by Colin Wilson
This sounds unexceptionable. But it soon became clear that ‘plunging within’ had some disadvantages. ‘A desire to withdraw from life, and to be committed to no one and to nothing, seemed to be growing in them’ [the initiates]. Some initiates could not be prevented from remaining in meditation almost permanently. A few began to have alarming experiences — a kind of cataleptic trance in which they were unable to move or open the eyes. As we shall see in a later chapter, such a state often precedes an ‘out-of-the-body experience’. Finally Joyce Collin-Smith began to experience doubts about the Maharishi himself, as success changed the childlike guru into a kind of super-tycoon, and after a period of disillusionment she left the movement. Then, quite suddenly, she was oppressed by a sense of boredom and futility:
Then slowly everything began to turn, not just depressing and heavy, but completely sinister. I found I couldn’t hold my mind steady at all. I perceived what the intellect had always known but experience had not as yet appreciated: that everything in life is in a perpetual state of flux; that there is no stability anywhere; that the only constant is continual unrelenting change.
Looking at my hands, I saw them dissolving from the competent ring-clad hands of a middle-aged woman to the slim, smooth young hands of a girl, the little fists of a small child, the tiny curled buds of the baby in the womb. And at the same time they were old and gnarled with the knuckles of an aged crone, and finally the skeleton hands crossed in the grave.
Soon this experience began to happen with everything she looked at: a cup would become a heap of china clay and a few broken shards, a table would be simultaneously a pile of unplaned timber and broken fragments of worm-eaten firewood; nothing would ‘hold still’. After a night in which she saw the world as a kind of Dante’s Inferno, full of helpless misery, she decided to kill herself. She took a rope and sat underneath an oak tree, trying to decide how to go about it. As she did so she noticed that the rope was ‘holding steady’.
In my recent state the rope would have been dissolving into strands, into hemp, into flax growing in a field, flowering and seeding, being gathered, soaked and plaited, and at the same time fraying and disintegrating… .
Now I saw that my deep concentration on the moment, on the rope as it was at that time — not what it had been or what it would become — had caused it to hold steady in its present moment of time… . The tree had also remained steady, neither dying nor becoming a sapling or a seed. It was like the television technique of stopping characters and situations in mid-action, leaving everything poised and immobile … .
The secret of recovering ‘normality’, then, must lie somehow in holding attention steady in the present moment; not allowing any slippage in the mind … . The intense concentration and narrowing down of my mind as I contemplated my own intention with the rope had apparently triggered off a mechanism that, in the normal state, enables one to function in the world. It was evidently an automatic function, operated in some way by attention, or perhaps by intention, but normally completely unobserved.
This led Joyce Collin-Smith to realize that ‘directed attention … must somehow be the key to getting back my sanity’. And she soon re-acquired the trick of focusing upon the present moment. ‘For months I had been looking at life as through an unfocused microscope, seeing far too much, far more than I could use profitably in any way at all.’ As soon as she grasped that, she again became ‘normal’.
Her symptoms had been very like those of a bad psychedelic trip. Transcendental meditation had taught her the knack of escaping the limitations of the left brain and of relaxing ‘into the right’, with all its wider connections with other areas of being. Her terrifying experience taught her that the purpose of evolution is not to escape the limitations of the left brain, but to put them to good use.
Since we have got hold of this problem by the coat tails it would be a pity to let it go without a determined attempt to get to the bottom of it.
We can see that Toynbee’s flashes of Faculty X were a controlled version of Joyce Collin-Smith’s unnerving ‘glimpses’. Toynbee was also catching a glimpse of reality — so that he was able to say something and mean it. Because he was actually in the citadel of Mistrà looking down on the plain of Sparta, he could say, ‘A century ago, invaders came over that wall there,’ and almost see them doing it. Whether that was all that happened is a matter we shall discuss in a moment. But the ‘flash of reality’ was certainly the starting point of the experience.
Why, in that case, can we not summon the experience at will? We can see, to begin with, that Toynbee summoned the experience by telling himself that it was true. And because he was in Mistrà, and because the place held for him such fascinating associations, he was somehow able to ‘convince’ his senses that it had happened five minutes ago.
It seems clear that when the senses are ‘convinced’, they are perfectly willing to reveal another dimension of reality. And this in turn raises the natural question, why do our senses not normally show us ‘reality’? Part of the answer is plain enough. The left brain is always in a hurry. Its job is to ‘cope’ with everyday life and its endless complications. It has very little time to ‘stand and stare’. When I am driving in heavy traffic I cannot afford to notice the make of every car that comes towards me, or even its colour; all that concerns me is its speed and what it intends to do next. So, for perfectly sound reasons, the left brain reduces the real world to a set of symbols. The problem is to persuade the brain to go behind these symbols — to galvanize it into a sense of reality, as Graham Greene’s Russian roulette galvanized his devitalized senses. William James said that what we need is ‘the moral equivalent of war’, meaning some imaginative experience that would galvanize us like the trumpet for battle.
