Strange Powers by Colin Wilson Page A

which we are at present ignorant. As I look across the room now, I can see a photograph on the back of a book jacket—a perfectly recognizable face. I pick it up and place it within three inches of my eyes. Now I can see just how little information the page actually carries—just a few blurry patches of black and grey. I hold it at arm's length—again, it is a face. My eyes can obviously 'decode' these patches, and read meaning into them—provided they are given enough of them to form a judgement. As Robert Leftwich walks over the ground, looking for water, some faculty as natural as sight decodes a set of vibrations, and tells him when he has found it. If I take the same dowsing rod, nothing happens; I am, comparatively speaking, 'short sighted'.
    But amid all my uncertainties, I am fairly sure of one thing. Robert Leftwich is a non-passive personality; in fact, he is a highly active personality, whose psyche has always exerted a definite pressure on the outside world, in the form of curiosity, expectancy, interest. Such pressure is like water; it finds its way into cracks, and enlarges them. His powers are the outcome of his attitude. He demonstrates, to my satisfaction, that psychic powers are a matter of choice, not of chance.

Two
Mrs Eunice Beattie
    As an 'occult investigator', I am aware that I'm thoroughly unsatisfactory. When I ought to be asking penetrating questions, or devising means of testing the truth of what I am being told, I simply listen and make notes. This, I suspect, is because I see the world through the eyes of a novelist. In a sense, I am incurious about people—about their affairs, their lives; but I'm interested in the way their minds work, in their motivations. From a fairly early age, I developed the conviction that most people waste their lives because they see the world falsely. Anyone can understand what is meant if we say that someone is 'utterly conventional': that such a person accepts a set of social values without question, like a sheep that never feels curious about what lies on the other side of the hedge. But we find it altogether more difficult to grasp that we all live according to a set of conventions of consciousness: that, on the whole, we see and hear what we expect to see and hear, and that there may be enormous areas of experience that cannot get past our mental filters. For example, can you imagine Mr Pickwick appreciating the music of Beethoven, or the painting of Goya? (Can you imagine Dickens himself appreciating it, if it comes to that?) Could Jane Austen, even with the greatest stretch of the imagination, understand the murders committed by the Charles Manson 'family'? Our perceptions have certain inbuilt limitations; yet, in a sense, it is we who limit them, as we might turn down the volume control on the radio to what we consider a 'bearable volume'. This is why Rimbaud dreamed of an 'ordered derangement of the senses', deliberately pushing the senses beyond their normal limits.
    This is why I would find Robert Leftwich an interesting character, even if I cannot state positively that all his claims are true and unexaggerated. He is aware that the normal boundaries are not absolutes; he wants to break out beyond them. Like Rimbaud, he has already rejected the 'communal fife-world'. A world in which there were millions of people like him would be, for me, a more interesting place.
    And the same applies to Mrs Eunice Beattie, who is otherwise about as unlike Leftwich as could be imagined. Outwardly she appears to be a perfectly ordinary person—a retired nurse, devoted to her married son and his family, living in an attractive suburb of Plymouth. She has written (and typed) hundreds of pages that reveal that either (a) she has a remarkable mind, or (b) that she has 'tuned in' to other intelligences and transcribed some of their ideas.
    I have not kept a record of when I first met Mrs Beattie, but it must have been in the early months of 1972. It was at the time when I