The room I enter is small, but is very clean, and brightly lit. It is rectangular; in my remembrance, about ten by fifteen feet. If you were to look down on it from above, the long axis would be vertical, and the door by which you have just entered is at the bottom right. As you enter there is a plain barrack room metal frame bed immediately on your left. Ahead, in the far right hand corner, is a washbasin attached to the wall, above a mirror, and above that a strip light. The main light is coming from a very bright bulb hanging from the ceiling.
   The bed is already made up. In other barrack rooms it would not have been, but here the sheets and counterpane are drawn taut in regulation fashion, over a clean pillow, the inner sheet turned down, but not folded open. I do not recall any other furnishing apart from the small square of carpet beside the bed, but the fact is that I had already slept in dozens of rooms just like this. To complete the inventory there might have been a chair, officer, bedroom; chest, 4 drawers, officer; and the usual table, officer, bedside, light oak - the sort of thing that the Gideons hide Bibles in; and on it an equally standard regulation lamp w/shade, plastic. Actually I do not remember any of this. All that I remember is just the bed, the mirror, the basin, and the carpet square. The room itself is in the corner of the building and has two windows. There are curtains, but as I enter they are not drawn. The one on the left only looks into dark trees, but the one in the wall straight ahead, looks out over the dark Solent. I go to it and look out. There is little to be seen.
   The building itself seems entirely separate from the rest of the hospital, but it is actually a wing of the much larger main building which is where they would keep any soldiers who have become psychotic or who are playing other loony toons. So far as I know I am the only officer here. I have certainly seen no-one but the corporal who very politely served me dinner.
   I undress carefully, doing ordinary deliberate familiar things. I realise that my wife has taken the other clothes we had brought for that 'nice weekend' we had both been promised. I have no toothbrush. I also have no razor. Perhaps I can borrow one in the morning from the corporal; but the hospital has put out pyjamas, officers, cotton, striped and a thin towel. I pull on the trousers, button the jacket right up to the neck. The room is not cold and the building now seems completely silent. If opened the windows, I would hear the wind in the trees and the distant sea. But I am now too busy to do this. I go to the wash-basin, press the switch to turn on the light above the mirror, and examine my reflection. I look calm, quite normal, but serious.
   I am very serious. I can think of no way out of this problem, and this is what is annoying me most. I am used to being able to think my way out of difficulties. But the first thing I need to know right now is not how to think, it is how to act. Here is the problem: if one is not insane and is treated as if one is, what behaviour is appropriate? This place is entirely open. There appears to be no-one on duty now downstairs, and I have just walked back from the station through the grounds. There is a NAAFI shop still open by the back gate, but that is the only other sign of life. There is certainly no guardroom. Apparently I could walk out of here if I wanted to. But where would that leave me? On the run! Self-evident response of unsound mind. What else? Is it sane simply to wait here without protest until these doctors have got their act together, and have decided what to do? They have clearly not initiated this reaction: that much is clear from Ferguson's anger. But to do nothing will be to leave the initiative to them - or whoever is behind them - entirely. Soldiers who do not let the enemy decide the plan of attack, generally survive much longer than those only wait for the attack.
   I have no friends to help: certainly no one with any power to speak to a government, let alone deter it. Bernard is a possibility, of course. This is his area of expertise. But what could he do for me? I have no idea how to reach him. And it is even a bloody Friday. Was that also planned: so that, even with a phone, I cannot reach anyone important?
   Okay, face the facts. Fact one, my dear Watson, is elementary. I had tried to tell this lazy, stupid government to deal with the Irish people as people, not criminals. I had never really expected to be thanked for this; not even by the Irish. I had expected to be noticed. Perhaps in this way to stop more people being killed. But I had missed a far simpler alternative. Now I had let them trap me, in this place, like bug under glass; and now they can squash me flat, at their leisure, and just scrape me down the drain. No court-martial; hence no public hearing. And even the question whether I am sane is not a question now for me to answer. Instead these people will answer. And if they decide, or can be persuaded, that I am not, they will then also decide what to do about it. I have no defence against this.
