by Colin Wilson
A case that occurred sixty years later provides interesting confirmation of Hudson’s observations about confidence. In May 1950 a sixteen-year-old boy was admitted to the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead, suffering from an exceptionally unpleasant complaint known as fish-skin disease: the whole of his body was covered with black warts, while his hands were covered in a horny skin that was as hard as his fingernails. A skin transplant was a failure. At this point the anaesthetist, Dr Albert A. Mason, decided that he would try hypnosis. He had often cured warts by hypnosis and saw no reason why multiple warts should be any more difficult than single ones. The boy was placed in a trance and told that the warts on his left arm would go away. A few days later the horny skin softened and fell off, revealing normal skin. Dr Mason communicated his success to the surgeon, who looked at him with incredulity and told him to go and look up ichthyosiform erythrodermia — the medical name for fish-skin disease — in the library. He did, and made the upsetting discovery that his patient’s skin had no oil-forming glands and that therefore the disease was incurable; the ‘hypnotic cure’ was literally an impossibility.
Nevertheless, hypnosis had worked. So Mason went on to hypnotize the patient and suggest that his right arm should clear up. The right arm was 95 per cent cleared of warts. On the legs and feet, about 50 per cent of the warts disappeared. More important, the boy’s state of mind improved enormously, and he got himself a job as an electrician’s assistant. However three years later Mason decided to try and renew the treatment: on this occasion his former patient turned out to be completely un-hypnotizable.
Between 1953 and 1961 Mason tried curing another eight cases of fish-skin disease by hypnosis: all were total failures. He reached the reluctant conclusion that the fault lay in himself: now he knew that ichthyosis could not be cured by hypnosis, he was somehow communicating his doubt to the patients. In the case of the sixteen-year-old boy, neither of them had known the disease was incurable when Hudson first attempted hypnosis and the result was a 100 per cent cure of the left arm. By the time he moved on to the right arm, Mason’s confidence had been shaken by the discovery that the disease was ‘incurable’, but the patient still had every reason to believe him. Result: a partial cure. But by the time Mason decided to try again, the patient himself had become worried and nervous, and could no longer be hypnotized. Hudson would say that his objective mind was now inhibiting the healing power of the subjective mind.
By the time of Dr Mason’s experiments in hypnosis the existence of the subjective and objective minds had been verified by science — for it must be obvious that Hudson had simply anticipated the findings of Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga on the right and left cerebral hemispheres. It was in 1952 that Sperry had acted as adviser on brain operations to prevent epileptic attacks, the idea being to prevent the ‘electrical storm’ from passing from one side of the brain to the other by splitting the brain right down the middle. Observing that a patient who accidentally bumped his left side against a table did not seem to know what he had done, Sperry and Gazzaniga performed a series of interesting tests. If a pencil was placed in the left hand of a blindfolded split-brain patient, the patient would have no idea what he was holding; yet asked to use the pencil, he did so in a perfectly normal manner. The right brain knew what it was holding. In one of the most interesting experiments, red or green lights were flashed at random into the patient’s right brain (i.e. into the left visual field, connected to the right hemisphere). When the patient was asked what colour he had just ‘seen’, he had to make a guess. And if he got it wrong, his muscles gave a little jerk. The right brain had overheard the wrong guess and was trying to tell him so by ‘kicking him under the table’, so to speak. It had no other way of communicating.
Perhaps one of the most important points to emerge from these studies was that in a very basic sense, we are all split-brain patients. Mozart once said that tunes were always wandering into his head, ready to be written down: what he meant, of course, was that tunes were always wandering into his left brain. And the source of the tunes — as of all ‘patterns’ — is the right brain. So Mozart himself (remember the ‘I’ lives in the left brain) had to sit waiting for the ‘other self’ to send him the music: he was, in effect, a split-brain patient. And if Mozart was a split-brain patient, then the rest of us less talented mortals most certainly are. (Of course if Mozart had actually undergone the split-brain operation his genius would have vanished — or rather would have become confined to his right hemisphere, which would have been unable to pass it on to the ‘amanuensis’ in the left.)
