by Colin Wilson
In fact this load is lifted from the mind every time some crisis disappears and we see the world without ‘upside-downness’. This explains why Maslow’s students found it so easy to have peak experiences once they began thinking and talking about them. The peak experience enabled them, in a flash of insight, to see through the mechanisms of ‘upside-downness’ and to recognize that there is no earthly reason why we should not live on a far higher level of optimism. The peak experience is not a trick but a perception. This is why it always produces a feeling that could be interpreted ‘Of course.‘
Understanding the robot also enables us to grasp the mechanism of depression and neurosis. In non-robotic consciousness — freedom consciousness — we experience a continual feedback of interest from all our activities and this recharges our vital batteries. When we are ‘on the robot’ there is no feedback and our batteries become flat. So people who spend too much time living robotically find themselves engaged in a continual struggle against discouragement, the suspicion that life is a losing battle. A few extra problems and the vicious circle effect can lead to nervous breakdown. Yet once we can grasp that this is a logical error, one of the nastier tricks of ‘upside-downness’, we can see that it is an almost laughable absurdity on the level of a schoolboy howler. Goethe’s Mephistopheles describes himself as ‘the spirit that negates’, and it is almost as if most of us had a tiny Mephistopheles living inside our heads waiting to turn our certainties upside down and whisper, ‘It isn’t really worth the effort … .’ Yet it should now be possible to see that ‘upside-downness’ involves a simple mistake, analogous to the mistake of a man who walks into a dimly-lit room and suspects that he is going blind. The moment he realizes there is nothing wrong with his sight he heaves a sigh of relief and the anxieties vanish like hobgoblins. If we could once grasp that nausea and depression are simple forms of ‘upside-downness’, they would immediately cease to be dangerous.
My own panic attacks, described in chapter 1 of Part Two, reveal how dangerous they can be: I felt that I was slipping down a slope that led to insanity. At its worst ‘upside-downness’ produces a feeling of standing on the edge of an abyss. I have cited elsewhere* an interesting case in point concerning the novelist Margaret Lane. In 1945 a prolonged and difficult labour had left her in a condition of total exhaustion. She was delighted to be a mother but found herself in a dangerous state of emotional oversensitivity: when the cat caught its paw in the door she felt it was a major tragedy. At this point a copy of the New Yorker arrived containing John Hersey’s famous account of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. She said that it seemed so terrible that it blew all her emotional fuses. Suddenly she ceased to be capable of feeling; life became completely grey and uninteresting. She continued to be a good wife and mother by behaving as she ‘ought’ to behave; but she felt drained of all emotional response. One of the symptoms of this inner ‘deadness’ was that grass looked like blue paper and leaves looked like green tin. (These are well-known symptoms of schizophrenia.)
This state continued for a long time. Every time some pleasant circumstance started to arouse a response in her she became aware of what was happening and the feeling promptly disappeared. Living became a kind of ritual, without any love or hatred. But one day she and her husband were tempted to buy a cottage in Hampshire and went to view it. Naturally she was feeling more cheerful than usual, but as she walked alone in the field behind the cottage, the grass still looked like blue paper and the leaves looked like green tin. Suddenly she noticed some blue flowers: their blue was so intense that she stared at them with a flash of pleasure. As she did so the ‘emotional freeze-up’ vanished. The grass and leaves suddenly looked normal again. She burst into tears as she realized that the ‘thaw’ had started. And over the next few days the capacity to feel and respond slowly came back again.
Here the problem of ‘upside-downness’ can be studied in detail. The physical fatigue of a difficult birth had left her drained; Hersey’s account of Hiroshima had the effect of plunging her into ‘nausea’, the feeling that human life is meaningless, brutish and short. When human beings are in a healthy state of mind their natural response to evil is a sensible desire to prevent it happening again, but ‘nausea’ brings a feeling of helplessness and passivity. So Margaret Lane found herself trapped in a vicious circle of negativity and ‘upside-downness’, which she was unable to escape because it seemed to her to be based upon a logical recognition. As her vitality fought back, her resistance increased. The pleasure of seeing the blue flowers produced a peak experience that lifted her clear of ‘nausea’ and freed her from the vicious circle of negativity, the ‘Mephistophelean point of view’.
In Margaret Lane’s experience we can see on a magnified scale something that happens to most of us a dozen times a day — that sudden feeling of ‘let down’, that life is, after all, rather an uphill struggle, and that perhaps we are fools to put so much effort into it. This feeling is accompanied by a mini-version of the collapse experienced by Margaret Lane. Because it is a mini-version, a mini-peak experience is enough to bring about a quick recovery — a dry martini, a favourite programme on television, the sound of a child laughing. But recognizing the mechanisms of the mini-collapse would be enough to prevent them from happening.
In Grace Metalious’s Return to Peyton Place the heroine has a serious car accident because the accelerator of her car jams. The author comments that if she had been a more experienced driver she would have realized that she only had to put her toe underneath it and unjam it. The same applies to the ‘vicious circles’ that produce so many nervous breakdowns and suicides.
