Reimagining the Bounds of Reality
A Remarkable Friendship
One of the most remarkable and intriguing stories of the early 20th Century concerns the friendship and correspondence between two of the most famous figures of the time — the legendary escape artist and stage magician Harry Houdini and the renowned author and creator of the immortal fictional detective Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The two men first met in 1920 during Houdini’s tour of England, met again in the United States, and continued to correspond until they had a public falling out in 1923 over their opposing views on the paranormal, specifically Doyle’s spiritualist beliefs.
In his book Our American Adventure (Hodder & Stoughton, 1923), Conan Doyle recounts his experiences during his lecture tour in the United States during the summer of 1922. Doyle lectured on spiritualism at Carnegie Hall in New York City, at the campuses of Harvard and Yale Universities, and even vacationed in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He also spent time visiting with his very good friend, at the time, Harry Houdini.
Doyle recounts, in his book, how he was invited as a guest of honor, with his family, at the American Club of Magicians on June 2, 1922. Houdini chaired the organization as the most celebrated stage magician of his time. On this occasion, Doyle screened footage previously filmed for a movie based on his science fiction novel, The Lost World, to the amazement of the viewers in attendance. The footage was a stop-motion animation of model dinosaurs in action, and the event was awe-inspiring enough to be reported in the newspapers the following day.
Doyle describes the evening in his book Our American Adventure, while also mentioning the larger-than-life presence of Houdini at the occasion:
… I had only to set up the cinema apparatus in the banquet-room. A dead and eerie silence fell as the company saw these horrible creatures clawing and biting and fondling in the primeval slime. One saw their jaws champing and their terrible eyes gleaming. I am sure that no one who was there will ever forget it. Of course I refused to give any explanation afterwards and I left them, as I had intended, utterly mystified. Nothing could have been more completely successful.
Apart from my effort it was a wonderful evening, and especially Mr. Houdini gave a perfectly amazing performance, in which having been packed into a bag, and the bag into a trunk, corded up and locked, he was out again after only a few seconds’ concealment in a tent, while in his place his wife was found, equally bound, bagged, and boxed, with my dress-coat on which I had put upon him before I tied his hands behind him. Houdini is the greatest conjurer in the world and this is his greatest trick. I may add that Houdini is not one of those shallow men who imagine they can explain away spiritual phenomena as parlour tricks, but that he retains an open — and ever, I think, a more receptive — mind towards mysteries which are beyond his art.
Doyle, Arthur Conan. Our American Adventure. Hodder and Stoughton, 1923, ChaP. XIII, p.80.
These words praising Houdini proved bitterly ironic, because only a year later the two men were destined to have a very public falling-out over their conflicting views on spiritualism. I don’t intend to delve into the circumstances that led to the rift, which are discussed in detail elsewhere. What I want to add to the discussion is my own understanding of what was at play here.
Contrasting Perspectives
Houdini was deeply skeptical of paranormal and spiritual phenomena and even made it his mission to expose perceived frauds and charlatans posing as seers, mystics, and spiritual mediums. This is ironic, given the nature of his stage performances, which often capitalized on the glamor of the mysterious and the supernatural. Essentially, I contend, Houdini was profoundly practical in his sensibility, having been immersed in stagecraft throughout his career. As a result, he was intimately familiar with the tricks of the trade involved in creating illusions for spectacle. Thus, he frequently projected his own materialism onto the objects of his investigation as he sought to expose what he believed were their deceptive practices.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1922 lecture tour in America, meeting his friend Harry Houdini
Doyle, on the other hand, had by the 1920s become deeply immersed in spiritualism, to the point of believing it represented a new religion or, at least, the basis of a religious revival in the Western World. In his book Our American Adventure, Doyle clearly states that his lecture tour in the US was driven by missionary zeal to bring spirituality back to a world immersed in modern scientific materialism. The irony in these circumstances is that Doyle is best known for creating the fictional character who epitomized cold, clinical, logical precision and scientific detachment in criminal investigation: the detective Sherlock Holmes. In addition, in creating another character, Professor Challenger, Doyle epitomized the spirit of scientific discovery in a highly entertaining series of science fiction stories. Thus, Doyle’s personal belief in the paranormal and spiritual matters was seemingly at odds with the fictional personages he was most renowned for bringing to the modern world.
