by Colin Wilson
When I draw a line with a ruler, says Bergson, my reason tells me that it consists of billions of points in space. But I know that this is not true, for it is a continuous line. If it really consisted of billions of points it ought to be possible to divide it into these points — or at least to imagine it divided into points. But no matter how many points I divide it into I can still imagine billions more points — in fact an infinite number — between them. In theory my pencil should take an infinite amount of time to draw it. Obviously there is something badly wrong with my reason, which tells me that a line consists of points. The same applies to time. How long does twelve o’clock last for? It doesn’t last for any period of time, for you can always imagine a billionth of a second to twelve, or a billion-billionth… . So, according to reason, time consists of an infinite number of points, each one of which has no duration. In fact we know that time flows.
It is as though my rational mind suffered from some odd disability, like colour blindness. If I try to think about a sunset, I can only think about rays of light vibrating in space. If I try to analyze a symphony, I can only speak of wavelengths of sound. If I look at a gramophone record through a microscope, I shall only see wavy bumps in the plastic — yet as the stylus travels over them it creates a Beethoven symphony, which in turn can induce a flash of mystical vision in a man like Warner Allen. The mind is a marvellously powerful instrument, but it is no more capable of grasping reality than I can eat gravy with a fork. It was not made for the job.
It seems astonishing that human beings have failed to recognize anything so obvious: that when we try to grasp reality, we falsify it. When I respond to a baby’s laugh, to a line of poetry, to the smell of a spring morning, I am responding directly to reality. But the moment I try to think about why I respond to these things it is like trying to pick up a soft-boiled egg with a pair of fire tongs; I simply squash it out of shape.
This is not to say we should avoid thinking about reality: thought is a powerful and valuable instrument provided we do not try to use it for picking up soft-boiled eggs. What Bergson recognized as he walked in the countryside of the Auvergne was that our most valuable experiences cannot be thought about. But that does not mean they should be ignored or dismissed as ‘mere feelings’. All we have to remember is not to try to reduce them to the crude simplicity of thought. Bergson had grasped that he had been closing his senses to the poetry around him (for the mind has an amazing capacity for ignoring things it considers unimportant), and that his soul had become shrivelled and dehydrated as a result.
In fact closing the senses to these finer shades of meaning can be extremely dangerous: it results in a sense of futility and boredom, the feeling of Ecclesiastes that all is vanity and there is nothing new under the sun. To avoid this problem we merely have to understand that we have two instruments for grasping the world around us, not — as we naturally tend to assume — just one. One part of the mind has the power to encounter reality as simply and directly as drinking a glass of water. The other part can only come to terms with reality by strapping it into a kind of rigid iron framework and measuring it with rulers and clocks.
Now in fact science has recently come to recognize the physical existence of these two ways of grasping reality, and that they are located in the left and right halves of the brain — the cerebral hemispheres. The science of split-brain physiology has uncovered the fact that we have two people living inside our heads: the person you call ‘you’, and a total stranger who lives in the other half of the brain.
Our brains are divided into two, like a walnut. The left hemisphere deals with language and logic, the right with intuition and ‘recognition’ — you could say that the left side is a scientist and the right an artist. The two halves are joined by a mass of nerve fibre called the commissure or corpus callosum. If this is severed — as it is occasionally to cure epilepsy — the patient begins to act like two separate people. One split-brain patient tried to zip up his flies with one hand and unzip them with the other. Another tried to hit his wife with the left hand while the right held it back. (For some odd reason the right half of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa, so it was the intuitive side that was trying to hit her and the rational side that was holding it back.) When a female patient was shown an indecent picture the right half of her brain caused her to blush with embarrassment: when asked why she was blushing she replied, ‘I don’t know.’ The ‘I’ that spoke was, of course, her left-brain self.
What this clearly demonstrates is that the person you call ‘you’ lives in the left cerebral hemisphere — the ‘logical’ half — while the ‘stranger’ lives in the ‘intuitive’ half. At first it seems difficult to account for anything so odd, until we recollect that man has been forced to develop his ‘logical’ aspect in order to build civilization. And this — as we observed in the case of Peter Hurkos — involves suppressing faculties that are not essential for survival. In fact brain physiologists call the left hemisphere — the ‘you’ — the dominant hemisphere and refer to the right as the non-dominant hemisphere. They could be compared to two partners in a marriage, where the husband is highly dominant and the wife unobtrusive and shy.
