by Colin Wilson
Whenever human beings experience that deep sense of happiness and meaning, it is because they are ‘paying attention’. If you eat a meal without paying attention, you do not enjoy it. But the reason that you can experience that sense of expanding happiness when setting out on a journey is that you are paying attention, and attention is somehow expanding, so you are aware of far more than your immediate situation. In some strange way, you are aware of other times and other places. It is almost as if you are in two places at once. This is what human consciousness should be like all the time. This is what it will be like when we have taken that next evolutionary step.
When I was a child, I was often told to chew my food properly, or it would give me indigestion. What I am now pointing out is that when we are happy, it is because we are chewing our experience properly—as you do in bed on a cold winter morning. Otherwise, we tend to swallow experience unchewed, and it does no good. This is what Socrates meant when he said: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’
But in order for this analogy with chewing to take on its full significance, we have to suppose that if a child swallowed food without chewing it, the food would remain undigested, and would fail to have any nutritive effect whatever. For this is what happens with ‘unchewed’ experience: it passes straight through us, and contributes nothing to our growth. That is why so many unreflective people are spiritually stunted.
Human beings have to learn to become ‘reflective’, to chew their experience, to savour it. We see this truth every time we experience crisis and wish it would go away. We suddenly see how easy it would be to savour every moment of our lives. We have to learn to calm ourselves down, to relax, to go inwards. R.H. Ward said that when he tried to put the essence of his mystical experience into words, he saw it as a repetition of ‘Within and within and within and within . . .’ like a repeating decimal.
Although mystics have known this for centuries, it is only within the past two and a half centuries that the ‘trick’ has begun to spread to the rest of us—to be more specific, since 1740. I am not, of course, claiming that Richardson’s Pamela was the first sign of this development. Throughout recorded history men have had this curious longing to escape into the world of the mind, the world of myths and stories, and that ‘eternal longing’ is manifested in The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Odyssey and the Greek drama and the Canterbury Tales and the Elizabethan drama and Don Quixote and Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus and Robinson Crusoe. But because Pamela was the first ‘soap opera’, it was a watershed, somehow as different from Don Quixote as a steamship is from a sailing ship. It taught people to pay attention to their own lives instead of dreaming about mythical heroes and faraway places with strange-sounding names.
Ever since Pamela, man has been trying to absorb that lesson. But the industrial revolution made life far more hectic, preventing us from ‘paying attention’. So we continue to swallow our experience without chewing it, and wondering why we suffer from indigestion. We have to consciously learn to make that effort to chew. The great heroes of this new phase of human evolution are not the conquerors, or even the scientists, but the men who have taught us to reflect, to ‘mythologise’, to go ‘within and within and within . . .’
Meanwhile, we remain trapped in a negative culture, whose cult figures are artists and writers who remain convinced that life is basically meaningless or tragic. Here, for example, is a typical passage from the French philosopher and critic Roland Barthes:
‘. . . the art of living has no history; it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, and there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutation.’1
This is still the same pessimism that we can find in the Romantics, from Novalis to Verlaine. And he is clearly missing the point: that the only way of preventing experience from ‘vanishing for good’ is to ‘permanise’ it through ‘attention’. This word processor on which I am writing has a key labelled ‘save’, and when I press it, the words I have written are transferred from the screen to the disc. Now they are recorded, fixed—as writing ‘fixes’ our speech. If my word processor is accidentally switched off before I have pressed the ‘save’ key, the words ‘vanish for good’. Barthes, like so many of his fellow romantics, has simply failed to realise that his brain has a ‘save’ key, and that it is because we have learned to use this key that human beings have evolved faster than any other animal.
