Strange Powers

  Back home, she met Joy and my three children. The youngest, then less than a year old, wasn't much interested in strangers, but the other two—aged six and eleven—took to her immediately. My six-year-old son Damon seemed to accept her as a kind of extra grandmother, and lost no time in climbing on her and demanding stories. Obviously, as far as the children were concerned, her 'vibrations' were good. Sally, who had overheard me telling Joy about Mrs Beattie's feats of astral projection, immediately began asking her questions about it. Mrs Beattie answered factually, without evasion or embarrassment. I got the feeling that Sally thought it was all a bit weird, but not 'scary'. As the daughter of a writer, she gets used to meeting all kinds of people.

  There is not much to tell about that weekend. I didn't want to ask lots of questions unless she obviously wanted to talk; and as she seemed quite contented to play with the children and talk to Joy, I didn't press it. It was just a matter of getting to know her, and letting things happen. She didn't seem to have any faddist preferences. She ate meat, and when we took her to the local pub on Saturday evening, she drank Moselle wine with me. There was only one odd event. As she was sitting opposite me, on the settee, her right hand began to jump about, rather in the way your leg twitches if a doctor strikes the knee to test your reflexes. Pointing to it with her other hand, she said: 'Look, someone's trying to get through.' 'Who?' 'I don't know. That's how it usually happens.' She went on talking, and the hand continued to twitch. At this point, Sally, who was watching it with interest, got a pencil and notepad, and asked her to see what 'they' wanted. She took the pencil, and began to scribble, in an odd, jerky way. After thirty seconds or so, she read it, wrinkled her nose, and handed it to me. It certainly didn't seem to make sense. 'Hearken unto me,' repeated three times, and then some such message as 'I am that which is eternal.' (Unfortunately, although we kept the paper, it has got mislaid.) The 'Hearken unto me' made it sound like some religious crank with a desire to be heard, but nothing much to say. I asked her: 'Do you often get messages like that?' She shrugged. 'Sometimes. Sometimes it doesn't make sense.' Over the next few minutes, as she talked,her hand twitched periodically, but she ignored it, as if it was a telephone she didn't want to answer... Which led me to reflect that the 'spirit world' obviously has its nuts and cranks too, its persistent talkers who are convinced they have something of world-shattering significance to communicate, when all they really want is attention. An interesting thought—that perhaps even disembodied spirits may be unfulfilled neurotics... Or is it possible that some of these voices are from Mrs Beattie's subconscious? I suspect she would say no, for the subconscious mind plays a definite part in her system of ideas... I have always been fascinated by the way the subconscious can throw up ideas and images that seem totally independent of the conscious personality. For example, on the edge of sleep, the images and thoughts that wash through the mind seem to be as objective as the sea, coming from somewhere else, not from your own memory banks...

  When I drove Mrs Beattie to the station on the following Monday morning, I still hadn't made up my mind about her. It would have been all very straightforward if she had been one of Yeats's simple, illiterate peasant women; then there would be no doubt that everything she wrote came from somewhere outside her own conscious mind. But she struck me as a fairly acute and astute person, and in much of her writing, she speaks with a direct personal voice—as in the passages quoted above. If these are not 'automatic writing', then where does the personal writing end and the 'dictated writing' begin?

  At which point, it is necessary to make some general comments on 'automatic writing'. And the first thing that must be said flatly is that no spirit message, whether received via a medium, automatic script, or even on recorded tape (as in Constantin Raudive's experiments) has ever said anything of profound importance. As far as I know, there is no automatic script on record that says anything that the actual writer (i.e. the person holding the pencil) would not have been capable of saying. The London housewife, Mrs Rosemary Brown, has produced many piano works which she believes are dictated by dead composers such as Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, and it seems to me highly unlikely that she is a fraud.[1] On the other hand, she has not produced a single piece that can be seriously compared with the best of these composers. If she could produce a piece of Chopin or Liszt as popular as the Minute Waltz or Liebestraum she would convert thousands of skeptics. She is now apparently engaged in taking down Beethoven's Tenth symphony from the composer's dictation; an exciting prospect—but experience tells me that it will be a noisy, pretentious piece with a few echoes of the Fifth and Ninth symphonies.

