Strange Powers (10 page)

Leftwich has always been a person of high energy; consequently, he has always had an active superconscious. The superconscious is, as I have said, the mind's Arid; sometimes it acts simply as a radar system, warning of dangers, possible accidents. ('Accident-proneness' and misfortune-proneness in general seem to be connected with low psychic energies, self-pity, tiredness, defeatism.) The superconscious is, basically, the power to
project oneself.
This explains why Leftwich also possesses the power of astral projection, although he is by no means a 'sick sensitive', (he explained to me that the periods when he can 'project' his astral body are always preceded by a feeling that seems to resemble the feelings of an epileptic before an attack—he has discussed the subject with epileptics in the course of his work for the Samaritans.) It also explains his 'luck', his ability to get what he wants.

When he came to Cornwall for the first time, he was driving a blue saloon car. He told me that he always drives very fast being an impatient sort of person—but has never had an accident. This, he said, was because his astral body was 'above' the car, enabling him to tell what was coming. I do not think he meant that literally—for when the astral body is being projected, the physical body goes into a trance. He meant, I suspect, that his 'superconscious' enables him to avoid accidents; and he talked about the astral body because he is aware that there is a close connection (perhaps they are even the same thing). He had a typical story about this. One early morning, driving very fast, he was stopped by a police patrol car; an irate policeman asked him if he was aware that he had overtaken dangerously three times within the past five minutes. Robert, with typical precision, explained that he hadn't been overtaking
dangerously.
'It's difficult to explain, but it's to do with partial detachment from the physical body. The Society for Psychical Research can tell you about it—I'm a member myself 'I don't care what bloody society you're a member of. Get out of that bloody car...' But, typically, he escaped without a summons, although the patrol car followed him for miles; then, when he thought he'd lost it, another patrol car followed him, obviously alerted by radio to look out for a nut in a blue saloon car.

The 'superconscious' hypothesis seems to me to explain his rather curious assortment of powers: dowsing, astral projection, 'making things happen' and getting his own way. But it leaves other questions unanswered. For example: are we dealing with 'natural' powers, pure and simple? This was a question also raised in
The Occult.
Primitive people believe in external forces of good and evil; we have gone to the opposite extreme, and try to account for everything in mechanical or natural terms. For example, Lethbridge's theory of ghosts regards them as 'recordings' rather than living creatures. But Robert Leftwich mentioned that there are times when his wife—and other people—feel that he is emanating a force of evil—not-strong, perhaps, but noticeable. He says that he is unaware of this; it has nothing to do with malignant thoughts. Is he 'picking it up' from outside himself, and unconsciously transmitting it? I do not know, and he certainly doesn't.

Again, he has the power to stop people smoking. He described the process to me as follows. The subject sits opposite him, and Robert 'attunes' his mind to him. Robert then induces a feeling of numbness in his own fingers. When the subject says: 'My fingers are feeling numb,' he knows the attuning process is complete. At which point he says: 'This is because you're attuned to me. And I can now assure you that you'll never feel the need to smoke again.' This, he says, has been a failure in only one case—and even then, the man gave it up for three years. This sounds closer to telepathy—or straight hypnosis—than to the use of the superconscious. What is the relation between this power of suggestion and the superconscious? Again, I have no idea.

And yet I am strongly inclined to believe that we
are
dealing with natural forces. I have just been playing back the tape I made of a conversation with Leftwich a year ago, and I reflect that Paracelsus would have thought it was sorcery. And so it is, in a way. I know about magnetism imprinting voice patterns in iron oxide; but it still seems strange that a tape should be capable of carrying all the vibrations of the living voice—just as it seems strange to me that a wavy line on the surface of a gramophone record can carry all the complexities of a great orchestra. So it is not difficult to believe that there may be other vibrations and fields of which we are at present ignorant. As I look across the room now, I can see a photograph on the back of a book jacket—a perfectly recognizable face. I pick it up and place it within three inches of my eyes. Now I can see just how little information the page actually carries—just a few blurry patches of black and grey. I hold it at arm's length—again, it is a face. My eyes can obviously 'decode' these patches, and read meaning into them—provided they are given enough of them to form a judgement. As Robert Leftwich walks over the ground, looking for water, some faculty as natural as sight decodes a set of vibrations, and tells him when he has found it. If I take the same dowsing rod, nothing happens; I am, comparatively speaking, 'short sighted'.