   Fact two: I cannot trust anyone here. This is the beauty of it, of course, strictly from their point of view. If I had been accused of anything criminal, then I could be locked up, sure; but I would also have the right to a lawyer, someone to add his arguments to mine. But once there is a medical opinion that someone has lost the plot, then only other doctors' opinions matter. And the nasty snag is that it is actually excruciatingly difficult for sanity to assert itself in a way that is unarguably sane.
   Although, in these few minutes I have only vague ideas of what might still be waiting for me, I had no doubt that my situation is very serious: that it could be fatal - literally as well as metaphorically. All animals have a sense of peril. Just now I was holding my own down in a corner of my mind where it was trying to bite through its chain. This whole exercise had been planned for some time. It must have started at a very high level, for to order anyone, even a serving soldier, to be tricked into entering a psychiatric hospital must require considerable political clout. This was what was worrying my saturnine Scotch colonel: as it should; this was why his had anger fired up so readily with mine. He was being put on the spot as well. But who the hell had I annoyed so much that they would take risks like these? Although half any nation goes crazy at some time in their lives, the taint of psychiatric imbalance can destroy a person's credibility for the rest of their lives. Surely I wasn't that important.
   But the colour-sergeant who had so punctiliously returned my salute had been briefed to expect me: and not for any hearing tests. The corporal who had sent along as my "driver's guide", but who was actually carrying the real medical authority, had known. The only thing that now seemed to be holding up this process was the caution of this colonel, whom I do not trust, although his anger was obviously genuine.
   Standing in this quiet room, I challenge my own reflection. Sure, I had been arrogant; but I would still stand by what I had written. The problem in Northern Ireland was not a military problem; it was fundamentally social. Then to use more force to solve a problem created by a lesser force is not just stupid, it is dangerously stupid. Unless the larger force - that is the British Army - can completely eliminate the lesser, which is Irish nationalism as represented by the PIRA - which I had argued was manifestly impossible - the problem could only get worse. By circulating this opinion I had clearly annoyed extremely someone very high up. But he would only have initiated a response. Who is now controlling it? I had the very nasty feeling that it may not be controlled at all; which meant that the limits to which it may go have not been fixed.
   So who is in charge? Well, I am. Of course, I am. Without me, and particularly without my dangerous sense of duty, none of this would be happening. And where in fact does this sense of duty come from, I ask myself - so that, even when you think it is your own government that is wrong, you have to challenge its power and its authority? I am still standing here looking at myself, wasting my energy trying to analyse this problem. I still need is a solution. To save myself, to save my own sanity, I need to know what is directed me. And suddenly I know.
   What happened next happened very fast. About three years later I wrote down the details, for a small group of professional philosophers in Cambridge - very distinguished philosophers - called the Epiphany Group, and they published this account in their journal. A copy is apparently in the archives of the British Museum, so the original text, if anyone ever wanted to refer to it, might be found there. The central experience was just as vivid to me then as in the moments that it happened. It is just as vivid now. For the following I use basically the text I wrote then. It can be improved a little, but only to make my intentions clearer. I must also try to give as exact a description as I can of my state of mind up to this moment. In a few more lines you will may notice a difference in the writing. This will then be mainly the writing of a man many years younger.
   I was still coldly furious. I was not at all afraid; still determined, somehow, to win. But then, still looking at the intent, calm face before me, I became s aware of something I could never have acknowledged openly before. I was not the real author of my behaviour. I was rather its agent. I was impelled from outside myself to take the risks I had. It was not just ambition for myself; together, perhaps, with too much confidence in my judgement; together with consternation and anger at the useless waste of lives; together with a hatred of all the politicians' pretence and posturing; together, finally, with anger towards those who used history as a reason to kill. There was as well a kind of responsibility which drove me. I felt responsible for my actions to another.
