Supernatural (6 page)

‘Each girl took her turn lying on a long wooden table .
.
.
with the others gathered
tightly
around her, so that there were no gaps .
.
.
As one lay there, the girls chanted a rhyme—the actual words of which I have forgotten, but which referred to the person on the table as looking white, ill and then dead.
It was spoken quite slowly and in unison so that its drone-like tone had great depth and was very penetrating.

‘Several girls took part before me without much success .
.
.
Some .
.
.
did admit to feeling a strange sensation .
.
.
and it was this plus the declaration of a friend that encouraged me to try it.

‘I have absolutely no explanation why I was able to rise approximately three feet from the table surface.
I was perfectly conscious that I was rising and might even have uttered an exclamation of surprise .
.
.
The rapidity of the rise and indeed the fact that I had risen at all caused me to jerk my body out of the lying position, and with much commotion the girls cushioned my fall.’

I, on the other hand,
do
have a kind of explanation of what happened.
It is quite clear that a sceptic would claim that it was all auto-suggestion: the low chanting, the suggestion that the person was becoming pale, then dead, would induce a certain mood like hypnosis.
And, the sceptic would assert, this then produced the illusion of floating up into the air.
My own explanation is that the ‘mood’ simply triggered some unknown power that we all possess, just as Richard Church’s mood of exultation somehow showed him how to float off the ground.
And if this sounds absurd, then consider the well-authenticated case of Joseph of Copertino, the ‘flying monk’ whose feats of levitation were witnessed by dozens of famous men of learning, including the philosopher Leibniz.
Born in Apulia, Italy, in 1603, Giuseppe Desa was—like Richard Church—a sickly boy; and, like Church, he was subject to sudden moods of ecstasy.
He was one of those persons who feel dissatisfied with the sheer weight of the flesh that they have to carry around with them, and mortified it with fasting and flagellation.
He became a priest at the age of 25.
And one day when he was saying mass in his own church of St Gregory of Armenia, he uttered a cry and, in the upright position, flew with his hands outstretched to the cross above the altar.
The nuns who were present thought he would catch fire on the candles, but moments later he flew back down into the church and began to dance and sing as he chanted the name of the Virgin.
Later, when seeing the pope, he was again seized with ecstasy and rose into the air.
And he continued to do so for the remainder of his life—he lived to be 60—witnessed by hundreds of people.
He seems to have been a simple, happy soul, who did not resent the envy with which he was regarded by his fellow Franciscan monks, and who rose into the air like a balloon every time he was overwhelmed by sudden joy.

But if we want to understand more about these ‘hidden powers’, it is worth looking more closely at Richard Church’s experience.
And the first thing that is important to note is that until he was 7, he was appallingly short-sighted.
When this was finally noticed by the school doctor, he was taken along to an optician who tested his eyes.
He was amazed when the optician dropped lenses into a frame on his nose, and the small letters on an illuminated card suddenly became clear.
But this was nothing to his amazement when he first wore the glasses, and realised that he could suddenly see everything with incredible sharpness and clarity.
For the first time he could see the pupils of his mother’s eyes, the hairs on his father’s moustache.
When he stepped out onto the pavement, it ‘came up and hit me’, so he had to grab hold of his father:

‘The lamplight!
I looked in wonder at the diminishing crystals of gas-flame strung down the hill.
Clapham was hung with necklaces of light, and the horses pulling the glittering omnibuses struck the granite road with hooves of iron and ebony.
I could see the skeletons inside the flesh and blood of the Saturday-night shoppers.
The garments they wore were made of separate threads.
In this new world sound as well as sight was changed.
It took on hardness and definition, forcing itself upon my hearing, so that I was besieged simultaneously through the eye and through the ear.

‘How willingly I surrendered!
I went out to meet this blazing and trumpeting invasion.
I trembled with the excitement, and had to cling to mother’s arm to prevent myself being carried away in the flood as the pavements rushed at me, and people loomed up with their teeth like tusks, their lips luscious, their eyes bolting out of their heads, bearing down on me as they threw out spears of conversation that whizzed loudly past my ears and bewildered my wits.

‘“Is it any different?”
asked Jack .
.
.

‘“It makes things clearer,” I replied, knowing that I had no hope of telling him what was happening to me.’

If you can read this passage with indifference, then you are missing the point.
It is about far more than a boy’s first pair of spectacles.
To grasp its real significance, ask yourself the following question: was his new vision of the world more or less true than his old one of a few minutes earlier?
The answer has to be: truer, for blurred vision is obviously less accurate than clear vision.
And the implications of this reply are tremendous.
For it means that the rest of us are normally blind to the reality around us.

How can this be?
After all, few of us are as short-sighted as Church was, and, in these days of Social Security, no one need be without spectacles.
Yet we are, in effect, just as short-sighted as the young Church, for we take the world for granted.
We have a kind of robot inside us, who does things for us.
You learn to read slowly and painfully, then the robot does it so fast that you are not even aware of ‘reading’ these words: they seem to be speaking to you from the page.
The robot is typing this book.
He drives my car and sometimes even gives lectures for me.
But he also takes over all kinds of other things which I would prefer to do myself.
I take my dogs for a walk on the cliffs, but they enjoy it much more than I do because their robot is less efficient.
Mine makes me take too much ‘for granted’.
He glances at something, says ‘Oh yes, we know all about that .
.
.’, and
prevents me from really seeing it.
It is just as if I spent my life wearing a dark pair of sun-glasses.

But does this really matter?
In some ways, no.
I get just as much exercise whether I walk ‘robotically’ or not, and a meal supplies me with just as much energy whether I eat mechanically or not.
The real trouble arises if I begin to feel depressed or discouraged.
These sun-glasses make the world so much darker.
But my vitality—and therefore my health—depends upon
enthusiasm.
It depends upon a certain eagerness.
It depends upon
noticing differences.

