Strange Powers (19 page)

And in New York in 1967, I noticed the reverse. Paramount had taken an option on one of my novels for a fairly large sum, and I intended to use some of it to take my family to the University of Seattle, where I had a job as writer in residence. But as the date for leaving England approached, there was still no contract. Half a dozen film deals had already fallen through; I found it hard to believe that this one would come off. But although the consequences would have been fairly serious if the deal
had
fallen through—we didn't have enough money to get from New York to Seattle—I declined to allow myself to worry. Staying with friends on Long Island, I rang my American agent—who told me that the contracts had been sent weeks ago. Some incompetent underling had sent them surface mail instead of airmail, and they were probably halfway across the Atlantic. I still declined to allow myself to get depressed—it is the writer's occupational disease, and I have always tried to bully myself out of it. The next day, my agent rang back to say that he had got a new set of contracts, and Paramount had agreed to pay up the moment he handed them over. I set out from Long Island on an August afternoon; the heat in the train to Manhattan was almost unbearable; but I was feeling cheerful. Although Grand Central station was crowded, I managed to get a taxi immediately. Half an hour later, I signed the contract; my agent said he'd try to get the cheque to me within forty-eight hours. I left the office, found another empty taxi outside, arrived at Grand Central five minutes before the next train out to Long Island, and was back home within a couple of hours. There was a strange, sleepwalking sense of smoothness about that whole afternoon.

Chance? Of course, in a sense. But I also felt that a kind of alertness and attention were allowing me to take advantage of chance. It was like being in a canoe on a fast current; the paddle doesn't have much to do, but its occasional strokes keep you clear of rocks.

Human beings have a deeply ingrained habit of passivity, which is strengthened by the relatively long period that we spend under the control of parents and schoolmasters. Moments of intensity are also moments of power and control; yet we have so little understanding of this that we wait passively for some chance to galvanize the muscle that created the intensity.

But whether you use the negative methods of relaxation (which is fundamentally 'transcendental meditation') or the positive method of intense alertness and concentration, the result is the same: a realization of the enormous vistas of reality that lie outside our normal range of awareness. You recognize that the chief obstacle to such awareness is that we don't
need
it to get through an ordinary working day. I can make do fairly well with a narrow awareness and a moderate mount of vital energy. I have 'peak experiences' when I occasionally develop more awareness and more energy than I need for the task in hand; then I 'overflow', and realize, for a dazzled moment, what a fascinating universe I actually inhabit. It is significant that Maslow's 'peakers' were not daydreaming romantics, but healthy, practical people...

That is my 'general theory'. My increasing sense of the vistas of reality that lie outside my everyday preoccupations leads me to take a far more tolerant attitude towards assertions that do not fit into my range of experience. The cybernetician David Foster came up with an interesting theory (which I described in
The Occult)
to the effect that the universe shows every sign of being run on a series of 'cybernetic codes'. A kind of plastic biscuit with holes in the edge codes my wife's washing machine; and an acorn is the plastic biscuit that codes an oak tree. This suggests to Dr Foster that acorns and human genes are coded by some conscious intelligence, not simply by the operation of Darwinian selection. He thinks that cosmic rays would be of sufficiently high frequency to do the coding—although this doesn't prove that they do. Now I don't know whether David Foster is fight. All I
can
say is that
there
is something about his theory that corresponds to my own glimpses of 'vistas of reality'.

Neither do I know whether Robert Leftwich and Eunice Beattie and Arthur Guirdham are right—exactly and precisely right. Mrs Beattie says that her own insights suggest that reincarnation is not a fact; Guirdham say it is... But it seems to me that they
are
indicating facts that lie outside our present sphere of acceptance. Becher and Stahl were not right when they suggested that all burning materials give off a gas called phlogiston; Descartes wasn't right when he suggested that the movements of the solar system are due to 'vortices'. But they were moving in the right direction; they were recognizing the existence of a problem that had so far been overlooked, or only partially recognized. Science has a nasty habit of declining to recognize the existence of problems that lie outside its accepted field; this, I suspect, is due to tidiness rather than fear of the unknown. So the first task of an original thinker is to persuade scientists—or philosophers—that a problem
does
exist. When Freud tried to introduce his ideas on hysteria to the Medical Society of Vienna, their first line of defence was to deny that such a thing as male hysteria existed; Freud had to produce a male hysteric before he could even get them to listen. Even then, the Society found it impossible to fit his theories into their own general system, and so decided to ignore them. This is the usual way such things operate, and it is to be expected.