   And with this sudden thought I felt abruptly a shift in my own mind, a decision made, and with it sudden certainty and confidence that is was the solution that I thought. Previously even I would have considered what I did insane. I knew now that it was not rational, and yet also I knew, unquestionably, that it would work; I had only to do it before I thought again. That, I was sure, was the most important thing. Don't check.
I was not at all accustomed to do anything without thinking out all the possible consequences first. This time I did not wait. I knelt at the foot of the bed, clasped my hands, bent my head; and I said aloud, in fact quite angrily. "I need some help."
   The effect was utterly astounding. There was an immediate cessation of all the perceptions of kneeling in that room. There was a tremendous sensation of forcible displacement, of tremendous acceleration to a huge velocity. Before there was time to realise more I knew that I was passing out of the region of solar space. I knew this quite distinctly. I mean that I could see this. It seemed to me that I was already at a great height above the solar plane, and travelling from it at a terrific speed. The speed did not diminish. It only seemed to increase, so that I was passing through the galaxies like streamers of mist, radiating a faint heat. I knew the energies that all this must involve, and yet I knew they were all insignificant compared with the power that moved me.
   But then I stopped. It was entirely dark. There was nothing in front of me and I knew that behind me there was nothing also. I was no longer in conventional space at all. And yet even here, wherever here was, it seemed that I had reached a boundary, or perhaps better would be a threshold. I had time to realise that I was alone. This loneliness was perfect. I was poised in emptiness, waiting.
   But then I knew I was not alone. I felt inexpressible relief at this. At first there was no consciousness of another presence. Instead it was a consciousness of having entered the dominion of another presence which had not yet revealed itself. Even so I began to comprehend its character. Whereas the previous displacement had been swift, this appeared to be slow. And yet it also seemed to increase exactly matching my ability to comprehend it. The difficulty of describing it is due to the fact that it was simultaneously expanding from a centre, which was discrete and distant, and yet it was also all around me. It had a vastness and a centrality.
In this period I also knew two things. It was familiar to me: there was no strangeness about it. It was even a person and of the same kind as I was. Perhaps it is wrong to say it was gigantic, for the scale of it defeated comprehension. It was as if I had been brought across the whole extent of the universe - or taken out of the picture that we have of the universe - simply to understand that this presence was not only greater but, being greater, more real. It included all that I had seen as the world includes its grains of sand, as galaxies contain stars, as space contains the galaxies.
   I then received two signals: first a salutation; then an enquiry. The salutation was both an acknowledgement and a greeting. It contained much that will be difficult to describe. It was an acknowledgement of kind to kind. It also affirmed possession. This as a statement, unarguable, undeniable, complete and absolute. It was as if to say, You need no protection: you are mine. Yet it came with such a blaze, such a force of love, of pride, delight, of comradeship; with such a shock that I might have laughed aloud with joy. It was the kind of love that, perhaps, men always dream of, and yet which is always beyond them to contain, often even to express. Nearest to it is that kind of love that men in battle feel for each other; and even for an enemy whose courage they share. It was therefore no soft love but was as hard as the blow of a fist, as strong as the grip in darkness, seizing, gripping to the bone. A grasp of comradeship; a blow of love; it was a caress, and its strength was its tenderness. What could have destroyed, smashed back into oblivion, instead reached out, touched, steadied, held. Here was a strength to do anything - perhaps which does everything. Yet here it was in check. Its power was balance, for whilst it included everything yet it was also outside everything. All polarities lose their meaning. Human affairs are nothing. Good and evil are human affairs. Good and evil are nothing. An absolute is the absolute; and the absolute is everything.
