In a way, Fleishman was easier to convince than Reich had been. To begin with, he had studied philosophy at college, and had done a term on Wilson and Husserl. And then, our PK demonstrations were particularly convincing. Fleishman had bought a ball made of coloured leather to take back for his granddaughter; Reich made this bounce all round the room. I exerted my powers and made a book float across the room, as well as holding a wasp buzzing angrily on the table, unable to move. As we went on explaining, Fleishman kept saying: ‘My God, it all fits in.’ One of the central concepts of his psychology is what he calls ‘the tax on consciousness’. We were able to show him that this ‘tax’ is mostly imposed by the mind parasites.
Fleishman was our first pupil. We spent the whole day trying to teach him all we knew: how to sense the presence of the parasites, how to close the mind to them when they seem to be present. More than that was not necessary. He saw the main implication immediately: that by a kind of trick, man has been prevented from taking possession of a territory that belongs to him by right: the country of the mind; and that once an individual knows this with complete certainty, there is nothing whatever to prevent him from claiming his right. The veil of fog lifts, and man becomes a traveller in the mind as he has become a traveller on sea and in the air and in space. What he then does is up to himself. He can simply make brief pleasure trips into this new land, or he can set out to map it. We explained why, at present, we dared not use psychedelic drugs, and we told him of what we had been able to add to the realms of phenomenology.
We ate a large lunch—the morning’s work had made us all ravenous—and afterwards it was Fleishman’s turn to talk. As a psychologist, he knew many who had asked the same questions as himself. There were two more in Berlin: Alvin Curtis, of the Hirschfeld Institute, and Vincent Gioberti, one of his own ex-students, now a professor at the university. He told us of Ames and Thomson in New York, and Spencefield and Alexey Remizov at Yale, of Shlaf, Herzog, Klebnikov and Didring at the Massachusetts Institute. It was also at this point that he mentioned the name of Georges Ribot, the man who would almost destroy us…
It was also during the course of that afternoon that we first heard the name of Felix Hazard. Reich and I knew little about modern literature, but Hazard’s sexual preoccupations had naturally interested Fleishman. We learned that Hazard had a high reputation among the avant garde for his curious blend of sadism, science fiction and world-weary pessimism. He was apparently paid a regular sum by a Berlin nightclub that catered for perverts, simply to come and sit there for a stated number of hours every month and be admired by the clientele. Fleishman described some of Hazard’s work to us, and added the interesting information that he had begun life as a drug addict, but now claimed to have cured himself. Everything he told us about Hazard seemed to indicate that this man was another ‘zombi’ of the mind parasites. Fleishman had met him only once, and had found it an unpleasant experience. He said that he had written in his diary: ‘Hazard’s mind is like a newly opened grave’, and that he had been strangely depressed for days after meeting him.
The question now arose: should we work closely together, or should we leave Fleishman to use his own discretion about making allies? We agreed that this latter might be a dangerous course: it would be better if all three of us could make such decisions together. On the other hand, there might be less time than we thought. The important thing was to gather a small army of men of high intellectual standing. Every one we added to our ranks made the task easier. Fleishman had been easy to convince because there were two of us. When there were enough of us, the whole world should be easy to convince. And then the real battle would commence…
In the light of what happened, it seems incredible that we could have been so confident. But it must be remembered that luck had been with us all the way, so far. And we had come to believe that the parasites were helpless against men who knew of their existence.
As we took Fleishman to his plane that evening, I remember him looking at the crowds in the brilliantly lit streets of Ankara, and saying: ‘I feel as if I’d died over the weekend and been born a different person…’ And in the air terminal, he remarked: ‘It’s strange, but all these people strike me as being asleep. They’re all somnambulists.’ We knew then that we had nothing to worry about where Fleishman was concerned. He was already taking possession of the ‘country of the mind’.