It is a pity that Bergson did not live long enough to see his philosophy scientifically justified — for that is what split-brain physiology has accomplished. The right brain is concerned with pattern-recognition — which means that a patient with right-brain damage might have difficulty recognizing his own mother, except by telling himself that she has grey hair and brown eyes. An undamaged right brain recognizes faces in a flash, without the need to analyze. And the same faculty responds to poetry and music and pretty girls and mountain scenery. And our response to these things is a valid recognition, not just a ‘feeling’. If science insists on confining itself to those things that can be grasped by the left side of the brain, then it is ignoring a half of reality.
But it would be a mistake to blame the left brain for being too dominant. It is not really a male chauvinist bully. The problem is that in our complex modern civilization, it has to work hard just to survive. It can easily become exhausted and overworked, in which case we begin to experience the ‘Ecclesiastes effect’, the feeling that all is vanity. T. S. Eliot was complaining about his left brain when he wrote:
And I pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain,
and Yeats was speaking of the same thing when he wrote about:
… the old mill of the mind
Consuming its rag and bone …
But this feeling of aridity and futility is simply due to having forgotten that we have another faculty for grasping reality. In effect the husband has become so overworked and exhausted that he has forgotten that he has a wife — and, moreover, a wife who can offer him extremely powerful support. So when he feels abandoned and miserable, it often comes as an extremely pleasant surprise to realize that he is not alone after all. He collapses from sheer exhaustion and is amazed to be suddenly overwhelmed by an exquisite sensation of relaxation and pure serenity: the recognition that the world is a delightful place after all. The psychologist Abraham Maslow called such moments ‘peak experiences’ — those moments of bubbling, overwhelming happiness when we realize we had forgotten how marvellous life can be. Maslow offered as a typical example the case of a young mother who was watching her husband and children eating breakfast when it suddenly dawned on her how lucky she was, and she went into a peak experience. She had been taking them for granted, then stopped taking them for granted.
An even better example concerns a marine who had been stationed in the Pacific for a long period without seeing a woman. When he went back to base and saw a nurse, he had a peak experience — because, he said, it suddenly struck him that women are different from men — that they’re soft and curved and gentle and as different from men as horses are from cows. Anyone who is enjoying a holiday has a similar sensation — the delighted
feeling that the world is a far larger and more interesting place than we had given it credit for. It is then that we realize that our ordinary workaday awareness tell us lies. It tells us that reality is rather dull and repetitive, and that if we were somewhere else it wouldn’t really be all that different from where we are now. And now we see that this is outrageously untrue: the world is full of infinite variety and strangeness. And connectedness.
The problem is that an efficient left brain is a ‘workaholic’. This word — which has entered the current vocabulary since the sixties — means a person who has become so accustomed to making an effort that he can no longer enjoy relaxation. He is too tense to relax for long. In the past few thousand years of human evolution the left brain has developed into a workaholic — and this applies to all human beings, even the laziest. This is why we have forgotten the sheer variety and strangeness of the universe, and why it took a philosopher like Bergson to even notice that something had gone wrong.
The peak experience makes us aware of the same thing: this is why it is so important. It descends upon us as a flash of recognition — the same kind of recognition that made Archimedes leap out of his bath shouting, ‘Eureka!’ What we recognize is what Bergson put into words: that we have two modes of perception, and that they are equally valid. Maslow also made another important observation: that most healthy people have peak experiences every day. The reason is obvious. We have peak experiences when we are full of energy and optimism. But the peak experience is not a mere overflow of energy and optimism: it is a perception that comes to us when the brain is highly energized. This explains another important observation made by Maslow. He discovered that when his students began talking and thinking about having peak experiences, they began having peak experiences all the time. This is because the peak experience is a perception — something suddenly grasped, like Archimedes’ perception of the law of floating bodies. It is not easy to grasp, because of the ‘logical’ limitations of the left brain. But once it has been seen, once it has become an insight, it can be recreated by a kind of mental flick of the wrist.
This is an exciting recognition, for it means that we are on the way to grasping how the peak experience — or even the mystical experience — can be recreated at will. We find it difficult to hold on to such experiences because our words and ideas are too crude and simplistic. (We have seen, for example, how Bergson’s insight can actually enable us to understand what happens in the peak experience by providing us with a more complex set of ideas.) A person who is overwhelmed by the mystical experience could be compared to someone who is given a glimpse of a city from an aeroplane, and then told to make a drawing of it from memory. This is why the mystical vision is ineffable — not because it is impossible to express in language, but because our language is at present too crude. Once we have learned to make some kind of simple map of the main features of the city, we have taken a major step towards learning how to recreate the peak experience — or the mystical experience — at will.
