Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  Suddenly the entire aspect of the surroundings changed. The whole atmosphere seemed strangely vitalized and abruptly the few other persons on the platform took on an appearance hardly more important or significant than that of the doorknobs at the entrance to the passengers’ waiting-room. But the most extraordinary alteration was that of the dun-coloured bricks. They remained, naturally, dun-coloured bricks, for there was no concomitant sensory illusion in the experience. But all at once they appeared to be tremendously alive: without manifesting any exterior motion they seemed to be seething almost joyously inside and gave the distinct impression that in their own degree they were living and actively liking it. This impression so struck the writer that he remained staring at them for some minutes, until the train arrived and it was necessary for him to mount the steps and enter a car.*

  On another occasion, when he was returning home from New York feeling rather tired, Daly King had a quite different kind of experience:

  Once more the scene altered unexpectedly and with a startling abruptness, as if one stage-set had been substituted instantly for another. But it was now chiefly the other people who held the focus of attention. They looked dead, really dead. One expected to see signs of decay but of course there were none. What one did see was stark unconsciousness, scores of marionettes not self-propelled but moved by some force alien to themselves, proceeding along their automatic trails mechanically and without purpose. Some of the mouths were open and they looked like holes in cardboard boxes. The faces were blankly empty: even those upon which otherwise some expression would have been noticeable had been drained of any significance and one saw that those expressions were unrelated to the entities that wore them. For the first time the concept of the zombie became credible.

  King says he experienced a curious mixture of compassion and contempt.

  If we look more closely at these experiences we can see that the first was basically due to a surge of vitality: any sudden feeling of happiness brings the same experience in a lesser degree. In his autobiographical novel Sinister Street Compton Mackenzie describes his hero waiting at a street corner for a girl he has just fallen in love with, and says, ‘ … In his present mood of elation he could enjoy communication even with bricks and mortar.’ But then Mackenzie’s hero is waiting for his ladylove, and Daly King had no similar reason for delight. What happened in his case was slightly different. Everyday human consciousness is like a tyre with a slow puncture: we leak. Energy has to be continually created as it drains away. We observe this most when we are bored or suddenly discouraged: we actually feel the energy draining out of us like a deflating tyre. Concentration closes the leaks. Daly King had accidentally succeeded in closing all his leaks simultaneously, and the result was a sudden surge in the pressure of consciousness and an almost ecstatic sense of control.

  On the second occasion he was tired, so the closing of the leaks brought no surge of inner pressure, only an awareness of his own freedom, by contrast with which the un-freedom of most other people became obvious. Ouspensky had once had a similar vision in which he saw that people were literally asleep, with their dreams hovering like clouds around their heads. In his heightened state of awareness Daly King was suddenly grasping the truth about human beings: that they are little more than machines that respond to stimuli from the environment. Such a vision also explains why the future may be regarded as more or less predetermined: because we do very little that is not purely mechanical.

  Yet if we consider both experiences together the total insight is by no means depressing. What Daly King was grasping was that it is after all fairly easy to rise to this higher state of inner pressure. Our ‘mechanicalness’ prevents us from becoming aware of it, but the moment we become aware we can begin to do something about it. Hence the feeling of ‘absurd good news’.

  This is the essence of ‘the occult vision’. The philosopher Fichte once remarked, ‘To be free is nothing: to become free is heavenly.’ The reason should now be obvious. When we suddenly become free, when some crisis suddenly evaporates or new and fascinating prospects suddenly open before us, we respond with a surge of energy. This surge of energy lifts us up above our normal ‘mechanicalness’ and makes us aware of connections, and of the extent of our freedom. But since it is impossible to live without ‘the robot’ we soon sink back into our usual condition of ‘unconnected’ passivity.

  I have described elsewhere the experience of a girl of my acquaintance who suddenly ‘became free’. She was married to an American academic who was unfaithful to her and had finally decided to leave him — a hard decision since they had young children. Her brother had recently been offered an appointment in Ohio and suggested that she should come and keep house for him. Then her husband was offered another academic post in Oregon and begged her to go with him. For days she agonized about whether to go to Oregon with her husband or Ohio with her brother. Suddenly, as she was wrestling with the problem, it dawned upon her, ‘I don’t have to go to Oregon or Ohio. I’m free.’ She said that the experience filled her with a sense of overwhelming joy and lightness, so that she felt as if she was walking on air. Even her tennis improved.

  Here we can see that the freedom experience is basically a recognition that certain limits we took for granted were an illusion. But what precisely are these limits? For normal, healthy people they are not physical limitations. As I sit in this room I do not feel imprisoned by its four walls. The real limitation is my sense of what is worth doing. If I have just received some crushing disappointment every effort becomes a drain on my vitality. If I have just received some unexpectedly good news I have so much energy that I feel like turning cartwheels. I allow the things that happen to me to determine my sense of freedom. And because our lives are to a large extent repetitive, we begin to assume that we possess a certain precise degree of freedom, no more and no less. We might say that ordinary consciousness is a kind of ‘habitual assessment’ of our freedom, with a tendency to be on the low side.

