The Essential Colin Wilson

  The sea proved far rougher than expected, and when I attempted to land on a rocky beach, a huge wave picked up the boat and dashed it on the rocks, completely wrecking it. No one was hurt, although we spent a bad half hour dragging the badly holed boat out of the heavy sea.

  I have had two experiences of apparently telepathic response to another person. My first wife and I had been separated for some months in the summer of 1953, although there were still strong emotional links. One evening, in a café in central London, I suddenly felt sick, and had to rush out. I continued vomiting for several hours—in fact, until the early hours of the next morning. A doctor in the hospital where I was then working diagnosed the trouble as food poisoning, although I had eaten the same food as the other porters, and they were all well enough. I learned a few days later, however, that my wife had been suffering from food poisoning—from a bad tin of corned beef—at the time I was sick; her retching had begun and ended at exactly the same time as mine.

  In 1965 I had lectured at St. Andrews University in Scotland, and was driving to Skye. I was feeling particularly cheerful when I set out because the weather was fine, and I was looking forward to stopping at a second-hand bookshop in Perth. But within half an hour of leaving St. Andrews, I began to feel unaccountably depressed. Half an hour later, I asked my wife why she was subdued: she explained that she had had a toothache ever since we left St. Andrews.

  It was unfortunately a Saturday, too late to find a dentist in Scotland. On Sunday morning, the gum was now badly swollen. My own depression continued all day. In Kyle of Lochalsh, on Monday morning, we were told that a travelling dentist would arrive at a caravan sometime during the day; I left my wife waiting while I took my daughter for a walk round the town. Suddenly the feeling of oppression lifted. I said, 'Mummy's just had her tooth out.' We arrived back in time to meet my wife coming out of the caravan, minus an impacted wisdom tooth.

  When my children were babies, I quickly became aware of the existence of telepathic links. If I wanted my daughter to sleep through the night, I had to take care that I didn't lie awake thinking about her. If I did, she woke up. In the case of my son, I had to avoid even looking at him if he was asleep in his pram. When my wife asked me to see if he was still asleep, in the garden or porch, I would tiptoe to the window, glance out very quickly, then turn away. If I lingered, peering at him, he would stir and wake up. This happened so unvaryingly during his first year that I came to accept it as natural. After the first year, the telepathic links seemed to snap, or at least, to weaken. But when they began to learn to speak, I observed that this was again a delicate and intuitive business—not at all a matter of trial and error, of learning 'object words' and building them up into sentences, but something as complex as the faculty with which birds build nests.[1] And again there was a feeling—perhaps illusory—that the child could pick up and echo your own thoughts, or at least respond to them when attempting to express something.

  But, among adults at least, thought-transference must be less usual than feeling-transference. And both of them seem to depend upon the right conditions, a certain stillness and sensitivity. On a still day you can sometimes hear the voices of people miles away.

  In the above-mentioned experiences of telepathy—if that is what it was—the 'transference' was unconscious and automatic, like the crossing of telephone lines. This gives rise to the speculation whether hatred might be transmitted in the same unconscious manner. My own experience of this has been a doubtful one, and I mention it here only for the sake of completeness. I found myself thinking about it seriously when I read the following in Wilson Knight's book on John Cowper Powys:[1] 'Those who have incurred his anger have so invariably suffered misfortune that he has, as it were, been forced into a life of almost neurotic benevolence . . . Powys's early ambition to become a magician was no idle dream.' (p. 62)

  Before moving to Kensington in the autumn of 1952, my wife and I had lived in Wimbledon, in the house of an old man who suffered from asthma; my wife was his nurse. During the six months we lived in the house, he became increasingly querulous and difficult, until there was a perpetual atmosphere of tension like an impending thunderstorm. I am not given to nursing grudges, but the feeling of being steeped in pettiness, of being prevented from concentrating on more important things, produced climaxes of loathing in which I wished him dead. In August we returned from a weeks holiday to find that he had died of a heart attack.

