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wonder. Then the tops of the trees became visible once again, then a piece of sky, and gradually the light was no more, and the cornfield was spread before me. I stood there for a long time, trying in vain for it to come back, and have tried many times. I only saw it once; but I know in my heart it is still there — and here — around us.
    The girl — who describes this in a book called
Seeing the Invisible
(which consists of letters about mysticism, written to the Alister Hardy Foundation) — obviously had an experience which, in some ways, resembled that of Proust. Something ‘triggered’ this marvellous perception of sparkling light. And she remains convinced that ‘it is still there’ — that our everyday consciousness somehow filters it out, just as if we were wearing a pair of dark glasses.
    It is, of course, deeply frustrating that we cannot learn how to contact these depths ‘below the iceberg’ at will. Yet — as I have tried to show — it is not as difficult as it sounds.
    The conclusions I have reached over the years are as follows. The romantics of the 19th century had many of these ‘glimpses’, because they knew how to ‘relax’. (The girl in the anecdote above does not say so, but it is clear that she was deeply relaxed.) But because the romantics were inclined to weakness — like Samuel Beckett —most of them could see no reason for getting out of bed, they failed to grasp the most important clue: that such experiences bring a feeling of strength, and that the best way to achieve them is certainly not to indulge in weakness and self-pity. Abraham Maslow, who called such moments ‘peak experiences’, discovered that his ‘peakers’ were usually strong and healthy people who coped well with their lives.
    In
Beyond the Occult
, I describe an interesting example of how I succeeded in achieving ‘higher consciousness’ for most of an afternoon in 1979.
    It was the New Year, and I had gone to a remote farmhouse in Devon to give a lecture to a group of extramural students. During that evening it began to snow, and by the following morning the snow was so thick that it would have been impossible to drive back home. I was forced to stay there another night. The following morning, the weather forecast announced more snow, and it was obvious that I might be unable to leave for a week. I determined to try to escape, and a group of us began to clear the snow in the farmyard with shovels. When the farmyard was clear, each of us tried to drive our cars up the slope that led to the gate; mine was the only car whose tyres would grip the slippery surface.
    There was still half a mile of snow-covered farm track between the farmyard and the main road. I would drive a few yards, then get out and help to shovel snow. At one point, I even risked driving straight across a field to avoid a long bend in the road. And finally, after several hours of hard work, I walked back to the farmhouse to eat some lunch and collect my bags. Then I walked back to the main gate, and began the long drive back home.
    Yet even now it was impossible to relax my vigilance, because the narrow country roads were covered in snow, and it was impossible to see the ditch on either side. It would have been easy to drive off the road and become stranded again, perhaps all night. So I sat forward in my seat, peering out of the windscreen, and focusing all my concentration.
    Several hours later, I arrived at the main road, where heavy traffic had turned the snow into muddy slush, and it was possible to relax and drive normally again. And it was now that I realized that I was full of a sense of power and concentration. Everything I looked at was obviously fascinating, and I had a sense of meanings stretching around me into the distance. Everything I saw reminded of something else — for example, of Christmases in my childhood. It was as if my normally narrow and limited consciousness had been widened and deepened by the concentration,