  We can also see that when Maslow’s young mother had a peak experience as she watched her husband and children eating breakfast, this ‘habitual assessment’ was suddenly swept away by a surge of energy and she ‘became free’. A moment before she was free but took it for granted: now she became free. She had remembered how much she had to feel delighted and relieved about. Our habitual feeling of unfreedom is a kind of forgetfulness.

  Now this is in a sense one of our most cheering observations so far. After all nothing is easier to remedy than ordinary forgetfulness. I can tie a knot in my handkerchief, leave a note for myself, set the alarm on my watch … . We can understand, for example, that after Daly King had seen the bricks glowing with interior life, he would never again look at those same bricks without remembering what he had seen and making an effort to regain the vision. And because he remembers, the vision becomes progressively easier to regain. This is why Maslow’s students began having peak experiences all the time when they began talking and thinking about peak experiences. Here we have one of the most basic methods for recreating the peak experience or mystical experience: deliberately trying to remember, to conjure up that strange feeling of joy and serenity that lies at the heart of the peak experience. More often than not nothing seems to happen: the essence of the experience refuses to return. Then, perhaps five minutes later, it comes wandering into the head like a forgotten tune. And the more often we remember the tune the easier it becomes to recall it at will.

  What has struck me again and again in discussing peak experiences and mystical experiences with those who have experienced them is that they happen so easily. We merely have to do something which breaks an old habit and the result is the peak experience. In other words our real problem is that we have a habit of not having peak experiences, of remaining preoccupied with the routines of everyday life. But the peak experience is a particular kind of insight, and once it has been experienced it tends to recur. Barbara Tucker, the wife of Albert Tucker, provided me with an interesting example. Sh
e described it quite casually as she was driving me to an outlying suburb of Melbourne, in response to some remarks I had made about Maslow. At the age of twenty she had suddenly become deeply interested in music. Her mystical experience came one day as she was listening to Beethoven’s late quartet, Opus 132. ‘I suddenly had the experience of seeing the entire universe.’ She had taken no interest in mysticism and read nothing about it, so the experience came as something of a shock.

  And suddenly this vast horizon opened up to me. And suddenly I knew — or I saw — that time, past, present and future, were all one, and that I was God, and yet at the same time was only the minutest grain of sand. I can remember thinking, ‘How incredible — how can you be two things at once?’ And also I saw that the entire universe is on a grid system — I actually saw the grid stretching out into infinity — that every thought, every deed, every word, anything that happened, was not accidental. Everything in the universe was interconnected: every time you meet someone, it’s not a chance meeting — there’s a purpose for that meeting, and it all ties up with everything else in the universe. It was the most incredible thing to see — everything linking up, everything tying in. And that experience changed my life — it made me see things very differently.

  Clearly she had ‘seen’ precisely what Ouspensky saw.

  Barbara Tucker had three or four similar experiences within twelve months, all of them far less revelatory than the first yet each giving her a glimpse of the original vision. In a typical one she was at a party given by friends, feeling rather ambivalent about it. (‘I tend to sit in a corner and not really enjoy them very much.’)

  All the people round me were laughing and chatting and doing the things people do at parties — and then again, I suddenly saw all the connections between these people — how they all interconnected — how all this show that was going on was not, in fact, idle chatter. It was all interconnecting into their relationships with one another in the most extraordinary way. But what I thought was interesting was that I wasn’t part of it. I was just a total outsider, a person looking in. I was not connected to them … .

  It is of course very difficult to grasp exactly and precisely what she saw: as I listen to the tape she made for me, with its long pauses, I am conscious all the time of her attempt to force language to express the inexpressible. This is not because her experiences were ineffable but simply because language was made to express concrete facts and ideas: it is helpless to describe even the difference between the smells of an orange and of a lemon. What she saw obviously struck her as in some way self-evident, and the memory has remained with her quite clearly ever since.

  What is also clear is that the capacity to grasp this type of experience can also lead to more straightforwardly ‘psychic’ experiences. Here again an event described by Albert Tucker provides a typical illustration. Partly as a result of the curious experiences already described he had become deeply interested in self-suggestion and self-hypnosis. He developed the habit of lying down for half an hour after lunch and inducing a state of deep relaxation, then giving himself all kinds of positive suggestions:

  In the course of doing this I’d had some rather odd little experiences, one of which was that the mattress and the bed would seem to convulse like a wave, and I’d feel this as a very distinct and unmistakable sensation, as if different waves of energy were coming through. I really felt that something was starting that I wasn’t ready for. I didn’t know where it was all leading, and I shied away from it.

  During one of these sessions Tucker tried to envisage what might be happening to a friend who had taken some of his paintings to New York. ‘All of a sudden an image flashed into my mind of a modern building with revolving glass doors. Through the doors I could see through into an art gallery. On the wall was a painting of mine — one of these paintings that my friend had taken with her.’ This image continued to float into his mind at every ‘relaxation session’ for a week or more. Some time later he went to New York, and on the first day set out full of enthusiasm to go and look at the Museum of Modern Art. From a distance it looked vaguely familiar. As he approached the revolving door he recognized it as the place he had seen so often in his after-lunch relaxation sessions. Facing him on the wall, exactly where he had ‘seen’ it, was the same painting.

