Strange Powers (14 page)

Human beings have three bodies: the physical body, the energy body and the astral (or soul-) body. All our memories are associated with the energy body. After death, the astral body is freed; the energy body remains in a state of quiescence or unconsciousness for three days. The energy body is joined to the physical body at the navel, and has its root in the liver. This body is also called the Ka, the Egyptian word for it. The Ka remains with the physical body to keep it alive when the astral body travels. After death, the Ka gradually disintegrates as the physical body decomposes; its memories are transferred to the astral body at death. In cases of violent death, the astral body finds itself in a grey, misty place and feels confused and lost. Mrs Beattie has also helped to 'guide' these lost souls out of this limbo state. 'Ghosts' are not lost souls, but fragments of the energy body which have not disintegrated. This happens in cases of violent death, when the memory has not had time to be transferred to the soul-body.

The astral body has awareness of the 'subconscious' mind. As human beings achieve extension of consciousness, they also achieve a closer relation to the subconscious mind. At a higher level still, the astral body is in contact with the whole race memory, which can become available to it. Interestingly enough, Mrs Beattie says that she disbelieves in reincarnation. People who think they have glimpsed themselves in previous existences are actually contacting fragments of the race memory. This is a point on which she is in flat disagreement with Arthur Guirdham, the subject of my next chapter. But it is only fair to say that spiritualists in general disagree about this subject. I asked Professor Wilson Knight if, next time he attended a seance, he would ask about reincarnation. He obliged me, and told me later that there seemed to be no general agreement. Reincarnation probably
did
occur, but it was the exception rather than the rule.

When Mrs Beattie was in our house, she picked up a book called A
World Beyond
by Ruth Montgomery, purporting to be a description of the after-life, transmitted to Ruth Montgomery from the medium Arthur Ford, after his death. Mrs Beattie opened it at a page dealing with race memory, and showed it to me, saying 'Look, that's exactly what I was saying earlier.' It was; but on other points, there is considerable disagreement between Mrs Beattie's 'world beyond' and Ruth Montgomery's. Ruth Montgomery states that reincarnation is definitely the rule, and that it is the means by which men work out 'evil karma' (although she doesn't use this phrase). For example, a philanthropist who had an appalling disfigurement on one side of his face had killed a child in a previous existence by striking it with great violence in the same place...

After death, the soul feels as if it is travelling down a long tunnel, and then emerges into a region that is very much like this physical world. In a sense, they are still exactly the same person they were when alive; 'they don't become spiritual just because they've died'. Evil souls may fall into a kind of limbo, an outer darkness. (Ruth Montgomery explains that Hitler has fallen into this state, but that he propelled himself into it. The paranoid self-assertion continued in the 'world beyond', but produced no effect, except increasing frustration and fury in Hitler—producing a fragmented mental state like insanity... )

From the 'ordinary' (or 'earthly') level, souls may evolve to a level in which they become involved in useful work (the 'guardians'?). Beyond this, there are two higher levels. All children—souls of those who have died young—congregate at the third level. The fourth level is 'purely creative'. I found this slightly baffling—after all, creativity can exist on any level—but Mrs Beattie explained that these four levels also exist in the minds of living people, i.e. we can evolve through these levels while still alive, and the level we have reached determines our place in the 'world beyond'.

At this point, Mrs Beattie made some comments that I did not fully understand. 'We've got to grow, to balance the negative, unconscious forces. We've got to have three extensions of consciousness in our conscious minds to balance the three levels of unconscious forces.' She conceives the subconscious as negative. (Elsewhere in the manuscripts, there is an interesting table labeled 'Human polarization', which declares that in man, the physical body is positive, and in woman, negative. The energy body in man is negative, and in woman, positive. The soul or astral body in man is positive, in woman, negative; and male consciousness is negative, while in woman, consciousness is positive. This, she says, is why man and woman harmonize, complementing each other.) When I asked her to explain the three negative forces of the unconscious more fully, she referred me to the manuscripts; but I have not been able to find anything.

