by Colin Wilson
In this account phrase after phrase confirms the analysis suggested by split-brain physiology. As a child her intuitive self was aware of ‘the Presence’ in nature. She suppressed this because ‘the everyday world had attractions for me too’ — and it is the logical, left-brain self that has to be cultivated in order to deal efficiently with the everyday world of experience. But an overdose of everyday experience — what Wordsworth meant when he said, ‘The world is too much with us’ — left her feeling that she had become ‘really futile’ — the Ecclesiastes effect. The dominant self had forgotten the existence of its non-dominant partner. A night of deep introspection made her once again aware of the existence of this hidden self. She began seeing the world through the eyes of the ‘other self’, and experience became intense and direct, no longer strained through what T. E. Lawrence called ‘the thought-riddled nature’.
Her ‘crowning experience’ consisted of what Douglas Harding has called ‘having no head’. In his book On Having No Head (1972), Harding described how, looking out over the Himalayas, he suddenly lost all sense of identity:
What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in — absolutely nothing whatever. Certainly not in a head.
It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything — room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.
Harding describes the sensation as being ‘utterly free of “me”, unstained by any observer… . Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.’
Yet split-brain physiology suggests that we should not regard this ‘me-less’ (i.e. ‘left-brain-less’) state as entirely desirable. After all we possess left brains for a perfectly good reason — to enable us to cope with the complexity of everyday life. We may recall that Anne Bancroft deliberately began to develop her left-brain faculties at the age of sixteen because she found the real world so interesting. The same reasoning suggests that Buddhism may not be the ultimate solution to the world’s problems. The fundamental parable of Buddhism tells how Prince Gautama was brought up by his father in total ignorance of pain and suffering; but in three unauthorized excursions from the palace, he saw an old man, a sick man and a dead man. These led him to recognize that human life is basically suffering, and that the answer lies in relinquishing all desire and regarding the world with total indifference. This attitude of wholesale world-rejection will strike most Westerners as another name for pessimism — or the tendency to throw out the baby with the bath water. The left brain is a kind of microscope whose purpose is to examine the world in detail; the right is a kind of telescope whose purpose is to scan wide vistas of meaning. It is true that ‘close-upness’ deprives us of meaning, but that is not the fault of the microscope but our own stupidity in forgetting that we can correct its limitations with the telescope.
Anne Bancroft’s account contains several more important clues — for example her remark that she wished she could know everything in the same way that she knew the rhododendron and the sudden realization, ‘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.’ Here again she is making an observation that can be explained in simple psychological terms. Because the left brain is always in a hurry it turns things into symbols, because symbols are simpler to handle than complex realities: you could say it turns real men into matchstick men. And it has to make continual decisions about how much attention to give each of these symbols or ideas — for, as Whitehead observed, movements of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle: you can only make so many of them. When tired or worried the left brain tends to ration its attention to a minimum, and the world begins to look increasingly unreal. A peak experience instantly restores the sense of reality and makes us aware that it was our own fault for failing to give enough attention to the world around us. Anne Bancroft had simply rediscovered the central recognition of the philosopher Edmund Husserl: that perception is intentional. That is to say that when we look at something, we fire our attention at it like a grappling hook. When you walk into a picture gallery you automatically ‘fire’ more attention at each picture than you would bestow on a passing bus. We control the amount of energy we put into perception, so Anne Bancroft was quite correct when she said, ‘Why not? It was only myself that was stopping me.’ The answer lies in energizing the perceptions. Our minds have a ‘concentrative faculty’, a certain power of intensifying our power of ‘focusing’, which could be compared to pulling back a spring-loaded piston or the bolt of a rifle. This faculty has the power of suddenly increasing our sense of reality; in fact, it might be labelled — in a phrase borrowed from the French psychologist Pierre Janet — ‘the reality function’. The ‘reality function’ is undoubtedly one of the major keys to the problem of mystical experience.
The ‘Bergsonian’ approach to the problem has certainly yielded unexpected dividends. Let us see whether it is possible to build on these insights to reach some general understanding of the ‘visions’ of the mystics.
Bertrand Russell’s objections make a convenient starting point. Almost without exception, mystics claim to have achieved some kind of flash of understanding of the universe. Now Russell admits that the aim of philosophy is to understand the universe. But he points out that before we can understand anything, we have to add one and one together to make two. The ‘one-and-ones’ that the scientist adds together are facts. And Russell objects that the mystics cannot possibly be in possession of enough facts to understand the universe. Nobody is.
To this objection, the mystic replies as follows:
All insights involve a kind of leap. When a psychologist puts a banana outside a monkey’s cage just out of his reach but leaves a walking stick in the cage, the monkey has to make a leap of insight before it sees it can use the stick to reach the banana. When our minds become tired, it is hard for us to make these leaps. On the other hand the mind is apparently a very strange kind of computer. Some mathematical prodigies can work out twenty-four-figure primes within seconds. So is it not conceivable that in certain moments, our minds might make a series of leaps that suddenly reveal the meaning?
