Free Beyond the Occult by Colin Wilson Page B

if there are really people who can foresee the future then our commonsense view of time as a one-way street
must
somehow be wrong.
    LeShan first outlined these ideas about mystics and mediums in a small book called
Towards a General Theory of the Paranormal
(1969), and when he presented me with a copy in the early 1970s I was immediately struck by the similarity of these views to a theory I had put forward in
The Occult
: that poets seem to be natural ‘psychics’. I had cited a number of cases — some of them gathered at first hand — of poets who had had experiences of ‘second sight’ or precognition. The poet and historian A. L. Rowse had described how he was leaning out of an old-fashioned Victorian window at Christ Church when it entered his head, ‘Suppose the thing should fall?’ Being in a black mood he said to himself, ‘Let the damned thing fall!’ As he withdrew his head a moment later the sash window fell with a crash that would probably have broken his neck if he had still been leaning out. I theorized that the poet is a person who has the power to sink into moods of reflective calm in which he withdraws
into himself
, and in such moods he becomes aware of the voice of the unconscious mind. Or, as LeShan expresses it, ‘The sensitive opens a channel of communication to some part of his non-conscious self which normally operates in this way.’
    LeShan was also willing to entertain a notion first put forward by the psychical researcher Frederick Myers in the 1880s: that the part of the ‘non-conscious self which has paranormal powers is not the unconscious mind as described by Freud — a kind of dark basement, full of guilts and repressions — but some kind of
superconscious
mind, a kind of ‘attic’, as much above ‘everyday awareness’ as the subconscious basement is below it. And this was also the view held by Mrs Garrett:
    There are certain concentrations of consciousness in which awareness is withdrawn as far as possible from the impact of all sensory perceptions… . Such withdrawals of consciousness from the outer world are common to all of us in some measure … .
    What happens to us at these times is that, as we withdraw from the environing world, we relegate the activities of the five senses to the field of the subconscious, and seek to focus
awareness
(to the best of our ability) in the field of the superconscious — the timeless, spaceless field of the as-yet-unknown.
    Most of us — as Mrs Garrett remarks — have some experience of this kind of thing: for example, we can occasionally become so deeply absorbed in a book that if someone slams a door it almost gives us a heart attack. We also slip into this same world of ‘deep absorption’ on the edge of sleep (a subject that will be explored in chapter 5 ). But these excursions are usually brief: we either fall asleep or quickly return to the normal world. What Mrs Garrett seems to be suggesting is that the psychic has the power to change her viewpoint so as to slip into this state at will. But once it has been attained she has no further power: the will goes to sleep. It is no use trying to obtain results: they can only be obtained by
not
trying. Eileen Garrett remarked, ‘I knew from experience that conscious effort was the one thing which would produce no results that could be described as supernormal.’
    In an essay called ‘Mysticism and Logic’ Bertrand Russell asserts that all mystics seem to agree on four basic points: (1) that there is a better way of knowing than through the senses, (2) that there is a fundamental unity or oneness in the universe, (3) that time is an illusion, (4) that evil is a mere appearance. Russell considers these statements and ends by dismissing them as nonsense — his own final conclusion being that ‘scientific philosophy comes nearer to objectivity than any other human pursuit’. Most normal people will be inclined to agree with him. Yet as soon as we begin to study accounts of