Ouspensky tells a story that makes the same point.
He describes how he and a friend were crossing the River Neva in St Petersburg.

‘We had been talking, but both fell silent as we approached the [Peter and Paul] fortress, gazing up at its walls and making probably the same reflection.
“In there are also factory chimneys,” said A.
Behind the walls of the fortress indeed appeared some brick chimneys blackened by smoke.

‘On his saying this, I too sensed the
difference between
the chimneys and the prison walls with
unusual clearness
and like an electric shock.
I realised
the difference between the very bricks themselves
.
.
.
.

‘Later in conversation with A, I recalled this episode, and he told me that not only then, but
always,
he sensed these differences and was deeply convinced of their reality.’

And Ouspensky goes on to say that the wood of a gallows, a crucifix, the mast of a ship is, in fact, a
quite different material
in each case.
Chemical analysis could not detect it; but then, chemical analysis cannot detect the difference between two twins, who are nevertheless quite different personalities.
Ouspensky begins this important chapter with a paragraph that ought to be written in letters 20 feet high:

‘It seems to us that we see something and understand something.
But in reality all that proceeds around us we sense only very confusedly, just as a snail senses confusedly the sunlight, the darkness and the rain.’
¹

A similar experience was reported by the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who had been told of it by a marine who had been stationed in the Pacific for several years and had not seen a woman.
When he came back to base, he saw a nurse, and immediately had a ‘peak experience’—an experience of sudden overwhelming delight—as it suddenly struck him with a kind of shock that
women are different from men.
We say ‘Of course women are different from men’, yet these words disguise the fact that we have allowed the robot to obliterate the real difference.
We do not see it with that sense of shock and amazement experienced by the marine—although it is true that a man might experience something similar if he walked past an open doorway and caught a glimpse of a woman removing her clothes.
And this example makes us aware that we have simply allowed our senses to collapse.
You could compare them to a tent that has been blown flat, so it is no longer of much use as a shelter.
Because of this collapse of our senses, they cannot do their proper work,
which is to show us the differences between things.

In short, I am suggesting that it is the ‘robot’ who destroys our ‘magical’ powers, and prevents us all from being able to float through the air like Richard Church or Joseph of Copertino.

Let us look more closely into this fascinating problem.

You may feel that the idea of floating through the air is just a little too much to swallow.
Yet there is another odd faculty which seems to be closely related to it, and which thousands of people have reported: I mean the odd ability to be in two places at once.

When the Society for Psychical Research was formed in London in 1882, it received hundreds of reports of people who had ‘seen’ other people who were not actually in the room.
In many of these cases, the person who appeared was about to die, or had just died, and the person who saw him (or her) was a close relative.
So such ‘apparitions’ could be explained either as ghosts, or—if you did not believe in ghosts—as some kind of telepathy.
In a typical case, a man sitting in his room in Dublin awoke in the night and saw his father—who was on his deathbed in Wales—sitting in a chair with his face covered by his hands; a moment later, he vanished.
The man was so impressed that he rushed over to Wales, and found that his father had been delirious for two days.
And when he entered the room, his father remarked that he had been to see him the day before .
.
.
¹

But the Society also received hundreds of reports of people who were not ill or in any danger being seen in other places.
These they called ‘phantasms of the living”, and the case cited above is from one of its earliest and most impressive compilations.
The following typical case is recounted by the poet W.B.
Yeats:

‘One afternoon .
.
.
I was thinking very intently of a fellow student for whom I had a message, which I hesitated about writing.
In a couple of days I got a letter from a place some hundreds of miles away where the student was.
On the afternoon when I had been thinking so intently I had suddenly appeared there amid a crowd of people in a hotel and seeming as solid as if in the flesh.
My fellow student had seen me, but no one else, and had asked me to come again when the people had gone.
I had vanished, but had come again in the middle of the night and given him the message.
I had myself no knowledge of either apparition.’
¹

What seems to have happened here is that Yeats’s anxiety to deliver the message somehow caused him to ‘project’ his image several hundred miles, where it apparently behaved like a normal person.
And in the case of the man who was dying in Wales, we may again surmise that the father’s anxiety (in fact, he wanted to tell his son the whereabouts of an overcoat) again caused him to ‘project’ himself to Dublin.
And it is a plausible hypothesis that when people are on the point of dying, they are able to tap some unconscious power which allows them to ‘show themselves’ to some close relative about whom they are anxious.
(In the same way, there is strong evidence that people who are drowning, or in some great physical danger, really
do
see their past lives flashing in front of their eyes within a second or two.)

But there are other cases in which people seem to have used this power more or less deliberately.
One evening in the the late 1920s, the novelist John Cowper Powys had spent the evening dining with the great American writer Theodore Dreiser.
Powys suddenly looked at his watch: ‘I must hurry.’
But as he left Dreiser’s New York apartment he remarked: ‘I’ll appear before you later this evening.’
Then he rushed off to catch his train to upstate New York.
Dreiser assumed the comment was a joke.
But two hours later, as he sat reading, he looked up and found Powys standing by the door.
He stood up, saying: ‘John, come in and tell me how you did it.’
At that moment, Powys vanished.
Dreiser rushed to the telephone and rang Powys’s home.
Powys answered, and, when Dreiser told him what had happened, replied: ‘I told you I’d be there.’

Dreiser adds that Powys later declined to discuss how he had done it.
But that may not be because Powys wanted to be secretive.
It may be, quite simply, that he did not know.
He probably ‘felt it coming on’ during the evening, an odd state of mind which he recognised as the ability to ‘project’ himself.
And it is almost certain that he did not know he had done it until Dreiser rang him up.