by Colin Wilson
5 Completing the Picture
Does it matter whether there is a ‘psychic world’? More about mystical experience. Daly King’s experience on a railway platform. Compton Mackenzie on a street corner. The leakage of energy. ‘To be free is nothing; to become free is heavenly.’ Freedom and the peak experience. Barbara Tucker’s experience listening to Beethoven. Albert Tucker and the Museum of Modern Art. What prevents us from experiencing mystical awareness? Franklin Merrell-Wolff’s mystical experience. ‘The great Tragedy — the failure of man to realize his own Divinity.’ Beethoven on the power of music. Focusing the ‘me’. Sex and the peak experience. Daskalos on the two personalities. The problem of ‘upside-downness’. The concept of ‘completing’. Development of the ‘completing’ faculty. Kierkegaard: ‘Take me to see the director.’ The mystic and ‘hidden powers’. John Heron and ‘astral projection’. ‘Protective entities’? Anita Gregory on ‘survival’. Lodge and Conan Doyle. T. S. Eliot on Steiner.
6 Towards the Unknown Region
The weak anthropic principle. The strong anthropic principle: the universe had to bring life into existence. Fred Hoyle and the ‘superintendent’. John Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle. The single photon experiment. Is the universe created by observers? The final anthropic principle: life will never die out. Did life come from ‘outside’? The vitalism of Bergson and Shaw. Human evolution. What the mystics say about the nature of the universe. The mystical experience more real than ordinary consciousness. R. H. Ward’s experience under dental gas. The near-death experience. The ‘connectedness’ of everything. Ouspensky’s vision of a flower. The seven levels of consciousness. What are we doing in this ‘wooden world’? The problem of the ‘robot’. Non-robotic consciousness. ‘The spirit that negates.’ Margaret Lane’s experience of schizophrenia. The purpose of language. The problem of ‘doubt’. The billiard balls. What is imagination? The evolution of human creativity. The ‘Outsider’ problem. Why Shakespeare thought life ‘a tale told by an idiot’. The problem of ‘upside-downness’. Grasping the mechanisms of the peak experience. ‘Psychic powers’ are evidence of man’s evolutionary potential.
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
As usual, I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the Society for Psychical Research (particularly its librarian Nick Clark-Lowes), the College of Psychic Studies, and the London Library. Many friends have also provided me with information, pointed out cases I was unaware of, and recounted personal experiences. These include Muz Murray, Nona Coxhead, John Kennedy Melling, Lyall Watson, Lawrence LeShan, Andrija Puharich, Guy Lyon Playfair, Adam Crabtree, William Arkle, Anne Bancroft, Christopher Bird, Douglas Harding, David Peat, Bill Corliss, Bob Cracknell, J. Finley Hurley, Brian Inglis, Mina Lethbridge, Stanley Krippner, Scott Rogo, Peter Russell, John Heron, David St Clair, Ian Kimber, Joan Forman and Joe Gaute. Wilbur Wright’s kindness in allowing me to quote from his unpublished typescript on the I Ching was a major stimulus in the writing of this book. My friend Howard Dossor introduced me to Albert and Barbara Tucker, whose contribution also proved to be of immense importance. I wish to thank Sir Stephen Runciman for information that enabled me to correct Toynbee’s account of his Mistra experience. Finally, I am deeply grateful to Jim Cochrane for endless editorial suggestions and for his incredible patience.
C.W.
Introduction to the New Edition
This is my most important non-fiction book.
It was first published in 1988, and unites two main currents in my thinking: the ‘existentialist’ ideas developed in The Outsider, and the ideas that developed from my study of ‘the occult’.
Oddly enough, I had no desire to write it. It came about because I was approached by an old friend who had been the editor of many of my early books — among them, The Space Vampires and A Criminal History of Mankind. He was now working for another publisher and wanted to commission another ‘occult’ book from me. I was anxious to oblige, but had no desire to write another book about ‘the occult’. Finally, I allowed myself to be persuaded. In retrospect, I have never been so satisfied with any decision I have ever made.
Thirty years earlier, in 1956, my first book The Outsider had appeared, and brought me an overnight notoriety that I found astonishing and exhausting. Since the ideas of The Outsider play such an important part in Beyond the Occult, I must begin by trying to explain them.
