Supernatural (19 page)

In July 1759, Swedenborg was able to tell guests at a party in Gothenburg that a great fire had broken out in Stockholm, 300 miles away.
Two hours later he told one of the guests that the fire had been extinguished only three doors from his home.
Two days later, a messenger arrived confirming these details.

So, understandably, Swedenborg’s disciples believed him when he described the ‘spirit realms’, and his visits to other planets.
Mercury, he said, had a moderate temperature, and its beings were more spiritual than human beings; the planet also had cattle that were a cross between cows and stags.
Venus had two races living on opposite sides of the planet, one mild and humane, the other savage and violent—the latter being giants.
Martians had faces that were half black and half white, and communicated by a kind of telepathy; they were also vegetarians.
The inhabitants of Jupiter—whom Swedenborg claimed to know more intimately than those of any other planet—looked like human beings, but were far more gentle and humane, and naturally moral and virtuous.
Those in warm regions went naked—except for a covering over the loins—and were astonished to be told that human beings could be sexually excited by another’s nakedness.
The inhabitants of the moon had thunderous voices, which were produced by a kind of belching .
.
.

How can these contradictions be resolved?
One answer is suggested by Dr Wilson Van Dusen in his book
Presence of Other Worlds.
Van Dusen argues that there is strong evidence that Swedenborg’s visions were seen in ‘hypnagogic states’, the states in which we linger between sleep and waking.
Swedenborg seems to confirm this when he writes: ‘Once, when I awoke at daybreak, I saw .
.
.
diversely shaped apparitions floating before my eyes .
.
.’
Swedenborg’s descriptions of various kinds of spirits—particularly the ‘damned’—sound as if he is deliberately writing in parables; but the descriptions are as precise and detailed as those of a novelist.
The most probable answer is that Swedenborg had developed a faculty very similar to that discussed by Denton in the chapter on Newton, Hugh Miller and others who experienced visual hallucinations.
The severe mental crisis that changed him in his mid-fifties from a scientist to a visionary allowed the unconscious mind to erupt into consciousness; he could, in effect, dream with his eyes open.

But if the visions of planets—and probably of heaven and hell—were self-deception, then how do we explain the accuracy of the vision of the Stockholm fire, and the information about the secret drawer and the queen’s letter?
The answer is that, unfortunately, the possession of genuine ‘clairvoyant’ or mediumistic faculty is no guarantee of the truthfulness of other kinds of vision.
In fact, the best clairvoyants and psychometrists have always been willing to admit that they can be confused by telepathic impressions from other people.

And so we must count the third volume of
The Soul of Things
a failure—but a most extraordinary failure which does little to obscure the achievement of the first two volumes.
It is a pity that Mrs Denton and Mrs Cridge were unable to distinguish between genuine ‘clairvoyance’ and the products of their own imagination; But, to be fair, we should admit that they had no reason to.

Thomson Jay Hudson devotes some space to Denton and his geological experiments in
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
; (Denton was dead by that time—he had died in New Guinea in 1883, while on a world lecture tour.) Recalling what Hudson had to say about the hidden powers of the ‘subjective mind’, you might expect him to praise Denton as another explorer of the ‘invisible palace’.
Yet, oddly enough, he rejects Denton’s ‘telescope into the past’ as self-deception.
According to Hudson, everything Mrs Denton discovered could be explained by the telepathic powers of the subjective mind.
She was simply able to read her husband’s mind.
But surely, Denton had gone to enormous trouble to make sure that even he did not know what was in the various brown paper parcels?
Hudson dismisses this.
The subjective mind possesses immense powers of observation and memory, and it would be child’s play for the subjective mind to see through the elementary precautions taken by Denton .
.
.

This sounds plausible, until we look more closely into Denton’s experiments.
If the visions originated in his own mind, then why did his wife and sister—and later his son—often produce different pictures from different periods in the sample’s history—as with the piece of mosaic from the villa of Cicero?
Why did Mrs Denton describe a man who sounds like Sulla when Denton was expecting her to describe Cicero?
And if, indeed, it was Sulla she described, and Denton had no idea that Sulla had lived in the villa, then telepathy would have been impossible.