It must be admitted that Maslow once remarked that peak experiences should not be confused with mystical experiences. But he was only pointing out that they are different in degree, not in kind. In fact it is obvious that the two have a great deal in common. Consider, for example, the following mystical experience described by Anne Bancroft, a lecturer in comparative religion:
‘When I was young … I felt sure that there was a wonder and a mystery and all the world was somehow full of a meaning which I couldn’t really understand and couldn’t reach … I was sure that I truly belonged to it and that it had a great deal to do with God, whom I called the Presence because he seemed often to be present to me when I was alone in the fields and woods.
‘But when I was sixteen I became afraid and stopped it all. I was afraid that I might lose myself altogether and although I had wanted this when I was younger, now the outer, everyday world had attractions for me too and I began to reject the inner, solitary quest.’
That is to say, she deliberately suppressed the right-brain mode of grasping reality in favour of a more practical approach.
When I was very young I married and started a family. The years began to trickle past but the marriage was not a happy one, we were completely unsuited to each other, and it ended with a bitter sense of guilt and failure. I kept the children and took them to America, where I remarried. But this marriage too was founded on sand and not on rock, and in a last-ditch effort to keep it going I persuaded my husband to return with us to England, hoping that a calmer and saner society might help us both. I think it did, but it was too late to save the relationship. It was when this marriage too seemed doomed to end in a wasteland of quarrels, jealousy, fear and hatred, that I suddenly woke up to the fact that something had gone badly wrong, not just with this situation but with me. Looking hard at myself I saw that I had become really futile, so much a slave to my emotions, so involved with my own feelings, so centred on myself that my life had narrowed down to the compulsive behaviour of a zombie. Where was the true? I saw clearly that something vital was missing in me. It lay there out of my reach, even beyond my imagination, because I could not see what it was: I only knew I was without it.
I then came to a time of great despair. In the middle of ordinary life — of looking after my children and sending them to school and playing with them, trying not to be inadequate for them — I saw myself as a person of no light, a person who was thick, opaque and joyless, not a real person at all. A tremendous sense of remorse came over me for the years I had messed up so badly, and an enormous depression closed down … .
One night I could not go to bed and I sat still all night, feeling a great repentance and sadness of mind. When the morning light came and the birds began to sing, I suddenly found myself strangely aware of them. I looked into the garden and saw a blackbird and it was as though I had never seen a blackbird before. It had a significance that was completely new to me and I suddenly felt that this blackbird was the most real thing I had ever seen, and that just to see a blackbird in this way would make life worth living. The days that followed were different from any that had passed before. I was suddenly intensely aware of sound and light and found myself more vulnerable to the impact of other people. Other things — a group of trees — would fleetingly take on the significance of the blackbird. I realized I was coming close to something, some new quality.
One evening I was looking at a branch of rhododendron which I had put in a vase. As I looked, enjoying its beauty but without any purpose in my mind, I suddenly felt a sense of communication with it, as though it and I had become one. It seemed to come from my forehead and the feeling was immeasurably happy and strong … that strange sense of oneness with the rhododendron seemed to have come about because I was still, and not wanting anything, and therefore somehow free to see it properly and know it as itself.
I wished I could know everything in this way, and then I found myself thinking, why not? It was only myself that was stopping me. There was no limit to the amount of love that I could give to everything that I saw. And then I realized that for most of my life I had never done this. I had thought lots of things not worth my attention because they gave me nothing in return. But now I could not imagine how I could have spent so long turning away from things or being indifferent to them … .
A few days later a new and somehow crowning experience came. It was in the morning and I switched on the wireless to hear a concert. As the first note of music sounded, there was an almost audible click in my mind and I found that everything was transformed. I was in a different state of consciousness altogether. It was as though the separate feeling of ‘me’ which we all feel had gone, clicked away, and instead there was a sense of clarity, of utter beneficent, wonderful emptiness. And in that emptiness there were no barriers. The stones on the road were exquisitively beautiful and as significant as a person. An upright, old-fashioned bicycle propped up by the road was wonderfully funny. It was as though my mind could now embrace, without reserve,
all that it encountered, whether people or animals or things, because it was living in clearness and emptiness. I was in this state of the completest and greatest happiness for three days … .*
She goes on to tell how this experience led her to decide to investigate religion, and how reading Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy led her to decide that her own experience fitted in with Buddhism.
The Buddha’s teaching was wholly concerned with untying the knots in men’s minds so that they can be open to reality and free from the greed and ignorance which bind them like chains. I discovered, through meditation, that seeing things in their suchness — the word Buddha uses for the essential nature of all things — seeing them as I did once without any barrier of ‘me’ to get in the way, was one of the great aims of Buddhism. This was a big relief to me because I didn’t want pious talk or a guilty feeling that I should attend some sort of church. I wanted, and found, a straightforward acceptance that man’s deepest need is not to live by bread alone but to transcend all his thoughts and feelings and to know the meaning of timeless reality, and of God.