And now things began to happen so swiftly that whole weeks seem a blur of events. Three days later, Fleishman was back to see us with Alvin Curtis and Vincent Gioberti. He arrived on Thursday morning, and left at five o’clock on Thursday evening. Curtis and Gioberti were all we could have wished, particularly Curtis, who seemed to have approached the problem through the study of existential philosophy, and who had come very close to suspecting the existence of the parasites through his own researches. Only one thing disturbed us. Curtis also mentioned Felix Hazard, and strengthened our suspicion that Hazard could be a direct agent of the parasites, a ‘zombi’ whose mind had been completely taken over when he was in a drug-stupor. Apparently Hazard produced on many people a curious effect of evil, which neurotic young girls found stimulating. On Curtis, he had produced the same disturbing effect as on Fleishman. But what was worse, Hazard had twice sneered at Curtis’s work in an avant garde magazine published in Berlin. Curtis had to be more careful than the rest of us; he was already suspect in the eyes of the parasites.
If we had not been fools, we would have arranged to have Hazard killed. It would not have been difficult. Fleishman had already developed rudimentary PK powers, and a little more training would strengthen them to a point where he could steer Hazard under a passing car—driven by Curtis or Gioberti. As it was, we felt the usual compunction. It was hard to realize that Hazard was already dead and that it was only a question of making his body useless to the parasites.
During the next three weeks, Fleishman came every weekend, always bringing a new ally with him—Spencefield, Ames, Cassell, Remizov, Lascaratos (of Athens university), the Grau brothers, Jones, Didring, and our first woman recruit, Sigrid Elgström of the Stockholm Institute. All passed through our hands in a space of twenty days. My feelings about it all were mixed. It was a relief to feel that the secret was spreading, and that Reich and I were no longer its sole custodians; but I was always afraid that someone might make a mistake and alert the parasites. Although I had convinced myself that they were not really dangerous, some instinct told me the importance of continued secrecy.
Some of the developments were extremely exciting. The Grau brothers, Louis and Heinrich, had always been close together, and already possessed a certain ability to communicate telepathically. They now outstripped us all in psycho-kinetic powers, and revealed that we might be underestimating the importance of PK. I was present in the antiquities room of the British Museum when they moved a marble block weighing thirty tons, by concentrating in unison. The only others present were Iannis Lascaratos, Emlyn Jones, Georges Ribot, Kenneth Furneaux (the director of the archaeology section, whom I had ‘initiated’) and myself. The brothers explained that they did this by somehow reinforcing one another’s efforts in a pulse rhythm. At the time, we were completely incapable of understanding them.
Before I go on to describe the first disaster that overtook us, I should say something more about PK, since it plays a part in my narrative. It was, of course, a simple and natural consequence of the new purpose given us to fight against the parasites. The first thing I realized when I started practising Husserlian disciplines was that human beings have been overlooking an extremely simple secret about existence, although it is obvious enough for anyone to see. The secret is this: that the poor quality of human life—and consciousness—is due to the feebleness of the beam of attention that we direct at the world. Imagine that you have a powerful searchlight, but it has no reflector inside it. When you turn it on, you get a light of sorts, but it rushes off in all directions, and a lot of it is absorbed by the inside of the searchlight. Now if you i
nstall a concave reflector, the beam is polarized, and stabs forward like a bullet or a spear. The beam immediately becomes ten times as powerful. But even this is only a half measure, for although every ray of light now follows the same path, the actual waves of light are ‘out of step’, like an undisciplined army walking along a street. If you now pass the light through a ruby laser, the result is that the waves now ‘march in step’, and their power is increased a thousand-fold—just as the rhythmic tramping of an army was able to bring down the walls of Jericho.