Ever since childhood, I had been baffled by a strange phenomenon: how we can want something badly, and then feel bored almost as soon as we get it. I had noticed it particularly at Christmas time. For months before Christmas Day, I would look forward to owning some long-coveted toy; yet a few hours after receiving it, I was already beginning to ‘take it for granted’, and even to find it slightly disappointing. I noticed the same thing about school holidays — how eagerly I would look forward to them during the school term, and how easily I became bored with them. I glimpsed the solution to this problem when I was still a thirteen-year-old schoolboy. One day, at the beginning of the six-week-long August holiday, I went to a church bazaar, and bought for a few pence some volumes of an encyclopedia called Practical Knowledge for All. It contained ‘courses’ on every imaginable subject, from accountancy, aeronautics, astronomy, biology, botany and chemistry, to philosophy and zoology. I had been fascinated by astronomy and chemistry since the age of ten, and now I conceived the preposterous idea of trying to summarize all the scientific knowledge of the world in one single notebook. I gave it the grandiose title of ‘A Manual of General Science’, and wrote steadily throughout that August holiday, filling four notebooks with my round, schoolboy handwriting. And I noticed that I never became bored. Learning — and writing — about geology, biology, and philosophy — from Practical Knowledge for All — kept me happier than I had ever been in my life, and I continued writing the book over Christmas, when I began the seventh volume — devoted to mathematics. All the time I was writing this book, I had an almost drunken sensation of the sheer immensity of the world of ideas, which seemed to stretch, like some marvellous unknown country, to a limitless horizon. Every day, when I began writing, I felt like a traveller preparing to discover new lakes and forests and mountain ranges. I felt sorry for the other boys at school, who were ignorant of this magical kingdom where I spent my evenings and weekends. I had learned a basic lesson: that the secret of avoiding boredom is to have a strong sense of purpose. Unfortunately, when I had finished the book, the problem of boredom returned, for I had no idea of what to do next. I spent one long school holiday trying to read all the plays of Shakespeare and his major contemporaries — Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, and the rest. During another holiday I read works by all the major Russian writers — Aksakov, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. During yet another, I studied the history of art, and discovered Van Gogh and Cézanne. Yet because I was merely reading, and not writing about them, even this left me bored and dissatisfied.
When I was sixteen I came upon another important clue. It was soon after the end of the war, and a British publisher had started to reissue the novels of Dostoevsky. I bought Crime and Punishment with my pocket money. In the Translator’s Preface, I read Dostoevsky’s letter to his brother Mikhail describing how he — and other condemned revolutionaries — were taken out on the Semyonovsky Square to be shot.
They barked orders over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones, and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, to bid them farewell. Suddenly, the troops beat a tattoo, and we were unbound, brought back to the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty … had spared our lives.
One of his fellow prisoners went insane. It struck me that if Dostoevsky had been offered his pardon on condition that he promised never to be bored for the rest of his life, he would have accepted gladly, and been quite certain that it shoul
d be possible — indeed, that it should be easy. And it seemed to me that he would obviously be correct. Surely, someone who had been through such a crisis would only have to remember being in front of the firing squad in order to be ecstatically happy?
In fact, it was this episode — and the years in Siberia that followed — that turned Dostoevsky into a great writer. Before he was arrested, he was a good but minor writer — in the tradition of Dickens and Gogol — but as a human being he was touchy and self-obsessed to the point of paranoia. His arrest — and long imprisonment in Siberia — made him aware that even to be alive is in itself a cause for rejoicing. The result of his new insight is expressed in a passage in Crime and Punishment, where the hero is afraid that he may be executed for his murder of an old woman, and thinks: ‘If I had to stand on a narrow ledge for ever and ever, in eternal darkness and tempest, I would still rather do that than die at once.’ He had seen that ‘life failure’ — to be bored, miserable, tortured by guilt — is a form of childish spoiltness.
In my mid-teens, my problem was not simply boredom with my working-class existence (my father was a boot- and shoe-worker who earned about £3 a week). It was a longing to escape from it and to retreat into that magical world of the mind that I had discovered when writing the ‘Manual of General Science’. This was intensified by my discovery — through Practical Knowledge for All — of the realm of English poetry. I left school when I was sixteen, and for a few months worked in a factory, while I prepared to take the mathematics exam a second time. Factory work made me so miserable that I spent my evenings and weekends reading poetry — all kinds of poetry, from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to T S Eliot’s The Waste Land. I quickly discovered that, after half an hour immersed in the world of Keats or Shelley or Wordsworth, my rage and despair had turned into a gentle sense of melancholy, which was slowly transformed into a sense of happiness and optimism, as if I was floating above the world, looking down on it like a bird. When, in the writings of Richard Wagner, I later came across the phrase: ‘art, that makes life seem like a game, and withdraws us from the common fate’, I understood instantly what he meant.
The only problem with this state of mind, the ‘bird’s-eye view’, was that it was made twice as difficult to go back to work the following morning and accept the ‘worm’s-eye view’ of boredom and triviality. Years later, when I read Thomas Mann’s novel Buddenbrooks, I recognize my own problem in the episode where young Hanno Buddenbrook goes to the opera to see Wagner’s Lohengrin, and is transported into ecstasy, so that he feels he is walking on clouds. But when, the next morning, he has to get up in the freezing dawn and make his way to school through the dark, icy streets, his despair is twice as deep because he has experienced ecstasy the night before.
It then seemed to me that the problem of human existence can be expressed very simply. At long intervals, we experience moments of strength and happiness in which we feel that we have the power to change the world and our own lives. But such moments are brief. For most of the time we experience the sense of being victims of circumstance, like dead leaves carried along by a river, with no ability to choose our course. And when circumstances become especially difficult, it is easy to imagine that fate will afflict us with a series of misfortunes, like Job, that will destroy all our security and leave us completely helpless.
