Second Sight (21 page)
Authors: Neil M. Gunn
“I think I can imagine it, yes,” said Helen.
“Now if you were capable of moving in the fourth dimensional world you would be able to interfere with the third, just as I in the third interfered with the bug in the second; that is, from outside you could suddenly appear in our midst, though doors and windows are all closed. But it would be no miracle to you or to any of your fourth-dimensional friends. You would all smile at our astonishment, at our terrorâgently, let us hope.”
Helen looked so thoughtful that some of the others smiled, and laughed when she said, “I thought for a moment I got a glimmer of it.”
“To finish with it,” said Colonel Brown: “you get the fourth dimension by adding to the dimensions of length, breadth, and thickness, the dimension of time. In the fourdimensional, you should be able to look along the dimension of time, just as we can look along the dimension of a straight line. If I put my finger there on the edge of the white cloth and call the spot
Now
, I can see not only the
past
part of the line extending up to my finger but the
future
part extending beyond it. In the same way, a person in the fourth dimensional world could not only see the
past
on our line of time up to
Now
but also the
future
beyond it. And I have only to lift the square of linen”âa twinkle came into his eyeâ“and place it over the slow curve of this arm of my chair, and we should be right bang into curved time. In short, what appears to happen in second sight is that you enter the world of four dimensions and so quite naturally see the future.”
“But does that mean that the future is rigidly determined?” Harry asked.
“That is even more difficult,” said Colonel Brown, as he blew out the match with which he had re-lit his pipe. “I cannot go into it. The mathematics of the situation, taking the serial, multi-dimensional view into account, would appear to permit of interference with foreseen events. Complete free will is as meaningless as complete determinism. Intervention in the limited sense that applies to all reality as we know it is possible to us in our dimension. I must leave it at thatâor else borrow a blackboard and Mr. Dunne's diagrams.”
“But does that mean that if I foresaw something that was about to happen, I could take steps to prevent its happening?” Harry persisted.
“It would appear that if you did your best, you might achieve a considerable degree of prevention.”
Geoffrey laughed loudly and for quite a time.
“I admit,” said Mr. Blair, “that is where I, too, get stumped.”
Colonel Brown enjoyed the mirth, even if Geoffrey's appeared to be unduly excessive for a social occasion. He said to his host, “But we are always in the process of getting stumped. That's the normal condition in evolution. If you had said to a scientist before Röntgen's day that you were hoping to take a photograph in a dark room, he would have proved to you quite conclusively the impossibility of doing soâassuming he was tolerant enough not to suggest a mental home. Yet photographs are now taken in dark rooms. We can even photograph a pin inside your stomach without putting you to the trouble of taking off your clothes.”
“But that's quite logical.”
“Yesâ
now that you understand the process
.”
“What do you think of all this, Mr. Smith?” asked Mr. Blair.
“I think it is the modern type of fairy story. Nothing more. The sort of pretty thing that looks valid to please our primitive appetite for wonders.”
“I don't see anything very pretty about second sight,” said Harry. “But apart from thatâhow do you explain the vision of the watch?”
“I should not think of attempting any explanation”, said Geoffrey, “until I had an opportunity of testing such an alleged vision under laboratory conditions.”
“But surely”, said Colonel Brown, “it is clear that you cannot produce a psychical state and lay it on a bench as you would a lump of matter?”
“Manifestly,” said Geoffrey. “You usually put it on a couch and psycho-analyse it.”
George laughed. Old Geoff was doing damned well!
“Is it not possible that we are confusing two quite different things,” said the Dean, “as different as physics and psychology? The one deals with matter; the other with mind. Each functions in its own way and has its own quite different conceptions and laws. Our
appreciation
of colour, of sound, of all sensory things, not to mention abstract things like love and hate, is not the concern of physics. For these things we have a separate science which we call psychology. There is a certain interrelation, inasmuch as the material body is an instrument for expressing psychical qualities. But no physicist could ever deduce from my grey matter my conception of beauty or horror or joy or pain. Yet these are precisely the qualities that are very important to me, to all mankindâand would be even if we were incapable of appreciating anything beyond sensual reactions. To us they are life and hope; they are
being
. Very well, that being so, they are to us the most important
facts
in the everyday process of living. Now let us test that by taking the extreme case; let me say, even for the purpose of discussion, that I am a mystic, that I believe in what is called mysticism. I am probably right in thinking that at once Mr. Smith gives me up in despair. Am I right?”
