by Colin Wilson
She herself provides one interesting clue. She seems to have had an unusual susceptibility to beauty. As a child, she spent some time in India. She describes her father pointing up to the snow on the mountain tops:
‘Look, children, there are the Snows.’
For a long time we could not see them. We had not looked high enough. Then at last, towering against the cobalt sky, we saw Kanchenjunga, white, shining, inviolate, all but the highest mountain in the world. I could not — and cannot — formulate what moved me almost beyond bearing in the Hills. It was as if some wind of the spirit blew down on the childish creature and touched something in it awake, so that it could never be quite childish again …
Back at home in England, she often cried when remembering the Hills. Years later, at a dinner party, she sat next to a Tibetan explorer, and tried to tell him something of what the Hills had meant to her. ‘After a pause he said the two words that of all others I would have chosen to hear. They were “Those presences”.’
It was after her return from India that she first became aware of ‘lesser presences’, like the old woman in the bedroom of her grandfather’s house.
She describes a number of these experiences of beauty, and their obvious sincerity robs them of any suggestion of ‘aestheticism’ — how, for example, after a fine rendering of Chopin’s A flat Ballade, she experienced a kind of hallucination of ‘a vast marble hall, oblong, with painted walls and the whole of the east end open to the night sky and the stars’. She also mentions that a very gentle touch on her back — by her husband — brought her back to earth as violently as if she had been kicked.
Her experiences bring to mind an event in the childhood of the modern Hindu saint Ramakrishna. One day, as a child, Ramakrishna was crossing a paddy field holding a large bowl of rice; when a flock of white cranes flew across a black storm-cloud, the sense of beauty was so overwhelming that he fainted, and the rice flew all over the place. Later in life, Ramakrishna became subject to moods of ‘God-intoxication’ — ‘samadhi’ — in which he was overwhelmed by ecstary, and would lose consciousness.
The obvious comment to make about such an experience is that it would be highly inconvenient if it happened in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. We are back to Julian Jaynes’s theory about the ‘bicameral mind’. Jaynes believes that civilised man had to cease being ‘bicameral’ — hearing the voices of the gods — when life became so dangerous and complicated that his chief concern was to keep his wits about him. Jaynes suggests that this happened as recently as 1200 BC, after a series of catastrophes in the Mediterranean world — such as the explosion of the volcano of Santorini, which practically destroyed Greek civilisation, and the invasion of the destructive barbarians known as the Sea Peoples. There certainly seems to be a certain amount of evidence for Jaynes’s belief that it was only after this period that cruelty appeared for the first time in human history.*
Even if we find it impossible to swallow Jaynes’s belief that the men who built Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid totally lacked what we would call ‘self-consciousness’, it seems clear that he is correct in believing that, at some point in the history of civilisation, man was forced to become a ‘left-brainer’ — that is, to deliberately abandon the warmer, gentler consciousness of the animal and the child, and develop a ruthless ‘eye to business’. We might say that ancient man looked at the universe through a kind of telescope, which showed him distant horizons. Then the increasing problems of survival forced him to develop an instrument much more like a microscope or a watchmaker’s eyeglass, which would enable him to concentrate on tiny particulars. The result is that he has become shortsighted. He has ceased to be aware of the horizons.
In fact, he is still capable of this wider awareness — but only in certain moments of deep relaxation. When this happens, the left and right halves of the brain seem to merge together, and he experiences a sense of peace and serenity, the ‘all is well’ feeling. But modern man has to start from left-brain awareness — our narrow ego-consciousness. Our remote ancestors could probably plunge straight into ‘cosmic consciousness’ by merely relaxing.
As a result of these evolutionary developments, modern man has a high ‘beauty threshold’. ‘Threshold’ is a psychological term, meaning how much stimulus it takes to arouse someone to awareness. A man with a high noise threshold can ignore a racket that would drive a more sensitive person mad. A man with a high pain threshold can have his teeth filled without local anaesthetic. Ramakrishna’s low beauty threshold meant that any kind of beauty was likely to plunge him into a trance of ecstasy. And to a modern city dweller, this would be as undesirable as permanent diarrhoea.
