Beyond the Occult Read Free

two worlds.
    5 Completing the Picture
    Does it matter whether there is a ‘psychic world’? More about mystical experience. Daly King’s experience on a railway platform. Compton Mackenzie on a street corner. The leakage of energy. ‘To be free is nothing; to
become
free is heavenly.’ Freedom and the peak experience. Barbara Tucker’s experience listening to Beethoven. Albert Tucker and the Museum of Modern Art. What prevents us from experiencing mystical awareness? Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s mystical experience. ‘The great Tragedy — the failure of man to realize his own Divinity.’ Beethoven on the power of music. Focusing the ‘me’. Sex and the peak experience. Daskalos on the two personalities. The problem of ‘upside-downness’. The concept of ‘completing’. Development of the ‘completing’ faculty. Kierkegaard: ‘Take me to see the director.’ The mystic and ‘hidden powers’. John Heron and ‘astral projection’. ‘Protective entities’? Anita Gregory on ‘survival’. Lodge and Conan Doyle. T. S. Eliot on Steiner.
    6 Towards the Unknown Region
    The weak anthropic principle. The strong anthropic principle: the universe
had
to bring life into existence. Fred Hoyle and the ‘superintendent’. John Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle. The single photon experiment. Is the universe created by observers? The final anthropic principle: life will never die out. Did life come from ‘outside’? The vitalism of Bergson and Shaw. Human evolution. What the mystics say about the nature of the universe. The mystical experience
more real
than ordinary consciousness. R. H. Ward’s experience under dental gas. The near-death experience. The ‘connectedness’ of everything. Ouspensky’s vision of a flower. The seven levels of consciousness. What are we doing in this ‘wooden world’? The problem of the ‘robot’. Non-robotic consciousness. ‘The spirit that negates.’ Margaret Lane’s experience of schizophrenia. The purpose of language. The problem of ‘doubt’. The billiard balls. What is imagination? The evolution of human creativity. The ‘Outsider’ problem. Why Shakespeare thought life ‘a tale told by an idiot’. The problem of ‘upside-downness’. Grasping the mechanisms of the peak experience. ‘Psychic powers’ are evidence of man’s evolutionary potential.
    Bibliography

Acknowledgements
    As usual, I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the Society for Psychical Research (particularly its librarian Nick Clark-Lowes), the College of Psychic Studies, and the London Library. Many friends have also provided me with information, pointed out cases I was unaware of, and recounted personal experiences. These include Muz Murray, Nona Coxhead, John Kennedy Melling, Lyall Watson, Lawrence LeShan, Andrija Puharich, Guy Lyon Playfair, Adam Crabtree, William Arkle, Anne Bancroft, Christopher Bird, Douglas Harding, David Peat, Bill Corliss, Bob Cracknell, J. Finley Hurley, Brian Inglis, Mina Lethbridge, Stanley Krippner, Scott Rogo, Peter Russell, John Heron, David St Clair, Ian Kimber, Joan Forman and Joe Gaute. Wilbur Wright’s kindness in allowing me to quote from his unpublished typescript on the I Ching was a major stimulus in the writing of this book. My friend Howard Dossor introduced me to Albert and Barbara Tucker, whose contribution also proved to be of immense importance. I wish to thank Sir Stephen Runciman for information that enabled me to correct Toynbee’s account of his Mistra experience. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Jim Cochrane for endless editorial suggestions and for his incredible patience.
    C.W.

Introduction to the New Edition
    This is my most important non-fiction book.
    It was first published in 1988, and unites two main currents in my thinking: the ‘existentialist’ ideas developed in
The Outsider
, and the ideas that developed from my study of ‘the occult’.
    Oddly enough, I had no desire to write it. It came about because I was