Beyond the Occult (8 page)

Most of us — as Mrs Garrett remarks — have some experience of this kind of thing: for example, we can occasionally become so deeply absorbed in a book that if someone slams a door it almost gives us a heart attack.
We also slip into this same world of ‘deep absorption’ on the edge of sleep (a subject that will be explored in
chapter 5
).
But these excursions are usually brief: we either fall asleep or quickly return to the normal world.
What Mrs Garrett seems to be suggesting is that the psychic has the power to change her viewpoint so as to slip into this state at will.
But once it has been attained she has no further power: the will goes to sleep.
It is no use trying to obtain results: they can only be obtained by
not
trying.
Eileen Garrett remarked, ‘I knew from experience that conscious effort was the one thing which would produce no results that could be described as supernormal.’

In an essay called ‘Mysticism and Logic’ Bertrand Russell asserts that all mystics seem to agree on four basic points: (1) that there is a better way of knowing than through the senses, (2) that there is a fundamental unity or oneness in the universe, (3) that time is an illusion, (4) that evil is a mere appearance.
Russell considers these statements and ends by
dismissing them as nonsense — his own final conclusion being that ‘scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human pursuit’.
Most normal people will be inclined to agree with him.
Yet as soon as we begin to study accounts of mystical experience one thing becomes very clear: that they are all talking about exactly the same thing.
What follows are a few typical accounts, taken from Nona Coxhead’s
The Relevance of Bliss
.
The first is a description by a medical journalist, Wendy Rose-Neill:

I had always found gardening a relaxing activity, and on this particular day I felt in a very contemplative frame of mind.
I remember that I gradually became intensely aware of my surroundings — the sound of the birds singing, the rustling of leaves, the breeze on my skin and the scent of the grass and flowers.

I had a sudden impulse to lie face down on the grass and as I did so, an energy seemed to flow through me as if I had become part of the earth underneath me.
The boundary between my physical self and my surroundings seemed to dissolve and my feeling of separation vanished.
In a strange way I felt blended into a total unity with the earth, as if I were made of it and it of me.
I was aware of the blades of grass between my fingers and touching my face, and I was overwhelmed by a force which seemed to penetrate every fibre of my being.

I felt as if I had suddenly come alive for the first time — as if I were awakening from a long deep sleep into the real world … .
I realized that I was surrounded by an incredible loving energy, and that everything, both living and non-living, is bound inextricably with a kind of consciousness which I cannot describe in words.

Here is an account by an American authoress, Claire Myers Owen:

One morning I was writing at my desk in the quiet writing room of our house in Connecticut.
Suddenly
everything within my sight vanished right away.
No longer did I see my body, the furniture in the room, the white rain slanting across the windows.
No longer was I aware of where I was, the day or hour.
Time and space ceased to exist.

Suddenly the entire room was filled with a great golden light, the whole world was filled with nothing but light… .

Extraordinary intuitive insights flashed across my mind.
I seemed to comprehend the nature of things.
I understood that the scheme of the universe was good, not evil as our Western society had taught me as a child; all people were intrinsically good.
Neither time nor space existed on this plane … .

This flood of light is a common feature of mystical experiences.
In one of the most famous of all books on mysticism, Richard Maurice Bucke described his own experience as he was driving home in a hansom cab:

All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-coloured cloud.
For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by … the next, I knew that the fire was within myself.
Directly afterwards there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness, accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe.
Among other things … I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life.
It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal… .
The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone.

Bucke labelled his glimpse ‘cosmic consciousness’ and gave his book the same title.
It consists of fifty studies of mystics who have experienced ‘cosmic consciousness’, beginning with the Buddha and ending with the Victorian
Edward Carpenter.
Bucke jumped to the conclusion that such an experience is rare — and that since there are an increasing number of modern examples, mankind is probably evolving to a higher level of awareness.
In fact modern surveys — such as those taken by Sir Alister Hardy’s Religious Research Unit in Oxford
^*
— show that an incredible 36 per cent of people have had some kind of religious or mystical experience.

Another basic element in accounts of mystical experience is the feeling that the light — or power — comes from
within
.
Muz Murray’s account of his ‘illumination’ in Cyprus contains the phrase, ‘… an indescribable sensation as if the whole universe was being poured into me, or rather, more as if the whole universe was welling out of me from some deep centre.’
One of Nona Coxhead’s correspondents, Jim Harrison, told her how he had been wondering how God could permit his wife to remain ill when it struck him, ‘Maybe it wasn’t God’s fault after all.’

So then I thought all right, I take it all back, and filling my heart with the tender love often reserved for my little daughter, I projected it towards him, thinking, if you exist then I give you my love.

I could feel this love being passed on and on, and then suddenly it returned, a brilliant shaft of light from out of the sky, brighter by far than the mid-morning sun, permeating me with such an intensity of happiness and Love as to halt me in my tracks with a jump for joy — and lingering for five or ten seconds before fading away.
I knew intuitively that this light, plainly visible, somehow, mysteriously, stemmed from within.