“Wellââ” said Geoffrey, smiling awkwardly.
“I understand. You would rather not appear to be rude, and if you spoke your mind straightforwardly you might sound very rude indeed!”
The gentle humour was appreciated and Geoffrey laughed.
“Yet consider,” said the Dean. “Your mystic is no more an abnormal person than is a great scientist, or a great artist. Like them, he is a person who has gone through a long and difficult training in an effort to achieve certain results. He is a man who has taken the trouble to investigate by personal experience certain psychic processes, and he can tell you, so far as language can communicate to you his meaning, the nature of the results he has achieved.”
“And what when his language fails, which seems to be the difficulty?” asked Geoffrey.
“Well, he can't help that. I see you shrug, but think. Assuming you had to explain to a man who was born blind the
redness
of the port in your glass, could you do it? Could you get him to apprehend
redness
as you and I apprehend it?”
Geoffrey was forced to admit that he could not.
“Similarly, if you cannot understand the state of mind the mystic attempts to describe to you, the fault may not lie altogether with the mystic. Now just as the scientist goes on making discoveries about matter, so the mystic goes on making discoveries about the powers of the mind, until he is able to do things with it comparable to what the taking of photographs in a dark room was to pre-Röntgen man. I gather that you are not impressed by Yoga. But what Yogis have achieved in the way of control over the body alone appears to us to be miraculous. Sight, hearing, and smell are enhanced to a degree that to us is incredible. The Yogi can endure extremes of heat and cold. He can sit naked in a snowstorm for days without food and be none the worse. We are astonished at a man seeing a watch-face that is placed outside his visual range, with his eyes shut. But such a thing was a commonplace to certain Indian thinkers, who could see and hear without the use of their senses at all. It is said of some Yogis that they could make their bodies invisible and even pass through doors. Perhaps they had achieved Colonel Brown's fourth-dimensional state! However, I am not going to debate these physical marvels. What I am concerned about is the states of mind that can be achieved by their difficult and exacting processes of concentration. For example, through concentration on what he calls the three-fold modifications which all objects constantly undergo, the Yogi assures us we can acquire the power to know the past, the present, and the future. He knows when he is going to die. Automatically you at once become not merely sceptical but full of active disbelief. You have the feeling that if you were allowed to test these Yogis in your laboratory you would very soon expose them. But that is merely a feeling on your part, a revolt of your mind, automatic and extremely strong, against what you don't want to believe. But that does not dispose of centuries of strenuous development of the mind, of a kind and to a degree new to us and therefore charged with fear of its powers over what to us is the unknown. These powers have yet to be investigated by our psychologists. Such investigation may take a long time, because our psychologists are not sufficiently advanced in psychic experience to assess the evidence. However, this is what I am coming to, and here I am capable of checking results through my own experienceâchecking them, that is, to a small tentative degree.”
Hitherto the Dean had talked with a simple logic out of what was obviously a wide knowledge of his subject. But it was clear even while he was talking that he respected Geoffrey's difficulties and appreciated his revolt, as if he knew that such an attitude on Geoffrey's part was and must be inevitable. But by his very tone it could be seen that these physical marvels, like seeing with the eyes shut or entering closed rooms, interested him merely as by-products of a central and infinitely more important reality.
As he paused his eyes took on a depth, an effect of light, in which there glowed a profound kindliness and understanding. Helen was at once moved, felt herself waiting with a dumb excited expectancy, as if a soft hand had caught upward at her heart.
