by Colin Wilson
Ward’s ‘upward flight’ ended in ‘a perfection of light’, a state of ‘indescribable purity’ and perfect unity. Again he experienced the odd feeling of familiarity, as if this was something he remembered. After this began the ‘downward flight’ back to earth, back through the region of ideas, then, ‘as consciousness diminished towards the consciousness of everyday life’, the region of ideas began to take on forms:
On its nether fringes the symbols we need in the waking state if we are to comprehend ‘intuition’ were supplied. In a flash … I saw the meaning; the meaning, that is, of the universe, of life on earth, and of man. As the darkness of what we flatter ourselves is consciousness closed in upon me, and even as I was dimly to be aware that I was ‘coming to’, the sum of things appeared before my inward eyes as a living geometrical figure, an infinitely complicated and infinitely simple arrangement of continually moving, continually changing golden lines on a background of darkness … . This living geometrical figure seemed to be telling me that everything is in order, that everything works according to an ineluctable pattern, and that … nothing ever need be wholly meaningless, even on earth… . Provided we bear the pattern’s existence in mind, even pain … can have meaning; so can death; so can the worst that we may have to endure; while the possibility of discerning this meaning is itself the meaning of divine mercy.
And as he came out of the gas he tried to recapture this vision of meaning in the words ‘Within and within and within and …’ repeated like an endlessly recurring decimal.
Ouspensky had also seemed to see the ‘meaning’ in the form of a geometrical figure,
… in the semblance of some big flower, like a rose or a lotus, the petals of which were continually unfolding from the middle, growing, increasing in size, reaching the outside of the flower and then in some way again returning to the middle and starting again from the beginning … . In this flower there was an incredible quantity of light, movement, colour, music, emotion, agitation, knowledge, intelligence, mathematics, and continuous unceasing growth. And while I was looking at this flower someone seemed to explain to me that this was the ‘World’ or ‘Brahma’ in its clearest aspect and in the nearest approximation to what it is in reality — ‘If the approximation were made still nearer, it would be Brahma himself, as he is,’ said the voice.
This image of a flower unfolding then returning continually to its own centre also seems to explain Ward’s ‘within and within and within … .’
Here again perhaps the most easily understandable part of Ward’s vision is his recognition of the ‘connectedness’ of everything, the realization that ‘nothing is separate’. He says, ‘Things were related to one another which to ordinary thinking would have no connexion whatever, and related to one another in ways which we cannot normally conceive. Things which we should call far apart, whether in space or time or by their nature, here interpenetrated; things which we should call wholly different from one another became one another.’ The moment we begin to experience a feeling of rising vitality we have an odd sense of the meaningfulness of everything — as if everything we looked at were communicating with us — and the feeling that everything reminds us of something else.
In his essay on mysticism and logic, Bertrand Russell dismisses such ‘glimpses’ as mere feelings, as if they could be compared with drunkenness. Ward and Ouspensky have no doubt that they amount to a wider glimpse of reality. And modern brain research indicates that they are probably correct. In his book Megabrain, Michael Hutchison describes a machine called the ‘Transcutaneous Electro-Neural Stimulator’, invented by brain physiologist Joseph Light, which can send an electric current into the brain. Light chose a frequency of 7.83 Hz, the frequency of the electrical field resonating between the earth and the ionosphere, which appears to be capable of harmonizing the body and brain with the earth’s electromagnetic energy. Hutchison was attached to the machine, but was unaware that it was switched on:
Yes, yes, I cried. I felt as if I were bursting at the seams. Full of wonder and excitement, I told Light some of my feelings about brain research. I told him about an article I was in the process of rewriting about the brain. I told him how I had become interested in the brain. At that moment a series of studies I had read about a variety of subjects, including the relation between protein synthesis and memory and the biochemical basis of addiction all flew together in my skull and I understood something new. Gesturing wildly and scribbling on a paper napkin, I began to explain my new insight … Suddenly I stopped, with my mouth hanging open in wild surmise. People seated in nearby booths were peering at me with great interest. ‘Listen to me talk!’ I said to Light. ‘Jabbering like a wired-up monkey!’