But amid all my uncertainties, I am fairly sure of one thing. Robert Leftwich is a non-passive personality; in fact, he is a highly active personality, whose psyche has always exerted a definite pressure on the outside world, in the form of curiosity, expectancy, interest. Such pressure is like water; it finds its way into cracks, and enlarges them. His powers are the outcome of his
attitude.
He demonstrates, to my satisfaction, that psychic powers are a matter of choice, not of chance.

Two

As an 'occult investigator', I am aware that I'm thoroughly unsatisfactory. When I ought to be asking penetrating questions, or devising means of testing the truth of what I am being told, I simply listen and make notes. This, I suspect, is because I see the world through the eyes of a novelist. In a sense, I am incurious about people—about their affairs, their lives; but I'm interested in the way their minds work, in their motivations. From a fairly early age, I developed the conviction that most people waste their lives because they see the world falsely. Anyone can understand what is meant if we say that someone is 'utterly conventional': that such a person accepts a set of social values without question, like a sheep that never feels curious about what lies on the other side of the hedge. But we find it altogether more difficult to grasp that we all live according to a set of conventions of
consciousness:
that, on the whole, we see and hear what we expect to see and hear, and that there may be enormous areas of experience that cannot get past our mental filters. For example, can you imagine Mr Pickwick appreciating the music of Beethoven, or the painting of Goya? (Can you imagine Dickens himself appreciating it, if it comes to that?) Could Jane Austen, even with the greatest stretch of the imagination, understand the murders committed by the Charles Manson 'family'? Our perceptions have certain inbuilt limitations; yet, in a sense, it is
we
who limit them, as we might turn down the volume control on the radio to what we consider a 'bearable volume'. This is why Rimbaud dreamed of an 'ordered derangement of the senses', deliberately pushing the senses beyond their normal limits.

This is why I would find Robert Leftwich an interesting character, even if I cannot state positively that all his claims are true and unexaggerated. He is aware that the normal boundaries are not absolutes; he wants to break out beyond them. Like Rimbaud, he has already rejected the 'communal fife-world'. A world in which there were millions of people like him would be, for me, a more interesting place.

And the same applies to Mrs Eunice Beattie, who is otherwise about as unlike Leftwich as could be imagined. Outwardly she appears to be a perfectly ordinary person—a retired nurse, devoted to her married son and his family, living in an attractive suburb of Plymouth. She has written (and typed) hundreds of pages that reveal that either (a) she has a remarkable mind, or (b) that she has 'tuned in' to other intelligences and transcribed some of their ideas.

I have not kept a record of when I first met Mrs Beattie, but it must have been in the early months of 1972. It was at the time when I was still receiving floods of correspondence about
The Occult
, which had appeared the previous autumn. Mrs Beattie's letter said that she hoped I wouldn't consider her a crank, but that she had been producing automatic writing that seemed to her to answer some basic questions about human purpose and destiny. I replied that I'd like to see some of it, and asked her if she would like to come and have lunch at the Westward TV studios next time I was there. I gave her the date.

I'd forgotten about her when a message came to say that a lady wanted to see me at the desk. I went down, and found Mrs Beattie looking nervously out of the window, as if tempted to dash out into the street. I asked her to come into the canteen for lunch. As soon as we sat down, she handed me a manila folder full of manuscript. I opened it, and saw that the first page was headed with a quotation from one of Arthur Waley's translations of a Chinese poem. I read it with a certain amount of pleasure—an understandable reaction, I think, when one is faced with a great sheaf of original manuscript that may be totally unreadable. It is like finding an oasis in a desert. I asked her if she liked Chinese poetry. She looked blank; then, when I pointed to the Waley quotation, said she had no idea who Arthur Waley was. It had simply been 'dictated' to her. I glanced at the rest of the typescript, and saw mentions of Walt Whitman and Angelus Silesius. 'What about these? Have you read them?' 'No. Who is Walt Whitman?'

As we ate, I looked at her curiously. She seemed shy, rather tense, as if trying to cut herself off from the sounds of the room. She was small, attractive, around sixty; a journalist might take the easy way out and describe her as motherly, but the rather smart hair style and the neat clothes reminded me that she had been a hospital sister—she had told me that in her letter. Very much the type children take to—as I discovered when she met my children. She didn't strike me as in any way a crank; or, for that matter, anything like my idea of a 'psychic' neither the professional spirit medium, nor the visionary peasant woman of the type described by Yeats. I found her very difficult to place.