  In Modern Spiritualism (1902), Frank Podmore (one of the founders of the SPR) has several chapters on automatic writing, trance utterance, and so on. Mrs Cora Tappan of America could produce an incredible flow of words, both in prose and verse, and it usually 'made sense'; but the extracts Podmore quotes never rise above the inspiration, say, of Hymns Ancient and Modern. A spirit who professed to be Francis Bacon asked whether 'in the whole history of written thought there is anything that can approach [his trance utterances] in ' the magnitude of the ideas or the profundity of the thoughts', and a believer, named Tallmadge admitted that 'their equal never proceeded from mortal man'. A glance at some examples of 'Bacon's' eloquence and profundity is a letdown:

  'How glorious that man's destiny! He leaves behind the errors of time, and boldly pushing forward through the untried future, he plants his standard on the very outward wall of eternity, and here he makes his stand... '

  And so on and so on, with the cliches clashing like cymbals. The spirits give no evidence whatever of the kind of sharpness of mind that we associate with genius. It is all woolly and bombastic. One single cutting verse by the spirit of Heine would carry more conviction than reams of pseudo-Bacon. In my own opinion, it requires a certain degree of self-deception to see anything very remarkable in most 'spirit teachings' or messages from the dead. I can think of only one occasion when the results were well above the usual standard: in that curious automatic script that W. B. Yeats published under the title of A Vision. With its complicated explanation of how different types of human character correspond to different phases of the moon, this is a work of considerable fascination. Yeats' biographers generally accept his story that his wife George wrote down most of the book at the dictation of 'spirits'; the fact remains that it is the kind of thing Yeats might have written as an exercise in cosmological speculation, and there is not a word in it that Yeats could not have written.

  Am I suggesting that all automatic writing is fraud? Not for a moment. It is possible that only the subconscious mind is involved—or perhaps the 'superconscious' that Robert Leftwich speaks of. But in that case, it would be reasonable to suppose that all so-called 'spirit phenomena' are purely subjective—springing from unseen depths of the human mind—and the evidence is against that. On the whole, the weight of evidence suggests that communication with the dead explains various spirit messages at least as well as the hypothesis of fraud or telepathy. (I have discussed this at length in The Occult.} So automatic writing finds itself in an embarrassing kind of limbo: never totally convincing, but much too convincing to be dismissed as fraud or self-deception. In most spirit writing (or painting, or, in the case of Rosemary Brown, music) the evidence is on the side of subconscious mental activity. For example, a great deal of 'spirit painting' has more merit—and talent—than the painter is able to call upon when painting normally and consciously; but in view of our tendency to under-utilize our powers (discussed earlier), this is what we might expect.

  So when I settled down to studying Mrs Beattie's manuscripts, I had no expectation of discovering profound revelations. And I didn't find any. But there were a great many keen insights, some of them exciting: 'When Roger Bannister ran the four-minute mile, he made it possible for all men to do it. Since that time, many have done so—the potential for this had always been there, but no one else had tried it; the time had not yet come. So it is with
all things, in the way of evolution.' That struck me as way above the level of the eloquence and profundity of 'Francis Bacon'. It is an oddity that has been observed by writers on mountaineering. First a mountain is regarded as unclimbable; men die in the attempt. Then someone succeeds; and within a couple of decades, Sunday school teachers are taking parties of children up it.

  On the other hand, there were misunderstandings. 'Ouspensky says: "The soul and the future life are one and the same." It is imperative to keep our souls, if we are to win eternal life... ' But Ouspensky was saying something much profounder than that. He meant that man is a fragmented creature with thousands of '/V, all replacing one another minute by minute. How can such a creature have a 'future'? His future is shared out between a thousand selves. In the same way, how can he be said to have a soul? He has a thousand fragments of soul, like a shattered mirror. So to achieve unity (a single 'self or soul) would also entail having a real future.

