Lyall Watson - Supernature: The Natural History of the Supernatural

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: COSMIC LAW AND ORDER
The earth The moon The sun Other factors

CHAPTER TWO: MAN AND THE COSMOS
Man and moon Man and sun The planets Astrology

CHAPTER THREE: THE PHYSICS OF LIFE
Life fields Brain waves Resonance Biophysics

CHAPTER FOUR: MIND OVER MATTER
Psychokinesis Willpower The aura Poltergeists

CHAPTER FIVE: MATTER AND MAGIC
Thoughtography Eyeless sight Psychometry Alchemy

CHAPTER SIX: SIGNS OF MIND
Palmistry Graphology Physiognomy Phrenology

CHAPTER SEVEN: TRANSCENDENCE
Hypnosis Autosuggestion Dreams Hallucination

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE COSMIC MIND
Telepathy Intuition Clairvoyance Witchcraft

CHAPTER NINE: NEW DIMENSIONS
Time Precognition Ghosts Exobiology

The author was born is South Africa and educated there and in Britain, taking his Ph. D. at London University in 1963. He had a vast and varied career; he was involved in anthropology in Jordan, Nigeria, Indonesia and Brazil; archaeological excavations in Israel, Turkey and Peru; palaeontology in South and East Africa; marine biology in the Indian Ocean; botany in the deserts of Sonora; medical research in the Philippines; and represented the Seychelles on the International Whaling Commission. He spent years pursuing the paranormal and published many important works in the area. He died in June 2008.

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First published in Great Britain in 1973 by

Hodder & Stoughton Limited

This edition published in 2013 by Sceptre

An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company

Copyright Lyall Watson 1973

The right of Lyall Watson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978 1 444 77857 1

Paperback ISBN 978 0 340 40419 5

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Dip into Lyall Watsons astonishing book SUPERNATURE It is a pot pourri to amaze and startle us. Dr Watson guides us through the maze and makes us realise how little we know about our world The result is fascinating, even scary what we understand as supernatural

The Times

To read this fascinating and well-documented book is to be shaken by the sheer piling-up of evidence that things are not what they seem, not by a long way

Daily Mail

Very stimulating instructive

Sunday Telegraph

SUPERNATURE is not simply an omnibus of psychic or natural phenomena but a scholarly examination of a science which could revolutionise the medical and psychological attitudes of mankind

Evening News

What the book does accomplish is a redefinition of the frontier. Instead of the old borders, there is a kind of demilitarized zone into which scientists and occultists may go without clubbing each other into insensibility

Los Angeles Times

A stimulating and unusual book

Daily Telegraph

The book explores virtually the whole field of the occult and succeeds in illuminating many of its darker areas

Psychic News

A store house of off-beat happenings

Observer

Carefully selective and well documented

Lancet

Remarkable Even the sceptics will agree that Dr Watson has at least given new meaning to those famous lines from Hamlet There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy

Coventry Evening Telegraph

Watson, a biologist, explores the fringes with a courage that commands respect

Kansas City Times

Science no longer holds any absolute truths. Even the discipline of physics, whose laws once went unchallenged, has had to submit to the indignity of an Uncertainty Principle. In this climate of disbelief, we have begun to doubt even fundamental propositions, and the old distinction between natural and supernatural has become meaningless.

I find this tremendously exciting. The picture of science as a jigsaw puzzle, with a finite number of pieces that would one day all be slotted neatly into place, has never been appealing. Experience indicates that things are not like that at all. Every new development in the microscope reveals further minute detail in structures once thought to be indivisible. Each enlargement in the power of the telescope adds thousands of galaxies to a list already so long that it is meaningless to all but mathematicians. Even research into what once seemed to be simple behavior patterns has a way of going on forever.

Fifty years ago naturalists were content with the observation that bats catch moths. Then came the discovery that bats produce sounds inaudible to the human ear and use echoes to locate their prey. Now it appears that not only do moths have soundproofing, but that they have ears specifically designed to listen in to an approaching enemy transmitter. To counter this advance, bats developed an irregular flight path, which confused the moths until they in turn came up with an ultrasonic jamming device. But bats still catch moths, and it can only be a matter of time before research discovers the next development in this escalating drama of nature.

All the best science has soft edges, limits that are still obscure and extend without interruption into areas that are wholly inexplicable. On the fringe, between those things that we understand as normal occurrences and those that are completely paranormal and defy explanation, are a cluster of semi-normal phenomena. Between nature and the supernatural are a host of happenings that I choose to describe as Supernature. It is with these go-betweens that this book is concerned.

In the course of a fairly catholic education in most of the life sciences, there have been many moments when the syllabus brushed up against something strange, shied away, and tried to pretend that it hadnt happened. These loose ends have always worried me and have now accumulated to a point where I am forced to go back and attempt to pick some of them up and try to relate them to the rest of my experience. Viewed together, they begin to make some kind of sense, but I must emphasise that this is very much a beginning and in no way a definitive study. I am resigned to the fact that my synthesis goes so far beyond the bounds of established practice that many scientists will find it outrageous, while at the same time it does not go nearly far enough to satisfy believers in everything occult. This is what bridges are about. I hope that there can be some kind of meeting in the middle.

The supernatural is usually defined as that which is not explicable by the known forces of nature. Supernature knows no bounds. Too often we see only what we expect to see: our view of the world is restricted by the blinkers of our limited experience; but it need not be this way. Supernature is nature with all its flavors intact, waiting to be tasted. I offer it as a logical extension of the present state of science, as a solution to some of the problems with which traditional science cannot cope, and as an analgesic to modern man.