Colin Wilson's 'Occult Trilogy': A Guide for Students (5 page)

Part One introduces the work of the British archaeologist and parapsychologist T.
C.
Lethbridge: “The only investigator of the twentieth century who has produced a comprehensive and convincing theory of the paranormal” (46), to a wider audience.
According to Wilson, Lethbridge’s books fall into four groups:

“…books on archaeology and primitive religion, and the books on pendulums and related matters.
Legend of the Sons of God
[1972] …about visitors from other worlds and the magnetic forces of the earth, belongs in a group on its own.
The same is
true of …
The Power of the Pendulum
[1976] in which he seemed about to embark on a new line of enquiry about dreams and the nature of time.”
(76)

All of these aspects of Lethbridge’s work are considered in Part One of
Mysteries
.
The contributions of other researchers, where relevant, are brought into the mix: Alfred Watkins, John Michell, Guy Underwood, Robert [Allan] Monroe, J.
W.
Dunne and J.
B.
Priestley among others.
Wilson applies his ‘ladder of selves’ theory to explain the phenomenon of dowsing:

“…there can be no doubt that what we accept as everyday consciousness is thoroughly sub-normal.
In which case, it seems a fair guess that such faculties as dowsing, second-sight, precognition and divination may simply be latent in some higher level….”
(75)

Lethbridge was a natural dowser, who no doubt found this skill useful when excavating archaeological sites.
But when someone suggested that, instead of a hazel twig, he should use a pendulum, he began, in his later years, a series of pioneering experiments using pendulums of varying lengths (or ‘rates’) to divine, at first, various metals and then all manner of objects.
His experiments also revealed that these objects all have vibrational ‘fields’ surrounding them, the radius being that of the ‘rate’ for the object.
Extending this ‘field theory’ to ghost sightings, “…Lethbridge [was] the first to speculate on whether hauntings may not be connected with the ‘field’ of water” (64).

“All his books are pervaded by an underlying feeling of excitement.
He believed that he was on the point of some important breakthrough …basically a feeling that the answer lies somehow in
rates of vibration
[and] if matter can be explained in terms of vibrations, then the same thing
probably applies to the world of ‘paranormal’ phenomena….
What really excited him was that his own investigations seemed to be somehow connecting up with those of modern physics.
Everything in the universe seemed to have a ‘rate’—just as the elements all have their atomic weights.”
(170-171)

In Part 2, Chapter 1: ‘The Curious History of Human Stupidity’, Wilson asserts that:

“Human beings possess a powerful stabilising mechanism which operates on the psychological as well as the physical level….
A person who feels deeply insecure is afraid to begin living.
That
is why we tend to ignore things that upset our basic sense of normality—or to forget them as quickly as possible….”
(202)

But the evidence for the existence of paranormal phenomena is such that we need to keep an open mind for fear of taking a similar stance to the clergy against early scientists and, latterly, scientists against theologians and philosophers.
Wilson outlines the danger and absurdity of the closed mind and argues:

“Obviously neither science nor religion possesses a monopoly on truth.
Ideally science is the impersonal pursuit of truth; but then, so is religion—as all the saints and mystics have recognised.
And to pursue truth requires some of the qualities of a saint or mystic.
Ordinary human beings are too easily swayed by the appetite for power and recognition and self-esteem.”
(197)

He sees investigators like Lethbridge and the rigidly methodical collector of anomalous phenomena Charles Hoy Fort as “tak[ing] pleasure in the fact that the world is bursting with anomalies” (203).

“The problem is to strike a balance between the two extremes.
We need a world with enough strangeness and ‘newness’ to keep us awake but not enough to produce a feeling of insecurity….
Most scientists seem to have a strong compulsion to cling to their old paradigms.”
(203)

[Taking up the ‘Fortean’ mantle, Wilson himself went on to edit the part-work
The Unexplained
(London: Orbis Publishing Co., 1980-83) and, with his son Damon,
The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries
(London: Harrap, 1987).
He has also spoken at many of the
FortFest
Conventions around the world.
This open-mindedness has left him open to accusations of gullibility by academics and sceptics but his stance is entirely consistent with his conviction that all human beings possess latent ‘occult’ powers.]

