Authors: Colin Wilson
No doubt dogs and cats are in this state most of the time; they lack any sustained power of concentration.
And it seems highly probable that our cave-man ancestors of forty thousand years ago also spent much of their time in this state.
When drawings of animals were discovered in the caves of Cro-Magnon man, scientists concluded that our ancestors whiled away their winter evenings with a lump of charcoal and a pot of red ochre.
Then it gradually became clear that this was not an early example of ‘art for art’s sake’.
It was art for the sake of magic.
It was the
shaman
who drew the bison and reindeer, because the men were going out to hunt them the next day; the drawings were supposed to link the minds of the hunters and their prey.
To us, with our abnormally high sensitivity thresholds, such an idea seems absurd; to primitives, it must have been a matter of commonsense, like dowsing for water.
Moreover, there is evidence that such ‘magic’ worked; Sir Arthur Grimble, who was commissioner of the Gilbert Islands, has described how the hereditary porpoise-caller established a mental link with the porpoises, so that they swam into the beach in a kind of trance, and the natives were able to wade into the water and club them to death.
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And Manuel Cordova-Rios, a Peruvian who was kidnapped by Amazonian Indians in 1902, and who spent several years living among them, has descriptions of hunting magic that makes it clear that it actually worked.
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As man developed the complexities of civilisation, he had to develop a complexity of mind to go with it.
The unicameral mind was lost, and replaced by the present version with two compartments — in which the living-room is situated to the left.
Yet it would be incorrect to believe that it is lost beyond recall.
We can, if we want to, deliberately lower the ‘sensitivity threshold’.
The tiger hunter Jim Corbett, author of
Man Eaters of Kumaon
, has described how he developed what he called ‘jungle sensitiveness’, so that he knew intuitively when a tiger was lying in wait for him.
(Presumably he would also be able to use the same faculty when he was hunting tigers.) Self-preservation had taught him to drop his sensitivity threshold, so his right brain would give him warning of
danger.
And we have seen that Rosalind Heywood apparently developed the same faculty accidentally through her sensitivity to the ‘presence’ of the Hills.
She also suggests that she developed her telepathic linkage with her husband because he was a non-verbal type, a man of a few words, and she had a ‘life-long exaggerated need for communication’.
The most peculiar chapter of her book
The Infinite Hive —
called ‘The Singing’ — provides interesting support for this ‘primitive’, right-brain theory of psychic powers.
The ‘Singing’ is a sensation that she hears more-or-less all the time (although more at some times than others), and she describes it as:
a kind of continuous vibrant inner quasi-sound, to which the nearest analogy is the noise induced by pressing a seashell against the ear, or perhaps the hum of a distant dynamo.… This sounds like tinnitus to anyone else, but to the experient it does not appear to be heard by the ear or to be exactly located.
Rather, like light, it pervades the whole atmosphere, though it is most clearly perceptible in a wide arc above and behind the head.
And — I cannot explain what I mean by this — it does not appear to ring through outer space, yet neither is it far ‘in’.
The right word may be borderline, if, as I most imprudently venture to suspect, there is no sharp barrier between sensory and extra-sensory phenomena.
It sounds rather like the noise that — according to the composer John Cage — is made by the nervous system, and which can be heard under conditions of total sensory deprivation, for example, in a deep mine.
But in that case, it would always be more or less the same.
Rosalind Heywood claims that it varies.
The only time she failed to hear it under conditions of silence was while waiting for a train at night on the Hampstead tube station (which is one of the deepest in London, and where, if the nerve theory is correct, it ought to have been particularly evident).
But:
it is far more evident in some places than in others; particularly so in a quiet wood, for instance, or on a moor or a mountain — clean wild places unspoilt by man.
It is also clear in, say, a church or a college library, places where thought or devotion have been intense for years; and it can ring out in an ordinary room where concentrated thought has been going on.
She adds: ‘Although the Singing seems to differ according to its apparent origin I cannot formulate in what this difference lies.
I can only say that mountain Singing conveys a different
“atmosphere” from church Singing, as an oboe conveys a different “atmosphere” from a trumpet …’ She goes on to speak about ‘church Singing’.
‘I listened for the Christian note in several quiet empty churches and found that in some it would pass over into a more intense experience, as if — I repeat as if — an inner force were streaming from the altar.’
A young engineer to whom she described the Singing — in the hope of shocking him — replied placidly: ‘Oh, yes, I hear that too, in places where there have been strong emotions.’ This comment provides an interesting clue.
As early as 1908, Sir Oliver Lodge, one of the most distinguished members of the Society for Psychical Research, made the interesting suggestion that ‘ghosts’ may be a kind of tape recording — ‘as if strong emotions could be unconsciously recorded in matter’:
Take, for example, a haunted house … wherein some one room is the scene of a ghostly representation of some long past tragedy.
On a psychometric hypothesis
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the original tragedy has been literally
photographed
on its material surroundings, nay, even on the ether itself, by reason of the intensity of emotion felt by those who enacted it; and thenceforth in certain persons an hallucinatory effect is experienced corresponding to such an impression.
It is this theory that is made to account for the feeling one has on entering certain rooms, that there is an alien presence therein …
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The phrase ‘nay, even on the ether itself’ may seem to be going too far; yet in the second half of the twentieth century this has, in fact, been one of the most widely held theories about the nature of apparitions.
The late T.C.
Lethbridge, whose contribution I have discussed at length elsewhere,
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came to believe that a type of manifestation he called a ‘ghoul’ — meaning the kind of ‘creepy’ sensation described by Lodge — is an emotion ‘tape recorded’ on some kind of electrical field.
He even became convinced that there are different types of field connected with woodlands, mountains and open spaces, exactly as Rosalind Heywood noted about the Singing.