The human brain is a kind of searchlight that projects a beam of ‘attention’ on the world. But it has always been like a searchlight without a reflector. Our attention shifts around from second to second; we do not really have the trick of focusing and concentrating the beam. And yet it does happen fairly often. For example, as Fleishman observed, the sexual orgasm is actually a focusing and concentrating of the ‘beam’ of consciousness (or attention). The beam of attention suddenly carries more power, and the result is a feeling of intense pleasure. The ‘inspiration’ of poets is exactly the same thing. By some fluke, some accidental adjustment of the mind, the beam of attention is polarized for a moment, and whatever it happens to be focused on appears to be transformed, touched with ‘the glory and the freshness of a dream’. There is no need to add that so-called ‘mystical’ visions are exactly the same thing, but with an accidental touch of the laser thrown in. When Jacob Boehme saw the sunlight reflected on a pewter bowl, and declared that he had seen all heaven, he was speaking the sober truth.
Human beings never realize that life is so dull because of the vagueness, the diffuseness, of their beam of attention—although, as I say, the secret has been lying at the end of their noses for centuries. And since 1800, the parasites have been doing their best to distract them from this discovery—a discovery that should have been quite inevitable after the age of Beethoven and Goethe and Wordsworth. They achieved this mainly by encouraging the human habit of vagueness and the tendency to waste time on trivialities. A man has a sudden glimpse of a great idea; for a moment, his mind focuses. At this point, habit steps in. His stomach complains of being empty, or his throat complains of dryness, and a false little voice whispers: ‘Go and satisfy your physical needs, and then you’ll be able to concentrate twice as well’. He obeys—and immediately forgets the great idea.
The moment man stumbles on the fact that his attention is a ‘beam’, (or, as Husserl put it, that consciousness is ‘intentional’) he has learned the fundamental secret. Now all he has to learn is how to polarize that beam. It is the ‘polarized’ beam that exerts PK effects.
Now, what the Grau brothers had discovered, quite accidentally, was how to use each other’s minds as ruby lasers, to ‘phase’ the beam. They were by no means expert at it; they wasted about 99% of the beam’s power. But even the remaining 1% was enough to move thirty tons with the greatest of ease. It would have been enough to move a block weighing five hundred tons if we had had one available.
And now to the night of October the 14th, when catastrophe struck us. I have no way of knowing who was responsible for alerting the parasites. It was probably Georges Ribot, a rather strange little man who had been initiated by Gioberti. Ribot had written various books on telepathy, magic, spiritualism, and so on, with titles like The Hidden Temple and From Atlantis to Hiroshima, and founded the magazine Les Horizons de L’Avenir. It would perhaps be unfair to say that Gioberti showed a lack of judgement in choosing him. Ribot was a man of keen intellect and a good mathematician. His books revealed that he had come very close to suspecting the existence of the mind parasites. On the other hand, they were too speculative, not sufficiently scientific. He would pass from Atlantis to atomic physics, from primitive tribal ceremonies to cybernetics. He would spoil a sound argument on evolution by dragging in some unverified ‘fact’ from spiritualist literature. He would cite cranks and scientists in the same footnote. He came to Diyarbakir especially to see me—a small man with a thin nervous face and intensely penetrating black eyes. He gave me an immediate sense of being less reliable than the others I had met, in spite of his intelligence and knowledge. His movements were too nervous and fast. I had a feeling that he was less stable than the others, less mentally secure. Reich expressed this by saying: ‘He’s not indifferent enough.’
At ten o’clock at night, I was making notes in my room. I suddenly had that ‘shivery’ feeling that told me that the parasites were present. It was exactly as in my Percy Street rooms. I surmised that they were making some kind of periodic check on me, so I simply merged my new personality into my old one, and began to think about a chess problem. I deliberately thought in slow-motion, examining each aspect of the problem minutely, although my mind could have leapt to a conclusion instantly. Halfway through, I allowed my thoughts to be distracted, and got up to get myself a fruit juice. (I had ceased to drink alcohol; the stimulus could now be achieved quite easily by a momentary act of concentration.) Then I pretended that I had lost my grip on the problem, and started laboriously from the beginning. After half an hour or so of this, I yawned and allowed my mind to grow tired. All this time, I remained aware that they were watching me, and at a deeper level of consciousness than in Percy Street. A year ago, I would not even have experienced depression under such observation; it was completely outside the range of conscious or unconscious awareness.
