One night late in February 1970, very shortly before I got a call from Dave’s father saying Dave was dying, I was in a drugstore checkout line when a strong impulse led me to pick up a paperback book off the rack. (Oddly, for some reason the thought came to me that I might steal it. I still don’t know why that thought came across, unless merely to underline for me the importance of that book.) It was a science-fiction novel called The Mind Parasites, by an author I’d never heard of named Colin Wilson. I bought it, and that was one more moment that turned my life.
The plot was simple enough. Two scientists at the end of the twentieth century (then thirty years in the future) discover that we are all the unsuspecting hosts to creatures that sap our vitality and our sense of purpose. After sundry adventures, the scientists learn to defeat the parasites, and for the first time begin to take possession of humanity’s unsuspected abilities, including a host of powers then usually called occult.
When I read that book, I was seized with the conviction that the author was telling the truth, that we do have such powers, and they are inexplicably beyond our grasp. What is more, it was clear to me that the author believed it too. The strength of his conviction ran like a strong current beneath the surface of the story, and was spelled out clearly in his preface.
In all his works, as I was to learn over the years, the same underlying message comes through. There is something wrong with life. The unsatisfactory way we live isn’t the way it should be or has to be. We possess vast unsuspected powers and abilities of which we are slowly becoming half-aware. It is our task to exert the intelligently directed will to learn to develop and use these powers.
The message came through to me that night, and filled me with excitement. Something within me went click! and said, “This is how it is.” For a while I pressed this book on all my friends, and was disappointed and puzzled that it didn’t turn their lives as it had mine. But it had turned mine because it was the right book for the right person.
I had read Jess Stearn’s Edgar Cayce—the Sleeping Prophet, and Ruth Montgomery’s A Gift of Prophecy, but not much else that could be called parapsychology or occult. My mental world was filled with history, biography, politics, current affairs. After all, I was going to be a statesman!
The only thing in my life touching on the paranormal was the fact that in college I had hypnotized a couple of my fraternity brothers, eliciting stories that purported to be past lives of theirs. As to drugs, George Washington University was a very conservative school, slow to catch up with the times, and I was a very conservative person—and a timid one—who had his future political career to consider. I graduated without having tried any drug stronger than alcohol and tobacco.
But now this book, that would open so many doors by reinforcing a certain mental bent, had come to me by what people thoughtlessly call “coincidence.”
I no longer believe in coincidence. Instead, I see opportunity and choice. Our Upstairs (non-3D) component nudges our lives to make available to us certain possibilities. We in turn (the Downstairs crew in the 3D) choose. We say yes or no, right or left, up or down, and whatever we choose leads to other choices. That is what we are here for, to choose. And, as I see it now, nudging is what was going on when I picked up Colin Wilson’s book that night, shortly before Dave Schlachter’s father called.