Charles Fort was particularly concerned with this problem. What he wanted to indicate, in four indigestible and impossible books, was that science keeps mistaking its own temporary theoretical boundaries for absolute limits. It is one thing to learn to ignore extraneous noises when you are working; it is another to become so accustomed to ignoring them that you finally deny that they exist. Fort never made his point. By collecting hundreds of odd occurrences from newspapers and printing them all side by side—fishes falling from the sky, skeletons of angels, devil tracks walking over snow-covered roof-tops—he only convinced any scientists who happened to open
The Book of the Damned
that he was infinitely gullible. Fort lacked the philosophical training to make his point. It is only nowadays that scientists like Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, Abraham Maslow, are beginning to make it in a way that scientists can understand.

And even they have only widened the boundaries of scientific tolerance. They have not really made Fort's point: that science operates in a kind of self-imposed blindness.

Beyond all doubt, things are changing. In the nineteenth century, science
had
to operate that way; the aggressive materialism and doubt was a part of its strength. What good would it have done if someone had recognized that Baron yon Reichenbach was right, and that the human body has some kind of electrical 'aura' or force? This piece of information would have been useless; and it might have hindered Freud in his important work of gaining general recognition for the role of the sex impulse and the subconscious mind. Now in the light of what we are beginning to learn about the body's life fields, and the way they fluctuate with illness, it could suddenly become as relevant as the sexual theory was in 1900.

In the mid-1960s, the San Francisco writer Dick Roberts told me that his plants grew better when he talked to them and touched them. I wasn't skeptical, but I pigeonholed this piece of information because I had no use for it. (To begin with, I am no gardener.) Some time later—perhaps a year—my wife read out to me an item from a newspaper asserting that a horticulturist had discovered that plants responded to sympathy. Again, I pigeonholed the information. A few months ago, I read in a book called
Supernature
, by the zoologist Lyall Watson, an account of an experiment that suddenly offered me the general background to Dick Roberts' observation. In 1966, an expert on lie detectors—polygraphs—called Cleve Backster found himself wondering whether a plant would show increased electrical activity when subjected to pain. A lie detector works partly on the change in the electrical resistance of the skin when a man begins to sweat. Backster attached the polygraph to the leaf of a rubber plant in the office, and tried dipping another leaf in hot coffee. The plant didn't register. Backster wondered whether he would get some result by burning the leaf with a match. As soon as he
thought
this idea, the polygraph registered an increase in 'perspiration'. The plant had read his mind. He tried dropping live shrimps into boiling water next to the plant; as each shrimp died in agony, the polygraph needle leapt. When a dead shrimp was dropped into the water, nothing happened.

Another plant, a philodendron, became attached to Backster. Backster's assistant had to produce the various shock responses on the plant, with the result that it would register alarm when he came into the room, and relax when Backster came in—or even when it could hear his voice in the next room. But it was not simply the voice it responded to. Surrounded by a lead screen that would cut out normal electromagnetic vibrations, it still responded. Obviously, these 'vibrations' are not magnetic or electrical.

Watson also mentioned in an interview published in
The Guardian
(21 September 1973), that he and Backster had tried the same experiment with eggs. When eggs were dropped on the floor or fed to a dog, another egg attached to the polygraph recorded a reaction. This was strongest when eggs were dropped into boiling water. Oddly enough, when this happened, the eggs connected to the polygraph ceased to react for several minutes, then would react again as before; Watson's explanation for this is that the egg
fainted
with shock.

I cannot resist mentioning perhaps the weirdest thing in Watson's book. A Frenchman named Boils who took refuge in the pharaoh's chamber of the Great Pyramid noticed that old litter thrown there—including a dead cat—
did not decay.
This led to the amazing discovery that a cardboard pyramid built to exactly the same proportions as the Great Pyramid has the same preservative effect. A dead mouse kept in it 'mummified' without stinking; a similar mouse kept in a shoebox stank. But the strangest thing is yet to come. Razor blades kept in the pyramid remained sharp if they were kept in an east-west alignment. Watson has tried it—he shaved with the same blade for four months without it becoming blunt. A Czech firm has actually patented this device. Watson's guess is that the pyramid may build up a magnetic field that causes a new crystalline 'edge' to form on the blade.

