The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (3 page)

Consider the strange case of the calculating twins discussed in the article on identical twins. A prime number is a number that cannot be divided exactly by any other number, like 3, 7 and 13. But there is no easy, quick way to tell whether a number is a prime or not: you just have to patiently divide all the smaller numbers into it and see if any of them “goes” precisely. If a number is very large – say five figures – then the only quick way to find out if it is prime is to look it up in a table of prime numbers. Yet these twins can do it instantaneously, and that is absurd. Quite apart from the mystery of how they can do it, there is the even more baffling mystery of how such a power could have developed during the course of human history. According to Darwin, the basic mechanism of evolution is “survival of the fittest”. The cheetah can run faster than a man and the kangaroo jump higher because they had to in
order to survive. Most animals cannot count beyond a few figures. Man had to learn to count as his social life became more complex. Even so, most people are “bad at figures”. So how could any human being have developed this amazing ability to recognize five figure primes instantaneously, when even a computer would be unable to do it?

There can only be one answer: that we are wrong to think that human intelligence has to operate like a computer. It seems to have some “alternative method”. And presumably it was the same alternative method that accidentally allowed Sanderson his curious glimpse of the past. That statement sounds reasonable enough, for we all agree that “intuition” seems to operate in mysterious ways. But then we come upon a case in which someone has clearly foreseen the future, and we know this is not simply a question of intuition. The notion that time has a one-way flow is the very foundation of western science; everything depends on it. If precognition is possible, then our basic assumptions need revising.

For the scientists of the nineteenth century, such an idea was deeply disquieting; that is why so many of them were so hostile to “psychical research”. It seemed the opposite of what all science stood for; a return to superstitions and old wives’ tales instead of experiment and analysis. In 1848 this reaction of science had swung so far that a novelist named Catherine Crowe decided it was time to protest. So she went to a great deal of trouble to gather together some of the best authenticated cases of the “supernatural” she could find – the kind of cases that would later be carefully examined by the Society for Psychical Research – and published them in a book called
The Night Side of Nature
. It had a considerable impact on thoughtful people.

But Mrs Crowe was unfortunate. The year of its publication also happened to be the year when strange poltergeist disturbances took place in the home of the Fox family in New York State – curious rappings and bangings that occurred in the presence of the two children, Kate and Margaret. In a code of raps, the “entity” claimed to be a murdered peddler who had been buried in the basement. (In fact, a human skeleton was found buried in the basement in 1907.) These manifestations caused a sensation, and soon “Spiritualism” had begun to spread across America and Europe. Scientists were outraged at this fashionable tide of “superstition” – particularly when a number of “mediums” proved to be frauds – and Mrs Crowe’s highly reasonable arguments were forgotten. In fact she encountered so much hostility that a little over a decade after the publication of
The Night Side of Nature
she had a nervous breakdown and spent some time in a mental home; during the last sixteen years of her life, she wrote no more.

Now, more than a century and a half later, Spiritualism has ceased to be a challenge to science, and has become little more than a harmless minority religion; nowadays it is perfectly obvious that it never was a challenge to science. We can also see that there was never any question of science being supplanted by superstition and old wives’ tales, and that therefore CSICOP was quite wrong to imagine that the success of Uri Geller heralded a return to the Middle Ages.

What it
would
involve is a recognition that the history of life on earth may be a little more complex than Darwin thought. If paranormal powers, such as telepathy and “second sight”, actually exist, then it also seems fairly certain that they were possessed in a far greater degree by our primitive ancestors, just as they are now possessed in a greater degree by many “primitive” people. Sanderson makes it clear, for example, that he believes that some of the Haitians he encountered possessed powers of “second sight”. One of these remarked to him after his “timeslip” experience, “You saw things, didn’t you? You don’t believe it, but you could always see things if you wanted to”. In short, Sanderson himself could have developed or perhaps simply rediscovered his paranormal faculties.

In my book
The Occult
I have cited many cases that seem to illustrate the same point. For example, the famous tiger-hunter Jim Corbett describes in
Man Eaters of Kumaon
how he came to develop what he calls “jungle sensitiveness”, so he knew when a wild animal was lying in wait for him. Obviously, such a faculty would be very useful to a tiger hunter in India, but virtually useless to a stockbroker in New York. So it would seem that civilized man has deliberately got rid of it. Or rather, the development of another faculty – the ability to deal with the complications of civilized life – has suppressed the “paranormal” faculty, because we no longer need it.

But is this actually true? Is it even true that a New York stockbroker does not need “jungle sensitiveness”. After all, he lives in other kinds of jungle – not only the commercial jungle, but the concrete jungle where muggers lurk in pedestrian subways and public parks. His real problem is more likely to be the problem that caused Catherine Crowe’s nervous breakdown; that he has allowed civilized life to “get on top of him”. We have all, to some extent, lost that primitive vital force that can be found in most “savage” peoples. But what has really been lost is a certain sense of wonder, a certain basic optimism. The child thinks that this world of adults is a magical place, full of endless adventures: going into bars, driving motorcars, catching aeroplanes . . . He would find it very hard to believe that as he grows up the world will turn into a hard and
ruthless and rather nasty place, where the basic rule is, “Nobody gets anything for nothing”.