Hudson understood how genius functions. His insight enabled him, for example, to demolish the argument that Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon. Bacon and Shakespeare were completely opposite types: Shakespeare the typical childlike intuitive right-brainer, Bacon the typical un-childlike, intellectual left-brainer. Bacon’s supporters argue that Shakespeare’s plays reveal far too much learning for the son of a Stratford butcher. But, Hudson argues, Shakespeare spent much of his time with the most brilliant and learned men of his age and had the natural capacity of the right-brainer to pick up knowledge quickly and easily.
Hudson also understood the problems of the natural right-brainer. His childlike innocence makes it difficult for him to cope with the complexities of practical life. The result is that he is a natural ‘Outsider’, since he never really feels at home in this ‘world’. Mozart, again, is a good example. Dostoevsky devoted a whole novel, The Idiot, to a childlike right-brainer, Prince Myshkin; but Myshkin’s innocence finally causes chaos and confusion and he ends by going insane. We need a strong left brain to cope with the difficult realities of existence. The trouble is that we can easily overdo it and develop such a cautious and defensive left brain that our natural genius never gets a chance to express itself. In fact we can become so defensive that we totally forget the existence of our ally in the right hemisphere and become over-tense and neurotic. Recognizing the existence of the ‘ally’ is an urgent necessity of mental as well as physical health.
A few years ago I had an interesting experience of the power of the right brain. A film producer had asked me to go to London to re-think and rewrite an extremely bad film-script. I had ten days to do it, and was placed in a suite in one of London’s most expensive hotels with permission to eat and drink whatever I liked. (I had champagne and lobster for lunch every day.) But the script had to be finished on time. The knowledge that it had to be done made me nervous, and the sheer luxury of the hotel deepened my anxiety; I spent the first day reading through the awful script with a sinking feeling. That night I found it difficult to sleep. Then, as I lay awake, it struck me that I was getting myself into an increasing state of left-brain tension and cutting myself off from any possible inspiration. Hudson had said that it is important to grasp that the subjective mind is a distinct and separate entity, and another interesting researcher, Max Freedom Long (of whom I shall speak later) even used to address his ‘other self’ as George. So I spoke to my ‘other self’ in a tone of friendly urgency. ‘Look, I’ve got to complete this damn script in nine days. I know you can manage it. So come on — show me what you can do.’ With that I fell into a deep and peaceful sleep. When I re-read the script the next morning I immediately began to see ways of improving it, and did a good day’s work. Whenever I felt tired or over-tense, I lay on the bed and reminded my right brain that I was relying on its co-operation, and for the next week progress was excellent. It looked as if there was no possibility of finishing it on time, but on the last day I had only a dozen or so pages to do. I began work at 7 a.m. and wrote quickly and easily all day. I typed the last sentences exactly five minutes before the producer’s secretary knocked on the door to collect the day’s work. And an hour later, as the chauffeured Daimler drove me to my train, I remembered to say a wholehearted thankyou to my right brain.
It is important to realize that since the right brain is in charge of our ‘internal’ organization (if Hudson is correc
t), then it is also the quartermaster in charge of our energy supply. It is also, as Hudson points out, immensely suggestible, so that the more we fall into states of depression and pessimism the more we undermine our own strength, for the ‘other self’ feels that it would be pointless to throw good energy after bad. On the other hand the least suggestion that we are ‘winning’ is enough to cause a sudden trickle of energy and delight.
These insights led me to formulate what I called the Laurel and Hardy theory of consciousness. The two ‘selves’ could be compared to Laurel and Hardy in the old movies: Ollie, the dominant, bossy type, and Stan, the vague and childlike character. The real problem is that Stan is so immensely suggestible. When you open your eyes on a wet Monday morning it is Ollie who assesses the situation and mutters, ‘Damn, it’s Monday and it’s raining… .’ Stan overhears him and — being suggestible — is thrown into a state of alarm. ‘Monday, and it’s raining.’ So he fails to send up any energy. And if you cut yourself while shaving and spill coffee down your shirt-front and trip over the mat in the hall, each mini-disaster causes Ollie to groan, ‘It’s one of those days …’, while Stan becomes practically hysterical with gloom.
