3
Letter to Unknown Recipient
[EL. 114]
1956
Island Hermitage Dear 1 Thank you for the copy of ‘Bilt’. I am afraid that publicity given to such foolish goings-on only serve to bring the Dhamma into disrepute and to turn away intelligent people who might otherwise be interested. People here, as you know very well, are just as foolish; but at least their foolishness is not attributed to their being Buddhist. In Europe, however, it may well come to be thought so, and that would be a pity. For your possible interest here is a revised (though I can never say final) copy of the article on rebirth 2. You will see that I have got myself involved (rather to my surprise) in sub-atomic physics; unfortunally I know little about these things and cannot say whether the resemblance between my descriptions of experience and the physicists’ description of their ultimate particles is sufficiently close to be of significance. Perhaps you know more about this than I do. The picture of things that emerges seems at first most improbable, namely, that all my more than infinitely infinite possibilities at all levels of generality are existing already in various degrees of absence, and that their existence is one with my choosing among them, on the basis of feeling, which shall be present. But after all precognition is really no less improbable, yet this is a well-established fact. And on the present view of things (and particularly after the discussions in the last appendix) it seems that we may now be able to describe the possibility of precognition as a regular structure of experience. Two of its features in particular seem much clearer: first, that we can never tell whether a given experience is precognitive until its fulfilment takes place; and second, that by timely voluntary action we can prevent such fulfilment, once it has started, from completing itself. There was also an interesting case I read recently of a precognition within a precognition: an experiment in precognitive clairvoyance with cards, where the pack was made up at least a week after the guesses were recorded, showed
315