Alien Dawn: A Classic Investigation into the Contact Experience (46 page)

The truth is that there could be no simple return to the past.
Things have changed inevitably and permanently.
We are all members of a global culture, and, for better or worse, that culture is as practical and down-to-Earth as ancient Rome.

And there is one respect in which it is definitely for worse.
Our scientific culture is basically sceptical.
So we have a suitably down-to-Earth picture of ourselves as practical creatures whose chief business on Earth is to stay alive and provide for our children.
When we hear about alien abduction, our first reaction is to dismiss it, and our second—if we get that far—is to wonder if we are about to be superseded by creatures to whom we must seem primitive and stupid.

This chapter introduces a third possibility: that the ‘aliens’ may not be so fundamentally different from us—that they have simply developed powers that are latent in all of us.

There is another reason why there can be no return to the past.
Unlike every other creature on Earth, man has shown a voracious appetite for knowledge.
In the time of Julius Caesar, most of that knowledge was stored in the great library of Alexandria.
Now it is stored in hundreds of thousands of libraries and millions of computers.
In other words, man’s development has been primarily
left-brain.
He has not bothered overmuch with the development of psychic faculties, which seems to be a right-brain ability; he regards the practical, technical approach as far more rewarding.
The result is that modern man is stuck firmly in a left-brain universe.

One UFO researcher, Donald Hotson, has thrown off an amusing and original theory that underlines this point.
What, he asks, would have happened if, at some remote period in the past, the human race had split into two types, one of whom followed the left-brain path, while the other followed the right?
The first thing that would certainly have happened is that the left-brainers would have developed a basic hostility to the right brainers, regarding them as ‘weirdos’.
And the right-brainers might, for their own protection, have withdrawn from the practical realm of the left-brainer, perhaps to one of these parallel worlds of which Monroe and Vallee speak.
Perhaps, Hotson suggests, UFOs are visitors from our right-brain half-brothers?

It is worth trying to imagine what would have happened to a civilisation that decided to follow the right-brain path as obsessively as we have pursued the left.
We have invented atomic power, computers and space travel.
What would they have developed over the same period?

In the mid-nineteenth century, a group of philosophers and scientists, impressed by man’s technological progress, decided to try to investigate scientifically the problem of life after death and psychic powers.
For some reason, it didn’t work.
They accumulated a great deal of very impressive evidence about life after death, OBEs, second sight, precognition and telepathy.
But they had not really annexed the paranormal in the way that nineteenth century science had annexed chemistry, geology and abnormal psychology.

We can see why.
They were trying to annex the paranormal using the methods of science—measuring rods, flashlight photography, tripwires.
And the paranormal was simply not willing to cooperate on those terms.
As Brian O’Leary realised when he discovered that science had told him only half the truth, the investigator has to plunge in head first and look for first-hand experience.
O’Leary had to learn that the paranormal exists as a separate realm, quite apart from our physical realm, which can be investigated with microscopes and telescopes and particle beams.
It is literally a parallel universe.

Yet it
is
possible to approach it in a thoroughly scientific spirit.
An interesting case in point is that of Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, born in Russia in 1878.
Ouspensky struck his followers as hard, pragmatic, impatient of all talk of mysticism or religion.
As a follower of the teacher and philosopher Gurdjieff, Ouspensky applied this same pragmatic, scientific approach, trying to organise Gurdjieff’s ‘system’ into a practical methodology.

One of the things Gurdjieff taught Ouspensky was about ‘self-remembering’.
Self-remembering is looking at some object—say your watch—and being at the same time
aware of yourself looking at it.
This is extremely difficult to do.
After a few seconds, you become aware only of yourself and forget your watch, or of your watch and forget yourself.

Wandering around St.
Petersburg at night, Ouspensky would practise self-remembering, and he noted that, as he began to succeed, he would feel that the houses were somehow aware of him, and that he could sense the individual history of each house.
‘They were living beings, full of thoughts, feelings, moods and memories’.
We may recall that David Morehouse made a similar observation about Dachau.
Passing through the stone wall into the camp, he noted: ‘It was at times like these that I learned that everything indeed has a spirit.
The wall had its own history.’

Ouspensky noted the same kind of thing looking at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St.
Petersburg, and a factory behind it.
As a friend drew his attention to this, he says, ‘I too sensed the
difference between
the chimneys and the prison walls with
unusual clearness
and like an electric shock.
I realised the
difference between the very bricks themselves’.

In a piece called ‘Experimental Mysticism’,
[3]
Ouspensky describes how he embarked on the study of altered states of consciousness by means of some method which he refuses to divulge, but which was almost certainly the inhalation of nitrous oxide, with which many psychologists were experimenting at the time.
His first observation in this new state of awareness was that ‘everything is linked together’, and that it would be impossible to say anything about it without saying everything at once.
Everything is connected.

Similarly, he describes looking at an ashtray in this heightened state, and becoming aware of ‘a whirlwind of thoughts and images’, including the history of tobacco, of copper, of mining, of smelting.
He wrote down a few words in order to try to recall what he had glimpsed; the next day he read: ‘One could go mad from one ashtray’.

