Beyond the Occult

by Colin Wilson

  It was this development of imagination that gave rise to what we call the romantic movement, every one of whose poets and artists and musicians glimpsed this vision of the sheer variety of the universe. The vision always filled them with courage and pure affirmation, so that Shelley wrote:

  I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

  To thee and thine — have I not kept that vow?

  With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now

  I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

  Each from his voiceless grave …

  We can also see that Shelley is speaking of the same ‘glimpse’ that overwhelmed Proust as he tasted the madeleine.

  These poets recognized that we should not blame the universe — or God — for the problems of human existence, but the narrowness of our senses. Blake wrote, ‘Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern,’ while Goethe declared:

  The spirit world is never closed

  Your heart is dead, your senses shut …

  Yet what made the romantics so miserable — sometimes to the point of suicide — was the feeling that there was nothing they could do about this narrowness: that man is trapped in a kind of prison and sentenced to life. It was true that the world of imagination permitted a certain freedom, yet indulgence in its delights only seemed to make them less capable of coping with the problems of the physical world. After a trip to the ‘land of dreams’ they usually felt completely debilitated. It seemed obvious that imagination was merely an escape from the harshness of ‘real’ reality and that it only made things worse when you had to cope with the dreariness of a cold Monday morning. Now a person who regards the world of the mind as unreal yet who feels he still prefers it to the stupidity and coarseness of reality is an ‘Outsider’, and the human race is still in the ‘Outsider’ phase of its evolution.

  The ‘Outsider’ problem was perfectly defined by Carlyle when he talked about the conflict between Everlasting Yes and Everlasting No. In other words it was the problem of which is true: those moments of sheer affirmation when it is self-evident that life is infinitely fascinating, or the depressing sense of ordinariness that fills most of our waking lives. Some of Van Gogh’s paintings are the most powerful expression of the affirmation experience ever made, yet he left a suicide note that read, ‘Misery will never end.’ Nietzsche’s philosophy is the most penetrating and wholesale rejection of romantic pessimism ever made, yet he died insane. All the romantics were dragged down by this suspicion that their moments of vision were illusions and that optimism is only another name for whistling in the dark. Every one of us experiences a smaller version of the same problem a dozen times a day: a beam of sunlight brings a glow of happiness that is immediately succeeded by a ‘sinking feeling’ at the thought of the electricity bill. With these continual swoops from optimism to pessimism and back again it is not surprising that Shakespeare’s Macbeth thought life a tale told by an idiot.

  The solution to this ancient problem bursts upon us as soon as we understand the mechanisms of the robot. What tormented the romantics was the suspicion that the moments of vision and peak experiences were pleasant illusions caused by an overflow of vital energy, and that they had no more significance than the euphoria induced by alcohol. In that case the truth is that life is dull, boring and ordinary, and the artists who want to turn it into something mysterious and exciting are self-deceiving escapists. As soon as we understand the mechanisms of the robot we can see that this is simply untrue. The robot is rather like the damper on a piano which stops the strings from vibrating. But it is natural for a string to vibrate and to cause other strings to vibrate. Non-robotic consciousness is natural consciousness. This means that it is natural for consciousness to grasp the connectedness of things. When Maslow’s marine saw a nurse for the first time in years he had a peak experience because he suddenly realized that women are different from men. She was not merely a woman, she was all women — the Eternal Feminine. And when human beings are in a state of intellectual excitement they suddenly glimpse the implications of an idea: they seem to stretch out like the strands of an immense spider’s web. The robot produces the sense of ‘separateness’ by damping our mental strings, but this is an interruption of the natural vibration.

