Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  A road may wind among hills for any distance. One sees the hills, and as the road reaches away, perspective operates and its further dimensions diminish… . Nevertheless, at the same time, one sees the entire road completely, regardless of the intervening hills, and its further reaches are as meticulously discernible as the areas that lie close to the spot from which one is seeing. Each rut and stone is individually seen and can be described with precision. The leaves of trees and the blades of grass are countable throughout the landscape.*

  This also brings to mind the experience of the motorcyclist Derek Gibson (pp. 23–4) in which as well as being able to look into the trees and grass, he was also aware of every blade of grass and every tree ‘as if each had been placed before me one at a time’. And there are other interesting parallels. Gibson’s experience began as the sound of his motorcycle seemed to fade to a murmur; this suggests some kind of involuntary withdrawal inside himself, which in turn suggests Eileen Garrett’s description of how she achieves her ‘superconscious’ states by withdrawing from the outside world. As Toynbee sat on the summit of Mistrà or overlooking Pharsalus, he was also in a state of contemplation — that is, deliberate withdrawal from the outside world. Most of us can achieve this state fairly easily: we merely have to think intently of some past event. But Toynbee, Gibson and Eileen Garrett then went a stage further — falling into Toynbee’s ‘time-pocket’. In effect they had learned to withdraw deeper into that inner world, as if they had found a trap-door in the floor with a flight of steps leading down to yet another level — or, like Alice in Wonderland, had stumbled down a rabbit hole.

  All this is rather puzzling, for it seems to contradict our commonsense view of imagination, which is simply another name for fantasy. In ordinary language, imagination means forming an image of something that is not actually present, and such an image is bound to be a poor copy of the original. What Toynbee did at Pharsalus or Ephesus is obviously quite different. This was no mere fantasy based on his historical knowledge, but something much more hallucinatory, as if he was actually watching — or rather taking part in — the original event. Ordinary fantasy is passive, like a spectator sitting in a cinema; Toynbee’s imagination had taken on an active quality, much more like a film director marshalling the actors in a crowd scene. The fundamental distinction here seems to be between passive and active imagination.

  Active imagination involves a sense of participation, as we can see from another example cited in A Study of History. Toynbee describes how, as a student, he was reading an account in Livy of the war between Rome and her Italian allies. Mutilus, a Roman who was fighting on the side of the Italians, had succeeded in making his way home to his wife’s house in disguise: when his wife refused to let him in, scolding him for having a price on his head, Mutilus plunged his sword into his breast and spattered her door with his blood. Toynbee says that as he read this account he was ‘transported, in a flash, across the gulf of Space and Time … to find himself in a back yard on a dark night witnessing a personal tragedy that was more bitter than the defeat of any public cause’. This flash of ‘active imagination’, which took place in the year before his trip to Greece, was clearly due to sudden intense personal sympathy with Mutilus, but it presages the experiences of the ‘time-pockets’ of the following year.

  It seems that the mind itself is suddenly raised to a higher level of power — as if the watch-spring in the grandfather clock has suddenly become far more powerful. But this access of power seems to happen by accident, as in the case of William James’s sudden glimpse of ‘ranges of distant facts’. It is as if some natural faculty has been accidentally galvanized. This becomes clearer in Toynbee’s account of another ‘illumination’ that sounds altogether more like the mystical illuminations described in an earlier chapter:

  On each of the six occasions just recorded, the writer has been rapt into a momentary communication with the actors in a particular historic event through the effect upon his imagination of a sudden arresting view of the scene in which this long-past action had taken place. But there was another occasion on which he had been vouchsafed a larger and a stranger experience. In London in the southern section of the Buckingham Palace Road, walking southward along the pavement skirting the west wall of Victoria Station, the writer, once, one afternoon not long after the end of the First World War — he had failed to record the exact date — had found himself in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come. In that instant he was directly aware of the passage of History flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide. The experience lasted long enough for him to take visual note of the Edwardian red brick surface and white stone facings of the station wall gliding past him on his left, and to wonder — half amazed and half amused — why this incongruously prosaic scene should have been the physical setting of a mental illumination. An instant later, the communion had ceased, and the dreamer was back again in the everyday cockney world … .’

  It is very plain that Toynbee’s mind was raised momentarily to a higher level of power, so that for a moment it hovered over the whole of human history like some mythical bird, as the mind of a mathematical prodigy must hover over the whole number field. James found that one thing reminded him of another, and that reminded him of something else, and that of something else — all so fast that his rational intellect had no time to catch up. In Toynbee’s case the ‘connecting process’ seems to have been instantaneous.

  It is also clear that these experiences of Faculty X can be explained in simple and logical terms — for example, of brain physiology. Toynbee’s experiences may have been due to some sudden surge of vitality which caused the brain to ‘glow’ as a surge in the electric current causes a light bulb to glow more brightly. Such illuminations are certainly accompanied by a switch from left-brain consciousness to right-brain consciousness. The left brain is always in a hurry, concentrating on the next thing that has to be done, so it has no time to linger over impressions or intuitions. Right-brain consciousness begins with a feeling of relaxation and relief. Instead of rushing forward, consciousness spreads gently ‘sideways’, taking in the present moment, looking at things instead of through them. The result is the sense of increased reality that Anne Bancroft experienced as she looked at the blackbird.

