Supernatural (70 page)

And already we see the emergence of the paradox.
What right has the Time Traveller to regard his own time as
the
present, and his own ‘self as
the
Time Traveller?
Wells sidesteps this question by sending the Traveller backwards or forwards in time
beyond
his own life span.
So if he went back to 1812 to meet Napoleon or 1066 to meet King Harold, it would
sound
perfectly logical, if unbelievable.
But if the Time Traveller consists of millions of ‘selves’, one for every split second of his life, then the same goes for every other person and object in the Universe.
The trouble with this is that every one of these multiple beings would have its own past and future, since each is a separate individual.
(For example, if the Time Traveller invited his selves of yesterday and tomorrow for dinner, each would proceed to travel into the future separately as three separate beings.) You end up with an absurd vision of a multiple-multiple Universe in which everyone is fragmented into an infinite number of selves .
.
.

It is, of course, mere fiction, so we can forgive its shortcomings.
But then, the actual experience of time travel is
not
mere fiction.
I suggested, for example, that the Time Traveller of today might pay a call on his self of tomorrow to enquire the winner of the Grand National; he could then go back to his own time and place a large bet on it .
.
.
But such events have, in fact, occurred.
In 1976 I made a television programme for BBC2 about John Godley, Lord Kilbracken, who, as an Oxford undergraduate, dreamed winners of horse races, and made several useful sums of money through his curious ability.
Peter Fairley, the science correspondent of Independent Television, had a similar experience.
In a BBC broadcast, he told how, as he was driving to work one day in 1965, he heard a request on the car radio for a Mrs Blakeney; he had just driven through the village of Blakeney, and a few minutes later, heard a reference to another—totally unconnected—Blakeney.
At the office he heard the name again, this time a horse running in the Derby.
He backed it and it won.
From then on, he explained, he could pick winners merely by looking down a list of horses; the winner would ‘leap off the page’ at him.
He said that as soon as he began to think about it and worry about it, the faculty vanished .
.
.

Now this is altogether closer to Wells’s suggestion of Time Travel as a purely mental faculty.
And it is certainly far more convincing than the version involving time machines.

Let us, then, agree that the usual notion of time travel, derived from Wells, is absurd and self-contradictory.
In
that
sense, the past is the past and the future is the future, and we can never hope to explore either with the aid of a Time Machine.
For in this sense, time does not exist; it is a semantic misunderstanding.
I tried to explain the reason for this in a passage of my book
The Occult.
Suppose people were born on moving trains and stayed on them until they died.
They might invent a word to describe the everyday sensation of scenery flowing past the window, a word like ‘zyme’.
When the train stops in stations they would say that zyme has halted; if the train reverses, they would say zyme is flowing backwards.
But if someone spoke of zyme as an entity, they would obviously be committing a logical error; it consists of
many
things—a railway carriage, scenery, motion and so on.
The same goes for time.
It is basically a
process
which involves physical objects.
If you think of a completely ‘empty’ Universe, or a completely static Universe, it would obviously have no time.
This
is why Wells’s time machine is an absurdity.

If Peter Fairley could really predict which horse would win a race, then there is clearly something wrong with our human notion of time; for the idea that the future has already taken place—which it must have done if you are to ‘know’ it—is self-contradictory, a paradox.
But then, our minds are a paradox in precisely the same sense.
You and I apparently exist in a solid, three-dimensional Universe: we are physical objects.
Then where, precisely, is my mind?
Inside my head?
‘Realist’ philosophers have tried hard to explain mind in physical terms—the brain and the nervous system—but they end with a static model, rather like a computer.
And a computer needs to be
worked
by somebody.
When I struggle with an intellectual or emotional problem, I am aware of an element that I call ‘me’ trying to get the best out of the computer.
This being can look on quite detachedly while ‘I’ am flooded with a powerful emotion.
It applies the accelerator or brake to my moods and feelings.
It seems to exist in a dimension apart from this physical world we live in.

To me, these considerations suggest that these two paradoxical concepts—time and the mind—are closely connected.
Our bodies exist in the realm of one-way time, but our minds do not.
As Wells points out, when I become absent-minded, my mind goes ‘elsewhere’.
But on the whole, these visits to other times and places are far less vivid than our everyday lives.
Yet this is not so much a limitation of our minds as of the ‘computer’ they use, the brain.

