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Beyond The Occult: Twenty Years' Research into the Paranormal PDF

410 Pages·2013·1.95 MB·English
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Preview Beyond The Occult: Twenty Years' Research into the Paranormal

COLIN WILSON Colin Wilson is one of the most prolific, versatile and popular writers at work today. He was born in Leicester in 1931, and left school at sixteen. After he had spent years working in a wool warehouse, a laboratory, a plastics factory and a coffee bar his first book The Outsider was published in 1956. It received outstanding critical acclaim and was an immediate bestseller. Since then he has written many books on philosophy, the occult, crime and sexual deviance, plus a host of successful novels which have won him an international reputation. His work has been translated into Spanish, French, Swedish, Dutch, Japanese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and Hebrew. By the same author NON-FICTION The Outsider cycle The Outsider Religion and the Rebel The Age of Defeat The Strength to Dream Origins of the Sexual Impulse Beyond the Outsider Introduction to the New Existentialism Books on the Occult and Paranormal The Occult Mysteries Poltergeist Psychic Detectives Strange Powers The Geller Phenomenon A Dictionary of Possibilities (with John Grant) Other Non-Fiction An Encyclopedia of Murder (with Pat Pitman) An Encyclopedia of Modern Murder (with Donald Seaman) A Casebook of Murder Order of Assassins Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs Bernard Shaw — A Reassessment New Pathways in Psychology The Quest for Wilhelm Reich The War Against Sleep — The Philosophy of Gurdjieff The Lord of the Underworld — A Study of Jung The Craft of the Novel The Strange Genius of David Lindsay Frankenstein’s Castle Access to Inner Worlds Eagle and Earwig (Essays on books and writers) Poetry and Mysticism A Book of Booze Starseekers The Brandy of the Damned (Essays on Music) Anti-Sartre The Misfits AUTOBIOGRAPHY Voyage to a Beginning FICTION The ‘Sorme Trilogy’: Ritual in the Dark The Man without a Shadow (retitled The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme) The God of the Labyrinth Other Fiction: Adrift in Soho The World of Violence Necessary Doubt The Glass Cage The Mind Parasites The Killer The Philosopher’s Stone The Black Room The Space Vampires The Schoolgirl Murder Case Rasputin: A Novel Spider World: The Tower Spider World: The Delta CONTENTS Analytical Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction to the New Edition Part One: Hidden Powers Introduction 1 Mediums and Mystics 2 The Other Self 3 Down the Rabbit Hole 4 The Information Universe 5 Intrusions? 6 Memories of the Future 7 Minds Without Bodies? Part Two: Powers of Good and Evil 1 The Search for Evidence 2 The Truth About Magic 3 The World of Spirits 4 Visions 5 Completing the Picture 6 Towards the Unknown Region Bibliography Analytical Table of Contents Part One: Hidden Powers Introduction I am asked to write a book about ‘the occult’. The moments of ‘mystical freedom’. Muz Murray’s experience in Cyprus. My own experience in Alsace. Derek Gibson sees inside the trees. Jacob Boehme’s vision of ‘the signature of all things’. Yuliya Vorobyeva develops X-ray vision. Jim Corbett and his ‘jungle sensitiveness’. Why man has lost his ‘occult faculties’. Calculating prodigies. How to gain control of our ‘hidden powers’. My original scepticism about ‘the occult’. Impressive consistency of reports. ‘Reading’ through the skin of the stomach. ‘Community of sensation’ under hypnosis. Buchanan and the discovery of psychometry. Peter Hurkos and precognition. My attempts to create a ‘Newtonian theory’ of the occult. My increasing doubts. 