Supernatural (5 page)

What were these ideas?
Well, to begin with, I had a deep conviction that man is on the point of an evolutionary breakthrough to a higher stage.
These strange ecstasies that filled the romantics with an odd sense of power and certainty were not illusions: they were, in fact, glimpses of the unknown powers of the human mind.
H.G.
Wells once remarked that the world has changed more in the past sixty years than in the previous 60 centuries.
He meant, of course, in technology.
Yet it seemed to me that man himself has also changed more in the past 2 centuries than in the whole of his previous evolution, and that he is now close to the stage at which a new creature will emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis.

The Morning of the Magicians
had also talked about a ‘new kind of man’, and the possibility that human beings may be about to achieve an ‘awakened state’.
The authors had even made the important comment that what is now needed is an Einstein of psychology who can understand the hidden powers of the mind.
Yet it was hard to see how these important ideas connected up with their talk about the Hollow Earth, vanished civilisations and aliens from outer space.
Which is why I continued to feel that the ‘occult revival’ was something I could safely ignore.
Yet on lecture tours of America—which I made at intervals in an effort to keep my bank-manager happy—I frequently bought paperbacks with titles like
Famous American Hauntings
or
Exorcism—Fact not Fiction
to read on the plane.
And, like Ouspensky, I continued to find something oddly fascinating in this strange if occasionally lunatic world of speculation.

It was in 1969 that my American literary agent wrote to ask me if I would be interested in writing a book about ‘the occult’.
I accepted because I needed the money; besides, I felt I probably knew as much about it as anybody.
But I found it hard to take the commission seriously—I only had to re-read that passage in Ouspensky about
Atlantis and Lemuria
and
The Temple of Satan
to feel that I was going to have to write it with my tongue firmly wedged in my cheek.
That winter—1969—I took the family to a small village in Majorca, where I was supposed to be a ‘visiting professor’ in the extramural department of an American college.
There I met the writer Robert Graves, whose book
The White Goddess
had given me severe headaches many years before, and I asked his advice on writing a book about the occult.
He gave it in one word: ‘Don’t.’
And I have to admit that, if I had not already received half the advance, I would probably have taken his advice.

It is difficult to say at which point I began to change my mind, I think it was the day Joy read aloud to me a passage from Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography
Left Hand, Right Hand,
in which he tells a story of how, just before the First World War, he and a group of brother officers went to see a famous palmist ‘as a lark’.
What happened dismayed him.
The palmist kept looking at hand after hand and saying: ‘I don’t understand it.
I can see nothing.
.
.’
The explanation came a few months later when the war broke out, and the men whose palms had been ‘blank’ were killed .
.
.

Now it seems clear from Sitwell’s other works that he was not a ‘believer’ in the supernatural—in that respect he seems to have shared the attitude of his father, Sir George Sitwell, who once grabbed a ‘spirit’ that was walking around at a seance, and revealed it to be the medium in her underwear.
And the more I studied this subject of the paranormal, the more I discovered that some of the most convincing witnesses were not spiritualists or occultists, but unbelievers who had had just one odd experience.

Charles Dickens is another example.
In a letter of May 30, 1863, he decribes how, the previous Thursday, he had had a dream in which he saw a lady in red, who stood with her back towards him.
He thought he recognised her as someone he knew, but when she turned round, saw that she was, in fact, a stranger.
The lady remarked ‘I am Miss Napier’.
And as he was dressing that morning, he thought: ‘What a preposterous thing to have such a distinct dream about nothing.
And why Miss Napier?’

That same evening Dickens gave one of his famous public readings, and some friends walked into his dressing-room with the lady in red, who was introduced to him as Miss Napier .
.
.

