Afterlife (23 page)

On another occasion, Sacks walked up behind them when they were repeating numbers to one another.
One would say a six-figure number, and the other would savour it, then say another six-figure number.
Sacks made a note of these numbers, and when he got home, studied them carefully.
He discovered that they were all prime numbers — numbers that cannot be divided exactly by any other number (for example, five, seven and eleven).

Now there is an interesting thing about prime numbers: there is no short cut to finding out whether some huge number
is
a prime, except by painstakingly dividing every other number into it.
(Sacks used a book.)

How were the twins doing it?
They could not be calculating them — they had virtually no power of calculation.
The next day, Sacks went to see them carrying his book on prime numbers.
They were still playing the number game, and Sacks joined in, repeating an
eight-figure
prime.
There was a half-minute pause while they looked at him in astonishment, then both broke into smiles, and began swapping eight-figure primes.
An hour later they were swapping twenty-four-figure primes — although even an ‘electronic brain’ would take some time to work out whether such a huge figure is a prime or not.

Sacks concluded that, in some extraordinary way, the twins were
seeing
these huge numbers instantaneously, just as they ‘saw’ the number of matches in the box.
That is to say, they were somehow using the
right side of the brain
instead of the left, as the rest of us do for calculation.
Yet the fact that they are not particularly intelligent seems to demonstrate that this is not some extraordinary form of genius.
It is almost certainly a power which everyone possesses — potentially — but which the rest of us have somehow ‘suppressed’ through the development of ‘left-brain consciousness’.

Myers knew nothing of the right and left hemispheres; he only knew that such powers spring from the unconscious mind
— or, as he preferred to call it, the ‘subliminal mind’.
This is not the modern ‘Unconscious’, derived from Freud and Jung.
Myers’s ‘subliminal mind’ is not some kind of dustbin that contains repressions, neuroses and incestuous guilt feelings.
It is the source of the flashes of intuition that we call genius.
It could therefore be regarded as a kind of combination of the Unconscious mind of Freudian psychology and the ‘high self of the Kahunas, as described by Max Freedom Long.
This view is concisely expressed by Aldous Huxley in a foreword he wrote for an American edition of Myers’s book: ‘Is the house of the soul a mere bungalow with a cellar?
Or does it have an upstairs above the ground floor of consciousness as well as a garbage-littered basement beneath?’ Myers, he goes on to say, takes the view that the human soul has an attic
above
ordinary consciousness as well as a basement below it, and that
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
is ‘an immense store of information about the strange and often wonderful goings-on in the upper stories of man’s soul-house’.
This is, in fact, precisely what makes Myers’s book so remarkable.

What it all proves, according to Myers, is that our powers are far greater than we realise.
If this argument sounds familiar, it is because we have already encountered it in Catherine Crowe’s
Night Side of Nature
.
The difference is that while Mrs Crowe states her facts, and leaves the reader to take them or leave them, Myers wants to make the reader concede that they
are
facts.
Mrs Crowe cites some vague experiment about a hypnotist engaging in a ‘battle of will’ with an animal.
Myers actually took the trouble to make the journey to Le Havre, and witness experiments in which a certain Dr Gibert hypnotised a patient called Leonie from half a mile away, merely by willing her to fall into a trance.
In fact, Leonie resisted; she told the psychologist Pierre Janet: ‘I know very well that M.
Gibert tried to put me to sleep, but when I felt him I looked for some water and put my hands in cold water.
I don’t want people to put me to sleep that way … it makes me look silly.’ And then he goes on to cite a successful experiment, in which — after Gibert had tried to put her to sleep at a distance — they all went and hid near Leonie’s house, and watched her walk out of the garden gate with her eyes closed, and walk towards Gibert’s house.

In her little book
Spiritualism and the Age We Live In
, published in 1859 (just before her mental breakdown), Mrs Crowe had remarked:

But a mere twenty years later, this was no longer true; psychology was quickly becoming a real science, and it was revealing some of those secrets about ‘ourselves’ that Catherine Crowe regarded as the most important of all kinds of knowledge.
This explains the undercurrent of excitement and optimism that runs through Myers’s book.
He was quite convinced — he says as much at the end — that man was at some crucial turning point in his history, and that this new ‘science of ourselves’ would transform human existence as completely as the science of Galileo and Newton had transformed it since the seventeenth century.

What abnormal psychology teaches us, he argued, was that our minds are richer and stranger than we could imagine.
Even Aldous Huxley’s image of a house with an upper storey fails to do justice to Myers’s vision of human personality.
It is more like a skyscraper, with dozens of storeys above ground,
and
another dozen or so below.
His experiments with different ‘layers’ of consciousness seemed to reveal that man has a whole series of ‘basements’ below his ‘everyday self’.
And that in turn suggests that he also has a series of upper storeys above his everyday consciousness.
Moreover, if we think of a case like that of Louis Vivé, we can see that his criminal alter-ego was a more primitive, violent person than the polite, well-behaved Louis, and therefore a step in the direction of the cave-man.
Which also suggests that his undeveloped higher levels are a step in the opposite direction — towards the god.

