Strange Powers

  As she described all this to me, I found myself forming a definite picture of what was involved, and realizing that, in a way, it was not so very different from my own teens and early twenties—or, for that matter, from anybody who has this romantic impulse to escape from the world. Thomas Mann's novel Buddenbrooks contains a classic portrait of the 'artist as a young man', and the chapter on Hanno's visits to the seaside—as a child—is particularly powerful: the sense of release, the peace, the delight, the freedom, of wide beaches, seaweed on the rocks, anemones in pools, hours of lying quietly on the sand, 'while you let your eyes rove idly and lose themselves in the green and blue infinity beyond. There was the air that swept in from that infinity—strong, free, wild, gently sighing and deliciously scented; it seemed to enfold you round, to veil your hearing and make you pleasantly giddy, and blessedly submerge all consciousness of time and space.' And I can recall, at fifteen or sixteen, spending evenings reading poetry in my bedroom,while all the tensions gradually relaxed out of the soul, until you felt tired, but completely serene and free, like someone who is convalescing from a dangerous illness. Thomas Mann felt that this capacity for total relaxation, the longing for 'dim hills and far horizons', makes one unfit for normal life; it is almost inevitable that Hanno should die young. Mrs Beattie always been made of stronger stuff; she has always been prepared to live a normal life and work for a living...

  What I am now suggesting—with no certainty of being on the right track—is that the forces that were struggling to find an outlet in her were very much the same forces that produce all literature and art. They seek out whatever channels are available to them. Yeats' imagination turned to fairy lands and the world of the occult. A young Cornishman named Leslie Rowse—from a working-class background—managed to win a scholarship to Oxford, and became a historian, finding in the study of the past the same release that Yeats found his fairy lands. Einstein found the same release in the world of stars and atoms; Freud in the dark waters of the unconscious. But poets and artists and scientists have a path to follow; once they have seen it, all they have to do is stick to it. A girl brought up to feed chickens and tend flowers had no comparable outlet; the creative energies turned inwards. A Freudian would talk about 'compensations', even of sexual unfullfilment, and there I think he would be wrong. Mrs Beattie said wryly that she always thought of herself as an old maid; but she admitted that, as a teenager, and as a nurse, she had flirtations and occasionally went out with boys. She would be unlikely to meet anyone like herself in the hospital milieu; so the lack of interest in sex was basically a failure to find anyone who appealed to her as an ideal.

  In fact, she did marry eventually. During the war—by which time she was working as a district nurse in Liverpool—she met an RAF man in a bus queue just as the sirens were sounding for an air raid; they got into conversation; he saw her home, and eventually, they married. Marriage didn't suit her; it was not what she was looking for. Almost immediately she felt she had done the wrong thing, and her inner life marked time. In 1947, her son John was born. Some two years later, her husband, who had taken a job with the Ministry of Supply, was killed when he was taking a car out on test. 'It was an emotional shock, but I suppose it was a kind of relief as well.' I don't think the comment indicates heartlessness. Her life so far had given her few opportunities for self-expression, self-development—what Maslow would call self-actualization. Work as a nurse was far from ideal, long hours of patrolling wards, changing sheets, emptying bedpans; and being a district nurse, while it was more interesting, was also non-stop hard work. She tried marriage and realized it was another cul-de-sac, as far as self-actualization was concerned (although she was a doting mother).

  From the practical point of view, the death of her husband meant loss of security. She had been working in a hospital (Bootle Maternity) during her marriage; now she decided to become a district nurse again. When John was ten, she decided to widen her field to social work, specializing in children. This was the most rewarding work she had done so far. John was at school in a religious community in Shropshire; she enjoyed social work, and the variety of people it brought her into contact with. The same insight that had enabled her to tell fortunes now made her a good social worker. Finally, she moved to Plymouth—to Freedom Fields Hospital—and became a sister in the maternity unit. She was there until her retirement three years ago. And now, after forty years, she at last had the freedom to pursue her 'habit' (as she once called it): that capacity to retire deep into herself, achieve a state of inner serenity, and then leave the body. At no stage has she regarded herself as a 'psychic' or potential medium; the evolutionary preoccupation has always been there. These 'astral' activities were strictly for the purpose of self-actualization. Her view was confirmed in discussion with Father Trevor Huddleston, who agreed that too much preoccupation with the 'psychic' could place an obstacle in the way of spiritual progress.

  By this time, the skeptically inclined reader will be asking why I should believe a single word she told me, since she offered no 'proof of any unusual power? And I can only say: because most of what she said 'fitted in' to things I already knew or suspected. I was groping my way towards some general theory of 'hidden powers' and astral projection, trying to relate them back to known psychological facts.