In other words, Ouspensky is saying that the things around us—houses, bricks, ashtrays—contain endless depths of meaning, which is actually perceptible to us in certain states of consciousness.
Aldous Huxley had noted the same thing in
Doors of Perception:
that, under mescalin, everything seemed to throb with meaning to an almost painful extent.
Huxley suggests that our senses actually filter out most of this meaning, because it would overwhelm us and make practical, everyday life impossible.
We are like blinkered horses.
Our senses, Huxley suggests, are designed to keep things out as much as to let them in.

Could this, perhaps, explain some of the paradoxes of remote viewing—how, for example, David Morehouse could view a Korean airliner that had been shot down years earlier, and how Jahn’s subject could
foretell what her friend would be looking at in an hour’s time?
If, in fact, this world around us is suffused with infinite meaning, to which we have deliberately blinded ourselves, as if wearing a welder’s dark goggles, then it is obviously possible that we might have access to all kinds of meanings that we assumed had ceased to exist.
An antiques expert looking at an old carpet or piece of furniture can perceive things about its history that would be invisible to the rest of us.

There was, in fact, one eminent twentieth-century historian who believed that there
is
a sense in which we can gain access to the past.
In the tenth volume of
A Study of History,
Arnold Toynbee describes ten occasions on which he felt himself transported back into the past, either as he stood on some historic site, or as he read some passage by a participant in the historic event.

At first, it sounds as if Toynbee is speaking simply about history ‘coming alive’ through the imagination.
But it soon becomes clear that he means far more than that.
He describes how, in March 1912, he rounded the shoulder of a mountain in Crete, and found himself looking at the ruins of a baroque villa, probably built for one of the last Venetian governors three centuries earlier.
He describes how, looking at the house, he had ‘an experience which was the counterpart .
.
.
of an aeroplane’s sudden deep drop when it falls into an air pocket’.
It felt, he says, like falling into a time pocket, to a time, 250 years before, when the house was hastily evacuated.
It seems clear that what Toynbee experienced was very similar to Ouspensky’s feeling that the houses of St.
Petersburg were speaking to him, or Morehouse’s experience as he passed through the walls of Dachau.

On another occasion, at the site of the battle of Pharsalus (197 BC, he seemed to see the Romans wiping out the army of Philip V of Macedon with such brutality that he averted his eyes.
As he did so, he caught sight of a group of horsemen fleeing from the battle—he had no idea of their identity.
A moment later, the whole scene vanished into thin air.

The full import of what Toynbee means by a ‘time pocket’ (if he had known the term, he might have called them time slips) becomes clear when he describes the experience that led him to write
Study of History.
In May 1912 he had been sitting in the ruined citadel of Mistra, looking down on the vale of Sparta.
Over six hundred years it had changed hands again and again—Franks, Byzantines, Turks, Venetians.
But then, in 1821, wild highlanders had poured through the city walls, massacring its fleeing inhabitants.
And, from that day onward, Mistra had been a deserted ruin.
His sense of this catastrophe was so real that he was suddenly overwhelmed by ‘the cruel riddle of mankind’s crimes and follies’, and received the inspiration for his gigantic
Study of History,
in which he attempts to glimpse some meaning and purpose in human history.

What has happened is that the past has suddenly ‘become alive’; it has become as real as the present.
In the same way, Proust’s novel
Á
la recherche du temps perdu
(‘in search of lost time’, commonly known as
Remembrance of Things Past
) sprang from the single experience described by the narrator Marcel (who is Proust himself).
Coming home one evening, cold and tired, Marcel tastes a little cake called a madeleine, which he has dipped in herb tea.
It brings a strange sensation of pure delight: ‘An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses .
.
.
I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal .
.
.’.
What has happened, he realises when he takes another taste, is that the cake dipped in tea has brought back his own childhood, when his Aunt Leonie used to offer him some of her madeleine dipped in herb tea when he came in from a long Sunday walk.
The taste has revived the past, made it alive, as if the intervening years were a dream.
His vast novel is an attempt to repeat this experience.

In a book called
The Occult
(1971), I coined a term for this curious ability to
grasp the reality of some other time and place.
I called it Faculty X.

But Faculty X should not be seen as some psychic ability.
Toynbee’s ability to ‘relive’ the past was based upon his exhaustive knowledge of it.
He knew every detail of the manoeuvres at the Battle of Pharsalus.
He knew all about how the Venetians had been driven out of Crete.
He knew precisely how Mistra had been overwhelmed.

What happened, quite clearly, is that, as he looked down on the ruined citadel of Mistra, he experienced something akin to Proust’s feeling as he tasted the madeleine; there was a kind of surge of vitality which, combined with imagination, suddenly made the past
totally real.

Ouspensky had expressed this when he wrote: ‘It seems to us that we see something and understand something.
But in reality all that proceeds around us we sense only very confusedly, just as a snail senses confusedly the sunlight, the darkness and the rain’.
In the flashes of Faculty X, the snail’s-eye view vanishes; what had been merely an idea becomes
real.