Now Rosalind Heywood was very much a product of British civilisation: stiff upper lip, dislike of emotion, cast-iron self-control. Such characteristics usually entail a high beauty threshold — the English take a pride in being artistically insensitive. In her case, we can see that this was not so, and that she associated her first psychic experiences with the ‘wind of the spirit’ that ‘blew down on the childish creature’ from Kanchenjunga, and ‘touched something in it awake’.
It may also be significant that when her husband gently touched her back — after hearing the Chopin Ballade — she experienced a shock out of all proportion to the stimulus. Most people have probably noticed the same thing if they are awakened on the verge of sleep. In that ‘midway’ state between sleep and waking — the state in which we begin to experience hypnogogic hallucinations — the slightest sound — the mere click of a door closing — produces a pattern of light inside the brain, and a sensation like an explosion. Rosalind Heywood also describes how she tried one morning to practise a little mind-reading, by floating into a state of deep relaxation and trying to contact the mind of another person in the house. She describes the sensation as ‘a glorified version of a phase of going under an anaesthetic’. Then the peace was shattered by ‘agonising thunderous bangs which crashed right through me’. The bangs continued, and she felt herself returning to physical awareness. It was her husband tapping on the door to say that breakfast was ready. When she asked indignantly why he was battering the house down, he answered that he had only tapped gently. With her lowered sensitivity threshold, she had heard each tap as an explosion like a bomb. She goes on to speculate whether this is why it is so dangerous to ‘awaken’ a medium from a state of trance — it has been known to cause heart failure.
After his first experience of ‘samadhi’ or ‘God-ecstasy’, Ramakrishna could induce the state at will; he merely had to hear the name of Krishna or Kali to sink into the ‘God-trance’. We can observe something analogous if we react deeply to a certain piece of music; the first notes of the Liebestod from Tristan or the opening notes of a Bruckner symphony can induce a tingling sensation in the scalp, followed by a sudden flood of delight. Physiologically speaking, it is merely a habit pattern, like a Pavlov dog salivating at the sound of a bell. What is interesting is that once the brain has learned the ‘trick’ — the route to ecstasy, so to speak — it can repeat it at will. It entails a certain act of will — a deliberate focusing on the source of pleasure. If you listen to the music while reading a newspaper or thinking of something else, it doesn’t work, or is appreciably less powerful. But when the brain and the stimulus cooperate, there is instant relaxation, followed by contact with the inner source of pleasure.
What is beginning to emerge, then, is a theory about ‘psychic’ sensitivity. It runs as follows. When I relax deeply, it is as if someone opened up the partition between the two compartments of my brain, turning them into a single large room. I experience a sense of mental freedom, as if I can suddenly breathe more deeply, and a feeling of contact with things. Everyone has had the experience of being in a state of hurry or excitement, and failing to notice that they have bruised or scratched themselves — until the excitement evaporates and the pain makes itself felt. Hurry and tension raise our sensitivity threshold, and at the same time, erect a glass wall between us and realit
y. In the ‘unicameral’ state, this wall vanishes, and everything seems more real.
