Supernatural (72 page)

This chapter is, of course, written in language, and it makes use of concepts; consequently its aim is, to some extent, self-defeating.
How can I convey in words the notion that time itself is merely a concept?
The above examples can at least take us in the right direction.
For most people have known what it is to suddenly ‘know’ the answer to a problem without thinking it out.
Everyone has had the experience of trying hard to remember something, and then having it stroll into his brain when he was no longer trying—almost as if another person had knocked on the door of the left brain and said: ‘Is this what you were looking for?’

Which brings me to the most important step in this argument: that everyone has experienced the most basic ‘right-brain’insight, the curious ability that in
The Occult
I labelled ‘Faculty X’.
This is simply that odd ability to suddenly grasp the
reality
of some other time or other place.
I have elsewhere cited the example of the experience that led Arnold Toynbee to begin his
Study of History.
Toynbee was sitting at the summit of the citadel of Mistrà, in Sparta, looking at the ruins that had been left by the wild highlanders who had overwhelmed it in 1821, when he was suddenly struck by the
reality
of what had happened—as if the highlanders were, at that very minute, pouring over the horizon and overwhelming the city.
He goes on to describe half a dozen more occasions when the ‘historical imagination’ has suddenly ‘brought the past to life’ and made it real, and ends by describing a semi-mystical experience that occurred as he was passing Victoria Station, London, during World War I, when he found himself ‘in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come’.

Chesterton once said: ‘We say thank you when someone passes us the salt, but we don’t
mean
it.
We say the Earth is round, but we don’t mean it, even though it’s true.’
We mean something only when we feel it intensely, here and now.
And this is what happens in flashes of Faculty X: the mind suddenly conjures up the
reality
of some other time and place, as Proust’s hero suddenly became aware of the reality of his childhood as he tasted the cake dipped in herb tea.

Faculty X is another name for insight, the sudden flash of understanding, of direct knowledge.
And it enables us to see precisely how the left and right co-operate.
At school, I may learn some mathematical formula, like those for doing long division or extracting square roots; but I use it mechanically.
If one day I forget the formula, and have to work it out for myself, I achieve insight into the reasons that lie behind it.
But I can quite easily forget this insight, and go back to a mechanical use of the formula.
The left brain deals with surfaces, with forms; the right brain deals with insights, with what lies beneath the surface.
The left brain is a labour-saving device, an energy-saving device—exactly like using some simple mnemonic to remember the colours of the spectrum or the black notes on the piano.
It is when you are full of energy—perhaps on a spring morning—that the right brain produces that odd glowing sense of reality.
When you are very tired, the left brain takes over.
Constant mental fatigue can produce the state Sartre calls ‘nausea’, in which the left brain scans the world but lacks all insight into its meaning—the right has gone off duty: reality seems crude and meaningless.

But here is the most difficult part of the argument to grasp.
It is the right brain which presents us with ‘reality’.
The left presents us only with
immediacy,
what happens to be here and now.
The left ‘scans’ the world; the right adds meaning and value.
And your eyes, which are now scanning these words, are actually
telling you lies.
For they are presenting an essentially unreal world to you as the only reality.
‘This is real,’ I say, knocking on the table with my knuckles; but my knuckles are only scanners, like my eyes.

If, as you read these lines, you can penetrate to the meaning I am trying to convey, you will do it by a mental
leap,
from left to right.
And if you can make that leap, you will also be able to grasp how Peter Fairley could know the winners of a race that had not yet taken place, or how Zerah Colburn could ‘know’ that 4,294,967,297 is divisible by 641.
Somehow, the right ‘thinks’ vertically, by taking a kind of upward leap and simply looking down on the answer.
You will object that this still doesn’t explain how it could ‘look down on’ the future, but this is because you are still thinking in left-brain terms.
How would you, in fact, go about predicting some future event, assuming that someone made it worth your while to do so?
You would ploddingly try to assemble thousands of present ‘trends’, and try to work them out according to the law of probabilities.
And because there are so many billions of possibilities, we say the future is unpredictable.
The right brain appears to know better .
.
.

