by Colin Wilson
However, it is unnecessary to be a Beethoven or even a philosopher to grasp this insight. It comes with every peak experience: the recognition that most of our problems are due to ‘upside-downness’. Whenever we experience delight we realize that the answer is simply to translate this delight into intellectual terms — words and ideas — and then trust the intellect. From then on we must learn to carry out the act of ‘completing’ with conscious deliberation, with the unshakeable certainty that it is providing us with the correct solution. When this truth is grasped the result is the insight the Buddha called Enlightenment. It is the recognition that most suffering is quite unnecessary and that we are fools to put up with it. We merely need to grasp this insight about ‘completing’ and ‘upside-downness’ to see that most human suffering is self-inflicted. The psychological mechanism involved is identical to that of religious conversion except that this conversion is a clear and objective perception with no overtones of ‘faith’ or belief in the unprovable.
The result of this insight is not a condition of non-stop euphoria but a calm recognition that life is not difficult, dangerous and treacherous, and that most of the problems that confront us can be dealt with by using what might be called ‘constructive will-force’. This is based upon the certainty that if we behave sensibly and rationally we shall achieve what we want to achieve. Most of our problems are shadow-bogeys created by ‘upside-downness’.
How is this insight connected to the ‘occult vision’ I have tried to outline in this book? To begin with it should be clear that it is completely consistent with the mystical experiences described by Anne Bancroft, Warner Allen, Arnold Toynbee, Merrell-Wolff, Daly King and the rest. The essence of their vision is always a sense of ‘absurd good news’ which springs from a sudden ‘bird’s-eye view’ of life and history. This is often accompanied by a certain pity for human beings for their inability to recognize that most of their miseries and anxieties are self-inflicted, and for ‘their failure to realize their own divinity’. On the other hand if they are divine then there is not much cause for pity, for they are bound to find out sooner or later.
An immense amount of vital energy is wasted in states of ‘upside-downness’, and ‘enlightenment’ frees this energy for more interesting uses. The result, as Anne Bancroft observes, is that ‘everything is transformed’. ‘I was in a different state of consciousness altogether … there was a sense of clarity, of utterly beneficent, wonderful emptiness.’ The emptiness is the emptiness around a man who stands on a mountain top. But because perception is suddenly vitalized with all this additional energy everything appears more alive. Daly King’s feeling that the bricks were glowing with life is basically similar to Aldous Huxley’s visions under mescalin.
This is of course perfectly understandable: it is merely an intensified version of Compton Mackenzie’s feelings as he waits for his ladylove. What is more difficult to understand is some of the other powers that seem to be activated by the insight: for example Derek Gibson’s ability to see inside the trees and grass, as if everything was ‘magnified beyond measure’. This is obviously another version of Albert Tucker’s experience of being able to see every single thread in the man’s tweed overcoat, or every hair on his wife’s head as he looked at her ‘astral form’ on the bed. It seems clear that some other power of vision has been activated, some power of which we are normally unaware. Eileen Garrett described this as being a kind of clairvoyance. ‘One sees the entire road completely … and its further reaches are as meticulously discernible as the areas that lie close … .’ But we have also seen, in the case of Toynbee, that the flood of insight seems to annihilate time so that he can actually see a battle that took place more than two thousand years earlier. Whether this ‘seeing’ is simply a case of heightened imagination is immaterial; we are still speaking of the sudden activation of ‘hidden powers’. And as we saw in the chapter on ‘time-slips’, these seem to include an ability to wander back into the past. In short the powers that are activated are various powers enabling us to read the ‘information’ encoded in the universe around us. There is an obvious and direct link between ‘enlightenment’ and so-called clairvoyant powers. And these powers in turn are simply an extension of our normal power of ‘completing’.
It seems then that Lawrence LeShan was correct: the universe seen by the clairvoyant has much in common with the universe seen by the mystic, and both are bigger and more complete than the universe seen by the rest of us. The view of the sceptic is based upon a misconception: that the mystic — or the clairvoyant — is offering an alternative to the ordinary reality that surrounds us. One of Daskalos’s followers objected, ‘Material reality is the only thing that I know exists. It is what I can feel, touch, see, smell.’ And Daskalos replied, ‘There is nothing more misleading than the five senses.’ He means that our assumption that the five senses ‘reveal’ reality is mistaken. They only reveal the limited reality of the immediate present, and this would be meaningless to us unless it was ‘completed’ by our minds. The senses of the mystic and clairvoyant are like doors that will open wider than the doors of ordinary humanity. What they perceive is not an alternative reality but an extension of normal reality.
