The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (109 page)

So why should energy be restricted to the speed of light? Ash writes: “If movement could have a faster speed, it would give rise to a completely different type of energy”. This he calls super-energy. (In fact, physicists have suggested in recent years the possibility of a particle called the
tachyon
, which is faster than light.)

According to Ash: “Objects of super-energy would share the same
form
as things in our world, but their
substance
would be entirely different”. They would actually coexist with our physical world but would be, under normal circumstances, undetectable. And this, Ash suggests, could be the explanation of ghosts, poltergeists, “miracles” (like those of the Hindu guru Sai Baba, who can “materialize” objects out of thin air), precognition, and all other so-called paranormal phenomena.

The skeptic will ask: does Ash’s suggestion bring us any closer to understanding the paranormal? In a sense, yes, it does. Most scientific theories begin as an attempt to explain some puzzling phenomenon, such as thunder and lightning. The super-energy theory can certainly help to explain a wide variety of “paranormal” phenomena.

Let us begin with an extremely simple one: dowsing. A “diviner” can hold a forked twig in his hands and detect underground water. This can be explained in purely electrical terms. Moving water produces a weak electric field, and men – and animals – seem to have an inbuilt sensitivity to this field – obviously part of our survival mechanism.

A Cambridge don named T. C. (“Tom”) Lethbridge, who was also an archaeologist, often used his own dowsing abilities to detect buried objects. He also discovered that a pendulum – a weight on a piece of string – worked just as well as a dowsing rod – the pendulum would swing in a circle over things he was looking for. He then made another discovery that sounds absurd but that all dowsers will verify: that he could “ask the pendulum questions” and that it would reply in the negative or affirmative by swinging back and forth or in a circle. The theory advanced by scientists – like Sir William Barrett – is that the unconscious mind knows the answer and causes the muscles to make the pendulum move in a circle or a “swing”.

During his Cambridge days, Lethbridge used the pendulum to explore a giant Celtic figure cut in a hillside but now buried beneath the turf.
²⁸
And after his retirement to an old house in Devon, he continued his investigations into the “power of the pendulum”. Instead of a short pendulum, he tried a pendulum made of a long piece of string, which he was able to shorten or lengthen by winding it round a stick. His first experiment was to place a silver dish on the floor and then to hold the pendulum over it and carefully unwind the string. When it reached 22 inches, it went into a circular swing. He tried it over copper; this went into a circular swing at 30½ inches. He now tried the 30½ -inch pendulum in his garden and soon unearthed a small copper tube with it.

So far, Lethbridge was merely “proving” that different metals caused the pendulum to respond at different lengths. He next proved to his satisfaction that all substances have their characteristic “rate” (length of the pendulum swing): oak (11 inches), mercury (12½ ), grass (16), lead (22 – the same as silver), potatoes (39). Many substances, of course, “share” a rate with others, but Lethbridge found that the weight “circled” a distinct number of times for each – for example, sixteen times for lead and twenty-two for silver.

Now certain that he was on to something of scientific importance, he became more ambitious. One of the strangest and most absurd phenomena connected with the pendulum is “map dowsing”. It sounds preposterous, but a good dowser can locate water by swinging his pendulum over a map. At this point we have to leave “scientific” explanations behind, and fall back on ESP (extrasensory perception) or on the powers of the unconscious mind. Lethbridge reasoned that if the pendulum is equally at home with an abstraction like a map, it should be at home with abstractions in general – love, anger, evolution, death. It ought, for example, to have a different rate for male and female. He and his wife, Mina, tried throwing stones against a wall; then he tested them with the pendulum. Those Mina had thrown reacted at 29 inches, those Lethbridge had thrown at 22. These, it seemed, were the “rates” for male and female.

Other stones – sling stones from an Iron Age fort – showed a reaction at 40 inches. Could it be that the stones had been thrown in the course of battle, and 40 was the rate for anger? Lethbridge set his pendulum at 40 inches and thought of something that annoyed him; it immediately began to swing in a circle.

So Lethbridge had established, at least to his own satisfaction, that emotions and ideas, as well as substances, caused the pendulum to react at a definite rate. The rate for death was 40, and this was also the rate for black, cold, anger, deceit, and sleep – obviously connected ideas. When he drew a circle divided into 40 compartments, and placed each quality or object in its appropriate compartment, he found that “opposite” qualities occurred where you would expect to find them: safety at 9, danger at 29, pleasant smells at 7, unpleasant smells at 27, and so on.

In a moment of idleness, he tried placing the substances at their appropriate distance from the centre – sulphur at 7 inches along line 7, chlorine 9 inches along line 9, and so on – then joined up the dots with a line – which was, of course, a spiral. Spirals (vortices) seem to play an important part in most primitive religions; they are found carved on rocks all over the world. The vortex obviously embodies some important primitive idea. And now, looking at his own spiral, it struck Lethbridge that a spiral can go on indefinitely. Why should the “dowsing spiral” stop at 40?

So Lethbridge proceeded to experiment with the pendulum extended beyond 40 inches. And he discovered that every substance now reacted at its “normal” rate,
plus
40; sulphur at 43½ , silver at 62, and so on. There was one small difference. If he held a 43½ -inch pendulum over a heap of sulphur, it reacted most strongly
slightly to one side
of the heap; the same applied to everything else he tested. It was as if, in this realm beyond 40, energies were slightly diffracted, like a stone at the bottom of a fish tank that appears slightly to one side of its proper position.

When the pendulum was extended beyond 80, all the same effects occurred again, including the “diffraction effect”. And when it was extended beyond 120, it was the same all over again.