“Upon a man who has achieved, by effort and struggle, those higher powers of the mind there comes at last a clear consciousness of profound harmony. He realises that there has been added to him an extra dimension of being. I am aware that my words may convey nothing to you, or, at the best, so little that it is negligible over against the reality, so I beg you, in your forbearance, to allow me to illustrate it as best I can. I should put it like this, that the extension of perception that is achieved might be compared with what a blind man has added to him when he first acquires sight. If I say to you that it is as real, as truly a
fact
, as is the blind man's new world to him, I should still hardly be telling the whole truth, because it is, to the person who experiences it, far more real, in the sense that it grasps not mere visual phenomena, appearances, but Reality itself. And I know this with as absolute a certainty as I know that if I put my hand to the bar of the grate there I should burn it, or if I put this glass to my lips I should feel the wine, and taste it, and get its bouquet. The trouble for you lies in my use of a word like Reality. I might illustrate that by referring to the Reality of you as the personality or spirit or whatever you call that thing which inhabits your body and which you usually designate as âI'. If you could think of the âI' being extended, transformed, into a universal âI', into a cosmic consciousness, and if you could think of yourself as coming in contact with, of being permeated by, that consciousnessâthe spirit within and behind all matter as the âI' is within and behind the bodyâthen you might vaguely get some sort of parallel. Though I suppose you wouldn't really, because you would still be without the actual experience, as in the case of the blind man and the
redness
of wine. However, let me make one more effort at illustration, for all this has some bearing on second sight in the Highlands.”
He paused for a little, and then went on: “There comes to most human lives a period, often perhaps not a very long period, when the senses are enhanced, when the spirit is quickened, and when the very essence of life seems to change in meaning, in purpose, in aim, and in desire. Colour glows. Flowers, trees, the surface of our earth, are seen with what is called new eyes. Over all is a lovely light. The mind is transported. Beauty becomes so heightened that the frail, newly awakened spirit can hardly bear it; in fact, cannot bear it at times, and breaks down in tears, tears neither of joy nor of sorrow, that yet seem to perform a mysterious cleansing or purifying act. The person undergoing this experience acquires a new consideration for humanity, wants to do little acts of kindness, wants all the world to be happy, to be at peace, to be rid of struggle and wrangling and the diabolic horrors of war. Life before this change is seen to have been to a large degree meaningless, because it was without this intense conception of harmony, of a state of being that is recognisedâwhatever went before or comes afterâas the most vivid and thrilling experience or fact that all existence contrived to offer. Many undergo this experience in an extreme degree, that fulfils itself to the highest or loses itself by frustration in the depths. Others experience it much more mildly. But all experience it in some degree. I am referring, as you will have guessed, to that condition termed âbeing in love'.”
Helen found his eyes on her. They were not questioning, yet she experienced for a moment the extraordinary illusion of holding converse with them, of opening her mind, of accepting their understanding, of saying in some inner region, “Yes”, and then, like the neophyte before the master, of bowing. And she actually bowed. Or, at least, her head drooped, and the dark-brown hair, with the straight parting on the left, was towards the Dean, and all the others, turning and looking at her, saw her head like that.
And to them all this silence, by virtue of some inward conviction, was the most eloquent passage of the evening.
“Now that blessed condition of being in love is to a small extent a parallel to that other higher condition,” the Dean went on as if the pause had been quite natural, while the others brought their faces from Helen and all their expressions, which each felt to be secret, could be read like the marked stops on an organ. “Just as the physicist discovers absolute harmony in the laws that govern or determine matter, so the mystic discovers absolute harmony in that higher condition to which his mind has won. There at last the psychical becomes supreme over the physical. Always our mind, in science as in everyday life, is trying to conquer matter in some form or other. The materialist is continuously engaged in the fight.
There
man succeeds. On the way to that condition the senses gain a power infinitely beyond, though of the same kind as, the little acts of premonition, telepathy, insight, intuition, silent understanding, identification with another, and with flowers and scents, which characterise human love. In a word, in that final state, which is a state of supreme love, everything is reconciled, all dualisms, all differences and divisions, in a feeling of an eternal Now, of a timelessness in which past, present, and future are fused. You are pervaded by a feeling of light, of bliss, of ease, of having at long last
come into your own
.