Observations like these—which have been confirmed in other laboratories (Watson quotes sources)—obviously lend new perspective to Dick Roberts' assertion that he can influence his plants by talking to them. But it also confirms the general attitude to 'the occult' that I have argued in this book. I do not know whether Guirdham is right when he says that children's night fears may be due to discarnate entities. But if a plant can sense hostile thoughts, then it is probable that a baby can. And if thought is carried like radio waves, then the 'psychic ether' of our world is probably buzzing with hostile vibrations that a baby might pick up.

Again, Guirdham's title
We Are One Another
takes on new meaning—or perhaps I should say, takes on meaning, for at first sight, it is meaningless. We are
not
one another. On the other hand, the basic assertion of his book is that there are deep psychic links between the Cathars who died at Montsegur, so that events in the psyche of one of them could reverberate in the mind of another member of the group who was a total stranger. Many husbands and wives experience each other's illness symptoms. (I mention in
The Occult
that I have experienced Joy's pregnancy pangs and been depressed by her toothache, before I knew she was suffering from it. I once vomited all night when my first wife was suffering from food poisoning a hundred miles away.) Guirdham claims that members of his group of reincarnated Cathars also experienced one another's spiritual crises in the form of spells of dizziness. Naturally, we are skeptical about this, for it contradicts our experience that our inner-worlds are strictly private. But we go on from there to assume that this applies to all nature. And if Backster is right, this is untrue; human beings are the
exception
to the rest of nature. In his essay
The Child in the House
, Walter Pater talks about the 'web of pain' that stretches throughout nature; I remember being deeply struck by the phrase when I read the essay at fourteen or so. But if a rubber plant shudders when a shrimp dies, the 'web of pain' may be more than a poetic phrase.

Again, I was struck when the painter William Arkle told me how the snakes in his garden seemed to respond to his thoughts. He bought himself a huge house—it used to be a monastery—on a hilltop overlooking Weston-super-Mare. The garden turned out to be full of adders and grass snakes. One adder made a habit of wandering along beside Bill Arkle when he walked down the drive. He had found it coiled in the middle of the drive one day, in such a position that he couldn't drive the car past without killing it. He got out of the car and prodded it awake with a stick; it hissed and declined to move. He decided that perhaps he had better kill it in case it bit one of the children; as soon as he moved towards it with this intention, it hissed violently at him. Being by nature a gentle mystic, he decided to let it live; the snake immediately moved to the side of the driveway, and went back to sleep. All he told me made it quite clear that the thing was telepathic. Again, I pigeonholed the information. But clearly, it fits. All the indications are that the poets were right when they talked about 'living nature'. And Tolkien's forest that hates hatchets may turn out to be more than a piece of whimsical fiction. All living things exist in a kind of unity, that is broken by thought, the need to concentrate on particulars. We exist in a kind of 'psychic ether' of which we are unaware...

All of this certainly lends support to Guirdham's basic theories, although it does nothing to either prove or disprove his belief that a group of thirteenth-century Cathars have been reincarnated in twentieth-century England. All that can be said is that the case he presents in his two Cathar books is the most challenging ever presented. It offers itself for examination. Morey Bernstein's case for the reincarnation of a Colorado housewife collapsed as soon as the Hearst newspapers began to probe it; it turned out that the reincarnated Bridey Murphy had lived opposite an Irishwoman in Chicago as a child, and been in love with her son; the 'memories' of a former existence dredged up from Mrs Virginia Tighe's subconscious under hypnosis turned out to be childhood memories of her Irish neighbor. But Guirdham's arguments do not depend upon anything as ambiguous as hypnosis. And there were several people involved. This could be the opportunity for the most thorough and exhaustive examination of the case for reincarnation ever conducted. And if the results of such an investigation proved to be positive then Miss Mills' 'instructors' would have achieved their aim: of making their case known to the widest possible audience. It would be a milestone in the history of physical research.