Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  This is a long and difficult passage. Yet Merrell-Wolff is obviously expressing the same insight that came to Barbara Tucker as she listened to the Beethoven quartet. ‘I found myself above the universe … in the sense of being above space, time and causality.’ ‘I felt intangibly, yet wonderfully, free.’ But the most difficult part is the description of how he arrived at this state of bliss — recognizing that the basic mistake is to look outside oneself for some kind of revelation. Suddenly we realize that what he did was to switch the beam of attention from what we lack to what we already possess, then on to his own essential being. This brought instant ‘Nirvana’.

  But the key to the whole experience obviously lies in the passage about the one great Tragedy — the failure of man to realize his own Divinity. To Western ears this almost has the ring of cliché — the kingdom of God is within you and so on. Yet Merrell-Wolff grasped it as an immediate truth. It reminds us that Beethoven told Elizabeth Brentano, ‘Those who understand my music must be freed from all the miseries which others drag around with them … . Tell [Goethe] to hear my symphonies, and he will see that I am saying that music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher worlds of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but which mankind cannot comprehend.’ We may also recall that Beethoven told Court Secretary Von Zmeskall, ‘The devil take you. I don’t want to know anything about your whole system of ethics. Power is the morality of men who stand out from the rest, and it is also mine.’ Beethoven obviously felt — as Merrell-Wolff did — that most of us take far too lowly a view of ourselves. Consequently we are too easily discouraged and are inclined to make mountains out of molehills. This inbuilt pessimism has become — as we saw in an earlier chapter — an integral part of our Western culture: ‘Man is a useless passion,’ ‘Human life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,’ ‘Most men die like animals, not men.’ We feel that this attitude is justified by the problems of modern civilization, the rat race, the rising crime rate, the atomic threat. For modern man, pessimism seems a logical response to human existence. Yet every peak experience, every flash of mystical intensity, reveals that this is nonsense. Why? Because they make us aware of ourselves as active forces, as ‘movers’, as beings who are capable of causing change in the universe. This was the essence of Beethoven’s view of himself and the essence of Merrell-Wolff’s Nirvana experience. ‘We are gods,’ says Daskalos, ‘but we are not aware of it. We suffer from self-inflicted amnesia.’

  Merrell-Wolff’s method of achieving his Nirvana experience offers a vital insight. He did it by an extremely difficult method: looking inward, and then ‘abstracting the subjective element’ from the ‘objective consciousness manifold’. That is he ignored everything that is ‘not me’ and thereby succeeded in focusing upon the ‘me’, the centre of consciousness. It was, as he tells us, a kind of darkness, and there was a time-lapse before he realized that it was ‘absolute light and fullness’.

  Quite instinctively most of us prefer a simpler method of focusing the ‘me’. Anything that gives us a sudden powerful sensation illuminates the ‘me’ like a flash of lightning. ‘God is fire in the head,’ said Nijinsky, speaking about this sudden ‘flash’. The same flash occurs ‘when a man is fighting mad’ and ‘he completes his partial mind’. In Tantric yoga sex is deliberately used to produce this insight. But there is a disadvantage in these methods. The lightning flash is too brief to give us a chance to grasp what it is showing us. This is why Don Juan and Casanova and Frank Harris spend their lives trying to repeat the sexual experience a thousand times: they hope that with the thousandth illumination they might finally grasp what they are looking at. Yet the process tends to be self-defeating for the reason that Merrell-Wolff specified. They are seeking for ‘a subtle object of Recognition’, something they can grasp. In fact what Frank Harris grasps in the moment of sexual conquest is the absurd recognition that he is not Frank Harris. The actual truth is, ‘I am God.’ But a moment later he is again Frank Harris, and the insight is meaningless.