1 Mediums and Mystics Lawrence LeShan studies Eileen Garrett. She ‘psychometrizes’ his daughter’s hair. The case of the missing doctor. The case of Marmontel’s memoirs. Eileen Garrett on mediumship: ‘A kind of turning inward’. Warner Allen’s ‘timeless moment’ at the Queen’s Hall. Is time an illusion? Poets as ‘natural psychics’. A. L. Rowse is almost decapitated. The ‘superconscious attic’ of the mind. The mystical experience. Wendy Rose-Neill lies on her lawn. Claire Myers Owen and the ‘golden light’. Bucke’s flash of ‘cosmic consciousness’. ‘A brilliant shaft of light from out of the sky.’ Vision of God in a cow-barn. Moyra Caldecott and the ‘Timeless Reality’. Ouspensky’s vision of ‘connectedness’. Steppenwolf’s mystical insight. Henri Bergson is converted from materialism to mysticism. The inability of thought to grasp experience. Two ways of grasping reality. The left and right brain. Peak experiences. Anne Bancroft’s mystical experience. The branch of rhododendron. Douglas Harding loses his head. Is it desirable to have no head? William James’s ‘Suggestion about Mysticism’. Robert Graves and ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’. Another mathematical prodigy. 2 The Other Self My dream of the amusement park. Thomson Jay Hudson watches a hypnotic demonstration. Return of the dead philosophers. Charcot and hypnosis. Man’s ‘two minds’ — the subjective and the objective. The power of the subjective mind: Henry Clay speaks for two hours. The artist who saw a picture before he painted it. Puységur and ‘magnetism’. Councillor Wesermann makes telepathic contact with a friend. The Verity Case. Hudson practises ‘distant healing’. His success. Doctor Albert Mason performs a miracle. Why Shakespeare was not Bacon. Learning to use the right brain. The Laurel and Hardy theory of consciousness. The ‘robot’. Negative feedback. The power of the Spectre. Graham Greene and the revolver in the corner cupboard. The gloominess of the great philosophers. Schopenhauer complains about life. Dylan Thomas’s ‘foul mousehole’. Thomas Mann’s ‘Disillusionment’. Schizophrenic patients ‘stop seeing things’. Artsybashev’s Breaking Point. The Master Ikkyu writes, ‘Attention’. Hesse’s Journey to the East. My experience of being caught in a snowstorm. Raising consciousness by an act of will. The journey to Northampton. Rilke’s solution: ‘To praise in spite of.’ 3 Down the Rabbit Hole Arnold Toynbee’s vision of the battle of Pharsalus. Frank Smythe’s vision of the massacre near Glen Glomach. Toynbee’s ‘time- slip’ in Crete. His experience in the ruins of the temple at Ephesus. His vision at Monemvasía. The destruction of Mistrà. The nature of Faculty X. Doctor Johnson and the Happy Valley. Toynbee’s vision of ‘all history’. Proust and the madeleine dipped in tea. Other experiences of Faculty X described in Proust. ‘The past was made to encroach upon the present.’ G. K. Chesterton and ‘Absurd good news’. Helen Keller learns to spell ‘water’. Why Faculty X is so difficult to achieve. Sartre and ‘nausea’. Camus and ‘the Absurd’. ‘Ordinary consciousness is a form of nausea.’ Roquentin is ‘sickened’ by a tree. Maupassant and sexual failure. The ‘erase key’. The demon Screwtape heads off a conversion. Physical, emotional and intellectual values. ‘Upside-downness’. Sartre in the French Resistance. The parable of the emperor and the grand vizier. The mechanism of ‘upside-downness’. Arthur Koestler joins the Communist Party. Koestler’s mystical experience in a Spanish jail. Einstein on science and mysticism. ‘Holiday consciousness’. 4 The Information Universe Mr Chase sees a cottage that no longer exists. ‘Time-slips’. The English ladies at Versailles. Jane O’Neill and Fotheringhay Church. Falling ‘down the rabbit hole’. J. B. Priestley on Faculty X. Ivan Sanderson’s ‘time-slip’ in Haiti. Can ‘time-slips’ be explained scientifically. Lethbridge and the ‘tape-recording’ theory. The Long Gallery at Hampton Court. Buchanan and ‘psychic bloodhounds’. Denton experiments with geological fragments. Hudson attacks Denton’s results. ‘The memory of the subjective mind seems to be practically limitless.’ Sulla’s villa. Pascal Forthuny psychometrizes a letter by a murderer. Pagenstecher’s experiments with Maria de Zierold. Walter Franklin Prince and the ‘sea bean’. Maria ‘shares’ Pagenstecher’s consciousness. Rilke’s experience at Castle Duino. How to make time stand still. Bentov’s Stalking the Wild Pendulum. Stephen Jenkins sees a phantom army in Cornwall. Joan Forman sees ghosts at Haddon Hall. ‘Tape-recording’ of the Battle of Edgehill. Stephen Jenkins on ley lines. Doctor Robin Baker’s experiments with earth magnetism. Is dowsing a superstition? Harvalik’s experiments with electrical fields. ‘The human body is a magnetic detector.’ Harvalik detects brainwaves. Lethbridge and the long pendulum. Tom and Mina Lethbridge throw stones. Edgar Devaux traces a missing housewife. Edison invents the gramophone record. Robert Leftwich and the underground water main. My wife investigates Bodmin gaol. Doctor Maximilien Langsner solves a murder case. Is reality ‘out there’? ‘The holo-gramatic universe.’ Karl Pribram and David Bohm. Could the world be a hologram? Bohm’s theory of reality as ‘implicate order’. Wing Commander Goddard flies over Drem airfield and sees into the future. Eileen Garrett on clairvoyance. 5 Intrusions? J. B. Priestley’s dream of being shot. Visions seen on the edge of sleep. Wilson Van Dusen on hypnagogic images. Woman who murdered a useless husband. Her powers of prediction. The ‘Feminine Aspect of the Divine’ writes in Greek. Doctor Houston’s patient talks to Socrates. An illiterate servant girl speaks Greek, Latin and Hebrew. ‘Sleep learning’. Mavromatis and hypnagogic images. Could they be telepathy? Upton Sinclair experiments with ‘mental radio’. Guy Playfair learns to induce hypnagogic states. Playfair transmits mental pictures to an audience. The powers of Marcel Vogel. The girl who woke up in bed with a male colleague. Rudolf Steiner and ‘inner space’. Steiner and Faculty X. Blake on imagination. The Akashic Records. Denton’s son travels to Mars. Cosmic memory. Swedenborg and the ‘spirit world’. The Dutch Ambassador’s wife. Jung falls ‘down the rabbit hole’. Active imagination. ‘Thoughts are like animals in a forest.’ ‘Some intelligent entity … .’ Nelson Palmer solves the murder of Joy Aken. Jung’s patient commits suicide. Ghosts dictate Seven Sermons to the Dead. Jung and the haunted cottage. Jung and the I Ching. Jung on synchronicity. Pauli’s power to cause accidents. My own experiences of synchronicity. Jacques Vallee and the cult of Melchizedec. Rebecca West in the London Library. Camille Flammarion and M. Fortgibu. Helmut Schmidt’s experiments in psychokinesis. ‘As above, so below.’ Can the human mind ‘make things happen’? 6 Memories of the Future Wilbur Wright’s best friend foresees his own death. Wilbur Wright dreams winners. Earl Attlee dreams the winner of the Grand National. Lord Kilbracken wins £450. Peter Fairley develops second sight. Wilbur Wright’s dreams of the future: the red airliner. J. W. Dunne and An Experiment with Time. Dunne’s theory of ‘serial time’. Lethbridge’s dreams of the future. Dunne’s ‘real time’. J. B. Priestley’s theories of time. Ouspensky’s ‘three-dimensional time’. Arthur Osborne’s experiences of precognition. Can the future be altered? Air Marshal Goddard and ‘the night my number came up’. Is the future predetermined? G. K. Chesterton on predetermination. Premonitions about the Titanic. Amazing ‘coincidences’ of identical twins. The ‘Jim twins’. Glimpses of future romance: Arthur Osborne, J. B. Priestley. Parallel time? Priestley’s archives. Woman foresees her son’s death. ‘A dog is going to bark a long way off.’ The ‘super-computer’ theory. Priestley’s ‘three selves’. Wilbur Wright’s theory of time. Robert Morris is killed by a salute. Wilbur Wright’s ‘Fixed Time Field’. The paradoxes of quantum physics. Can a photon interfere with itself? Erratic behaviour of electrons. Einstein exclaims, ‘God does not play dice.’ Einstein proves to be mistaken. Bell’s inequality theorem. Identical twins again. The Allans go to Wotton Hatch. Their ‘time-slip’ experience. Do human beings possess freedom? 