Supernatural (71 page)

This
is the problem of human consciousness: habits that bundle us into bed and off to sleep when there are far more interesting things to be done.
Chesterton asked why the world is so full of bright children and dud grown-ups.
The reason is that our most interesting potentialities fail to survive adolescence; we slip into a habit of using only a fraction of our powers.

When habit is broken, anything can happen.
In a book called
Mysteries
(1978) I have cited the case of a lady named Jane O’Neill who, when driving to London airport, witnessed a serious accident and helped to free badly injured people from a wrecked coach.
The shock was so severe that she had to take several weeks off from work.
She began to experience strange waking visions, some of which were oddly accurate: for example, she ‘saw’ a close friend chained in the galleys; told about this, her friend replied that her ancestors were Huguenots and many
had
found themselves in the galleys.
One day in Fotheringhay Church, Jane O’Neill was impressed by a picture behind the altar.
She later mentioned this to the friend who had accompanied her, and her friend said that
she
had not seen any picture.
Miss O’Neill was so puzzled that she rang the lady who cleaned the church and asked her about it; the lady replied that there was no such picture.
Later, the two women revisited the church; to Jane O’Neill’s surprise, the inside was quite different from what she had seen before—it was much smaller—and the picture was not there.
She asked an expert on East Anglian churches, who put her in touch with a historian who knew the history of Fotheringhay.
He was able to tell her that the church she had ‘seen’ had been the church as it was more than four centuries ago; it had been rebuilt in 1553 .
.
.

Jane O’Neill’s experience is, in its way, as well authenticated as that of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain.
In one sense, it is more convincing; I heard of it by accident, through a friend, and wrote to Miss O’Neill, who was kind enough to send me a full account, together with the exchange of letters with the historian which established that she had ‘seen’ the earlier church.
Miss O’Neill had made no attempt to publish her interesting story, so cannot be accused of attention-seeking.

But how can we reconcile a story as extraordinary as this with our everyday experience of the real world?
Most scientists have a short and convenient method of dealing with such anomalies; they dismiss them as lies, distortions or mistakes.
Whether intellectually justified or not (on grounds of ‘the laws of probability’), this is bound to strike anyone interested in such matters as pure mental laziness.
If an answer is to be found, I believe that its starting-point must be the notion that the powers of the human mind are far less limited than we naturally assume.
This was a conclusion I had reached many years before I became interested in the paranormal; so that, for example, in
Religion and the Rebel
(1957), I had suggested that our everyday consciousness is as limited as the middle few notes of a piano keyboard, and that its possible range is as wide as the whole keyboard.
In states of great happiness or relief, or when involved in some absorbing adventure, we receive a clear intuition that the world is an infinitely richer and more complex place than ordinary consciousness permits us to perceive.
And, moreover, that the mind is perfectly capable of taking a wider grip on that breadth and complexity .
.
.

Hurkos’s accident, like Jane O’Neill’s, shook his mind out of its usual narrow rut, and made him aware that ‘everyday consciousness’ is basically unreliable in its report about the actuality that surrounds us.
But then, is not such narrowness preferable to the state of confused inefficiency that accompanied his powers of ‘second sight’?
Was Jane O’Neill’s glimpse of Fotheringhay in the 16th century (or earlier)
worth
the mental shock of the coach accident?
These questions raise serious doubts about the desirability of such powers.
But then, we are assuming that it is possible to investigate the unknown powers of the mind only by destroying our everyday sense of reality.
And this, fortunately, is untrue.