Few people would disagree that they would be better off if they could induce peak experiences and mystical illuminations at will and experience clairvoyance and precognition when necessary. What is rather more difficult to decide is whether we would be better off if we could see spirits and communicate with the dead. Here the essential link in the chain of argument is exomatosis or ‘out-of-the-body experience’. Reports of this experience are so widespread that there seems to be little doubt that it should be included among our ‘hidden powers’. Some writers even give reasonably detailed instructions about how it can be brought about. Here for example is a passage from John Heron’s Confessions of a Janus-Brain:
Years ago I lived in a remote cottage alone in the Isle of Man, and through the use of dietary control, ritual and meditation, I obtained for a period a measure of command over the process of going out of the physical body in the ka body. [Heron uses this term for the ‘astral body’.] I will describe the experience in the present tense, as if it is happening now.
I lie in bed, it does not matter in what position as long as I am very deeply relaxed both mentally and physically. I then imagine all the energy in my body being drawn to a central point around the area of the solar plexus: I consciously ‘withdraw’ energy from all the extremities and focus it, condense it, in this one place — which is really, of course, a ka space within the physical body.
I must hold this conscious force of energy in the ka region of the solar plexus, without any distraction of attention to, or any ‘leaking’ back of energy to, the extremities. The challenge is to sustain the focus for a sufficient time, in a state that combines intense alertness with deep relaxation. The activity of consciousness is contracted to a central point, without drifting back to the limbs — which remain totally inert, dispossessed. Then, after a certain period of charging up, the process of going out begins.
Going out is a dramatic experience. There is a very powerful and very rapid spiral thrust of energy, an intense vortex of motion in ka space, that hurtles my consciousness from the solar plexus region up to and out through my head. It is like being carried off in a rushing whirlwind.
There is no way this process can be confused with phantasy or delusion or anything of the sort. It is a vertiginous encounter with the profound reality of inner space. The potent vortex or subtle energy ruthlessly detaches me from the safe moorings of my physical body, and I surge into the world beyond.
Heron goes on to say:
Once I have transcended fear and surrendered to the powerful energy of the process, I am out of the physical body and start to travel. My experience of travelling to ka domains has always been that of moving at very high speed, in something like a rushing energy wind, with all my ka senses occluded so that I have no awareness of what sort of spaces I am travell
ing through. I only feel the presence, but have no perception, of those who are conducting me on the journey … .
And here, as in the case of Arthur Ellison, we encounter the notion of the involvement of some kind of ‘protective entities’. (Ellison, we may recall, felt hands grasping his head and firmly guiding him back to his body.) These are not invariably encountered in descriptions of ‘out-of-the-body’ travel, but often enough to suggest that they are a normal part of this ‘astral world’.
But do they really exist? ‘Astral travel’ undoubtedly involves an element of imagination: for example Daskalos explains that in order to get to some place on the other side of the world the ‘astral traveller’ merely has to imagine it and he is transported there. So it is arguable that ‘out-of-the-body experiences’ are simply a version of Jung’s ‘active imagination’, and that the entities who may be encountered are really ‘archetypes of the collective unconscious’, like Philemon and Salome. There is no reason why we should not take this view and refuse to go any further: that is, we could — figuratively — draw a line under ‘astral travel’ and ignore all the evidence for spirits, poltergeists and communication with the dead. In that case we could define paranormal research simply as the study of the ‘hidden powers’ of the unconscious mind — a view that might be labelled the ‘anthropic’ theory of the paranormal. And if we are prepared to admit the existence of Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ then it must be admitted that the arguments in favour of the anthropic theory are very powerful indeed. Spirits, according to this theory, are the creation of the human imagination, a response to man’s deep instinctive fear of death.
The anthropic theory strikes me, on the whole, as reasonable and satisfying, and the majority of paranormal researchers appear to agree. All the same I am not happy with it, for most of them, if asked privately, will admit that they are inclined to accept the reality of ‘survival’. Not long before her death from lung cancer I asked Anita Gregory — known as one of the most sceptical of modern researchers — if she believed in life after death. She replied:
You quite rightly say that I am considered one of the most tough-minded investigators of the SPR. Let me try and explain what I mean by that. To me, being tough-minded means being careful and conscientious about evidence, scrupulous about methodology and searching as regards possible failings both of my own and those of other people. This type of hard-nosedness is for me a matter of principle and it often, much to my regret, brings me into conflict with people I like and with whom I see eye to eye on larger matters.
There is however quite another sense of ‘tough’ and in that sense I do not qualify at all. That is the sense of being a reductive positivist, entertaining a belief about the world as a very bare and spare concatenation of accidents and causal pushes and pulls. So far as I’m concerned, this is a mean and meagre philosophy to which I do not subscribe. I think the world is a very mysterious and wonderful place and we only know a small fraction of its properties.
I ought to say that I have never made a very special study of survival but I am very impressed by the evidence for it. I mean not only the traditional SPR-type mediumistic evidence (excellent though much of this is) but also the more recent near-death experience type of evidence. There are also some of the reincarnation data that are not at all easily dismissed; although in their case the evidence seems to point more to an occasional accident rather than a systematic happening.
