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develop a faculty which he called ‘jungle sensitiveness’, which told him when he was in danger. I argue that all our remote ancestors possessed such a faculty, and that we have gradually lost it because we do not need it. Yet many people have not lost it. The archaeologist Clarence Weiant described how the Montagnais Indians of eastern Canada are able to contact distant friends and relatives by telepathy. When they wish to make contact, the Indians go into a remote hut in the forest, and build up the necessary psychic energy (‘mana’) through meditation. Then the relative would hear his voice — distance made no difference.
    Now it is obvious that it is simpler to pick up the telephone when we want to contact a distant relative. Yet this does not mean that picking up a telephone is ‘just as good’ as contacting him through clairaudience. The Indian who is able to call upon these faculties from the depths of his own mind has an understanding of nature, a sense of connection with the rest of the universe, and a deeper knowledge of himself that the rest of us have lost.
    What has happened is clear. Even towards the end of the 19th century, the English poet Matthew Arnold was mourning that Victorian man no longer had access to ‘Wordsworth’s healing power’, while Tennyson was complaining that science had destroyed faith and left man in an empty universe, trapped in his own smallness. But the problem had started long before the 19th century — perhaps when Euclid systematized geometry and Archimedes rolled a weight down an inclined plane. This kind of knowledge — which Graves calls ‘solar knowledge’ — gradually eclipsed man’s ‘lunar knowledge’, man’s intuitive awareness of the hidden part of the iceberg.
    This was the problem that I had discussed in the second volume of
The Outsider
(called in England
Religion and the Rebel
). Now, in
Beyond the Occult
, I attempted to bring together this philosophy of ‘Outsiderism’ and the insights I had gained from the study of ‘the occult’. Yet I began to write the book reluctantly, feeling that I was merely regurgitating something I had already expressed in previous books. But I soon realized that I was creating a new synthesis. The problem of human beings is that it is possible to ‘know’ something without really knowing it. The adult Proust thought he ‘knew’ he was a child in Combray, but the madeleine taught him that this ‘adult’ knowledge was superficial. I thought I knew the ideas I had expressed in books like
The Outsider
and
The Occult
. Writing about them again made me realize that my knowledge of them was superficial. In order to really know something we must meditate upon it until we have absorbed it into our being. (I have to confess that even writing this introduction has once again made me aware of this truth.)
    Beyond the Occult
is an attempt to draw together all the insights I have discussed here, and many more — particularly the insights of those who have had sudden ‘mystical’ experiences. They all teach us the same thing: that our ‘ordinary’ consciousness of ourselves is superficial and deceptive. We are all like Simone de Beauvoir, looking in the mirror and ‘feeling that we can never grasp ourselves as an entire object’.
    Here is a typical example of one of these experiences. A girl describes how, when she was sixteen, she set out to walk up a lane towards a wood. ‘I was not feeling particularly happy or particularly sad, just ordinary.’ As she stood in a cornfield, looking towards the wood, everything suddenly changed.
    Everything surrounding me was this white, bright, sparkling light, like sun on frosty snow, like a million diamonds, and there was no cornfield, no trees, no sky, this light was everywhere … The feeling was indescribable, but I have never experienced anything in the years that followed that I can compare with that glorious moment; it was blissful, uplifting, I felt open-mouthed