by Colin Wilson
This, obviously, brings us back to Dostoevsky facing the firing squad. He suddenly knows that life is not pointless and meaningless. And we all know the same thing whenever we are faced with any serious problem or crisis. We know that the statement ‘Life is meaningless’ or ‘Nothing is worth doing’ is the self-indulgence of a philosopher who is both lazy and weak.
But moments of crisis are not the only moments in which we recognize that the philosophy of Heraclitus and Samuel Beckett is nonsense. The same thing happens in all moments of sudden happiness — the feeling we experience on a spring morning, or when setting out on holiday. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T E Lawrence describes such an experience:
We started on one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun, while the intellect, tired of the thinking of the night, was yet abed. For an hour or two, on such a morning, the sounds, scents, and colours of the world struck man individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought: they seemed to exist sufficiently by themselves, and the lack of design and carefulness in creation no longer irritated.
This is the basic poetic vision, the sheer affirmation experienced by Wordsworth and Shelley and William Blake. And Lawrence has also identified the problem: the ‘tired intellect’ which questions everything. Elsewhere he referred to it as his ‘thought-riddled nature’. It is the ‘thought-riddled nature’ that causes Outsiders to see life as meaningless. They are in the position of someone who wears sunglasses and complains that the world is dark. But if thought has caused this problem, surely it is capable of identifying and overcoming the problem?
Let me again define this problem. It is the feeling that ‘nothing is worth doing’, that life is so complicated and the world in such a state of endless flux that all our actions are futile. It is the feeling that we cannot do. Yet this feeling vanishes — and is seen to be an illusion — every time we experience the ‘spring morning feeling’ described by T E Lawrence. Optimism gives us the certainty that action is worthwhile, and that the use of the intellect can bring freedom. We only have to look around us to see the truth of this assertion. We are living in a world that has been completely transformed, in the course of little more than a century, by science and optimism. In fact, since the days of the caveman, human effort and optimism have steadily transformed the world. Individual men have died in failure and misery, yet the efforts of the human race have altered our lives until we are no longer mere animals, living and reproducing and dying. We are slowly learning to become something a little more like gods.
This, then, is the basic philosophy I reached after The Outsider. Dr Johnson once said: ‘When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.’ The pessimism of Heraclitus and Samuel Beckett is basically due to a lack of concentration. Our sense of futility, the feeling that life is just ‘one damned thing after another’, is an illusion due to fatigue.
But how can we rescue ourselves from this feeling? First of all, we have to study it and understand it, as I tried to study and understand it in The Outsider. Our most important ally in this battle is the imagination. If you can imagine the feelings of Dostoevsky as he stood in front of the firing squad, then you are already learning to overcome the petty annoyances and childish weaknesses that make most people unhappy. The truth is that we have no right to be unhappy. It is an insult to the spirit of life. A man who is dying of AIDS knows that, if only he could be cured, he would live his life on a far higher level of purpose and optimism.
Until the late 1960s, I had considered myself a kind of ‘existentialist’ philosopher, who was attempting to rescue existentialism from the pessimism of Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger. But at this point, I came upon a new subject of study that turned my thoughts in an entirely different direction. An American publisher asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about ‘the occult’. It was not a subject that interested me greatly. As a child I had been fascinated by ‘spiritualism’ and the question of whether there is life after death. But as soon as I began to study chemistry, physics, and astronomy, this interest seemed to evaporate like a dream. After the request from the publisher, I began to give the matter some new thought. I also began to ask people of my acquaintance whether they had ever had any ‘paranormal’ experiences, and I was surprised by the number who said yes.
One friend was a concert pianist called Mark Bredin. He told me how he had been returning, very late at night, from a concert in central London, and travelling in a taxi along the Bayswater Road. Suddenly, he knew with absolute certainty that the next traffic light, a taxi would try to ‘jump’ the light, and would hit them sideways. He wondered if he ought to warn his driver, but felt that he might be regarded as slightly mad. And at the next traffic light, a taxi tried to ‘beat’ the light at Queensway and hit them sideways.