In his book, Doyle describes his vision regarding his study of spiritual matters. He points out that he initially approached the subject with considerable skepticism of his own, but was subsequently persuaded by the weight of the evidence he was confronted with:
I showed how I had started from theistic materialism with absolute incredulity as to any life beyond this one. Then I showed my early psychic experiments, my long course of reading, my years of struggle against the facts, and my final forced acceptance of the phenomena….
Ibid., Chap. II, p.9
Doyle also describes his near-religious devotion to the cause of spreading the message of spiritualism in the Western World through his lectures and presentations:
“The true aim of communication with spirits is consolation, knowledge of spiritual matters, including conditions of life after death, and above all, self-improvement.
“Far from being antagonistic to religion, this psychic movement is destined to revivify religion, which has long been decaying and becoming a mere formality.”
Ibid., Chap. I, p.3
From my perspective, though the two men appear to be diametrically opposed in their views, at a certain level, they are fundamentally in agreement. Both men expressed a profound dissatisfaction with the prevailing ethos of modern Scientific Materialism in the 20th Century and with its perceived limitations imposed on the nature of reality. However, they approached this problem from different angles.
Houdini, while professing to be a skeptic in spiritual matters and dedicated to exposing frauds and charlatans, nevertheless owed his own stage presence and performance to the visceral appeal of the supernatural. Houdini’s death-defying escape acts tapped into the deep human fear of confinement and enclosed spaces, as well as the human impulse for danger and freedom. While his own firsthand knowledge of the tricks of the magician’s trade drove him to expose the facade of fraudulent supernatural practices, he nevertheless tapped into the deep human need for escape from the confines of material experience in his stage performances and charismatic appeal.
Houdini’s death-defying escape acts tapped into the deep human impulse for danger and freedom
Doyle, on the other hand, literally came from a clinical background as a medical practitioner early in his career. His fictional creations underscored his own convictions in the prevalence of the scientific method over “benighted superstition.” Nevertheless, he came to experience a deep sense of dissatisfaction with the material plane of reality and sought answers beyond the merely physical. He seemed to have found refuge in his study of paranormal and spiritual phenomena and lectured passionately on these ideas towards the latter part of his career. Whether or not he may have been misguided, as his critics suggest, he was deeply convinced of his ideas, and even believed they were part of a divinely inspired mission to bring spirituality to the deeply materialistic Western society of his time. Referring to spiritual messages received from communications with ethereal dimensions, he writes:
… they constituted an organised philosophy and explanation of life and fate quite different from any held by the world before, but simple, reasonable, and credible, when once we had cleared our minds of its prepossessions and prejudices. I showed that it bore every sign of being a new revelation from God to man, sent to the human race at the hour of its need….
Ibid., Chap II, p.10
Thus, while Houdini deployed the trappings of mystery and mysticism in his act, he was fundamentally a practical skeptic who believed that all mysticism was sleight of hand, projecting his own experience onto others. As such, he was driven by a well-intentioned zeal to expose the perceived fraud in the spiritual domain. Doyle, on the other hand, developed a strong belief in paranormal phenomena and spiritual matters through his extensive reading, study, and firsthand experience. He developed his own near-religious missionary zeal to spread mystical enlightenment in a world which he perceived as jaded, decadent, and corrupted by egomaniacal materialism.
Beyond the Box
I began my blog nearly 8 years ago with an article about Thinking Outside the Box and what it meant to me. On this occasion of my 50th blog post, I have come full circle to discussing what it means to escape from the “box,” to get beyond the “box.” At the beginning of this article, I posted a video clip of one of Harry Houdini’s most famous performances — an underwater escape from a locked box. Perhaps that gives one a clue about what it means to get outside the box!
