Afterlife (9 page)

She goes on to add that she has had several other experiences of contact with the dead, but that they were more fleeting than the contacts with ‘Julia’ and ‘Vivian’, and that it would be monotonous to describe them.
She adds:

In other words, these experiences of contact with the recently dead were due to a desire on the part of the deceased to ‘get in touch’.
Rosalind Heywood merely happened to be ‘open’ enough for them to communicate.

I have considered her experiences at some length because it is important to realise that the experiences of a clairvoyant are
not a series of weid occurrences that interrupt the normal flow of everyday life, but a part of its pattern, its fundamental texture.
In fact, as a ‘psychic’, Rosalind Heywood is not particularly gifted.
On the scale of a Daniel Dunglas Home or Eusapia Palladino — or even of a Gerard Croiset or Robert Cracknell — she hardly rates at all.
She could be described as ‘mildly psychic’, which is why she forms such an excellent subject for study.
She is an ordinary housewife, a typical upper-middle-class Edwardian lady who shares most of the values of her class, and thinks that being psychic is slightly discreditable.
This is why she is always looking for other explanations for her experiences — so that, for example, when she feels foreboding at hearing the name of the swindler, she is inclined to wonder if it is some form of telepathy with her husband.
She even wonders whether, as primitives believe, the name itself could have linked her with the swindler telepathically — then has to regretfully admit that this is impossible because it was an assumed name.
She is unwilling to accept the obvious — if equally baffling — explanation that she recognised the swindler’s name because, in some sense, the fraud had ‘already happened’.
That is to say, her experience was an example of what Professor Joad once called ‘the undoubted queerness of time’.
And in spite of her own abundant experience of ‘clairvoyance’, Rosalind Heywood was the sort of person who was unwilling to believe in the ‘undoubted queerness’ of anything.
She had a strong Victorian prejudice in favour of order and tidiness.

There is, of course, one other possible explanation of her ‘precognition’ — which she is equally unwilling to entertain: that the information came to her from a ‘spirit’.
Yet she has just told an anecdote that brings her face to face with that possibility.
In the early days of the Second World War, she tried using an ouija board, consisting of a pointer, on which the operator rested his fingers, and a semicircle of cards containing letters of the alphabet.
When a doctor friend asked her to demonstrate the board, she decided to rule out the possibility that her unconscious mind was dictating the message by sitting on the floor under the table, with her fingers resting on the pointer above her head.
The doctor noted down the message, and told her that someone called George had warned Frank to drive with exaggerated care for the next two days.
Frank was Rosalind Heywood’s husband, and his brother George had been killed not long before.
The doctor was not even aware that
Frank was his hostess’s husband.
At this time, she explains, she was extremely sceptical about the possibility of life after death (in spite of the experience in Washington with ‘Julia’ — another example of her reluctance to join the ranks of the ‘believers’), and was inclined to wonder if her own unconscious mind was pulling her leg.
With considerable embarrassment, she passed on the message to her husband.
The next day he told her: ‘If I hadn’t driven with extreme care, as you asked me to, I should have had no less than three major accidents today.’

But then, although the ‘spirit’ explanation might provide an acceptable alternative to precognition in the case of the swindler — presumably a friendly spirit would know he was a swindler — it still fails to explain how brother George knew in advance that Frank was in danger of having three car accidents during the next forty-eight hours.
Here, as in the case of her youngest son’s foreknowledge that someone was going to ask him to find a certain street, we have to fall back on Joad’s ‘undoubted queerness of time’.

Is it possible, considering Rosalind Heywood’s experience as a whole, to discern some pattern that might help to provide a basic explanation?

She herself provides one interesting clue.
She seems to have had an unusual susceptibility to beauty.
As a child, she spent some time in India.
She describes her father pointing up to the snow on the mountain tops:

Back at home in England, she often cried when remembering the Hills.
Years later, at a dinner party, she sat next to a Tibetan explorer, and tried to tell him something of what the Hills had meant to her.
‘After a pause he said the two words that of all others I would have chosen to hear.
They were “Those presences”.’

It was after her return from India that she first became aware of ‘lesser presences’, like the old woman in the bedroom of her grandfather’s house.

She describes a number of these experiences of beauty, and their obvious sincerity robs them of any suggestion of ‘aestheticism’ — how, for example, after a fine rendering of Chopin’s A flat Ballade, she experienced a kind of hallucination of ‘a vast marble hall, oblong, with painted walls and the whole of the east end open to the night sky and the stars’.
She also mentions that a very gentle touch on her back — by her husband — brought her back to earth as violently as if she had been kicked.

Her experiences bring to mind an event in the childhood of the modern Hindu saint Ramakrishna.
One day, as a child, Ramakrishna was crossing a paddy field holding a large bowl of rice; when a flock of white cranes flew across a black storm-cloud, the sense of beauty was so overwhelming that he fainted, and the rice flew all over the place.
Later in life, Ramakrishna became subject to moods of ‘God-intoxication’ — ‘samadhi’ — in which he was overwhelmed by ecstary, and would lose consciousness.