After I had been in bed for ten minutes, I realized they had gone, and began to speculate on what they could have done to me if they had decided to ‘attack’. It was difficult to tell, but I felt that my mind was strong enough to repulse an exceptionally strong attack.
At midnight, my screen rang. It was Reich, and he looked worried.
‘Have they been to you?’
‘Yes. They went an hour ago.’
Reich said: ‘They only just left me. It’s my first real experience of them, and I don’t like it. They’re stronger than we thought.’
‘I don’t know. I think it’s some kind of routine check up. Did you manage to hide your thoughts?’
‘Oh, yes. Luckily I was working on these Abhoth inscriptions, so I simply had to concentrate on them and think at half speed.’
I said: ‘Ring me if you need any help. I think we might try putting our minds in phase, like the Grau brothers. It might work.’
I went back to sleep. I even took the precaution of allowing my consciousness to drift into sleep, in the old way, instead of shutting it off like a light.
I woke up from sleep with a feeling of oppression like a hangover, or the beginnings of some illness. My mind felt rusty and cramped, as my body might have felt cramped if I had fallen asleep in a cold and damp spot. Instantly, I knew that the time for bluff was over. They had moved in quietly while I was asleep, and had me prisoner. I was like a man held tightly by both arms and legs.
Now it had happened, it was not as unpleasant as I had expected. Their actual presence was not disgusting, as I had always believed. It was alien, and had an element that I might describe as ‘metallic’.
I had no idea of resisting. For the moment, I was like a man under arrest whose best chance of survival depends on pleading to his captors that they are mistaken. So I reacted just as I would have reacted a year ago: with a certain fear, with bewilderment, but with a fundamental lack of panic, a certainty that it was some oppression that I would throw off with a dose of aspirin. I let my mind search my actions during the previous day to try to account for this feeling of illness.
For about half an hour, nothing else happened. I simply lay there, quite passive and not too worried, wondering if they would relax. I felt that I could exert my strength if necessary, and throw them off.
Then I began to realize that this was no use. They knew that I knew; they knew I was playing possum. And, as if they sensed my realization, a new stage began. They began to put pressure on my mind, the kind of pressure that would simply have driven me insane in the old days. Just as physical nausea produces a sense of physical oppre
ssion, so their pressure produced a sense of mental oppression, a kind of nausea.
I obviously had to resist, but I decided not to show my hand yet. I resisted passively, as if I were not even aware of their pressure. They probably had a sensation of trying to move a hundred ton block by pushing it. The pressure increased, and I felt quietly confident. I knew I had the strength to resist fifty times this much.
But half an hour later, I felt as though my mind was supporting a load the size of Mount Everest. I still had plenty of reserve strength, but if this carried on, I might exhaust it. There was nothing but to show my hand. So with an effort like a man bursting his bonds, I threw them off. I focused the beam of my attention to about the intensity of a sexual orgasm, and blasted it at them. I could have increased it to ten times that amount, but I still wanted to keep them guessing about my strength. I was still calm and unpanicked. In a sense, I was almost enjoying this contest. If I won, it meant that in future I did not have to limit my strength carefully, because they now knew in any case.
The result of my first effort was disappointing. The weight vanished and they scattered; but I had a feeling that they were unhurt. It was like trying to hit shadows. It would have been infinitely satisfying to feel that I’d hit them, like a boxer landing a punch; but obviously, I hadn’t.
Their attack commenced again immediately. This time, it was so sudden and violent that I was forced to parry it from an unprepared position. One might say that I was like a householder facing an attack from a horde of tramps. I had a feeling that these things belonged to some ‘lower’ order, that they were a kind of vermin that had no right in my mind. Like rats from sewers, they had decided that they had the strength to attack, and it was my business to show them that they would not be tolerated. I was not afraid; I felt that they were on my ‘territory’. As they came back, I lashed out at them, and felt them scatter again.