It seemed to me that there was a certain parallel between Mark’s experience and that of T E Lawrence in the early dawn. Both had been tired, and the ‘intellect’ was therefore asleep. But what peculiar power could make Mark aware of something that would happen in the future? I had already recognized that the mind possesses the power to escape from pessimism and defeat by meditating on a firing squad. But this was something altogether more strange and unusual.
Another friend, the historian A L Rowse, told me how he had been leaning out of a window in Oxford. The window frame was very heavy, and it occurred to him that if it fell, it might easily kill him. Since he was in a bad mood, he thought: ‘Let the damn thing fall!’ A few moments later, just after he had withdrawn his head, the window fell.
Rowse also told me how, one quiet afternoon, he had a sudden premonition that if he went into the college library, he would find two young men embracing. He crossed two quadrangles and walked into the library — and saw the two young men embracing.
Even stranger was an experience described to me by a middle-aged friend named Kay Lunnis, who spent several days a week in our house, helping to look after our children. Kay described how she had once been seriously ill, and had felt herself rise up above her body so she could look down on it; then she had descended and re-entered her body.
A few years earlier I would have at least considered the possibility that this was some kind of hallucination due to fever. But in gathering material for The Occult, I had come across far too many cases of ‘out-of-the-body experiences’ to doubt that it was possible. Another friend, Lyall Watson, had described how, when his vehicle overturned in Kenya, he suddenly found himself hovering above the bus, and looking at the head and shoulders of a boy who had been hurled halfway through the canvas roof. It occurred to him that if the bus rolled any further, the boy would be crushed. A few minutes later, he recovered consciousness in the driving seat, got out of the vehicle, and rescued the boy, who was in exactly the position he had seen a few moments earlier. Now, if these friends were telling the truth — and I was strongly inclined to believe that they were — then human beings possess at least two ‘powers’ that were unsuspected by Heraclitus, Schopenhauer, and Samuel Beckett: the power to ‘see’ the future, and the power to ‘leave the body’.
Now quite clearly, if this were true, then it should be taken into account in any attempt to create a ‘philosophy of human existence’. Such a philosophy demands that we try to understand ‘what man is’. And if, in certain moments, man can see into the future, then he is certainly more than Heraclitus assumed.
Inevitably, I also had to reconsider the question of life after death. Another friend, Professor G Wilson Knight, was a convinced spiritualist, and told me a circumstantial story that seemed to prove beyond all doubt that his mother had survived death. Now Dostoevsky had once remarked that if there is such a thing as life after death, it would be the most important thing that human beings could possibly know. And Dostoevsky was the most profound of the ‘existential’ philosophers. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov argues that the world is so full of suffering that no ‘religion’ can justify it; Ivan says that he wa
nts to ‘give God back his entrance ticket’. Here he is expressing the philosophy of Heraclitus and Ecclesiastes and Sartre — that in a world dominated by brute matter, ‘man is a useless passion’ who is doomed to defeat. Yet Dostoevsky recognized that if there is life after death, this fact would change everything.
This, then, is why I regarded the evidence of the paranormal as so important. According to modern Western philosophy, which begins with Descartes, it is the philosopher’s duty to ‘doubt everything’ until he has achieved some area of ultimate certainty — no matter how small — on which he can take his stand. Unfortunately, this method has failed to yield any kind of certainty. It led Bishop Berkeley to doubt the existence of the material world and David Hume to doubt cause and effect, and even the existence of the ‘self’. It led Sartre to conclude that ‘it is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die’, and Camus to regard human life as ‘absurd’. The most fashionable of modern French philosophers, Jacques Derrida, is quite simply a descendant of Heraclitus, who believes that there is no such thing as ‘underlying meaning’ (which he calls ‘presence’) in the universe; the only reality is the endless flux of matter.