But it seems to me that the essence of Mrs Beattie's ideas is contained in a phrase she used when I asked her why some 'spiritual' people are completely non-psychic. 'We make an inward journey, to find the truth of our own being. You go through the emotional soul level, and in so doing, you become aware of the psychic level.'

A lot of what she says puzzles me, or simply rings no bells at all. But this phrase seemed to me to be of central importance: the inward journey. She says several times in the manuscript that most people live on a purely physical level, unaware that this is only an imitation of real life. In her teens—perhaps earlier—she learned the trick of 'cavoseniargising', making the inward journey, focusing the inner-mind.

Anybody can do this. Ed Morrell did it by focusing on pain. I have heard of cases in which a similar act of focusing could bring a certain release. In America, I met a young college teacher who said he could induce sudden intense experiences of joy, and that he had learned this trick as a boy, when he had to sit still in church. One day, when he had been fidgeting, his mother told him he would be punished if he didn't stop it. Then he began to itch—I think he said it was in the small of his back—and experienced an overwhelming desire to scratch it, which he had to resist. The itch became unbearable—then, as he concentrated on it, was suddenly replaced by an intense 'peak experience'.

It is not necessary to focus on pain. If I settle down to read a book that I have been trying to obtain for a long time, or to listen to some music that I really want to hear, I relax completely, and prepare to devote my fullest attention to the act of focusing; and it is this that leads to states of absorption that resemble the mystic's contemplation. Such an act of concentration on one thing also refreshes us; no matter how weary I feel, if I become deeply interested in something, my energies slowly return. I recall, at the age of fifteen or so, cycling nearly fifty miles to Matlock Bath, in Derbyshire, and arriving there worn out. I felt that all I wanted to do was to lie down and sleep; instead, we paid our shillings and went on a guided tour of the deep caves that run below the limestone hills. It involved a great deal of walking and scrambling; yet we came out as relaxed and refreshed as if we'd had a good night's sleep. The proper use of our energies depends on this power to direct them—or rather, direct the attention—to new regions of the mind. This is the way 'mental voyages' are made; this is the way in which we explore our hidden powers. This is the reason people seek pleasure—because pleasure has the power to direct the mind in a single direction. And such a 'focusing' is, literally, a voyage. After a short time, we find ourselves in new mental realms, just as if we were exploring a road, and when we look back, we have an odd sense of being far from home—or at least, from the starting point.

For me, what is important about Mrs Beattie is not her claim to be able to project the astral body, or her descriptions of the after-life. I am unable to judge these, not having any basis of personal experience to go on. But it seems dear to me that the rather odd, introspective girl who was brought up on a Welsh farm, developed the same power that all artists and poets possess: the power to make 'inward journeys'... and perhaps developed it to a greater extent than most. An artist might regard her as an artist
manque
, but it seems to me that she would have as much right to regard the artist as a 'psychic
manque".
Both belong to the group of 'inward voyagers'. Mrs Beattie is not a philosopher; but the central idea that emerges from her work is the basis of modern existentialist philosophy: Kirkegaard's recognition that 'truth is subjectivity'. But, expressed in this way, we fail to grasp its significance. What we are talking about is a
real
power that is possessed by human beings: the power to evolve by a process of 'inner voyage'.

She herself has a rather skeptical attitude towards a great deal of what she has written, and is obviously not sure how much of it comes from her own mind, and how much from 'outside'. She writes in her notes: 'The things I have written from time to time, when the mood was on me, seem to me not typical of me. Some is too donnish, other pieces are too sentimental. (It all has a religious background, which
is
, of course, me.) But I rather suspect the other material, which is why I don't know what to do with it. It's all broken up...'

This may be true, but it does not matter. What is significant about her is that she has learned the trick of making 'inner voyages' without the aid of a water-tank or psychedelic drugs, and she demonstrates that it
can
be done. I think that she is right to believe that she has taken a step along the road that leads to the next phase of human evolution.

