Travels (55 page)

To me all the varieties of consciousness constitute a landscape of the mind, similar to the physical landscape of our planet. I find this landscape of consciousness rewarding to explore. I recognize that exploration of these different states is a personal interest of mine, and not everybody shares that interest.

But I feel there is more than private value in such explorations. I suspect that, in the future, studying the varieties of consciousness will have increasingly practical importance in such areas as treating illness, maintaining health, and promoting creativity.

As the practical value of altering consciousness becomes recognized, procedures to effect those alterations will become increasingly ordinary and unremarkable. The whole concept of changing states of consciousness will cease to have an exotic or a threatening aspect.

2. At least some psychic phenomena are real. Psychic phenomena are generally categorized as telepathy (communication between minds), clairvoyance (perception at a distance), precognition (perception of events before they occur), and psychokinesis (influencing objects or events by thought alone). This in fact covers a rather broad range of claims, and broadly overlapping phenomena.

I’ve concluded some people have the ability to know about past and future events in a manner that is not at present explicable. To me the most convincing evidence for such ability comes from rather trivial information.

I suspect everybody has a degree of psychic ability, just as everybody has a degree of athletic or artistic ability. Some people have special gifts; other people have a particular interest that leads them to develop their abilities. But the phenomenon itself is ordinary and widespread.

I have no idea of the limits of psychic ability. I don’t know, for example, whether somebody can move an object simply by thinking about it. I don’t even know how to go about assessing such an idea, since I have no theory to explain psychic phenomena in general.

3. There are energies associated with the human body that are not yet understood. These energies can be felt and seen, and they are related to healing, sickness, and health. Although the existence of these body energies is formally accepted in some theoretical systems, such as those of Indian Yogis and Chinese acupuncturists, they are not yet accepted in Western medical systems.

I suspect they will be in the near future; when that happens, medicine will recapture some traditional wisdom concerning the importance of bedside manner and hand-holding—what is now considered the “art of medicine,” as opposed to the science.

This was all I concluded. And it’s not really much different from what Carl Jung believed, or William James believed. It’s only different from
what a certain variety of incautious, unintrospective physical scientist believes. And, in their day, Jung and James found themselves at odds with this kind of scientist, too.

I went on to make a list of the things that I don’t believe in, which was much longer. I don’t believe in levitation, flying saucers, UFOs, ancient astronaut landing sites in Peru, the Bermuda Triangle, extraterrestrials, palmistry, numerology, astrology, psychic surgery, rebirthing, biorhythms, coincidence, or pyramid power.

And finally I made a list of beliefs about which I hold no opinion, either because evidence is lacking, or because the issue seems to me fundamentally a matter of faith. These beliefs include reincarnation, past lives, entities, poltergeists, ghosts, the yeti, the Loch Ness monster, and the power of crystals.

But, as I looked at my lists, I decided they were beside the point. I hadn’t traveled with the intention of learning about anything except myself. And the real point of all this travel was not what I had come to believe or disbelieve about the wider world, but what I had learned about myself.

When I look back on my travels, I see an almost obsessive desire for experiences that would increase my self-awareness. I needed new experiences to keep shaking myself up. I don’t know why this should be true for me.

In one sense, I suppose the search for new experiences represents an appetite. It’s an acquired taste, in my case acquired early. From my parents I learned to perceive new experiences as fun and invigorating, and not as frightening. So this is learned behavior.

In another sense, I see my travels as a strategy for solving problems in my life. Whenever things got bad, whenever my life really wasn’t working, I’d get on a plane and go far away. Not to escape my problems so much as to get perspective on them. I found that this strategy worked. I returned to my life with a new sense of balance. I was able to get to the point, to stop spinning my wheels, to know what I wanted to do and how to go about doing it. I was focused and effective.

In every instance, it was because I had gone away and found out something about myself. Something I needed to know.

My own sense is that the acquisition of self-knowledge has been made more difficult by the modern world. More and more human beings live in vast urban environments, surrounded by other human beings and the creations of human beings. The natural world, the traditional source of self-awareness, is increasingly absent.

Furthermore, within the last century we have come to live increasingly in a compelling world defined by electronic media. These media have evolved a pace that is utterly alien to our true natures. It is bewildering to live in a world of ten-second spots, each one urging us to buy something, to do something, or to think something. Human beings in the past were not so assaulted.

And I think that this constant assault has made us pliable in a certain unhealthy way. Cut off from direct experience, cut off from our own feelings and sometimes our own sensations, we are only too ready to adopt a viewpoint or perspective that is handed to us, and is not our own.

In 1972, I bought a house in the hills of Los Angeles. I moved into my house and was ecstatically happy for several months.

One day I mentioned to a friend that I’d bought a house in the hills. He said, “I guess the snakes don’t worry you.”

“What snakes?” I said.

“Rattlesnakes. The hills are full of rattlesnakes.”

“Come on,” I said. “Stop kidding around.”

“I’m serious. Haven’t you seen any?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, they’re there. You have any land around your house?”

“Yes, almost an acre. On the side of a hill.”

“Then you’ve definitely got them. Just wait. The rattlers come out when it gets dry, September-October. Just wait.”

I went back to my wonderful house in a state of profound depression. I didn’t have any fun at all; I just looked for snakes. I worried that snakes were sneaking into my bedroom, so I locked all the doors every night to keep the snakes out. I thought snakes might come to the swimming pool to drink the water, so I avoided the swimming pool, particularly in the heat of the day, because the snakes were probably sunning on my deck. I never walked around my property, because I was sure there were snakes in the bushes. I walked only on the little path from the garage to the house, and I peered around every corner before I turned it. But, increasingly, I didn’t like to be outside at all. I became a prisoner in my own house. I had altered my entire behavior and my emotional state purely on the basis of something I had been told. I still hadn’t seen any snakes. But I was now afraid.