Light gave me a demonic grin and pointed his finger at the black gizmo on the table, and I realized that all this while subtle little electrical waves had been insinuating their way into my brain. I burst out laughing, filled with immense pleasure. I felt that my brain was working faster and more efficiently than ever before — ideas were tumbling into place so fast that I could hardly capture them.
Clearly, Hutchison is describing an experience that is fundamentally the same as Ouspensky’s sensations in his mystical states: connectedness — ‘a man could go mad from one ashtray.’ We could hardly demand a better proof that our brains are usually subnormal, and that when we begin to experience fascination and excitement we are coming closer to our normal capacities. Hutchison is also describing what Koestler calls ‘the Eureka experience’, when insights suddenly lock together, like a jigsaw puzzle, forming a pattern. ‘At that moment a series of studies I had read about a variety of subjects … all flew together in my skull and I understood something new.’
What Light had done was to cause his machine to release large quantities of the brain’s natural opiates, the painkilling and euphoria-causing endorphins. He told Hutchison how he had once driven six hundred miles to a conference hooked up to his brain machine, had spent the whole journey doing useful mental work, then, after the conference, had driven straight back. ‘When I got back I wasn’t even tired.’
It is significant that Ward calls the chapter in which he describes his own experience ‘Consciousness is not a constant’. For this obviously lies at the root of the problem: our assumption that ordinary consciousness tells us the truth about the external world. Yet every time we have a peak experience we see once again that ordinary consciousness deserves to be regarded with mistrust. Because it is so dim and dull it virtually tells us lies. Once we begin to see this we can also grasp that there are a number of distinct levels of consciousness that every one of us experiences during the course of a lifetime.
Let us, simply as an exercise, see if we can recognize the most fundamental of these levels. Let us start off with the basic state of non-consciousness that we experience in very deep sleep, and call this Level O. In that case Level 1 is the level we experience as we dream, and which persists in hypnagogic experiences.
Level 2 is the most basic level of waking consciousness: that is mere awareness. A child experiences this when he is too tired to take any interest in anything. He may be on his way home from a party but he gazes blankly at the passing world. If you were to ask, ‘What have you just seen?’ he would reply, ‘I don’t know.’ His consciousness is merely a mirror reflecting the outside world. Nietzsche once said that we envy the cows their placidity, but it would be no use asking them the secret of their happiness for they would have forgotten the question before they could give the answer. This is Level 2.
At Level 3 consciousness has become self-aware but it is still dull and heavy — so heavy that we are only aware of one thing at a time: everything seems to be ‘merely itself’, utterly without meaning, and your own reflection in a mirror seems to be a stranger. This is the level that Sartre calls nausea.
Level 4 is the normal consciousness we experience every day. It is no longer too heavy to move: it has learned how to cope with existence yet it tends to think of life as a grim battle — possibl
y a losing battle. Consequently it tends to sink back easily towards Level 3 and to find experience meaningless and boring.
So far the one thing the levels all have in common is a basically passive attitude towards life and experience. At Level 5 this ceases to be so. This is a level that I have labelled provisionally ‘spring morning consciousness’ or ‘holiday consciousness’. It is characterized by that bubbling feeling of happiness we experience when life suddenly becomes more interesting and exciting and all kinds of prospects seem to be opening up in front of us. Quite suddenly caution and doubt disappear; life becomes self-evidently fascinating and delightful. This is the feeling that Hesse’s Steppenwolf experiences as he tastes a glass of wine and is reminded of ‘Mozart and the stars’.
Level 6 could be labelled the ‘magical level’. It is what happens to a child on Christmas Day, when everything combines to make life seem wonderful. Or imagine the consciousness of two honeymooners on their wedding night looking down from a balcony on to a moonlit lake, with the dark shapes of mountains in the distance. In such states we feel a total reconciliation with our lives. ‘For moments together my heart stood still between delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life,’ says Steppenwolf. Problems seem trivial; we see that the one real virtue is courage. Consciousness has become a continuous mild peak experience, what J. B. Priestley calls ‘delight’.
