Authors: Colin Wilson
C.
D.
Broad: ‘If the facts of psychical research are true, they literally alter
everything
.’ But do they?
My encounter with Martha, the ‘materialisation medium’.
Raymond Lodge loses his temper.
Spirits have nothing to add to the sum total of human thought.
The problem of personality.
How many ‘me’s are there?
The ‘ladder of selves’.
The problem of human beings: we are too
subjective
.
Flashes of ‘Objective consciousness’.
The problem of vitalism.
‘Enlarging the leak’.
Has life conquered the ‘higher planes’?
History of mankind from the point of view of ‘angels’.
Force T and Force C.
The importance of imagination.
Faculty X.
Is Faculty X encoded in our genes?
The apparently ‘absurd’ powers of the human mind.
Turning the ‘telescope’ inward.
As usual, I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the Society for Psychical Research, and its librarian Nick Clarke Lowes, and to the College of Psychic Studies, and its librarian Bernadette Giblin.
Both provided me with many books that would otherwise have been quite unobtainable.
I am grateful to Dr.
Adam Crabtree, Dr.
Wilson Van Dusen and to Margot Grey for allowing me to quote from unpublished material, and to the late Anita Gregory for some valuable comments.
I also wish to thank Joe Keeton, Ray Bryant, Andrew and Marguerite Selby and Ian Wilson, for invaluable material for the reincarnation chapter; and Julie Peters for drawing my attention to the case of the calculating twins.
Finally, I should like to thank Simon Scott, at whose suggestion this book was written.
Dr Adam Crabtree is a psychotherapist who lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
He began to practise in 1966, and, like most psychiatrists, soon began to encounter cases in which patients heard ‘voices’ inside their heads.
Now such cases are not particularly rare, and ‘hearing voices’ is certainly not a sign of madness.
Dr Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist, began to make a study of auditory hallucinations after experiencing one himself — he was lying on a couch when he heard a voice speaking from the air above his head.
Naturally concerned about his sanity, Jaynes discovered, to his relief, that about 10 per cent of people have had hallucinations of some sort, and that about a third of these take the form of ‘phantom voices’.
One perfectly normal young housewife told him that she held long conversations with her dead grandmother every morning when she made the beds.
Jaynes, of course, takes it for granted that such experiences
are
hallucinations, and for a long time, Adam Crabtree shared that belief.
Then he encountered a case that raised some basic doubts.
It concerned a young woman named Sarah Worthington, who was the patient of a female colleague of Crabtree’s called Jenny.
After a treatment that had been initially successful, Sarah Worthington had suddenly plunged into moods of depression in which she was tempted to commit suicide.
The three of them met in Crabtree’s office, and he began to probe her difficulties.
One of his questions was whether she had ever heard voices inside her head, and she admitted that she had.
Crabtree asked her to lie down and relax, and to do her best to try to recall these inner conversations.
Almost immediately, the girl’s body tensed, and she exclaimed: ‘Oh, the heat!
I’m hot!’ And as she went on speaking, both psychiatrists observed the change in her voice.
Sarah lacked confidence; this new personality had the voice of someone who was used to exercising authority.
When they asked the woman what she wanted to do, she replied: ‘Help Sarah.’ It was a clear indication that this was
not
Sarah.
They asked the woman her name, and she replied: ‘Sarah Jackson.’ She identified herself as Sarah’s grandmother.
Crabtree explained that he and Jenny
were also trying to help Sarah, and asked the ‘grandmother’ if she would be willing to help; she replied yes.
This ended the first session.
At the next session, the grandmother soon came back.
She was still talking about a fire, and at one point she asked: ‘Where is Jason?’ Jason, it transpired, was her son, and the fire she was referring to had taken place in 1910.
Sarah Jackson had rushed home as soon as she heard that there was a fire in her street — her seven-year-old son had been left in the house alone.
The whole neighbourhood was ablaze.
In fact, Jason had been moved to safety by neighbours, but it took Sarah Jackson another hour to discover this, and in the meantime she had rushed around the streets in a frenzy, stifling in the heat.
The experience had imprinted itself deep in her consciousness.
