Beyond the Occult Read Online Free PDF Page B

clear that some of these powers that lie below the surface seem to contradict the ‘scientific’ view of man. Science tells us that the future has not yet happened; therefore we can only guess what is going to happen. Yet when he was deeply relaxed, Mark Bredin had a clear premonition of what would happen when his taxi reached the next traffic light.
    Robert Graves, the friend to whom
The Occult
was dedicated, drew my attention to another curious example of these unknown powers. It is described in one of his autobiographical stories called ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’. In Graves’s class at prep school there was a boy called F F Smilley, who was apparently a mathematical prodigy, a ‘lightning calculator’. When the master (Mr Gunn) had given the boys a difficult mathematical problem, Smilley simply wrote down the answer. He explained that he had not had to work it out, because it had just ‘come to him’. Mr Gunn accused him of looking up the answer in the back of the book. Smilley denied this, and pointed out that the answer in the back of the book had two figures wrong. Mr Gunn regarded this as impertinence, and sent Smilley to the headmaster to be caned. After that, he bullied Smilley into doing problems ‘the normal way’.
    In the same story, Graves records a curious anecdote about himself. One summer evening, as he was sitting behind the cricket pavilion (and presumably in a deeply relaxed state of mind, like T E Lawrence and Mark Bredin), he received a ‘sudden celestial illumination’.
    It occurred to me that I knew everything.
    I remember letting my mind range rapidly over all the familiar subjects of knowledge; only to find that this was no foolish fancy. I did know everything. To be plain: though conscious of having come less than a third of the way along the path of formal education…! nevertheless held the key to truth in my hand, and could use it to open any lock of any door. Mine was no religious or philosophical theory, but a simple method of looking sideways at disorderly facts so as make perfect sense of them.
    This, of course, is precisely what existentialism wants to do — and precisely what I am trying to do in this introduction: to ‘look sideways’ at the disorderly facts of human existence and try to find some way of making sense of them. Graves, apparently, did it when he was fifteen. He says that he tried out his insight ‘on various obstinate locks’ and found that they all opened smoothly. The insight was still intact when he woke up the next day. But when he tried to record it in the back of an exercise book ‘my mind went too fast for my pen’. He had another try later, but the insight had vanished.
    Nevertheless, together with Smilley’s curious abilities, it convinced Graves that we possess a peculiar power which is not generally recognized by science, a ‘supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer’.
    It is worth looking a little more closely into this mystery. There are certain numbers called ‘primes’, which cannot be divided by any other number without leaving a ‘remainder’ — numbers like 3, 5, 7, and 11. Nine is not a prime because it can be divided exactly. The actual number of primes is infinite, but if a number is very large, there is no way of telling whether it is a prime or not — except by the long and painful process of dividing every smaller number into it. Yet a Canadian ‘calculating prodigy’ named Zerah Colburn was asked whether a certain ten-digit number was a prime, and replied after a moment: ‘No, it can be divided by 641.’
    There is no logical way of doing this. The psychiatrist Oliver Sacks has described a pair of subnormal twins in a New York mental hospital who amuse themselves by swapping 24-figure primes. Obviously, the twins somehow rise into the air, like birds, over the whole number-field, and instantly see which number is a prime and which is not.
    I would suggest that