“Now if you were capable of moving in the fourth dimensional world you would be able to interfere with the third, just as I in the third interfered with the bug in the second; that is, from outside you could suddenly appear in our midst, though doors and windows are all closed. But it would be no miracle to you or to any of your fourth-dimensional friends. You would all smile at our astonishment, at our terrorâgently, let us hope.”
Helen looked so thoughtful that some of the others smiled, and laughed when she said, “I thought for a moment I got a glimmer of it.”
“To finish with it,” said Colonel Brown: “you get the fourth dimension by adding to the dimensions of length, breadth, and thickness, the dimension of time. In the fourdimensional, you should be able to look along the dimension of time, just as we can look along the dimension of a straight line. If I put my finger there on the edge of the white cloth and call the spot
Now
, I can see not only the
past
part of the line extending up to my finger but the
future
part extending beyond it. In the same way, a person in the fourth dimensional world could not only see the
past
on our line of time up to
Now
but also the
future
beyond it. And I have only to lift the square of linen”âa twinkle came into his eyeâ“and place it over the slow curve of this arm of my chair, and we should be right bang into curved time. In short, what appears to happen in second sight is that you enter the world of four dimensions and so quite naturally see the future.”
“But does that mean that the future is rigidly determined?” Harry asked.
“That is even more difficult,” said Colonel Brown, as he blew out the match with which he had re-lit his pipe. “I cannot go into it. The mathematics of the situation, taking the serial, multi-dimensional view into account, would appear to permit of interference with foreseen events. Complete free will is as meaningless as complete determinism. Intervention in the limited sense that applies to all reality as we know it is possible to us in our dimension. I must leave it at thatâor else borrow a blackboard and Mr. Dunne's diagrams.”
“But does that mean that if I foresaw something that was about to happen, I could take steps to prevent its happening?” Harry persisted.
“It would appear that if you did your best, you might achieve a considerable degree of prevention.”
Geoffrey laughed loudly and for quite a time.
“I admit,” said Mr. Blair, “that is where I, too, get stumped.”
Colonel Brown enjoyed the mirth, even if Geoffrey's appeared to be unduly excessive for a social occasion. He said to his host, “But we are always in the process of getting stumped. That's the normal condition in evolution. If you had said to a scientist before Röntgen's day that you were hoping to take a photograph in a dark room, he would have proved to you quite conclusively the impossibility of doing soâassuming he was tolerant enough not to suggest a mental home. Yet photographs are now taken in dark rooms. We can even photograph a pin inside your stomach without putting you to the trouble of taking off your clothes.”
“But that's quite logical.”
“Yesâ
now that you understand the process
.”
“What do you think of all this, Mr. Smith?” asked Mr. Blair.
“I think it is the modern type of fairy story. Nothing more. The sort of pretty thing that looks valid to please our primitive appetite for wonders.”
“I don't see anything very pretty about second sight,” said Harry. “But apart from thatâhow do you explain the vision of the watch?”
“I should not think of attempting any explanation”, said Geoffrey, “until I had an opportunity of testing such an alleged vision under laboratory conditions.”
“But surely”, said Colonel Brown, “it is clear that you cannot produce a psychical state and lay it on a bench as you would a lump of matter?”
“Manifestly,” said Geoffrey. “You usually put it on a couch and psycho-analyse it.”
George laughed. Old Geoff was doing damned well!
“Is it not possible that we are confusing two quite different things,” said the Dean, “as different as physics and psychology? The one deals with matter; the other with mind. Each functions in its own way and has its own quite different conceptions and laws. Our
appreciation
of colour, of sound, of all sensory things, not to mention abstract things like love and hate, is not the concern of physics. For these things we have a separate science which we call psychology. There is a certain interrelation, inasmuch as the material body is an instrument for expressing psychical qualities. But no physicist could ever deduce from my grey matter my conception of beauty or horror or joy or pain. Yet these are precisely the qualities that are very important to me, to all mankindâand would be even if we were incapable of appreciating anything beyond sensual reactions. To us they are life and hope; they are
being
. Very well, that being so, they are to us the most important
facts
in the everyday process of living. Now let us test that by taking the extreme case; let me say, even for the purpose of discussion, that I am a mystic, that I believe in what is called mysticism. I am probably right in thinking that at once Mr. Smith gives me up in despair. Am I right?”