  Daskalos explained the essence of the problem when one of his followers asked him about the meaning of personality. He explained that there are two personalities: the permanent personality and the present personality. The present personality is ‘who I think I am at this moment’. The permanent personality is ‘that part of ourselves upon which the incarnational experiences are recorded and are transferred from one incarnation to the next’:

  Let us assume [Daskalos said] that the permanent personality is a large circle. Imagine another circle outside without a periphery. We call that the soul, which is within God, within infinity and boundlessness … . There is also a small circle inside the other two which I call the present self-conscious personality. All three circles have the same centre… . The centre of the present and permanent personality, as well as the self-conscious soul, is the same.

  The more the present self-conscious personality opens up as a circle, the more the permanent personality penetrates into the present personality. The higher you evolve on the spiritual path, the greater the influence and control of the inner self over the present personality. We habitually say, for example, that this man has conscience whereas another one does not. In reality there is no human being who does not have a centre.

  So Frank Harris’s problem, as he steps into this centre and recognizes that the circle spreads out to infinity, is that he momentarily ceases to be Frank Harris: a moment later he has no way of understanding what he has glimpsed. So what can he do about it? Daskalos would say that he must keep on maturing until he grasps the paradoxical fact that he is not his present personality. But this answer is bound to be disappointing for the rest of us, who feel that we would like some more specific recommendation. The alternative — trying to dive head first into mystical experience like Merrell-Wolff — is hardly more satisfying since as Merrell-Wolff himself admits, the experience evaporates and refuses to return when we want it.

  In the course of this book I have tried to suggest that there is a more pragmatic and straightforward route to these insights. Ever since Plato Western man has realized that he has the power to put complex insights into clear and simple language. Many of the great philosophers expressed themselves with appalling obscurity, yet any intelligent commentator can explain their meaning in words that can be understood by a reasonably bright child. When the problems of mysticism are approached in the same spirit they begin to seem less bafflingly paradoxical.

  The essential clue emerged in the third chapter of Part One of this book: the concept of ‘upside-downness’. This, we saw, is the basic reason that our outlook tends to be negative. We have three sets of ‘values’: physical, emotional and intellectual. The intellect aims at a rational, objective view of the world but is continually being undermined by negative emotions. When we allow these emotions to overrule the intellect the result is a state of ‘upside-downness’. And the world seen from a state of ‘upside-downness’ is a horribly futile and meaningless place. ‘Upside-downness’ produces ‘the Ecclesiastes effect’, the feeling that ‘all is vanity’. It also produces what Sartre calls ‘magical thinking’, a tendency to allow our judgement to be completely distorted by emotion so that we cannot distinguish between illusion and reality.

  Most murders are committed in a state of ‘upside-downness’, for ‘upside-downness’ involves loss of control. In A Criminal History of Mankind I pointed out that our energies operate on a counterweight system, like up-and-over garage doors. The forces involved could be referred to as Force T — standing for tension — and Force C, standing for control. When I become angry or impatient or tired, Force T clamours to be released, producing an uncomfortable sensation exactly like wanting to urinate badly. It attempts to destabilize me. On the other hand if I become deeply interested in something I deliberately ‘damp down’ these forces of destabilization to bring them under control. We can see that when Barbara Tucker went into a state of mystical insight as she listened to the Beethoven quartet she had achieved what might
be called ‘a condition of control’. All the forces of destabilization had been soothed into deep serenity.

  All this seems so simple that it is hard to see why we cannot achieve conditions of control whenever we listen to music. The answer goes to the very heart of this problem. It is because our intellectual values are still ‘upside-down’. Our underlying, instinctive feeling is that life is grim and difficult and something awful might happen at any moment. In other words, as absurd as it sounds, the basic problem is an intellectual one. It is not simply that our emotions are negative, but that our intellect agrees with them. Our judgement ratifies the ‘upside-down’ view of the world.

  In fact the solution should be fairly straightforward. Whenever some minor crisis disappears I experience a sense of relief and a recognition of how delightful it is to be rid of the problem. If I have been suffering from toothache and then it stops, I deeply appreciate the condition of not being in pain. Absurdly enough, I am grateful for a negative state — not having toothache. If if could make proper use of my imagination I could be grateful for a hundred other negative conditions: not having a headache, not having earache, not having gout in my big toe … . Then why is it so difficult for me to make use of this simple method of enjoying life?