But if we examine this problem more closely we can see that it is not entirely a matter of symbols. The real problem is the way we interpret these symbols. The trouble is that faced with a rather dull-looking world (which is dull because we have turned it into symbols), we allow ourselves to groan with despair and turn away in disgust. When this happens we experience what Sartre calls ‘nausea’, and Camus ‘the absurd’. In Sartre’s novel Nausea the hero, Roquentin, describes how it first happened to him. When he was in Cambodia, an acquaintance tried to persuade him to accompany him on an archaeological mission. He happened to be staring at a Cambodian statue at the time. Then, suddenly, he seemed to wake up ‘from a six-year slumber’:
The statue seemed to me unpleasant and stupid and I felt terribly, deeply bored. I couldn’t understand why I was in Indo-China. What was I doing there? Why was I talking to these people? Why was I dressed so oddly? My passion was dead. For years it had rolled over and submerged me; now I felt empty. But that wasn’t the worst: before me, posed with a sort of indolence, was a voluminous, insipid idea. I did not see clearly what it was, but it sickened me so much that I couldn’t look at it. All that was confused with the perfume of Mercier’s beard.
And Sartre’s hero abruptly refuses to go on the mission.
We can see that what has happened is simply that Roquentin has been overwhelmed by the ‘Oh No!’ feeling, and that he has been taken in by it. He has fallen into the elementary error of telling himself that this is ‘the truth’ and that his previous feeling that life is quite interesting was a delusion. He has been overtaken by the ‘Ecclesiastes effect’. And he makes the enormous mistake of believing that it is a revelation of meaninglessness, instead of recognizing that he has simply allowed himself to ‘let go’, like an exhausted man clinging to a window ledge.
Camus falls into the same error. He writes in The Myth of Sisyphus about the problem of boredom. ‘Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm … . But one day the “why” arises, and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.’ That is to say the feeling of ‘absurdity’ begins with a sense of futil
ity, with the question, ‘Why on earth am I wasting my life like this?’ He goes on:
Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime, make silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition, but you see his incomprehensible dumb-show; you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea’, as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we encounter in our own photographs, is also the absurd.
These examples reveal the flaw in Camus’s argument. If you turn down the sound of the television at a moment of high drama the faces of the characters look absurd, with their mouths opening and closing like fishes. But this is because you have deliberately robbed them of a dimension of reality — a dimension necessary to grasp fully what is going on. Similarly, if you walked into a play halfway through it would mean less to you than to someone who had watched it from the beginning. But you would not argue that your lack of understanding is somehow ‘truer’ than the view of the other person. The same argument applies to the man gesticulating in the telephone booth. You have been denied certain essential clues that would enable you to complete the picture, but it is obvious nonsense to allege that your incomprehension somehow proves his ‘inhumanity’.
Now it should be clear that Sartre’s ‘nausea’ and Camus’s ‘absurdity’ are not very different from our normal perception of the world. For as Ouspensky points out, the essence of normal perception is that everything is separate; the world is ‘cut into little pieces’. Nausea is just this separateness carried to an extreme: all ‘connectedness’ has vanished. In short, ordinary consciousness is a form of nausea. The left brain has deprived us of a whole dimension of meaning. If by ‘normal’ we mean something that tells us the truth, then Faculty X is far more normal than our everyday awareness and the reality seen by the mystics is the most normal of all.
We can also see why the flashes of duo-consciousness are accompanied by the sense of ‘absurd good news’, the ‘all is well’ feeling. Our analysis has shown that narrow, left-brain consciousness is not ‘normal’ consciousness but a rather specialized and abnormal form developed as a tool for controlling the world. (Language is its first and most important means towards that end, as we saw in the example of Helen Keller.) The form of consciousness Proust experienced in his ‘flashes’ was normal — even if, paradoxically, human beings only experience it in flashes. We were intended to have this richer and more complex form of consciousness, and — as Wordsworth pointed out — most children actually do possess it. Our consciousness of the world was intended to have a richness and warmth that would make everything appear to be ‘apparelled in celestial light’. This is the kind of consciousness that most adults experience only during holidays, when the actual sight of new and interesting places awakens in them a sense of the complexity and variety of the external world. But the original sense of ‘glory and freshness’ is lost as they are forced to cope with an increasingly complex environment and the ‘shades of the prison house begin to close’.