For example, there is an important experience of the philosopher J.B.
Bennett described in his autobiography
Witness.
Bennett tells how, when he was staying at the Gurdjieff Institute at Fontainebleau, he woke up one morning feeling exceptionally weak from dysentery, but nevertheless forced himself to get up.
Later that morning he took part in some Gurdjieff exercises— incredibly difficult and complex physical movements.
One by one, the other disciples dropped out; but, in spite of extreme fatigue and discomfort, Bennett forced himself to go on.
Then, quite suddenly, ‘I was filled with an influx of an immense power.
My body seemed to have turned into light.’
All fatigue vanished.
When he went outside, he decided to test this power by digging at a rate he could not ordinarily maintain for more than a few minutes; he was able to continue for half an hour without fatigue.
He walked out into the forest, and decided to try to test his control over his emotions.
He willed himself to feel astonishment.
‘Instantly, I was overwhelmed with amazement, not only at my own state, but at everything I looked at or thought of.’
The thought of ‘fear’ fill him with immense dread; the thought of ‘joy’ filled him with rapture; the thought of ‘love’ flooded him with a tremendous tenderness and compassion.
Finally, bewildered by this new ability to feel anything he liked, he willed it to go away, and it instantly vanished.

Now what is involved here is obviously what William James calls ‘vital reserves’.
James points out that we can feel exhausted, push ourselves
beyond
the exhaustion, and suddenly feel full of energy again.
It is the phenomenon of ‘second wind’.
It seems that we possess vast energy reserves that we fail to make use of.
But a sudden emergency will bring them into operation.
Bennett’s tremendous effort not to drop out of the Gurdjieff exercises somehow pushed him into a heightened state of ‘second wind’, and brought a completely new level of control over his ‘computer’.
It is a pity that he did not try the experiment of recalling some event from his past; I suspect that he would have been able to ‘replay’ it in the most accurate detail.

In fact, as Dr Wilder Penfield discovered, our brains contain the stored ‘memory tapes’ of everything we have ever seen or felt, and these tapes can be ‘replayed’ by stimulating the temporal cortex of the brain with an electric probe.
If we could achieve Bennett’s state of ‘second wind’, the electric probe would be unnecessary; all the memory tapes of the brain would become instantly accessible to us .
.
.

But that, you will object, is still not time travel; it is merely playing back a recording.
True.
But, if Joseph Rodes Buchanan and William Denton were correct about ‘psychometry’, then the brain also has the power to play back the history of any object it chooses to scan—for example, a five billion-year-old meteorite.
Buchanan’s ‘sensitives’ could hold a sealed letter and describe not only its contents but also the state of mind of the person who had written it.
And this, you may point out, is still not time travel.
True.
But it is something very like it.
And I would remind you that we have already agreed that time travel, in Wells’s sense, is an absurdity.
You cannot literally go back ‘before’ the Battle of Hastings, because the Battle of Hastings has already happened, and it cannot be unhappened.
Yet, if Buchanan and Denton are correct, then it should be possible for a ‘sensitive’ to literally relive a day in the life of a soldier who fought at the battle of Hastings.
And Dunne’s experiment with time seems to suggest that it might be possible to do the same for the future, and ‘relive’ a day that has not yet taken place.
And this, I think,
would
qualify as time travel.

What I am now suggesting is a view of the human mind that has been forcing itself upon me for many years.
My starting-point, in books like
The Outsider
and
Religion and the Rebel,
was the experiences of certain poets and mystics.
The romantic poets of the 19th century seemed to differ from their predecessors in one important respect: they seemed to have an altogether greater capacity for sustaining
imaginative intensity.
We live our lives confined by space and time and the trivial necessities of everyday life; consciousness is basically a device for perceiving what goes on around us.
Poets and mystics seem to be able to use it for a quite different purpose—to build up a kind of internal world whose intensity rivals that of the physical reality that surrounds us.
When I came—almost by accident—to turn my attention to the realm of the ‘occult’ or paranormal, it struck me that the ‘psychic’ is only another type of poet: a person for whom the physical world is only one aspect of reality.

