Strange Powers (9 page)

On the whole, Buddhism struck him as the religion that made the strongest appeal to his inner needs; he still regards himself as fundamentally a Buddhist (although, in
Philosophy of an Escapist
, he states his belief in a Creator of the universe, and seems altogether closer to a mystical pantheism). During this stage—when he was investigating comparative religions—he had no particular interest in 'occultism'. I asked him if he could say roughly when it began to interest him. He placed the date at about 1957, when he was looking around an antique shop near Reigate. He got into conversation with the proprietor, a woman, and when he left, shook her hand. She looked at him in an odd way, and said 'You're a healer, aren't you?' Robert said not as far as he knew. She looked at his hand, and what she saw in his palm apparently confirmed her intuition; she told him that he had a line on his palm that only one person in ten thousand possesses.

Still, he was skeptical—or perhaps only uninterested. Five more years went by. One morning, on his way to work, he noticed workmen digging a hole; on the previous two days he had noticed them digging holes in other places nearby. He stopped the car and asked them what they were doing ('You know I'm extremely inquisitive'). They said they'd lost the water main—and at that moment, a diviner arrived, took out his rods, and within a few minutes had located the main. Robert asked if he could try it, and the diviner handed him the forked stick. Robert walked over the main—and felt the stick twist violently in his hands. He was so excited that he decided not to go to work. Instead, he went to the Lewes Public Library, and consulted all their books on dowsing. He discovered that there is a British Society of Dowsers, and that the president was a Colonel Bell who lived in Cuckfield. Robert contacted him, and soon became an active dowser. At the same time, he discovered he also possessed certain healing gifts—someone told him that dowsing and healing go together. He has never tried to develop these; but he can cure his wife of severe migraine in a few minutes, by laying his hands on her forehead; and can cure an ordinary headache in ten seconds.)

When Brian Inglis came to lecture to the Society, he asked if any dowsers would be willing to demonstrate their powers on television. Everyone declined; the general feeling was that these things depend on a certain inner-concentration, and that TV cameras would spoil it. Robert said this was untrue: If dowsing depended on the power of the mind, then it shouldn't make any difference where it was done.

The result was the TV broadcast of 1968 when—as already mentioned—he found three out of five tins of water, a result he regarded as poor, but which satisfied Brian Inglis—as well as the Society of Dowsers, who had declined to have anything to do with the program.

Having discovered that he could dowse for water, Leftwich was curious to know what other hidden abilities he might possess. Experiment soon convinced him that he could find anything—provided he had an idea of what he was looking for. He can detect any liquid—for example, oil—any solid object, and even empty space (he has often been asked to dowse for tunnels). This obviously suggests that he has some subconscious knowledge of the 'field' he is looking for. Again, it is the 'directionality' of the mind that seems to be important. Most of us lack these abilities because we never direct the mind in that direction.

He also seems to possess strong telepathic abilities, although these depend, to a large extent, upon whether the other person involved is a good receiver (or transmitter). He mentioned one friend who is an exceptionally good receiver. Robert hands him a pack of cards, tells him to shuffle them, and then place several cards, face downwards, on a table. He says: 'Move your hand back and forward over the cards; the one you finally decide to pick up will be the ten of diamonds.' His friend moves his hand, hesitates, then says: 'No, I won't have that one—I'll have this... ' And his second choice proves to be the ten of diamonds. The friend often asks: 'How did you do that?' to which Robert replies: 'I don't know.'

I felt this
was
an area in which I could test him. I had contemplated getting him to accompany me round the local shops, and getting him to demonstrate his powers of shoplifting; but it struck me that if he failed, we might both be in trouble. We took a pack of cards—it was ours, not his. He told me to shuffle them, and then start placing them, face down, on the table, while he stood several feet away, where he could not see the cards. 'I'll stop you when you get to the ace of clubs.' After I had thrown down twenty cards or so, he said: 'Stop, that's it.' It was the ace of clubs. We did it several times more. He was not right every time—I think there were three failures out of seven. He was apologetic, and said that it could be because this was the first time we'd tried it; but I found the performance impressive.