Let me try to summarize the argument so far.
We have begun by dismissing ‘time’ in the Wellsian sense, the kind of time in which you could travel with the aid of a time machine.
Like ‘zyme’, this time is a logical error.
What really happens out there is ‘process’, and it would be absurd to speak of travelling in process.
Time is actually a clock ticking inside the head—and, what is more, in only one side of the head.
Our senses, which are built to ‘scan’ the world, chop up process into seconds and minutes.
They force us to see the world in these rigid terms of spatial and temporal location.
Kant was quite right when he said that we see the world through ‘categories’.
Think of the Kantian categories as a weird pair of prismatic spectacles you wear on your nose, spectacles which turn everything you see into the strangest angles and corners.
This
is space and time, as our brains grasp it.

All this, of course, fails to answer a basic question: how future time—that is, process which has not yet taken place—can be predictable.
The only scientific explanation is the one we have considered, the statistical assessment of ‘trends’.
But it seems fairly clear that Peter Fairley was unable to spot winners by this method, for he knew nothing about racing, let alone about the complex possibilities presented by all the horses in the race.
Anyway, experiment has shown that this cannot be the explanation.
The well-known psychical investigator S.
G.
Soal performed a series of experiments in telepathy with a man named Basil Shackleton, and both were disappointed that the results seemed to be negative.
Then a careful look at the results revealed an interesting thing: Shackleton was guessing the
next
ESP card that would be chosen.
This was confirmed by substituting cards with animal pictures—zebras, giraffes, and so on.
Now there could be no possible doubt.
If Soal uncovered a card of a zebra, and Shackleton (sitting in the next room) named it as a giraffe, it was almost certain that the
next
card Soal turned over would be a giraffe.
Other experimenters—like J.
B.
Rhine and Charles Tart—have produced similar results.

So it looks as if we are faced with a basic fact: that, whether it is impossible or not, precognition actually takes place—precise and detailed precognition of the future—which suggests clearly that the ‘Kantian’ theory is basically correct: there is something
wrong
with what our senses—and left brain—tell us about the world.

I could easily spend the remainder of this chapter raising questions about precisely how our senses could be mistaken.
Such an approach would be interesting; but I doubt whether it would be very conclusive.
Besides, much of my time would be taken up in summarising Edmund Husserl’s book
The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness
; and those who are interested would do better to read it for themselves.
Instead, let us, for the sake of argument, assume that this part of the case is proved—that there is something wrong with our left-brain conception of time—and look more closely into the other half of the equation: the curious power that, under certain circumstances, seems to enable us to foresee the future.

In a fascinating and lucid book,
The Case Against Jones,
John Vyvyan cites two interesting cases, one of precognition, one of retrocognition.

The first concerns a priest named Canon Guarnier, who dreamed with exceptional clarity of an Italian landscape—a mountain road, a white house, a woman knitting with her daughter looking on, three men dressed in aprons and pointed hats sitting at a table, a sleeping dog, three sheep in a field .
.
.
The scene was detailed and vivid.
Three years later, on his way to Rome, Guarnier’s carriage stopped to change horses, and he found himself looking at the identical scene, accurate in every detail.
‘Nothing is changed; the people are exactly those I saw, as I saw them, doing the same things in the same attitudes, with the same gestures .
.
.’

The other case concerns the novelist George Gissing, who fell into a fever at Crotone in southern Italy.
After a nightmare, he fell into a ‘visionary state’, in which he saw a series of pictures of Roman history.
These are described in considerable detail—too long to quote here.
But Gissing himself had no doubt that he had somehow witnessed real scenes of history, not simply imaginative pictures.
‘If the picture corresponded to nothing real, tell me who can, by what power I reconstructed, to the last perfection of intimacy, a world known to me only in ruined fragments.’