Hudson could, of course, have countered these objections.
If Denton’s wife and sister selected different parts of the sample’s history to describe, then they were merely selecting from the knowledge in Denton’s mind.
As to Denton not knowing that it was the dictator’s villa, perhaps he
did
know, but had long ago forgotten that he had read it .
.
.

But the real objection to Hudson’s arguments is that he is willing to credit the subjective mind with powers just as remarkable as psychometry—for example, healing a relative at a thousand miles.
If the subjective mind can pick up vibrations from another mind, then why can it not pick up vibrations from a letter or a piece of mosaic?
Hudson even credits the subjective mind with the power to foretell the future; he says that its deductive powers are so tremendous that it can calculate every possibility—like some gigantic computer—and select the likeliest one.
He gives a great deal of space to the ‘daemon’ of Socrates—the inner voice that would give the philosopher good advice and warm him of impending danger; this, says Hudson, is simply the subjective mind making itself heard as a kind of voice inside the head.
(A modern exponent of split-brain theory, Julian Jaynes, believes that the ancients heard ‘voices’ that came from the right cerebral hemisphere.) If the subjective mind possesses these remarkable powers, it seems contradictory to deny it the power of psychometry.

The explanation of Hudson’s ‘tough-minded’ attitude is probably that he was unwilling to expose his newborn theory to ridicule by appearing too credulous.
In fact, we can see in retrospect that many of his mistakes sprang out of being too sceptical.
His chapter on crime and hypnosis provides two examples.
He argues that no one could be made to commit a crime under hypnosis, because the prophetic powers of the subjective mind would make it aware that it might lead to disaster.
In fact, many crimes have been committed under hypnosis—one of the best known examples being the Copenhagen case of 1951, when a man named Palle Hardrup robbed a bank and murdered the cashier under hypnotic suggestion.
Hudson also remarks that committing suicide under hypnosis is as unlikely as committing a crime under hypnosis; in fact, this is precisely what did happen in the Sala case of 1929, when the hypnotist Sigwart Thurneman made a member of his criminal gang commit suicide by hypnotic suggestion.
¹

But these criticisms fail to obscure the remarkable nature of Hudson’s achievement.
The Law of Psychic Phenomena
is one of the most important contributions to nineteenth-century thought, and deserves to be as well-known as
The Origin of Species
or
Das Kapital.
But, within a few years of the book’s publication, Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious mind had become still more notorious.
Freud also believed that the unconscious is far more powerful than the conscious mind; but Freud’s unconscious is entirely negative, a kind of gigantic dustbin full of guilt, misery and repressions.
Freud seemed even more sceptical and tough-minded than Hudson, and the result was that his more controversial theories won the day, and Hudson’s were forgotten.

In fact, modern split-brain research has shown that Hudson’s ideas have a sounder basis than Freud’s.
It is now a matter of scientific fact that we have two ‘selves’ inside our heads, that one is intuitive and the other intellectual, and that genius, as Hudson said, is a close co-operation between the two.
So it is important to look again at Hudson’s contribution, and give careful thought to some of his insights.
His most important recognition is that human beings possess mental powers of which they are unaware.
He was right to emphasize the mystery of calculating prodigies; for their abilities seem to defy what we regard as the normal laws of the mind.
They often appear out of the blue, in perfectly normal children, and later vanish just as abruptly.
Archbishop Whately said that his own powers appeared at the age of six, when he knew nothing about figures except simple addition; suddenly, he could do tremendous calculations in his head.
When he went to school three years later, ‘the passion wore off, and he became a dunce at mathematics.
The powers of such prodigies seem incredible.
One 6-year-old boy, Benjamin Blyth, was out walking-with his father when he asked what time he was born.
His father told him four a.m.
A few minutes later, the child stated the number of seconds he had lived.
When they got home, his father worked it out on paper, and told Ben he was 172,800 seconds wrong.
‘No’, said the child, ‘you have forgotten two leap years’.