On the other hand, I have to admit that, in spite of his obvious dowsing abilities, his demonstration in that direction was not wholly successful either. When he came to see us in 1972,1 was having water trouble. To begin with, I noticed that the walls of a new room we'd just had built on to the house were getting damp at the bottom. One day, I moved a bookcase and found the floor, and carpet, underneath it flooded. With the help of the local handyman—who built the room—I knocked a hole in the outside wall, just below ground level. As the chisel went through, there was a violent gush of water, and a torrent came from under the house. When we turned off the water at the main, the flood ceased; obviously, we had a burst pipe. The problem: to locate the burst, and dig down to it. It had to be exactly located, unless I wanted to tear up several yards of concrete. Robert walked around the room, and got strong water reactions from near the far wall. (Oddly enough, so did Joy, who asked if she could try his rods—she is obviously another natural dowser.) He wandered around outside the house, and got a very strong reaction outside the wall. 'I think your burst pipe's down here...' I got out a steel punch and a lump hammer, and started cutting down into the concrete. It took me most of a morning, but when I was about six inches down, the water began to well up through it. Then I reached the earth underneath, and the water began to seep into the hole. I spent the rest of the day enlarging it, suddenly delighted at the prospect of finding the broken pipe, and being able to call in the local plumber to repair it... But although I enlarged the hole to a foot or so, and dug down nearly two feet, I could find no pipe. On the housing estate below us, a bulldozer was in action; I went down and asked him if he could come up and dig through some concrete for me; he agreed to come the next day. By that time Robert had left, to rejoin his family near Penzance. The next morning, the bulldozer arrived. It had a narrow digging shovel with long steel teeth. The method of breaking into the concrete was to pose the shovel, teeth downwards, six feet above the ground, then allow it to drop; each time, the teeth bit in deeper. Finally, the surface was cracked enough to tear up the concrete in lumps. I looked on with satisfaction, waiting for the water to spurt from the leak; nothing happened. When he'd reached a depth of six feet, it was obvious that nothing
would
happen. Baffled, I suggested that he dig in another place round the corner where the water was running in a steady stream from under the house. He tore up the concrete there. No pipe. Finally, I asked him to dig at a spot ten feet away where I
knew
the pipe ran. It was a lucky guess; the pipe made a right-angle-bend at that spot, and we could assume that it ran from there straight into the house—several yards from both spots where we'd been tearing up concrete. I cursed Robert, and asked the bulldozer operator to fill in the holes again... (We solved the water problem by having a new pipe laid from the right-angle-bend, around the outside of the house.) When I wrote to him a week later, I mentioned casually that he had been mistaken about the water—but I didn't mention where the pipe was actually situated. He wrote back, commenting that he
had
found another water pipe under the deep freeze, but hadn't bothered to mention it since I seemed so certain the one we were looking for ran outside the house.

So on the whole, I would count our water problem as one of his failures—although, since most of the space under the new room was flooded with water, perhaps this is unfair.

What are my general impressions and conclusions about Robert Leftwich?

I must first state a general principle, which is known to every student of mysticism. 'Strange powers' have nothing to do with what the mystics would call 'knowledge of God'. The Persian mages were, in fact, priests of Zoroaster, and we tend to associate the idea of the 'magician' with
spiritual
power—an idea that has been fostered by the Christian tradition of miracles. According to Sri Ramakrishna, the power to 'work miracles' may be a
by-product
of spiritual advancement; but it is an unimportant byproduct. In
The Occult
, I wrote: 'Eusapia Palladino was undoubtedly a genuine medium; yet she was exposed for fraud several times; a kind of genial dishonesty seemed to be part of her character, as of Madame Blavatsky's.' And in my book on Rasputin, I made the same point: that some saints acquire 'power' in the course of spiritual advancement, other men are born with it—like Rasputin, and even Hitler (whose power was, of course, of a different kind)—and may misuse it.

I say this because I am fully aware that if any thoroughgoing skeptic, with a logical-positivist turn of mind, read my account of Leftwich, he would say that it demonstrates nothing but Robert's desire for 'fame', and my gullibility. In fact, when I first met Robert, I was aware of this possibility. Not that he makes an impression of dishonesty; he doesn't. But that a man so obviously people-oriented might be deceiving himself. On the other hand, his demonstrations with the divining rod made it perfectly clear that he possesses the power of dowsing to a high degree. The more I got to know him, the more I felt that he is basically a solid and consistent character, whose schoolboyish exterior only
seems
to be at variance with the powers he possesses.

I tend to be naturally sympathetic to him because I have always been a rather cheerful and optimistic sort of person, and to some extent, my experience parallels his own. His descriptions of his childhood make it clear that he always had superabundant vitality, and intense curiosity. He mentions that, at the age of five, he used to be up before anyone else in the household—at six a.m.—and out in the street, building dams in the gutter with the aid of a toy sweeping brush. The odd affinity for water was already apparent. At school, he developed the knack of concealing his laziness by the trick already mentioned: somehow 'willing' the master to ask him only the questions he knew. The result was that he always did badly in exams; but this was attributed to exam nerves. And in conversations with me, he mentioned several times his lifelong ability to get his own way. (For example, he decided one day that he would like a Kipp's apparatus—a device for producing Hydrogen Sulphide in the laboratory. The next day, he saw one among a pile of unused glassware at a factory he was visiting on business; when he asked about the apparatus, the manager said it was going to be thrown out, and told him to take it home. He mentioned a dozen other examples of similar 'coincidences.') He said, wryly, that this ability to get whatever he wants has probably been bad for his character; and, to some extent, this may be true. I am not saying that people need adversity to improve their characters; intelligence and self-criticism will serve just as well; but some problems may turn your attention in a particular direction, and produce important insights. A man with too much power to control his own destiny may be in danger of limiting his experience to what he
thinks
he wants. For example, it may be all very nice to get a Kipp's apparatus within a week of deciding you'd like to own one; but he admits it has been in his attic, unused, ever since.