It now becomes possible to attempt an answer to the earlier question, What are we doing in this ‘wooden world’? In states of visionary ecstasy mystics like Ouspensky see the answer to the basic problems of human existence, but it all happens so quickly that they cannot even begin to pin it down in language. And that is the problem: to pin it down. It could be compared to a traveller who is lost in a forest and who is suddenly whisked up into the air by an angel and shown the way to the nearest main road. But as soon as he is back on the ground he forgets what he saw. His problem is how to retain enough of it to draw a map.
When R. H. Ward was returning to waking consciousness, he remarks, ‘the symbols we need if we are to comprehend “intuition” were supplied.’ In our ‘wooden world’ we need words and symbols to pin down meanings because we cannot see the meanings all the time: we keep losing them, like a man who goes into a room to get something then forgets what he went in for. Robert Graves’s friend Smilley was unusual in this respect: he could ‘see’ the answer to a complex mathematical problem in one ‘bird’s-eye view’ and did not need the mathematical symbols and formulae that enable the rest of us to grope our way to a solution. Symbols — and words and concepts — are our way of struggling towards the meanings we cannot grasp ‘in a flash’. (Of course every one of us has sudden flashes of insight: the trouble is that we cannot connect them up to other insights.) Which explains, incidentally, why Ouspensky compared the ‘mystical realm’ to a world of complicated mathematical relations: mathematics is a model of the way we struggle from smaller to greater meanings.
So what we are doing with our slow and clumsy logic is advancing step by step into the realm of pure intuition, the mystical realm glimpsed by Ward and Ouspensky. It is of course very pleasant to have mystical glimpses of the meaning of life, but what gives human beings really deep satisfaction is to pin them down in words so that they cannot escape.
Please note that although most of us feel that life is painful and difficult — so that poets like to refer to it as a ‘dim vast vale of tears’ and to suggest that we are here to improve our characters — we all realize, in states of ‘spring morning consciousness’, that it can be a perpetual delight. Ouspensky is not being quite accurate when he talks about the ‘wooden world’. In all states of consciousness above Level 4 the ‘resistance’ of the ‘wooden world’ is a source of delight
: think of the pleasure of a skier who feels the wind whistling past his ears, of a racing driver travelling at top speed, of a strong swimmer forging his way against the current, and it is obvious that life experiences itself most intensely in the face of resistance. And this may explain why the force of life decided to undertake the hazardous venture of invading the realm of matter.
There its problems began. Before it could establish a foothold in matter it had to create the robot, and the robot soon became a Frankenstein’s monster that came close to destroying its master. Its immense complexity robs life of spontaneity and undermines it with discouragement. Yet it should also be plain that human beings are now close to a turning-point in their evolution. It is at the lower levels of consciousness that life is most enslaved by the robot: at higher levels its influence becomes progressively less powerful until, at the mystical level, it vanishes entirely. At Level 4 human beings already catch repeated glimpses of Level 5 — ‘holiday consciousness’ and the peak experience. What prevents us from establishing a secure foothold on this higher level is the problem of ‘upside-downness’, and the peak experience makes us aware that this is not a real problem. Once we have grasped this insight and pinned it down in language, the problem will evaporate.
The basic weapon in this evolutionary struggle is language. Consider the following sobering reflection: if Voltaire could read the last dozen pages of this book he would not have the slightest idea of what we are talking about. He thought in cruder categories (atheism versus superstition, etc.), and for all his intelligence he would be as baffled as if I were talking Chinese. Yet most fairly intelligent modern readers can understand what we are saying without any difficulty. This is because language has succeeded in pushing so far into the realms of the unknown since the late eighteenth century. Every new concept — the fourth dimension, intentionality, the peak experience, Faculty X — is a bridgehead thrown out into that region of the inexpressible — Ouspensky’s mystical level where everything is ‘seen’. The business of language is to make these connections that Ward and Ouspensky saw as soon as they passed beyond the level of ordinary physical consciousness. And once these connections have been pinned down in language they become, so to speak, permanent revelations of meaning, like Margaret Lane’s blue flowers.
This was an insight that suddenly struck me in the early 1970s when a friend came to see me to ask if I had any research he could do for me: he felt he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and wanted something to occupy his mind. I had to explain apologetically that I had nothing to offer. But as he left I gave him a copy of my book on Maslow, New Pathways in Psychology. A few days later he rang me. ‘You knew what you were doing when you gave me that book, didn’t you?’ He told me that the first chapter, describing Maslow’s concept of the peak experience, had lifted him straight out of his depression. Maslow’s ideas had enabled him to get to grips with his problem, which until then had seemed a dangerous and invisible enemy. As he read the book the depression had simply evaporated.
The story underlines a point of central importance: it is surprisingly easy to move from one level to another; the chief obstacle is doubt — that moment-to-moment feeling that the efforts demanded by life are not really worth it. And, as Blake says:
If the sun and moon should doubt
They’d immediately go out.