Most calculating prodigies lose their powers in their teens, when life becomes more complex and difficult, and sexual changes in the body disturb the emotions.
But the inference is that our brains have an extraordinary power that few of us ever bother to develop.

Where psychometry is concerned, the power of ‘eidetic vision’ is even more important, as Denton recognised.
Modern research has revealed that between 8 and 20 per cent of all children may possess eidetic vision—the power to conjure up an image so powerfully that it looks like a film projection.
One test involves the use of ‘random dot stereograms’.
Two sheets of paper contain apparently random patterns of ten thousand dots, but when these are superimposed, a picture emerges.
Many children can look at one pattern, then move their eyes to the other sheet, and see the two patterns combining into a picture.
This is obviously a right-brain function—it is the right brain that recognizes patterns and shapes—and again the inference is that we gradually lose it as the left brain becomes more powerful, to ‘cope’ with reality.
But if this is correct, then all human beings possess a latent power to ‘photograph’ what they are looking at, and to project the photograph later in all its detail.
As we have seen in the cases cited by Denton, this ‘projection’ is a deliberate act of will and imagination.
But Hudson’s artist friend was able to project purely imaginary scenes on his canvas.
And this, again, would be perfectly natural.
If we have the latent power to ‘hold’ mental photographs and keep them in some memory-file, then there is no reason why the imagination should not combine them, or simply invent its own mental photographs.

The psychologist C.G.
Jung also recognized this power, which he called ‘active imagination’, and he believed that anyone could develop it with sufficient effort.
Jung made the discovery accidentally.
In 1913, after his break with Freud, Jung was experiencing severe mental problems that made him fear insanity.
Sitting at his desk one day, he says, ‘I let myself drop.
Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths.’
There followed a waking dream in which Jung found himself in an underground cave, guarded by a mummified dwarf, and saw the body of a blond youth with a wound in his head float past on a stream.

In his autobiography,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
Jung goes on to describe his deliberate development of techniques to enter this realm of ‘waking dreams’:

‘In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep descent.
I even made several attempts to get to the very bottom.
The first time I reached, as it were, a depth of about a thousand feet; the next time I found myself at the edge of a cosmic abyss.
It was like a voyage to the moon, or a descent into empty space.
First came the image of a crater, and I had a feeling that I was in the land of the dead.
The atmosphere was that of the other world.
Near the steep slope of a rock I caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard, and a beautiful young girl.
I summoned up my courage and approached them as though they were real people, and listened attentively to what they told me .
.
.’

Here we can see clearly that Jung had entered a hypnagogic realm in which he remained wide-awake whilst at the same time encountering the strange creations of that ‘other self inside us.
It is, admittedly, difficult for most of us to accept the notion of such an ability; but we should bear in mind that a dog would find it quite impossible to conceive the mental state of a child reading a book, with half his consciousness in the ‘real world’ and the other half in a world of fantasy.
Jung’s ‘active imagination’ is only a single step beyond this ability that every educated person possesses.

And now at last we are in a position to understand those detailed descriptions of ‘other worlds’ that we find in Swedenborg and Denton.
A good psychometer possesses the power to ‘read’ objects in the way that a bloodhound can recognize scents.
When this reading becomes second nature, it is accompanied by images—images that are sometimes so detailed and real that they amount to eidetic visions.
When Mrs Denton described Cicero’s villa, or when Sherman Denton described the theatre in ancient Pompeii, they were using active imagination as a tool to amplify their readings.
But when they tried to ‘psychometrize’ Mars or Jupiter, there were no psychometric impressions to amplify, and the subjective mind—which, according to Van Dusen, is an incorrigible performer that hates to admit defeat—produced elaborate waking dreams.

This tendency of the unconscious to spin its own webs of fantasy certainly complicates the question of psychometry.
But, unlike Swedenborg and Denton, we are at least aware of the problem; and this is already an important step toward solving it.