Beyond the Occult (12 page)

When I was in Majorca in 1969 I asked Robert Graves whether he had ever had a mystical experience, and he told me to read one of his short stories entitled ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’.
In it he described how, as a schoolboy, he was sitting on a roller behind the cricket pavilion when he received a sudden ‘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, and being weak in mathematics, shaky in Greek grammar, and hazy about English history, I nevertheless held the key of truth in my hand, and could use it to open the 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.

Graves explains that he tried out his insight on ‘various obstinate locks: they all clicked and the doors opened smoothly’.
The insight was still intact when he woke up next day.
But when, after a morning’s lessons, he tried to record it in the back of an exercise book, ‘my mind went too fast for my pen, and I began to cross out — a fatal mistake — and presently crumpled up the page.’
When he later tried to write it down under the bedclothes, ‘the magic had evaporated’ and the insight vanished.
Writing about his experience he says that what struck him at the time 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.’

And as a further illustration of this curious ability Graves tells the story of a fellow pupil, F.
F.
Smilley, who had apparently developed the powers of a calculating prodigy.
The master, Mr Gunn, had set them a complicated mathematical problem.
Smilley simply wrote down the solution and sat gazing out of the window.
Asked how he did it without written calculations, Smilley replied, ‘It just came to me — I just looked at the problem and saw what the answer must be.’
Mr Gunn accused him of looking up the answer in the back of the book; Smilley replied that the answer got two of the figures wrong anyway.
Mr Gunn sent him to the headmaster with a note ordering him to be caned for cheating and gross impertinence.

Graves’s description of his own experience is less clear than it might be.
When he says he ‘knew everything’ we are naturally inclined to believe that he is speaking of general knowledge — like knowing dates in history.
But this is obviously not so, for he goes on to say that it was a method of ‘looking sideways’ at disorderly facts to make order out of them.
This brings to mind Eileen Garrett’s remark that her clairvoyance depends on ‘a fundamental shift of one’s
awareness’.
And when Graves goes on to compare his ‘celestial illumination’ with Smilley’s ability to solve mathematical problems at a single glance, it is clear that he is talking about Ouspensky’s ‘bird’s-eye vision’, James’s glimpse of ‘increasing ranges of distant facts’.
But James says he could give no articulate account of them, while Graves was sufficiently in control of his insight to apply it to various problems and to try to write it down.
It seems obvious that Graves’s experience was in many ways similar to James’s, but that
what
he saw was something about human nature or the working of the human mind.
At a later stage in this book it may be worthwhile to try to define it more precisely.
Meanwhile one thing is clear: Graves’s illumination concerned the right brain, or the workings of intuition.
But his insight seems to contradict our normal assumption that the right brain is simply a natural counterpart of the left, complementing its powers of logical analysis with an ability to perceive patterns.
Graves’s comment that the insight was of ‘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’, means that he is claiming that its powers go far beyond mere ‘pattern-perception’ and come much closer to what we would call ‘occult’ or paranormal.

^*
Warner Allen,
The Timeless Moment
, 1946.

^*
See
The Spiritual Nature of Man
, A Study of Contemporary Religious Experience, Oxford 1979.

^*
James Webb,
The Harmonious Circle
, p.
112.

^*
Quoted from a BBC talk, ‘A Crowning Clarity’, in the series ‘The Light of Experience’, and published in a book of the same title.

A few hours before beginning to write this chapter I had an extraordinary dream.
I dream a great deal, but most of my dreams are the usual confused muddle and have little or no story-line.
In this dream I was in some kind of ‘fun house’, presumably on a fairground or amusement park.
This was some new and very up-to-date attraction.
Everyone was swept at a breathtaking pace, on some kind of moving belt, through strange and bewildering tableaux, most of which I have forgotten.
But I can clearly remember the most extraordinary of the effects.
The belt passed through some powerful magnetic field, and this had the effect of somehow distorting the upper part of my body as if in a fairground mirror, and inducing a most peculiar, light-headed sensation.
Now in most of my dreams, I wake up if anything very unusual happens.
In this one, I went through the whole strange experience with a vivid sense of reality.
At one point the ‘field’ somehow lifted my hat off my head, and I remember being puzzled and wondering if there was some metal in my hat to account for the phenomenon.
And while most of the other people on the belt were swept straight through and out at the other end, I found some method of dodging back through a stairway or tunnel so I could keep on experiencing the effects of this strange ‘distorting field’, which induced a delightful and rather ‘giddy’ sensation, unlike anything I have ever known.
I woke up feeling as though I had just been through an extraordinary experience.

Before going to bed I had been thinking about the
beginning of this present chapter, which was to be about Thomson Jay Hudson and the remarkable powers of the right brain, particularly in dreams.
It was as if the ‘stranger’ in my right brain had said, ‘You want an example of my sheer inventiveness?
All right, here’s one you won’t forget … .’

