The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (97 page)
Read The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries Online
Authors: Colin Wilson
Most students of the paranormal would admit another possibility: the notion that what is being “contacted” is the mind of someone who lived in the distant past. In 1907 the architect Frederick Bligh Bond was appointed by the Church of England to take charge of the excavations at Glastonbury Abbey. What his employers did not know was that Bond was interested in spiritualism. Together with a friend named Bartlett, Bond attempted “automatic writing”, the aim being to learn where to start digging in the abbey grounds. When they asked about Glastonbury the pencil – which they were both holding – wrote: “All knowledge is eternal and is available to mental sympathy”. And soon a communicator who signed himself Gulielmus Monachus – William the Monk – began giving extremely detailed instructions on where to excavate, and as a result Bond unearthed two chapels, each of precisely the dimensions given by William the Monk. Another “communicator”, Johannes, made the following interesting remark:
Why cling I to that which is not? It is I, and it is not I, butt parte of me which dwelleth in the past and is bound to that whych my carnal self loved and called “home” these many years. Yet I, Johannes, amm of many partes, and ye better parte doeth other things . . . only that part which remembereth clingeth like memory to what it seeth yet.
Bond’s downfall came when he wrote a book describing how he had obtained the information that had made his excavations so successful; the Church of England dismissed him. But the book,
Gate of Remembrance,
remains an astonishing proof that a twentieth-century mind
can
apparently attain some kind of direct access to the past. “All knowledge is eternal and is available to mental sympathy”. And the comments of Johannes seem to imply that a “parte of me which dwelleth in the past
. . . clingeth like memory to what it seeth yet”. It seems, therefore, remotely possible that some “time slips” may involve contact with a mind “which dwelleth in the past”.
Many writers describing time slips mention an odd sense of “crossing a threshold”. When Miss Jourdain returned alone to Versailles a few months after her “adventure” with Miss Moberly she suddenly felt “as if I had crossed a line and was in a circle of influence”, and saw oddly dressed labourers in bright tunics. A girl named Louisa Hand told Joan Forman how, when she was a child, she had entered her grandmother’s cottage, and been puzzled to find herself in a place with older furniture. Thinking she had entered the wrong place, she went out to check, then went back in; still the room was different. But when she went in a third time things had returned to normal. She also mentioned the sensation of “crossing a threshold”, and of a feeling of silence associated with it.
It would seem, then, that the “psychometric” theory of Buchanan and Denton could account for the time-slip phenomenon. But this is far from the truth. It is also possible to “slip” the other way, into the future. Joan Forman cites the case of a teacher from Holt, Norfolk, who while involved in a “traffic contretemps” in the town noticed that a launderette that had been under construction was now finished and in use. He told his wife, who went there the next day with a bag of soiled laundry, and found that the place was still half-finished. The teacher had seen the shop as it
would
be in six weeks’ time.
Most of the cases of “future visions” cited in
The Mask of Time
are involved with dreams. In 1927 J.W. Dunne’s book
An Experiment With Time
, with its study of “precognitive dreams”, caused a sensation. Dunne described a number of occasions on which he had dreamt of events that he would read about later in the newspapers. T.C. Lethbridge later had much the same experience; he carefully observed his dreams, and noticed how often he dreamt of some trivial event of the next day; for example, he woke up dreaming of the face of a man he did not know; the face seemed to be enclosed in a kind of frame, and the man was making movements with his hands in the area of his chin, as if soaping his face prior to shaving. The next day, driving along a country road, he saw the face of the man of his dream; he was behind the windscreen of an oncoming car – the “frame” – and his hands were moving on the steering wheel, which was directly under his chin. Joan Forman cites many similar cases. All tend to have the same “trivial” quality, as if the glimpse of the future is some kind of freak accident. One schoolteacher, lying in bed with a high temperature, had an odd hallucination involving hedgehogs walking round the bedroom floor, and building a high nest with
sticks and straw. Three months later he was packing ceramic figures made by his pottery class to take them to the kiln; he packed them in a kind of layered nest, with straw between the layers. Several ceramic hedgehogs were on the floor around his feet. Suddenly he recognized his hallucination. Just before he began the packing operation, he experienced a feeling of “a peculiar mechanical inevitability”.
An Oxford scientist, Michael Shallis, has written a book on the nature of time,
25
in the course of which he mentions two of his own odd experiences of “prevision”. As a twelve-year-old boy he went into the house one day and called out to ask his mother what they were having for dinner. As he did so he experienced a feeling of
déja vu
, and knew that his mother would reply that they were having salad for dinner which she did.
This kind of “prevision” is fairly common. Joan Forman quotes a letter she received from a man who often knew with absolute certainty that a cricketer would be bowled out before the ball left the bowler’s hand; he comments that this often annoyed the batsman, who felt that he had somehow caused it. One explanation for such an ability might be some kind of unconscious “computer” that swiftly assessed the whole situation – the stance of the batsman, the skill of the bowler – and “saw” that the loss of the wicket was inevitable. But another experience cited by Shallis suggests that the problem is rather more complex than this.