This seems to suggest an answer to one of the most puzzling questions about the brain: why does it possess two apparently identical halves which appear to duplicate one another’s functions? So far no physiologist has succeeded in offering a convincing answer to this problem, the most plausible suggestion being that one half is intended as a ‘spare’ in case the other half is damaged. The experiences of Toynbee and Proust suggest another answer: the brain has two halves so we can be in two places at the same time. Which brings us, of course, back to our former question — and the question to which Proust devoted the twelve volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu: is there some method by which we could summon ‘duo-consciousness’ at will?
The foregoing analysis offers one important clue. The real problem is what prevents us from achieving such states at will? One basic obstacle is that we accept ‘everyday’ consciousness as ‘normal’, and it is this acceptance that keeps us trapped in our mechanical expectations. Consider again the case of Toynbee on Mistra. As he looks at the scenery he tells himself that this place was destroyed by invaders in the Greek war of independence; he is actively imposing his knowledge of history upon the evidence of his senses. And his brain responds with some kind of ‘surge’ that transforms history into reality. An ordinary tourist, looking down on Mistrà, would lack two of Toynbee’s advantages: his knowledge of Greek history and the sudden imaginative conviction that caused the ‘surge’. In short the attitude of the tourist is relatively passive; Toynbee is using his imagination actively.
But the problem is not merely one of passivity. We can see, in the example of Sartre’s Roquentin, that there is an actively negative element, which sets in motion the ‘vicious circle effect’. This can be seen even more clearly in the well-known episode of the chestnut tree in Nausea. Roquentin begins the diary entry by admitting that he feels crushed, but at least he now knows what he wanted to know. ‘The Nausea has not left me and I don’t believe it will … but I no longer have to bear it, it is no longer an illness or a passing fit: it is I.’
He had, he explains, just been sitting in the park:
The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me … . And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder — naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.
What has happened is similar to his experience in Indo-China. Boredom, a sense of futility, causes a collapse of his will power, a sudden feeling of ‘What am I doing here?’ It is a little like stage-fright — a sudden desire not to go on. But this experience then goes a stage further than stage-fright. We do not need to know that Sartre’s own experiences of nausea were due to a bad mescalin trip to understand what happens next. The writhing, snake-like appearance of the roots produces a mixture of revulsion and terror. He knows it is a tree and perfectly harmless, but the collapse of his will power, of his will to live, makes him feel totally vulnerable. It is basically the same mechanism of revulsion and mistrust that makes Dylan Thomas regard a girl’s sexual organs as a ‘foul mousehole’.
We are all subject to a more or less permanent degree of mistrust. If you reach out to open a door and the doorknob is wet and sticky, you snatch your hand away in disgust. If you pick up a fallen apple from under a tree and find a slug on the underside, you drop it in disgust. We are always vaguely prepared for things to be not as they seem: that is part of our self-preservation mechanism. But if we allow it to go too far, it develops into the state known as paranoia. The Victorian scientist Sir Francis Galton wanted to find out how easy it was to slip into a state of paranoia, and deliberately induced a persecuted state of mind by telling himself that everyone he passed in the street was a spy. He was alarmed to discover how easy it was to make himself feel persecuted: when he passed a cab-stand he even had a feeling that all the horses were staring at him. Professor Peter McKellar was intrigued by this experiment and tried persuading friends in a restaurant that the waiter had something against them and was determined not to serve them; in Mindsplit he records that it was surprisingly easy to induce a state of mild paranoia. And when Aldous Huxley took mescali
n he also realized how frighteningly easy it would be to ‘embark upon the downward, the infernal road… . If you started the wrong way, everything that happened would be a proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self-validating. You couldn’t draw a breath without knowing it was part of the plot.’
All this is explained, of course, by the Stan and Ollie mechanism. Ollie tells himself that everybody is against him, but he doesn’t really believe it. But Stan believes it, and before long Ollie is horrified to realize that he has become the victim of Stan’s negative responses. And this is what has happened to Sartre’s Roquentin. He knows the root is not a snake or a writhing octopus, yet the sense of paranoia is so strong that the root seems to exude alien menace.
The important thing to note is that Roquentin’s intellect tells him that he is looking at the root of an ordinary tree, but his negative emotions convince him that it is nasty and frightening. His paranoia assures him that he ought not to take the root for granted; his attitude should be one of mistrust. But we can also see that the real problem is that Sartre’s intellect then ratifies the whole transaction. Instead of telling himself, ‘Nonsense, this is just a chestnut root,’ he proceeds to convince himself that the, world is really a far nastier and more frightening place than most of us realize. He tells himself that when we look at things, we do not really believe they exist; we treat them as if they were stage scenery. And now he suddenly realizes that things exist in their own right, and that their sheer reality seems to mock our attempt to keep them in their ‘proper place’. This is the real root of Sartre’s problem: he has allowed his emotions to convince his intellect that human existence is short, brutal and futile, and that — as he says in Being and Nothingness — ‘it is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die.’