Read Online Beyond the Occult by Colin Wilson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Colin Wilson
Tags: Beyond the Occult
Ads: Link
suddenly
knew
that another taxi would jump the traffic lights at the Queens way intersection and hit them sideways-on. The fact that it was late at night and he was exhausted after playing in a concert could help to explain why he was in the right condition to receive the message from his unconscious mind. But how could his unconscious mind know about something that was going to happen in a minute or so? Even if it could somehow ‘see’ the other taxi approaching the traffic light and read the mind of the driver, he could still not
know
that there would be a collision. There can be no ‘scientific’ explanation for precognition because it is obviously impossible to know about an event which has not yet happened. Yet my reading revealed that there are hundreds of serious, well-documented cases.
It was at this point that I found an important clue in a book that had been presented to me by its author not long after publication of
The Occult
. It bore the intimidating title
Towards a General Theory of the Paranormal
and it led me on to so many fresh clues and new insights that they will require a chapter to themselves.
* Muz Murray,
Sharing the Quest
(1986).
* Quoted by Nona Coxhead in
The Relevance of Bliss
(1985).
† Hans L. Martensen,
Jacob Boehme, Studies in his Life and Teachings
(1949).
* See my
Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries
pp. 92–8.
* See my book
The Psychic Detectives
. Denton’s major work
The Soul of Things
has now been republished by Aquarian Press.
1
Mediums and Mystics
In 1964 an experimental psychologist named Lawrence LeShan became increasingly interested in the way the mind can influence the body and decided — with some misgivings — to study the evidence for extra-sensory perception. This was out of sheer conscientiousness, for his training as a scientist had convinced him that it could not exist. ‘I was fairly sure that I would wind up trying to figure out how it was that serious men like William James, Gardner Murphy, and half a dozen Nobel Prize winners had been deluded into believing such nonsense.’
Careful study changed his mind:
To my intense surprise, as I began to read the scientific journals and serious books in the field, it became obvious that the material
was
valid. The standards of research were extremely high, and the evidence scientifically valid. The only alternative explanation to the hundreds of carefully studied ‘spontaneous’ incidents reported, and the hundreds of scientifically controlled laboratory experiments, was that the greatest conspiracy in history had been going on for more than eighty years.
LeShan heard that a medium named Eileen Garrett was highly regarded in scientific circles, and decided to work with her. His first professional encounter convinced him that she was no fraud. Previous researchers had been trying to get Mrs Garrett to ‘guess’ the colour of cardboard squares. That sounded dreary, so LeShan decided to try to make it more interesting. He clipped a lock of hair from the head of his twelve-year-old daughter Wendy, persuaded the next-door neighbour to give him a tuft of hair from the tail of their dog, and plucked a fresh rosebud from the garden. These were placed in three clear plastic boxes, and LeShan began the experiment by telling the medium what was in each of them. Then he retreated behind a screen with the boxes, and Mrs Garrett had to put her arm in through a narrow hole. LeShan took a box at random and placed it where she could touch it. She immediately identified it correctly as the box containing the lock of his daughter’s hair, then went on to make incredibly accurate comments about the child. Her first remark was, ‘I think I’ll call her Hilary — she’ll like that.’ In fact when Wendy LeShan was four years old she had developed a crush on a girl called Hilary, and had begged her parents to let her change her name to Hilary. But the incident was long forgotten — it had not even been mentioned in
knew
that another taxi would jump the traffic lights at the Queens way intersection and hit them sideways-on. The fact that it was late at night and he was exhausted after playing in a concert could help to explain why he was in the right condition to receive the message from his unconscious mind. But how could his unconscious mind know about something that was going to happen in a minute or so? Even if it could somehow ‘see’ the other taxi approaching the traffic light and read the mind of the driver, he could still not
know
that there would be a collision. There can be no ‘scientific’ explanation for precognition because it is obviously impossible to know about an event which has not yet happened. Yet my reading revealed that there are hundreds of serious, well-documented cases.
It was at this point that I found an important clue in a book that had been presented to me by its author not long after publication of
The Occult
. It bore the intimidating title
Towards a General Theory of the Paranormal
and it led me on to so many fresh clues and new insights that they will require a chapter to themselves.
* Muz Murray,
Sharing the Quest
(1986).
* Quoted by Nona Coxhead in
The Relevance of Bliss
(1985).
† Hans L. Martensen,
Jacob Boehme, Studies in his Life and Teachings
(1949).
* See my
Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries
pp. 92–8.
* See my book
The Psychic Detectives
. Denton’s major work
The Soul of Things
has now been republished by Aquarian Press.
1
Mediums and Mystics
In 1964 an experimental psychologist named Lawrence LeShan became increasingly interested in the way the mind can influence the body and decided — with some misgivings — to study the evidence for extra-sensory perception. This was out of sheer conscientiousness, for his training as a scientist had convinced him that it could not exist. ‘I was fairly sure that I would wind up trying to figure out how it was that serious men like William James, Gardner Murphy, and half a dozen Nobel Prize winners had been deluded into believing such nonsense.’
Careful study changed his mind:
To my intense surprise, as I began to read the scientific journals and serious books in the field, it became obvious that the material
was
valid. The standards of research were extremely high, and the evidence scientifically valid. The only alternative explanation to the hundreds of carefully studied ‘spontaneous’ incidents reported, and the hundreds of scientifically controlled laboratory experiments, was that the greatest conspiracy in history had been going on for more than eighty years.
LeShan heard that a medium named Eileen Garrett was highly regarded in scientific circles, and decided to work with her. His first professional encounter convinced him that she was no fraud. Previous researchers had been trying to get Mrs Garrett to ‘guess’ the colour of cardboard squares. That sounded dreary, so LeShan decided to try to make it more interesting. He clipped a lock of hair from the head of his twelve-year-old daughter Wendy, persuaded the next-door neighbour to give him a tuft of hair from the tail of their dog, and plucked a fresh rosebud from the garden. These were placed in three clear plastic boxes, and LeShan began the experiment by telling the medium what was in each of them. Then he retreated behind a screen with the boxes, and Mrs Garrett had to put her arm in through a narrow hole. LeShan took a box at random and placed it where she could touch it. She immediately identified it correctly as the box containing the lock of his daughter’s hair, then went on to make incredibly accurate comments about the child. Her first remark was, ‘I think I’ll call her Hilary — she’ll like that.’ In fact when Wendy LeShan was four years old she had developed a crush on a girl called Hilary, and had begged her parents to let her change her name to Hilary. But the incident was long forgotten — it had not even been mentioned in
Similar Books