Chapter 2 ‘How Many Me’s Are There?’
examines the phenomenon of multiple personality, quoting cases recorded by Carl Jung and Pierre Janet and those of the remarkable Christine Beauchamp, Doris Fischer (who had five distinctive personalities) and Sybil Dorsett (sixteen!).
To help explain this phenomenon, Wilson uses Janet’s theory (and that of the philosopher and scientist Michael Polanyi) that human consciousness has a hierarchy of levels and that our lives evolve as we climb to higher levels, successfully integrating each stage as we progress.
In all cases of multiple personality it appears that the subject’s progress had become arrested: “they had ceased to climb” (229), releasing a number of unfulfilled personalities:

“We can think of a human being as a small garden containing a number of seeds at various depths.
If all goes well, and the human being strives for self-actualisation …then the ‘seeds’ awaken one by one, and quietly integrate with those that have already started to germinate.
But if the human being becomes severely discouraged …the whole personality becomes static.
The seeds start to germinate, put out a few buds, then ‘freeze’.
(232)

At the end of the chapter Wilson reminds us that, although we are certainly not all multiple personality cases, we are, however, all characterised by a tendency to ‘duality’:

“No matter how involved …in an emotion or enthusiasm, a part of the ego remains detached, uninvolved….
We are all ‘divided’ from the moment of birth; it is a condition of our evolution.

These recognitions are not a discovery of modern ‘depth psychology’.
They are part of an esoteric tradition that is older than civilisation.
Oddly enough, its name is magic.”
(234)

In the following chapters Wilson concerns himself with the power of the will allied to the imagination, particularly with regard to making magic work.
Imagination is “…the power to get back to reality, to re-focus our true values, to combat the curious erosion of our vitality” (266-7).
He considers the invention of the novel (which he argues dates from 1740 with the publication of Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela
) “one of the most remarkable events in human cultural history” (255).
Richardson “taught the middle-classes the use of the imagination” (256) and inspired “the expanding revolution of the human spirit that we call romanticism” (256).

He discusses also the “old magical art of memory” (254) and the way that our accumulated knowledge can enhance our experience of ‘Faculty X’ [“that latent power that human beings possess
to reach beyond the present
” (Wilson (1), 73)]:

“…the meaning-content of such an experience depends on the amount we know.
For an ignoramus, Faculty X would merely be a pleasant sense that ‘all is well’….
For a philosopher, it
could be an insight into the meaning of human existence.”
(251)

Dreams, visions, revelations, alchemy, Cabbalism, possession, poltergeists, reincarnation and many other topics are dealt with in this rich section of the book.
But it is when Wilson considers Jung’s collective unconscious, in the chapter entitled ‘The Rediscovery of Magic’, that he introduces us to the potentially useful concept of ‘gliding’, a method of establishing contact with the unconscious: “[Gliding is] probably the simplest and most accessible to the ordinary person, and there are few people unlucky enough never to have experienced it” (316):

“It happens frequently when you relax in front of the fire and pour yourself a drink….
It happens to children at Christmas time …when a whole range of reinforced stimuli …build up a mood of intensity and delight….
In all cases it is easy to see how the effect works.
The mind relaxes into a state [of] ‘pleasant expectancy’.
Among the normal anxieties and tensions of modern life, we grow accustomed to a fairly constant flow of negative stimuli, and we finally slip into a state of negative expectation….
When ‘pleasant expectancy’ is slightly higher than usual, we can gradually de-condition ourselves out of the negative responses….
A person who has unusually strong reasons for feeling happiness …may quickly reach the normal ‘ceiling’ for positive response and pass straight through it into a ‘floating’ state of ecstasy.
Such states …can produce an effect of stunning paradox and overwhelming joy that can produce floods of tears or an ecstatic sense of the goodness of the universe.”
(316-7)

However, instead of trying to grasp and analyse these states, most of us fail to learn from our experiences of a more relaxed consciousness.
In the following chapter, ‘Revelations’, Wilson
looks at some of those who have learned and progressed further.