Lethbridge’s deduction from these observations may sound totally arbitrary, although in his books he makes it sound reasonable enough: that since 40 is the “rate” for death, then the pendulum beyond 40 is reacting to a level of reality “beyond death” and to yet another level at 80, another at 120, and so on, possibly ad infinitum. (He found it impossible to test a pendulum at more than 120 inches because it was too long.)

One of the oddities that Lethbridge observed is that in “our” world – below 40 – there is no “rate” for time; this is presumably because we are
in
it, and so time appears “stationary”, as a stream would to a boat drifting along it. At the second level – beyond 40 – time “registers” at 60 inches but – oddly enough – seems to have no forward motion. (I do not profess to understand what he meant.) Then, in the world beyond 80, time disappears again.

Lethbridge concluded that many “worlds” coexist on different “vibration rates”. We cannot see the world “beyond 40” because it moves too fast for us, so to speak, just as you cannot read the name of a station if the train goes through it too fast. But some people – “psychics” – are better at reading fast-moving words, so to speak, and keep catching glimpses of the next level of reality.

Lethbridge is of interest in this context because he did not begin as an occultist but as an archaeologist trained in scientific method. The notion of “other realities” forced itself upon him little by little, as a result of experiences that he found hard to explain. He always declined to go further than the facts would allow, but the facts often forced him to go further than he wanted. Personal experience convinced him, for example, of the reality of ghosts, poltergeists, and what he called “ghouls” – unpleasant sensations associated with certain places where tragedies have occurred. Yet he preferred to believe that these could be explained in terms of “tape recording” – “imprints” of human emotions on some kind of electrical field.

Lethbridge died in 1971, but he would undoubtedly have approved of David Ash’s vortex theory and of the notion that paranormal events can be explained in terms of super-energy (or, as he would have said, higher vibrational rates). He would probably have added that each level of reality has its own level of super-energy and that there is no obvious limit to the number of levels.

This notion of levels is fundamental to occultism. Madame Blavatsky taught that there are seven levels of reality, the first three of a descending order and the last three of an ascending order. Earth is situated at the bottom, at level four, the “heaviest” and densest of all levels. Yet the sheer density of matter means that human beings are capable of greater achievement than on any other level – just as a sculptor can create more permanent works of art out of marble than out of clay.

Another thinker who attempted to bridge the gap between science and the paranormal was Arthur Young, inventor of the Bell helicopter.
²⁹
In books such as
The Reflexive Universe
, Young also speculated that there are “seven levels of existence”, which include (in order) subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, plants, animals, humans, and what might be called “true humans”, or human beings who have moved to the next evolutionary stage. This seventh level is also that of light.

To most scientists, such speculations will sound suspiciously “mystical”. Yet the most interesting scientific development of the second half of the twentieth century has been the recognition by scientists themselves that some of the implications of relativity physics and quantum theory
are
“mystical”. Consider the strange paradox of the “photon that interferes with itself” (for the sake of brevity I will quote my own book,
Beyond the Occult
):

In 1957 a Princeton physicist named Hugh Everett III suggested an apparently preposterous idea to explain this apparent paradox. The “wave” we call a quantum is not a real wave. We impose reality on it because our minds work that way. It is a “wave of possibilities”. (Heisenberg’s famous “uncertainty principle” – that you cannot know both the speed and the position of a photon – and the amusing paradox of Schrödinger’s cat – that a cat in a box can be neither dead nor alive, but in an “intermediate” state – are examples of the same notion.) If the two “holes” can somehow interfere with each other, even though there is only one photon, then the two alternative paths of the electron must
exist side by side, so to speak. But where? Everett suggested that one of them exists in a parallel “alternative universe”. In these parallel universes (or perhaps they are just different ways of seeing the same universe), a tossed coin could come down heads in one and tails in the other. A wave is actually two particles in two different worlds – or rather, many different worlds, for every “alternative” splits into two more, and so on.

Anyone who finds this idea absurd should study
Parallel Universes
(1988) by the physicist Fred Alan Wolf, in which the implications of the theory are developed in all their Alice-in-Wonderland complexity. The physicist Sir Fred Hoyle has suggested that the paradoxes of quantum physics can be explained only if we assume that
future
possibilities can somehow influence the present and that therefore, in some very real sense, the future has already taken place – a possibility that is already familiar to all students of precognition – those sudden flashes of foreknowledge of the future.

Clearly, the need to find a deeper foundation that can embrace science and the “paranormal” is one of the most vital notions that has emerged during the twentieth century. Yet obviously, even this way of expressing it perpetuates the misunderstanding, since it speaks of science and the paranormal as if they were separate entities, rather than part of the same whole. The philosopher Edmund Husserl was struggling toward the same insight in his last book,
The Crisis in the European Sciences
, when he pointed out that the Greeks had
divided
reality into the world of the physically real and the world of ideas. Galileo then taught scientists how to handle this physical world in terms of mathematics, and suddenly science was confined to the world of physical reality. And since scientists declined to admit any other reality, science became oddly lopsided. (This is what Alfred North Whitehead meant when he accused science of “bifurcating” nature, dividing reality into the “solid” realm of physics and the – comparatively unimportant – realm of lived experience, which includes art, religion, and philosophy.) Husserl argued that we have to take a stand against “scientific reality” and rethink science until it can comfortably include the full range of our human reality. Husserl, of course, was not remotely interested in the paranormal, and his work is doubly important because it shows how a philosopher (who began his career with a book on mathematics) can reach the same philosophical conclusions closely related to those of Lethbridge or David Ash from the other end, so to speak.