Now it should be clear why I think that ‘the paranormal’ is of such immense importance. Here is one field that is untinged by contemporary pessimism. The clear message that emerges is that man possesses powers of which he is normally unaware. As Richard Church watched the gardener wielding the axe, and noticed that the sound came after the blow, he says that he experienced a marvellous sense of freedom. His enemy so far had been ‘the drag of the earth’. Now he realised that he had been overestimating the enemy. It was at that moment that he made an instinctive effort and rose from the ground and glided about the room. When man can clearly recognise the existence of these powers, and incorporate that recognition into his everyday awareness—so that he is no longer subject to a permanent ‘leakage’ of vitality—then he will suddenly have become a totally different kind of creature.
1. Varieties of Religious Experience, chapter 16, p. 378.
1. From Barthes by Barthes.
Appendix
IT SEEMS wortwhile to explain how I came to be converted from the notion that poltergeists are simply a form of ‘spontaneous psychokinesis’, due to the hidden powers of the unconscious mind, to the conviction that they are independent ‘spirits’. It began in 1976, when I presented the Rosenheim case on BBC television.
In 1967 the office of a lawyer in Rosenheim, Bavaria, became the scene of a number of violent poltergeist disturbances. Light tubes shattered, pictures turned on the walls and a heavy filing cabinet was moved as if it weighed only a few pounds. Moreover the telephone bill was enormous because hundreds of calls had apparently been made to the talking clock – more calls than were physically possible in the time available.The ‘poltergeist’ was apparently getting straight through the relays. A well-known professor of parapsychology from Freiburg, Hans Bender, went to investigate the case and soon observed that the disturbances only took place when a young girl named Anne-Marie Schaberl was in the office. Anne-Marie was a country girl who was unhappy working in a town; her family life had been difficult – her father was a strict disciplinarian – and she was mistrustful and tense. Bender took her back to his laboratory to try various tests for extra-sensory perception and she showed remarkable telepathic abilities. And while Anne-Marie was in Freiburg the disturbances in the office ceased. But they continued at the mill where she found work: when someone was killed in an accident Anne-Marie was blamed, and she left. Her fiancé broke off his engagement to her because she had such an extraordinary effect on the electronic scoring equipment at his favourite bowling alley. Finally she married and had a child, and the manifestations ceased.
Anne-Marie had no suspicion that she was the cause of the disturbances in the lawyer’s office: indeed when I met him during the course of the programme Professor Bender told me that one of the first rules of poltergeist investigation is not to tell the ‘disturbed adolescent’ that he – or she – is the real cause of the disturbances, for it usually terrifies them.
In 1980 I heard of a poltergeist haunting that was even more astonishing than the Rosenheim case. It had taken place in Pontefract in Yorkshire and I heard about it from a friend of the family concerned, who seemed to think that it might make a book rather like the best-selling Amityville Horror. The poltergeist had, it seemed, wrecked practically every breakable item in the house and made such loud drumming noises at night that neighbours gathered in crowds to listen. But in this case a number of people concerned had apparently also seen the poltergeist, which took the form of a monk dressed in black. The friend of the family who contacted me was also
interested in local history and told me that his researches had revealed that there had once been a gallows on the site of the house, and that a Cluniac monk had been hanged there for rape in the time of Henry VIII.
The story sounded almost too good to be true. But before deciding to write about it I asked a friend who lived in the area, Brian Marriner, to go and investigate. He wrote me a long letter in which he outlined the story of the haunting, and I was left in no doubt that this was a genuine case, not a hoax. The daughter of the family, Diane Pritchard, had been dragged upstairs by the throat by ‘Black Monk’ and thrown out of bed repeatedly. But the ghost also seemed to have a sense of humour. When Aunt Maude, a determined sceptic, came to see for herself, a jug of milk floated out of the refrigerator and poured itself over her head. Later what looked like two enormous hands appeared around the door: they proved to be Aunt Maude’s fur gloves. As the gloves floated into the bedroom Mrs Pritchard asked indignantly, ‘Do you still think it’s the kids doing it?’ Aunt Maude burst into ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and the gloves proceeded to conduct her singing, beating in time.