  It is interesting to speculate what might have happened if he had allowed the ‘energy waves’ to develop. It sounds like an experience of what the Hindus call the kundalini serpent, the spiritual energy that lies coiled at the base of the spine which can be released to flow upwards through the seven chakras — the points where man’s physical body and the astral body are connected. It seems conceivable that he might have developed into a full-flown psychic, and it seems clear that even ordinary relaxation was enough to produce ‘clairvoyant’ perception. And so once again we become aware that there is no sharp dividing line between mystical experience and ‘psychic’ experience: one blends into the other.

  But if mystical awareness is so ‘close’ then what prevents us from experiencing it every other day? This question goes to the very heart of the problem. The answer, in a single sentence, is that consciousness tends to focus upon what we lack rather than what we possess. From the moment we are born we struggle to achieve the things we lack, or think we lack: food and drink, possessions, the esteem of other people, security, personal fulfilment. It is only when we are faced with some threat or crisis that we grasp how lucky we are, how much we already possess. Then, suddenly, consciousness ceases to focus upon what we still want and focuses upon what we already have. This is what happened to Maslow’s mother as she watched her husband and children eating breakfast.

  When we are faced with a crisis we suddenly realize that we already possess the secret of happiness. Faced with the prospect of a concentration camp Hans Keller could say, ‘If only I could escape from Germany, I swear that I would never be unhappy for the rest of my life,’ and in that moment he could see that it would be perfectly easy to keep this promise. Standing in front of a firing squad Dostoevsky can see that all life is infinitely delightful, and that if he is fortunate enough to be reprieved it will be perfectly easy never to forget this insight. What has happened, of course, is that he has been plunged into the state we often experience in a warm bed on a freezing winter morning when we have to get up in five minutes: a state that might be called ‘self-reflective awareness’ in which we are intensely aware of ourselves and of our present situation, resting wholly in the present moment instead of straining our eyes into the future. This trick of inducing ‘self-reflective awareness’ is obviously the basic trick of the peak experience and of all human happiness.

  This is the fundamental essence of Buddhism: to cease to be driven by desire (i.e. consciousness of what we lack) and to recognize that we already possess the fullness of existence. Yet when the mystic tries to express this simple insight he finds himself wrestling with a kind of octopus of unsatisfactory language.

  An American doctor, Franklin Merrell-Wolff, had his own experience of Nirvana in August 1936 and ten days later tried to express what happened in his journal:

  I had been sitting in a porch swing, reading … . Ahead of the sequence in the book, I turned to the section devoted to ‘Liberation’, as I seemed to feel an especial hunger for this. I covered the material quickly and it all seemed very clear and satisfactory. Then, as I sat afterward dwelling in thought upon the subject just read, suddenly it dawned upon me that a common mistake made in the higher meditation, i.e. meditation for Liberation, is the seeking for a subtle object of Recognition, in other words, something that could be experienced. Of course, I had long known the falseness of this position theoretically, yet had failed to recognize it. (Here is a subtle but very important distinction.) At once, I dropped expectation of having anything happen. Then, with eyes open and no sense stopped in functioning — hence no trance — I abstracted the subjective moment — the ‘I AM’ or ‘Atman’ element — from the totality of the objective consciousness
manifold. Upon this I focused. Naturally, I found what, from the relative point of view, is Darkness and Emptiness. But I Realized It as Absolute Light and Fullness and that I was That. Of course, I cannot tell what It was in Its own nature. The relative forms of consciousness inevitably distort non-relative Consciousness. Not only can I not tell this to others, I cannot even contain it within my own relative consciousness, whether of sensation, feeling or thought. Every metaphysical thinker will see this impossibility at once. I was even prepared not to have the personal consciousness share in this Recognition in any way. But in this I was happily disappointed. Presently I felt the Ambrosia-quality in the breath with the purifying benediction that it casts over the whole personality, even including the physical body. I found myself above the universe, not in the sense of leaving the physical body and being taken out in space, but in the sense of being above space, time and causality. My karma seemed to drop away from me as an individual responsibility. I felt intangibly, yet wonderfully, free. I sustained this universe and was not bound by it. Desires and ambitions grew perceptibly more and more shadowy. All worldly honours were without power to exalt me. Physical life seemed undesirable. Repeatedly, through the days that followed, I was in a state of deep brooding, thinking thoughts that were so abstract that there were no concepts to represent them. I seemed to comprehend a veritable library of knowledge, all less concrete than the most abstract mathematics. The personality rested in a gentle glow of happiness, but while it was very gentle, yet it was so potent as to dull the keenest sensuous delight. Likewise the sense of world-pain was absorbed. I looked, as it were, over the world, asking, ‘What is there of interest here? What is there worth doing?’ I found but one interest: the desire that other souls should also realize this that I had realized, for in it lay the one effective key for solving of their problems. The little tragedies of men left me indifferent. I saw one great Tragedy, the cause of all the rest, the failure of man to realize his own Divinity. I saw but one solution, the Realization of this Divinity.*