So now let us return to the business in hand.

In the 1880s, largely as the result of the researches of the famous Professor Charcot, the subject of hypnosis once again regained a certain academic respectability.
In America, one of its leading exponents was the celebrated Professor Carpenter of Boston.
At the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, Charcot liked to make his hypnotized patients bark like dogs or flap their arms like birds.
Professor Carpenter preferred more civilized manifestations: he enjoyed demonstrating that hypnosis can enhance the powers of the human mind.
One of his most impressive presentations took place in Washington DC in the presence of ‘an audience of highly cultivated ladies and gentlemen’, which included a college graduate who is identified only as ‘C.’.
C.
was placed under hypnosis, then asked by Carpenter if he would like to meet Socrates.
He replied that he would esteem it a great privilege if Socrates were still alive.
Carpenter explained that he had the power to invoke the spirit of Socrates, and pointing to a corner of the room exclaimed, ‘There he is.’
C.
looked at the place indicated, and his face took on an expression of awe and reverence.
Carpenter performed the introductions, and C.
looked speechless with embarrassment, although he still retained his wits enough to offer Socrates a chair.
Carpenter then explained that Socrates was willing to answer any questions, and C.
proceeded with some hesitation to open a conversation.
Since Carpenter had explained that he was unable to overhear the philosopher’s replies, C.
acted as intermediary and repeated everything Socrates said.
For two hours this amazing ‘conversation’ continued, and the answers were so brilliant and plausible that some of the audience began to wonder whether there really
was
an invisible spirit in the room.

Later Carpenter offered to introduce C.
to the spirits of more modern philosophers, and with most of these he felt a great deal more at ease than with Socrates.
What emerged from these conversations was a ‘wonderful system of spiritual philosophy … so clear, so plausible, so perfectly consistent with itself and the known laws of Nature that the company sat spellbound.’
With each new philosopher C.’s manner changed, exactly as if he were speaking to a series of real people, and the language and style of the invisible philosophers changed too: it was all so weirdly real that the audience felt as if they were watching a play.

Among the audience was a Detroit newspaper editor named Thomson Jay Hudson, a man at this time in his mid-fifties, and he watched the demonstrations with baffled amazement.
Hudson knew that C.
was a total sceptic on the question of ‘spirits’ — as was Hudson himself.
Under hypnosis he accepted the existence of the spirits of the great philosophers because he could obviously
see
them.
What seemed most surprising was that the ‘spiritual philosophy’ expressed was not that of C.
himself — he frequently expressed his astonishment at some of the statements of the dead philosophers.
Yet the whole philosophy was such a coherent system that according to Hudson, it could have been printed in a book verbatim and would have ‘formed one of the grandest and most coherent systems of spiritual philosophy ever conceived by the brain of man’.

There happened to be a number of spiritualists present in the audience, and many of them were inclined to the hypothesis that real spirits were present, until Carpenter disillusioned them by summoning up the spirit of a philosophical pig which discoursed learnedly on the subject of the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation.

At about the time Hudson was witnessing these sessions in Washington, a young Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud was in Paris, studying medicine under the celebrated Charcot.
Jean-Martin Charcot was not only one of the greatest medical men of the late nineteenth century; he was also one of its greatest showmen, and — as already noted — he
took immense delight in demonstrating the amazing suggestibility of his hypnotized subjects, by, for example, making a woman shriek with horror and pull up her skirts when he threw a glove at her feet and told her it was a snake.
Charcot mollified his less flamboyant colleagues — who were still inclined to believe that hypnosis was some kind of fraud — by assuring them that it was really just a form of hysteria.
But this explanation left Freud as troubled as ever.
He had seen a man’s arm blister after it had been touched with a piece of ice which the hypnotist declared was a red-hot poker; he had seen the swollen stomach of a woman suffering from hysterical pregnancy.
Such cases made it perfectly obvious that there must be some part of the mind which is far more powerful than the ordinary conscious will.
And on his return to Vienna, Freud gradually formulated his doctrine of the unconscious mind and built upon it the theory of psychoanalysis.

Hudson was equally baffled by what he saw, but he pursued a different line of reasoning.
He also reached the conclusion that man has ‘two minds’, one of which has far greater powers than the other.
But what precisely
were
they?
According to some ancient philosophers, man possesses a soul
and
a spirit; but that was apparently neither here nor there.
As far as Hudson could see, man possesses a ‘practical’ mind which copes with the problems of the outside world, and a kind of ‘non-practical’ mind which copes with his
inner
problems.
Hudson decided to call these two the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’ minds.
The objective mind deals with the real world through the medium of the five senses, and its highest function is that of reason.
The subjective mind prefers to use intuition.
‘It is the seat of the emotions, and the storehouse of memory.
It performs its highest functions when the objective senses are in abeyance.
In a word, it is that intelligence which makes itself manifest in a hypnotic subject when he is in a state of somnambulism.’

