by Colin Wilson
Greene’s use of the word ‘drug’ makes it clear that he had failed to grasp the essence of the experience. He thought of Russian roulette as a way of releasing adrenalin, failing to grasp the insight that the answer lay in energising his perceptions, making a deliberate effort to throw off boredom and laziness. Twenty years later, in The Power and the Glory, Greene again made use of the experience. When his ‘whiskey priest’, another manic depressive, is about to be shot, he suddenly realizes ‘that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint’. But the boredom that hangs over the novel like a stifling fog makes it clear that once again Greene has not grasped the import of his own insight.
What is beginning to emerge is perhaps the most important single insight that any human being could experience. Peak experiences and mystical experiences are not glimpses of some ineffable, paradoxical truth, but simply a widening of our ordinary field of perception. The mechanism is described precisely by William James when he says that he was 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 [my italics] of which I could give no articulate account.’ That is to say something reminded him of something else, and that of something else, and that of something else, until — like a flash of lightning — he was grasping a far wider range of ‘facts’ than usual. What he ‘saw’ was not some mystical vision of God or the universe — merely facts. But he saw them all together, in relation to one another. We are reminded of Ramakrishna’s parable of the blind men touching the elephant: the one who touches its leg thinks it is like a pillar, the one who touches its ear thinks it is like a winnowing fan, the one who touches its tail thinks it is like a rope, and so on. But anyone who possessed the power of sight, no matter how stupid, would instantly have seen how all these parts combine to make an elephant. It is as if the problem with our normal perception is that it has somehow been crippled or ‘damped down’ so that it only works at a mere fraction of its proper efficiency. So instead of perceiving the horizons of distant fact that our brains are capable of grasping we grope short-sightedly at the surface of immediate reality and mistake ears for winnowing fans and tails for ropes.
Now although it may not be immediately apparent, all this constitutes a completely new theory of the nature of reality. For as long as philosophy has existed, philosophers have been passing negative judgements on human life. Ecclesiastes thought that all life is vanity and vexation of spirit. Plato compared human life to men chained up in a cave, forced to look at shadows on the wall. Aristotle said that it is better not to have been born, and death is better than life. The Buddha says that all life is misery and bitterness. Lucretius says that life is a treadmill that leads nowhere, a desire that never finds fulfilment. And in 1818 Arthur Schopenhauer published the longest and most comprehensive attempt so far to prove that human life is meaningless and pointless and that — as Sartre later put it — man is a useless passion. According to The World as Will and Idea, ‘the world is my idea’ and has no objective reality; our perceptions only show us illusions. The only underlying reality is a blind, obstinate will that has no real purpose and therefore dooms us all to perpetual disappointment. One of the book’s central paragraphs reads as follows:
We saw that the inner being of unconscious nature is a constant striving without end and without rest. And this appears to us much more distinctly when we consider the nature of brutes and man. Willing and striving is its whole being, which may very well be compared to an unquenchable thirst. But the basis of all willing is need, deficiency, and thus pain. Consequently, the nature of brutes and man is subject to pain originally and through its very being. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of desire, because it is suddenly deprived of them by a too easy satisfaction, a terrible void and ennui comes over it, i.e. its being and existence itself become an unbearable burden to it. Thus its life swings like a pendulum, backwards and forwards between pain and boredom.*
The complaint is that we all change from moment to moment and have no permanent being or purpose. Even the pleasure of love, according to Petronius, is gross and brief, and brings loathing after it, a sentiment echoed in Dylan Thomas’s lines:
At last the soul from its foul mousehole
Slunk pouting out when the limp time came†
The latter is probably as good a summary as any of the philosopher’s basic indictment of the world. When a man falls in love he experiences the same perception that he experiences on spring mornings and holidays and in peak experiences: the sense of reality, of the real value of the objects of his enthusiasm. When this collapses into a feeling of satiety and fatigue it seems equally obvious that the whole thing was a mistake, that the sex instinct, whose only purpose is procreation, lured us into this situation in order to fulfil its own dubious aims. Or as T. S. Eliot put it:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
Which is ‘true’ — the original desire, or the later feeling of disillusionment? According to most philosophers, even this question is meaningless. Neither is ‘true’. We just happen to feel one thing one day and another thing another: to ask which is true is like asking whether a rainy day is ‘truer’ than a sunny one. The same answer applies to the question, why do we experience such a clear sense of meaning and purpose when we are in love — or even merely in a state of erotic excitement? Because the ‘conjuror’ has chosen to delude us for his own purposes. This is why man ‘feels sad after coitus’ — because he knows he has been duped again.