   The enquiry then was very simple. I was asked what did I want. By this time I could not have drawn three breaths. Now my presence was my question. Of course I wanted to know what to do. Then I heard the answer just as clearly and distinctly as if a strong voice was speaking into my ear. It seemed to me that a voice really did speak to me; as if a man stood close beside me, just behind my right shoulder. "BE HONEST" was all it said, but almost as if with amusement, as if I had been expected to ask something more difficult.
   And then I was back in the room again, and I opened my eyes. Nothing there had changed. But I had changed. The world had changed. First of all there were matters to decide. I said, aloud: "That was God". This must sound foolish, but it was pronounced in delight and with astonishment. But it was also for a purpose.
   In these few moments ten years' - no, almost twenty years' - of unbelief, and also of increasing certainty in that unbelief, had been swept away. I had learnt very slowly to trust my own judgement. Just a few weeks before I had come to much the same conclusion as Ludwig Wittgenstein and others - although my reading was not sufficiently extensive, and I did not know this - that we can only know what our mind is prepared to know.
   This had been one of the subjects that that friendly Medical Corps colonel, one of Ferguson's colleagues whom he was later to anathemize to me as those "silly buggers up North", had found so very interesting. It had been, or so I had thought, friendly enough since our conversation was mainly about my hearing. I had only told him that I had become fascinated by the question of how it is that we can communicate meaning. I had not told him that this had caused a virtual abyss to open under my feet, for I realised very abruptly that much of what we take to be certain knowledge, but which, however, we have actually learnt from others (via persons, books, film, etc), is not more substantial, essentially, than our dreams. In other words, there is about as great a difference between a personal and a public reality, as between a personal reality and that person's dreams. Only in a public reality can a public behave as if a certain aspect of knowledge is true for them all. In the final analysis, however, it is only within the realm of our personal reality that our judgement can say this is true, whatever any public may say. (This may not appear very scientific, On the contrary, unless this distinction is upheld, there is no science. Insofar as my own mind needed to be prepared for this experience, I would therefore conjecture that nothing was as important in preparation as this. It was as if, after all these years of deafness, my ears were unblocked.)
   But now I had to ask what did my judgement make of it. All the centuries of rational scepticism that I had learnt, agreed with, and made my own; Bertrand Russell had been amongst the most valued of my guides - all this had to go. I could no longer declare out of hand that all reports of spiritual experience were made by either fools or charlatans. I was neither. I had nothing to gain - and much to lose: but this had been real. First, however, I had wanted to hear my own voice. There was a difference. Those words heard by my mind had not come out of my throat. I was not surprised; I wanted to be sure. By now the rough coir of the little carpet beside the bed was beginning to hurt my knees even through my new striped pyjamas. I got into the bed, and lay on my back. I was so full of elation that my impulse was to leap up and to find someone else to tell them. A second thought was that I had already decided there was no-one to tell (although actually this was almost certainly wrong; in a hospital, especially one like this, there would have to be an orderly on duty somewhere.) Even before this came the thought that a mental hospital is probably not the best place to do so.
   This would have to wait. First I needed to consider this answer; and the more I thought, the emptier it seemed. How had honesty ever helped anyone in a situation like this? How would it help me now? Honesty had created the danger I was in! Feeling now consciously like an anxious child, I scrambled out of bed and knelt again just as I had before. Now I was consciously also breaking my own rules. Never ask for help had long been an unbreakable rule of mine. I had already broken it once. Now I was breaking it again - and this time I was expecting a response. I did not say anything. How: be honest? What did it mean. This time I was conscious of the presence, but only as if at a great distance. There was no movement at all, but once again the answer came from outside, to form in my mind as if I was having to read them with difficulty. Without the spectacular mise en scène of the first occasion it was even absurdly trite. Be of good cheer: no harm can come to an honest man.
   This I knew without doubt I understood correctly. But still it made no sense. Worse, it was plainly false. Honest people were being harmed - ridiculed, hurt, ruined, tortured and killed - every day. It seemed that very little attracted violence so much as honesty. After I had lain for some time, debating this in my mind with increasing dismay, I knelt and tried a third time. This time there was nothing. I was alone in the room. The room enclosed me in quietness. Nothing at all. But then I did begin to understand what it meant. It was something that I could understand by my own intelligence - and it was therefore something that I should understand through my own intelligence.