7 Minds Without Bodies? Mrs McAlpine’s vision of a suicide. ‘Paralysis’. Robert Cracknell’s experience of ‘paralysis’. Sylvan Muldoon and Projection of the Astral Body. ‘Out-of-the- body experience’. Miss Z reads a five-digit number in the next room. Robert Monroe floats out of his body. Goethe sees his doppelgänger. W. B. Yeats and accidental astral projection. Cases from Phantasms of the Living. Susie Bauer’s experience of astral projection. The girl and the ‘magician’. Cases cited by Camille Flammarion. Arthur Ellison’s experience of ‘astral projection’. Ellison’s experiments in the laboratory. Jack Seale is bitten by a twelve-foot black mamba. He recovers eight days after ‘dying’. Van Eeden and ‘lucid dreams’. The ‘dream body’. Albert Heim falls from a ledge. Caresse Crosby is almost drowned. Lyall Watson’s ‘out-of-the-body experience’. ‘Seeing with the eyes of the spirit.’ Alexis Didier and ‘astral travel’. Didier solves a crime. Mesmer ‘influences’ a man through a brick wall. Doctor Gibert hypnotizes a woman from a distance. Is it possible to hypnotize someone against his will? The case of Timotheus Castellan. The case of Franz Walter. Hypnosis in animals. Lady Abercrombie’s ability to influence other minds. ‘In betweenness’. Robert Monroe visits Andrija Puharich. Divided consciousness. Rosalind Heywood splits into ‘White Me’ and ‘Pink Me’. Sir Auckland Geddes leaves his body. Do we have ‘a whole collection of consciousnesses’? Part Two: Powers of Good and Evil 1 The Search for Evidence My own involvement in the ‘search for evidence’. Screwtape on how to keep human beings stupid. The inability to believe in the unfamiliar when the familiar is at hand. Rimbaud on becoming a visionary. Holidays fill us with courage. The Outsider problem. Can civilization survive without religion? Abraham Maslow and peak experiences. Yeats and the ‘partial mind’. Multiple personality: the case of Clara Fowler. The three faces of Eve. Are multiple personalities doppelgängers? The Doris Fischer case. My panic attacks. ‘Discouragement’. The problem of self-division. The case of Billy Milligan. Max Freedom Long and The Secret Science Behind Miracles. The Huna theory of the ‘three selves’. Doctor Brigham and the ‘death curse’. Doctor Leapsley’s case of multiple personality. Could multiple personality be ‘spirit possession’? Does the soul exist apart from the body? The case of Shanti Devi. The case of Jasbir Lal Jat. Case of Imad. The case of Mary Roff and Lurancy Vennum. William James’s theory of multiple personality. The case of Ansel Bourne. The beginning of spiritualism. The Hydesville knockings. Why Hudson did not believe in spiritualism. Nandor Fodor and the poltergeist. The case of Esther Cox. The Rosenheim case. The Pontefract poltergeist. Guy Playfair tells me that poltergeists are spirits. My experiences in Pontefract. The story of the Black Monk. 2 The Truth About Magic The life of Allan Kardec. Kardec questions the spirits. The success of The Spirits’ Book. Introduction to spiritism. The spirit healers of Brazil. Arigo, surgeon of the rusty knife. Playfair investigates poltergeists in Brazil. Black magic centres. David St Clair is bewitched. The girl who was driven to suicide by a poltergeist. The story of Marcia and the statue of Yemanja. Why the ‘paranormal’ is always unbelievable. My reassessment of witchcraft. The North Berwick witches. Witchcraft in Africa. Was the Rosenheim poltergeist the spirit of a murdered girl? The case of the bewitched housewife. Montague Summers and his views on witchcraft. The Shaman Ramon Medina. Steiner and the ages of civilization. Margaret Murray and The Witch Cult in Western Europe. Stan Gooch on the paranormal. Martyn Pryer is attacked by an ‘invisible entity’. Stan Gooch is seduced by a succubus. The case of Ruth. Gooch’s ‘hypnosis’ theory of apparitions. Guy Playfair and the case of the Enfield poltergeist. 