The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries Read Online Free Page B

of “taken-for-grantedness”, that finally engulfs them. (This is why so many people die after they retire from a lifetime of work.)
    Now, obviously, the human race is on the point of an extremely interesting evolutionary development. The first step towards escape from this vicious circle is to recognize that the apparent “ordinariness” of the world is a delusion. If we could become deeply and permanently convinced that the world “out there” is endlessly exciting, we would never again allow ourselves to become trapped in the swamp of “taken-for-grantedness”. And we would become practically unkillable. Shaw says of his “Ancients” in Back to Methuselah : “Even in the moment of death, their life does not fail them”. “Life failure” is that feeling that there is nothing new under the sun, and that we all have to accept defeat in the end. If we could learn the mental trick of causing the dynamo to accelerate, this illusion would never again be able to exert its power over us.
    Let me state my own fundamental belief about human existence. Man consists of a highly complex body, a “computer” that has taken millions of years to evolve, controlled by an entity which we call the soul, spirit or whatever. But to place the “spirit” in charge of such a complicated piece of machinery is like asking a baby to drive a Rolls-Royce. We fail to understand about 90 per cent of its potentialities. Besides, it is simply too “heavy” for us to handle comfortably. As we drag this massively heavy body around, we are in the position of a space-traveller who has been cast away on a planet where gravity is several times greater than on earth, so he cannot even stand upright, and it takes him all his strength just to crawl on his hands and knees. When he is galvanized by some emergency he can summon far more strength, and even stagger briefly on to his feet. Then he can catch a glimpse of the real answer: that he has to develop far more powerful muscles – mental as well as physical muscles.
    Whenever I am faced by some exciting challenge or crisis I can see the answer. I can then see that if I could be “galvanized” like this all the time, I could rise up to a far higher level of purpose and vitality. Our trouble is that after a crisis we quickly lose that sense of emergency, and sink back into the old dull, sleepy state in which every molehill becomes a mountain, and the mind falls into a curious apathy in which it loses all sense of purpose. In fact we are so accustomed to this state that we accept it as normal. We only tend to glimpse our true potentialities when we set out on voyages – either physical or mental.
    The answer lies in generating (through the use of determination) a far more powerful imagination, a sense of reality, that will make us continually aware of the potential challenges and problems, and keep us in the “galvanized” state. It is a total absurdity that a man sitting on a train should stare dully out of the window, when his mind contains a vast library of past experiences that could keep him entertained for years.
    All this explains, of course, why we spend so much of our time seeking out challenges and stimulants – travel, adventure, sport, sex, alcohol; it is a pathetic and misguided attempt to hurl ourselves beyond these stupid limitations. If we could learn to identify and face the basic problem, we would have taken the most decisive step towards solving it. We would become incapable of boredom, and “discouragement” would lose its power over us. We would begin to see the way out of the trap that has been killing off human beings prematurely for thousands of generations.
    Now it should be clear why I feel such impatience with those people who want to convince us that the universe is a perfectly rational and logical place, and that any attempt to suggest the opposite is a return to medieval superstition. I am prepared to admit that poltergeists are not particularly important –