“Wellââ” said Geoffrey, smiling awkwardly.
“I understand. You would rather not appear to be rude, and if you spoke your mind straightforwardly you might sound very rude indeed!”
The gentle humour was appreciated and Geoffrey laughed.
“Yet consider,” said the Dean. “Your mystic is no more an abnormal person than is a great scientist, or a great artist. Like them, he is a person who has gone through a long and difficult training in an effort to achieve certain results. He is a man who has taken the trouble to investigate by personal experience certain psychic processes, and he can tell you, so far as language can communicate to you his meaning, the nature of the results he has achieved.”
“And what when his language fails, which seems to be the difficulty?” asked Geoffrey.
“Well, he can't help that. I see you shrug, but think. Assuming you had to explain to a man who was born blind the
redness
of the port in your glass, could you do it? Could you get him to apprehend
redness
as you and I apprehend it?”
Geoffrey was forced to admit that he could not.
“Similarly, if you cannot understand the state of mind the mystic attempts to describe to you, the fault may not lie altogether with the mystic. Now just as the scientist goes on making discoveries about matter, so the mystic goes on making discoveries about the powers of the mind, until he is able to do things with it comparable to what the taking of photographs in a dark room was to pre-Röntgen man. I gather that you are not impressed by Yoga. But what Yogis have achieved in the way of control over the body alone appears to us to be miraculous. Sight, hearing, and smell are enhanced to a degree that to us is incredible. The Yogi can endure extremes of heat and cold. He can sit naked in a snowstorm for days without food and be none the worse. We are astonished at a man seeing a watch-face that is placed outside his visual range, with his eyes shut. But such a thing was a commonplace to certain Indian thinkers, who could see and hear without the use of their senses at all. It is said of some Yogis that they could make their bodies invisible and even pass through doors. Perhaps they had achieved Colonel Brown's fourth-dimensional state! However, I am not going to debate these physical marvels. What I am concerned about is the states of mind that can be achieved by their difficult and exacting processes of concentration. For example, through concentration on what he calls the three-fold modifications which all objects constantly undergo, the Yogi assures us we can acquire the power to know the past, the present, and the future. He knows when he is going to die. Automatically you at once become not merely sceptical but full of active disbelief. You have the feeling that if you were allowed to test these Yogis in your laboratory you would very soon expose them. But that is merely a feeling on your part, a revolt of your mind, automatic and extremely strong, against what you don't want to believe. But that does not dispose of centuries of strenuous development of the mind, of a kind and to a degree new to us and therefore charged with fear of its powers over what to us is the unknown. These powers have yet to be investigated by our psychologists. Such investigation may take a long time, because our psychologists are not sufficiently advanced in psychic experience to assess the evidence. However, this is what I am coming to, and here I am capable of checking results through my own experienceâchecking them, that is, to a small tentative degree.”
Hitherto the Dean had talked with a simple logic out of what was obviously a wide knowledge of his subject. But it was clear even while he was talking that he respected Geoffrey's difficulties and appreciated his revolt, as if he knew that such an attitude on Geoffrey's part was and must be inevitable. But by his very tone it could be seen that these physical marvels, like seeing with the eyes shut or entering closed rooms, interested him merely as by-products of a central and infinitely more important reality.
As he paused his eyes took on a depth, an effect of light, in which there glowed a profound kindliness and understanding. Helen was at once moved, felt herself waiting with a dumb excited expectancy, as if a soft hand had caught upward at her heart.