This story raises perhaps the most difficult of all questions about the ‘supernatural’.
It should be
totally impossible
to know about an event before it takes place, except as some kind of vague guess.
Time is a one-way street, and the future has not yet happened.
We may choose to believe in all kinds of strange things: spontaneous combustion, telepathy, out-of-the-body experiences, haunted houses, phantom hitch hikers .
.
.
But each one of these might well have some more-or-less rational explanation.
In the case of foreseeing an event that has not yet happened, there is no ‘rational’ explanation: it seems to defy the laws of reason.
Yet, as I was soon to discover, there are hundreds of well-authenticated cases of people who have foreseen the future.

What fascinated me was that this was not really so remote from my interest in ‘outsiders’.
Because what these cases seemed to prove beyond all doubt was that human beings possess strange
powers
of which they are normally unaware.
And this is precisely the intuition that had excited so many of the great poets and musicians of the 19th century.
In
The Prelude,
for example, Wordsworth decribes how, one moonlit evening, he borrowed a small boat he found moored on the edge of Lake Windermere, and how, as he rowed out into the middle of the lake, a huge black peak seemed to tower above him like a living creature.
For days afterwards, he says: and his dreams were troubled by ‘huge and mighty forms that do not live’.

‘. . . . my brain

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

Of unknown modes of being’,

Is that mere ‘poetic imagination’?
Or had he actually
seen
something that the rest of us do not see because our senses are too narrow and practical, in the same way that some people can see ghosts?

Here is an example that brings home the point even more clearly.
Richard Church was a poet who was born in London in 1893, the son of a post office worker.
Life was hard; his mother, whom he adored, destroyed her health by working as a schoolteacher to help support the family.
Church himself suffered from such poor health that at one point he was sent
away to spend some months in a convalescent home.
He felt miserable and sick with longing for his mother.
And then there came a strange experience that, in some ways, transformed the rest of his life.
He describes how:

‘.
.
.
one heavy morning, when the outside world was iron-bound with frost, I stood at a long French window in the playroom waiting to go down to breakfast.
The sun was just risen beyond the ground, and stood above the lawns, his great red disk etched with naked twigs of the bushes.
Under these bushes a gardener was chopping down a dead tree.
I watched him.
The axe flashed red, and fell.
It rose again.
The movement, steady and sure, fascinated me.
Suddenly I realised that the sound of the blows did not synchronise with what I saw.
The thud came when the axe was on an upstroke, ready for the next blow.

‘I disbelieved the evidence of my eyes.
Then I thought my spectacles (those miracle workers) must have betrayed me; or that my illness had begun to affect my vision.
I stared intently, screwing up the eye-muscles against any possible intrusion of light or irrelevant image.
But the picture I saw and the sound I heard remained disparate.

‘Then, while I stared, knowledge came to me; the knowledge that follows a recognition of fact, of concrete experience, bringing with it a widening both of the universe and of the individual’s understanding of it.
These moments are rare, and they are wholly vital.
For a flash, the recogniser is a god, who can say ‘I am’, as Jehovah said in the Old Testament.

‘On that frosty winter morning, between getting up and going down to breakfast, in an antiseptic, varnished institution where the inmates and staff were so dehumanised that they were little more than parts of the mechanism of the place, leaving me in a murmurous solitude, day after day bemused and lonely, elated by the very dreariness of things, there I stood transfigured .
.
.

‘I had found that time and space are not absolute.
Their power was
not
law.
They were not even unanimous; they quarrelled with each other; and through their schism the human imagination, the hope, the faith, could slip, to further exploration where intuition had formerly hinted, but where logic and fatal common sense had denied.

‘I felt both power and exultation flooding my veins.
The blood glowed warm within me, rising to my brain and pulsing there, like a crowd roaring some racial acclamation.
I had found out the cheat of time and space; and if that were so, then other seemingly stable laws of nature might be questioned, to the advantage of this fettered and hoodwinked spirit, this hidden and oppressed self, locked in the dungeon of my body.

‘I looked again, and still the evidence wrote itself upon the frosty air, against the disk of the sun who had now risen an inch or two higher, like the minute-hand of a giant clock, jerking itself up toward the hour, invisibly visible in its motion.
The beauty of this syncopation between sight and sound released me from so much, from the mass of daily life, the burden of the flesh and its strict locality, from the drag of earth.

