by Colin Wilson
How do we explain Corbett's jungle sensitiveness? As a 'sixth sense'? Or simply as some form of subconscious observation? I would argue that it makes no real difference. When Sherlock Holmes deduces that Watson has sent a telegram from the clay on his shoes and the ink stain on his finger, this is obviously what we mean by logical, scientific thinking. It is possible that Corbett's reasons for crossing the road were equally logical, although subconscious. An hour before he set out for home, he may have heard the tiger cough, and subconsciously registered the direction in which it was travelling. A few other small signs—the absence of birds near the culvert, a broken twig—and his subconscious mind was already reaching its conclusions in the best Holmes tradition. But if Corbert remained consciously unaware of all this, then we are dealing with a faculty that may be called a sixth sense, a subconscious faculty by comparison with which our powers of conscious observation are clumsy and inaccurate. We find this difficult to grasp because we use the conscious mind as an instrument of learning. Driving my car has become so natural to me that it might almost be called an instinct; but I had to learn to do it consciously first. But it would obviously be absurd to suppose that pigeons learned navigation by the sun in the same manner. There was no conscious process of learning; it was all done at the instinctive level.
We may be able to explain the pigeon's homing instinct in terms that Sherlock Holmes would understand; but it is important to realize that the subconscious mind works with a speed and accuracy beyond our conscious grasp, and that it may work upon data that are too subtle for our clumsy senses. How, for example, do we explain the power of water diviners? I have seen a man with a twig in his hand walking around the field in which our house is built, tracing the course of an underground spring, and distinguishing it clearly from a metal water-pipe. (We later consulted the plans of the house and found that he was completely accurate about the water-pipe.) He denied the suggestion that this was a 'super-normal' faculty, and insisted that he could teach anyone to divine water in less than an hour: 'Everyone possesses the faculty; it's merely a matter of training.' As far as I know, no scientist has even attempted to explain the power of water diviners, although they are accepted as a commonplace in any country district. And when they are finally understood, it will no doubt prove to be something as simple and startling as the salmon's sense of smell, or the robin's sensitivity to stellar radiation. There is no need to draw a sharp distinction between scientific 'commonsense' and powers that would once have been classified as 'magical'. In the animal kingdom, 'magical' powers are commonplace. Civilized man has forgotten about them because they are no longer necessary to his survival.
In fact, his survival depends upon 'forgetting' them. High development of the instinctive levels is incompatible with the kind of concentration upon detail needed by civilized man. An illustration can be found in the autobiography of the 'clairvoyant' Pieter van der Hurk, better known as Peter Hurkos.[1] In 1943 Hurkos was working as a house painter when he fell from the ladder and fractured his skull. When he woke up—in the Zuidwal Hospital in the Hague—he discovered that he now possessed the gift of second sight; he 'knew things' about his fellow patients without being told. This almost cost him his life. Shaking hands with a patient about to be discharged, he suddenly 'knew' that the man was a British agent, and that he would be assassinated by the Gestapo in two days time. As a result of his prediction, Hurkos came close to being executed as a traitor by the Dutch underground; he was fortunately able to convince them that his clairvoyance was genuine.
The chief drawback of this unusual power was that he was, no longer able to return to his old job as a painter; he had lost the faculty of concentration. 'I could not concentrate on anything in those days, for the moment I began to carry on an extended conversation with anyone, I would see visions of the various phases of his life and the lives of his family and friends.' His mind was like a radio set picking up too many stations. From the social point of view he was useless until he conceived the idea of using his peculiar powers on the stage.
Again, science has nothing to say about the powers of Peter Hurkos, or of his fellow Dutchman Gerard Croiset, although these powers have been tested in the laboratory and found to be genuine. Foretelling the future, or solving a murder case by handling a garment of the victim, is obviously a very different matter from Corbett's jungle sensitivity or the homing instinct. But it is worth bearing in mind that until the mid-1950s Schmidt's observations on eels—published as long ago as 1922—were ignored by scientists because they failed to 'fit in'. Ardrey remarks that the Eel Story was classified with Hitler's Big Lie. That is, no one was willing to tackle the problem until science had reached a stage where it could no longer advance without taking it into account. No doubt the same thing will happen to the observations made on Hurkos by the Round Table Institute in Maine, and those on Croiset by the Parapsychology Institute of Utrecht University.
At this point it is necessary to say something of the course of evolution over the past million years or so. Some eleven million years ago, an ape called Ramapithecus seems to have developed the capacity to walk upright. He began to prefer the ground to the trees. And during the next nine million years, the tendency to walk upright became firmly established, and Ramapithecus turned into Australopithecus, our first 'human' ancestor. What difference did the upright posture make? First of all, it freed his hands, so that he could defend himself with a stone or a tree branch. Secondly, it enlarged his horizon.
