Strange Powers (17 page)

In fact, the only skeptical hypothesis that can be regarded as unassailable is that Guirdham himself has invented the whole thing: that neither Mrs Smith, Miss Mills, Betty, Jane and the rest ever existed. And on my own knowledge of the Guirdhams, I find this almost impossible to accept. For what it is worth—and I agree it would not convince the
News of the World
reporter—he strikes me as eminently sane, balanced and honest.

Miss Mills told Guirdham that it was important to go ahead with the publication of the facts about this strange case, because the same kind of thing is happening all over the world at the moment, and it is important that other people involved should realize that they are not the only ones. In which case, it could be argued that it is in Guirdham's interests—and those of the 'Cathars'—to try to furnish some solid proofs. He mentions several times that Miss Mills had been unwilling to discuss her own experiences, even when some of the others involved—Betty, Jane, Jack—offered evidence that suggested that they themselves were Cathars. On the other hand, Miss Mills is obviously the key to the problem. At a fairly early stage in their acquaintance, she experienced a pain in her hip, and when Guirdham examined her, he found that she had a strange line of blisters across her back—hard blisters. This, said Miss Mills, was where she had been struck across the back with a burning torch as she was led to the stake. The blisters would certainly be very powerful corroborative evidence for the story.

However, let me, for the moment, put aside the doubts and qualifications, and ask the vital question: If this is all true, what does it mean?

Centrally, it would establish the fact of reincarnation, as certainly as Newton's observations established the fact of gravity. Which, even in occult circles, would cause a sensation. For, as I have already commented, by no means all spiritualists accept reincarnation—in fact, very few of them do. Mrs Beattie seems inclined to deny it completely. On the other hand, there is a great deal of solid evidence for something of the sort. In
The Occult
, I quote
Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation
by Ian Stevenson MD, published by the American Society for Psychical Research in 1966. This is one of those typically careful, painstaking volumes that offers huge quantities of detailed information about cases of supposed reincarnation. In a typical case, an Indian girl of seven described to her parents her previous existence in a nearby town, which she had never visited. She said that she had been a mother, and had died in childbirth. Taken to the town in question, she was able to point out people and places in a way that demonstrated that she certainly had a thorough knowledge of them, and, as able to talk to relatives of her previous 'self in the local dialect, although she had only been taught Hindustani. In the case of a Hindu boy who had been beheaded at the age of six by a relative who wanted to inherit property that would descend to the child, the 'reincarnated' boy had a scar on his neck resembling a knife wound. Another child who began to describe a previous existence (at the age of two) had scars on his stomach resembling gunshot wounds; he claimed to have been killed (in his previous existence) by a gun blast in the abdomen. All this would seem to support Guirdham's statements about his reincarnated Cathars suffering the pains of their burning and developing blisters.

Even if I did not know Arthur Guirdham, and consider him honest, I would still be inclined to give credit to his two Cathar books in the light of his other work.
A Theory of Disease
shows him, quite simply, breaking away from the Freudianism and behaviorism that form the foundation of every psychiatrist's medical training. Like Jung and Rank, he is groping towards 'holistic' concepts. And the holistic trend has been steadily gaining force in science and philosophy ever since Husserl formulated Phenomenology in 1912 and the gestalt psychologists began their experiments in perception.
Man, Divine or Social
(1960) is a determined attempt to formulate a kind of metaphysics of 'holism'. He again starts from the recognition of the 'You that is Not You'—what Husserl would call the transcendental ego. This book is about the conflict between man's two basic urges: what he calls 'the cosmic urge' and the Herd-Personality Impulse. This is less 'metaphysical' than it sounds. Wordsworth's poem 'The world is too much with us' deals with the same problem. (So does my
Outsider.}
Observed purely objectively—phenomenologically—man is a dual being, torn between 'the triviality of everydayness' (to use Heidegger's phrase) and sudden flashes of deeper meanings, 'a certain odor on the wind'. The problem is 'close-upness', being forced to live with our noses pressed against reality. His use of the term 'Herd-Personality Impulse' indicates that he is preoccupied with the 'outsider' problem and how to solve it.

