by Colin Wilson
Obviously, it is no great scientific problem to convert the light energy—as observed by the Kirlian device—into electrical energy, and this is what Victor Adamenko has done in his tobioscope. It is a kind of flashlight that is passed over the patient's skin, and which goes on and off as it passes over acupuncture points. If the patient is healthy, it gives a good light; if unhealthy, it is dim. The relation to Harold Burr's work on 'life fields' is obvious. (For example, sunspots affect the Kirlian photographs.) Kirlian photographs have been taken of the whole body; one of Mrs Kulagina, an adept in psychokinesis, shows a pulsating field around the body. (Mrs Kulagina is, apparently, able to move objects like matches and paperclips by passing her hands close to, them; Stanley Krippner reports that she has even made them move by thought alone.)
It certainly looks, then, as though a century after Reichenbach, the reality of his odic force (read: 'field of force') is being demonstrated. Which makes it seem that dowsing, even in its odder manifestations, is as explainable as any other simple wave phenomena. We simply need an Isaac Newton of this new field to recognize the underlying laws of the phenomena. I'm inclined to believe that Lethbridge has taken the largest step in this direction so far. In Ghost and Divining-Rod, he advances the theory that there are specific electrical fields connected with water (including the sea), and with mountains and deserts; and although he chooses to call these by romantic names such as 'Naiad fields', 'Oread fields' and 'Nereid fields', he regards them as perfectly normal electrical fields. He observed that 'ghost' and 'ghoul' phenomena often seem to occur in the area of such fields. For example, he saw a 'ghost' at Hole Mill, near Seaton, and discovered that an underground stream connected the spot where he was standing with the spot where he saw the ghost. At which point, he makes a further assumption: that his own 'psychic field' was able to pickup a picture implanted on the 'naiad field' of the stream by the 'ghost's' psychic field many years before. In other words, that the 'ghost' was really a kind of snapshot, imprinted on the naiad field by some intense emotion, (He suggests that intense happiness can 'imprint' itself on 'fields' just as easily as intense misery or fear.) The same applies to the 'ghouls' he has sensed on various occasions—for example, on Ladram beach.[1]
In his book Design for Destiny (Neville Spearman 1971), Edward Russell, an American journalist, quotes Burr's experiments with 'Life fields', and then goes on to cite the results of the Russian scientist, L. L. Vasiliev, professor of physiology at Leningrad, who performed a series of experiments that demonstrated the reality of telepathy beyond all reasonable doubt. Vasiliev had two subjects sitting in different rooms; one sent out suggestions that the other should fall asleep. It worked. Moreover, it worked over immense distances—from Leningrad to Sevastopol, and it worked even if the subjects were enclosed in a metal chamber that would prevent any transmission by electrical fields. Vasiliev's extremely detailed and complicated experiments were published in a book called Experiments in Mental Suggestion, which has so far been published in England only in a limited edition. Mr Russell argues that these experiments prove the existence of another kind of field, 'thought fields', which he calls 'T-fields'. He goes on to state that T-fields can 'attach themselves to any kind of matter'. He is speaking about Lethbridge's 'ghouls' and such like: 'Many an estate agent, trying to sell a desirable property, must have been puzzled and disappointed when clients exclaimed: "Ugh, let's get out of here! This place gives me the willies!"' He adds that the size of the object on which the field is impressed seems to make no difference: it can be as large as a house or as small as a pinhead. An observation that brings to mind Lethbridge's remark about the constant size of electrical fields for various metals, and again suggests that we are here dealing with some general law concerning fields.
Another important clue is offered in the book called The World of Ted Serios by Dr Jule Eisenbud (which I have also discussed in The Occult). Ted Serios is an alcoholic bellboy who has the extraordinary ability to press a Polaroid camera against his' head, and somehow imprint 'mental photographs' on the plate. The photographs, many of which are included in the book, are usually of places. Eisenbud was shocked when he discovered that, although Serio's results seemed genuine, no one was interested. He need not have been surprised. The problem is that Serio's powers do not fit into any general pattern. It is like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle that doesn't connect together with any other piece. So, for the time being, it is pushed to a corner of the table and left alone; no one is interested in it until some interlocking pieces can be found. And this is again demonstrated by the fate of the book; it excited a good deal of interest when it appeared; since when, it seems to have lapsed into relative oblivion. But some of the interlocking pieces may perhaps be found in Lethbridge and the Kirlian device. The Kirlian device takes photographs of life fields, or psychic fields, proving they can be impressed on a photographic plate; Ted Serios can impress his T-fields on a photographic plate. And,Lethbridge suggests, any human beings may impress a T-field on the electrical field associated with a certain area, particularly if that area has water running through it.
I was already aware of the probable importance of 'fields' in explaining psychic phenomena before I met Robert Leftwich. So I found most of his ideas and theories easy enough to accept. I had an opportunity to explore these further a few months after that first meeting. In January 1972,1 became one of the presenters of a monthly arts program, Format, on Westward Television. In May 1972, Michael Joseph brought out a book called The Table Rappers, a history of spiritualism by Ronald Pearsall, who lives in the west country. Mr Pearsall's point of view is distinctly skeptical; so when I asked him to appear on the program, I also asked Robert Leftwich if he would care to take part. He agreed, and drove down to Cornwall on the day of the program. It was an interesting discussion. I asked Leftwich to explain about 'astral projection'; he said that he could only do it at certain times, which seem to come around periodically. He can feel it 'coming on' for some days in advance. He described how, on one occasion, he had been sitting on the London Underground, feeling rather oppressed by the crowds; so he closed his eyes—to look as if he was asleep—and 'projected' himself out of his body. After a while someone noticed him; his face had gone very pale, and he seemed to have stopped breathing. There was a minor panic; but while the passengers were discussing what to do with the corpse, Robert arrived at his station, opened his eyes, and walked off the train...
The story is typical; it demonstrates the element of schoolboyish mischief that is a definite part of Leftwich's make-up. It seems incongruous; but this is because most of us have formed our conceptions about 'psychic powers' from fairy stories; from the Arabian Nights to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, the wizards have grey beards, piercing eyes and a basilisk-like stare. The truth is that psychic powers are almost accidental; their possessors may belong to any personality type. This is particularly true in the case of 'astral projection', also known as 'out-of-the-body experience' (and ecsomatic experience). They often seem to occur by accident, if one can accept the testimony of those who claim to have experienced it. For example, in Out-of-the-Body Experiences by Celia Green (Vol. II of the Proceedings of the Institute of Psychophysical Research, Oxford 1968), a waitress describes how she was walking home in a state of fatigue when she suddenly realized that her body was below her, walking along the street; a girl reading a book suddenly found herself floating near the ceiling, looking down on her body in the chair; a man sitting on the seat of a bus suddenly found himself on the stairs, looking at himself still seated. The two classic books on the subject are The Phenomena of Astral Projection (1950), and The Projection of the Astral Body (1929), both by Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington, and I must refer the reader to these for further information.
I had been hoping to carry out some systematic exploration of Robert Leftwich's 'strange powers' when he came to see us in Cornwall; but again, I was disappointed. This was not his fault. He seemed willing to discuss any subject frankly; but his ideas about his powers
are bound up with ideas about vegetarianism, health foods, marriage, morality, and so on. So a question about the first time he experienced astral projection might produce a discourse on his diet, childhood fantasies, army experiences or marriage.
When I had been at The Beacon House, he had shown me the typescript of a 'book', actually a volume of essays, called The Philosophy of an Escapist; I had been puzzled by the title, until he explained that by 'escapist', he meant someone who wanted to escape the rat-race and retire to a place where he could meditate. I had wanted to borrow the typescript, but it was the only one and he was unwilling to let it out of his hands. Now he brought me a photocopy to Cornwall, and I had a chance to study it in more detail. I found it an immensely interesting document, which provided me with a great deal more insight into his character; but as far as explaining his 'powers' was concerned, it was again a disappointment. All the same, it did provide certain insights. It was clear from the opening paragraphs that Leftwich is a typical 'outsider' figure. 'The idea of settling down away from the influences of modern civilization and its appalling artificiality originated in my mind almost immediately after I left College... ' An 'outsider', in the terminology I developed, is a self-actualizes who wants to sidestep the demands of everyday life and get down to creation. He (or she) wants to evolve, to move on. Maslow's classic case was of a girl who had been a brilliant sociology student at college, and was forced to take a job as a personnel manager in a chewing gum factory during the depression years; she became so depressed she even ceased to menstruate. Maslow cured her by simply suggesting that she should continue her studies at night school. She was getting sick of marking time, staying in the same place. W. B. Yeats had a fantasy of a 'Castle on a Rock' where a community of poets and artists could spend their lives growing vegetables and living the life of the mind. What really destroyed Van Gogh was not the mental strain of being a visionary; it was the strain of never knowing where his next meal was coming from, of always being poor, of having to live off his brother who, unburdened by a powerful creative urge, was able to bring himself to work for a living. Gauguin hoped to find his freedom in the South Seas, but poverty followed him there. This is the basic problem of the Outsider; he just wants time to sort himself out, to be creative.
In my own teens, I dreamed of retiring to one of those stone huts on the Aran Isles, formerly occupied by religious ascetics. This problem—of how to stay alive and develop my potentialities, in a society that insisted that I work forty-five hours a week for just enough money to keep me alive—was solved by the success of The Outsider. It is true that it brought as many problems as it solved; but it certainly solved that basic problem: of how to avoid working in a factory or office, doing somebody else's business instead of my own. So I had solved the problem by the time I was twenty-four. The writer's life still has plenty of problems—The Author has conducted a survey that showed that less than a hundred writers in Great Britain can live wholly from their working—but at least they are problems you can feel strongly about, not problems that strike you as infinitely boring and irrelevant.
Robert Leftwich had faced the problem logically, and set out to solve it in a sensible, determined way: to save enough money to retire while fairly young, and be able to devote the last third of his life to 'self-actualization'. 'I began to economize very enthusiastically by depriving myself of all unnecessary luxuries......ad had a shot at the same method, working for a few weeks to make a little spare money, then sleeping out in a sleeping bag to save rent, and eating in cheap workman's cafes. I also had reason to sympathize with Robert's divagation, if that is the word: '... ultimately, the basic desire for female companionship superseded these good intentions, with the result that... I eventually found myself engaged.' I had also found myself married and a parent; I fled the dilemma, rather than solved it, by separating from my wife after eighteen months. Robert had behaved more decently; he married, produced children, and continued to work towards the ideal of 'escape', while continuing to take full responsibility for his wife and children. He had recognized, after a while, that marriage and parenthood would not provide a substitute for what he really wanted. When I first met him, he felt he had about another year before he could 'escape'; at the time of writing, two years later, he is somewhere in the South of France with a caravan, while Patricia and the children are in England.
The desire for escape has been Leftwich's lifelong preoccupation. And it suggests a reason for the development of his unusual powers. He set himself a long-distance aim—a very long-distance aim, since it has taken him until he is fifty to achieve it. Now anybody who has ever set out determinedly to lose weight knows about the curious effect of 'moral uplift' that can come from self-discipline. Once you've embarked on the course, and see your weight vanishing at a rate of five pounds a week, you become a kind of miser about every mouthful of bread. You begin to calculate—by Easter you'll have lost twenty-five pounds... Being hungry becomes a kind of pleasure. It even becomes a kind of addiction; doctors are familiar with cases of girls who diet to achieve 'Twiggy figures', and then continue to starve until they are suffering from serious undernourishment, and have to be force-fed. But even dieting is a fairly short-term discipline; at the end of three months or so, you can go back to normal eating. Robert Leftwich has been subjecting himself to a rigorous self-discipline for twenty-five years or so.
Now what does discipline do? Basically, it increases one's 'vital reserves'—or, rather, makes them more available. It makes one more 'free'. Satre said he had never felt so free as during the war, when he was in the Resistance, was likely to be arrested and shot at any moment. Why? Because he had to maintain a higher level of alertness, of 'preparedness'. Similarly, the disciplines evolved by Gurdjieff—and practised at his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man at Fontainebleau—aimed at keeping his pupils in a state of constant alertness: they might be asked to leap out of bed in the middle of the night and instantly assume some difficult position. A young boy, Fritz Peters, was induced to make greater and greater efforts mowing the lawns, until he could do vast areas in one day. The aim was to keep everyone bubbling with energy. 'Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake,' said William James, who might almost have been quoting Gurdjieff. (Gurdjieff would have said that, compared to what we ought to be, we are fast asleep.) 'We are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources.' 'We live subject to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from habit to obey. Most of us may learn to push the barrier further off, and to live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power.' And he adds: 'The transformation, moreover, is a chronic one; the new level of energy becomes permanent.' All these quotations are from his important essay 'The Energies of Man'.
It is not only ignorance—or laziness—that keeps us 'below our proper selves'. All animals are complicated systems of drives and inhibitions. Different circumstances require different responses. In battle, it is of great advantage to be carried away by anger; in peace time, it could be a great disadvantage. A self-controlled man would be able to allow himself to be carried away by anger when it suits him, and to inhibit it when it doesn't: that is to say, he sets up a system of control even over the ability to lose control. Such complexities are bound to defeat their own purpose sometimes—particularly in modern civilized life: hence Rousseau's nostalgia for the life of the noble savage; hence the rising rate of neurosis in our society. The sheer entanglement of inhibitory systems and anti-inhibitory systems and systems for overruling anti-inhibitory systems is bound to produce a certain energy wastage through tension. Psychologists have observed that when a patient is hypnotized, and told that he cannot move his arm, he finds it impossible to move it, no matter how hard he tries. On examining what is happening in more detail, it has been found that, for example, a patient who has been told to bend his arm is actually contracting his flexor muscles, but is also contracting the extensor muscles to prevent him from bending it; his self-division (in this case, an artif
icial one caused by the hypnotist) causes him to cancel out an action he is attempting to perform. On the other hand, tests on patients under hypnosis have also shown that they can be made to exert far more strength than they are capable of exerting when 'awake': up to one-third more. Their mental performance can also be improved in a similar ratio. We might say, then, that our natural powers are inhibited by a self-consciousness that has the same basic nature as embarrassment or stage fright. I can overcome this 'canceling' process in two ways: either by relaxing completely (perhaps with the aid of drugs or alcohol, or by meditation techniques), or by making such a steady and determined effort that I launch myself onto a higher plane of energy, in which the forward drive completely overrules the inhibitory mechanism.
In his book, Leftwich says he isn't sure whether his tireless energy is due to his 'self-imposed restrictive way of life', or whether he was 'fortunate enough to inherit a very high basic metabolic rate'. I would plump for the first.
I read a great deal of Philosophy of an Escapist that first night he stayed with us, and it was then that I definitely decided that I would like to write about him, whether or not I could satisfy my curiosity about his powers. I have to admit that I had misgivings about having Robert actually around the premises. I usually write all day; then, at six o'clock, I'm ready to pour a glass of wine and spend a long evening listening to music or reading, or even watching TV if there is some culturally rewarding program such as Maigret or The Avengers. I like to 'switch off and become purely receptive; and I tend to resent it if I have guests who want to discuss questions of philosophy or psychology; it may be relaxation for them, but for me, it is talking shop. But Robert wasn't as bad as I'd anticipated. I was amused to watch Joy's reaction to him; I could see she didn't quite know what to make of him, bewildered by the impact of his schoolboy exuberance and completely non-offensive—because totally candid—egoism. He repeated some of the things he had said to me before—for example, about dowsing, or the ability to make things happen—and I noted that he repeated them in almost exactly the same words. This reinforced my feeling of his basic honesty; a man who is letting his imagination run away with him tends to change things slightly each time, to embroider...