As far as I know, no anthropologist has regarded this as significant—perhaps because there are many taller creatures than man. But the elephant and the giraffe have eyes in the sides of their heads, so that their horizon is circular. The ape sees straight ahead; his vision is narrower but more concentrated. Could this be why the apes have evolved more than any other animal? Narrow vision makes for boredom; it also makes for increased mental activity, for curiosity. And when the inventiveness and curiosity were well developed, a certain branch of the apes learned to walk upright, so that his horizon was extended in another way. To see a long distance is to learn to think in terms of long distances, to calculate. Man's ability to walk upright and use his hands, and his natural capacity to see into the distance instead of looking at the ground, became weapons of survival. He developed intelligence because it was the only way to stay alive. And so, at the beginning of human evolution, man was forced to make a virtue of his ability to focus his attention upon minute particulars. No doubt he would have preferred to eat his dinner and then sleep in the sun, like the sabre-toothed tiger or the hippopotamus; but he was more defenceless than they were, and had to maintain constant vigilance.
In the course of time, this ability to 'focus' his attention and calculate became so natural that thinking became one of man's leisure activities. And it 'paid off' to an incredible extent. In a few thousand years, man evolved more than the great reptiles had evolved in several million. He created civilization, and in doing so, entered a new phase of self-awareness—the phase that human children now enter at the age of six or seven.
Self-consciousness brings heavy losses and enormous gains. The greatest loss is that instinctive 'naturalness' that small children and animals possess. But the vital gain is the sense of force, of power, of control. Man became the willful animal, the most dangerous animal on the earth, never contented to live in peace for long, always invading the neighboring country, burning the villages and raping the women. And this endless ego-drive has, in the past ten thousand years, separated him further and further from the apes in their dwindling forests and the swallows that fly south in the winter.
He is not entirely happy with this civilization that his peculiar powers have created. Its main trouble is that it takes so much looking after. Many men possess the animals' preference for the instinctive life of oneness with nature; they dream about the pleasure of being a shepherd drowsing on a warm hillside, or an angler beside a stream. Oddly enough, such men have never been condemned as sluggards; they are respected a
s poets, and the soldiers and businessmen enjoy reading their daydreams when the day's work is over.
A poet is simply a man in whom the links with our animal past are still strong. He is aware that we contain a set of instinctive powers that are quite separate from the powers needed to win a battle or expand a business.
And he is instinctively aware of something far more important. Man has developed his conscious powers simply by wanting to develop them. He has traveled from the invention of the wheel to the exploration of space in a few quick strides. But he had also surpassed the animals in another respect: in the development of those 'other' powers. No animal is capable of the ecstasies of the mystics or the great poets. In his nature poetry, Wordsworth is 'at one' with nature in a quite different sense from the hippopotamus dozing in the mud. Self-consciousness can be used for the development of man's instinctive powers, as well as those of the intellect. The poet, the mystic and the 'magician' have this in common: the desire to develop their powers 'downward' rather than upward. In the Symposium, Socrates expresses the ideal aim: to do both at the same time—to use increased knowledge to reach out towards a state of instinctive unity with the universe. In the two and a half thousand years since then, civilization has been forced to devote its attention to more practical problems, while the artists and mystics have continued to protest that 'the world is too much with us', and that triumphant homo sapiens is little more than a clever dwarf. If man is really to evolve; then he must develop depth, and power over his own depths.
And now, for the first time in the short history of our species, a large percentage of the human race has the leisure to forget the practical problems. And in America and Europe, there is a simultaneous upsurge of interest in 'mind-changing drugs' and in the 'occult'.
The psychedelic cult differs from the drug cults of the early twentieth century, or even the laudanum drinking of De Quincey and Coleridge, in being more positive in character. It is less a matter of the desire to escape from a 'botched civilization' than a definite desire to get somewhere, to 'plug in' to subconscious forces of whose existence we are instinctively certain. The same is true of the increased sexual permissiveness; it is not simply a matter of disintegrating morals, but the recognition that sexual excitement is a contact with the hidden powers of the unconscious. D. H. Lawrence describes Lady Chatterley's sensations after lovemaking: 'As she ran home in the twilight the world seemed a dream; the trees in the park seemed bulging and surging at anchor on a tide, and the heave of the slope to the house was alive.'
All Lawrence's work is concerned with the need for civilization to take a new direction, to concentrate upon the development of these 'other' powers instead of continuing to develop the intellect. It is not a matter of sinking into a kind of trance, a passive state of 'oneness with nature', like the cows Walt Whitman admired so much. The nature of which Lady Chatterly is aware as she runs home sounds more like those late canvases of Van Gogh in which everything is distorted by some inner force—by Russell's 'breath of life, fierce and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things'.
In the same way, Ouspensky's preference for reading a book on magic instead of writing an article on the Hague Conference indicates something more positive than the poet's distaste for politics. At fourteen, Ouspensky is plunged into a state of ecstatic excitement by a book on physics, because it is a contact with the world of the impersonal. But science is a dead end for an imaginative youth; he doesn't want to cud up injecting guinea pigs in Pavlov's laboratory. He has a feeling that all the ways of life offered by the modern world lead him in the opposite direction from the way he wants to go. In moments of depression he is inclined to wonder if this craving for distant horizons is not some odd illusion, 'the desire of the moth for the star'. But an instinct leads him to search persistently in books on magic and occultism; later, the same desire leads him to wander around in the East, searching in monasteries for 'esoteric knowledge'. (It is ironical that he should have discovered what he was looking for when he returned to Moscow and met Gurdjieff.)