The cube is a representation of 3D (three-dimensional) reality — of the material, spatial domain that we inhabit. Our senses are tuned to 3D experience, and, as such, we have no concept of any dimension of human experience beyond it. We are, in effect, confined to the domain of materiality and physicality — to the three-dimensional experience of the “box.” And yet, there is something deep and visceral in human nature that expresses deep dissatisfaction with the material universe and yearns for an experience beyond it — if not consciously, then certainly at a subconscious level. We look at everyday experience, at the actions of nihilistic individuals with purely materialistic motivations, and something within us feels deep revulsion at them. “There has got to be something more to it than this,” we wonder to ourselves.
Human beings, on the other hand, seek to impose “order” on the perceived “chaos” of reality. We seek to create an “ordered,” predictable society that we can control and in which we can live in safety. In doing so, however, we are paradoxically building around ourselves a control system that imprisons us and stifles our spirit. Even as we seek order and predictability in the face of chaotic, uncontrolled circumstances, a part of us is driven to rebel against that very system because we feel stifled and contained by it. While we need a measure of order, safety, and comfort in our lives, we achieve this by constructing boxes that impose themselves upon the dynamic fluidity by which the multidimensional energies of the universe express themselves, thereby cutting ourselves off from experiencing the life-affirming qualities of these energies.
Perhaps we need to recognize that the control system we create to protect ourselves from unpredictable, uncontrollable circumstances is inherently limited and confining. It is driven by human fear and ego, at its deepest level, and is, ultimately, nearsighted and restrictive, even though it serves us well as an insular protection against the chaotic vagaries of an unpredictable reality. It is a shell that restricts us from a larger experience of reality — it incubates us, if you will, until we are prepared to face reality. Indeed, the word “incubate” interestingly suggests enclosure within a cube or box, though its etymology derives from the Latin incubatus, which means “to lie upon.”
The question remains, however: do human beings ultimately need to get past our individual egos and fears and embrace the uncontrollable fluidity of the universe as part of our growth and maturation process? Do we need to move beyond the cradle of cubical constructs that protect us from the unpredictability of the universe in our immaturity, and grow up to achieve “unity consciousness,” immersed in the oneness and fluidity of the true universe? Do we need to surpass our overdependence on technological crutches that ultimately serve only to constrict our growth and maturation as a species?
Expanding Awareness
The “boxes” of reality are, essentially, the left-brain control systems that serve, initially, to protect and incubate us and allow us to develop, but which, ultimately, can become restrictive, constraining, and imprisoning when we achieve a stage in our development when we perceive that we have outgrown our need for them. In addition, we are also limited by our own use of words and language, which control and limit our perceptions through the sensory filter of the “word cloud” that constitutes our verbal consciousness. By embracing the silence of pure consciousness through meditative practices, for example, we can expand our awareness beyond the limiting verbal narratives that constrain our perceptions. We can explore the wider universe beyond the boundaries of culture and convention and come to understand pure Being — the I AM of existence.
We need to learn to “surf reality” as a surfer navigates shifting ocean currents and waves on their surfboard while remaining stable and agile. We need to learn to anchor our souls to the deep, universal consciousness through meditative practices so that we are no longer tossed about by the waves of arbitrary circumstances. We need to learn to see beyond the limitations of the sensory, the material, and the physical, thereby expanding our own consciousness and perception of the universe.
In this manner, we can expand our beings beyond the limited “box” of 3D (three-dimensional) sensory, material experience and achieve the higher dimensions of transcendent spiritual experience. In so doing, we can truly be free in life and escape the limited material experience that entraps us.
There is a much larger universe awaiting us “outside the box.” We only need to learn, acquire, and develop the life skills that enable us to think outside the box and get byond the box. We need to learn to embrace the universal Being that exists deep within us and beyond the verbal and material — the pure silence, fluidity, and oneness of essential Being — the I AM of ultimate existence.