William James describes such an experience in an essay called ‘A Suggestion about Mysticism’:
In each of the three like cases, the experience broke in abruptly upon a perfectly commonplace situation and lasted perhaps less than two minutes. In one instance, I was engaged in conversation, but I doubt whether my interlocutor noticed my abstraction. What happened each time was that I seemed all at once to be reminded of a past experience; and this reminiscence, ere I could conceive or name it distinctly, developed into something further that belonged with it, this in turn into something further still, and so on, until the process faded out, leaving me amazed at the sudden vision of increasing ranges of distant facts of which I could give no articulate account. The mode of consciousness was perceptual, not conceptual [James means it was right-brain rather than left] — the field expanding so fast that there seemed no time for conception or identification to get in its work. There was a strongly exciting sense that my kn
owledge of past (or present?) reality was enlarging pulse by pulse, but so rapidly that my intellectual processes could not keep up the pace. [My italics.] The content was thus lost entirely to introspection — it sank into the limbo into which dreams vanish when we awake. The feeling — I won’t call it belief — that I had had a sudden opening, had seen through a window, as it were, into distant realities that incomprehensibly belonged with my own life, was so acute that I cannot shake it off today.
We can see that James had simply experienced a less powerful version of Ouspensky’s mystical insight. In between two words of the conversation his intuition suddenly zigzagged towards the horizon like a flash of lightning, revealing the basic ‘connectedness’ of everything and operating at such a speed — and revealing so many connections — that language was left behind, dragging its feet. Like Ouspensky, James saw this vast continuum of interconnected ‘fact’ — ‘the mode of consciousness was perceptual, not conceptual.’ And if he had had time to investigate the experience he would undoubtedly have found, like Ouspensky, that he could have answered any question, because ‘the answer to [any] question included the answer to all possible questions.’
When I was in Majorca in 1969 I asked Robert Graves whether he had ever had a mystical experience, and he told me to read one of his short stories entitled ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’. In it he described how, as a schoolboy, he was sitting on a roller behind the cricket pavilion when he received a sudden ‘celestial illumination’.
It occurred to me that I knew everything. I remember letting my mind range rapidly over all its 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, and being weak in mathematics, shaky in Greek grammar, and hazy about English history, I nevertheless held the key of truth in my hand, and could use it to open the lock of any door. Mine was no religious or philosophical theory, but a simple method of looking sideways at disorderly facts so as to make perfect sense of them.
Graves explains that he tried out his insight on ‘various obstinate locks: they all clicked and the doors opened smoothly’. The insight was still intact when he woke up next day. But when, after a morning’s lessons, he tried to record it in the back of an exercise book, ‘my mind went too fast for my pen, and I began to cross out — a fatal mistake — and presently crumpled up the page.’ When he later tried to write it down under the bedclothes, ‘the magic had evaporated’ and the insight vanished. Writing about his experience he says that what struck him at the time was ‘a sudden infantile awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer.’
And as a further illustration of this curious ability Graves tells the story of a fellow pupil, F. F. Smilley, who had apparently developed the powers of a calculating prodigy. The master, Mr Gunn, had set them a complicated mathematical problem. Smilley simply wrote down the solution and sat gazing out of the window. Asked how he did it without written calculations, Smilley replied, ‘It just came to me — I just looked at the problem and saw what the answer must be.’ Mr Gunn accused him of looking up the answer in the back of the book; Smilley replied that the answer got two of the figures wrong anyway. Mr Gunn sent him to the headmaster with a note ordering him to be caned for cheating and gross impertinence.
Graves’s description of his own experience is less clear than it might be. When he says he ‘knew everything’ we are naturally inclined to believe that he is speaking of general knowledge — like knowing dates in history. But this is obviously not so, for he goes on to say that it was a method of ‘looking sideways’ at disorderly facts to make order out of them. This brings to mind Eileen Garrett’s remark that her clairvoyance depends on ‘a fundamental shift of one’s awareness’. And when Graves goes on to compare his ‘celestial illumination’ with Smilley’s ability to solve mathematical problems at a single glance, it is clear that he is talking about Ouspensky’s ‘bird’s-eye vision’, James’s glimpse of ‘increasing ranges of distant facts’. But James says he could give no articulate account of them, while Graves was sufficiently in control of his insight to apply it to various problems and to try to write it down. It seems obvious that Graves’s experience was in many ways similar to James’s, but that what he saw was something about human nature or the working of the human mind. At a later stage in this book it may be worthwhile to try to define it more precisely. Meanwhile one thing is clear: Graves’s illumination concerned the right brain, or the workings of intuition. But his insight seems to contradict our normal assumption that the right brain is simply a natural counterpart of the left, complementing its powers of logical analysis with an ability to perceive patterns. Graves’s comment that the insight was of ‘a sudden infantile awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer’, means that he is claiming that its powers go far beyond mere ‘pattern-perception’ and come much closer to what we would call ‘occult’ or paranormal.