No doubt dogs and cats are in this state most of the time; they lack any sustained power of concentration. And it seems highly probable that our cave-man ancestors of forty thousand years ago also spent much of their time in this state. When drawings of animals were discovered in the caves of Cro-Magnon man, scientists concluded that our ancestors whiled away their winter evenings with a lump of charcoal and a pot of red ochre. Then it gradually became clear that this was not an early example of ‘art for art’s sake’. It was art for the sake of magic. It was the shaman who drew the bison and reindeer, because the men were going out to hunt them the next day; the drawings were supposed to link the minds of the hunters and their prey. To us, with our abnormally high sensitivity thresholds, such an idea seems absurd; to primitives, it must have been a matter of commonsense, like dowsing for water. Moreover, there is evidence that such ‘magic’ worked; Sir Arthur Grimble, who was commissioner of the Gilbert Islands, has described how the hereditary porpoise-caller established a mental link with the porpoises, so that they swam into the beach in a kind of trance, and the natives were able to wade into the water and club them to death.* And Manuel Cordova-Rios, a Peruvian who was kidnapped by Amazonian Indians in 1902, and who spent several years living among them, has descriptions of hunting magic that makes it clear that it actually worked.**
As man developed the complexities of civilisation, he had to develop a complexity of mind to go with it. The unicameral mind was lost, and replaced by the present version with two compartments — in which the living-room is situated to the left. Yet it would be incorrect to believe that it is lost beyond recall. We can, if we want to, deliberately lower the ‘sensitivity threshold’. The tiger hunter Jim Corbett, author of Man Eaters of Kumaon, has described how he developed what he called ‘jungle sensitiveness’, so that he knew intuitively when a tiger was lying in wait for him. (Presumably he would also be able to use the same faculty when he was hunting tigers.) Self-preservation had taught him to drop his sensitivity threshold, so his right brain would give him warning of danger. And we have seen that Rosalind Heywood apparently developed the same faculty accidentally through her sensitivity to the ‘presence’ of the Hills. She also suggests that she developed her telepathic linkage with her husband because he was a non-verbal type, a man of a few words, and she had a ‘life-long exaggerated need for communication’.
The most peculiar chapter of her book The Infinite Hive — called ‘The Singing’ — provides interesting support for this ‘primitive’, right-brain theory of psychic powers. The ‘Singing’ is a sensation that she hears more-or-less all the time (although more at some times than others), and she describes it as:
a kind of continuous vibrant inner quasi-sound, to which the nearest analogy is the noise induced by pressing a seashell against the ear, or perhaps the hum of a distant dynamo.… This sounds like tinnitus to anyone else, but to the experient it does not appear to be heard by the ear or to be exactly located. Rather, like light, it pervades the whole atmosphere, though it is most clearly perceptible in a wide arc above and behind the head. And — I cannot explain what I mean by this — it does not appear to ring through outer space, yet neither is it far ‘in’. The right word may be borderline, if, as I most imprudently venture to suspect, there is no sharp barrier between sensory and extra-sensory phenomena.
It sounds rather like the noise that — according to the composer John Cage — is made by the nervous system, and which can be heard under conditions of total sensory deprivation, for example, in a deep mine. But in that case, it would always be more or less the same. Rosalind Heywood claims that it varies. The only time she failed to hear it under conditions of silence was while waiting for a train at night on the Hampstead tube station (which is one of the deepest in London, and where, if the nerve theory is correct, it ought to have been particularly evident). But:
it is far more evident in some places than in others; particularly so in a quiet wood, for instance, or on a moor or a mountain — clean wild places unspoilt by man. It is also clear in, say, a church or a college library, places where thought or devotion have been intense for years; and it can ring out in an ordinary room where concentrated thought has been going on.
She adds: ‘Although the Singing seems to differ according to its apparent origin I cannot formulate in what this difference lies. I can only say that mountain Singing conveys a different “atmosphere” from church Singing, as an oboe conveys a different “atmosphere” from a trumpet …’ She goes on to speak about ‘church Singing’. ‘I listened for the Christian note in several quiet empty churches and found that in some it would pass over into a more intense experience, as if — I repeat as if — an inner force were streaming from the altar.’
