Afterlife (43 page)

In fact, we are always catching glimpses of our real power over the present.
I may be involved in some boring task when a fragment of music creeps into my head, and induces the ‘absurd good news’ feeling.
A smell encountered as I walk down an unfamiliar street — of newly baked bread or roasting coffee beans — may evoke my childhood and induce a surge of sheer
joy.
These moments — Proust devoted a twelve-volume novel to them — are difficult to explain until we can grasp how far we are normally entrapped in the present moment.
It squeezes us and suffocates us, and we have become so used to the feeling that we take it for granted as part of the ‘human condition’.
What the fragment of music or the unexpected smell does is to remind us that the past seemed just as oppressively real as the present — yet it is long gone.
These moments tell us:
You are freer and stronger than you think
.
Hence the surge of pure delight.

When we think about it, we can see that what we call happiness is nothing more than this sense of
not
being trapped in the present moment.
That is why we enjoy holidays and excitement and romance, just as the early balloonists enjoyed soaring up above the ground, and seeing the world from a ‘bird’s eye view’.
Excitement gives us a bird’s eye view of life itself, and seems to neutralise that strange force of gravity that keeps us stuck in the present.

Now this, in fact, is the real purpose of imagination: not to create fantasies, but to make us aware of
other times and other places
.
When it actually happens, we realise that ‘imagination’ is a totally inadequate word for this faculty that can lift us like a rocket out of the present moment, and make us aware that we are, in some curious sense, citizens of eternity.
That is why I have elsewhere coined the term ‘Faculty X’ for the ability to suddenly
grasp the reality
of other times and places.
^*

At the moment, it refuses to work to order; it operates fitfully, when it feels inclined.
Yet when it
does
work, it does so easily and instantaneously, like switching on a light.
Quite suddenly, some moment of the past has become totally real, as real as the present: and we realise that it
is
as real as the present — or rather, that the present does not have some special status of super-reality, just because it happens to be here and now.
We were intended to be the masters of time, not its slaves.

The ease with which this faculty operates suggests that it is somehow encoded in our genes, like our power to walk upright, or the bird’s power of flight.
This is why ‘Faculty X’ brings the feeling of ‘absurd good news’.
It makes us realise that we
already have it
.

And at this point, we may recollect the main thesis of
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death:
that there is extremely
powerful evidence that human beings possess all kinds of unusual faculties of which most of us are unaware, from the extraordinary powers of calculating prodigies and mnemonists (people who can glance at a page of a book and then recite it word for word) to telepathy, clairvoyance and astral projection.
And these powers may, in fact, be closely related to ‘Faculty X’ — for example, the erratic power of ‘projecting’ one’s ‘doppelgänger’, so it can be seen by other people in distant places.
(In the case of the Rev.
Mountford,
^**
we have seen that this included the ability to ‘project’ a horse and cart as well.) Myers’s book is a plea for a new form of psychology to investigate these unknown powers.
When Professor Heim saw his whole life flash before his eyes as he fell down the crevasse, he was discovering something about his brain that he had never even suspected.
The same applies to the Rev.
Bertrand as he lay frozen on a ledge and followed the progress of his students to the top of the mountain.
And when Sarah Hall saw her own ‘double’ standing by the sideboard, and when Rosalind Heywood split into ‘Pink Me’ and ‘White Me’, they were encountering an aspect of human personality that is at present unknown to science.
When Joseph Rodes Buchanan discovered that certain people can ‘read’ the history of an object by holding it in their hands, he was demonstrating that the unconscious mind has access to ‘hidden’ information.
When Alfred Russel Wallace placed a schoolboy under hypnosis, then made him ‘taste’ things by putting them into his own mouth, he was proving that the unconscious has access to other minds.

But perhaps the most interesting discovery of psychical research is that we can develop these powers simply by wanting to.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow made a similar discovery about the ‘peak experience’, the moment of sudden overwhelming happiness.
He discovered that when he talked to his students about the peak experience, they not only recalled many half-forgotten peak experiences, but also began having peak experiences far more frequently.
Thinking and talking about the peak experience had ‘reprogrammed the subconscious mind’, and the subconscious mind did the rest.

Which suggests that the chief problem confronted by the human race is not some appalling form of original sin, some deep and justified anxiety about our place in the universe, or recognition of our fundamental weakness and helplessness.
It is simply the problem of a badly programmed subconscious.
Most of us have allowed the subconscious to become messy and untidy, like a disused playroom that has become a repository for old junk.
It smells rather unpleasant because there are a few ancient fishpaste sandwiches and half-eaten apples lurking under the one-eyed teddy bears and mildewed copies of nursery classics.
Every time we catch a glimpse of the mess through the half-open door, we shudder and hurry past.
Yet it would only take half an hour with a broom and mop to make it one of the nicest rooms in the house.

The whole history of psychical research has been a series of demonstrations of the apparently ‘absurd’ powers of the human mind.
For the scientist, this has always been at best an embarrassment, at worst a scandal.
But it now begins to look as though this may be because he is the slave of his old-fashioned idea of the nature of science.
More than three centuries ago, René Descartes established the method of modern science and philosophy; he called it ‘radical doubt’.
The philosopher, says Descartes, should sit in his armchair and contemplate the universe around him.
He should then proceed to doubt everything that can be doubted.
Does the sun really go around the earth, as it seems to do?
If we question it, we may arrive at the truth.
As to the question: ‘How do you prove your own existence?’, Descartes replied: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ And having established this apparently unshakeable foundation, he felt able to relax in his armchair and turn his telescope on the universe outside his window.

The investigator of the paranormal has no doubt that ‘I think, therefore I am’, but he is inclined to add the disconcerting question: ‘You are
what?’
For this is clearly the question that Descartes overlooked: Who precisely
am
I?
He assumed, naturally enough, that he was René Descartes; that is what it said on his birth certificate.
But every mystic has had the curious experience of realising that he is not who he thinks he is.
In moments of visionary intensity, his identity dissolves, and he becomes aware that it is no more than a mask.
Instead, he is looking into the depths of an inner universe that bears a strange resemblance to the external universe.
And the question: ‘Who am I?’ can only be answered by pointing his telescope inside himself.

In that moment, he realises that the apparent limitation of his powers is due to the limitation of his picture of himself.
In order to expand those powers, he has to expand his knowledge of himself.
He merely has to turn the telescope the other way.