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Seeing Things
Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion reports having once seen
“a face of unspeakable malevolence” staring at him from a window. As he approached he saw that it was only a patterned curtain.
About ten years ago as I was approaching my home in the peaceful English countryside, I saw a magnificent black panther sitting and looking at me from the shade of some overhanging branches. As I got close I saw that it was only a trick of light and shade.
Like Dawkins, I have never forgotten this incident and never will forget it no matter how many years pass. The effects of light and shade, like Dawkins’ patterned curtain, I now realise were the means whereby a being from another world can sometimes invade our world and interact with us. The curtain and the branches in themselves explain nothing. People think it’s just a trick of the brain, and the brain can certainly play tricks, but that squishy handful of grey matter inside our skull does not explain our thoughts, feelings and perceptions. It’s simply a means whereby our minds and bodies can operate on a physical level. To put it the other way around is like saying that a switch on the wall explains electric light. Or that a car explains the fact that people travel back and forth. Of course, most of the time that a patterned curtain or a tree’s foliage produce an illusion of a face there is nothing more to it than that. What makes the difference is the emotional punch of “unspeakable malevolence” which created in Dawkins an unforgettable experience. Or for me, the thrill of seeing a panther in the wrong place. A curtain can’t explain this, nor can blaming everything on constructs of the human brain. The brain will always present us with resemblances and we are used to dealing with them.
Perhaps, as it’s Dawkins we’re speaking of here, you might be tempted to say that he was projecting his own “unspeakable malevolence” on an innocent curtain. But I don’t think he’s such a bad guy at heart, simply misguided. One day even he may have to face the possibility that there are other intelligent entities here besides us and they interact with us whether we accept their existence or not.
I’m glad to say I never outgrew my childhood tendency to see faces everywhere, both human and animal. This is considered to be a primitive trait, but I was good at it, enjoyed it and it often provided people with amusement, as when I saw a perfect likeness of George Bernard Shaw in a red-haired toddler in a sandpit. I never took this habit seriously and so there seemed no pointing suppressing it. As time has gone on I have come to realise that spirits can see into my mind, align themselves with my consciousness and project images at me which they can inhabit.
After a lifetime of looking at the external world in this way it often presents me with fabulous works of art, drawings to rival the best of Durer or Picasso. As I write I look across the hillside to some houses behind the trees, which are bare in the wintertime. Two windows have become eyes and the curvature of a branch creates a beak for a gigantic bird straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. I suspect that if I had a strong enough desire a spirit would turn up and inhabit it and I could communicate with it, but I tell myself I don’t know how. Truth is it scares me a little bit. I don’t know what it might possibly say or do.
A stupendous work of art was a Madonna of the Sorrows of ethereal beauty whose face appeared in a tree. When I turned away for some reason and then looked again, her eyes were wide open and one of them was black as if she had been punched. She was no longer ethereal but now seemed intensely human.
You sometimes get confirmation that you are on the right track. Last summer a friend who lives about 75 miles away rang me and told me that on a particularly beautiful evening that week she had seen angelic forms in the sky with three dinosaurs dancing around each other in an elaborate sequence. I was staggered. On what must have been the same evening I too had seen angelic forms, and one dinosaur, which in my case was lying down on a cloud, its large benign head crowned with 3 or 4 spikes. All were cloud formations. The odd thing was that both of us had been led to believe that angels were good and dinosaurs bad. I am not so sure about dinosaurs any more.
It’s not hard to see things this way. When next you see a resemblance on a wall or in clouds or trees or your bedclothes lying on the floor, stay with it for a moment and acknowledge that a spirit may come and inhabit it for a while. Whether or not it has anything to say to you beyond “hello” may not matter as much as the fact that you have made a friendly gesture towards the countless unacknowledged life forms who share this world with us.