One of his most revealing books is a short work—a mere ninety-five pages—published in 1966 under the pseudonym Francis Eaglesfield; it is called
Silent Union, A Record of Unwilled Communication
, and consists of extracts from his journals about patients who had 'occult faculties'. For example, a rugger-playing coal merchant, who had often dreamed of things before they happened. When he followed the beagles, this man never had to look in the newspaper to see what time the hunt would start; he seemed to know intuitively, and would set out at the right time. This book forms a link between the early healing books and the later 'occult' books. Many of its cases are simply 'odd'. For example, the rather repressed, silent man who blamed himself for the death of his seven-year-old-son—he had failed to call the doctor soon enough. His son had had a wart on his forehead, and the father often felt it with his index finger as he stroked the boy's forehead. One day, ten years after the boy's death, the father developed a wart on the fingertip; then they spread across the hand. A doctor burned off one wart with caustic; after this, the man called on an amateur wart charmer, who made the others 'disappear' very quickly. The incident demonstrates that warts may be cured, as well as caused, by psychological strain.

But the most interesting and significant section of the book is its longest chapter. He begins by describing an odd occurrence when he was on holiday in Yorkshire with Mary. They were staying at a hotel, and had been to visit a friend at a town fifteen miles away. They had only been driving home about four minutes when they passed a signpost saying that their destination was only three miles away. This seemed impossible; they stopped and looked in the AA book—which confirmed that the towns were fifteen miles apart. A few minutes later, they found themselves driving into the town—even the last three miles had 'vanished', or been foreshortened. Time had somehow accelerated.

He goes on to describe the hotel they were staying in: 'there was something fascinating and macabre in its perfection of mediocrity'. Yet one evening, looking up from his book in the lounge, everyone seemed to be intensely alive, 'and endowed suddenly with a new and inexplicable dignity'. It was after these two events that he began to keep a diary, the diary he quotes in this book.

The events seem, in a way, trivial. But they are of considerable significance. The first indicates the illusory and relative nature of time; the second, the relative nature of our perception of the external world. Nothing could seem 'realer' than the dullness of a lot of ordinary middle-class people, apparently incapable of an original thought—or any thought at all. Something happens in the brain, a kind of psychic orgasm, and they are transfigured. It is as if a new 'eye' had opened in the brain.

He goes on to recount two more odd events. One we already know about. In a couple of pages, without any details about Cathars (or his own involvement) he recounts the story of Mrs Smith, calling her D; he mentions simply that her detailed account of a previous existence convinced him of reincarnation. He also mentions an old friend, Celia, in whose presence he has always felt refreshed, 'as if I had been charged by an inexhaustible battery'. But Celia had a deep distrust of anything 'psychic', and disliked Mrs Smith's influence (such as it was). On a walk with Celia one day, Guirdham felt completely low and exhausted, as if recovering from a serious illness, and felt like this for several days. He concluded that Celia had, in some way, withdrawn her psychic energy. Again, a minor event—pointing only to the mind's power to give strength and to heal.

There is another brief and interesting episode. His wife asked him what he thought Keats looked like; and then, a few minutes later, what was the next line after 'Fear no more the heat of the sun' from
Cymbeline.
Ten minutes later, in a book on Napoleon, she came across a reference to Keats, and the song in
Cymbeline.

And why should these disparate episodes be grouped together? Because, I think, they all point to the same thing: a 'bridge period' in life in which some fundamental change occurs. As far as I know, no one has ever written about the importance of 'bridge periods'. During these periods, you sense that something is happening, some basic change, of the sort that occurs at puberty. But then, when the body changes at puberty, you are aware that this is a purely subjective change; it is happening to you, not to the rest of the world. But in other 'bridge periods', there is a curious feeling that can only be described as 'involvement', as if you are involved in some wider, more general change. It is the kind of 'sense of change' you might experience if you drove down from New York to Florida in midwinter, and saw the scenery becoming greener, and felt the air becoming warmer. I am not implying that 'the World' is somehow taking account of you; only that you seem to have passed into a region where you are subject to slightly different laws. New experiences seem to be thrusting themselves under your nose. These periods are so important because we accept a static existence; the heroes of Chekhov and Beckett seem to be saying: 'Things don't change. Things
can't
change. Life just goes on repeating itself, like a gramophone stuck in a groove, and we just get older and die... ' But any young man who has just discovered poetry or music or science knows this is untrue. The universe is endlessly new and fresh. And if we find it difficult to be endlessly new and fresh, this is because of some absurd misunderstanding, some piece of ignorance—for example, like a man who took a bath every morning in the same dirty water, unaware that the plug is for emptying the bath and the taps for refilling it with clean water...