When The Occult appeared in 1971, it soon became apparent that many people who had regarded me as a kind of maverick existentialist now believed that I had turned to more trivial topics, and abandoned the rigour of my ‘Outsider’ books. To me, such a view was incomprehensible. It seemed obvious to me that if the ‘paranormal’ was a reality — as I was increasingly convinced that it was — then any philosopher who refused to take it into account was merely closing his eyes.
To begin with, most modern philosophers seem united in denying that man has a central ‘self’ (or soul). The Scottish philosopher David Hume started this revolution in the 18th century when he declared that, ‘when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other … I never catch myself at any time’. Sartre declared that man has no ‘self’; what he thinks of as ‘himself’ is really created by the outside world, ‘the gaze of others’. And this is the position that has been accepted by French philosophers ever since. Derrida, who is celebrated for his theory of ‘deconstruction’, believes that the ‘self’ is a delusion that has been created by ‘metaphysical’ philosophers, whom he rejects with contempt.
Sartre’s close ally Simone de Beauvoir expressed the same notion when she wrote (in Pyrrhus and Cinéas):
I look at myself in vain in a mirror, tell myself my own story, I can never grasp myself as an entire object, I experience in myself the emptiness that is myself, I feel that I am not.
In other words, man is a purely superficial creature; the sense of selfhood is like a mere reflection on the surface of a pond. Sartre carried this view to its logical conclusion when he declared that there is no such thing as the ‘unconscious mind’.
Yet as soon as we begin to study the paranormal, we immediately encounter the existence of all kinds of powers that contradict Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Far from being a mere reflection on the surface of a pond, man seems to be like an iceberg whose most important part is hidden below the surface. Of course, Freud and Jung had already told us about the ‘unconscious’ (the word was actually invented by Leibniz). But it would seem that even they underestimated its powers. Even the anecdotes I have recounted above seem to indicate that the part of the ‘self’ hidden below the water line possesses virtually magical powers.
Of course — as Dostoevsky recognized — the ultimate contradiction of the view that we possess ‘no self’ would be an actual proof of life after death, for without a self, there would be nothing to survive death. This ultimate proof eludes us; but the existence of other paranormal powers seems to leave no doubt of the truth of the ‘iceberg’ view of the human mind. Moreover, it seems clear that some of these powers that lie below the surface seem to contradict the ‘scientific’ view of man. Science tells us that the future has not yet happened; therefore we can only guess what is going to happen. Yet when he was deeply relaxed, Mark Bredin had a clear premonition of what would happen when his taxi reached the next traffic light.
Robert Graves, the friend to whom The Occult was dedicated, drew my attention to another curious example of these unknown powers. It is described in one of his autobiographical stories called ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’. In Graves’s class at prep school there was a boy called F F Smilley, who was apparently a mathematical prodigy, a ‘lightning calculator’. When the master (Mr Gunn) had given the boys a difficult mathematical problem, Smilley simply wrote down the answer. He explained that he had not had to work it out, because it had just ‘come to him’. Mr Gunn accused him of looking up the answer in the back of the book. Smilley denied this, and pointed out that the answer in the back of the book had two figures wrong. Mr Gunn regarded this as impertinence, and sent Smilley to the headmaster to be caned. After that, he bullied Smilley into doing problems ‘the normal way’.
In the same story, Graves records a curious anecdote about himself. One summer evening, as he was sitting behind the cricket pavilion (and presumably in a deeply relaxed state of mind, like T E Lawrence and Mark Bredin), he received a ‘sudden celestial illumination’.
It occurred to me that I knew everything.
I remember letting my mind range rapidly over all the familiar subjects of knowledge; only to find that this was no foolish fancy. I did know everything. To be plain: though conscious of having come less than a third of the way along the path of formal education…! nevertheless held the key to truth in my hand, and could use it to open any lock of any door. Mine was no religious or philosophical theory, but a simple method of looking sideways at disorderly facts so as make perfect sense of them.