According to the grandmother, she had ‘taken possession’ of Sarah Worthington when her granddaughter was playing the piano — both of them loved music.
And it soon became clear that, in spite of her avowed intention of helping her granddaughter, it was Sarah Jackson herself who was in need of help.
She was tormented by guilt feelings about her own life — particularly about how badly she had treated her daughter Elizabeth, Sarah’s mother.
Elizabeth had developed into an unhappy, neurotic girl, who had in turn treated her own daughter badly.
And Sarah’s relations with her mother were a strange duplicate of Elizabeth’s relations with
her
mother.
Both mothers had greatly preferred their son to their daughter, and had taught the daughter that men were everything and women nothing.
The grandmother had become fully aware of all this by the time she died, which is why she now felt that she had to help her granddaughter.
Instead of helping, she had made things worse; Sarah was frightened and confused by the voice inside her, and was becoming desperate.
Now grandmother Jackson was ‘out in the open’ things became much easier.
She was able to give the psychiatrists invaluable information about Sarah’s family background.
And although Sarah was at first astonished to realise that her grandmother was speaking through her, she gradually learned to accept it, and began to achieve deeper insight into her problems.
At the end of two months she was cured.
The grandmother remained a ‘possessing presence’, but now Sarah understood it she was no longer afraid; in fact, it gave her a sense of comfort to feel that her grandmother was a vaguely beneficent presence in the background of her life.
The reader’s reaction to this story is probably much the same as my own, when I first read it in the typescript of Adam Crabtree’s
Multiple Man:
that there must be some purely psychological explanation.
Sarah had known her grandmother as a child; perhaps she had heard the story about the fire from her own lips.
Perhaps she recognised how similar her mother’s problems had been to her own.
And her unconscious mind had ‘re-told’ her the story as a rationalisation of her own sufferings … But the more I read of Crabtree’s book (which his publishers had sent to me, asking if I would write an introduction) the more I saw that such explanations are unacceptable.
He goes on to recount another eight cases from his practice, each one involving some type of ‘possession’.
And after the third or fourth case, the unconscious mind explanation had begun to wear very thin.
A social worker named Susan was unable to sustain any normal relationship with a male, and recognised, correctly, that this was due to some deep resentment towards her father.
Crabtree was able to speak to her father — who had died in a car crash — just as he spoke to Sarah’s grandmother, and he learned that he had been sexually obsessed with his daughter.
Until she was sixteen, he had crept into her bedroom after she was asleep and had fondled her genitals.
On some unconscious level, she was aware of what was happening.
She recognised his desire for her, and treated him with contempt, behaving provocatively and exercising her new-found sexual power to make him squirm.
The contempt spread into her relations with boyfriends and caused problems.
When her father died in the car crash, he was drawn to his daughter as a ‘place of refuge’, and she was vulnerable to him because of the sexual interference.
Once ‘inside’ her, he was in a condition of ‘foggy sleep’, unaware of his identity or his present position.
Crabtree patiently explained to Susan’s father that he was actually dead, and that he ought to leave his daughter alone.
And one day, he simply failed to appear at the therapeutic session; Susan experienced a sense of relief and freedom.
I found one case particularly fascinating and intriguing; it concerned a university professor called Art, whose first marriage had been unsuccessful, and who was about to embark on a second.
He was beginning to experience a deep reluctance to go through with the marriage, and he associated this with ‘inner storms’ in which a censorious voice criticised him and various people he knew.
He was vaguely aware that the voice sounded like his mother — who was living in Detroit — and he had
arrived at the commonsense explanation that the voice was some negative aspect of himself, and that he had somehow incorporated elements of his mother, who had always been intensely possessive towards him.
Crabtree followed his usual procedure, placing Art in a state of deep relaxation, and then opening a dialogue with the mother, who was called Veronica.
Veronica was perfectly willing to talk at length about her relation to her son, and about why she disapproved of so many of his friends.
‘Veronica came across as blatantly, almost naively, self-centred …’ She explained that she simply wanted to make her son recognise that many people he trusted — including his future wife — were stupid and scheming and not worthy of his respect.