Yet it is doubt that offers us the essential key to this problem. Consider what happens when you experience that sinking feeling, or when you force yourself to do some task that strikes you as a waste of time. You ‘leak’, and your energies drain away. Most of us spend a great deal of our lives trying to cope with leakage, with an underlying lack of enthusiasm for everyday tasks. Doubt causes our energies to become scattered and diffused. They could be compared to billiard balls scattered over a table-top. The moment we pay attention we draw the balls towards the centre of the table. If we become absorbed in something the balls press together into a tight cluster. If I am galvanized into intense concentration the pressure causes some of the balls to climb on top of the rest. But this is as far as most of us can get: the effort exhausts us, or some doubt intervenes, and we allow the balls to scatter once again. But occasionally, if some crisis or sense of purpose causes us to make some desperate effort of will — like a man standing before a firing squad — we can cause the balls to form a second tier and then even begin to form a third. As this happens the sense of meanings, of ‘connections’, becomes so exciting that we momentarily grasp the real purpose of our powers of concentration: to ‘concentrate’ the billiard balls into a pyramid. If we could actually achieve the ‘pyramid’ our minds would be fed by such a powerful sense of meaning from the ‘ranges of distant fact’ that ‘doubt’ would become an impossibility: there would be no temptation to allow the balls to scatter, any more than a child might be tempted to fall asleep in the middle of his birthday party. This is Faculty X, the level of concentration that precedes the mystical experience. It is a recognition of what human consciousness is one day destined to achieve, what Shaw’s Captain Shotover called ‘the seventh degree of concentration’. It would be a state in which man would be totally in control of his ‘hidden powers’, and in which the evolutionary struggle would be conducted in the full conscious daylight of awareness. At that stage the negative forces that at present obstruct us would have been left far behind.
The history of human evolution reveals that such a development is inevitable. We have already noted that for its first half billion years, life on earth was little more than a ruthless struggle for survival, an endless record of brutality. This was hardly a recipe for Utopia, so the next step was a drive towards the development of intelligence. This was an astonishingly successful venture, and as recently as two-and-a-half thousand years ago a remarkable number of human beings began to grasp that the major aim of human existence is the development of intelligence and the creation of circumstances that will foster it. The invention of the drama in ancient Greece was one of the most important steps in this development. It taught men that they possess a theatre inside their own heads, and in this theatre Socrates and Plato taught their pupils to stage dramas of ideas. The evolution of man over the next two thousand years was the evolution of this inner theatre. Another name for it is imagination, for what it actually means is that man is playing out the dramas of the external world on an internal stage. And the development of imagination made man realize that this inner world is independent of the accidents and contingencies of matter. It was this recognition that transformed him from a remarkably intelligent ape into a being who recognized — no matter how dimly — that he was potentially a god.
What is imagination? It is the power to make connections. An uncle of mine once sat on the branch of a tree as he sawed it off at the trunk and was surprised when he landed on the ground: he had failed to make the necessary ‘connections’ in advance. That sounds absurd, but I have just done something almost equally absurd. I broke off work to make myself a cup of tea and absent-mindedly filled the kettle to the top, failing to ‘see’ that it would take much longer to boil. Imagination is the power to anticipate reality by conjuring up mental connections.
Now when imagination is working well it spreads like a forest fire and I ‘see’ all kinds of connections. (I am emphasizing the word ‘see’ because Ouspensky and Ward insist that they literally saw that everything in the universe is connected.) When I feel tired or dull, it is as if the forest is soaked in rain, and the fire fails to spread. But when I am feeling full of energy on a spring morning, my mind and my senses seem to combine to make dozens of connections — with past spring mornings, with childhood, with memories of the countryside, with water sparkling in the sunlight … . C. S. Lewis once said that the very idea of autumn filled him with deep longing, and again we can see that this longing is compounded of yellow leaves, the smell of bonfires, soft grey skies and the thought of toasted muffins, and a thousand other things. Our minds obviously have this power to ‘spread sideways’ into a thousand co
nnections, but the wood is usually too damp to burn. Or to put it another way, our brains are too dull, so that the great treasury of memory hidden inside us is inaccessible to ordinary consciousness.
Sex is a particularly potent releaser of connections. It is easy to imagine that as Antony made love to Cleopatra for the first time, or Paris to Helen, they experienced an almost mystical sense of total reconciliation, a sense that everything in the universe is good. This explains the perennial popularity of love stories: we only have to read about a boy falling in love with a girl to experience that warm surge of interest that means that the imagination is touched. It also explains the popularity of pornography — and here we encounter one of the most remarkable of human evolutionary developments. Man is the only creature on earth who can imagine a sexual act in such realistic detail that he can carry it through to a physical climax. As absurd as it sounds, masturbation is one of humankind’s most remarkable evolutionary advances. But we can also see that the invention of the drama, and later of the novel, were remarkable extensions of the human power of imagination. With a novel in her hands the daughter of some nineteenth-century country vicar could live as richly as Helen of Troy — in a sense more richly, for the real Helen spent her days carding flax and trying to stave off boredom.