Three

I had just completed
The Occult—
some time around August 1970—when I saw a review of a book called
The Cathars and Reincarnation
by Arthur Guirdham. It was a short review, but it said that it was probably the best authenticated case of reincarnation on record. So I hastened to buy the book, which was published by Spearman—a firm that seemed to have succeeded Rider as England's chief 'occult' publishers.

The book arrived in mid-September. It had a sub-title: 'The record of a past life in 13th century France'. I settled down to read it; from the blurb, it sounded fascinating.

My first impression was of disappointment. It began by stating that one of the writer's patients—he was a doctor—had written down all kinds of details about the Cathars, a heretical sect of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and that at the time she wrote, most of these details were unknown to scholars. Since that time—twenty-six years ago—many of these details have been verified, said Dr Guirdham.

He certainly had my attention. In fact, it seemed fairly clear to me that he had the material of a best-seller. All he had to do was to tell his story simply, in chronological sequence.

Unfortunately, this was precisely what he didn't do. His style was clear enough, but he got involved in all kinds of minor details about the Cathars and thirteenth-century France until I was completely bogged down. What it needed was to tell the reader, in words of one syllable, exactly who the Cathars were, and their history up to the time of their destruction by the Inquisition. And then, step by step, to tell the story of his patient, whom he calls Mrs Smith, and show how it corresponded in detail with what is known of the Cathars in Languedoc in the middle of the thirteenth century—particularly of the murder of the two Inquisitors at Avignonet in 1242, which led to the great persecution of Cathars, culminating in the massacre of Montsegur.

On the other hand, the very fact that he hadn't tried to turn the book into another
Search for Bridey Murphy
was evidence for the genuineness of the book. I got the impression that, as a doctor, he was slightly embarrassed by the sensational nature of the material he was presenting, and was anxious to present it as soberly as possible.

The story presented in
The Cathars and Reincarnation
is, briefly, as follows:

Throughout his adult life, Arthur Guirdham has felt a strong attraction to the heretical sect known as the Cathars, or 'pure ones'. Their basic doctrine was similar to that of the Manichees and the Gnostics: that this world is the domain of Satan, and that human beings are the spirits of angels who revolted against God, and who have been condemned to spend a lifetime imprisoned in the body. This world is hell, created by the devil. A man's only chance of redemption is to become united with Christ in this life, to become completely pure.

The Catholic Church has always been inclined to condemn this type of doctrine; to begin with, the Bible says that God looked at the world and saw that it was good. Second, the majority of clerics, from priests to popes, have been ordinary human beings, lacking in fanaticism; the Savonarolas and Cornelius Jansens strike them as slightly nutty. On the other hand, intense natures long to evolve at a faster rate than the Church makes provision for, and this has been the source of all the Church's troubles, from Chrysostom to Luther. The 'purists', the fanatics, are a nuisance and a menace. Purist doctrines always made their strongest appeal in times of universal hardship and suffering; and at the time of the second Crusade, there was plenty of hardship and suffering in Europe.

Trouble began after 1174, when St Bernard preached against the Cathars in Toulouse, which was virtually their capital city; Count Raymond of Toulouse was a Cathar. In 1205, a monk called Dominic Guzman—later Saint Dominic—began his own personal crusade against the Cathars, wandering around barefoot and preaching against them. His followers—the Dominicans—were later given the job of rooting out Catharism, and became known as the Inquisition. In 1204, the pope asked the king of France to depose Count Raymond and place a good Catholic in his position. In 1208, one of Raymond's squires retaliated by assassinating the papal legate; the pope was so furious that he couldn't speak for two days. And the first 'crusade' against the Cathars began in 1209. Twenty thousand people were massacred at Beziers. Simon de Montfort (senior—father of the founder of English democracy) was a particularly violent persecutor. He plundered Toulouse in 1215. The slaughter and persecution went on, with Toulouse changing hands, for the next thirty years. But the beginning of the end happened in 1242, when the two Inquisitors were betrayed by their host, and murdered. In 1243, the Cathars were besieged at Montsegur; they held out for ten months; when they finally surrendered, two hundred who refused to renounce their faith were burnt alive in one huge pyre.