Jim Harrison, like so many others who have experienced a flash of ‘cosmic consciousness’, concluded:

So then I knew for certain that God does indeed exist, that he is love, that he is joy, that he is light, that he stems
from within as much as from without, and that we alone are responsible for our own sufferings and problems in consequence of the mis-use of our free will.

C.
G.
Price, a farmer whose farm was on the point of bankruptcy, had a similar experience of light:

With thoughts of self-pity such as these in my mind, one Sunday morning in February 1968 … I set about the task of bedding my cows down with straw … I don’t even remember the feeling creeping up on me, but suddenly… .

I seemed to be enveloped in a cocoon of golden light that actually felt warm, and which radiated a feeling of Love so intense that it was almost tangible.
One felt that one could grasp handfuls of it, and fill one’s pockets.

In this warm cocoon of golden light I sensed a presence which I could not actually see but knew was there.
My mind became crystal clear, and in an instant of time I suddenly knew, without any doubts, that I was part of a ‘Whole’.
Not an isolated part, but an integral part.
I felt a sense of ‘One-ment’.
I knew that I belonged and that nothing could change that.
The loss of my farm and livelihood didn’t matter any more.

In fact he
was
forced to sell the farm, but his mystical experience made this seem unimportant.

Moyra Caldecott, a South African schoolgirl, had a similar experience when kneeling at the altar rail to take Communion.
As the bishop placed his hand on her head:

I suddenly seemed to cease to be me (that is, in the sense of ‘me’ I had thought I was — living in a particular house, in a particular street, going to a particular school).
I felt the most incredible flow of energy and power coursing through me and had what I believe to be an experience of Timeless Reality … of consciousness that took in everything without limit … but reacted to
nothing except in the sense of ‘knowing’… and … ‘loving’.

In fact it is very tempting to say that what mystical experiences all have in common is a sudden sense of one’s
real
identity, and that this ‘real self’ is in some sense god-like — could even be described as God.

But perhaps the most remarkable of all accounts of mystical experience is to be found in P.
D.
Ouspensky’s book
A New Model of the Universe
, in a chapter called ‘Experimental Mysticism’.
Ouspensky was the most important follower of the Russian philosopher and mystic G.
I.
Gurdjieff, but he was also a considerable thinker in his own right, as his books reveal.
Ouspensky does not tell us the details of how he achieved his states of mystical consciousness, but his biographer James Webb is probably correct in assuming that he used yogic and magical methods combined with the use of some sort of drug, almost certainly nitrous oxide — ‘laughing gas’.
^*
Ouspensky states that the change took place more quickly and easily than he had expected.
The account that then follows is one of the most important and detailed in the whole literature of mysticism.

‘The unknown,’ Ouspensky notes, ‘is unlike anything that we can suppose about it.
The complete unexpectedness of everything that is met with in these experiences, from great to small, makes the description of them difficult.’
And he goes on to make an observation of central importance:

First of all, everything is unified, everything is linked together, everything is explained by something else and in turn explains another thing.
There is nothing separate, that is, nothing that can be named or described
separately
.
In order to describe the first impressions, the first sensations, it is necessary to describe
all
at once.
The new world with which one comes into contact has no sides, so that it is impossible to describe first one side and then the other.
All of it is visible at every point … .

Here we have one of the most basic assertions that all descriptions of mystical experience have in common.
Everything is seen to be connected
.
And the word ‘seen’ deserves to be underlined.
This world of infinite relationships, in which everything is connected with everything else, is seen all at once — from a bird’s-eye view, as it were.
And language instantly becomes useless, because it can only pin down one thing at a time.
‘A man becomes lost amidst the infinite number of totally new impressions, for the expression of which he has neither words nor forms.’

What seems equally strange is that the normal sense of the distinction between objective and subjective disappeared:

Here I saw that the objective and the subjective could change places.
The one could become the other.
It is very difficult to express this.
The habitual mistrust of the subjective disappeared; every thought, every feeling, every image, was immediately objectified in real substantial forms which differed in no way from the forms of objective phenomena; and at the same time objective phenomena somehow disappeared, lost all reality, appeared entirely subjective, fictitious, invented, having no real existence… .

And he goes on to say that this strange world resembled more than anything else ‘a world of
very complicated mathematical relations’
.

This vision of infinite meaning made it very difficult to carry on a conversation, for between each word of the sentence so many ideas occurred that it was difficult to remember what he intended to say next.
He began a sentence with the words, ‘I said yesterday …’ but could simply get no further.
The word ‘I’ raised hundreds of insights about the meaning of ‘I’, the word ‘said’ raised just as many ideas about speech and self-expression, each of which produced ‘an explosion of thoughts, conjectures, comparisons and associations’, and the word ‘yesterday’ led to endless thoughts and ideas about the nature of time, so that he was
left with a feeling of breathlessness that made it impossible to continue.