chance to explore its own capacities—or rather, the capacities of that extraordinary computer called the brain. But here we come to one of the strangest parts of the story. For some odd reason, the capacity of this computer is far greater than it needs to be—at least, in terms of Darwinian evolution. For example, it is quite clear that we never make use of that vast library of ‘memory tapes’ that Wilder Penfield discovered; we don’t need to make use of them for everyday survival. Then why are they there? Why has evolution dictated that the brain should remember every tiny event and idea of our lives? Again, I have always been fascinated by the capacity of calculating prodigies—usually young children of ordinary intelligence—who can multiply or divide immense sums in their heads. Equally extraordinary is the class known as ‘idiot savants’—children whose IQ may be on the moron level, yet who, in one particular field, have some incredible mental gift—one, for example, could reel off the name of every musical film ever made and every actor who played every part. Moreover, some of these idiot savants have highly developed ‘psychic’ powers; for example, one boy declined a lift home with his teacher because, he said, his mother would be meeting him out of school. In fact, his mother did arrive to meet him; but she had decided to do so only half an hour before, when another trip took her close to the sc
hool . . .
And this example brings me to the starting-point of my book The Occult: the observation that ‘psychic powers’ often seem to involve a breakdown—or at least, loss of efficiency—in our normal mental powers. For example, a Dutch house painter named Peter van der Hurk fell off his ladder and fractured his skull; when he woke up in hospital, he discovered that he ‘knew’ all kinds of things about his fellow patients, about their past and even their future. This strange capacity has remained with him and, under the name of Peter Hurkos, he has made a considerable reputation as a ‘clairvoyant’ and psychometrist, often helping the police to solve murder cases. But, in the days immediately following his accident, he found life difficult because his new psychic powers made it impossible for him to concentrate on ordinary, everyday jobs; he might have starved if someone had not suggested using his powers to make a living as a stage ‘magician’. When I read this story in Hurkos’ autobiography I found myself thinking of all those romantic poets and artists who had died in poverty because they found it impossible to concentrate on the dreary necessities of material existence. There is obviously a close analogy.
All this seems to suggest that our brains possess extraordinary powers that most of us never have reason to use. The problem of survival demands that we are tied down to the everyday world; if this were not so, we might all be calculating prodigies and psychics, and probably literary and artistic geniuses into the bargain.
But to phrase it this way suggests that it is a question of either/or: either we get rid of such unusual faculties or we lose our ability to survive. But is the choice really as harsh as that? I am inclined to doubt it. Life for most of us is safer and more secure than at any other time in history. Modern man is far less likely to be knocked down by a car than his ancestors were to be eaten by wild beasts or killed by their fellow men. (Even as recently as the age of Dr Johnson, remote country houses were often besieged by gangs of ruffians who killed those who resisted and carried off everything of value.) Most of us have hours of leisure every week in which we might explore the possibilities of human consciousness. No, the real problem is a force of habit so deeply ingrained that it would be better to refer to it as hypnosis. If you force a chicken’s beak against the floor, then draw a chalk line straight in front of it, the chicken will be unable to raise its head when you let it go; for some odd reason it focuses attention on the chalk line, and becomes hypnotized by it. We all suffer from a similar tendency; the moment we relax, habit induces a state similar to hypnosis, in which the attention becomes fixed on the external world. Sartre wrote about the café proprietor in Nausea: ‘When his café empties, his head empties too.’ But it is not confined to the illiterate or unintelligent. There is a story told of the famous mathematician Hilbert. Before a dinner party, his wife sent him upstairs to change his tie; when, after an hour, he had still not reappeared, she went to see what had happened; he was in bed fast asleep. He explained that as soon as he had removed his tie, he had automatically taken off the rest of his clothes, put on his pyjamas and climbed into bed.
This is the problem of human consciousness: habits that bundle us into bed and off to sleep when there are far more interesting things to be done. Chesterton asked why the world is so full of bright children and dud grown-ups. The reason is that our most interesting potentialities fail to survive adolescence; we slip into a habit of using only a fraction of our powers.
When habit is broken, anything can happen. In a book called Mysteries (1978) I have cited the case of a lady named Jane O’Neill who, when driving to London airport, witnessed a serious accident and helped to free badly injured people from a wrecked coach. The shock was so severe that she had to take several weeks off from work. She began to experience strange waking visions, some of which were oddly accurate: for example, she ‘saw’ a close friend chained in the galleys; told about this, her friend replied that her ancestors were Huguenots and many had found themselves in the galleys. One day in Fotheringhay Church, Jane O’Neill was impressed by a picture behind the altar. She later mentioned this to the friend who had accompanied her, and her friend said that she had not seen any picture. Miss O’Neill was so puzzled that she rang the lady who cleaned the church and asked her about it; the lady replied that there was no such picture. Later, the two women revisited the church; to Jane O’Neill’s surprise, the inside was quite different from what she had seen before—it was much smaller—and the picture was not there. She asked an expert on East Anglian churches, who put her in touch with a historian who knew the history of Fotheringhay. He was able to tell her that the church she had ‘seen’ had been the church as it was more than four centuries ago; it had been rebuilt in 1553 . . .