Level 7 is Faculty X — Toynbee’s experience on Pharsalus, Proust’s experience as he tastes the madeleine dipped in tea. There is an almost godlike sensation: ‘I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal… .’ This is more than a peak experience: it is an odd sense of mastery over time, as if every moment of your life could be recalled as clearly as the last ten minutes. We suddenly realize that time is a manifestation of the heaviness of the body and the feebleness of the spirit. We can also see that if we could learn to achieve this condition of control permanently, time would become, in a basic sense, non-existent.
The most interesting thing about the levels beyond Level 7 — the levels explored by Ouspensky and other mystics — is that they seem to contradict the evidence of our senses and of everyday consciousness. The inner becomes the outer, the outer becomes the inner, man is the whole universe and a mere atom, space and time are seen to be illusions and so on. Yet we can see that these contradictions are already inherent in everyday consciousness. At Level 2 consciousness has no kind of ‘connectedness’; it is merely a flow of meaningless impressions. Level 3 — nausea — starts to arrest this flow, to connect things together, but it keeps collapsing into a sudden perception that the world is after all quite meaningless and futile. Level 4 — ordinary consciousness — ‘connects’ things to a far higher degree, yet it still takes it for granted that life is an endless uphill struggle and that we have to make a continuous effort to see any meaning in it. At Level 5 — ‘holiday consciousness’ — all this changes: there is a sense of being able to see to distant horizons, of becoming aware of ‘Mozart and the stars’. We suddenly realize that the world around us is so fascinating in itself that no effort is required. Everything makes us think of something else and so we are kept in a continuous state of interest and excitement.
At Level 6 — ‘magic consciousness’ — we seem to be floating in a sea of meaning and find it hard to understand how we could ever have been unhappy, or how anyone else could be. Even the worst experiences of the past now seem deeply interesting attempts to teach us something, essential steps on the upward path to this sense of optimism and control. The only tragedy in the universe seems to be that so many people lack the courage and sheer dogged stubbornness to keep going and so miss this literally ‘heavenly’ sense of wonder and reconciliation.
Level 7, with its sense of freedom, of mastery over time, is only a short step from the mystical level, just as Level 6 — ‘magic’ — is only a short step from Faculty X. A sudden additional effort can carry the mind over the threshold into that strange realm where ‘separateness’ is seen to be a delusion caused by fatigue and everything is seen to be connected. One of the most encouraging things about this insight into the levels is that each level is only a short and easy step away from the previous one.
All mystical experience leaves us confronted by the same fundamental question: What are we doing here? And what are we supposed to do now we are here? If the mystical experience gives us an odd experience of ‘returning home’ to our proper state of being, then what are we doing here in the first place? Why have we descended into this ‘outer Siberia’?
One assumption seems obvious: that we are here for a purpose. Like the pioneers who went to the Yukon we are driven by some powerful compulsion. The stakes are obviously higher than we think. The obvious explanation is that we are a colonizing expedition, and that our purpose is to colonize the realm of matter. According to this view life — or spirit — is attempting to establish a bridgehead in matter, just as man might attempt to establish a space-station on the moon. The trouble is that the supply lines are too long so that contact with base is irregular and uncertain. Even radio contact is intermittent. And after years in these difficult surroundings the explorers tend to become obsessed with the mere problem of survival and to forget why they came there. This is why for millions of years life on earth was little more than a story of murderous conflict, with one species gobbling up another. And that is still why some of the ablest men on our planet devote their lives to the futile pursuit of money and power — unable to see any logically-appealing alternative.
The basic problem, quite clearly, is that we waste so much time on the first four levels of consciousness, whose dullness makes them virtually useless. Mere survival is all very well, but it is not until we achieve Level 5 that we begin to live to some purpose. It is only then that we cease to be undermined by the suspicion that life is an endless uphill struggle, a battle that cannot be won, and recognize that even in ‘outer Siberia’, the world is endlessly fascinating. It is worth noting that all healthy human beings achieve regular glimpses of ‘spring morning consciousness’, when they rise like a cork from Level 4 to Level 5, for these glimpses are what Maslow meant by the peak experience. And in such moments we can see clearly that the major problem is the number of mistakes we make when we are confined to the lower levels.
