Free Beyond the Occult by Colin Wilson Page A

before
he went off to the conference. And all the evidence indicates that the doctor vanished on a sudden impulse several days later. How could the shirt afford Mrs Garrett a clue to something that was to happen in the future? LeShan decided that the best way of finding out was to ask her — in fact to ask all the ‘sensitives’ he could find what it felt like to ‘know’ something that it was logically impossible to know.
    ‘When I approached them with this question, something fascinating immediately happened. “Oh yes,” they said, “when we are getting the paranormal information the world looks different than at other times.” “Different?” I asked, as this clearly seemed very important. “Different how?”’ Mrs Garrett explained that she somehow shifted her whole field of awareness, and that this involved a kind of
turning inward
. She did this, she said, by a sort of self-hypnosis. Asked what she meant by this she explained, ‘It is a withdrawal from the conscious self into an area of the non-conscious self. And … within this other mind, life is being worked out on a different level.’ She described the sensation as being like ‘living in two worlds at once’. And she emphasized that her ‘glimpses’ were not something she achieved with conscious effort; they just ‘happened’. ‘You open a door for a moment, and are confronted with it. The door closes, as it opened, and the image is gone.’
    LeShan was struck by the close similarity between what Mrs Garrett told him and various mystics’ descriptions of their sudden ‘illuminations’. Here, for example, is a well-known description of an ‘illumination’ experienced by a modern writer, Warner Allen:
    It flashed up lightning-wise during a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Queen’s Hall, in that triumphant fast movement when ‘the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy’. The swiftly flowing continuity of the music was not interrupted, so that what Mr T. S. Eliot calls ‘the intersection of the timeless moment’ must have slipped into the interval between two demi-semi-quavers. When, long after, I analyzed the happening in the cold light of retrospect, it seemed to fall into three parts: first, the mysterious event itself which occurred in an infinitesimal fraction of a split second; this I learned afterwards from Santa Teresa to call the Union with God; the Illumination, a
wordless
stream of complex feelings in which the experience of Union combined with the rhythmic emotion of the music like a sunbeam striking with iridescence the spray above a waterfall — a stream that was continually swollen by tributaries of associated Experience; lastly Enlightenment, the recollection in tranquillity of the whole complex field of Experience as it were embalmed in thought-forms and words. *
    Here again we have the opening of a door and a sudden brief glimpse. The comparison of many such ‘illuminations’ with the descriptions of ‘psychics’ like Eileen Garrett, Rosalind Heywood and Phoebe Payne finally convinced LeShan that both the ‘medium’ and the mystic experience the same abrupt shift of viewpoint so they find themselves looking into another world. It might be compared to a man sitting in a boat looking at the surface of the ocean, who suddenly plunges his head beneath the surface and sees an entirely new world down below. And for some odd reason beyond our understanding, this paranormal world below the ‘sea’ is
timeless
, so that events in the future or the past can be studied just as easily as the present. This is one of the most basic statements of all the mystics: that time is somehow an illusion. And this, LeShan thought, must be the ultimate solution — the
only
solution — to the mystery of precognition. Of course the statement that time is unreal strikes most of us as nonsense — the philosopher G. E. Moore thought he had disproved it by pulling out his watch — yet