Being static has its uses. There are periods when the mind
needs
to be closed to outside influences. When I read Freud or Bertrand Russell, I realize that their positive qualities depend on their rather narrow pragmatic attitudes. You cannot bake a cake with the oven door open. Too much open-mindedness makes for mediocrity. We know this instinctively; this is why we accept a certain narrowness of consciousness without too much protest. All the same, it is an exciting moment when mental barriers seem to be withdrawn; the shutters open; light comes in. A chrysalis must feel rather the same as it changes into a butterfly. In such states, you tend to feel sorry for Chekhov and Beckett, and also rather contemptuous; their gloom is largely their own fault.

Arthur Guirdham went into his 'bridge period' comparatively late in life. He specifies the period as his late forties, when he began relaxation exercises. These sometimes produced a sense of being detached from his body or looking down on himself from near the ceiling; but he is careful to state that it was only a 'sense'—not a full-fledged experience. Then there were the cases of clairvoyance, telepathy and healing that he mentions in
Silent Union.
'Sometimes I acquired the symptoms, often physical, of patients who began to recover at the same time that I had assumed their symptoms. During these periods I experienced all manner of so-called coincidences. People I had never seen for years came vividly to my mind. In a few minutes I would meet them in the street. I would puzzle my mind with abstruse problems. The answers would be prodded by strangers I had met in casual encounters. I obtained from these experiences an utter conviction of the indivisibility of human consciousness. I discovered that in the sphere of medicine we share a common psychic life and exchange, with those on the same wavelength, not only thoughts and feelings, but the syndromes of disease.' The ground was being prepared for the insights into Catharism.

The interesting thing is that he was not entirely unprepared; in childhood, and again in early manhood, there had been 'glimpses'. At the age of four, he had a serious illness, and had a dream of heaven—a dream of such intensity that he now believes it to have been a real experience of 'the other world'. He was in a field with a little girl, but the colors had an extraordinary intensity. In his teens, he had experiences of premonitions, none of them important, of things that he would later see in the newspapers; this sounds like the 'time experiences' described by J. W. Dunne. There was also a curious episode in his third year at Oxford. Staying a night at an inn at Beckley, on the edge of Otmoor, he began to shiver violently. A doctor diagnosed a liver complaint. For two days he felt cold and jaundiced, then recovered. Later on, he discovered that Otmoor was one of the last places in England where malaria occurred, and it struck him that he had experienced all the symptoms of malaria, without actually having the disease. It seems to have been a case of picking up the psychic vibrations.

All these speculations about the origins of disease are gathered together and explored in a book called
Obsession
(1972). Here he suggests openly that children's 'night terrors' may not be due to nightmares, but to genuine forces of evil. In an autobiographical book,
A Foot in Both Worlds
(recently published), he describes one of his own 'night terrors' at the age of six—what seemed to be an encounter with the Devil. In
Obsession
, he is concerned with 'compulsives'. One child patient suffered from convulsions, asthma and night terrors. He was also incredibly, rigidly punctual. He had a recurring dream in which he was gasping with thirst in a desert. He was an omnivorous reader, but never read fiction; he preferred books on Roman history, and on travels in America and Australia—both countries with large tracts of desert, as Guirdham points out. He does not reach any positive conclusions about the patient, but anyone who has read his other books can see the direction of his thoughts: that the deep interest in Roman history could indicate reincarnation, and that the gasping for breath and the dreams of dying of thirst in the desert could stem from an experience in a previous existence. As to the obsessive punctuality, it is the attempt to escape fears 'outside time' by plunging into time—trying to grasp it, so to speak.