We can also see that the fundamental cause of all human problems is the entity I have called the robot, the automatic part of us that takes over when we are tired and does our living for us. The robot is absolutely essential to life on earth; we could not survive for ten seconds without him. When mystics descend from their realms of pure enlightenment into this ‘unreal, slow and clumsy’ world of human reality, the robot is waiting for them at the door. He is even more important than symbols and language, for very simple organisms can survive without symbols and language but no creature can survive without his robot.
It is the sheer weight of the robot that makes us feel we are living in a ‘wooden world’. We can see for example that the moment Ouspensky or Ward returned from the mystical realm of perfect freedom and found themselves ‘back in the body’ they once again found themselves saddled with all their boring old habits and worries and neuroses, all their old sense of identity built up from the reactions of other people, and above all the dreary old heaviness, as if consciousness has turned into a leaden weight. This is the sensation that made the romantics feel that life is a kind of hell — or at the very least, purgatory.
Yet we know enough about the robot to know that this feeling is as untrustworthy as the depression induced by a hangover. The trouble with living ‘on the robot’ is that he is a dead weight. He takes over only when our energies are low. So when I do something robotically I get no feedback of sudden delight. This in turn makes me feel that it was not worth doing. ‘Stan’ reacts by failing to send up energy and ‘Ollie’ experiences a sinking feeling. Living becomes even more robotic and the vicious circle effect is reinforced. Beyond a certain point we feel as if we are cut off from reality by a kind of glas
s wall: suddenly it seems self-evident that there is nothing new under the sun, that all human effort is vanity, that man is a useless passion and that life is a horrible joke devised by some demonic creator. This is the state I have decribed as ‘upside-downness’, the tendency to allow negative emotional judgements to usurp the place of objective rational judgements. Moreover this depressing state masquerades as the ‘voice of experience’, since it seems obvious that you ‘know’ more about an experience when you’ve had it a hundred times. This is the real cause of death in most human beings: they mistake the vicious circle effects of ‘upside-downness’ for the wisdom of age, and give up the struggle.
On the other hand it takes only a flash of non-robotic consciousness — the delight of a spring morning, the sudden relief when a crisis disappears — to make us aware that ‘upside-downness’ is an appalling mistake. Here it is we who are in control, instead of being controlled by the robot, and non-robotic states are characterized by this sense of being in control. In these ‘conditions of control’ our vitality is so high that everything looks fresh and interesting; the result is the overwhelmingly authentic sense of ‘absurd good news’. If you asked someone who is experiencing this state to define exactly what he ‘sees’, he would reply that it is a clear and objective recognition that the universe really is infinitely exciting and beautiful. It also brings a dazzling vision of how human life might be transformed. For we can see, instantly and intuitively, that the ‘Ecclesiastes effect’ is a confidence trickster who makes life seem dull and boring by assuring us that it is dull and boring — the process is closely akin to hypnosis. In ‘conditions of control’ we can see through the lie, and the effect is a kind of revelation. Suddenly everything is clear. Now we are free of the robot we can see that the world is full of infinite and fascinating variety; it is the robot who irons out our perceptions and makes everything look alike — makes every house look like every other house, every tree look like every other tree. More importantly we can see the way that the mechanisms of the robot produce ‘upside-downness’ and that it is our unconscious conviction of the truth of ‘upside-downness’ — the feeling that life is not worth too much effort — that really obstructs us from spending far more time in the non-robotic states. (If you wish to measure your own unconscious level of ‘upside-downness’, observe your feelings next time you do something ‘pointless’ like picking up something you have dropped or closing a door that should not have been left open: in moods of ‘upside-downness’ it causes a sinking of the heart and costs a real effort.) In conditions of control we suddenly recognize that ‘upside-downness’ is a logical error, and that if we could once grasp this with the conscious mind, as we can grasp the trick of doing long division or extracting a square root, a tremendous load would be lifted from the mind and the peak experience would become an everyday occurrence.