Now according to the view of perception that we have developed in the last two chapters, all this is simply untrue. The basic problem lies in the dullness of our senses and our brains, which reveal to us an extremely limited range of reality. And it is the ‘close-upness’ that deprives us of meaning. Or, as I have expressed it elsewhere, man is like a grandfather clock driven by a watchspring. Or like some enormous watermill whose stream has dried up into a narrow, sluggish flow. As William James put it in an essay called ‘The Energies of Man’:
Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth … . Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources.
And he summarizes the problem by saying that our basic problem is an inveterate ‘habit of inferiority to our full self’.
If we can once grasp this fact — that our senses are so dull that we are little better than sleep-walkers — then we can also begin to see that when we experience a sense of meaning, it is because our senses have opened a little wider than usual, to admit a wider range of reality. In its normal state, the brain is like a piano whose strings are damped so that each note vibrates for only a fraction of a second. In these ‘wider’ states of mind the strings go on vibrating and cause other strings to vibrate. One thing suddenly ‘reminds’ us of another, so the mind is suddenly seething with insights and impressions and ideas. Everything becomes ‘connected’. We see that the world is self-evidently a bigger and more interesting place than we usually take for granted. There is no question of illusion or of being somehow ‘intoxicated’ with energy. We are simply in a state of wider perception — both outer and inner perception. The brain is operating a little closer to normality instead of in this grossly subnormal state that usually makes life such a burden.
In ‘wider’ states, we can also see that a man’s response to a pretty girl is not some conjuring trick of natu
re designed to lure him into fathering her children: it is a genuinely deeper perception of her reality. Sexual excitement also has this effect of widening and deepening the perceptions: the ‘distant ranges of fact’ are, in this case, of a sexual nature. If sadness or disappointment or even loathing succeed this excitement, it is simply because the senses have returned to their usual narrow state; we are once again ‘subnormal’.
Now clearly, this view of perception contradicts the whole ‘negative’ trend in philosophy from Ecclesiastes and Plato to Schopenhauer and Sartre. These philosophers insist that we should distrust our senses because their evidence is ‘relative’; therefore the statement that the universe (and human existence) is meaningless is just as valid — or as invalid — as the statement that it has an ultimate purpose and direction. But if the insights of the mystics are valid then this ‘melancholy relativism’ (as Thomas Mann called it) is quite simply a fallacy. The trouble lies in the curious limitations of everyday consciousness — limitations that seem even more puzzling when we realize that they can vanish in a flash and leave us staggered and overwhelmed by a sense of infinite vistas of meaning.
Oddly enough it was Thomas Mann who gave classic expression to this ‘melancholy relativism’ in an early story called ‘Disillusionment’. The author describes a conversation he had with an unknown man in St Mark’s Square in Venice. After asking him whether Venice comes up to his expectations the stranger goes on, ‘Do you know what disillusionment is? Not a miscarriage in small, unimportant matters, but the great and general disappointment which everything, all of life, has in store?’ He goes on to tell how, as a child, he expected life to be infinitely strange and exciting. His first great disappointment came when his family’s house caught fire and they were all forced to watch it burn down in their night clothes: he stood there thinking, ‘So this is what it is like to be burned out of house and home? Is that all there is to it?’ When he fell in love and the girl rejected him, he thought, ‘So this is what it is like to suffer agonies of jealousy — is that all?’ And it was just as bad when his desires were satisfied: the same feeling of ‘Is this all?’ Even the first sight of the sea was an anticlimax, for it had horizons, and he had hoped that it would be infinite. It will probably be the same, he concludes, when death arrives: he will confront it with the feeling, ‘Is this all?’