  It was when the situation repeated itself three months later that I found myself speculating idly whether thoughts can kill. The landlady was insanely suspicious, and violent scenes soon became a daily occurrence. Two months later, she visited a doctor, who diagnosed a cancer of the womb. She died shortly after we left the house. I now recalled the peculiar nature of those paroxysms of loathing. On certain occasions, the anger had increased to a pitch that in a paranoid individual would lead to an explosion of violence. But the explosion would be purely mental: a burst of rage and hatred, followed by relief, as if I had thrown a brick through a plate-glass window.

  These mental explosions always had a peculiar feeling of authenticity, of reality. By this I mean they seemed somehow different from paroxysms of feeling induced by imagination. I cannot be more specific than this, but I suspect that most people have experienced the sensation.

  In his Autobiography,[1] Powys writes: 'The evidence of this—of my being able, I mean, and quite unconsciously too, to exercise some kind of "evil eye" on people who have injured me—has so piled up all my life that it has become a habit with me to pray to my gods anxiously and hurriedly for each new enemy.' (p. 480)

  The case of Powys is interesting because of the peculiar nature of his genius. Until he was in his mid-fifties, Powys spent much of his life lecturing in America, and three novels written in his early forties are interesting without being remarkable. Then, in his sixties, there appeared a series of immense novels—in bulk and in conception—beginning with Wolf Solent and A Glastonbury Romance. The most remarkable thing about these novels is their 'nature mysticism' and their incredible vitality; it is clear that he has tapped some subconscious spring, and the result is a creative outpouring that has something of the majesty of Niagara Falls. A Glastonbury Romance (1933) is probably unique in being the only novel written from a 'God's-eye' point of view. The simplest way of illustrating this is to quote its first paragraph:

  At the striking of noon on a certain fifth of March there occurred within a causal radius of Brandon railway-station and yet beyond the deepest pools of emptiness between the uttermost stellar systems one of those infinitesimal ripples in the creative silence of the First Cause which always occur when an exceptional stir of heightened consciousness agitates any living organism in the astronomical universe. Something passed at that moment, a wave, a motion, a vibration, too tenuous to be called magnetic, too subliminal to be called spiritual, between the soul of a particular human being who was emerging from a third-class carriage of the twelve-nineteen train from London and the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause of all life.

  The abstractness of the language here gives a false impression of a book that is anything but abstract; but it also reveals Powys's desire to see his characters and events from some 'universal' point of view in which the algae in a stagnant pond and the grubs in a rotten tree are as important as the human characters.

  One should note the presupposition of this first paragraph, which is present in all Powys's work: that there is a kind of 'psychic ether' that carries mental vibrations as the 'luminiferous ether' is supposed to carry light.

  This I would define as the fundamental proposition of magic or occultism, and perhaps the only essential one. It will be taken for granted throughout this book.

  What is so interesting about Powys is that he deliberately set out to cultivate 'multi-mindedness', to pass out of his own identity into that of people or even objects: 'I could feel myself in to the lonely identity of a pier-post, of a tree-stump, of a monolith in a stone-circle; and
when I did this, I looked like this post, this stump, this stone' (Autobiography, p. 528).

  It was an attempt to soothe his mind into a state of quiescent identity with the 'psychic ether', with the vast objective world that surrounds us. Everyone has had the experience of feeling sick, and then thinking about something else and feeling the sickness vanish. 'Objectivity' causes power to flow into the soul, a surge of strength, and contact with the vast, strange forces that surround us. In a famous passage in The Prelude, Wordsworth describes a midnight boating excursion when a huge peak made a deep impression on his mind, and how for days afterwards:

  . . . my brain

  Worked with a dim and undetermined sense

  Of unknown modes of being; o 'er my thoughts

  There hung a darkness, call it solitude

  Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes

  Remained, no pleasant images of trees,

  Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;

  But huge and mighty forms, that do not live

  Like living men, moved slowly through the mind

  By day, and were a trouble to my dreams. (Book 1)