  On the other hand, the spirit generally pervading the manuscript is close to that of Ramakrishna, the Hindu saint who went into a state of samadhi (ecstasy) at the mere mention of the name 'God' or 'Krishna'. 'Tell yourself that God is good, unchangeably good. That He exists in you, and that without Him you could not exist at all. Feel a desire to unite with Him, so that He may express Himself through you. Feel God as love.' The words are trite, but the overall impression is of a genuine, deep, strong religious impulse, not of someone repeating religious platitudes. There is a strong overall feeling of genuineness.' The insights are real: for example, the recognition that most human beings are hopelessly passive, failing to recognize that 'all power comes from within', and that 'we are weak only when we fail to recognize this'. This is, of course, the same basic recognition as in Robert Leftwich's book. And once I had noted this similarity, I noted many others: the insistence on the importance of discipline and responsibility, for example. She writes of the necessities for spiritual evolution: to lead an ordered life, to keep the body as fit as possible, and not to 'use it to excess', to accept obligations to family and society, and take up a profession according to our capacities. No outsider-ish 'opting out', no

  'Do what you will, this world's a fiction And is made up of contradiction...'

  Again, she agrees with Leftwich that it is necessary to 'retire' in order to be able to devote time to thinking and self-knowledge. 'Since retirement I live a secluded life, a kind of contemplative life. It would not be possible to live the normal everyday working life full-time and to be able to have this kind of inner-experience. This is not possible; which is why, I think, I was able to leave the body only before and after I had ceased to live a full emotional sex life and a full-time working life. All levels of consciousness, as well as the three bodies, have to be in alignment, in harmony, at rest, before real contemplative experience is possible.' Passages like this have a definite sense of authenticity.

  Certain phrases—like the reference to the three bodies—puzzled me. When I asked Mrs Beattie about them, she would refer me back to the manuscript, saying they were explained there; but I couldn't see them, or the explanations were mixed up with other matters, which confused me. So the next time she came over for a weekend, I asked her to sit down and talk into a tape recorder, giving me details of her life, and an outline of her basic ideas.

  Eunice Beattie was born in Bangor, North Wales, and grew up on a nearby farm—which had been in her family for generations. (I was surprised to realize she was Welsh—she has no trace of the accent.) It was interesting to realize she was a Celt. There was a tradition in her family (although she admits she is not sure whether there is any truth in it) that one member of each generation should become a hermit, and a kind of priest. The 'religion', as she described it, sounded like some curious survival of paganism; the family would go to some kind of stone circle near the farm, and perform a harvest festival type of ceremony that involved placing wheat, honey and water on a flat stone which served as an altar. (Note that the harvest festival, as known in English churches today, was introduced in the nineteenth century by the Rev. R. S. Hawker, the poet and smuggler of Morwenstow.) A prayer was offered in Welsh. And just before Christmas, the family decorated a cauldron, known as Ceridwen's cauldron, with holly. This sounds like the kind of semi-pagan survival described by Margaret Murray, although Mrs Beattie insists that it was a simple religious ceremony, nothing to do with witchcraft.

  Her childhood was completely normal—attending school, working on the farm (with her brothers and sisters). She was always lonely, and regarded by the rest of the family as delicate, although she only suffered the usual childish illnesses. It was at sixteen that she had her first unusual experience. One night, just before dawn, she woke up and found herself standing beside her bed, and looking down on her body which lay in the bed. There was a man standing beside her—or rather a figure, whose body seemed to be an area of luminosity. She could only see his head, although this was not particularly clear. This 'man' she refers to as her teacher. He told her that he had brought her out of her body, and that he wanted to warn her that she would have a serious accident within two weeks. Precisely fourteen days later, the brakes on her bicycle failed and she was thrown into a brick wall; she spent several weeks in hospital. I wondered why her teacher couldn't simply have warned her to have her brakes looked at by the local repairman, but she went on a moment later to say that the accident, and the period in hospital, were essential to her evolution. This is an interesting point. Many 'psychics' have started their careers with an accident or serious illness. (In The Occult, I have cited the well-authenticated case of Peter Hurkos, who became psychic after receiving a serious head injury when he fell off a ladder; when he woke up in hospital, he found he could read people's thoughts and 'see' their future.)