A young engineer to whom she described the Singing — in the hope of shocking him — replied placidly: ‘Oh, yes, I hear that too, in places where there have been strong emotions.’ This comment provides an interesting clue. As early as 1908, Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the most distinguished members of the Society for Psychical Research, made the interesting suggestion that ‘ghosts’ may be a kind of tape recording — ‘as if strong emotions could be unconsciously recorded in matter’:
Take, for example, a haunted house … wherein some one room is the scene of a ghostly representation of some long past tragedy. On a psychometric hypothesis* the original tragedy has been literally photographed on its material surroundings, nay, even on the ether itself, by reason of the intensity of emotion felt by those who enacted it; and thenceforth in certain persons an hallucinatory effect is experienced corresponding to such an impression. It is this theory that is made to account for the feeling one has on entering certain rooms, that there is an alien presence therein …**
The phrase ‘nay, even on the ether itself’ may seem to be going too far; yet in the second half of the twentieth century this has, in fact, been one of the most widely held theories about the nature of apparitions. The late T.C. Lethbridge, whose contribution I have discussed at length elsewhere,*** came to believe that a type of manifestation he called a ‘ghoul’ — meaning the kind of ‘creepy’ sensation described by Lodge — is an emotion ‘tape recorded’ on some kind of electrical field. He even became convinced that there are different types of field connected with woodlands, mountains and open spaces, exactly as Rosalind Heywood noted about the Singing. According to Lethbridge, she would simply be ‘picking up’ some form of electrical vibration — a vibration, presumably, that cannot penetrate as deep as the Hampstead underground, or which is somehow insulated by it.
If there is anything in this theory, and feelings or mental states can be recorded on matter (or its field), this would also explain why she observed a quite different kind of Singing in university libraries or in Christian churches; the ‘vibration’ would be different. It is particularly interesting that she noted an ‘inner force’ streaming from church altars. Christian churches are frequently built on pagan sites; in fact, there was a directive from the Vatican in the Middle Ages that churches should be built on such sites. Any dowser will verify that the ‘field’ around ancient sites — for example, standing stones like those of Stonehenge and Carnac — is unusually powerful. Christian churches, like pagan religious sites, usually face east, and the altar is located at the east end. What Rosalind Heywood sensed streaming from the altar may have been precisely the quality for which the site was chosen in the first place.
According to this theory, the ‘lesser presence’ that Rosalind Heywood sensed in the bedroom of her grandfather’s house was not really an old woman, but a tape recording of some past event. (Lethbridge believed that the ‘recording’ can often be seen as well as felt — especially by good dowsers.)
Yet although this explanation has a pleasingly scientific ring, it still fails to account for many of Rosalind Heywood’s experiences. It is quite clear that when she experienced ‘Julia’ and ‘Vivian’, she did not feel t
hat she was picking up a tape recording, and that on Dartmoor, she and her husband felt that they had really encountered invisible natural presences, and not some kind of electrical field. And how can the ‘sensitivity threshold’ theory of clairvoyance account for the curious episode of ‘splitting’ into two people?’
Where this latter is concerned, we can turn for aid to Rosalind Heywood’s friend G. N. M. Tyrrell whose book The Personality of Man has become a classic of psychical research. (It was, in fact, written in her house; she describes how, when left alone in the house during the war, ‘Orders’ told her to write to Tyrrell asking him if he wanted to move to London, and — against all the odds — he eagerly accepted.) Tyrrell also cites her story of ‘splitting’ (although he omits to mention her name), and then goes on to mention various parallel cases. There was Mrs Willett (the pseudonym of Winifred Coombe-Tennant), an automatic writing medium, who in August 1913, received a letter from Sir Oliver Lodge containing certain enclosures. About to take out these enclosures, she experienced a ‘thundering sort of knock-down blow conviction that I must not do so’. While she hesitated, wondering whether to overrule this feeling, she divided into two. ‘Mind No. 1 got my body up and walked it across the room to the door … But Mind No. 2 (which was ‘me’ as I know myself) couldn’t make out why it was that I was there.’ Then ‘Mind No. 1’ made her put the letter back in its envelope, walk to her husband’s room, and hand it to him. (It was important, from the point of view of evidence, that she should not read the enclosures.)
Tyrrell also cites the case of a soldier in the trenches during the First World War who, frozen and miserable, suddenly ‘split’ and found himself outside his ‘earthly body’. But his ‘earthly body’ went on talking to a companion, who later reported that he had chatted with great wit and humour, as if sitting in front of a comfortable fire.