Beyond the Occult by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page B

entered into.
    My world became a fairyland of vivid greens and browns, colours not seen so much as felt. Instantly also my mind was not observing but was living what it was registering. ‘I’ did not exist. Power and knowledge surged through my mind. The words formed in me — I can remember clearly — ‘Now I know’, ‘There is
nothing
I could not answer. I am a part of all this.’ *
    A similar revelation had come to the Protestant mystic Jacob Boehme in the year 1600. This is how his biographer Bishop Hans Martensen describes it:
    Sitting one day in his room, his eye fell upon a burnished pewter dish, which reflected the sunshine with such marvellous splendour that he fell into an inward ecstasy, and it seemed to him as if he could now look into the principles and deepest foundations of things. He believed that it was only a fancy, and in order to banish it from his mind he went out into the green fields. But here he noticed that he could gaze into the very heart of things, the very herbs and grass, and that actual nature harmonised with what he had inwardly seen. †
    It seems obvious that Derek Gibson and Jacob Boehme had the same basic experience, and that therefore it is some perfectly normal faculty that might be activated at any time in any one of us. It is as if the human race is colour-blind — as most animals are — and a few men suddenly develop colour vision.
    It also seems clear that there is a close link between these ‘mystical’ experiences and the faculty labelled extra-sensory perception. For example, the Russian newspaper
Izvestia
reported in June 1987 the case of a woman named Yuliya Vorobyeva, 37, who was pronounced dead after receiving a 380-volt electric shock in March 1978. She recovered after two days in the morgue, but was unable to sleep for the next six months. Then she sank into a long sleep, and awoke to discover that she had acquired paranormal powers. ‘I went shopping one morning. I got to the bus-stop and a woman was standing there. Suddenly I was struck by horror — I thought I could see right through this woman like a television screen.’ When
Izvestia
’s reporter interviewed her she looked at his stomach and told him correctly what he had had for lunch. Within seconds of meeting a doctor she was able to tell him that one ear was weaker than the other, and that the same was true of his eyes.
    Significantly, Vorobyeva also states that she can see ultra-violet rays from the sun. This could offer a clue to her ‘X-ray vision’. The human eye is only able to see light of wavelengths of between 16 and 32-millionths of an inch (violet and red respectively). Nature has apparently decided that it would serve no purpose for the eye to detect energy of wavelengths longer than 32 millionths (heat and microwaves), or shorter than 16 millionths (ultra-violet and X-rays). But we might regard these limits as more or less arbitrary. In 1828 a youth named Caspar Hauser walked into Nuremberg with bleeding feet, and it soon became clear that he had been kept captive in a darkened room since birth. Physicians who examined him discovered that as a result he was able to read aloud from the Bible in a completely dark room and see the heat from a stove long before it had become red hot. * Vorobyeva seems to have developed the power to ‘see’ energy from beyond the other end of the spectrum, including ultra-violet and X-rays; one result — according to
Izvestia
— is that she can see through the asphalt surface of a road to the soil underneath.
    It is easy enough to understand why human beings do not possess X-ray eyes. They would simply complicate our lives
without enhancing our power of survival
. If we are to live with maximum efficiency our lives need to be as simple as possible. If a human being could somehow get inside a frog’s head he would be astounded at the crude simplicity of its world. Experiments have shown that the frog’s eyes pass on only very limited information to