The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries Read Online Free

about fifty yards, turned left, and found them standing at a Mexican food stall.
    Forty-eight hours ago I was looking for a book on the Habsburg Empire, and I searched through three book cases without success. The next morning I made another search, and this time found the book on a shelf I had searched several times. Why had I missed it? Because I was in a state of tension as I searched (as if I was in a hurry) and sheer “haste” made me look at it without seeing it. Conversely, I have noticed again and again that when I am in a mood of relaxed confidence I can find things by some kind of “sixth sense”.
    But I have noticed something even more interesting: that when I am in these moods of relaxed confidence, things just somehow seem to “go right”. And this obviously has nothing to do with me or with any “sixth sense”. I just happen to “stumble upon” an important piece of information the day before I am due to write about it, or avoid some unpleasant experience by sheer serendipity.
    Our basic civilized problem is that our attitudes have become quite unjustifiably negative. Everyone is familiar with the experience of how relief can place us in an optimistic frame of mind. The plumbing goes wrong and you have to flush the lavatory with buckets of water for a couple of days. When the plumber finally arrives you feel immense relief, and for the next twenty-four hours feel how delightful it is to have a lavatory that flushes at the touch of a button. And whenever we experience this relief we alsorecognize that we are surrounded by reasons for delight: with bath taps and light switches and electric toasters that actually work, and doors that open without squeaking, and televisions that provide us with news as often as we want it. It has taken man about fifty thousand years to move out of caves and achieve this felicity. Yet we have become so accustomed to our civilization that we take it for granted, and spend most of our time worrying about trivialities.
    Yet whenever some minor inconvenience is followed by relief, we recognize that we have allowed ourselves to discount our blessings, and fall into a narrow and joyless state of mind. Civilization was designed to give us leisure and freedom; instead, we waste our days concentrating obsessively on minor problems that will appear totally unimportant in a week’s time. And this anxiety-ridden shortsightedness is due to certain left-brain qualities that we have developed over the past few thousand years. (The left-brain deals with logic and language, the right with meaning and intuition.) The only way to regain our birthright of leisure and freedom is to recognize that everyday left-brain awareness somehow tells us lies, and that we have to learn to relax into a wider type of awareness.
    Consider the following example from a book called The States of Human Consciousnes by C. Daly King; he is speaking of experiences of what he calls “Awakeness”.
    The first of them took place upon the platform of a commuters’ railway station in New Jersey as the writer walked along it to take a coming train to New York late one sunny morning. On the platform there were several small housings for freight elevators, news-stands and so on, constructed of dun-coloured bricks. He was emotionally at ease, planning unhurriedly the schedule of his various calls in the city and simultaneously attempting to be aware, actively and impartially, of the movements of his body’s walking . . .
    Suddenly the entire aspects of his surroundings changed. The whole atmosphere seemed strangely vitalized and abruptly the few other persons on the platform took on an appearance hardly more important or significant than that of the door-knobs at the entrance of the passengers’ waiting room. But the most extraordinary alteration was that of the dun-coloured bricks, for there was no concomitant sensory illusion in the experience. But all at once they appeared to be tremendously alive; without manifesting