  In short it is the robot who dulls our senses so that they seem to be covered with a thin layer of some insulating material that prevents us from feeling anything; it is the robot who makes our experience seem dull and repetitive; it is the robot who reduces the infinitely complex world of reality to ‘ordinariness’. So robotic perception is false, and non-robotic perception is true. If the romantics had understood this it would have removed the deep underlying cause of their misery and despair by making them aware that the moments of vision are a genuine perception, not some pleasant delusion. For until we can make up our minds about this basic question, life is bound to be a series of pendulum-swings between optimism and pessimism, determination and discouragement. We are in the position of a financier who is asked to invest in an enterprise that at one moment appears to be sound and prosperous and the next on the verge of bankruptcy: while he is unable to make up his mind his capital lies idle. The moment he knows the enterprise to be sound he can get on with the business of financing it. The moment we grasp that the apparent ‘ordinariness’ of the world is a delusion created by the robot and that ‘absurd good news’ is a glimpse of the underlying reality, we can get on with the business of transforming our lives.

  How can we learn to escape the delusions of the robot? How can we transform robotic consciousness into non-robotic consciousness? This was the problem to which Gurdjieff devoted his life, and his solution consisted of what he called ‘alarm clocks’, a series of shocks and stimuli that would galvanize people out of their ‘mechanicalness’ into a higher level of effort — for, like James, he recognized that it is efforts and excitements that carry us over the dam. For example, Gurdjieff made a habit of entering the dormitory where his pupils were asleep and snapping his fingers, and everyone had to be out of bed and in some complicated position within seconds. Obviously such a technique would have the effect of encouraging alertness: the trouble with such methods is that they can easily become mechanical. But the real danger is that this strenuous approach tends to induce a sense of grim determination that easily slides into pessimism: it is sad to record that Ouspensky spent his last days drinking too much and daydreaming gloomily about the good old days in Russia. Even Gurdjieff conveyed a curious impression of sadness in his final years. It makes us aware that the ‘freedom feeling’ is essentially a sense of optimism, a feeling that life is full of marvellous possibilities. This happens when the subconscious mind is in a positive mood — in which state it is as if we had switched on a kind of rose-coloured underfloor lighting. This is what Maslow’s students did when they began to think and talk about peak experiences, and it explains why they then continued to have peak experiences. The peak experience is a perception that all is well and that the ‘upside-downness’ which usually fills us with mistrust is a misunderstanding, a childish delusion.

  This also enables us to see why Maslow was mistaken when he said that the peak experience cannot be induced at will. We do induce peak experiences, but the mechanism is so subtle that we fail to grasp how we do it. Goethe revealed that he understood the mechanism when he made the spirit tell Faust, ‘Your heart is dead, your senses shut.’ The heart, oddly enough, seems to be the essential organ concerned. When we are in a hurry or doing something we dislike, we clench the heart, exactly like clenching a fist, and nothing can get in. When we are filled with a sense of multiplicity and excitement we somehow ‘open’ the heart and allow reality to flow in. But in that state we only need to entertain the shadow of some unpleasant thought for it to close again. And human beings are so naturally prone to mistrust that it is hard to maintain the openness for very long. Children on the other hand find it easy to slip into states of wonder and delight when the heart finally
opens so wide that the whole world seems magical. The ‘trick’ of the peak experience lies in this ability to relax out of our usual defensive posture and to ‘open the heart’. Maslow’s students quickly learned the trick, and then did it repeatedly.

  We can now begin to understand the future direction of human evolution. Socrates once said that since the philosopher spends his life trying to separate his body from his spirit, death should be regarded as a consummation. That comment sounds like a piece of sophistry: yet if we can accept the evidence of the mystics and of the near-death experience, it may be less absurd than it sounds. In which case we are still left confronting the central question: if that is so, what are we doing here? And more importantly, what are we supposed to do now we are here? We can glimpse the answer in the peak experience and in what Ouspensky and Ward said about the mystical experience. If the ‘all is well’ feeling is a valid insight and not some absurd oversimplification, then human beings create most of their own problems through their confused and negative attitudes. They then compound the problem through mistrust and a kind of self-belittlement. Peak experiences bring the insight that if these attitudes could be eliminated we could live on a far higher level of affirmation and of freedom, a level — as Shaw put it in Back to Methuselah — on which all life would be akin to sexual ecstasy. H. G. Wells glimpsed the same vision in books like A Modern Utopia and Men Like Gods, but his scientific materialism made him see the problem in purely social terms so that he failed to grasp that the ‘new age’ could only be founded upon a new psychological insight: as a consequence his future Utopias seem oddly disappointing and unreal. The freedom insight, Maslow’s recognition of ‘higher ceilings of human nature’, means that human beings are mistaken to assume that this world is, in its fundamental nature, a ‘dim, vast vale of tears’. We are not trapped in some kind of original sin; only original stupidity. And stupidity can be overcome by a determined effort of intelligence.

  At the present stage our problem is to grasp the mechanisms of the peak experience and to understand that the sinking feeling is not a glimpse of the basic meaninglessness of life but merely a ‘leak’ which reduces our inner pressure. It would then be self-evident, for example, that Sartre’s nausea is merely a state in which the billiard balls are scattered all over the table-top: that is why meaning has collapsed — it is impossible to grasp meaning with scattered attention. The depression that made Graham Greene play Russian roulette was also a scattering of the billiard balls: the click of the hammer caused them to sweep together into the middle of the table, bringing a vision of meaning. The same applies to Proust’s ‘glimpse’ as he tasted the madeleine: which means in turn that his sensation of ceasing to feel ‘mediocre,’ accidental, mortal’ was a genuine perception, a glimpse of ‘hidden powers’, not some vagary of the nervous system.

  This book has been an attempt to show that these ‘hidden powers’ are a sign of our evolutionary potential. For anyone who is willing to consider it with an open mind, the evidence is overwhelming. When Alfred Russel Wallace found that a hypnotized schoolboy was ‘sharing’ his own sensations he had stumbled on an undiscovered human potential. So had William Denton when he realized that his wife and sister-in-law could ‘read’ the history of ancient stones. So had Arnold Toynbee when he ‘saw’ the battle of Pharsalus re-enacted. So had Jane O’Neill when she spent an hour in Fotheringhay church as it had existed five hundred years ago. So had Wilbur Wright when he dreamed winners of future horseraces. So had Susie Bauer when an intense longing somehow ‘transported’ her more than seven hundred miles. So had Ouspensky when he foresaw that he would not be making his intended trip to Moscow. All these cases, and hundreds more, make it clear that our assessment of human capabilities is absurdly limited and inaccurate. The mistake comes about through the limitations of our bodies and the dullness of our senses — not through our powers of reason. There is no contradiction between our powers of reason and the glimpses we achieve in moments of vision and flashes of ‘intensity consciousness’. Our chief problem is to interpret these glimpses in terms of reason and logic. As we do so we become aware that there is a vital link between mystical experience, paranormal experience and the unexplored powers of imagination.

  Let me try to state briefly what is at issue. Man is the first animal on earth to possess a sense of long-term purpose. The absurdity is that he applies this purpose to his physical life but not to his mental life. The result is that physically speaking he has become the lord of civilization, while mentally speaking he is still living in the days of Ecclesiastes. He has climbed the world’s highest mountains and explored its most inhospitable wildernesses, yet where consciousness is concerned he has hardly ventured beyond his own backyard. If he feels like a change of consciousness he pours himself a whisky or buys a ticket for the cup final. The result is that he accepts peak experiences as a pleasant kind of bonus instead of recognizing their implications: that all life could be a kind of continual peak experience. And so every time he climbs to the top of some foothill, he admires the view and then turns round and goes back to the bottom again, instead of recognizing that his real business is to scale the mountain that lies beyond. He does this because he takes it for granted that the natural state of the billiard balls that constitute his awareness is to remain scattered over the table-top, and that what he experiences when they are gathered in a tight cluster was never meant to be a permanent state of affairs. So he accepts mental stagnation as a norm (for that is what ordinary consciousness amounts to) and makes no attempt to build his insights into a pyramid.

  As long as this remains true man will continue to mark time at his present stage of evolution. The moment it ceases to be true, the next stage of human evolution will commence.

  *John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), p. 470.

  *R. H. Ward, A Drug Taker’s Notes.

  *Beyond the Outsider. Appendix 1.

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