“Upon a man who has achieved, by effort and struggle, those higher powers of the mind there comes at last a clear consciousness of profound harmony. He realises that there has been added to him an extra dimension of being. I am aware that my words may convey nothing to you, or, at the best, so little that it is negligible over against the reality, so I beg you, in your forbearance, to allow me to illustrate it as best I can. I should put it like this, that the extension of perception that is achieved might be compared with what a blind man has added to him when he first acquires sight. If I say to you that it is as real, as truly a
fact
, as is the blind man's new world to him, I should still hardly be telling the whole truth, because it is, to the person who experiences it, far more real, in the sense that it grasps not mere visual phenomena, appearances, but Reality itself. And I know this with as absolute a certainty as I know that if I put my hand to the bar of the grate there I should burn it, or if I put this glass to my lips I should feel the wine, and taste it, and get its bouquet. The trouble for you lies in my use of a word like Reality. I might illustrate that by referring to the Reality of you as the personality or spirit or whatever you call that thing which inhabits your body and which you usually designate as âI'. If you could think of the âI' being extended, transformed, into a universal âI', into a cosmic consciousness, and if you could think of yourself as coming in contact with, of being permeated by, that consciousnessâthe spirit within and behind all matter as the âI' is within and behind the bodyâthen you might vaguely get some sort of parallel. Though I suppose you wouldn't really, because you would still be without the actual experience, as in the case of the blind man and the
redness
of wine. However, let me make one more effort at illustration, for all this has some bearing on second sight in the Highlands.”
He paused for a little, and then went on: “There comes to most human lives a period, often perhaps not a very long period, when the senses are enhanced, when the spirit is quickened, and when the very essence of life seems to change in meaning, in purpose, in aim, and in desire. Colour glows. Flowers, trees, the surface of our earth, are seen with what is called new eyes. Over all is a lovely light. The mind is transported. Beauty becomes so heightened that the frail, newly awakened spirit can hardly bear it; in fact, cannot bear it at times, and breaks down in tears, tears neither of joy nor of sorrow, that yet seem to perform a mysterious cleansing or purifying act. The person undergoing this experience acquires a new consideration for humanity, wants to do little acts of kindness, wants all the world to be happy, to be at peace, to be rid of struggle and wrangling and the diabolic horrors of war. Life before this change is seen to have been to a large degree meaningless, because it was without this intense conception of harmony, of a state of being that is recognisedâwhatever went before or comes afterâas the most vivid and thrilling experience or fact that all existence contrived to offer. Many undergo this experience in an extreme degree, that fulfils itself to the highest or loses itself by frustration in the depths. Others experience it much more mildly. But all experience it in some degree. I am referring, as you will have guessed, to that condition termed âbeing in love'.”
Helen found his eyes on her. They were not questioning, yet she experienced for a moment the extraordinary illusion of holding converse with them, of opening her mind, of accepting their understanding, of saying in some inner region, “Yes”, and then, like the neophyte before the master, of bowing. And she actually bowed. Or, at least, her head drooped, and the dark-brown hair, with the straight parting on the left, was towards the Dean, and all the others, turning and looking at her, saw her head like that.
And to them all this silence, by virtue of some inward conviction, was the most eloquent passage of the evening.
“Now that blessed condition of being in love is to a small extent a parallel to that other higher condition,” the Dean went on as if the pause had been quite natural, while the others brought their faces from Helen and all their expressions, which each felt to be secret, could be read like the marked stops on an organ. “Just as the physicist discovers absolute harmony in the laws that govern or determine matter, so the mystic discovers absolute harmony in that higher condition to which his mind has won. There at last the psychical becomes supreme over the physical. Always our mind, in science as in everyday life, is trying to conquer matter in some form or other. The materialist is continuously engaged in the fight.
There
man succeeds. On the way to that condition the senses gain a power infinitely beyond, though of the same kind as, the little acts of premonition, telepathy, insight, intuition, silent understanding, identification with another, and with flowers and scents, which characterise human love. In a word, in that final state, which is a state of supreme love, everything is reconciled, all dualisms, all differences and divisions, in a feeling of an eternal Now, of a timelessness in which past, present, and future are fused. You are pervaded by a feeling of light, of bliss, of ease, of having at long last
come into your own
.
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