Wilson has often been criticised for his interest in the occult.
In this book he argues that “the paranormal often leads directly to questions of philosophy” (504).
However, many casual readers of his earlier work failed to see the connection between this and his ‘new existentialism’.
Towards the end of this section, in the chapter entitled ‘Powers of Evil?’
Wilson explains the development of his own field of interest from ‘outsiderism’ to the paranormal:

“The ‘outsider’ is aware of being trapped in his own narrow personality, and he suffers from a sense of suffocation….
But the ‘outsider’ suffers so much because he has had moments in which he experienced an intoxicating sense of freedom, in which his consciousness seemed somehow enlarged….
The great romantics, from Rousseau to T.
E.
Lawrence, were all driven by this desire to escape from ‘themselves’ and explore the realms of freedom.”
(492)

But exploring the ‘realms of freedom’ is a task that has preoccupied philosophers throughout time and Wilson sees psychics, dowsers, clairvoyants etc as somehow having occasional access to these realms even if some of their evidence is not always reliable.

In the final part of
Mysteries
, Wilson turns his attention to evolution and argues that mental evolution is a basic law of the universe: “It is as if a higher level of consciousness [is] trying to persuade us to bring it into actuality” (505).
He feels that there is “something unsatisfactory about the Darwinian theory of evolution” (507) and goes on to consider others, in particular Stan Gooch’s theory of evolution through the inner conflict between man’s new and old brains, the cerebrum and the cerebellum, and
Charlotte Bach’s [i.e.
Karoly Hajdu] idea of sexual aberration driving evolution.

[Students wishing to know more about the work of Charlotte Bach are referred to Wilson’s 1988 book
The Misfits: a Study of Sexual Outsiders
, (London: Grafton Books).]

But there is an obstacle to evolution and it is ‘the robot’, Wilson’s name for the mental servant that we have developed to perform automatic tasks for us: “man has allowed himself …to become too dependent on the ‘robot’, until low-consciousness has become part of our human heritage” (526).

“The odd thing is that the brain circuits that produce wider consciousness are not waiting to evolve; they are already there….
The strange implication seems to be that there
was
a time when we made fuller use of them, and that our capacities have been atrophied since those days.”
(525)

Wilson sees this as something equivalent to the Fall in Genesis:

“Like the Original Sin of Genesis, our low-pressure consciousness can be held responsible for most of our major defects.
It produces a kind of nagging hunger for excitement that leads to all kinds of irrational behaviour.
This is why gamblers gamble, sex maniacs commit rape …why men become alcoholics and drug addicts.
It also explains why we are so prone to outbreaks of criminality and mass destruction.
Violence and pain are preferable to boredom and frustration.”
(526)

So is there a way forward for mankind?
The ‘robot’ is essential to all life, yet it is also a jailer.
As always, Wilson, the consummate optimist, says yes.
We need to “shake the mind awake” (527).
Discomfort can do this but “a sense of purpose can do it more positively and effectively” (527).
We must learn from the sense of
freedom we experience in moments of excitement or happiness.
An emergency can concentrate the mind and call up vital reserves of energy and we should be able to call upon these reserves whenever we please by adopting meditative techniques, or indeed Wilson’s ‘gliding’ or by making “sudden convulsive efforts of concentration” (529).
Persisting with these disciplines, Wilson asserts, produces a cumulative effect that will provide us with greater control over our inner freedom and expand our consciousness.

In the next chapter, ‘Messages from Space and Time’, Wilson looks at the evidence for alien intervention in human evolution.
He considers the extra-terrestrial claims of Dr Andrija Puharich, Uri Geller, John Keel, F.
W.
Holiday (1920-1979) and others but retains an open mind:

“All these speculations fail to suggest a definite answer to the problem of UFOs….
We cannot draw a line between the latent powers of the human mind, and the invisible powers that may exist around us in the universe….
[There is] an uncertainty principle in paranormal phenomena.
They may be ‘genuine’ yet still not what they seem.”
(562)