Hudson was convinced that the subjective mind is somehow independent of the senses.
He knew of experiments in which a hypnotized subject, with closed eyes, was able to
read a newspaper held by someone on the other side of the room.
He knew of hypnotized subjects who could ‘travel’ to some distant place and describe precisely what was going on.
Moreover the subjective mind seems to be capable of drawing upon a power and energy far greater than the subject could exercise by conscious effort.
A Danish hypnotist named Carl Hansen used to tell people that they had become as rigid as planks then order them to lie across two chairs — their heads on one and their heels on the other — while members of the audience stood on the stomach or used it as a seat.
It seemed clear that the subjective mind is somehow in charge of our energy supply.
The objective mind is the person you call ‘you’.
The subjective mind seems to be a ‘separate and distinct entity’, a stranger.
And under hypnosis the ‘you’ is put to sleep and the ‘stranger’ is able to take charge of the brain and body — with remarkable results.

It was in 1893 that Hudson introduced these ideas to the public in a book called
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
.
(By ‘psychic’, of course, he meant psychological.) He had only another ten years to live; but at least he had the satisfaction of achieving sudden fame and seeing his book sell more than a hundred thousand copies.

What excited the American public was the sheer flamboyant sweep of Hudson’s theory.
He seemed capable of explaining everything from genius to insanity and from hypnosis to the miracles of Jesus.
But perhaps the most exciting idea was that the subjective mind has incredible powers — of memory, of invention, of power over the body — and that we
all
possess a subjective mind.
Then why are we not all geniuses?
Because our objective minds
cramp the powers
of the subjective mind.
We
would
be geniuses if we could release these powers.
The subjective mind has an apparently limitless memory.
Hudson tells stories of people who, under hypnosis, spoke in foreign languages they had never learned; but it turned out, on investigation, that they had overheard the languages in childhood and unconsciously ‘absorbed’ them.
The objective mind
inhibits
the subjective mind, as a schoolboy feels inhibited when the teacher looks over his
shoulder.
A person who could ‘uninhibit’ his subjective mind would presumably be capable of learning a foreign language in a week.

There are some people, says Hudson, who are naturally free of inhibition, and whose subjective mind expresses itself as freely and naturally as a child.
These are men of genius, and he offers Shakespeare as an example.
He also tells a delightful story of the great American orator Henry Clay, who once asked a friend to tug on his coat-tails when he had been speaking for ten minutes in the Senate.
The friend duly pulled on his coat-tails; Clay ignored him.
The friend tried jabbing him gently with a pin.
Still Clay ignored it.
The friend jabbed the pin so hard that it went deep into Clay’s leg, but Clay was in full flight and did not even notice.
Finally, at the end of two hours of magnificent eloquence, he slumped into his seat, overcome by exhaustion, and asked his friend reproachfully why he had not stopped him at the end of ten minutes.
Hudson points out that when he made this speech Clay was almost too ill to stand up, and that it is an example of the ‘synchronous action of the two minds’ and the subjective mind’s power over the body.

This is the kind of story that accounted for the book’s popularity — with its implication that we might all learn to make better use of the powers of the subjective mind.
After all we all know how easy it is to lose our spontaneity when we become self-conscious.
(Hudson pointed out that the subjective mind is totally demoralized by scepticism, which is why people with ‘psychic powers’ find it so hard to demonstrate them before scientists.) The implication is that if we could learn to relax and trust the ‘hidden self’ we could all make better use of our latent genius.
Why is it that some people, who appear perfectly dull and ordinary, have some special gift that enables them to write or compose or paint brilliantly?
According to Hudson it is not a ‘special gift’ but a kind of accidental state of harmony between the ‘two minds’ that allows a free flow of communication between them.
It could be compared to accidentally tuning your radio set so that you get perfect reception of some particular station.
It
could happen to anybody, and undoubtedly
would
happen to most people if they could merely learn not to undermine themselves with self-doubt.

Even more interesting from our point of view is Hudson’s assertion that mystics and visionaries — he instances William Blake — are men who have a natural access to the subjective mind.
Most of us are
tied
to the external world by a kind of nervous vigilance; we are afraid of what would happen if we ‘let go’.
Blake was able to ‘let go’ at will, and see strange visions.
Another of these odd powers of the subjective mind is ‘eidetic vision’, the power to recreate a mental image so vividly that it seems to hover in front of the eyes.
The scientist Nicola Tesla insisted that he could visualize his inventions so clearly that he could virtually ‘build’ them in his head and watch them working.
Hudson had also known such a person: