Strange Powers

by Colin Wilson

  Neither do I know whether Robert Leftwich and Eunice Beattie and Arthur Guirdham are right—exactly and precisely right. Mrs Beattie says that her own insights suggest that reincarnation is not a fact; Guirdham say it is... But it seems to me that they are indicating facts that lie outside our present sphere of acceptance. Becher and Stahl were not right when they suggested that all burning materials give off a gas called phlogiston; Descartes wasn't right when he suggested that the movements of the solar system are due to 'vortices'. But they were moving in the right direction; they were recognizing the existence of a problem that had so far been overlooked, or only partially recognized. Science has a nasty habit of declining to recognize the existence of problems that lie outside its accepted field; this, I suspect, is due to tidiness rather than fear of the unknown. So the first task of an original thinker is to persuade scientists—or philosophers—that a problem does exist. When Freud tried to introduce his ideas on hysteria to the Medical Society of Vienna, their first line of defence was to deny that such a thing as male hysteria existed; Freud had to produce a male hysteric before he could even get them to listen. Even then, the Society found it impossible to fit his theories into their own general system, and so decided to ignore them. This is the usual way such things operate, and it is to be expected.

  Charles Fort was particularly concerned with this problem. What he wanted to indicate, in four indigestible and impossible books, was that science keeps mistaking its own temporary theoretical boundaries for absolute limits. It is one thing to learn to ignore extraneous noises when you are working; it is another to become so accustomed to ignoring them that you finally deny that they exist. Fort never made his point. By collecting hundreds of odd occurrences from newspapers and printing them all side by side—fishes falling from the sky, skeletons of angels, devil tracks walking over snow-covered roof-tops—he only convinced any scientists who happened to open The Book of the Damned that he was infinitely gullible. Fort lacked the philosophical training to make his point. It is only nowadays that scientists like Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, Abraham Maslow, are beginning to make it in a way that scientists can understand.

  And even they have only widened the boundaries of scientific tolerance. They have not really made Fort's point: that science operates in a kind of self-imposed blindness.

  Beyond all doubt, things are changing. In the nineteenth century, science had to operate that way; the aggressive materialism and doubt was a part of its strength. What good would it have done if someone had recognized that Baron yon Reichenbach was right, and that the human body has some kind of electrical 'aura' or force? This piece of information would have been useless; and it might have hindered Freud in his important work of gaining general recognition for the role of the sex impulse and the subconscious mind. Now in the light of what we are beginning to learn about the body's life fields, and the way they fluctuate with illness, it could suddenly become as relevant as the sexual theory was in 1900.

  In the mid-1960s, the San Francisco writer Dick Roberts told me that his plants grew better when he talked to them and touched them. I wasn't skeptical, but I pigeonholed this piece of information because I had no use for it. (To begin with, I am no gardener.) Some time later—perhaps a year—my wife read out to me an item from a newspaper asserting that a horticulturist had discovered that plants responded to sympathy. Again, I pigeonholed the information. A few months ago, I read in a book called Supernature, by the zoologist Lyall Watson, an account of an experiment that suddenly offered me the general background to Dick Roberts' observation. In 1966, an expert on lie detectors—polygraphs—called Cleve Backster found himself wondering whether a plant would show increased electrical activity when subjected to pain. A lie detector works partly on the change in the electrical resistance of the skin when a man begins to sweat. Backster attached the polygraph to the leaf of a rubber plant in the office, and tried dipping another leaf in hot coffee. The plant didn't register. Backster wondered whether he would get some result by burning the leaf with a match. As soon as he thought this idea, the polygraph registered an increase in 'perspiration'. The plant had read his mind. He tried dropping live shrimps into boiling water next to the plant; as each shrimp died in agony, the polygraph needle leapt. When a dead shrimp was dropped into the water, nothing happened.

  Another plant, a philodendron, became attached to Backster. Backster's assistant had to produce the various shock responses on the plant, with the result that it would register alarm when he came into the room, and relax when Backster came in—or even when it could hear his voice in the next room. But it was not simply the voice it responded to. Surrounded by a lead screen that would cut out normal electromagnetic vibrations, it still responded. Obviously, these 'vibrations' are not magnetic or electrical.

  Watson also mentioned in an interview published in The Guardian (21 September 1973), that he and Backster had tried the same experiment with eggs. When eggs were dropped on the floor or fed to a dog, another egg attached to the polygraph recorded a reaction. This was strongest when eggs were dropped into boiling water. Oddly enough, when this happened, the eggs connected to the polygraph ceased to react for several minutes, then would react again as before; Watson's explanation for this is that the egg fainted with shock.

  I cannot resist mentioning perhaps the weirdest thing in Watson's book. A Frenchman named Boils who took refuge in the pharaoh's chamber of the Great Pyramid noticed that old litter thrown there—including a dead cat—did not decay. This led to the amazing discovery that a cardboard pyramid built to exactly the same proportions as the Great Pyramid has the same preservative effect. A dead mouse kept in it 'mummified' without stinking; a similar mouse kept in a shoebox stank. But the strangest thing is yet to come. Razor blades kept in the pyramid remained sharp if they were kept in an east-west alignment. Watson has tried it—he shaved with the same blade for four months without it becoming blunt. A Czech firm has actually patented this device. Watson's guess is that the pyramid may build up a magnetic field that causes a new crystalline 'edge' to form on the blade.

  Observations like these—which have been confirmed in other laboratories (Watson quotes sources)—obviously lend new perspective to Dick Roberts' assertion that he can influence his plants by talking to them. But it also confirms the general attitude to 'the occult' that I have argued in this book. I do not know whether Guirdham is right when he says that children's night fears may be due to discarnate entities. But if a plant can sense hostile thoughts, then it is probable that a baby can. And if thought is carried like radio waves, then the 'psychic ether' of our world is probably buzzing with hostile vibrations that a baby might pick up.

  Again, Guirdham's title We Are One Another takes on new meaning—or perhaps I should say, takes on meaning, for at first sight, it is meaningless. We are not one another. On the other hand, the basic assertion of his book is that there are deep psychic links between the Cathars who died at Montsegur, so that events in the psyche of one of them could reverberate in the mind of another member of the group who was a total stranger. Many husbands and wives experience each other's illness symptoms. (I mention in The Occult that I have experienced Joy's pregnancy pangs and been depressed by her toothache, before I knew she was suffering from it. I once vomited all night when my first wife was suffering from food poisoning a hundred miles away.) Guirdham claims that members of his group of reincarnated Cathars also experienced one another's spiritual crises in the form of spells of dizziness. Naturally, we are skeptical about this, for it contradicts our experience that our inner-worlds are strictly private. But we go on from there to assume that this applies to all nature. And if Backster is right, this is untrue; human beings are the exception to the rest of nature. In his essay The Child in the House, Walter Pater talks about the 'web of pain' that stretches throughout nature; I remember being deeply struck by the phrase when I read the essay at fourteen or so. But if a rubber plant shudders when a shrimp dies, the 'web of pain' may be more than a poetic phrase
.

  Again, I was struck when the painter William Arkle told me how the snakes in his garden seemed to respond to his thoughts. He bought himself a huge house—it used to be a monastery—on a hilltop overlooking Weston-super-Mare. The garden turned out to be full of adders and grass snakes. One adder made a habit of wandering along beside Bill Arkle when he walked down the drive. He had found it coiled in the middle of the drive one day, in such a position that he couldn't drive the car past without killing it. He got out of the car and prodded it awake with a stick; it hissed and declined to move. He decided that perhaps he had better kill it in case it bit one of the children; as soon as he moved towards it with this intention, it hissed violently at him. Being by nature a gentle mystic, he decided to let it live; the snake immediately moved to the side of the driveway, and went back to sleep. All he told me made it quite clear that the thing was telepathic. Again, I pigeonholed the information. But clearly, it fits. All the indications are that the poets were right when they talked about 'living nature'. And Tolkien's forest that hates hatchets may turn out to be more than a piece of whimsical fiction. All living things exist in a kind of unity, that is broken by thought, the need to concentrate on particulars. We exist in a kind of 'psychic ether' of which we are unaware...

