The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries Read Free Page B

“Spiritualism” had begun to spread across America and Europe. Scientists were outraged at this fashionable tide of “superstition” – particularly when a number of “mediums” proved to be frauds – and Mrs Crowe’s highly reasonable arguments were forgotten. In fact she encountered so much hostility that a little over a decade after the publication of The Night Side of Nature she had a nervous breakdown and spent some time in a mental home; during the last sixteen years of her life, she wrote no more.
    Now, more than a century and a half later, Spiritualism has ceased to be a challenge to science, and has become little more than a harmless minority religion; nowadays it is perfectly obvious that it never was a challenge to science. We can also see that there was never any question of science being supplanted by superstition and old wives’ tales, and that therefore CSICOP was quite wrong to imagine that the success of Uri Geller heralded a return to the Middle Ages.
    What it would involve is a recognition that the history of life on earth may be a little more complex than Darwin thought. If paranormal powers, such as telepathy and “second sight”, actually exist, then it also seems fairly certain that they were possessed in a far greater degree by our primitive ancestors, just as they are now possessed in a greater degree by many “primitive” people. Sanderson makes it clear, for example, that he believes that some of the Haitians he encountered possessed powers of “second sight”. One of these remarked to him after his “timeslip” experience, “You saw things, didn’t you? You don’t believe it, but you could always see things if you wanted to”. In short, Sanderson himself could have developed or perhaps simply rediscovered his paranormal faculties.
    In my book The Occult I have cited many cases that seem to illustrate the same point. For example, the famous tiger-hunter Jim Corbett describes in Man Eaters of Kumaon how he came to develop what he calls “jungle sensitiveness”, so he knew when a wild animal was lying in wait for him. Obviously, such a faculty would be very useful to a tiger hunter in India, but virtually useless to a stockbroker in New York. So it would seem that civilized man has deliberately got rid of it. Or rather, the development of another faculty – the ability to deal with the complications of civilized life – has suppressed the “paranormal” faculty, because we no longer need it.
    But is this actually true? Is it even true that a New York stockbroker does not need “jungle sensitiveness”. After all, he lives in other kinds of jungle – not only the commercial jungle, but the concrete jungle where muggers lurk in pedestrian subways and public parks. His real problem is more likely to be the problem that caused Catherine Crowe’s nervous breakdown; that he has allowed civilized life to “get on top of him”. We have all, to some extent, lost that primitive vital force that can be found in most “savage” peoples. But what has really been lost is a certain sense of wonder, a certain basic optimism. The child thinks that this world of adults is a magical place, full of endless adventures: going into bars, driving motorcars, catching aeroplanes . . . He would find it very hard to believe that as he grows up the world will turn into a hard andruthless and rather nasty place, where the basic rule is, “Nobody gets anything for nothing”.
    The adult’s problem is that his attitudes have become negative. I have described elsewhere how in 1967 I went to lecture at a university in Los Angeles, then went to meet my family in Disneyland. I had forgotten just how big Disneyland is, and when I walked in through the turnstile and saw the crowds my heart sank. But I was feeling cheerful and optimistic, having just given a good lecture. So I relaxed, placed myself in a mood of confidence and then simply allowed my feet to take me to them. I strolled at random for