Now this view seems to me, on reflection, logical and reasonable enough.
Consciousness is tied to the physical world for a simple reason: if it weren’t, we would have been extinct long ago.
As H.G.
Wells pointed out, all animals are ‘up against it’ from the moment they are born.
In the Victorian age, children began work at six in the morning and finished at eight in the evening.
Life is still brutal and hard for well over a half of the human race.
I
am lucky that I can sit at my desk, in a comfortable room, and address my mind to this interesting problem of the nature of time; you are lucky that you can sit down and read it.
If you and I had to work a fourteen-hour day in a factory we would long for a little leisure to relax and allow the mind to wing its way through the worlds of imagination.

Because of this harsh physical necessity, consciousness has accustomed itself to sticking to the material world: which means, in effect, that it has never had a chance to explore its own capacities—or rather, the capacities of that extraordinary computer called the brain.
But here we come to one of the strangest parts of the story.
For some odd reason, the capacity of this computer is far greater than it needs to be—at least, in terms of Darwinian evolution.
For example, it is quite clear that we never make use of that vast library of ‘memory tapes’ that Wilder Penfield discovered; we don’t
need
to make use of them for everyday survival.
Then why are they there?
Why has evolution dictated that the brain should remember every tiny event and idea of our lives?
Again, I have always been fascinated by the capacity of calculating prodigies—usually young children of ordinary intelligence—who can multiply or divide immense sums in their heads.
Equally extraordinary is the class known as ‘idiot savants’—children whose IQ may be on the moron level, yet who, in one particular field, have some incredible mental gift—one, for example, could reel off the name of every musical film ever made and every actor who played every part.
Moreover, some of these idiot savants have highly developed ‘psychic’ powers; for example, one boy declined a lift home with his teacher because, he said, his mother would be meeting him out of school.
In fact, his mother
did
arrive to meet him; but she had decided to do so only half an hour before, when another trip took her close to the school .
.
.

And this example brings me to the starting-point of my book
The Occult:
the observation that ‘psychic powers’ often seem to involve a breakdown—or at least, loss of efficiency—in our normal mental powers.
For example, a Dutch house painter named Peter van der Hurk fell off his ladder and fractured his skull; when he woke up in hospital, he discovered that he ‘knew’ all kinds of things about his fellow patients, about their past and even their future.
This strange capacity has remained with him and, under the name of Peter Hurkos, he has made a considerable reputation as a ‘clairvoyant’ and psychometrist, often helping the police to solve murder cases.
But, in the days immediately following his accident, he found life difficult because his new psychic powers made it impossible for him to concentrate on ordinary, everyday jobs; he might have starved if someone had not suggested using his powers to make a living as a stage ‘magician’.
When I read this story in Hurkos’ autobiography I found myself thinking of all those romantic poets and artists who had died in poverty because they found it impossible to concentrate on the dreary necessities of material existence.
There is obviously a close analogy.

All this seems to suggest that our brains possess extraordinary powers that most of us never have reason to use.
The problem of survival demands that we are tied down to the everyday world; if this were not so, we might all be calculating prodigies and psychics, and probably literary and artistic geniuses into the bargain.

But to phrase it this way suggests that it is a question of either/or: either we get rid of such unusual faculties or we lose our ability to survive.
But is the choice really as harsh as that?
I am inclined to doubt it.
Life for most of us is safer and more secure than at any other time in history.
Modern man is far less likely to be knocked down by a car than his ancestors were to be eaten by wild beasts or killed by their fellow men.
(Even as recently as the age of Dr Johnson, remote country houses were often besieged by gangs of ruffians who killed those who resisted and carried off everything of value.) Most of us have hours of leisure every week in which we might explore the possibilities of human consciousness.
No, the real problem is a force of habit so deeply ingrained that it would be better to refer to it as hypnosis.
If you force a chicken’s beak against the floor, then draw a chalk line straight in front of it, the chicken will be unable to raise its head when you let it go; for some odd reason it focuses attention on the chalk line, and becomes hypnotized by it.
We all suffer from a similar tendency; the moment we relax, habit induces a state similar to hypnosis, in which the attention becomes fixed on the external world.
Sartre wrote about the café proprietor in
Nausea:
‘When his café empties, his head empties too.’
But it is not confined to the illiterate or unintelligent.
There is a story told of the famous mathematician Hilbert.
Before a dinner party, his wife sent him upstairs to change his tie; when, after an hour, he had still not reappeared, she went to see what had happened; he was in bed fast asleep.
He explained that as soon as he had removed his tie, he had automatically taken off the rest of his clothes, put on his pyjamas and climbed into bed.