This, of course, is precisely what existentialism wants to do — and precisely what I am trying to do in this introduction: to ‘look sideways’ at the disorderly facts of human existence and try to find some way of making sense of them. Graves, apparently, did it when he was fifteen. He says that he tried out his insight ‘on various obstinate locks’ and found that they all opened smoothly. The insight was still intact when he woke up the next day. But when he tried to record it in the back of an exercise book ‘my mind went too fast for my pen’. He had another try later, but the insight had vanished.
Nevertheless, together with Smilley’s curious abilities, it convinced Graves that we possess a peculiar power which is not generally recognized by science, a ‘supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer’.
It is worth looking a little more closely into this mystery. There are certain numbers called ‘primes’, which cannot be divided by any other number without leaving a ‘remainder’ — numbers like 3, 5, 7, and 11. Nine is not a prime because it can be divided exactly. The actual number of primes is infinite, but if a number is very large, there is no way of telling whether it is a prime or not — except by the long and painful process of dividing every smaller number into it. Yet a Canadian ‘calculating prodigy’ named Zerah Colburn was asked whether a certain ten-digit number was a prime, and replied after a moment: ‘No, it can be divided by 641.’
There is no logical way of doing this. The psychiatrist Oliver Sacks has described a pair of subnormal twins in a New York mental hospital who amuse themselves by swapping 24-figure primes. Obviously, the twins somehow rise into the air, like birds, over the whole number-field, and instantly see which number is a prime and which is not.
I would suggest that the ability that enabled Mark Bredin to ‘know’ that his taxi would be struck by another taxi is closely related to the ability of Zerah Colburn and Sacks’s twins, and that both are related to T E Lawrence’s feeling on the morning when ‘the senses awoke before the intellect’.
Now, long before I became interested in ‘the occult’, I had been fascinated by another example of the powers that lie ‘below the iceberg’. (I say ‘below the iceberg’ rather than ‘below the visible part of the iceberg
’ because it has always seemed to me that man’s hidden powers are located in the sea below the iceberg as much as in the iceberg itself.) As everyone knows, Proust’s vast novel À la recherche du temps perdu sprang from a single incident in his childhood, just as Graves’s theories in The White Goddess sprang from his experience behind the cricket pavilion. One day, feeling tired and depressed, Proust’s hero is offered by his mother a small cake (called a madeleine) dipped in herb tea. As he tastes it he experiences an exquisite sensation of sheer happiness. ‘I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.’ After eating another bite, he recalls what has caused this feeling of power and happiness: the madeleine has revived memories of his childhood in a small country town called Combray, where his Aunt Leonie used to give him a taste of her own madeleine dipped in the same herb tea.
Why should this make him feel so happy? Because it has reminded him of the depths below the iceberg. He had been feeling bored and depressed — in other words, superficial. Now he catches a glimpse of the depths of his own mind, and of its hidden powers. He also realizes that if only he could learn the ‘trick’ of bringing back this feeling, he would never be unhappy again. This is why he sets out to revive it by writing his enormous autobiographical novel. Yet this deliberate intellectual activity fails. When he catches other glimpses of this magical feeling of power and strength, it is always by accident, when he is thinking of something else.
In the tenth volume of his A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee describes several occasions on which he also had these strange glimpses into the reality of the past — not his own past, but that of history. On each of these occasions, he actually seemed to see the past, as if he had been transported by a time machine. On one of these occasions, he seemed to see the battle of Pharsalus, which had taken place in 197 bc, and saw some horsemen — of whose identity he was ignorant — galloping away from the massacre. It seems clear from his descriptions that he felt this was not ‘imagination’, but some kind of glimpse of the past like Mark Bredin’s glimpse of the future. (In Beyond the Occult I cite many other examples of more distant ‘glimpses’ of the future which proved to be accurate.)