The adult’s problem is that his attitudes have become negative. I have described elsewhere how in 1967 I went to lecture at a university in Los Angeles, then went to meet my family in Disneyland. I had forgotten just how big Disneyland is, and when I walked in through the turnstile and saw the crowds my heart sank. But I was feeling cheerful and optimistic, having just given a good lecture. So I relaxed, placed myself in a mood of confidence and then simply allowed my feet to take me to them. I strolled at random for about fifty yards, turned left, and found them standing at a Mexican food stall.

Forty-eight hours ago I was looking for a book on the Habsburg Empire, and I searched through three book cases without success. The next morning I made another search, and this time found the book on a shelf I had searched several times. Why had I missed it? Because I was in a state of tension as I searched (as if I was in a hurry) and sheer “haste” made me look at it without seeing it. Conversely, I have noticed again and again that when I am in a mood of relaxed confidence I can find things by some kind of “sixth sense”.

But I have noticed something even more interesting: that when I am in these moods of relaxed confidence, things just somehow seem to “go right”. And this obviously has nothing to do with me or with any “sixth sense”. I just happen to “stumble upon” an important piece of information the day before I am due to write about it, or avoid some unpleasant experience by sheer serendipity.

Our basic civilized problem is that our attitudes have become quite unjustifiably negative. Everyone is familiar with the experience of how relief can place us in an optimistic frame of mind. The plumbing goes wrong and you have to flush the lavatory with buckets of water for a couple of days. When the plumber finally arrives you feel immense relief, and for the next twenty-four hours feel how delightful it is to have a lavatory that flushes at the touch of a button. And whenever we experience this relief we also
recognize that we are surrounded by reasons for delight: with bath taps and light switches and electric toasters that actually work, and doors that open without squeaking, and televisions that provide us with news as often as we want it. It has taken man about fifty thousand years to move out of caves and achieve this felicity. Yet we have become so accustomed to our civilization that we take it for granted, and spend most of our time worrying about trivialities.

Yet whenever some minor inconvenience is followed by relief, we recognize that we have allowed ourselves to discount our blessings, and fall into a narrow and joyless state of mind. Civilization was designed to give us leisure and freedom; instead, we waste our days concentrating obsessively on minor problems that will appear totally unimportant in a week’s time. And this anxiety-ridden shortsightedness is due to certain left-brain qualities that we have developed over the past few thousand years. (The left-brain deals with logic and language, the right with meaning and intuition.) The only way to regain our birthright of leisure and freedom is to recognize that everyday left-brain awareness somehow tells us lies, and that we have to learn to relax into a wider type of awareness.

Consider the following example from a book called
The States of Human Consciousnes
by C. Daly King; he is speaking of experiences of what he calls “Awakeness”.

The first thing to note about this is his comment that “he was emotionally at ease, planning unhurriedly the schedule of his various calls”. That is, he was in a “right-brain” state, free of tension. Then
some curious effort, some slight movement of the mind, so to speak, propelled him in the right direction, and made him aware that the bricks he would normally have taken for granted were somehow glowing with inner life. It is also significant that the human beings who would normally have occupied the centre of his field of attention now ceased to seem important. Long habit has made us select human beings as the centre of our field of attention, for we are social animals whose peace of mind depends upon “fitting into” society.

There is no need to assume that his perception of the bricks was a “mystical” experience. We can all induce something of the sort by simply staring intently at a perfectly ordinary wall in the sunlight. Our problem is that we do not normally concentrate on anything; we “scan” things automatically, like the girl on a supermarket checkout. But if anything attracts our interest and we focus our full attention on it, we instantly experience this sense of heightened meaning.

I am only trying to point out that the chief reason our experience usually seems to unmemorable is that we have become accustomed to responding “robotically” to our surroundings, leaving the automatic pilot to do the driving for us.

And what difference would non-robotic experience make? Basically this: it would make Daly King aware that the normal assumption he shares with the rest of us, that the world “out there” is a rather ordinary place, is mistaken. His senses are telling him lies. Or rather, his senses are doing their best; it is his attitudes, his assumptions, that reduce their testimony to “ordinariness”. His “glimpse” would have told him that he is surrounded by an unutterably strange vicious circle in which most of us are trapped. This consists in the assumption that the world out there is rather ordinary and dull. And when we are bored our energies sink. And when our energies sink it is rather like a cloud coming over the sun, making the world seem dimmer and less interesting. This feeling that the world is uninteresting prevents us from making any kind of effort. The normal human tendency – unaided by external stimulus – is to sink into a state of lethargy, rather like Samuel Beckett characters sitting in dustbins.

Every glimpse of reality – every “moment of vision” – even setting out on holiday – tells us the opposite. This tells us that when a cloud seems to obscure the sun, what has actually happened is that we have allowed our senses to become dimmer, like the device in a cinema that lowers the lights. Perception is “intentional”. You see things by a beam of light generated by a dynamo inside your head. When you are bored the dynamo works at half speed, and everything you look at seems dull.
But if you can persuade your subconscious mind that the world out there is fascinating – as holidays persuade it – the dynamo will accelerate, and you will see that this is true.