A few years ago I was teaching a student physics in an upstairs lecture room. I had reached the part of the tutorial where we were discussing radioactive half lives and I was again swamped with the deja-vu feeling. I knew I was going to suggest that I needed to show him some examples from a certain book in my office and then go and collect it. I resisted saying this to him, but the feeling it had all happened before was strong. I was determined to break the pattern of the event. I turned to my student and asked him if we had done this work before, believing that he might be sharing the experience. He looked puzzled and replied no. I struggled to avoid continuing the experience. I resolved not to go and fetch the book. Having made that resolution I turned again to the student and said: “I think I had better show you some examples of these. I will just pop down to my room and get a book”. My awareness of the experience itself did not make it go away, even when I tried not to repeat its pre-set pattern.
There is an alarming implication in the words “repeat its pre-set pattern”.
Is
it possible that we do what we “have” to do, whether we want to or not, and that our sense of free will is a delusion? Shallis goes on to say:
There is an element of precognition itself in the experience, because the situation is so “familiar” that one knows what will happen next. It is different from precognition, however, in that it is familiar; one is in a sense reliving a part of one’s life, not predicting or sensing a remote event.
J.W. Dunne’s explanation for such experiences involves what he calls “serial time”. Basically, he is suggesting that there are several “times”. When we say “time flows”, it means we are measuring it
against
something. That something must be another kind of time, “time number two”. And this in turn could be measured against “time number three”. We also have several “selves”. Self number one is stuck in time number one; but we have another self which is not the physical body, which can rise above self number one and foresee the future.
In his book
Man and Time
, J.B. Priestley tells a story that seems to illustrate the difference between the two selves. A young mother dreamed that on a camping holiday she left her young son by the river while she went off to get the soap, and that when she came back he was drowned. On a camping holiday some time later she was about to go off and get the soap when she suddenly recognized the scene of her dream; so she tucked the baby under her arm before she went off to the tent . . .
The implication here is important. We
do
possess a degree of free will, but it is hard to exercise in the material world of “time number one”. It is like swimming against the current. Our human problem is not to remain stuck in “time number one”, the material world, with its repetitious futility, but to learn to spend as much time as possible in the mental world, the world of “time number two”.
Priestley argues that Dunne is making things unnecessarily complicated in arguing for an infinite number of selves; according to Priestley, there are only three. Self number one is simply involved in living; it might say, for example: “I feel depressed.” Self number two says: “I know self number one is depressed.” Self three says: “I know self two knows self one is depressed. But then, self one is a self-indulgent idiot.” Self one experiences; self two is conscious of experience; self three
passes judgment on the experience. Priestley gives an example; in a plane accident, self one was hurled out of his seat; self two knew there was about to be an accident. Self three thought: “Now I shall know what it’s like to be fried alive.” It “does not really care; it is as if it goes along with the other two just for the ride.”
This is perhaps one of the most interesting and important observations to arise from these speculations about the nature of time; the experience of what seems to be a “higher self”. In his important book
A Drug-Taker’s Notes
, R.H. Ward describes his experience under dental gas:
. . . I passed, after the first few inhalations of the gas, directly into a state of consciousness already far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary waking consciousness, and that I then passed progressively upwards . . . into finer and finer degrees of heightened awareness. But although one must write of it in terms of time, time had no place in the experience. In one sense it lasted far longer than the short period between inhaling the gas and “coming round”, lasted indeed for an eternity, and in another sense it took no time at all.
Ward’s observation here emphasizes that the nature of time is essentially
mental
. It might almost be said that the sense of time is produced by the stress between the physical world and the “higher self”, and that when this stress vanishes there is a sense of timelessness. The stress vanishes as a result of a withdrawal
inward
, as if towards another level of reality inside us, an inner world with its own reality. Ward says that when he later tried to recall the essence of his experience he found himself repeating “Within and within and within . . .” like a recurring decimal.
He also quotes from the experience of a friend he calls A, who was on his way back from the station when he experienced mild indigestion. The thought occurred to him
It belongs only to my body and is real only to the physical not-self. There is no need for the self to feel it . . . Even as I thought this the pain disappeared; that is, it was in some way left behind . . . the sensation of “rising up within” began . . . First there is the indescribable sensation in the spine, as of
something mounting up
, a sensation which is partly pleasure and partly pleasure and partly awe . . . This is accompanied by an extraordinary feeling of
bodily
lightness
, of well-being and effortlessness . . . Everything was becoming “more”, everything was
going up to another level.
Here it sounds as if A’s “self number three” had decided to actively intervene, and the result was a sense of leaving the pain behind.
If there is any general conclusion to be drawn from these experiences of the “undoubted queerness of time”, it is this: that we are somehow mistaken in our natural and very understandable assumption that the physical world is the basic and perhaps the only reality. Experiences of “time slips” and of precognition suggests that when the mind can slip into another “gear” it escapes its normal enslavement to time, and achieves a state of serene detachment “above” time.
The puzzling thing about such a notion is its implication that time is somehow unreal, or at least less real than we take it to be. Common sense and science are in agreement that the future cannot be predicted with any precision because it has not yet happened. Every “cause” in the world of the present moment could have many different effects. When a gas is heated its molecules begin to move faster, and an increasing number of collisions will occur. Each of these collisions causes the molecules to change course, and so leads to a different set of collisions. So it would be virtually impossible to determine which molecules will be colliding with others in ten minutes’ time; everything depends upon chance. In the same way, the five billion or so people in the world at the present moment will interact in unpredictable ways, and will determine what is happening in a week from now. In the case of the gas molecules, a sufficiently complex computer could in theory predict what will be happening a week from now; but no computer could make similar predictions about people.