   I had been offered what I now know to be called an existence theorem: the kind of truth that the mind may know but cannot prove. It is an error - and essentially an error of honesty - to suppose that what we cannot prove cannot exist. And at the same time, whilst I was attempting to hold it back and to deal only in these moments with the matters of immediate concern, a realisation of what I had learnt, together with a beginning of an appreciation of the gift that had been made to me, pressed in and would not be ignored.
   It is only through honesty that may one know God. The quality that God acknowledges is honesty. The way in which we perceive God is the way that God perceives us. If not at all, not at all; if dimly, dimly; if distorted, distorted - and so on. The clearest perception must be when there are no preconceptions whatsoever. This is honesty.
   And then to know God through honesty - or even to acknowledge God unknowingly, by honestly declaring that one does not know - is to be beyond the powers of man to harm; for nothing but this is so important.
   That night, surprisingly, I went to sleep almost at once, and slept as soundly as a child. It was only five days later, three days after the formal tests had begun - and by which time, Colonel Ferguson told me later, he and his team were already convinced that I was sane beyond reasonable doubt - that I began to question my recollection of the events. I was sitting in the officer's wing garden at the time, for on the south coast it was still warm enough in November. What I needed to know was if there was anything I could remember which could not have come from my imagination. The plain fact was that although the entire experience would have needed an extreme effort of my imagination, there was still no doubt that it could have come from my imagination.
   I began to realise that whilst I had distinct recollection of the main visual impressions accompanying the displacement (but it must be said, such as they were, for what followed after confronting that nothingness - to use my friend King's favourite description - had been more of a direct apprehension rather than a collection of perceptions) there was no trace of any visual trace for the final interval. This seemed to me to be very odd. But slowly I realised that my memory did contain a definite impression. I think now it had been there continually; but was so strange and uninformative that I had not noticed it - or I had even refused to notice it. Indeed, I could make no sense of it then as I examined it. I rejected it and sought again for something that would make sense. But all of this was to no avail. The image continued to persist clearly, without any further addition to help me understand it. I can see it now if I recollect it. It makes very little sense - as it made no sense to me at the time - if I describe it as a visual image. And yet that is what was, and so I must. What I saw was an intensely black sphere, neither radiating nor reflecting light; not completely free, but as if a third enclosed from the base in the darker background apparently of space itself. This was the source from which what I had experienced had seemed to appear. Somewhat later I would like to discuss whether this particular insight is also important. I think possibly that it is - and also very probably that it is not as it at first appears.

Comments:

   Experiences like this may be much more common than we may suppose. Alternatively, they may be just as rare as history seems to suggest; or, perhaps, although it amounts to much the same thing, as rare as both secular and religious authorities may wish us to believe. In any case I would not like to suggest at this stage what conditions: physical; emotional; psychological; philosophical; and so on - there may be many - may be necessary conditions for them to occur. This is a very difficult subject that I will try to discuss later. For the present I wish only to comment that it does not appear to me to make much sense to ask what do such experiences mean - either to the percipient, or to a later reader. You may find this surprising, but my reasoning is that for the percipient it is entirely possible that everything reported is remembered - as here - as an immediate interpretation made of events, but that this is not final. It is possible as well that the experience communicates much more than is consciously experienced, either then or later. Much the same may be said, I think, for the response of the reader. What matters, ultimately, it appears to me, is therefore not what the experience says in itself, but what effect does it have on one's life. If it changes one's life at all, then, clearly, it is important to the degree that it does this - but whether it changes it for good or ill is actually not something that the individual can decide entirely alone.

Colin Hannaford,

"Soldier."

If you have arrived from an external link click here.