Having studied Brian Marriener’s report on the case I concluded that there was not enough material there for a full-length book, but it would make an admirable centre-piece for a book on the poltergeist, on which there is an immense amount of well-authenticated material. Poltergeist cases seem to be among the most frequent of paranormal events – at any given moment there is likely to be one going on within a dozen miles of where you are now reading this book. This, I concluded, is because the world is so full of sexually disturbed adolescents. I sketched out an outline of a history of poltergeist phenomena and submitted it to my publisher, who wrote back to say he liked the idea. Then, accompanied by my wife, I set out for Yorkshire to investigate for myself.
On our way to Pontefract we stopped for a night at the Hayes Conference Centre in Swanwick, Derbyshire, where I was to lecture at a conference on the paranormal. The following afternoon, just as we were about to leave, someone mentioned that Guy Playfair was due to arrive in half an hour. He and I had corresponded but had never met. So although I was anxious to get on to Yorkshire I decided to stay around for another half hour to introduce myself. It proved to be one of those fateful decisions that exercise an immeasurable influence on the future.
Guy, I knew, had spent some time in Rio de Janeiro, where he had joined the Brazilian equivalent of the Society for Psychical Research and studied the local version of black magic, umbanda. I knew his book The Indefinite Boundary, a scientific study of the paranormal, and was impressed by its logic and detachment. I was just as impressed by Playfair himself, a quietly-spoken man whose modest utterances nevertheless carried total conviction. For half an hour or so we talked about ley lines, animal homing and telepathy. Then, just as it was about time to leave, I told him I was writing a book on the poltergeist and asked his opinion. He frowned, hesitated, then said, ‘I think it’s a kind of football.’ ‘Football!’ I wondered if I’d misheard him: ‘A football of energy. When people get into conditions of tension, they exude a kind of energy – the kind of thing that happens to teenagers at puberty. Along come a couple of spirits, and they do what any group of schoolboys would so – they begin to kick it around, smashing windows and generally creating havoc. Then they get tired and leave it. In fact the football often explodes, and turns into a puddle of water.’
‘So you mean a poltergeist is actually a spirit?’
‘That’s right. I’m not saying there’s not such a thing as spontaneous psychokinesis. But most poltergeists are spirits.’ And he advised me to read the French spiritualist Allan Kardec.
I must admit that I found this notion hard to swallow. Ever since making the programme on the Rosenheim case I had taken it for granted that poltergeists are some kind of strange manifestation of the unconsious mind. I was not sure where the energy came from, but suspected that it was from the earth itself. I had seen a dowser standing above an underground spring, his fingers locked together and his hands pumping up and down so violently that the sweat poured down his face: he was obviously unable to stop himself while his hands were together. And at a dowsing conference I had been introduced to an old lady who sometimes picked up a large fallen branch and used it as a dowsing rod. Suspended in one hand, it would swing from side to side like a huge voltmeter needle. It seemed to me highly likely that the energy used by the poltergeist flows from the earth via the right brain of the disturbed adolescent. And now Guy Playfair was advising me to abandon these carefully constructed theories and return to a view that sounded like crude mediaeval superstition.
The following afternoon we arrived at the home of Joe and Jean Pritchard in Pontefract. It was the typically neat home of an upper-working-class family. Their nineteen-year-old son Phillip was at home, and during the course of the afternoon their daughter Diane came over with her husband to join us. These two had been the unconscious cause of the events that had caused a local sensation in 1966. I asked how the disturbances had begun. ‘With these pools of water on the kitchen floor.’ Joy and I looked at one another. ‘Can you describe their shape?’ Mrs Pritchard shook her head. ‘They were just neat little pools – like overturning an ink bottle.’ This, according to Playfair, was a description of the pools of water created by the explosion of the ‘energy football’. He said it was almost impossible to make them by pouring water on the floor – from a jug for example – because it splashes. These pools look as if a small cat has placed its behind close to the floor and urinated. I began to feel that there might be something in his spirit theory after all.