  This brings me to the most important recognition so far. Our minds are inclined to accept the present moment as it is, without question. Of course we ask questions when we are unhappy or in pain. But in ordinary, everyday consciousness — what we might call ‘neutral consciousness’ — we accept the present moment as if it were complete in itself.

  A little reflection reveals that this is a mistake of gargantuan proportions. Every dullard and stick-in-the-mud is a dullard because he makes this assumption. A few years ago, in a Cornish village not far from here, there died a man who boasted that he had never left the village during the entire course of his life. He had never even experienced the curiosity to go to the next village, less than a mile away. He was apparently a completely normal individual with no disabilities — except a complete lack of imagination. One imagines that he suffered from the same problem as Sartre’s cafe proprietor in Nausea: ‘When his cafe empties, his head empties too.’ The present always struck him as self-complete.

  Now the truth is that the present moment is always incomplete, and the most basic activity of my mind is ‘completing’ it. Imagine that a being from some distant galaxy suddenly finds himself, by some curious accident of space-time, travelling in a bus through Piccadilly Circus. For him the world appears to be a meaningless chaos, for he cannot understand a single thing he can see. When you and I see a man raising a match to his lips we know he is only going to light a cigarette, not set his hair on fire. When we see a woman place a handkerchief to her nose we know she is going to blow it, not tear it off. When we see a man climbing a ladder we know he is not hoping to reach the sky. When we see flashing lights advertising a toothpaste we know they are not announcing the end of the world. Our star dweller knows none of these things. His world is meaningless because he cannot ‘complete’ things. Anything he looks at might signify anything.

  This makes us aware that the process of education is simply the process of ‘completing’ whatever we see. When my telephone rings I know that someone is ringing my number, but a baby has no idea of what is happening. When I look at a house I know that it has two or three sides that are invisible to me, but for all a baby knows it may be merely a façade. I ‘complete’ it in my mind without even realizing that I am doing so. This ‘completing’ is the most basic activity of all intelligent beings. And because we do it every waking moment of our lives we accept it as naturally as our heartbeat.

  But our ‘completing’ activities tend to vary from moment to moment. When I am tired I may watch the television without taking it in: I cannot be bothered to ‘complete’ it. On the other hand when I set out on holiday the world seems to me an extraordinarily interesting place — I cannot understand why I ever thought it was dull. My mind is now doing its ‘completing’ work with enthusiasm and efficiency.

  This is why we all crave experience. It is the only way of developing this all-important ‘completing’ faculty. Imagination helps, but it can never be a real substitute. Imagine two people watching a television programme about the pyramids of Egypt; one has visited the pyramids, the other has not. For the person who has visited the pyramids the programme has a whole extra dimension of meaning. He is able to ‘complete’ what he sees on the screen.

  Of course we may ‘complete’ things quite wrongly. A paranoiac imagines that the whole world is engaged in a conspiracy against him: he believes that the window cleaner across the street is spying on him in order to report to the CIA. He is ‘completing’ the present moment but adding some quite unwarrantable assumptions. This example makes us aware that ‘completing’ is not as natural and instinctive as it looks. It is to some extent a precise intellectual activity. Even to ‘complete’ a detective novel, I have to use my powers of reason. But that kind of ‘completing’ is fairly obvious and presents no problems. It is the purely instinctive ‘completing’ that makes life so difficult, for we have a deeply ingrained habit of accepting the present moment as complete in itself and of consequently taking it for granted. Life is what it appears to be. If I am bored, that is because life is boring. If I am tired, that is because life is tiring. If I am confused, that is because life is confusing. I gaze at the world as passively as a baby and wonder why, on the whole, it all seems so oddly meaningless. Kierkegaard expressed this confusion when he wrote:

  One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell what land one’s in; I stick my finger into existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How did I come to be here? What is this thing called the world? What does the word mean? Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me there? … . How did I come into the world? Why was I not consulted … . And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I would like to see him.