For Myers, cases like the ones we discussed at the beginning of this chapter — the lady who saw her own ‘double’ standing by the sideboard and the schoolteacher who was continually standing ‘beside herself’ — were not psychological freaks or anomalies; they were evidence of some peculiar power we do not understand.
He cites a typical case of a ‘phantasm of the living’ taken from the Society for Psychical Research’s ‘Census of Hallucinations’.
On a Sunday afternoon in August 1889, a
girl identified as ‘Miss KE’ changed her mind about going to church, and instead spent the afternoon in her uncle’s library, studying his genealogical chart.
But her two sisters, who went to church, saw her walking up the aisle with a roll of paper (evidently the genealogical chart) under her arm.
All three sisters wrote an account of this odd occurrence.

The case is not as unusual as it sounds; there are well over a hundred like it in the ‘Census of Hallucinations’ and
Phantasms of the Living
.
In most of them, it seems clear that the person who projected the ‘doppelgänger’ was thinking about the place where the ‘double’ was seen.
In his autobiography
Legends
, the dramatist Strindberg describes how, when he was dangerously ill in Paris, he experienced a powerful longing to be back in Germany with his wife’s family.
For a moment, he felt he was inside the house, and could see his mother-in-law playing the piano.
Shortly afterwards, he received a letter from his mother-in-law asking ‘Are you all right?
When I was playing the piano the other day I looked up and saw you standing there.’ It is important to note that Strindberg was seriously ill at the time, which suggests that the mechanism involved is much the same as in cases where people on the point of death have been seen by close relatives.

In fact, there is evidence that ‘psychic projection’ can be performed at will.
Although Edmund Gurney was undoubtedly hoaxed by the exuberant teenagers who claimed that one of them had ‘visited’ his girlfriend under hypnosis,
^*
other ‘experimental’ cases are well authenticated.
In 1881, a student named S.
H.
Beard decided to try ‘projecting’ himself three miles, to the house of his fiancée, Miss L.
S.
Verity.
He made the attempt after going to bed on a Sunday evening.
On the following Thursday, he went to see Miss Verity, and she told him that she had been terrified to find him standing by her bedside the previous Sunday.
As the apparition moved towards her, she screamed, and woke up her eleven-year-old sister, who also saw it.
In his own statement, Beard said:

After his studies in hypnosis, Myers found it easy enough to believe in such a force.
If Dr Gibert could hypnotise Leonie from half a mile away, then he was, in some sense, ‘projecting’ himself to her; under different circumstances, he might have made her ‘see’ him.
Myers, like Thomson Jay Hudson, was fascinated by the extraordinary powers of the ‘subliminal’ mind.
One hypnotist told a patient to make a cross at exactly 20,180 minutes after being awakened from the trance, and the patient did it.
Yet the patient was not particularly good at arithmetic.
‘Something’ inside her had carefully counted more than twenty thousand minutes (about fourteen days) then obeyed the order to make a cross.
This is a variation on a power most of us possess — to decide that we must wake up at a certain time, and to wake up at that precise moment as if by an alarm.
If the ‘subliminal mind’ has an alarm clock that can operate during sleep or count the minutes in fourteen days, then the power of ‘projecting’ an image of oneself to some other place seems altogether less extraordinary.
And in our own time, when television transmitters can send images to the moon, it is a great deal easier to accept than in Myers’s day.

Professor C.
D.
Broad, discussing the case of Sarah Hall
^*
— who saw her own ‘double’ by the sideboard — suggests that what she saw might have been her ‘astral body’.
But that seems highly unlikely.
To begin with, most accounts of the astral body state that it cannot be seen by other people.
Secondly, many cases of ‘doppelgängers’ include objects — like the genealogical chart held by ‘Miss KE’ in church; there is no reason why a roll of paper should have an astral body.
In another case cited by Myers, the ‘doppelgänger’ included a horse and carriage, as well as two people.
The Rev.
W.
Mountford, of Boston, described how he was standing by the window, in the house of a friend, when he saw a horse and carriage arriving.
He remarked to his host: ‘Here is your brother coming’, and his host also saw the carriage.
It turned round the corner of the house, to the front door.
But no visitors arrived.
Instead, the host’s niece, Mary, came into the room, looking worried.
She had just walked from her parents’ home, leaving them sitting by the fire; but as she was on her way, their carriage passed by her.
They were looking straight ahead, and ignored her.

Ten minutes later, Mountford heard the sound of a carriage, and said: ‘Look, they’re coming down the road again.’ This
time, the carriage proved to be real.
And its occupants were baffled when told that they had arrived a quarter of an hour earlier, and that they had passed their daughter on the road.

The question Mountford should have asked was whether one of them had fallen into a daydream while sitting in front of the fire, and imagined driving to the brother’s house.
The answer would almost certainly have been yes.

The implication seems to be that the ‘subliminal mind’ possesses a kind of television transmitter, as well as a receiver.
Both Mountford and his host — and niece — all saw the carriage.
Both of ‘Miss KE’ ’s sisters saw her walk into church clutching a roll of paper.
In both cases, the image looked perfectly real and normal.

Another interesting point about the Beard case mentioned above is that, after his first successful attempt, he felt he had learned the ‘trick’, and could then do it at will.
Gurney asked Beard to let him know next time he tried the experiment.
Beard did this on 22 March 1884.
And Miss Verity signed a statement to the effect that, at about midnight, Beard had appeared in her room and stroked her hair.
She passed on this information to her little sister, who also verified it.