  In the same way, right-brain memory seems to be quite different in kind from left-brain memory. Left-brain memory brings back the salient features of what we want to remember; right-brain memory brings back the very smell of reality. Proust devoted a whole vast novel to the distinction between the two: A la recherche du temps perdu, whose title could be more accurately translated The Search for the Past than (as it is in English) Remembrance of Things Past. He says gloomily, ‘And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to try to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect… .’ Yet his hero does recapture it by accident, coming home cold and tired and tasting a little cake called a madeleine which he dips in herb tea:

  No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory — this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather, this essence was not in me, it was me. I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal… .

  Several more tastes of the madeleine dipped in tea finally reveal to him that the ‘exquisite pleasure’ was due to memories of childhood in a little town called Combray, when his Aunt Leonie used to give him a taste of her own madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea.

  But why should Proust’s autob
iographical hero experience this almost mystical sensation of sheer happiness merely because he recalls his childhood? Proust shows himself fairly adept at analyzing the reason. In the second volume he describes how, on a train journey to the seaside town of Balbec, at a small country station, he sees a young girl selling milk and coffee. ‘Flushed with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt on seeing her that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness.’ Proust has undoubtedly placed his finger on the very essence of the human problem. We keep on forgetting how delicious life can be, and allow ourselves to slip into a state of mind in which it scarcely seems worth the effort. Proust says, ‘And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgement which we suppose to be accurate, for we believed that we were taking happiness and beauty into account, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there was not a single atom of either.’ We may believe we have preserved the essence of some past pleasure in the memory: in fact it is really little more than a poor carbon copy — a piece of paste jewellery in place of the original diamond.

  Proust’s hero experiences the same illumination in the final volume, Time Regained, when, feeling rather depressed and discouraged, he is on his way to a reception. In the courtyard he steps back to avoid a car and almost loses his balance on an uneven paving stone. Yet once again, ‘all my discouragement vanished, and in its place was that same happiness which had been given to me at various epochs of my life … .’ And once again he is able to remember why he feels so happy: the uneven flags have suddenly recalled the uneven paving stones in the Baptistery of St Mark’s in Venice. Twice more in the next quarter of an hour he experiences similar flashes of ‘magic’, once when a servant accidentally knocks a spoon against a plate, reminding him of a railwayman testing wheels with a hammer on the Balbec line, and once more when he wipes his mouth with a napkin, releasing a flash of memory of performing the same action on holiday in Balbec. Brooding once again on this problem Proust reaches the conclusion that the reason for that odd feeling of ‘immortality’ is that such experiences occurred ‘outside time’. This explanation arouses understandable misgivings, since the ‘flashes’ did occur in time — if only in a split second.

  In fact Proust has stumbled on the real explanation in an earlier sentence, when he says that he ‘experienced them at the present moment and at the same time in the context of a distant moment, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present…’ (my italics). This also answers the question about why these memories of Balbec and Venice cause such intense pleasure when the original experiences were often rather boring. The explanation, we can see, is not that the ‘flashes’ were timeless, but that they caused a state of duo-consciousness. This is what produces the flood of delight, the sensation of ‘ceasing to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal’. It is the recognition that consciousness is not restricted to the boring, down-to-earth present in which we are all stuck for most of our lives. It can achieve a strange double-focus that can suddenly arouse in us ‘the desire to live which is reborn whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness’ — Graham Greene’s sudden recognition that life contains an infinite number of possibilities.

  Once again we confront that most baffling of all problems: how is it possible that human beings can cease to want to live? Whenever we experience intense happiness — or danger — we suddenly feel that it would be perfectly easy to go on living forever. It is the feeling Dostoevsky expresses in Crime and Punishment when Raskolnikov reflects that if he had to stand on a narrow ledge forever, in eternal darkness and tempest, he would still prefer to do that rather than die at once. The same recognition came to Hans Keller, former head of the BBC music department, when he was in Germany in the late 1930s. Keller was aware that fellow Jews were vanishing into concentration camps, and described in a broadcast how it had suddenly struck him that if only he could escape from Germany he would never be unhappy again for the rest of his life. Then how is it possible for us to lose that vision? The answer lies in Bergson’s recognition that the intellect was not made for grasping the living quality of experience; it keeps on reducing the world to symbols and measurements. And we forget just how marvellous life can be.

  Apart from Proust, the modern writer who was most continually concerned with this paradox was — oddly enough — G. K. Chesterton, although the light-hearted style in which he expresses it has tended to obscure the importance of what he is saying:

  The Gallows in my garden, people say,

  Is new and neat and adequately tall.

  I tie the noose on in a knowing way

  As one that knots his necktie for a ball;

  But just as all the neighbours — on the wall —

  Are drawing a long breath to shout ‘Hurray!’