This breezy, willful aspect of his character may explain why he is a good 'transmitter' but a poor 'receiver'. He mentioned a friend, Walter Mellor, the chief engineer of a large firm, who is a superb receiver. Mellor can go out of the room, and Robert thinks of a number, 'transmits' it, and writes it down on a piece of paper. Mellor comes into the room, and can announce the four-figure number correctly and without hesitation, before lifting the paper to verify it. But if Robert goes out of the room, and Mellor tries to transmit, there is no result. Mellor's forehead begins to perspire, and nothing comes into Robert's head. Mellor is also a 'sensitive': he can take an object—say, Patricia's watch—and tell her all kinds of things about herself that he cannot possibly have known. Leftwich cannot do this; his mind is attuned to 'doing', not receiving. Yet when I asked him about this, he remarked, interestingly, that he felt he 'didn't know where to start'. 'Perhaps if I knew where to start, I could do it. But I just don't know.'

This led us on to the subject of dowsing; I asked him how, in that case, he accounted for his ability to divine almost anything. The answer was important. 'There used to be two schools of thought, and I made a third. One school believes all matter emits some radiation, and some people are sensitive to it. Two, that we emit some minute radar signal that enables us to "pick
up"
what we're looking for. But this doesn't explain how I can use other people to dowse. I can see a man walking down the street, and tune in to him. And as he passes over, say, a water pipe, he emits a signal which I pick up.' This is obviously not quite accurate; this
is
accounted for by the radar theory. But then, as Leftwich went on to point out, neither of these theories accounts for map dowsing. This is certainly the most baffling form of divining; the map dowser can sit at home, suspend his pendulum—or whatever he uses—over a map, and say: 'There is water in the comer of this field.' Although this sounds preposterous, it is well attested as the more common form of dowsing. In
Rasputin
, I described how a map-dowser had taken a letter from me and held it (unopened) in one hand, while he allowed a pendulum to swing above the map of England with the other. The two intersecting lines of its swing pinpointed the place where the sender (Margaret Lane) was at that moment, as I later confirmed. Leftwich believes that
all
dowsing depends on the 'superconscious' mind—a term invented, as far as I know, by Aldous Huxley, who asked why, if the mind has a Freudian 'basement' which is hidden from consciousness, it should not also have a non-Freudian attic.[1] This, Leftwich believes, is the basic source of the ability to dowse. The superconscious mind is certainly an extremely tempting hypothesis to all who are interested in the theory of occultism. It explains, for example, the thousands of well-attested cases of 'specters of the living'. Goethe relates, for example, how, when he was out for a walk in the rain, he saw a friend wearing his own dressing gown and slippers, walking in front of him. When he arrived home, he found the friend seated in front of the fire in his dressing gown and slippers; he had got soaked on his way to Goethe's house. The friend was completely unaware of having walked in front of Goethe in the rain. And in many cases of 'specters of the living', the person whose 'specter' is seen knows nothing about it—although he may have been thinking about the person to whom it appeared at the time. Telepathy is a possible explanation of these specters—i.e. the assumption that there was no 'real' specter, only an
image
of the person in the mind of the 'receiver'. On the other hand, there have been cases in which the specter has been seen by several people, and it seems unlikely that all are good receivers. Leftwich's 'superconscious' seems a better explanation: that there is a part of the mind whose powers exceed those of normal consciousness, and that can be 'elsewhere'—like Prospero's messenger Arid—when it pleases. Leftwich has, to some extent, learned the trick of controlling his Arid. My own theory of Leftwich's powers is simply this. The superconscious operates efficiently only when our energies are high. It is, in a sense, a 'dispensable' part of the mind, not essential to our survival. Goethe's guest was sitting comfortably in front of the fire, relaxed and thinking about Goethe; perhaps he had a 'peak experience', one of those spontaneous overflows of sheer joy described by Maslow. The superconscious felt free to go and find Goethe Most accounts of specters of the living that I have seen occur either when the person is thinking of someone, or is totally relaxed.