Consider, on the other hand, what happens when a child wakes up on Christmas morning. Ollie says, ‘Marvellous, it’s Christmas,’ and Stan almost turns a somersault of delight. And of course sends up a spurt of energy, which produces a feeling of well-being. Everything reinforces the sense of delight: the Christmas presents, the lights on the tree, the smell of mince pies … . The result is that before the day is half over, the child can experience an almost mystical sense of sheer ecstatic happiness, a feeling that life is self-evidently marvellous — not just now, but all the year round. For in this mood all mountains are seen as molehills, and no problem seems insurmountable.
It can also be seen that this Stan and Ollie mechanism explains a wide range of psychological states and mechanisms, from clinical depression and neurosis to the peak experience and states of mystical affirmation. Neurosis is simply a state of ‘negative feedback’ in which Ollie’s jaundiced viewpoint plunges Stan into hysterical gloom so that he fails to maintain the energy supply, which makes Ollie feel worse than ever. Once a person has fallen into this vicious circle of depression and low energy it is extremely difficult to escape from it because the depression changes the perceptions, like a pair of dark glasses; and since we take it for granted that our senses are telling us the truth, we react with weariness and pessimism. On the other hand a person locked into the ‘virtuous circle’ of peak experience and optimism feels it equally obvious that the world is a fascinating place, full of marvellous variety and complexity. He also has a sense of ‘hidden wonders’ behind the present facade of reality. It is arguable that this positive vision is, objectively speaking, more accurate than the negative vision, for our common sense tells us that our senses only reveal a fraction of the variety and complexity of the universe.
Expressed in this way, Ollie sounds like the villain — the person who is responsible for Stan’s poor performance. But this is not entirely true. There is a third person involved — the entity I have called ‘the robot’. We each have a robot in the unconscious mind whose function is to take over all the repetitive tasks of life. For example, the robot is now typing these words for me, while Stan and Ollie between them work out precisely what I have to say. Your robot breathes for you and keeps your heart beating regularly. He also drives your car and performs numerous other ‘automatic’ functions. Note that it was Ollie who had to learn to drive the car, with a great deal of effort; then, at a certain point, the robot took over, and proceeded to do it far more quickly and efficiently than Ollie. The robot halves our work for us. But he also has one great disadvantage. He tends to ‘switch on’ like a thermostat whenever we feel tired, and literally take over our lives. If I am very tired, I may not recall driving home from work: the robot has done it for me. The trouble is that he not only ‘takes over’ the tasks I would rather avoid but is also inclined to interfere in tasks I would prefer to do myself. I discover a piece of music that moves me deeply: the tenth time I hear it the robot is doing the listening for me, and I fail to experience it. I discover a new country walk which I thoroughly enjoy: the tenth time I do it all the freshness has gone, because the robot has taken over.
But it is when Stan and Ollie have got themselves into a state of ‘negative feedback’ that the robot becomes downright dangerous. As we have already seen, Stan is in charge of the energy supply, and when Ollie feels depressed, Stan fails to send him any energy. When that happens the robot’s ‘thermostat’ switches on, and he takes over most of our routine tasks. Experience suddenly loses its freshness; life loses its savour; reality becomes unreal. As a result, of course, Ollie feels lower than ever and Stan sends up less energy than ever. In this state a human being lives on a far lower level than he is intended for, and he cannot escape the vicious circle for he can see no reason for effort. The result may be nervous breakdown, oir paranoia, or even suicide.