We may recall the story told by Alan Vaughan in his book
Patterns of Prophecy,
cited in
Chapter 11
(
p. 350
), in which he became ‘possessed’ by the wife of a Nantucket sea captain, and how he was ‘exorcised’ by an occultist, who caused an entity called ‘Z’ to drive out the sea captain’s wife through the top of Vaughan’s head:

‘I began to feel an energy rising up within my body and entering my brain.
It pushed out both “Nada” and “Z”.
My friends noted that my face, which had been white and pinched, suddenly flooded with colour.
I felt a tremendous sense of elation and physical wellbeing.
The energy grew stronger and seemed to extend beyond my body.
My mind seemed to race in some extended dimension that knew no confines of time or space.
For the first time, I began to sense what was going on in other people’s minds and—to my astonishment—I began to sense the future through some kind of extended awareness.
My first act in this strange but exciting state was to throw the Ouija down an incinerator chute .
.
.’

It was this experience that led Vaughan to study the whole question of prophetic glimpses of the future.
He had
seen
this ‘extended dimension that knew no confines of time or space’, and decided that it deserved to be investigated.
The poet Robert Graves described a similar experience in a story called ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’ (which, he told me, was autobiographical): ‘One fine summer evening as I sat alone on the roller behind the cricket pavilion, with nothing in my head, I received a celestial illumination: it occurred to me that I knew everything.
I remember letting my mind range rapidly over all its familiar subjects of knowledge; only to find that this was no foolish fancy.
I did know everything.
To be plain: though conscious of having come less than a third of the way along the path of formal education .
.
.
I nevertheless held the key of truth in my hand, and could use it to open any lock of any door.
Mine was no religious or philosophical theory, but a simple method of looking sideways at disorderly facts so as to make perfect sense of them.’

The ‘secret’, Graves says, was still there when he woke up the next morning; but, when he tried writing it down, it vanished.

It is true that Graves fails to explain just what he meant by the ‘secret’, except to say that it was ‘a sudden infantile awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer’.
But he offers a further clue in citing the case of another boy in the school who was able to solve a highly complicated arithmetical problem merely by looking at it.
The form master—‘Mr Gunn’—accused the boy of looking at the answer at the end of the book; the boy replied that he
had
checked with the answer—later—and that its last two figures were wrong—they should be 35, not 53.
The unsympathetic and obtuse Mr Gunn sent the boy to the headmaster for a caning, declining to believe that he could simply have ‘seen’ the answer .
.
.

So it seems that Graves is speaking of a power related to that of mathematical prodigies, the ability of the mind to
see
the answer to a problem in a single flash.
And how, precisely, does such an ability work?
Is it some form of lightning calculation, that is, a process of ordinary reason in which everything is speeded up, as in the famous Trachtenberg speed system of mathematics?
Apparently not.
We know this from the case of Zerah Colburn, the Canadian calculating prodigy, who was asked whether a certain immense number was a prime (i.e.
could not be divided by any other number), and who replied instantly: No, it can be divided by 641.
Now there is no mathematical method of determining whether a certain number is a prime—except the painful method of trial and error, dividing it by every smaller number and deciding that none of them works (shortcuts exist: if it can’t be divided by 3 it can’t be divided by 6, 9, 12, 15 .
.
.).
Obviously, Colburn ‘saw’ the answer, as Graves’s fellow pupil F.F.
Smilley did—from ‘above’, as it were: a kind of bird’s eye view.
And Graves’ ‘secret’ was, presumably, some similar method of grasping the answer to any problem by instantaneous intuition .
.
.

We have seen in
Chapter 2
that man is a double being, with two selves who live one in each half of the brain.
The being you call ‘you’—your ego—resides in the left cerebral hemisphere.
A few inches away, in the right hemisphere, there is another ‘you’; but it is dumb.

When I work out a sum on paper, I am using my left hemisphere—with a certain amount of occasional assistance from the right, by way of sudden insights.
And this, on the whole, seems to be the way the human brain works: the left is the ‘front man’, the ego that deals with the world; and the right has to express itself
via
the left.
And, on the whole, the right has a fairly hard time of it; for the left is always in a hurry, always working out problems, and it tends to treat the right with impatience.
This is why civilized Man seems to possess so little intuition.

It seems probable that calculating prodigies have not yet fallen victim to this bullying dominance of the left.
The ‘shades of the prison house’ have not yet begun to close.
They
see
the answer to a problem, and pass it on instantaneously, unimpeded by the usual red tape of the bureaucrat who lives in the left brain.