  Subsequently, she had many experiences of astral projection. At this point, she explained the puzzling business of the 'three bodies'. There is, apart from the physical body, an electromagnetic (or energy) body, and the 'astral' body (which she prefers to call the emotional or soul-body). The energy body would seem to be what Harold Burr measures with his voltmeters, and what the Kirlian device detects. The astral body is the body that travels—perhaps Robert Leftwich's superconscious. The energy body hovers above the physical body when it is unconscious—or anesthetized. Mrs Beattie said she had often seen this in the operating theatre. (The psychic Phoebe Payne, quoted in The Occult, was also able to see the 'auras' of flowers and animals. The inference would seem to be that people like Mrs Beattie and Phoebe Payne have a sense that can detect the 'energy body' like the Kirlian device.) The aura, in a healthy person, spreads out about a foot beyond the physical body, and it radiates various colors—depending on the consciousness of the individual. When the individual is tired, the aura dims.

  She laid a gear deal of stress on this matter of vital energy. I found it interesting because I had recently been fascinated by an account of experiments carried out at McGill University, as described in Lyall Watson's important book Supernature. Barley seeds were treated with salt and baked in an oven—but not long enough to kill them. They were then planted, and some were treated with water which had been held for thirty minutes per day by a known 'healer'. The plants treated with this water gave appreciably better results than those treated with ordinary tap water. Moreover, when the water was 'treated' by a woman suffering from severe depression, and a man with psychotic tendencies, the growth of the seeds was notably retarded. These experiments by Bernard Grad, which seem to confirm the findings of Harold Burr, also fit the pattern of Mrs Beattie's own insights into the subject of vital energy. (Oddly enough, chemical analysis of the water treated by 'healers' revealed a slight spreading between the hydrogen and oxygen atoms.)

  This led Mrs Beattie to make some comments on negative people and 'vampirism'—the way that some people can drain your energy, so you feel completely worn out after half an hour with them. It was phenomenon, she said, that she had often noted when working on old people's wards. They would ge
t into a thoroughly negative state of mind, and drain the energy of anyone who worked on the ward. I asked her whether the negative attitude causes their sickness, or vice versa. I could guess what her answer would be, and I was right: that most sickness is caused by 'negativity', and begins with the energy body, which then affects the physical body. 'The mind affects the emotions, the emotions affect the energy, the energy affects the physical body.'

  The effect of her accident at sixteen was to give her certain powers of insight, of the same type as Peter Hurkos'. She found that she often knew about people simply by looking at them, and found that by looking at their hands—or the tea leaves left in their cups—she was able to describe their lives and foretell the future. This was 'instinctive', she said—and it sounds, as she describes it, not unlike Robert Leftwich's description of dowsing. At a later stage, these powers diminished, although they never faded. She had no definite idea of what she wanted to do when she grew up—only that she didn't want to marry a farmer and settle down to existence as a housewife. When she thought about it, she was inclined to feel that she would become a nurse or a nun. But by the time she left school, her father had left the farm and moved to Knowsley, near Liverpool, where he took over a market garden on Lord Derby's estate. Eunice worked for her father—tending greenhouses, wrapping flowers. From the family's point of view, the change was a success; her father proved to be a good market gardener, and the business prospered. From Eunice's point of view, it was less satisfactory; after farm life in Wales, she found the English too practical and down to earth. It was lucky that she could work for her father. The out-of-the-body experiences continued to happen periodically, preceded by a feeling of introspection, a desire to 'sink into herself. She told no one of these experiences. She also decided, at a fairly early stage, that it was important to keep these experiences secret; she felt that this was essential if she was to live a normal life. At the age of 22%, she was ready to leave home; she wanted to get as far away as possible. So she answered an advertisement to become a nurse—a probationer—at a hospital at Kingston on Thames. At that time, hospital work was a vocation rather than a career. Pay was minimal; they had to work long hours, and buy their own uniforms. But it was about the only vocation—apart from a nunnery—that suited her temperament. The problem, as always, was simply amount of work involved; she would be so exhausted at the end of a day that there was no time for spiritual adventures.