According to Lethbridge, she would simply be ‘picking up’ some form of electrical vibration — a vibration, presumably, that cannot
penetrate as deep as the Hampstead underground, or which is somehow insulated by it.
If there is anything in this theory, and feelings or mental states can be recorded on matter (or its field), this would also explain why she observed a quite different kind of Singing in university libraries or in Christian churches; the ‘vibration’ would be different.
It is particularly interesting that she noted an ‘inner force’ streaming from church altars.
Christian churches are frequently built on pagan sites; in fact, there was a directive from the Vatican in the Middle Ages that churches should be built on such sites.
Any dowser will verify that the ‘field’ around ancient sites — for example, standing stones like those of Stonehenge and Carnac — is unusually powerful.
Christian churches, like pagan religious sites, usually face east, and the altar is located at the east end.
What Rosalind Heywood sensed streaming from the altar may have been precisely the quality for which the site was chosen in the first place.
According to this theory, the ‘lesser presence’ that Rosalind Heywood sensed in the bedroom of her grandfather’s house was not really an old woman, but a tape recording of some past event.
(Lethbridge believed that the ‘recording’ can often be seen as well as felt — especially by good dowsers.)
Yet although this explanation has a pleasingly scientific ring, it still fails to account for many of Rosalind Heywood’s experiences.
It is quite clear that when she experienced ‘Julia’ and ‘Vivian’, she did not feel that she was picking up a tape recording, and that on Dartmoor, she and her husband felt that they had really encountered invisible natural presences, and not some kind of electrical field.
And how can the ‘sensitivity threshold’ theory of clairvoyance account for the curious episode of ‘splitting’ into two people?’
Where this latter is concerned, we can turn for aid to Rosalind Heywood’s friend G.
N.
M.
Tyrrell whose book
The Personality of Man
has become a classic of psychical research.
(It was, in fact, written in her house; she describes how, when left alone in the house during the war, ‘Orders’ told her to write to Tyrrell asking him if he wanted to move to London, and — against all the odds — he eagerly accepted.) Tyrrell also cites her story of ‘splitting’ (although he omits to mention her name), and then goes on to mention various parallel cases.
There was Mrs Willett (the pseudonym of Winifred Coombe-Tennant), an automatic writing medium, who in August 1913,
received a letter from Sir Oliver Lodge containing certain enclosures.
About to take out these enclosures, she experienced a ‘
thundering
sort of knock-down blow conviction that I must not do so’.
While she hesitated, wondering whether to overrule this feeling, she divided into two.
‘Mind No.
1 got my body up and walked it across the room to the door … But Mind No.
2 (which was ‘me’ as I know myself) couldn’t make out why it was that I was there.’ Then ‘Mind No.
1’ made her put the letter back in its envelope, walk to her husband’s room, and hand it to him.
(It was important, from the point of view of evidence, that she should not read the enclosures.)
Tyrrell also cites the case of a soldier in the trenches during the First World War who, frozen and miserable, suddenly ‘split’ and found himself outside his ‘earthly body’.
But his ‘earthly body’ went on talking to a companion, who later reported that he had chatted with great wit and humour, as if sitting in front of a comfortable fire.
The third case he cites concerned Sir Auckland Geddes, Professor of Anatomy at Dublin, and it bears a strong resemblance to the case of the Rev.
Bertrand quoted in Chapter One.
Geddes describes how he began to feel very ill from acute gastroenteritis, and when he tried to ring for help, found himself unable to move.
As he sat there, he realised that ‘
my
consciousness was separating from another consciousness which was also me’.
He calls these A-consciousness and B-consciousness, and says that ‘B-consciousness’ was attached to his body, sitting in the chair, while ‘A-consciousness’ was attached to his ego.
(We should note that he says ‘attached’ to the ego — not that it was identical with it.)
… as my physical condition grew worse and the heart was fibrillating rather than beating, I realised that the B-consciousness belonging to the body was beginning to show signs of being composite, that is, built up of ‘consciousness’ from the head, the heart and the viscera.
These components became more individual and B-consciousness began to disintegrate, while the A-consciousness, which was now me, seemed to be altogether outside my body …
He suddenly became aware that he could not only see the room he was in, but the whole house and garden, then things in London and Scotland.
He makes the odd comment that he felt he was now ‘free in a time dimension of space, wherein “now” was in some way equivalent to “here” in the ordinary three-dimensional space of everyday life’.
In other words, he
seemed to be one dimension ‘higher’ than in the physical world — an observation that may explain Alan Vaughan’s experience of precognition as he ‘left’ his body, cited in Chapter One.
Geddes was discovered a few minutes later, and given a powerful camphor injection which started his heart beating again.
Like the Rev.
Bertrand, he felt ‘intensely annoyed’ at being drawn back to his body, because he felt that he was finally beginning to understand.
(When Geddes described this experience, in a lecture to the Royal Medical Society, he claimed that it was of a friend whose word he could trust implicitly, but he later confessed that it was his own.) He emphasised that, when the experience was over, it had no tendency to fade like a dream.
There is one very obvious difference between this experience of Geddes and that of the Rev.
Bertrand on the Titlis.
When Bertrand experienced the ‘separation’, his conscious ego looked down on his lifeless body.
This seems to be what happens in most out-of-the-body experiences.
Geddes, like Rosalind Heywood, experienced
divided consciousness;
he became two people, both conscious.
This is something we find impossible to envisage; we can only imagine consciousness being in one place at once, so to speak.
But Rosalind Heywood told Tyrrell: ‘I was definitely both “mes”, and conscious in both places simultaneously.
There was no sense of a third “me” linking the two.’