For this, I must stress, is the real problem of civilized Man.
We have evolved to our present level through the use of language and concepts.
We use these so constantly that we ‘identify’ with the left half of the brain.
This does no real harm, for in a sense the ‘personality’
is
the linguistic part of us.
The trouble arises from the
attitude
of the ego to the non-ego who lives in the right cerebral hemisphere.
We tend to treat it as an idiot, as a kind of inarticulate and not-very-bright younger brother who is always being ignored and told to shut up.
If we took the trouble to listen to it, we might learn a great deal.
Occasionally, it may become so alarmed at our carefully calculated stupidities that it takes the
law into its own hands and interferes.
Here I can cite a personal example.
The hill that leads up from Pentewan to Mevagissey is long, and has several abrupt curves.
One day, I was driving up this hill with the sun in my eyes, almost completely blinded.
At a certain point I reasoned that I must be approaching a bend, and tried to turn the steering-wheel.
My hands ignored me:
they kept the wheel steady.
My right brain knew I had not yet reached the bend, and simply cancelled my order to turn the steering-wheel.

Even this last sentence illustrates our basic mistake.
I say ‘
my
hands’,
‘my
right brain’, as if they were both my property, like my clothes.
But the being who calls himself ‘I’ is a usurper.
It is his brother, who lives next door, who is the rightful heir to the throne.
I say this because the left, for all its naive egoism, cannot live without the intuitions and insights of the right—there are many creatures in the world who live perfectly well without language or ideas.
But the ideal state is one of close co-operation between the two halves, with the left treating the right as a wise counsellor and trusted adviser, not as the village idiot.

Significantly, the left brain has a strong sense of time; the right has absolutely none.
It strolls along at its own pace, with its hands in its pockets.
This does not mean that the right lacks the ability to calculate time—on the contrary, when you tell yourself that you must wake up at six o’clock precisely and you open your eyes on the stroke of six, this is the work of the right.
But it declines to take time too seriously.
And it is right to feel sceptical.
The left is stupidly obsessed by time.
An anecdote told by William Seabrook of Aleister Crowley illustrates the point.
When Crowley was on the island of Sicily, a film star named Jane Wolfe came to pay him a visit; she was in a state of permanent nervous tension.
Crowley told her that she must begin her cure with a month of meditation on the cliff top.
The idea dismayed her, but she agreed.
She lived in a lean-to shelter and a boy brought up water, bread and grapes every day at dusk.
For the first few days she was bored and irritable.
By the 19th day she felt nothing but boredom.
Then, quite suddenly, she passed into a state of deep calm and peace, with no desire to move.
What had happened was simply that her over-dominant left brain—accustomed to the Hollywood rat race—had gradually realised that it could stop running; then the right took over, with its sense of timelessness and serenity.
What is being suggested is that
time is an invention of the left brain.
Time, as such, does not exist in nature.
Nature knows only what Whitehead calls ‘process’—things happening.
What human beings call time is a psychological concept; moreover, it is a left-brain concept.

Now the left brain, as we know, sees things in rigid categories, and nature does not operate within such categories.
Consider Zeno’s paradox of the arrow.
At any moment it is either where it is or where it isn’t.
It
can’t
be where it isn’t; but if it is where it
is,
then it can’t be moving.
The paradox of Achilles and the tortoise depends on the same kind of logic.
But the arrow
does
move; Achilles
does
overtake the tortoise, although it is ‘logically’ impossible.
According to the left brain, there is no logical way of deciding whether a large number is a prime except by trial and error, but Zerah Colburn’s right brain solved it instantly; and, in the same way, Peter Fairley’s right brain knew in advance which horses would win at the races.
(Significantly, Fairley had suffered temporary blindness just before he developed this ability; it seems probably that the shock was responsible for ‘short-circuiting’ the usual left-brain processes.)