This, of course, is no proof that it was not imagination.
What strikes me in reading Gissing’s account—for example, of seeing Hannibal’s slaughter of two thousand mercenaries on the seashore by Crotone—is its similarity to Toynbee’s ‘visions’ of the past.
Wells’s account of Gissing’s death—in the
Experiment in Autobiography
—makes it clear that Gissing saw these visions again on his deathbed.
Like John Vyvyan, I am certainly inclined to disbelieve that it was mere hallucination.
His insistence on the clarity of the scene recalls Guarnier’s dream, and the experiences of Jane O’Neill and of Misses Moberly and Jourdain.

I formulated the theory of Faculty X in my book
The Occult
(1971).
But four years before this, I had made use of the concept in fiction, in a novel called
The Philosopher’s Stone,
which is centrally concerned with this notion of ‘mental time travel’.
In this novel I suggested that the prefrontal lobes of the brain (I didn’t then know about the rôles of the right and left brains) are somehow connected with ‘poetic’ experience: Wordsworth’s feeling as a child that meadow, grove and stream were ‘apparelled in celestial light’.
No one seems certain of the precise purpose of the prefrontal lobes, but we know that, when an adult’s prefrontal lobes are damaged, it seems to make little difference to his functioning, except that he becomes coarser.
In children, on the other hand, prefrontal damage causes an obvious drop in intelligence: that is, children
use
the prefrontal lobes.
Could this explain why children experience the ‘glory and the freshness of a dream’, while adults live in an altogether drearier world—that adults have ceased to use this ‘visionary’ function of the prefrontal lobes?

In
The Philosopher’s Stone
I posit a brain operation that is able to restore the ‘glory and the freshness’ to the prefrontal lobes.
Whoever has this operation experiences a kind of revelation.
The world becomes alive and exciting and infinitely fascinating, a place of constant ‘magic’.

The underlying assumption here is that the rational intellect—the left brain—is to blame for the dullness of everyday consciousness, with its accompanying sense of triviality and futility.
The dullness and rationality are
necessary
if we are to deal with the complexities of adult life; but we somehow
forget
the reality that lies behind our systems of abstraction.
And since our vitality is fed by the sense of reality—and purpose—this forgetfulness causes a gradual withering-away of some essential faculty, just as blindness would cause a gradual forgetfulness of the reality of colour.
The prefrontal operation remedies this forgetfulness, generating a sudden enormous sense of the purpose of human existence.

One of the central scenes of the novel occurs when the hero is seated in a Stratford garden, basking in the peace and serenity, and enjoying the sense of timelessness that Jane Wolfe experienced after a month of meditation in Sicily.
He finds himself wondering idly what this garden would have looked like in the age of Shakespeare—then suddenly realises that he
knows
the answer; that he possesses a faculty that can tell him exactly what he wants to know.
In writing this scene, it struck me as quite obvious that if one could retreat into a deep enough state of serenity, all such questions would become answerable.
Yet I was fully aware that ‘insight’ can deal only with questions of a logical nature, not with those involving particularities or facts (e.g., no amount of insight could normally tell me the name of Cleopatra’s great-grandmother: I have to turn to the history books).

When I thought about this question, it seemed to me that the answer lay in something we know intuitively about states of deep serenity.
And this ‘something’ is probably the notion I have already discussed in connection with Buchanan and psychometry: the feeling that the world contains an infinitude of information, and that we possess, although we seldom use, the senses to make use of it.
If
psychometry works—and there is an impressive body of experimental evidence that it does—it must be because objects somehow record everything that has ever happened to them.
But we have already noted that our brains also record everything that has ever happened to us.
At this point we should observe that, no matter how much information we have access to, we can make use of it only by cross-checking it with information inside us (e.g.
faced with a broken-down car, a man who knew nothing about cars would be helpless, even if he had a massive handbook on cars; before he can make use of it, he needs to have certain basic information about cars
inside
his brain).
But with an infinitude of information outside us, and something like an infinitude inside us, we possess the basic necessities for answering almost any question.