  Wordsworth, like Powys, had acquired the ability to pass beyond his own personality and achieve direct contact with the 'psychic ether'. But as he grew older, he lost this ability to transcend his personality and the poetry loses its greatness. Powys never lost his power of summoning a strange ecstasy. In the Autobiography he describes how, lecturing on Strindberg in an almost empty theatre in San Francisco, there stirred within him:

  . . . that formidable daimon which, as I have hinted to you before, can be reached somewhere in my nature, and which when it is reached has the Devil's own force . . . I became aware, more vividly aware than I had ever been, that the secret of life consists in sharing the madness of God. By sharing the madness of God, I mean the power of rousing a peculiar exultation in yourself as you confront the Inanimate, an exultation which is really a cosmic eroticism . . . (p. 531)

  And again, in the Roman amphitheater in Verona:

  Alone in that Roman circle, under those clouds from which no drop of rain fell, the thaumaturgic element in my nature rose to such a pitch that I felt, as I have only done once or twice since, that I really was endowed with some sort of supernatural power . . . I felt it again, only five years ago, when I visited Stonehenge . . . The feeling that comes over me at such times is one of most formidable power . . . (p. 403)

  There is reason to believe that Powys did not understand the mechanisms of this power. A strange story was related of Powys and his friend Theodore Dreiser:

  Dreiser said that when he was living in New York, on West Fifty-Seventh Street, John Cowper Powys came occasionally to dinner. At that time Powys was living in this country, in a little town about thirty miles up the Hudson, and he usually left Dreiser's place fairly early to catch a train to take him home. One evening, after a rather long after-dinner conversation, Powys looked at his watch and said hurriedly that he had no idea it was so late, and he would have to go at once or miss his train. Dreiser helped him on with his overcoat, and Powys, on his way to the door, said, 'I'll appear before you, right here, later this evening. You'll see me.'

  'Are you going to turn yourself into a ghost, or have you a key to the door?' Dreiser laughed when he asked that question, for he did not believe for an instant that Powys meant to be taken seriously.

  'I don't know,' said Powys. 'I may return as a spirit or in some other astral form.'

  Dreiser said that there had been no discussion whatever during the evening, of spirits, ghosts or visions. The talk had been mainly about American publishers and their methods. He said that he gave no further thought to Powys's promise to reappear, but he sat up reading for about two hours, all alone. Then he looked up from his book and saw Powys standing in the doorway between the entrance hall and the living room. The apparition had Powys's features, his tall stature, loose tweed garments and general appearance, but a pale white glow shone from the figure. Dreiser rose at once, and strode towards the ghost, or whatever it was, saying, 'Well, you've kept your word, John. You're here. Come on in and tell me how you did it.' The apparition did not reply, and it vanished when Dreiser was within three feet of it.

  As soon as he had recovered somewhat from his astonishment Dreiser picked up the telephone and called John Cowper Powys's house in the country. Powys came to the phone, and Dreiser recognized his voice. After he had heard the story of the apparition, Powys said, 'I told you I'd be there, and you oughtn't to be surprised.' Dreiser told me that he was never able to get any explanation from Powys, who refused to discuss the matter from any standpoint.[1]

  Why should Powys refuse to discuss it from any standpoint? Because he had no idea of how he had done it and could not describe the process. It depended on the nature of the psychic link between himself and Dreiser: 'I used to be aware . . . of surging waves of magnetic attraction between Dreiser and myself. . . which seem super-chemical and due to the diffusion of some mysterious occult force. . . ' The appearance was probably in Dreiser's own mind; another person in the room would not have seen it.