Now all this throws an entirely new light on the problem of mysticism. We can see, for example, that when Anne Bancroft looked out of the window at the blackbird and felt that she had never really seen a blackbird before, she was simply seeing the blackbird through her own eyes instead of through the eyes of the robot. It also explains Ouspensky’s recognition that we are living in a ‘wooden world’, full of wooden thoughts, wooden moods, wooden sensations, where everything moves with a melancholy creaking sound. It is the robot that is creaking. When I experience something directly, intuitively, with what Gottfried Benn calls ‘primal perception’, I experience an immense delight, a feeling that our world, far from being dull and ordinary, is infinitely beautiful. Even a draught of cool water going down a dry throat can bring this almost painful shock of sheer happiness. It is then that I recognize that the real problem of this world is that most of my experience is ‘automatic’. The robot thickens our senses, as if we were wearing a suit of armour with metal gloves. I can raise the visor for a moment, but it slips down almost immediately. Moreover this continual sense of woodenness, of unreality, of blunted sensation, makes me feel thoroughly discouraged, so that everything I do is half-hearted. There is a ‘vicious circle effect’ in which all our perceptions become down-graded. Yet any sudden crisis can rescue us by driving us to make a convulsive effort of will. William Blake wrote:
Each man is in his Spectre’s power
Until the arrival of that hour,
When his Humanity awake
And casts his own Spectre into the Lake.
Anne Bancroft’s ‘humanity awoke’ and cast her spectre into the lake.
Blake’s image makes us aware that the spectre — or robot — can become a kind of octopus that strangles our senses and limits our vision. In other words our normal perception is diluted and debased by the robot; when we open our eyes in the morning what we see is not objective reality but a highly subjectivized reality, coloured by our doubts and miseries. Epictetus said, ‘What alarms and disturbs man are not real things, but his opinions and fancies about things.’ And since our civilization has been nurturing these opinions and fancies for several thousand years, most of us find ourselves trapped in a totally false ‘communal reality’.
Of course it would be unfair to think of the robot only as a kind of spectre. He is simply a computer — a computer thousands of times more complex than anything that has been developed by IBM — and we would find it impossible to live without him. But when we slip into the ‘vicious circle’ situation he becomes a kind of Old Man of the Sea, sitting on our shoulders and strangling the life out of us.
Graham Greene’s autobiography A Sort of Life provides an insight into the mechanisms of the vicious circle. He describes how, at public school, the ‘interminable repetitions’ of his life finally broke him down. It is clear from his account that it was not a particularly unpleasant public school and he had no real reason to be unhappy. But boredom and a naturally gloomy outlo
ok (probably rooted in self-pity) finally drove him to a number of suicide attempts. He drank a bottle of hypo developing fluid under the impression that it was poisonous, drained his blue glass bottle of hay fever drops, ate deadly nightshade picked on the common and went swimming in the school baths after taking twenty aspirin. (He says it produced a sensation like swimming through cotton wool.) After an attempt to run away he was sent to a psychiatrist in London, and thoroughly enjoyed the break from routine. But the psychiatrist’s efforts to ‘normalize’ him only increased his manic depressive tendencies, and he comments, ‘For years, after my analysis, I could take no aesthetic interest in any visual thing: staring at a sight that others assured me was beautiful I felt nothing. I was fixed, like a negative in a chemical bath.’
It was at this point that he discovered a revolver left in a corner cupboard by his elder brother. He had read in some Russian book about Russian roulette, and now took the revolver on to Berkhamsted common to try it for himself. He inserted one bullet, then spun the chambers behind his back, put the revolver to his right ear and pulled the trigger. ‘There was a minute click, and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into the firing position. I was out by one. I remember an extraordinary sense of jubilation, as if carnival lights had been switched on in a dark drab street. My heart knocked in its cage, and life contained an infinite number of possibilities.’
We can see that what had happened is simply that the self-induced ‘crisis’, followed by relief, had jerked Greene out of a state of self-induced laziness which was based on a feeling of futility and a decision that ‘nothing was worth doing’. He had been thoroughly trapped in the negative feedback effect until he was half-strangled by the ‘spectre’. When he pulled the trigger, the Old Man of the Sea gave a shriek of alarm and leapt off his shoulders. However when Greene continued to play Russian roulette — six times in all — the effect of the ‘drug’ wore off and he ceased to experience the sense of renewal.