Jane O’Neill’s experience is, in its way, as well authenticated as that of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain. In one sense, it is more convincing; I heard of it by accident, through a friend, and wrote to Miss O’Neill, who was kind enough to send me a full account, together with the exchange of letters with the historian which established that she had ‘seen’ the earlier church. Miss O’Neill had made no attempt to publish her interesting story, so cannot be accused of attention-seeking.
But how can we reconcile a story as extraordinary as this with our everyday experience of the real world? Most scientists have a short and convenient method of dealing with such anomalies; they dismiss them as lies, distortions or mistakes. Whether intellectually justified or not (on grounds of ‘the laws of probability’), this is bound to strike anyone interested in such matters as pure mental laziness. If an answer is to be found, I believe that its starting-point must be the notion that the powers of the human mind are far less limited than we naturally assume. This was a conclusion I had reached many years before I became interested in the paranormal; so that, for example, in Religion and the Rebel (1957), I had suggested that our everyday consciousness is as limited as the middle few notes of a piano keyboard, and that its possible range is as wide as the whole keyboard. In states of great happiness or relief, or when involved in some absorbing adventure, we receive a clear intuition that the world is an infinitely richer and more complex place than ordinary consciousness permits us to perceive. And, moreover, that the mind is perfectly capable of taking a wider grip on that breadth and complexity . . .
Hurkos’s accident, like Jane O’Neill’s, shook his mind out of its usual narrow rut, and made him aware that ‘everyday consciousness’ is basically unreliable in its report about the actuality that surrounds us. But then, is not such narrowness preferable to the state of confused inefficiency that accompanied his powers of ‘second sight’? Was Jane O’Neill’s glimpse of Fotheringhay in the 16th century (or earlier) worth the mental shock of the coach accident? These questions raise serious doubts about the desirability of such powers. But then, we are assuming that it is possible to investigate the unknown powers of the mind only by destroying our everyday sense of reality. And this, fortunately, is untrue.
We may recall the story told by Alan Vaughan in his book Patterns of Prophecy, cited in Chapter 11 (p. 350), in which he became ‘possessed’ by the wife of a Nantucket sea captain, and how he was ‘exorcised’ by an occultist, who caused an entity called ‘Z’ to drive out the sea captain’s wife through the top of Vaughan’s head:
‘I began to feel an energy rising up within my body and entering my brain. It pushed out both “Nada” and “Z”. My friends noted that my face, which had been white and pinched, suddenly flooded with colour. I felt a tremendous sense of elation and physical wellbeing. The energy grew stronger and seemed to extend beyond my body. My mind seemed to race in some extended dimension that knew no confines of time or space. For the first time, I began to sense what was going on in other people’s minds and—to my astonishment—I began to sense the future through some kind of extended awareness. My first act in this strange but exciting state was to throw the Ouija down an incinerator chute . . .’
It was this experience that led Vaughan to study the whole question of prophetic glimpses of the f
uture. He had seen this ‘extended dimension that knew no confines of time or space’, and decided that it deserved to be investigated. The poet Robert Graves described a similar experience in a story called ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’ (which, he told me, was autobiographical): ‘One fine summer evening as I sat alone on the roller behind the cricket pavilion, with nothing in my head, I received a celestial illumination: it occurred to me that I knew everything. I remember letting my mind range rapidly over all its familiar subjects of knowledge; only to find that this was no foolish fancy. I did know everything. To be plain: though conscious of having come less than a third of the way along the path of formal education . . . I nevertheless held the key of truth in my hand, and could use it to open any lock of any door. Mine was no religious or philosophical theory, but a simple method of looking sideways at disorderly facts so as to make perfect sense of them.’
The ‘secret’, Graves says, was still there when he woke up the next morning; but, when he tried writing it down, it vanished.
It is true that Graves fails to explain just what he meant by the ‘secret’, except to say that it was ‘a sudden infantile awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer’. But he offers a further clue in citing the case of another boy in the school who was able to solve a highly complicated arithmetical problem merely by looking at it. The form master—‘Mr Gunn’—accused the boy of looking at the answer at the end of the book; the boy replied that he had checked with the answer—later—and that its last two figures were wrong—they should be 35, not 53. The unsympathetic and obtuse Mr Gunn sent the boy to the headmaster for a caning, declining to believe that he could simply have ‘seen’ the answer . . .