  It may sound contradictory to say that Powys had no idea of how he had projected his 'apparition'; but it is not. For we are now concerned with the fundamental question of conscious control of the subconscious mind. All my physical functions, from digestion to excretion, are controlled by my subconscious depths. If I am of a nervous disposition, I may find it impossible to urinate in a public lavatory with other people standing near; no amount of conscious effort can destroy the inhibition; I need to relax and let my subconscious do the work. Stendhal suffered from an embarrassing sexual disorder which he called le fiasco. Whenever his sexual excitement reached the point at which he was prepared to make love, he would experience an embarrassing collapse of the ability to do so. No amount of conscious desire to oblige his disappointed partner could make any difference. If I try to remember a name I have forgotten, I again rely on my subconscious to 'throw it up', although in this case I may be able to dispense with its help: I may look up the name in my address book, or get at it by some trick of association of ideas.

  There is no reason why a man should not learn the basic 'tricks' of telepathy, or even 'astral projection', as he might train his memory to greater efficiency or get rid of urinatory inhibition by auto-suggestion. He would still not be able to explain it, even to his closest friend.

  Serious emotional upset can also stimulate the 'psychic faculties'. The case of the playwright Strindberg provides an interesting example. The break-up of his second marriage precipitated an emotional crisis in which he came close to insanity. He suffered delusions of persecution, all of which are described at length in his autobiographical volume Inferno. The result was an unlooked-for development of psychic powers that parallels the case of Peter Hurkos. In Legends[1], he describes an involuntary astral projection:

  [in the autumn of 1895] I was passing through a dangerous illness in the French capital, when the longing to be in the bosom of my family overcame me to such a degree that I saw the inside of my house and for a moment forgot my surroundings, having lost the consciousness of where I was. I was really there behind the piano as I appeared, and the imagination of the old lady had nothing to do with the matter. But since she understood these kind of apparitions, and knew their significance, she saw in it a precursor of death, and wrote to ask if I were ill. (1912 edition, p. 86)

  What is so interesting about this brief account is that Strindberg's power of astral projection was connected with the imagination. He clearly imagined the room in which his mother-in-law was sitting, playing the piano, and the intensity of his imaginative vision somehow 'projected' him into the real room. He had used the 'psychic ether' as he might have used a telephone or closed-circuit television.

  In the same volume he describes an event that may have even deeper significance. In the early hours of the morning, in a period of emotional strain he was sitting in a wine shop, trying to persuade a young frien
d not to give up his military career for that of an artist.

  After arguments and endless appeals, I wished to call up in his memory a past event that might have influenced his resolve. He had forgotten the occurrence in question, and in order to stimulate his memory, I began to describe it to him: 'You remember that evening in the Augustiner tavern.' I continued to describe the table where we had eaten our meal, the position of the bar, the door through which people entered, the furniture, the pictures . . . All of a sudden, I stopped. I had half lost consciousness without fainting, and still sat in my chair. I was in the Augustiner tavern, and had forgotten to whom I spoke, when I recommenced as follows: 'Wait a minute. I am now in the Augustiner tavern, but I know very well that I am in some other place. Don't say anything . . . I don't know you anymore, yet I know that I do. Where am I? Don't say anything. This is interesting.' I made an effort to raise my eyes —I don't know if they were closed—and I saw a cloud, a background of indistinct colour, and from the ceiling descended something like a theatre curtain; it was the dividing wall with shelves and bottles.

  'Oh yes!' I said, after feeling a pang pass through me. 'I am in F's wine shop.'

  The officer's face was distorted with alarm, and he wept.

  'What is the matter?' I said to him.

  'That was dreadful,' he answered. (pp. 92-93)

  We may, of course, dismiss the whole thing as Strindberg's imagination, excited by emotional stress. On the other hand, this event is consistent with the theory of 'psychic faculties' that I have tried to outline, and has the ring of truth. (Strindberg is a remarkably honest man, in spite of his neuroses, as the reader discovers when it is possible to check his version of events against someone else's.) Again, he was exhausted—physically and emotionally. He was pushing himself to his limits as he exerted his powers of persuasion. And, as he remarks in the same book: 'In the great crises of life, when existence itself is threatened, the soul attains transcendent powers.'