The obvious comment to make about such an experience is that it would be highly inconvenient if it happened in the middle of Piccadilly Circus.
We are back to Julian Jaynes’s theory about the ‘bicameral mind’.
Jaynes believes that civilised man
had
to cease being ‘bicameral’ — hearing the voices of the gods — when life became so dangerous and complicated that his chief concern was to keep his wits about him.
Jaynes suggests that this happened as recently as 1200 BC, after a series of catastrophes in the Mediterranean world — such as the explosion of the volcano of Santorini, which practically destroyed Greek civilisation, and the invasion of the destructive barbarians known as the Sea Peoples.
There certainly seems to be a certain amount of evidence for Jaynes’s belief that it was only after this period that cruelty appeared for the first time in human history.
^*

Even if we find it impossible to swallow Jaynes’s belief that the men who built Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid totally lacked what we would call ‘self-consciousness’, it seems clear that he is correct in believing that, at some point in the history of civilisation, man was forced to become a ‘left-brainer’ — that is, to deliberately abandon the warmer, gentler consciousness
of the animal and the child, and develop a ruthless ‘eye to business’.
We might say that ancient man looked at the universe through a kind of telescope, which showed him distant horizons.
Then the increasing problems of survival forced him to develop an instrument much more like a microscope or a watchmaker’s eyeglass, which would enable him to concentrate on tiny particulars.
The result is that he has become shortsighted.
He has ceased to be aware of the horizons.

In fact, he is still capable of this wider awareness — but only in certain moments of deep relaxation.
When this happens, the left and right halves of the brain seem to merge together, and he experiences a sense of peace and serenity, the ‘all is well’ feeling.
But modern man has to
start
from left-brain awareness — our narrow ego-consciousness.
Our remote ancestors could probably plunge straight into ‘cosmic consciousness’ by merely relaxing.

As a result of these evolutionary developments, modern man has a high ‘beauty threshold’.
‘Threshold’ is a psychological term, meaning how much stimulus it takes to arouse someone to awareness.
A man with a high noise threshold can ignore a racket that would drive a more sensitive person mad.
A man with a high pain threshold can have his teeth filled without local anaesthetic.
Ramakrishna’s low beauty threshold meant that any kind of beauty was likely to plunge him into a trance of ecstasy.
And to a modern city dweller, this would be as undesirable as permanent diarrhoea.

Now Rosalind Heywood was very much a product of British civilisation: stiff upper lip, dislike of emotion, cast-iron self-control.
Such characteristics usually entail a high beauty threshold — the English take a pride in being artistically insensitive.
In her case, we can see that this was not so, and that she associated her first psychic experiences with the ‘wind of the spirit’ that ‘blew down on the childish creature’ from Kanchenjunga, and ‘touched something in it awake’.

It may also be significant that when her husband gently touched her back — after hearing the Chopin Ballade — she experienced a shock out of all proportion to the stimulus.
Most people have probably noticed the same thing if they are awakened on the verge of sleep.
In that ‘midway’ state between sleep and waking — the state in which we begin to experience hypnogogic hallucinations — the slightest sound — the mere click of a door closing — produces a pattern of light inside the brain, and a sensation like an explosion.
Rosalind Heywood also describes how she tried one morning to practise a little mind-reading, by floating into a state of deep relaxation and trying to contact the mind of another person in the house.
She describes the sensation as ‘a glorified version of a phase of going under an anaesthetic’.
Then the peace was shattered by ‘agonising thunderous bangs which crashed right through me’.
The bangs continued, and she felt herself returning to physical awareness.
It was her husband tapping on the door to say that breakfast was ready.
When she asked indignantly why he was battering the house down, he answered that he had only tapped gently.
With her lowered sensitivity threshold, she had heard each tap as an explosion like a bomb.
She goes on to speculate whether this is why it is so dangerous to ‘awaken’ a medium from a state of trance — it has been known to cause heart failure.

After his first experience of ‘samadhi’ or ‘God-ecstasy’, Ramakrishna could induce the state at will; he merely had to hear the name of Krishna or Kali to sink into the ‘God-trance’.
We can observe something analogous if we react deeply to a certain piece of music; the first notes of the Liebestod from
Tristan
or the opening notes of a Bruckner symphony can induce a tingling sensation in the scalp, followed by a sudden flood of delight.
Physiologically speaking, it is merely a habit pattern, like a Pavlov dog salivating at the sound of a bell.
What is interesting is that once the brain has learned the ‘trick’ — the route to ecstasy, so to speak — it can repeat it at will.
It entails a certain act of will — a deliberate focusing on the source of pleasure.
If you listen to the music while reading a newspaper or thinking of something else, it doesn’t work, or is appreciably less powerful.
But when the brain and the stimulus cooperate, there is instant relaxation, followed by contact with the inner source of pleasure.

What is beginning to emerge, then, is a theory about ‘psychic’ sensitivity.
It runs as follows.
When I relax deeply, it is as if someone opened up the partition between the two compartments of my brain, turning them into a single large room.
I experience a sense of mental freedom, as if I can suddenly breathe more deeply, and a feeling of
contact
with things.
Everyone has had the experience of being in a state of hurry or excitement, and failing to notice that they have bruised or scratched themselves — until the excitement evaporates and the pain makes itself felt.
Hurry and tension raise our sensitivity threshold, and at the same time, erect a
glass wall between us and reality.
In the ‘unicameral’ state, this wall vanishes, and everything seems more real.