This sense of 'meanings' that are not apparent to ordinary consciousness is experienced by everyone at some time or another. One may ignore such hints for years, until some event brings them all into focus; or the 'focusing' may happen gradually and imperceptibly. Science declares that life began with the action of sunlight on carbon suspended in water, and that man has reached his present position by a process of natural selection. In that case, the laws of human existence are physical laws, and can be found in any textbook of science. But there occur moments of absurd certainty that seem to transcend the usual law of probability. Mark Bredin, a musician of my acquaintance, described how he came away from a rehearsal late at night and took a taxi home. He was very tired; there was little traffic about along the Bayswater Road. Suddenly, with total certainty, he knew that as they crossed Queensway, another taxi would shoot across the road and hit them. He was so certain that was tempted to warn the driver, then decided that it would sound silly. A few seconds later, the other taxi rushed out of Queensway and hit them, as he had known it would. He attributes the flash of 'second sight' to extreme tiredness, when the conscious mind was relaxed and the subconscious could make itself heard.
We may reject the story as exaggeration, or explain it in terms of 'coincidence'. But the word 'coincidence' solves nothing. For again, everyone has noticed how often absurd coincidences occur. Some years ago, I made an attempt to keep notes of unlikely coincidences, and I find a typical example in my journal for January 1968. 'I was reading Hawkins's Stonehenge Decoded, the last section on the standing stones of Callanish, which Hawkins describes as a kind of Stone Age computer. I finished the book, and immediately picked up Bell's Mathematics, Queen of the Sciences. It opened at Chapter 6, and I found myself looking at a footnote on Stone Age mathematics. The chances against coming across it immediately after the piece on Callanish were probably a million to one. Again, last night I was reading an account of the Domenech murder case at Moher, in Galway, and noted that the victim had been at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where I had lectured recently. Ten minutes later I opened Wanda Orynski's abstracts of Hegel, and saw that the introduction is by Kurt Leidecker of Mary Washington College. . . '
There is nothing very startling about these coincidences except the odds against them. I can add another one from the past week. An article in The Criminologist referred to a Nebraska murder case without mentioning the name of the murderer; I spent ten minutes searching through a pile of old True Detective magazines because I could recall that the man whose name I was trying to remember (Charles Starkweather) was featured on the cover of one of them. I took the magazine back to my armchair and finished the article in The Criminologist. It ended with a reference to a murderess named Nannie Doss, of whom I had never heard. I opened the True Detective magazine half an hour later, and discovered that the first article was on Nannie Doss. Oddly enough, as I looked at her photograph, and a caption mentioning the word 'Nannie', I experienced a sudden sense of total certainty that this was the woman I had been wondering about, although it took a few seconds longer to locate her surname in the text.
Similar coincidences are described in a remarkable book, The Cathars and Reincarnation, by Arthur Guirdham (which I shall discuss in detail later).[1] He describes how, one day in 1963, he began to discuss a village called Little Gaddesden, and tried to recall the name of a pub there. Later the same day, he took a book on the Pyrenees out of the public library, and on starting to read it at home, almost immediately came across the name of Little Gaddesden and the pub whose name he wanted to recall. The coincidence—one of several—occurred at the beginning of his strange involvement with a patient whose memories of a previous existence constitute one of the best-authenticated cases of reincarnation that I have come across.
To suggest that such matters are not entirely coincidence, is not to suggest that 'hidden forces' were trying to d
raw my attention to Stone Age mathematics or Guirdham's to the name of a pub. Probably all that is at work is some 'vital sense' of the same order as the eel's homing instinct. The more the mind is absorbed, interested in a subject, the more frequently these useful coincidences seem to occur, as if the healthy mind has a kind of radar system. Distraction or depression will prevent the radar from working, or may prevent one paying attention until too late. The following is from a recent account of a murder case, written by the father of the victim:
It was a squally day of cold-front weather with alternations of bright sunshine and sudden rain or hail storms. My wife and I were at the front of the house, in between the rain squalls, with two painters who were attempting to make some progress on the eaves and window frames. It was necessary to trim down a hedge outside one of the rooms . . . At 4 P.M. my wife said: 'Where's Fiona?' Irrationally and unaccountably, we both felt an excess of acute anxiety and fear. . .
Until the child was mentioned, both parents were preoccupied with other things, and the alarm signals of the unconscious were unobserved; then, with the question 'Where's Fiona?' they sound clearly, like a telephone that cannot be heard until the television is turned down. The child had been the victim of a sex killer.[1]
My own experience of 'premonitions' has not been extensive; in fact, I can call only one to mind. On July 16, 1964, an ordinary palmist at a fairground in Blackpool looked at my hand, and warned me that I would have an accident over the next month; she said it would probably be a car accident, and I would not be badly hurt. In mid-August 1964 I decided to take a guest out in a speedboat, although I had a strong premonition of danger.