Mann’s character is obviously suffering from the same sense of boredom that led Graham Greene to play Russian roulette. ‘Staring at a sight that others assured me was beautiful, I felt nothing. I was fixed, like a negative in a chemical bath.’ This last comment offers us an important clue. Greene had become ‘fixed’ in a condition of total passivity. But passivity is a highly dangerous condition for human beings, because our natural laziness immediately takes advantage of it until it seems to us self-evident that nothing is worth doing. This is the condition in which Samuel Beckett’s characters sit around in dustbins or lie on their faces in the mud. Yet all this is an absurd misunderstanding. Man has gained power over the world by turning it into symbols — by turning real men into matchstick men, and so on. But he has gained this mastery at the expense of losing touch with external reality and spending far too much of his time in an unreal world of symbols. In effect modern man spends most of his time inside a sound-proof room inside his own head, staring at a computer screen. This enables him to handle reality with far more efficiency than a child or a savage, but it also means that he tends to forget that there is a ‘real’ reality out there. And when he grows tired and bored with the computer, he thinks he has grown tired and bored with life and decides that all effort is futile and that life is an endless disenchantment.
Having landed himself in this ‘unreal’ situation, Greene had to ‘galvanize’ himself out of it by playing Russian roulette. His situation could be compared to that of a man who has convinced himself by logic that his limbs are paralysed, but is forced to swim for dear life when he falls into a river. Greene’s real problem was that he failed to grasp the insight produced by the Russian roulette: that a certain kind of mental effort can produce the recognition that ‘life contains an infinite number of possibilities’. It is as if the man had scrambled out of the river and immediately fallen victim again to the delusion that he could not move his limbs.
The point is interestingly underlined in a series of case studies made by the psychologist J. Silverman. He reported that schizophrenic patients, after a stay of more than three years in a hospital ward, simply stopped seeing things as clearly as they had (or, as Silverman put it, suffered ‘changes towards diminished field articulation and diminished scanning’). The same thing was found to be true of convicts who had been in prison for very long periods. Their perceptions became blurry and they tended to notice far less. Their consciousness, says Silverman, had shifted from the ‘active mode’ to the ‘receptive mode’ (i.e. passive mode).* In other words boredom had the effect of making their eyes less efficient, so that they actually saw the world as a duller and more boring place. Here, we could say, science is providing us with a kind of proof of the mystic’s statement that our senses are telling us lies and that they ought to show us a far richer and more fascinating world.
It must be acknowledged that the main problem here is that it is very hard to see what Greene could actually have done about his state of ‘diminished perception’, short of playing Russian roulette. For this is obviously the most important question of all: what can we actually do? The Russian novelist Artsybashev has a novel called Breaking Point about a small Russian town where an increasing number of people become convinced that life is futile and meaningless, and the book ends with an epidemic of suicides. How would a psychologist — or a mystic — go about convincing these people that they are actually committing a schoolboy howler about the nature of consciousness?
Silverman’s observation of convicts and schizophrenic patients makes it clear that the trouble was that they had stopped noticing things, and finally stopped seeing them. They were not paying attention. A Zen parable tells how a common man asked the Zen Master Ikkyu to write down for him some maxims of the highest wisdom. The Master wrote one word: ‘Attention.’ ‘Will you not add something more?’ asked the man, whereupon Ikkyu wrote, ‘Attention. Attention.’ The disgruntled man said he couldn’t see much wisdom in this, whereupon the Master wrote, ‘Attention. Attention. Attention.’ ‘What does attention mean?’ asked the man, whereupon Ikkyu replied, ‘Attention means attention.’