So all in all, I am inclined to go a bit further than Alan Gauld and say I do tend to believe in the personal survival of death. Admittedly it hasn’t been proved but then hardly anything ever has or could be that is at all at the edges of knowledge.*
In my own experience most researchers would be willing to make some such cautious admission, although few of them would be happy to be quoted. The reason is obvious. The evidence for ‘hidden powers’ — telepathy, clairvoyance, even precognition — is very strong indeed, and most reasonable people would be willing to concede that a belief in them is not incompatible with a scientific attitude. But a man who admits to a belief in communication with the dead is in danger of being labelled a spiritualist and dismissed as a credulous sentimentalist. This happened in the 1920s to Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: there was a general feeling — which still persists — that they had gone soft-minded. What is not generally realized is that both of them were finally convinced only after many years of scepticism. Lodge had been interested in telepathy since 1884; it was only in 1908 that he finally admitted that he accepted survival. His friend Conan Doyle remained unconvinced; it was not until 1915 that he received overwhelming evidence for the survival of his brother-in-law Malcolm Leckie, killed at Mons, and admitted his conversion to a belief in life after death.
This is undoubtedly the reason that Jung spent most of his life insisting that all ‘occult’ phenomena can be explained in terms of the unconscious mind and that he had never had any direct experience that convinced him otherwise. It was only after an accidental fall in 1943, when he was sixty-eight, brought him close to death that he decided to burn his boats and admit to a lifelong interest in the paranormal and a belief in life after death. His earlier attitude was plainly a matter of caution.
Surprisingly enough even T. S. Eliot abandoned an attitude of rigid orthodoxy a few years before his death (in 1965) and admitted to an admiration for Rudolf Steiner:
I think that the present time will spontaneously lead to something like the separation of individual human beings from time’s events. They will stand on their own feet, and from their innermost being they will seek new paths, spiritual paths.
It seems to me that Goethe, for example, had a compass of consciousness which far surpassed that of his nineteenth-century contemporaries. Rudolf Steiner expressly upheld this, and I do too.
In a certain connection, atomic science has a meaning, namely inasmuch as it is in the hands of men who are in no way able to cope with it. It has no importance whatever for the progress of mankind. I see the path of progress for modern man in his occupation with his own self, with his inner being, as indicated by Rudolf Steiner.
But these remarkable words were uttered in a broadcast on Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk on 26 September 1959 and remained unreported in England or America.
Eliot would certainly have been startled if he could have foreseen that the atomic science he regarded with such suspicion would, within a quarter of a century, give birth to a theory that was in fundamental agreement with Steiner. This was the ‘anthropic principle’ that we have already considered briefly. In the final chapter of this book it deserves to be examined in more detail.
*C. Daly King, The States of Human Consciousness (1963), p. 120.
*Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Pathways Through to Space, An Experiential Journal, pp. 4–5.
*Letter to the author.
6
Towards the Unknown Region
As soon as man began to study the heavens he reached the conclusion that our earth is the centre of the universe. And since man is obviously the most intelligent creature on earth, it followed that he must also be the most important creature in creation.
In 1512 a canon of the Church named Nicolaus Copernicus realized that many of the riddles of astronomy could be cleared up by assuming that the sun, not the earth, is the centre of the universe. Being a timid soul he preferred not to publish the idea, even though the Pope’s right-hand man, the Cardinal of Capua, urged him to do so. His book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies finally appeared when he was on his death-bed.
On the whole his misgivings were well-founded. As the new theory slowly gained acceptance science came to recognize that man is less important than he assumed. By the mid-nineteenth century most scientists had come to accept that man is an accidental creature who was born on an unimportant planet of a second-rate star. Religious men were inclined to challenge this view. But it was not until 1974 that science began to raise its own mild objections.
It was in this year that an as
tronomer named Brandon Carter, of the Paris Observatory, formulated what he called ‘the weak anthropic principle’. This stated, in effect, ‘Well, there’s one thing about the universe — no one would be here to observe it if it hadn’t created the observers in the first place. So in that respect, at least, we are privileged.’ In other words it may have done it accidentally, but it did it. So we needn’t regard ourselves as total nonentities.
But when we speak of ‘accidentally’ we are using a word that has no place in science. If the universe is a machine then there is no accident: everything had to happen the way it has. And this in itself is something of a puzzle. If we imagine two gods sitting in a ‘dimensionless hyperspace’ and discussing the idea of creating a universe, we can see that they would have an infinite number of choices: ‘What about the weight of the electron — what shall we make that? How about the speed of light? What about the force of gravity? And electromagnetic forces… .’ If any of these had been different the universe as we know it would never have come into existence. But these ‘constants’ were not different and our universe did come into existence. And in due course it brought us into existence. If even one of those constants had been changed we wouldn’t be here either.
Considerations like this led Carter to formulate what he called ‘the strong anthropic principle’, which says that the universe is such that life had to develop. That sounds, at first, a controversial statement, almost religious in its implications. But anyone who reads the foregoing sentences again will see that it is a strictly logical consequence of our scientific argument.