  My basic assumption is that we possess ranges of power that we do not suspect. Anybody who has ever bought some gadget—like a tape recorder—knows that it is necessary to read the handbook before you can fully understand all the things you can do with it. If you don't read the handbook, you may have it for years without realizing that a certain button will enable you to superimpose one recording on another, or that a socket is intended for an earphone that automatically cuts out the main loudspeaker... Human beings come without instruction books, and we have to find out our potentialities by trial and error. And since most of us lack the exploratory urge, we never discover all our capacities. To take a simple example: most of us can wake up at a certain definite hour if we have to, as if we possessed some inner alarm clock; but, as far as I know, no psychologist has ever conducted an investigation into this 'power', to find out how it works. Again, we have all experienced 'second wind', the ability to call upon vital reserves; but no one knows where these vital reserves are stored.

  Now the power to 'retreat within oneself is one of our most interesting human capacities. I do not mean simply to go off into a daydream; most daydreaming is a negative thing, a kind of inattention, a 'switching off, a form of loss of memory. On the other hand, a child sometimes becomes so completely absorbed in a book that it is just as if he has retreated to a room inside himself. You can often see it in a young mother breast-feeding a baby; it is as if she and the baby had retreated into an inner-room. In Wolf Solent, John Cowper Powys describes Wolfs 'trick of sinking into his soul', which Wolf calls his 'mythology'.' Powys describes it as 'a device that supplied him with the secret substratum of his whole life'.

  'This "sinking into his soul"... consisted of a certain summing-up, to the surface of his mind, of a subconscious magnetic power which... as he watched the glitter of sun and moon upon the waters from that bow window, had seemed prepared to answer such a summons.'

  In the later novel Porius, Powys invents yet another word for this ability, 'cavoseniargising', which he describes as:

  '... those recurrent moments in his life when the gulf between the animal consciousness of his body ... and the consciousness of his restless soul was temporarily bridged; so that his soul found itself able to follow every curve and ripple of his bodily sensations, and yet remain suspended above them..." (Porius, p. 83).

  This process of self-withdrawal is undoubtedly one of the major unexplored secrets of human nature. And the discovery of psychedelic drugs in the late forties suggested some interesting new methods of exploration. Aldous Huxley was the first to assert, in his two books on the mescaline experience, that man's 'inner landscapes' could be as vast and as varied as the surface of the earth. Since then, the
re have been many attempts to chart this inner world. One of the most interesting—because the most reasonable and logical—is The Center of the Cyclone, by John Lilly. Dr Lilly is a scientist, whose early work on the mind of the dolphin attracted considerable attention. Later on, he experimented with sensory deprivation in a tank of lukewarm water, and experienced dream-like states, trance-like states, mystical states. It was during the course of these experiments that he began to have experiences which could have been delusions, but which seemed to have a certain authenticity: a feeling of apparently being joined by other people in the dark, floating environment, and times when he apparently tuned in on networks of communication that are normally below our levels of awareness, networks of civilizations 'way beyond ours'. He decided to try the effect of LSD—lysergic acid—in the water-tank. He describes how, in this first experiment, there was a sense of completely black, completely silent, empty space without a body. He called it the 'zero point', and says: 'I wish to emphasize that this zero point was not in the body, it was out in the universe of nothing except silence and blackness...' A positivist would say this is just quibbling with words; he was still 'in his body', even if his imagination produced a sensation of outer space. The positivist could be right; but I am not sure. According to Mrs Beattie, this is the state in which the 'astral body' may pass out of the physical body. Is this, perhaps, the meaning of that curious passage at the beginning of Blake's Europe:

  Five windows light the cavern'd Man; thro' one he breathes the air; Thro' one hears music of the spheres; thro' one the eternal vine Flourishes, that he may receive the grapes; thro' one can look And see small portions of the eternal world that ever groweth; Thro' one himself pass out what time he please; but he will not, For stolen joys are sweet, and bread eaten in secret pleasant.'

  The opening lines are clear enough—they obviously refer to the five senses. But what is this 'window through which man can pass out what time he please'? And what is the meaning of the odd line about stolen joys and bread 'eaten in secret'? Is this now Powys' 'cavoseniargising' or 'mythologising', withdrawing deep into some secret place? Is Blake saying that this is the route to passing out of the body?

  The interesting thing about John Lilly's book is that he quite obviously believes that his strange experiences under LSD were more than 'imagination'. And he continues to emphasize the distinction between being 'in' his body and out of it.

  'Then I became intensely exhilarated and went into a high while in my body. I got out of the tank and went out into the sunlight, looking up into the sky, savoring the fact that I was a human being on a planet. For the first time since childhood, life was precious. My body was precious. My feelings of energy and extreme exhilaration continued. I sat and contemplated the wonder of our creation, of the creation of our planet. An hour or so later, I climbed back into the tank and launched into other regions. I had had enough of the vast spaces, the vast entities for a while. Now I attempted to contact other systems of life, more on a level with our own, and yet alien to us. I moved into a region of strange life forms, neither above nor below the human level, but strange beings, of strange shapes, metabolism, thought forms and so forth... The vast variety of possible forms in the universe passed before me.'

