Supernatural Read Online Free PDF Page B

raises perhaps the most difficult of all questions about the ‘supernatural’.It should be totally impossible to know about an event before it takes place, except as some kind of vague guess.Time is a one-way street, and the future has not yet happened.We may choose to believe in all kinds of strange things: spontaneous combustion, telepathy, out-of-the-body experiences, haunted houses, phantom hitch hikers ...But each one of these might well have some more-or-less rational explanation.In the case of foreseeing an event that has not yet happened, there is no ‘rational’ explanation: it seems to defy the laws of reason.Yet, as I was soon to discover, there are hundreds of well-authenticated cases of people who have foreseen the future.
    What fascinated me was that this was not really so remote from my interest in ‘outsiders’.Because what these cases seemed to prove beyond all doubt was that human beings possess strange powers of which they are normally unaware.And this is precisely the intuition that had excited so many of the great poets and musicians of the 19th century.In The Prelude, for example, Wordsworth decribes how, one moonlit evening, he borrowed a small boat he found moored on the edge of Lake Windermere, and how, as he rowed out into the middle of the lake, a huge black peak seemed to tower above him like a living creature.For days afterwards, he says: and his dreams were troubled by ‘huge and mighty forms that do not live’.
‘. . . . my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being’,
    Is that mere ‘poetic imagination’?Or had he actually seen something that the rest of us do not see because our senses are too narrow and practical, in the same way that some people can see ghosts?
    Here is an example that brings home the point even more clearly.Richard Church was a poet who was born in London in 1893, the son of a post office worker.Life was hard; his mother, whom he adored, destroyed her health by working as a schoolteacher to help support the family.Church himself suffered from such poor health that at one point he was sentaway to spend some months in a convalescent home.He felt miserable and sick with longing for his mother.And then there came a strange experience that, in some ways, transformed the rest of his life.He describes how:
    ‘...one heavy morning, when the outside world was iron-bound with frost, I stood at a long French window in the playroom waiting to go down to breakfast.The sun was just risen beyond the ground, and stood above the lawns, his great red disk etched with naked twigs of the bushes.Under these bushes a gardener was chopping down a dead tree.I watched him.The axe flashed red, and fell.It rose again.The movement, steady and sure, fascinated me.Suddenly I realised that the sound of the blows did not synchronise with what I saw.The thud came when the axe was on an upstroke, ready for the next blow.
    ‘I disbelieved the evidence of my eyes.Then I thought my spectacles (those miracle workers) must have betrayed me; or that my illness had begun to affect my vision.I stared intently, screwing up the eye-muscles against any possible intrusion of light or irrelevant image.But the picture I saw and the sound I heard remained disparate.
    ‘Then, while I stared, knowledge came to me; the knowledge that follows a recognition of fact, of concrete experience, bringing with it a widening both of the universe and of the individual’s understanding of it.These moments are rare, and they are wholly vital.For a flash, the recogniser is a god, who can say ‘I am’, as Jehovah said in the Old Testament.
    ‘On that frosty winter morning, between getting up and going down to breakfast, in an antiseptic, varnished institution where the inmates and staff were so dehumanised that they were little more than parts of the mechanism of the place, leaving me in a murmurous solitude, day after day bemused and lonely, elated by the very dreariness of things, there I