As I read my favourite writers — Plato, Hoffmann, Shelley, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Eliot — or listened to the music of Beethoven, or looked at the paintings of Van Gogh, it seemed to me that all shared an awareness of this problem. Plato said that the universe is divided into a world of being and a world of becoming. The world of ‘becoming’ is this everyday world of matter, of endless change, in which we are trapped. The world of ‘being’ is the world of intellect and ideas, the world of truth and values that lies hidden behind the facade of the material world. As he prepares to commit suicide, Socrates declares that the philosopher spends his life trying to live in the world of true being, and that therefore he should welcome death, which finally frees us from the endless distractions of the world of mere ‘becoming’. This, I realized, was why so many romantics were fascinated with death. Yet I still found the idea of death stupid and repellent. It was an attempt to escape from reality. And the moments of ecstasy, of ‘bird’s-eye vision’, seemed to promise that life itself could be lived on a level of continuous joy and affirmation.
When, in my late teens, I began to write a novel, it was inevitable that it should be about this problem of the bird’s-eye view and the worm’s-eye view.
The hero of Ritual in the Dark is a young man who has spent years working in boring jobs, and whose strongest desire is to have the freedom to read and think and listen to music. Then he receives a small legacy which enables him to rent a cheap room and spend his days in libraries and art galleries. And he finds that this kind of ‘freedom’ is curiously boring. Then he becomes accidentally involved with a man he suspects of being a murderer, and feels ashamed that, now he has something to maintain his ‘interest’, he no longer feels bored. He is ashamed because it has taken an external stimulus to suddenly renew his sense of being fully alive, when he feels that he ought to be able to do it himself. Surely he ought to wake up every morning with a feeling of immense gratitude for not having to go to an office? What is wrong with the human mind that it seems so incapable of freedom?
It was while I was writing this novel that I decided to break off and try to express some of its basic ideas in a volume of philosophy. Inevitably, this book was about ‘Outsiders’, people who felt a longing for some more purposeful form of existence, and who felt trapped and suffocated in the triviality of everyday life. It was a book about ‘moments of vision’, and about the periods of boredom, frustration, and misery in which these moments are lost. It was about men like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, T E Lawrence, and William Blake, who have clear glimpses of a more powerful and meaningful way of living, yet who find themselves on the brink of suicide or insanity because of the frustration of their everyday lives. The problem of the Outsider is summarized in the life of Vincent Van Gogh. His painting called Starry Night is full of mystical vitality and affirmation; yet Van Gogh committed suicide and left a note that read: ‘Misery will never end.’ Here, then, is the vital question. Was the tragedy of Nietzsche and Van Gogh inevitable, or should there be some way in which human beings can live on a higher level of intensity?
My own conclusion was that tragedy was not inevitable. Many Outsiders caused their own downfall through self-pity — in other words, they allowed themselves to become weak. Why? Because they are inclined to feel that life is futile and meaningless — or at least, that it is so difficult that it is not worth the effort. In the 20th century, this feeling has been expressed most clearly in the works of Samuel Beckett. It is recorded that when he was a young man, Beckett stayed in bed all day because he could see no reason to get up. And his works are a part of a long tradition of ‘defeatism’ that goes back to Ecclesiastes, with its ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’, and ‘There is nothing new under the sun’. This is the feeling that haunts so many Outsiders, particularly when they become tired and discouraged. It was expressed with a certain gloomy power in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. I labelled this sense of boredom and futility ‘the Ecclesiastes effect’.
This sense of meaninglessness was also expressed by a Greek philosopher who died 50 years before Plato was born. Heraclitus argued that the world of ‘becoming’ is the only reality: everything changes constantly. Permanence is an illusion of the senses. Therefore man can make no real ‘mark’ on the world, for any ‘mark’ we make vanishes again as quickly as the tide washes away words written in the sand. This view also implies, of course, that there is no such thing as good or evil, and that ‘values’ are an illusion.
This is certainly the feeling we get when we are exhausted with effort, and life seems to be an endless vista of problems and complications. Yet the truth is that it is impossible to be a genuine follower of Heracl
itus. According to Heraclitus, death is inevitable, and it is therefore no use making any efforts. Yet if Heraclitus had fallen into the river, he would have struggled to get out again. And if someone had put a knife to his throat and asked: ‘Shall I cut your windpipe and save you the trouble of living?’ he would have shouted: ‘No!’
Still, Heraclitus has undoubtedly put his finger on our most basic problem: that everything we do is soon undone by time. Life is basically repetition. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes:
Rising, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, according to the same rhythm … But one day, the ‘why?’ arises, and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
Camus calls this sudden revelation ‘the Absurd’, a word he borrowed from his friend Sartre, who also coined a word for man’s reaction to the Absurd: ‘nausea’. Nausea is the sudden recognition that we are ‘unnecessary’, and that the world of matter that surrounds us is the only reality. ‘Meaning’ is an illusion.
Yet, like Heraclitus, both Sartre and Camus contradicted themselves. Sartre recorded that he had never felt so free as when he was working for the French Resistance, and was likely to be arrested and shot at any moment. And, on the evening before his execution, the hero of Camus’s novel L’Étranger is overwhelmed by a feeling of happiness and affirmation that sounds like Van Gogh’s starry night. He writes: ‘I had been happy and I was happy still.’