‘That last was my most hated foe.
The drag of earth, the weight that would pull me day and night, making every movement, even the smooth gestures which we throw in sleep, a labour too heavy to be borne; the putting on of clothes, the passage from chair to chair, the endless travel from one room to another, and that final torture, the treadmill of the tandem, during those Sunday rides behind my brother, as I tried to do my share of the pedalling, under the goad of his tongue, lashing me to it.

‘But now I was free.
Since time and space were deceivers, openly contradicting each other, and at best offering a compromise in place of a law, I was at liberty to doubt further, to carry on my exploration of the horizons of freedom.
Still conscious of the warm blood whispering in my veins, I looked down at my wrist and saw the transparent flesh, the bird-bones, the channels of blue beneath the skin.
All this was substance as fragile as a plant.
It could not possibly outweigh the solid earth under my feet, where I and the rest of duped mankind walked with such docility.

‘The sun had brightened to a liquid fire that dazzled my sight, reducing the woodman and his brief moment of revelation to a penumbral figure under the shadow of the bushes in the dead grey frost.
I stared at the light, and the stuff of life within my body began to increase its speed of flow.
I sensed, with a benignancy deeper and more assured than reason, that my limbs and trunk were lighter than they seemed, and that I had only to reduce them by an act of will, perhaps by a mere change of physical mechanics, to command them off the ground; out of the tyranny of gravitation.

‘I exerted that will, visualising my hands and feet pressing downwards upon the centre of the earth.
It was no surprise to me that I left the ground, and glided about the room (which was empty) some twelve or eighteen inches above the parquet floor.
At first I was afraid of collapsing, of tumbling and hurting myself.
But I had only to draw in a deep breath, and to command the air through the heavy portions of my anatomy,
watching
it flow and dilute the solid bone and flesh through the helpful chemistry of the blood, this new, released and knowledgeable blood, and I soared higher, half-way to the ceiling.
This thoroughly frightened me, and I allowed myself to subside, coming to ground with a gentleness that was itself a sensuous delight.

‘I could not leave the matter there.
I must put my discovery to the test again, and accordingly I drew in a deep breath and was just about to visualise that downward pressure of will upon body, when the door opened, and a nurse came in.

‘“Why, little boy?”
she said.
“Haven’t you heard the breakfast bell?”

‘Then she took a second glance at me, stooped and peered into my face, “Is anything wrong?
Are you feeling poorly this morning?”

‘I was almost indignant, and disclaimed the suggestion that I might have a temperature, for that would mean going to bed in the large ward where a pail stood conspicuously in the middle, on a sheet of mackintosh; an improvisation which disgusted me.

‘I hurried away without replying, leaving the nurse looking after me with some inquiry in her manner.
The corridor and staircase were empty, for everybody was at breakfast in the vast dining-room below.
Here was another opportunity!
I drew my breath again, I scorned the liars of time and space, I took the presence of Christ into my hollow, featherweight bones, and I floated down the staircase without touching either tread or baluster.
Alighting outside the dining-room door, I entered and took my seat, content now to live incognito amongst these wingless mortals.’

This is surely one of the most remarkable passages ever written by a poet.
His other references to the experience—in his autobiography
Over the Bridge
—make it clear that he is telling of something that actually happened; this is not some childish fantasy or daydream.
Did he actually float through the air in a physical sense, as he seems to be claiming?
Or was he having what is known as an ‘out-of-the-body experience’?
His account seems to make it quite clear that it was his physical body that floated clear of the ground.
And his case is far from unique.
Dozens of children have been quite convinced that they have floated downstairs without touching the stairs.
In her book
The Decline and Fall of Science,
the researcher Celia Green quotes a letter from a woman who claims to have had the experience as a 17-year-old schoolgirl: