The
UNEXPLAINED

Mysteries of Mind Space and Time

The mind seems able to leap over barriers of space, time and even death itself. ARCHIE ROY describes daring attempts to account for these strange human powers in terms of modern science

THE STRANGE and beautiful Universe discovered by the brilliant researches of 20th-century physicists is forever hidden from our senses, adapted as they are to the macroworld. The entities of the subatomic Universe elude everyday concepts: they are related to each other in a web of mathematical probabilities in a shadow game whose rules are the laws of relativity and quantum physics. The statements of physicists about the nature of reality and about the immediate sensory world resemble more and more the statements of mystics, both eastern and western, and those of mediums regarding the operations of their psychic faculties.

The medium, the mystic and the physicist find themselves in unexpected accord. The odd man out is the one who still believes that the 19th-century picture of the Universe is adequate to the whole of reality. A few quotations are sufficient to illustrate this.

The physicist Sir Arthur Eddington: 'The stuff of the world is mind stuff.'

The mystic Evelyn Underhill: 'The game of give and take that goes on between the human consciousness and the external world.

The physicist Louis de Broglie: 'In space-time everything which for each of us constitutes the past, the present, and the future is given en bloc...'

The medium Eileen Garrett: 'In the ultimate nature of the Universe there are no divisions in time and space.'

The Zen Master Dogen: 'It is believed by most that time passes; in actual fact. it stays where it is. This idea of passing may be called time, but it is an incorrect idea, for since one sees it only as passing, one cannot understand that it stays just where it is.'

From a Buddhist text: 'It was taught by the Buddha . . . that . . . the past, the future, physical space . . . and individuals are no-thing but names, forms of thought, words of common usage, merely superficial realities.'

'I'he physicist Henry Margenau: The central recognition of the theory of relativity is that geometry is a construct of the intellect. Only when this discovery is accepted can the mind feel free to tamper with the time-honoured notions of space and time.'

Below: Arthur Eddington. an innovative theorist, believed that the results of scientific research are largely determined by our methods of investigation - in studying nature we discover ourselves

'The principle of complementarity was forced on theoretical physicists because of the dual nature of subatomic particles: they behave sometimes like traditional notions of particles,sometimes like waves. The principle is relevant in the paranormal field. The point of view provided by our senses in everyday life is evidently only one aspect of reality, a model geared towards a human being's immediate physical survival. The modern physicist's picture, totally different from the sensory one, represents nature in a different way, revealing quite different aspects of reality. Instead of conferring importance on objects, masses, positions, distances and a linear time of past, present and future, it emphasises patterns, fields and relationships in divisionless time. Individual identity is illusory, position a matter of probability. The physicist, from this second point of view, is able to set up experiments that reveal new aspects of nature and confirm his theories, or force him to modify them. The points of view of science and of common sense are complementary. Both work in their own fields.

Lawrence LeShan, medical man, psychologist and psychical researcher, has tabulated the characteristics of such viewpoints. His 'sensory reality' (SR) corresponds roughly to the sensory viewpoint: his 'clairvoyant reality (CR) is the clairvoyant or medium's view of the world. He finds that the CR view is not at all different in major respects from that of the theoretical physicist,or indeed from what the mystics of all ages have told us about the world.

One may then hope that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychometry, precognition and retrocognition can take their place in a body of CR theory analogous to the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity. Like these theories, it may have to begin by agreeing that in the world of the paranormal ordinary concepts of space and time are inadmissible. There are indeed good grounds for believing this, since the ability of the sensitive to acquire information seems totally independent of distance or time intervals.

Above: the physical distances involved in predictions are immense. An event on 1 February is not only 4 weeks later than one on 6 January because of the movement of the Earth, it is also 42 million miles (67 million kilometres) away in space

The sensitive Gerard Croiset (see page 488) could predict detailed events to be experienced during the following month by a person he had never met. In one case he made predictions on 6 January concerning the experiences of a woman, Mrs M, on 1February. The idea of a brain-to-brain 'mental radio' breaks down here. What is not usually appreciated is that a further spatial difficulty arises if one supposes that Croiset's brain was somehow reading the physical memory traces that were to be laid down in Mrs M's brain a month later. On 1 February Mrs M was 42 million miles (67 million kilometres) away from Croiset's position on 6 January, because of the Earth's motion around the Sun. Thus it seems that mind cannot be localised in time and space.

What could correspond in the 'psychic mechanics' of clairvoyant reality to the nonmaterial fields of quantum mechanics? Strangely enough, the first steps along the road to such a concept may have been taken by certain researchers in the very period when the demolition of 19th-century science was under way. At that time brilliant psychologists such as the American William James, the Austrian Sigmund Freud and the Swiss Carl Gustav Jung were exploring another world invisible to the senses: the world of the unconscious mind, the strange, often paradoxical operations of which covertly influenced human thoughts and actions. All three were interested in the paranormal -James and Jung intensely so - for the light it might shed on the dark continent of the psyche. James, the founding father of American psychology, used the idea of the block universe' (see page 854) in attempts to understand the psychic phenomena. He postulated the concept of the 'specious present', a tiny interval of time containing everything being experienced by the individual at that moment. Jung, who later collaborated with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli in an attempt to come to grips with synchronicities (see page 594)' was well aware of the amazing revolution in physics going on throughout his long life. He introduced the concept of the collective unconscious, in some ways related to James's own idea of a psychic repository or record of all human experience. A major feature of the Jungian collective unconscious, however, was that it was not merely a passive record but a dynamic, creative one, giving rise to dream, myth, religion and artistic creation.

Below: Lawrence LeShan. a medically trained parapsychologist in the United States, has made rigorous tests of the powers of psychics and mediums, notably the 'object-reading' abilities of Mrs Eileen Garrett

The memory of the race

The existence of the collective unconscious-the racial memory of mankind - is supported by dream analysis, by the universality of myth, and by paranormal phenomena. It looks, too, as if this great, submerged continent of the psyche exists outside space and time. Like an island in the ocean, each human mind lies separated from all others above the threshold of consciousness. But just as all islands join below the ocean surface, so Jungian teaching suggests that below the conscious level, at greater and greater depths of the psyche, there is a merging of each personal subconscious. As Jung himself put it:

The deepest we can reach in our exploration of the unconscious mind is the layer where man is no longer a distinct individual. but where his mind widens out and merges into the mind of mankind - not the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind of mankind, where we are all the same.

Above: Sir John Eccles shared the 1963 Nobel prize for medicine for his researches on nerve cells. His work led him to speculate on the interaction between mind and brain

The pioneers of quantum mechanics replaced gross matter with non-material fields, accepting that their nature was indefinable and only the laws of their behaviour could be sought. Similarly, the depth psychologists for the most part ignore questions regarding the nature or 'whereabouts' of the collective unconscious. seeking merely to discover and understand its laws by studying its transactions with human beings. Just as the theoretical physicists have recognised various kinds of subatomic particles within the fields they study and have deduced their laws of interaction, it may be expected that the explorers of the psyche psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychical researchers - will discover more about the structures of the collective unconscious.

For example, if  the collective unconscious is a record or psychic store of all human experience, does it contain, like an electronic computer, the 'program' of everyone who has ever lived? Is it possible that sensitives, who enter a psychic state gain the ability, to activate and 'run' certain programs - the programs of people now dead?

Running such a program may not be at all analogous to running a cassette on a tape recorder. The tape is passive, non-reactive and fixed in content. By contrast, there are pocket computers that are 'intelligent' enough to give you a very good game of chess. And it is possible to program computers with medical programs that can 'converse' with a patient via a screen and a typewriter keyboard so fluently that the patient finds it difficult to believe that he is not dealing with a sympathetic doctor.

When Rosemary Brown receives music from Liszt, Chopin and Beethoven (see page 350), or Luiz Gasparetto's hands are guided by Picasso or Toulouse-Lautrec (see page 390), are these two sensitives merely interacting with programs stored in the collective unconscious - programs that contain information not only on the lives of these great men, but also their musical and artistic techniques, their memories, their personality traits and even their drives?

It seems reasonable to suppose, if we accept the hypothesis of a collective unconscious stocked with records of the lives and personalities of every human being, that the 'communicators' contacted by mediums will behave according to the beliefs and knowledge possessed by their originals. The ghostly figure may still act as if it believed itself damned for its sins. It may still try to invoke the aid of the living to solve the problems it left behind at the end of its earthly life.

Above: the prolific artist Pablo Picasso who died in 1973. His genius seems to have survived - appearing in the 'automatic' paintings of some psychics, notably those of Luiz Gasparetto	Left: before numerous witnesses Luiz Gasparetto demonstrates the remarkable rapidity with which he can produce drawings and paintings in the style of artists no longer living. His facility strongly suggests that during these sessions his normal personality 'program' has been supplanted by that of the deceased artist

It is also reasonable to suppose that the words, pictures, music and other productions of such a communicator will be strongly influenced by the mind through which they are channelled - as the performance of a computer program is modified by the capabilities of the machine on which it is run.

This picture of human minds influencing and being influenced by the collective unconscious raises the mind-brain problem with increased force. The relationship between the mind and brain has long been a thorny problem for interactionists (see page 801). The mystery of how the will operates the brain and hence the neurones that control the muscles has been tackled by, among others, Sir John Eccles,. the world-famous physiologist. Grossly over-simplifying his ingenious arguments, it may be said that the brain is a structure of an enormous number of neurones, many of which are critically poised between firing and not firing. Eccles suggests that tiny amounts of mental energy, well-directed by the mind, will operate such T'hair-trigger' neurones by psychokinesis (PK). Each in its turn fires others, initiating in a fraction of a second a chain reaction involving hundreds of thousands of neurones. In this mind-brain influence, which would operate also in the other direction, we see the possibility of a theory incorporating some paranormal phenomena. If the minds of A and B connect at their deepest levels with the a timeless collective unconscious (CU), sensory data entering A's brain could surface as imagery in B's brain. Various researchers have attempted to generalise quantum mechanics to include paranormal phenomena. Martin Ruderfer suggested that neutrinos are responsible. Neutrinos are particles without electric charge and, to the best of our present knowledge, no mass. They react with matter extremely infrequently. In fact they are ghost-like in their behaviour: billions of neutrinos pass unimpeded through the Earth every second. Interstellar space is filled with neutrinos, created in nuclear reactions within the stars and travelling in all directions. This 'neutrino sea' might be capable of initiating psychic phenomena.

Above: a computer in combat with a chess master David Levy (at keyboard). The computer could be given new skills by equipping it with a new program. In a similar way the mysterious abilities and knowledge that psychics can acquire may also be some kind of 'change of program'

Adrian Dobbs, a mathematical physicist. put forward a two-dimensional model of time and postulated the existence of 'psitrons', particles that travel faster than light and can never be slowed below the speed of light. (This concept is in accordance with orthodox relativity theory.) In his closely argued theory (no more bizarre than much of quantum mechanics) he tries to account for telepathy and precognition.

Above: illustration of the interconnection of human minds, as conceived by Carl Jung. The conscious minds of individuals seem separated, as islands are separated by the ocean. Below the 'surface' each individual has a personal unconscious mind that is similarly isolated. But at the deepest level each mind merges with the collective unconscious a shared racial memory that unites individuals as the ocean floor links the world's islands

The physicist and parapsychologist Helmut Schmidt persuaded volunteers to try to predict single quantum processes; emissions of electrons from a radioactive strontium 90 source. The time of occurrence of such an event is completely unpredictable and yet Schmidt's volunteers obtained scores that  should have been expected to happen by chance only once in every thousand million experiment. It is, to understate it, difficult to explain Schmidt's experiments without invoking precognition or psychokinesis. If the former is involved, the mind is acquiring information about future events. If the latter, then the mind is causing events on the subatomic level, in a manner recalling Eddington's assertion, quoted at the beginning of this article, that the world is made of 'mind stuff'.

We are still at the beginning of our understanding of such matters. Some new Einstein or Newton may already be waiting in the wings to show how a more generalised quantum-mechanical model will embrace paranormal phenomena. On the other hand, it may be that quantum mechanics will be of value to the study of the paranormal only by the shining example of its creators courage in postulating totally new and seemingly irrational concepts. On one famous occasion the sign of approval bestowed on a new scientific idea was the reaction; 'It's just mad enough to be right!' Perhaps a scientific theory of the paranormal will have to be very mad to stand a chance of being right.

Can sense be made of our paradoxical universe? A bold attempt to harmonise its contradictions is described on page 938