  All of this certainly lends support to Guirdham's basic theories, although it does nothing to either prove or disprove his belief that a group of thirteenth-century Cathars have been reincarnated in twentieth-century England. All that can be said is that the case he presents in his two Cathar books is the most challenging ever presented. It offers itself for examination. Morey Bernstein's case for the reincarnation of a Colorado housewife collapsed as soon as the Hearst newspapers began to probe it; it turned out that the reincarnated Bridey Murphy had lived opposite an Irishwoman in Chicago as a child, and been in love with her son; the 'memories' of a former existence dredged up from Mrs Virginia Tighe's subconscious under hypnosis turned out to be childhood memories of her Irish neighbor. But Guirdham's arguments do not depend upon anything as ambiguous as hypnosis. And there were several people involved. This could be the opportunity for the most thorough and exhaustive examination of the case for reincarnation ever conducted. And if the results of such an investigation proved to be positive then Miss Mills' 'instructors' would have achieved their aim: of making their case known to the widest possible audience. It would be a milestone in the history of physical research.

  Yet the really important change has already taken place. On my desk, as I write, I have two books that I acquired in the last couple of days. One is called Thirty Years Among the Dead, by Carl A. Wickland, MD, published in America in 1924 by the National Psychological Institute. The other is The Cosmic Clocks, by Michel Gauquelin, published by the Henry Reguery Company in 1967. The interesting thing is that both books approach their subject from a scientific point of view; Dr Wickland states that he only intends to present the records and deductions of thirty years experimental research in the science of normal and abnormal psychology and within the first few pages he discusses the fascinating case of Sally Beauchamp, the girl with four distinctive personalities, recorded by Morton Prince. (I have discussed it in the The Occult). But he starts Chapter One: 'The reality of an invisible world surrounding the physical world is for many difficult to comprehend, and the mind sphere is often limited to the visible and tangible; however, it requires but little thought to realize the constant change of matter as it occurs in three forms, solid, liquid and gaseous, in its range back and forth between the visible and the invisible...' And so on '... Considering the wonderful advancement of science into the field of nature's finer forces it is inconceivable that any thinking mind can fail to recognize the rationale of the independent existence of the human spirit apart for [sic] the physical body.' This writing is basically gobbledygook. The book may or may not be valueless; but it will certainly convince no one but the converted.

  On the other hand, Gauquelin's study deals with biological clocks, how animals and plants know the time of day, and kindred subjects. Opening it at random, I find in Chapter Eleven:

  'Around 1950, as we were preparing our critique of traditional astrology, we found ourselves confronted, somewhat unwillingly, with a strange result. In one of our research samples—composed of the birth dates of 576 members of the French Academy of Medicine—the frequency of the position of certain planets was altogether unusual. The phenomenon did not correspond to any of the traditional laws of astrology, but it was interesting, nevertheless. What we had observed was that a large number of future great physicians were born when the planets Mars and Saturn had just risen or culminated in the sky...' He goes on to describe how he took a second sample of 508 physicians—a long job, since the actual hour of birth is not included in most reference books—and again discovered that most of them were born after the rise or the culmination of Mars and Saturn.

  One can sense the whole world of difference between the two extracts quoted. One is by a spiritualist who is determined to sound like a scientist; one is by scientist who finds himself flying to explain facts that so far have no place in the framework of science. Gauquelin goes on to produce various hypotheses about the influence of 'cosmic clocks' on our physical make-up. I do not know whether he is a better scientist than Dr Wickland, or whether he is more reliable. All I know is that he is treating his subject matter like a traditional scientist. This is how Rutherford and his colleagues worked when it was a question of exploring the 'invisible' realm of the inside of the atom; the facts are taken into account, hypotheses are constructed to fit them, and then research is undertaken to try to uncover more facts, to confirm or deny the theories.

  The 'occult' has not yet qualified for recognition as a science. But the day when occultists and spiritualists had to plead to be taken seriously is past. Certain facts are lying around where scientists cannot help tripping over them. And that is a situation which the tidy mind of the scientist finds intolerable. As Charles Fort might have expressed it: If the occult did not exist, science would be compelled to invent it.