Finally, one day, I saw my gardener tramping fearlessly around the
brush at the edge of the property. I asked him about snakes. “Are there any rattlers here?”

“Oh sure,” he said. “Especially September-October.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

“Well,” he said, “I’ve been working here for five years, and in that time I’ve only seen one rattlesnake. So I’m not too worried, no.”

“What’d you do when you saw the rattlesnake?”

“Killed it.”

“How?”

“I went and got a shovel, came back, and killed it. It was just a rattlesnake.”

“That’s the only one you saw?”

“That’s right.”

“One snake in six years?”

“That’s right.”

I went and got my towel, and sat by the pool for the rest of the day. I was perfectly comfortable. One snake every six years was something to be aware of, but you didn’t have to man the watchtowers every minute of your life.

So, still without ever having seen a snake, I had shifted to another perspective, and I had changed my behavior and my emotions again. Now I was a little more cautious than before, but I was relaxed.

As he was leaving, the gardener said, “You can be sure you don’t have many snakes on your property.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you’ve got so many gophers.”

I had been trying for weeks to get rid of the gophers that lived in my lawn. Gophers were something new to me; they weren’t found back east. Gophers were small, cute-looking rodents that created an elaborate network of underground burrows all around your property, thus turning previously solid earth into something resembling a sponge. Sometimes I’d walk out onto my lawn and fall through to my ankles. I had an image of my entire house one day sinking into the ground because the gophers had finally burrowed one tunnel too many. So I set poison, and I set traps, and I took potshots at them with an air pistol. All to no effect whatever. Each morning fresh gopher burrows crisscrossed my lawn. It was extremely frustrating. My house was Gopher National Park.

Now I realized that, if a few more of my friends the rattlesnakes took up residence around the house, this frustrating gopher problem would be solved. I began to wish for more rattlesnakes. Was there anything I could
do to attract rattlesnakes to my house? Put out some favorite rattlesnake food, or perhaps dishes of water? What was wrong with my property, anyway, that the snakes would abandon it and leave me at the mercy of the gophers?

So I had still another perspective. Now I was feeling the lack of snakes, wishing for more. I had gone through all these changes—and I still had never actually seen a snake. I couldn’t really say that I had experienced successive episodes of calmness, panic, and longing because I’d had some life experience that made me that way. I’d acquired some new information, but nothing really had
happened
to me.

I felt different only because I had shifted perspectives. Each shift in perspective was accompanied by a total change in my attitudes, my physiology, my behavior, my emotions. I was immediately and wholly modified by each new perspective that I adopted.

But never as a result of direct experience. Never as a result of something that had actually happened to me.

Unaccustomed to direct experience, we can come to fear it. We don’t want to read a book or see a museum show until we’ve read the reviews so that we know what to think. We lose the confidence to perceive for ourselves. We want to know the meaning of an experience before we have it.

We become frightened of direct experience, and we will go to elaborate lengths to avoid it.

I found I liked to travel, because it got me out of my routines and my familiar patterns. The more traveling I did, the more organized I became. I kept adding things I liked to have with me on my trips. Naturally I took books to read. Then I’d take my Walkman and the tapes I liked to listen to. Pretty soon I’d also take notebooks and colored pens for drawing. Then a portable computer for writing. Then magazines for the airplane trip. And a sweater in case it got cold on the airplane. And hand cream for dry skin.

Before long traveling became a lot less fun, because now I was staggering onto airplanes, loaded down with all this stuff that I felt I had to take with me. I had made a new routine instead of escaping the old one. I wasn’t getting away from the office any more: I was just carrying most of the contents of my desk on my shoulders.

So one day I decided I would get on the plane and carry nothing at all. Nothing to entertain me, nothing to save me from boredom. I stepped
on the plane in a state of panic—none of my familiar stuff! What was I going to do?

It turned out I had a fine time. I read the magazines that were on the plane. I talked to people. I stared out the window. I thought about things.

It turned out I didn’t need any of that stuff I thought I needed. In fact, I felt a lot more alive without it.

One of the most difficult features of direct experience is that it is unfiltered by any theories and expectations. It’s hard to observe without imposing a theory to explain what we’re seeing, but the trouble with theories, as Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed, but what
can be
observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories. And often those expectations get in the way.

Claridge’s Hotel in London is famous for catering to the idiosyncrasies of its guests. If you like mineral water at your bedside every night, the staff of Claridge’s will notice this, and each night you’ll find the bottle of mineral water by your bed. If you like it half empty, you will find it half empty. And since the staff is English, no eccentricity is too bizarre to indulge.

I lived at Claridge’s for several weeks in 1978, rewriting a screenplay. I was typing and cutting and pasting the pages together. But I couldn’t get an ordinary tape dispenser; I just had a plain roll of Scotch tape and a pair of scissors. Of course, every time I cut a piece of tape, the edge would fall back onto the roll, and I’d have a terrible time prying it free with my fingernails to cut another piece. Eventually I hit on the expedient of cutting long strips of tape, and running them lightly down the knobs of my desk drawers on both sides of the desk. This allowed me simply to cut between the knobs to get a piece of tape. I followed this procedure of taping the drawers for several weeks.

A year later I returned to Claridge’s and checked into a room. It was a nice room, but it had a peculiarity: someone had stretched rows of Scotch tape down all the drawers of the desk in the corner.

They’d remembered! I was flattered, but I tried to imagine what the staff must have thought. Who knows why this guy likes it? But he always tapes the desk drawers shut. So make sure they’re taped shut on arrival, so Mr. Crichton will be comfortable.