  Earlier in the book, John Lilly describes a crucial experience in which he came close to losing his life. In giving himself an antibiotic injection, he also injected a small quantity of detergent into his blood the syringe had not been thoroughly cleaned out; the bubbles lodged in his brain, and he went into a coma. Fortunately, he was taken to a hospital where he was known, and eventually recovered. While in a coma, waiting for the ambulance, he had a sensation of coming into contact with two 'guardians':

  'The pounding headache, the nausea and the vomiting that occurred forced me to leave my body. I became a focussed center of consciousness and traveled into other spaces and met other beings, entities, or consciousnesses. I came across two who approached me through a large empty space, and who looked, felt and transmitted guiding and teaching thoughts to me.' He says of them: 'I realize that they are beings far greater than I. They begin to teach me. They tell me I can stay in this place, that I have left my body, that I can return to it if I wish. They then show me what would happen if I left my body back there—an alternative path for me to take.. .They tell me it is not yet time for me to leave my body permanently, and that I still have an option to go back to it. They give me total and absolute confidence, total certitude in the truth of my being in this state. I know with certainty that they exist... ' And he adds: 'They say that they are my guardians, that they have been with me before at critical times, and that in fact they are with me always, but that I am not usually in a state to perceive them.'

  Again, much of this sounded familiar to me. For example, a man named Ed Morrell, who was confined in a straitjacket in a prison in Arizona. In fact, the treatment—designed to break the spirit of 'tough' prisoners—was to lace them tightly in two straitjackets, one outside the other, and then pour water on them so they would shrink. It was like being 'slowly squeezed to death by a boa constrictor'. But at the height of the pain, he suddenly found himself wandering around outside the prison. Summarizing this case in The Phenomena of Astral Projection, Muldoon and Carrington declare that while 'projecting', Morrell met the Governor of the State, George W. P. Hunt, who was later able to verify what Morrell had seen at the time. Jack London made Morrell the hero of his book The Star Rover.

  Similarly, the medium Ena Twigg (whose contacts with the dead son of Bishop James Pike are summarized in The Occult} has described in her autobiography (Medium) how, as a child of two or three, she could fly up and down the stairs after her body had been put to bed. She was always aware of entities who were apparently invisible to other people; she named these 'misty people'. At the age of fourteen, the 'misty people' told her that her father would be 'with them' in a week's time. Exactly a week later he slipped and fractured his skull, dying a few hours later. But until she was an adult, she remained only vaguely 'psychic'. The turning point came with a serious illness—appendicitis. Under anaesthetic, she was aware of herself suspended above her body, looking down. The operation was not wholly successful; she failed to gain weight after it, and gradually became weaker. One day, three of her 'misty people' walked into the bedroom. They seemed to be doctors; one wrote down what she told him about her symptoms; another gave her an injection in the base of the neck. The mark was there the next morning when she told her husband about the experience. The three 'guardians' came weekly, and her health recovered. She asked them how she could repay them. 'By helping others.' They gave her the address of a spiritualist circle.Cases like this obviously do nothing to disprove or confirm the individual case of Mrs Beattie. A skeptic would say they were all liars or victims of their imagination. On the other hand, if you accept that the sheer weight of the evidence tends to confirm that 'there are more things in heaven and earth' than Bertrand Russell ever suspected, then all these cases will be seen as part of a discernible pattern, and Mrs Beattie's claims fit into this pattern.

  On the second occasion Mrs Beattie came to stay with us, I asked her how she'd slept. She said she hadn't slept much, because she'd had to spend the night helping someone in Sheffield. I pressed for further details. She said she had been 'summoned' to Sheffield, to help someone she had never met; the woman was thinking of killing herself. Mrs Beattie's task was to soothe her by standing beside her and pouring reassuring thoughts into her head. The guiding of the astral body, she said, was achieved by a kind of imaginative willing—a statement that agrees with most writers who have described astral projection.

  Mrs Beatties observations struck me as rather more interesting than most of the accounts contained in Muldoon and Carrington—which are simply straightforward descriptions of out-of-the-body experiences. She is very much preoccupied with the evolutionary aspect of the whole experience. I had hoped to find a consecutive account of her 'cosmology' in the manuscripts; but they moved from subjec
t to subject. But here is a brief outline sketch, compiled from the manuscripts, and from her answers on tape:

  Human beings have three bodies: the physical body, the energy body and the astral (or soul-) body. All our memories are associated with the energy body. After death, the astral body is freed; the energy body remains in a state of quiescence or unconsciousness for three days. The energy body is joined to the physical body at the navel, and has its root in the liver. This body is also called the Ka, the Egyptian word for it. The Ka remains with the physical body to keep it alive when the astral body travels. After death, the Ka gradually disintegrates as the physical body decomposes; its memories are transferred to the astral body at death. In cases of violent death, the astral body finds itself in a grey, misty place and feels confused and lost. Mrs Beattie has also helped to 'guide' these lost souls out of this limbo state. 'Ghosts' are not lost souls, but fragments of the energy body which have not disintegrated. This happens in cases of violent death, when the memory has not had time to be transferred to the soul-body.