3 The World of Spirits The case that convinced Jung of life after death. The case of Nils Jacobsen. Wilbur Wright sees a ghost. The ghost that shook hands. John Cowper Powys appears to Theodore Dreiser. Are ghosts mental television pictures? The case of the murdered Filipino nurse. The Eric Tombe case. Spirit ‘possession’ and multiple personality. The nuns of Loudun. Walter Franklin Prince’s case of Phyllis Latimer. How James Hyslop came to believe in spirit possession: the case of Frederic Thompson. The cases of Doctor Titus Bull. The case of the ‘possessed’ Arab youth. Bill Slater fights off possession. Wilson Van Dusen and Emanuel Swedenborg. How Van Dusen learned to talk to ‘spirits’. Philip K. Dick is possessed by a benevolent entity. Tibetan spirit possession. Adam Crabtree and the case of Anna Ecklund. Crabtree’s case of Sarah Worthington. The case of the girl possessed by her father. Possession by family spirits. The girl possessed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The case of Marius. Arthur Guirdham on obsession. Ralph Allison and the case of Janette. The case of Carrie Hornsby. The case of Babs. The case of Elise and Shannon. Was ‘Dennis’ a spirit? Allison’s categories of spirit possession. Beyond rationalism. 4 Visions Eileen Garrett and visionary consciousness. Albert Tucker–an unwilling psychic. The woman who sat on his legs. The man in the tweed overcoat. Rosalind Heywood’s psychic experiences. ‘The Singing’. Non-human presences. Eileen Garrett’s career as a psychic. Death of her children. ‘Uvani’. Her increasing dislike of spiritualism. Work in experimental psychical research. An experiment in astral projection. Failure with Zena cards. The haunting of Ash Manor. Paranormal powers among primitive people. The ‘telephone’ system of the Montagnais Indians. Doug Boyd and Rolling Thunder. Rolling Thunder at Leavenworth Penitentiary. Donald Wilson’s story of Hadad. Was Hadad a hypnotist? Daskalos on hypnosis and the Indian rope trick. Daskalos and the Nazi spirits. Daskalos on ‘elementals’. Daskalos takes on the karma of his son- in-law. How Markides was convinced. The story of the vampire. An epidemic of black magic. The demon in the bottle. Daskalos and Skylab. Daskalos on concentration. Communication with Nature. Daskalos and Steiner. Daskalos on reincarnation. The three planes of existence. The ‘borderland’ between two worlds. 5 Completing the Picture Does it matter whether there is a ‘psychic world’? More about mystical experience. Daly King’s experience on a railway platform. Compton Mackenzie on a street corner. The leakage of energy. ‘To be free is nothing; to become free is heavenly.’ Freedom and the peak experience. Barbara Tucker’s experience listening to Beethoven. Albert Tucker and the Museum of Modern Art. What prevents us from experiencing mystical awareness? Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s mystical experience. ‘The great Tragedy — the failure of man to realize his own Divinity.’ Beethoven on the power of music. Focusing the ‘me’. Sex and the peak experience. Daskalos on the two personalities. The problem of ‘upside-downness’. The concept of ‘completing’. Development of the ‘completing’ faculty. Kierkegaard: ‘Take me to see the director.’ The mystic and ‘hidden powers’. John Heron and ‘astral projection’. ‘Protective entities’? Anita Gregory on ‘survival’. Lodge and Conan Doyle. T. S. Eliot on Steiner. 6 Towards the Unknown Region The weak anthropic principle. The strong anthropic principle: the universe had to bring life into existence. Fred Hoyle and the ‘superintendent’. John Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle. The single photon experiment. Is the universe created by observers? The final anthropic principle: life will never die out. Did life come from ‘outside’? The vitalism of Bergson and Shaw. Human evolution. What the mystics say about the nature of the universe. The mystical experience more real than ordinary consciousness. R. H. Ward’s experience under dental gas. The near-death experience. The ‘connectedness’ of everything. Ouspensky’s vision of a flower. The seven levels of consciousness. What are we doing in this ‘wooden world’? The problem of the ‘robot’. Non-robotic consciousness. ‘The spirit that negates.’ Margaret Lane’s experience of schizophrenia. The purpose of language. The problem of ‘doubt’. The billiard balls. What is imagination? The evolution of human creativity. The ‘Outsider’ problem. Why Shakespeare thought life ‘a tale told by an idiot’. The problem of ‘upside-downness’. Grasping the mechanisms of the peak experience. ‘Psychic powers’ are evidence of man’s evolutionary potential. Bibliography Acknowledgements As usual, I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the Society for Psychical Research (particularly its librarian Nick Clark-Lowes), the College of Psychic Studies, and the London Library. Many friends have also provided me with information, pointed out cases I was unaware of, and recounted personal experiences. These include Muz Murray, Nona Coxhead, John Kennedy Melling, Lyall Watson, Lawrence LeShan, Andrija Puharich, Guy Lyon Playfair, Adam Crabtree, William Arkle, Anne Bancroft, Christopher Bird, Douglas Harding, David Peat, Bill Corliss, Bob Cracknell, J. Finley Hurley, Brian Inglis, Mina Lethbridge, Stanley Krippner, Scott Rogo, Peter Russell, John Heron, David St Clair, Ian Kimber, Joan Forman and Joe Gaute. Wilbur Wright’s kindness in allowing me to quote from his unpublished typescript on the I Ching was a major stimulus in the writing of this book. My friend Howard Dossor introduced me to Albert and Barbara Tucker, whose contribution also proved to be of immense importance. I wish to thank Sir Stephen Runciman for information that enabled me to correct Toynbee’s account of his Mistra experience. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Jim Cochrane for endless editorial suggestions and for his incredible patience. C.W. Introduction to the New Edition This is my most important non-fiction book. It was first published in 1988, and unites two main currents in my thinking: the ‘existentialist’ ideas developed in The Outsider, and the ideas that developed from my study of ‘the occult’. Oddly enough, I had no desire to write it. It came about because I was approached by an old friend who had been the editor of many of my early books — among them, The Space Vampires and A Criminal History of Mankind. He was now working for another publisher and wanted to commission another ‘occult’ book from me. I was anxious to oblige, but had no desire to write another book about ‘the occult’. Finally, I allowed myself to be persuaded. In retrospect, I have never been so satisfied with any decision I have ever made. Thirty years earlier, in 1956, my first book The Outsider had appeared, and brought me an overnight notoriety that I found astonishing and exhausting. Since the ideas of The Outsider play such an important part in Beyond the Occult, I must begin by trying to explain them. Ever since childhood, I had been baffled by a strange phenomenon: how we can want something badly, and then feel bored almost as soon as we get it. I had noticed it particularly at Christmas time. For months before Christmas Day, I would look forward to owning some long-coveted toy; yet a few hours after receiving it, I was already beginning to ‘take it for granted’, and even to find it slightly disappointing. I noticed the same thing about school holidays — how eagerly I would look forward to them during the school term, and how easily I became bored with them. I glimpsed the solution to this problem when I was still a thirteen-year-old schoolboy. One day, at the beginning of the six-week-long August holiday, I went to a church bazaar, and bought for a few pence some volumes of an encyclopedia called Practical Knowledge for All. It contained ‘courses’ on every imaginable subject, from accountancy, aeronautics, astronomy, biology, botany and chemistry, to philosophy and zoology. I had been fascinated by astronomy and chemistry since the age of ten, and now I conceived

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.