Mrs Pritchard said that as fast as they mopped up the pools they reappeared elsewhere. But waterboard officials could find no leak. And when the tap was turned on green foam rushed out. Then the button of the tea dispenser began to move in and out, covering the draining board with dry tea leaves; lights switched on and off and a plant-pot somehow found its way from the bottom to the top of the stairs.
This first set of manifestations occurred in 1966 and Phillip was obviously the focus since Diane way away on holiday at the time. Two days later, they ceased. But when they began again in 1968, Diane – now fourteen – had become the focus. The ghost seldom paid a visit during the day, when she was at school. But in the evening the racket would start – usually a noise like a child beating a big drum – and ornaments would levitate across the room while the lights turned erratically on and off. Yet the poltergeist did not seem malicious – rather an infuriating practical joker. After a tremendous crash all the contents of the china cabinet were found scattered around the sitting room, yet not one was even craked. When the vicar came to try to exorcise the poltergeist and told the family that he thought their trouble was subsidence, a candlestick rose from the shelf and floated under his nose. The exorcism was unsuccessful.
Diane found it frightening, yet less so than might be expected. She always had a kind of inward notification when the pranks were about to start. Hurled violently out of bed with the mattress on top of her, she was unhurt. When the hall stand – made of heavy oak – floated through the air and pinned her down on the stairs (with a sewing machine on top of it for good measure) she was unable to move and the family were unable to budge it, yet she was not even bruised. When the ghost – whom they called Mr Nobody – hurled the grandfather clock downstairs so that it burst like a bomb, no one was anywhere near.
At a fairly late stage in the haunting the ghost began to show itself. Jean and Joe Pritchard awakened one night to see a dim figure standing in the open doorway. Their next-door neighbour was standing at the sink when she felt someone standing behind her: it proved to be a tall figure in a monk’s habit with a cowl over the head. It looked so solid and normal that she felt no alarm: then it vanished. Another neighbour, Rene Holden (who was a bit psychic), was in the Pritchards’ sitting room when the lights went out. In the faint glow of the streetlamp that came through the curtains she saw the lower half of a figure dressed in a long black garment.
The haunting was nearing its climax. One evening when the lights went out Diane was heard to scream: the family rushed into the had and found her being dragged up the stairs. The ghost seemed to have one hand on her cardigan, which was stretched out in front of her, and the other on her throat. As Phillip and Jean Pritchard grabbed her the ghost let go, and they all tumbled down the stairs. Diane’s throat was covered with red finger-marks yet Mr Nobody had not exerted enough pressure to hurt her. Soon after this Jean Pritchard came downstairs to find the hall carpet soaked in water; on the wet surface there were huge footprints.
One day Phillip and Diane were watching television when they both saw the Black Monk – or at least his shape – silhouetted on the other side of the frosted glass door that led to the dining room. As Phillip opened the door they saw his tall, black shape in the process of vanishing. It seemed to disappear into the kitchen floor. And that was the end of the Pontefract haunting. Mr Nobody disappeared and has not been heard from since.
I spent the whole of that Sunday afternoon listening to recordings of the poltergeist making violent banging noises, and questioning the family and neighbours. I also read the accounts contained in the local newspapers at the time. There could not be the slightest reasonable doubt that the haunting was genuine: there were too many witnesses.
Even if I had not met Guy Playfair some of the features of the case would have puzzled me. This poltergeist behaved more like a ghost, and its connection with the former Cluniac monastery and the local gallows was fairly well established. In that case the theory that it was a really a kind of astral juvenile delinquent from Diane’s unconscious mind seemed absurd. Besides, as Diane described her feelings as she was pulled upstairs by Mr Nobody I experienced a sudden total conviction that this was an independent entity, not a split-off fragment of her own psyche. When I left the Pritchards’ house that afternoon I had no doubt whatever that Guy Playfair was right: poltergeists are spirits.