experienced the feeling: ‘There is nothing I could not answer… .’)
Once again we confront the question, how
could
such powers have developed in the normal course of our evolution? Man began as an amoeba, then turned into a fish, then became an amphibian, then developed into a kind of rodent, then into an ape, then into a human being. There is no room in this process for a power of recognizing twenty-four-digit primes. It is easy enough, of course, to explain how we might develop such a power at some
future
date. After all the very word evolution implies an extension of our powers. What is so baffling is that we already appear to possess this power in a latent form. G. K. Chesterton would probably say that it proves that man is a fallen angel rather than a ‘risen ape’. Whatever the explanation, it seems to fly in the face of common sense.
Yet if we are willing to use a little imagination we can begin to see at least the outline of an answer. As you are reading these words, try to recall what it was like when you first learned to read — the misery, the exasperation, of trying to understand row upon row of squiggly little symbols; recall how you occasionally felt as though you were suffocating and your head was bursting. Yet now you read almost as naturally as you breathe. That is because you have disciplined all those bursting energies, put them into harness and tamed them as a rider tames a wild colt. Now the discipline has become quite unconscious and you do not even notice it — unless the print is too small or you are feeling tired and impatient. For thousands of years civilized man has been imposing a similar discipline on his senses, so that he no longer notices that he is wearing a saddle and harness.
In effect he has learned to look at the world through a kind of microscope which shows him the immediate present with extreme clarity, so he can handle it with remarkable precision. But since his attention only has room for a small number of things at a time, he is obliged to ‘forget’ 99 per cent of his experience, or at least place it in a kind of cold storage. (Sherlock Holmes told Watson that he couldn’t care less whether the earth went round the sun or vice versa; he said his mind was like an attic that could only store a certain number of facts, so if he admitted some new piece of information he had to throw out an old one.) Animals almost certainly have a far wider and more interesting form of consciousness — probably something closer to the consciousness of a slightly drunken man for whom the whole world is a marvellously warm and glowing place.
The most obvious characteristic of mystical experience is that it happens to
relaxed
people. Muz Murray was relaxing outside a Cypriot café, Boehme was staring at a pewter dish, Derek Gibson was following a familiar route in the early morning. In this state it seems that the harness often slips off and allows us to experience something closer to the free, untrammelled consciousness of the animal or child with its ‘glory and freshness’. So instead of being aware of just one or two things, we glimpse the whole panorama of existence. The mentally subnormal twins who can swap twenty-four-digit primes must somehow
hover
above the whole ‘number field’, like birds looking down on the landscape and seeing hills and lakes and villages all at a glance.
In short, our chief limitation lies in our
assumption
that our narrow, tightly-harnessed consciousness is normal and natural, whereas it is in fact highly abnormal and highly unnatural. The basic problem of human beings is simply an inability to ‘get it all together’. We possess all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle but it is so huge that we never see it as a whole. The moment we learn to
grasp
this fact we have also begun to learn how to achieve the ‘moments of vision’
at will
, and how to gain control of our ‘hidden powers’.
When I began systematic research for my book
The Occult
, I
Once again we confront the question, how
could
such powers have developed in the normal course of our evolution? Man began as an amoeba, then turned into a fish, then became an amphibian, then developed into a kind of rodent, then into an ape, then into a human being. There is no room in this process for a power of recognizing twenty-four-digit primes. It is easy enough, of course, to explain how we might develop such a power at some
future
date. After all the very word evolution implies an extension of our powers. What is so baffling is that we already appear to possess this power in a latent form. G. K. Chesterton would probably say that it proves that man is a fallen angel rather than a ‘risen ape’. Whatever the explanation, it seems to fly in the face of common sense.
Yet if we are willing to use a little imagination we can begin to see at least the outline of an answer. As you are reading these words, try to recall what it was like when you first learned to read — the misery, the exasperation, of trying to understand row upon row of squiggly little symbols; recall how you occasionally felt as though you were suffocating and your head was bursting. Yet now you read almost as naturally as you breathe. That is because you have disciplined all those bursting energies, put them into harness and tamed them as a rider tames a wild colt. Now the discipline has become quite unconscious and you do not even notice it — unless the print is too small or you are feeling tired and impatient. For thousands of years civilized man has been imposing a similar discipline on his senses, so that he no longer notices that he is wearing a saddle and harness.
In effect he has learned to look at the world through a kind of microscope which shows him the immediate present with extreme clarity, so he can handle it with remarkable precision. But since his attention only has room for a small number of things at a time, he is obliged to ‘forget’ 99 per cent of his experience, or at least place it in a kind of cold storage. (Sherlock Holmes told Watson that he couldn’t care less whether the earth went round the sun or vice versa; he said his mind was like an attic that could only store a certain number of facts, so if he admitted some new piece of information he had to throw out an old one.) Animals almost certainly have a far wider and more interesting form of consciousness — probably something closer to the consciousness of a slightly drunken man for whom the whole world is a marvellously warm and glowing place.
The most obvious characteristic of mystical experience is that it happens to
relaxed
people. Muz Murray was relaxing outside a Cypriot café, Boehme was staring at a pewter dish, Derek Gibson was following a familiar route in the early morning. In this state it seems that the harness often slips off and allows us to experience something closer to the free, untrammelled consciousness of the animal or child with its ‘glory and freshness’. So instead of being aware of just one or two things, we glimpse the whole panorama of existence. The mentally subnormal twins who can swap twenty-four-digit primes must somehow
hover
above the whole ‘number field’, like birds looking down on the landscape and seeing hills and lakes and villages all at a glance.
In short, our chief limitation lies in our
assumption
that our narrow, tightly-harnessed consciousness is normal and natural, whereas it is in fact highly abnormal and highly unnatural. The basic problem of human beings is simply an inability to ‘get it all together’. We possess all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle but it is so huge that we never see it as a whole. The moment we learn to
grasp
this fact we have also begun to learn how to achieve the ‘moments of vision’
at will
, and how to gain control of our ‘hidden powers’.
When I began systematic research for my book
The Occult
, I
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