  The strangest whim has seized me … . After all

  I think I will not hang myself today.

  Tomorrow is the time I get my pay —

  My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall —

  I see a little cloud all pink and grey —

  Perhaps the Rector’s mother will not call —

  I fancy that I heard from Mrs Gall

  That mushrooms can be cooked another way —

  I never read the works of Juvenal —

  I think I will not hang myself today.

  It was Chesterton who coined the phrase ‘absurd good news’ to express these flashes of ‘immortality’. And in The Man Who Was Thursday he demonstrates his insight into Faculty X when he makes the hero ask, ‘When you say, “thank you” for the salt, do you mean what you say? No. When you say, “the world is round”, do you mean what you say? No. It is true, but you don’t mean it.’ A moment before Proust’s hero tastes the madeleine dipped in tea he could have said, ‘I was a child in Combray,’ but he would not have meant it. As he tastes the madeleine he can say, ‘I was a child in Combray’, and mean it. Yet in a sense he has only grasped the obvious: the reality of the past. But he ‘knows’ the past is real anyway. Proust’s experience only underlines the fact that our normal consciousness is a consciousness of unreality. Our left-brain perception separates us from reality as if we were enclosed by a wall of sound-proof glass. In fact it is easy to fall into a pessimistic view of the left brain as our jailer. Eliot writes:

  We think of the key, each in his prison

  Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

  Yet, as already pointed out, it would be a serious mistake to think of ‘Ollie’ as the villain. On the contrary, it is left-brain perception that makes life interesting and exciting. This emerges with almost painful clarity in a passage of a letter written in 1887 by Mrs Sullivan, the teacher of a blind deaf-mute child called Helen Keller. Mrs Sullivan tells her friend:

  In a previous letter I think I wrote you that ‘mug’ and ‘milk’ had given Helen more trouble than all the rest. She confused the nouns with the verb ‘drink’. She didn’t know the word for ‘drink’, but went through the pantomime of drinking whenever she spelled ‘mug’ or ‘milk’. This morning, while she was washing, she wanted to know the name for ‘water’. When she wants to know the name of anything, she points to it and pats my hand. I spelled ‘w-a-t-e-r’ and thought no more about it until after breakfast. Then it occurred to me that with the help of this new word I might succeed in straightening out the ‘mug/milk’ difficulty. We went out to the pump-house and I made Helen hold her mug under the spout while I pumped. As the cold water gushed forth, filling the mug, I spelled ‘w-a-t-e-r’ in Helen’s free hand. The word coming so close upon the sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to startle her. She dropped the mug and stood as one transfixed. A new light came into her face. She spelled ‘water’ several times. Then she dropped on the ground and asked for its name and pointed to the pump and the trellis, and suddenly turning round she asked for my name. I spelled ‘Teacher’. Just then the nurse brought Helen’s little sister into the pump-house, and Helen spelled ‘ba
by’ and pointed to the nurse. All the way back to the house she was highly excited, and learned the name of every object she touched, so that in a few hours she had added thirty new words to her vocabulary… .

  PS … Helen got up this morning like a radiant fairy. She has flitted from object to object, asking the name of everything and kissing me for very gladness. Last night when I got into bed, she stole into my arms of her own accord and kissed me for the first time, and I thought my heart would burst, so full was it of joy.*

  It is almost impossible for us to imagine the world of a blind deaf-mute. But as we read these lines, we can suddenly grasp the overwhelming happiness of the child who realizes that everything has a name. Before that she was in a state of confusion about ‘mug’ and ‘milk’ — she thinks that words are interchangeable. And now, suddenly, this seven-year-old child has been handed the key to the understanding of all life, and her excitement is so immense that she learns thirty new words in a few hours. And from then on, she wants to know the name of everything she touches; she drops the signs and pantomimes and prefers to spell out her desires in words. In a few hours she has become the master of her environment. She has ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, helpless, mortal… . And all this because she has learned the proper function of the left brain: mastery of life.

  This recognition is of central importance, for it is too easy to fall into the error of regarding the left brain merely as a jailer who prevents us from having peak experiences. The left brain is, on the contrary, the key to our evolutionary destiny. ‘Vision’ is important, but control is even more important. The point is powerfully underlined by the novelist Joyce Collin-Smith in her autobiography Call No Man Master. In the 1960s she became a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was convinced that the world could be transformed by transcendental meditation. The Maharishi ‘initiated’ her one day by teaching her to repeat her personal mantra, then left her to meditate. She described how she immediately slipped into a state of blissful serenity that lasted for most of an afternoon and evening. After this she found it easy to achieve states of ‘inwardness’ in which hours passed like minutes. According to the Maharishi, the mind will turn naturally towards the source of its own being if it is shown an easy technique. This is the ‘kingdom of God within’, and the source of all existence. ‘Great happiness, energy, creativity, love, can be tapped by this simple means,’ he said, ‘for the mind easily transcends this world and enters the field of the Being. So the initiate finds all tensions, world-weariness and all negative emotions falling away from him. He goes deep within and emerges renewed and refreshed.’