*Warner Allen, The Timeless Moment, 1946.
*See The Spiritual Nature of Man, A Study of Contemporary Religious Experience, Oxford 1979.
*James Webb, The Harmonious Circle, p. 112.
*Quoted from a BBC talk, ‘A Crowning Clarity’, in the series ‘The Light of Experience’, and published in a book of the same title.
2
The Other Self
A few hours before beginning to write this chapter I had an extraordinary dream. I dream a great deal, but most of my dreams are the usual confused muddle and have little or no story-line. In this dream I was in some kind of ‘fun house’, presumably on a fairground or amusement park. This was some new and very up-to-date attraction. Everyone was swept at a breathtaking pace, on some kind of moving belt, through strange and bewildering tableaux, most of which I have forgotten. But I can clearly remember the most extraordinary of the effects. The belt passed through some powerful magnetic field, and this had the effect of somehow distorting the upper part of my body as if in a fairground mirror, and inducing a most peculiar, light-headed sensation. Now in most of my dreams, I wake up if anything very unusual happens. In this one, I went through the whole strange experience with a vivid sense of reality. At one point the ‘field’ somehow lifted my hat off my head, and I remember being puzzled and wondering if there was some metal in my hat to account for the phenomenon. And while most of the other people on the belt were swept straight through and out at the other end, I found some method of dodging back through a stairway or tunnel so I could keep on experiencing the effects of this strange ‘distorting field’, which induced a delightful and rather ‘giddy’ sensation, unlike anything I have ever known. I woke up feeling as though I had just been through an extraordinary experience.
Before going to bed I had been thinking about the beginning of this present chapter, which was to be about Thomson Jay Hudson and the remarkable powers of the right brain, particularly in dreams. It was as if the ‘stranger’ in my right brain had said, ‘You want an example of my sheer inventiveness? All right, here’s one you won’t forget … .’
So now let us return to the business in hand.
In the 1880s, largely as the result of the researches of the famous Professor Charcot, the subject of hypnosis once again regained a certain academic respectability. In America, one of its leading exponents was the celebrated Professor Carpenter of Boston. At the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, Charcot liked to make his hypnotized patients bark like dogs or flap their arms like birds. Professor Carpenter preferred more civilized manifestations: he enjoyed demonstrating that hypnosis can enhance the powers of the human mind. One of his most impressive presentations took place in Washington DC in the presence of ‘an audience of highly cultivated ladies and gentlemen’, which included a college graduate who is identified only as ‘C.’. C. was placed under hypnosis, then asked
by Carpenter if he would like to meet Socrates. He replied that he would esteem it a great privilege if Socrates were still alive. Carpenter explained that he had the power to invoke the spirit of Socrates, and pointing to a corner of the room exclaimed, ‘There he is.’ C. looked at the place indicated, and his face took on an expression of awe and reverence. Carpenter performed the introductions, and C. looked speechless with embarrassment, although he still retained his wits enough to offer Socrates a chair. Carpenter then explained that Socrates was willing to answer any questions, and C. proceeded with some hesitation to open a conversation. Since Carpenter had explained that he was unable to overhear the philosopher’s replies, C. acted as intermediary and repeated everything Socrates said. For two hours this amazing ‘conversation’ continued, and the answers were so brilliant and plausible that some of the audience began to wonder whether there really was an invisible spirit in the room.
Later Carpenter offered to introduce C. to the spirits of more modern philosophers, and with most of these he felt a great deal more at ease than with Socrates. What emerged from these conversations was a ‘wonderful system of spiritual philosophy … so clear, so plausible, so perfectly consistent with itself and the known laws of Nature that the company sat spellbound.’ With each new philosopher C.’s manner changed, exactly as if he were speaking to a series of real people, and the language and style of the invisible philosophers changed too: it was all so weirdly real that the audience felt as if they were watching a play.
Among the audience was a Detroit newspaper editor named Thomson Jay Hudson, a man at this time in his mid-fifties, and he watched the demonstrations with baffled amazement. Hudson knew that C. was a total sceptic on the question of ‘spirits’ — as was Hudson himself. Under hypnosis he accepted the existence of the spirits of the great philosophers because he could obviously see them. What seemed most surprising was that the ‘spiritual philosophy’ expressed was not that of C. himself — he frequently expressed his astonishment at some of the statements of the dead philosophers. Yet the whole philosophy was such a coherent system that according to Hudson, it could have been printed in a book verbatim and would have ‘formed one of the grandest and most coherent systems of spiritual philosophy ever conceived by the brain of man’.