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and travelling in a taxi along the Bayswater Road. Suddenly, he knew with absolute certainty that the next traffic light, a taxi would try to ‘jump’ the light, and would hit them sideways. He wondered if he ought to warn his driver, but felt that he might be regarded as slightly mad. And at the next traffic light, a taxi tried to ‘beat’ the light at Queensway and hit them sideways.
    It seemed to me that there was a certain parallel between Mark’s experience and that of T E Lawrence in the early dawn. Both had been tired, and the ‘intellect’ was therefore asleep. But what peculiar power could make Mark aware of something that would happen in the future? I had already recognized that the mind possesses the power to escape from pessimism and defeat by meditating on a firing squad. But this was something altogether more strange and unusual.
    Another friend, the historian A L Rowse, told me how he had been leaning out of a window in Oxford. The window frame was very heavy, and it occurred to him that if it fell, it might easily kill him. Since he was in a bad mood, he thought: ‘Let the damn thing fall!’ A few moments later, just after he had withdrawn his head, the window fell.
    Rowse also told me how, one quiet afternoon, he had a sudden premonition that if he went into the college library, he would find two young men embracing. He crossed two quadrangles and walked into the library — and saw the two young men embracing.
    Even stranger was an experience described to me by a middle-aged friend named Kay Lunnis, who spent several days a week in our house, helping to look after our children. Kay described how she had once been seriously ill, and had felt herself rise up above her body so she could look down on it; then she had descended and re-entered her body.
    A few years earlier I would have at least considered the possibility that this was some kind of hallucination due to fever. But in gathering material for
The Occult
, I had come across far too many cases of ‘out-of-the-body experiences’ to doubt that it was possible. Another friend, Lyall Watson, had described how, when his vehicle overturned in Kenya, he suddenly found himself hovering above the bus, and looking at the head and shoulders of a boy who had been hurled halfway through the canvas roof. It occurred to him that if the bus rolled any further, the boy would be crushed. A few minutes later, he recovered consciousness in the driving seat, got out of the vehicle, and rescued the boy, who was in exactly the position he had seen a few moments earlier. Now, if these friends were telling the truth — and I was strongly inclined to believe that they were — then human beings possess at least two ‘powers’ that were unsuspected by Heraclitus, Schopenhauer, and Samuel Beckett: the power to ‘see’ the future, and the power to ‘leave the body’.
    Now quite clearly, if this were true, then it should be taken into account in any attempt to create a ‘philosophy of human existence’. Such a philosophy demands that we try to understand ‘what man is’. And if, in certain moments, man can see into the future, then he is certainly more than Heraclitus assumed.
    Inevitably, I also had to reconsider the question of life after death. Another friend, Professor G Wilson Knight, was a convinced spiritualist, and told me a circumstantial story that seemed to prove beyond all doubt that his mother had survived death. Now Dostoevsky had once remarked that if there is such a thing as life after death, it would be the most important thing that human beings could possibly know. And Dostoevsky was the most profound of the ‘existential’ philosophers. In
The Brothers Karamazov
, Ivan Karamazov argues that the world is so full of suffering that no ‘religion’ can justify it; Ivan says that he wants to ‘give God back his entrance ticket’. Here he is expressing the philosophy of Heraclitus and Ecclesiastes and Sartre — that in a world dominated by