She came and watched the program being videotaped, sitting quietly in a corner of the studio without speaking to anybody. Afterwards I asked her if she'd found it interesting. 'Oh, yes. Fascinating.' But I had a feeling she wouldn't have said so unless I'd asked her.

Clearly, I wasn't going to be able to assess her without seeing rather more of her. I asked her if she could come to my home that weekend. She looked anxious. 'Are you sure your wife won't object?' 'I don't think so.' 'Perhaps you'd better ask her first and let me know.'

Before we left the studio, I asked her how she had come to write to me. I expected her to say that she'd read something about
The Occult
, or seen me on television. Again she surprised me. 'Your name came floating into my head one day. I'd no idea who you were. Then, a week later, I saw something about you in a newspaper. I had an odd feeling that I ought to get in touch with you.'

When I told Joy I'd asked Mrs Beattie over for the weekend, she asked: 'What sort of a person is she?' and I had to admit I didn't know. I could only say she seemed a perfectly ordinary, normal person and I didn't think she'd be a difficult guest. Apart from Robert Leftwich, my acquaintance with 'psychics' had been small. In my early twenties, when I was working at United Dairies, Chiswick, I had met a woman called Grace who worked in the canteen (I have forgotten her other name), and I had been convinced that she possessed unusual powers. She seemed to be an ordinary, middle-aged cockney lady, of the kind you'd find behind almost any counter in any works canteen in the country; but Joy and I spent an evening with her, and I realized that she 'knew' a great deal—in the sense that Gurdjieff did; and the things she was able to tell me about myself startled me. Mrs Beattie seemed as ordinary as Grace; and I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. I am averagely skeptical, and I was aware of the possibility that she might be suffering from delusions, or might be making it all up to make herself interesting. I didn't believe for a moment that she was suffering from delusions. Neither did it seem likely that she was making it all up—although I had to entertain the possibility. She was a widow, living on her own—and, by her own admission, without many close friends. I settled down to reading her manuscript, hoping it might provide clues. And the first thing that was obvious was that if she was pulling my leg, then it wasn't a recently conceived plan. She'd written a lot, and over a long period; there were diary references dating back ten years. And it soon struck me, from the general tone of her writing, that she is deeply and genuinely preoccupied with what we loosely term 'the spiritual'. Now when some average, not-very-intelligent person becomes obsessed with religion, the result is an obvious feeling of unbalance; their minds become lop-sided; they spout the jargon, but it is almost a meaningless noise. In fact, it becomes a kind of mask, designed to hide their stupidity. The most obvious thing about Mrs Beattie's writing was that it was carefully and painstakingly saying something, and what it was saying was close to what all saints and mystics have always said, 'We are completely dependent on the creative energy of God, from our first breath. Our lives are usually wrecked by our sense of personal power.' Aldous Huxley's anthology of mysticism,
The Perennial Philosophy
, is full of these statements about the need to abandon the 'Self, to become identified with the Not-Self. 'There are many,' said Mrs Beattie, 'who are branches of a tree that are cut off from the main stem, and who do not know they are dying.' I got a feeling she knew what she was talking about; this was not just religious gobbledygook. And there were places where I suddenly found myself reading with increased interest. 'Man in his spiritual state is both male and female, and can thus create for himself—just as his Father can. Christ said that all he could do, men could do also, when they had come to full realization.' For some months before meeting Mrs Beattie, I had been struggling with the obscure but impressive work of a Hungarian philosopher, Charlotte Bach, whose studies of sexual perversion—particularly of 'trans-sexuality' (i.e. the man's desire to become a woman, and vice versa) had led her to a completely new theory of evolution, in which the inner tensions created by this sexual ambiguity drive man up the evolutionary ladder. She had also noted that some human beings achieve a precarious balance through the creative act. Mrs Beattie seemed to be stating the same thing much more simply. In many ways, she might be poles apart from the formidably intellectual and erudite Mrs Bach; but she seemed equally aware of the possibilities of an evolution of consciousness. A disciple of Gurdjieff s once said that his system was 'a method of preventing your past from becoming your future'; the same preoccupation ran throughout these manuscripts of Mrs Beattie's.