  These words were written in 1843. When Kierkegaard was ‘discovered’, almost a century later, critics found his attitude remarkably ‘modern’ and he became — together with Kafka — one of the culture-heroes of the existentialists. Yet we can see plainly that Kierkegaard’s sense of bewilderment arose from a simple misunderstanding. He reminds us of a man who pushes frantically at a door, convinced he has been locked in and failing to realize that it opens inwards. His problem is a simple failure of ‘completing’. This becomes obvious if we think of Dostoevsky in front of the firing squad, suddenly realizing that life is infinitely interesting and infinitely exciting — a feeling he expressed in Crime and Punishment when his hero says that he would prefer to stand on a narrow ledge for all eternity, in darkness and tempest, than die at once. In the urgency of the crisis his mind is galvanized into doing its proper work of ‘completing’. And as soon as he does this, he sees that far from being meaningless, life consists of infinite vistas of meaning.

  This, I repeat, is the central problem of human existence: we are inclined to accept the present moment as ‘self-complete’, like a painting on the wall of an art gallery. Of course, there are moments when fate presents us with such a delightful richness of experience that the moment is virtually self-complete. A child on Christmas day, a lover kissing the girl he adores, a mountaineer on the summit of Everest — these people experience such a breathtaking sense of the richness of life that the very thought of defeat or despair seems preposterous. But such glimpses of the ‘bird’s-eye view’ are rare. For the most part we have to be content with a worm’s-eye view and ‘complete’ it from inside our own heads. This is why all young people long to travel, to fall in love, to experience conquest: because they will then have the necessary materials for ‘completing’ stored in a lumber room behind the eyes. That at any rate is the theory. As I sit outside a Paris cafe on a sunny morning smelling the odour of Gauloises and roasting coffee beans and watching the passing crowds, it now seems to me that fate has handed me an insight that w
ill always save me from despair — or even depression. I merely have to remember how wonderful life can be and I shall see that temporary setbacks are unimportant. In such a state of mind even the worst miseries and humiliations are seen to be merely interesting challenges, like high waves to a surfer.

  The artist has always seen it as his task to remind himself of these moments when he can see that the ‘disasters of life are innocuous’. Wordsworth asked:

  Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

  Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

  But he believed that the answer lay in ‘recollection in tranquillity’. So did Proust. The problem is that recreating lost delight is more difficult than it looks: as Proust’s Marcel remarks, ‘It is a labour in vain to try to recapture it; all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile.’

  There may be some truth in that, but once we understand the role of ‘completing’ we can see that it hardly matters. And now we can suddenly grasp the immense importance of the concept of ‘upside-downness’. ‘Upside-downness’ is the feeling that the vicissitudes of life are important, that its disasters are anything but innocuous, that its brevity is all too real. In short it is a state in which short-sighted emotional values have imposed themselves on the intellect. This happens because in most of us emotional and intellectual values are roughly the same weight — like the two halves of an old-fashioned egg-timer. Our problem, as we see in every glimpse of optimism, is simply to add intellectual ballast until we can no longer turn ‘upside-down’ — or, at least, so that when we do turn ‘upside-down’ we can instantly right ourselves again. Beethoven’s music reveals that he had achieved this state, which is why he told Elizabeth Brentano, ‘Those who understand my music must be freed from all the miseries which others drag around with them.’ When faced with problems that would make other romantics burst into tears Beethoven was strong enough to take hold of the egg-timer and turn it the right way up. But it was not simply a question of grim, bear-like strength: the real secret lay in his intellectual insight, an adult recognition that most of the problems that worry human beings are childish irrelevances. The power of Beethoven’s music lies in its underlying optimism: not an emotional or temperamental optimism, but the insight of a philosopher who has balanced life in the scales of objectivity and decided that the good far outweighs the bad.