Hermann Hesse stumbled upon the same insight in his small book Journey to the East, a kind of allegory about a group of people who wander off in search of ‘salvation’. The narrator records, ‘I, whose calling was really only that of a violinist and story-teller, was responsible for the provision of music for our group, and I then discovered how a long time devoted to small details exalts us and increases our strength.’ Everyone has made a similar discovery at some time: that exhaustion and fatigue can be reversed simply by becoming deeply interested in something and giving it the full attention. It is as if the vital energies, which had become scattered and diluted, are somehow funnelled into the object of attention. The moment Ollie murmurs, ‘How fascinating!’ Stan immediately sends up a trickle of strength and vitality. And we only have to experience this trickle of vitality — what J. B. Priestley calls ‘delight’ or ‘magic’ — to grasp our true situation and to realize that the sense of being ‘cut off from reality’ is not a particularly serious condition. We are ‘cut off from reality’ because we are standing in front of a computer screen in a sound-proof room inside our heads. But it is easy enough to walk out of the door into the fresh air. We merely have to know that the door is there.
This is what happened to Maslow’s students, who discovered that as soon as they began thinking and talking about peak experiences, they had peak experiences all the time. They had recognized the simple fact that ‘reality’ is real and should not be confused with the world of symbols. This recognition comes very easily when we are on holiday or travelling in
a strange place, for it is then self-evident that reality is real. Sitting outside a pub, drinking cold beer and eating bread and cheese from a wooden table, or walking through some quiet old cathedral close that looks unchanged since the time of Trollope, we can see that the world is ten times as interesting as we thought and that life holds out far more promise than we had realized. Then we experience Anne Bancroft’s insight that our normal perception is too lazy and half-hearted and that we make no real effort because we do not believe we shall see any adequate return for our energy. The feeling of ‘absurd good news’ that comes in such moments is a sudden recognition that there is no good reason why we should return to our former ‘debased’ perceptions. If we can merely hang on to this recognition, we shall have broken out of the vicious circle of Stan and Ollie and the robot. Then it will merely be a question of arousing ourselves to live with far more determination and effort and optimism — an optimism which, in this state of insight, we can see is richly justified.
The most important insight is the recognition that states of ‘delight’ can be produced by a more or less co-ordinated effort of will. William James noted that it is continual effort that can ‘carry us over the dam’. My own efforts to induce these states have convinced me of the truth of Ikkyu’s observation that the basic necessity is attention. I have succeeded on a number of occasions in producing states of concentrated awareness which lasted for a period of hours, and on each occasion the first necessity was to convince myself (that is to say, my ‘other self’) that a continuous effort would produce worthwhile results, exactly like the effort devoted to reading a book — or, for that matter, writing one.
On one occasion a few years ago the initial effort was the result of being caught in a snowstorm in a remote farmhouse. I had gone there to give a lecture to a group of extra-mural students on New Year’s Eve, and before I arrived at the farm it had begun to snow heavily. I had arranged to stay the night, and when I woke up the next morning I found that my ground-floor bedroom window was blocked by a snowdrift. My car, and a dozen or so others, were stranded in the farmyard, with no possibility of getting them out. So I was forced to stay there another night. The next morning the weather forecast announced more snow, and it was obvious that unless I wanted to spend a week there I had better make a serious effort to get out. Some of the other ‘castaways’ felt the same, and a team of us set to work with shovels to clear the entrance to the farmyard. Then the car that was nearest to the gate made an effort to get through. But its wheels spun in the snow, and the driver had to admit defeat. My car was next in line, and to my delight it had no problems in gripping the compacted snow. But there was still half a mile of snow-covered road — much of it uphill — between the farm and the main road. In some places the wind had blown the road clear, in others the snow was three feet deep.