Crabtree asked her if she thought all this interference could be good for her son, or even good for herself, and she finally admitted that the answer was probably no.
In Detroit she was living a drab and boring life, and Crabtree pointed out that if she paid more attention to her own affairs and less to her son’s, things might improve.
During the therapy, Art’s mother discovered that she had a cancerous growth, and had to have an operation.
The ‘Veronica’ who spoke through Art’s mouth agreed that this might be because she was robbing herself of vitality by ‘possessing’ her son.
And at this point, Art’s ‘inner voice’ began to fade, until he finally ceased to hear it.
But there was a remarkable change in his mother in Detroit.
She had been experiencing a slow deterioration, and emotional withdrawal from life.
Now, suddenly, her vitality began to return; she started going out and making new friends.
‘She seemed to have gained the proverbial “new lease” on life.’
Crabtree insists that his own attitude towards such cases is not that of a believer in the paranormal; he claims to be merely an observer, a phenomenologist, who simply treats each case ‘as if it were possession.
And clearly, there is nothing contradictory in such an attitude; Susan and Sarah and Art
could
have been manufacturing the voices themselves; the unconscious mind is capable of far more remarkable feats.
Still, the fact remains that most readers will feel that, taken all together, these cases make an overwhelming impression of being something more than unconscious self-deception.
I turned back to Julian Jaynes to see what he had to say about ‘disembodied voices’.
He outlines his theory in a remarkable work called
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the
Bicameral Mind
, published in 1976 (‘bicameral’ means simply having two compartments).
Jaynes advances the extraordinary theory that our remote ancestors heard ‘voices’ all the time, the reason being that — according to Jaynes — early man lacked all self-awareness in our modern sense of the word.
Jaynes believes that our cave-man ancestors could not look inside themselves and say: ‘Now let me think …’, because they had no ‘inner me’.
Their eyes were like a car’s headlamps, directed permanently towards the outside world.
So if one of these men was ordered to go and build a dam down the river, he would find it extremely difficult to remember why he was ambling along the river bank.
But his sense of purpose would be refreshed by a voice — the voice of his chief — which seemed to come from the air above his head, and which would repeat his instructions.
And where would that voice come from?
According to Jaynes, from the right-hand side of the brain.
For Jaynes’s theory depends heavily on the science of ‘split-brain’ research, which has made such remarkable advances since the mid-1950s.
For some reason no one yet understands, the brain consists of two identical halves, as if a mirror had been placed down the middle.
(It has even been suggested that one of them is intended as a ‘spare’ in case the other half gets damaged).
The top part of the brain, the part immediately below the skull, is the specifically human part; it is called the cerebrum, or cerebral hemispheres, and it has developed at a phenomenal speed over the past half million years (which, in evolutionary terms, is the mere bat of an eyelid).
If you could remove the top of the skull, the two halves of the brain would look rather like a walnut.
The bridge that joins them together is a bunch of nerves called the
corpus callosum
.
For more than a century it has been known that the left hemisphere deals with language and logical thinking, while the right seems to deal with patterns and intuitions.
The left enables us to add up a column of figures, the right to recognise somebody’s face.
You could say that the left is a scientist and the right is an artist.
A man with left-brain damage will probably develop a speech impediment, but he could still draw a picture or hum a tune.
A man with right-brain damage will sound perfectly logical and coherent, but he will probably not even be able to draw a matchstick man.
The strangest thing is that if the bridge joining the two halves, the
corpus callosum
, is severed (as it sometimes is, to
prevent epilepsy), the patient literally becomes
two
people.
One ‘split-brain’ patient tried to unzip his flies with one hand while the other tried to do them up; another tried to hit his wife with one hand, while the other held it back.
Another tried to do a jigsaw puzzle with his right hand, and his left hand kept trying to interfere, so that he had to sit on it.
(It should be added that the right brain controls the left side of the body, and vice versa — once again the reason is a mystery.)
But the most significant discovery is that the person you call ‘you’ lives in the left brain; the person who lives in the right seems to be a stranger.
One split-brain patient whose right brain was shown a dirty picture (i.e.
with her left eye) blushed; when asked why she was blushing, she replied: ‘I don’t know.’