by Colin Wilson
For nearly a week afterwards, I was in a state of the most abject terror, and closer to insanity than I have ever been in my life. For although I was now back in the ordinary physical world, I had no feeling of safety. I felt that, in returning to everyday consciousness, I was like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. It only meant that I was unaware of the menace.
Luckily, I was not working at the time; it would have been impossible. And about a week later, I found myself thinking: Well, what are you afraid of? You’ve come to no harm. I immediately began to feel more cheerful. It was only a few days after this that Standard Motors and Engineering offered me the post of their chief medical officer. I accepted it, and plunged into the work of an enormous and complex organization. For a long time it left me no time for brooding or devising new experiments. And whenever my thoughts turned back to my mescalin experiments, I felt such a powerful revulsion that I always found some excuse for putting it off.
Six months ago, I finally returned to the problem, this time from a slightly different angle. My friend Rupert Haddon of Princeton told me of his highly successful experiments in rehabilitating sexual criminals with the use of L.S.D. In explaining his theories, he used a great deal of the terminology of the philosopher Husserl. It immediately became obvious to me that phenomenology is only another name for the kind of self-observation I had tried to carry out under mescalin, and that when Husserl talks about ‘uncovering the structure of consciousness’, he only means descending into these realms of mental habit of which I have spoken. Husserl had realized that while we have ordnance survey maps that cover every inch of our earth, we have no atlas of our mental world.
Reading Husserl renewed my courage. The idea of trying mescalin again terrified me; but phenomenology starts from ordinary consciousness. So I again began making notes about the problems of man’s inner world, and the geography of consciousness.
Almost at once, I became aware that certain inner-forces were resisting my researches. As soon as I began to brood on these problems, I began to experience sick headaches and feelings of nausea. Every morning, I woke up with a feeling of profound depression. I have always been a student of mathematics in an amateurish way, as well as a good chess player. I soon discovered that I felt better the moment I turned my attention to mathematics or chess. But the moment I began to think about the mind, the same depression would settle on me.
My own weakness began to infuriate me. I determined that I would overcome it at all costs. So I begged two months’ leave of absence from my employers. I warned my wife that I was going to be very ill. And I deliberately turned my mind to these problems of phenomenology. The result was exactly as I predicted. For a few days I felt tired and depressed. Then I began to experience headaches and nerve pains. Then I vomited up everything I ate. I took to my bed, and tried to use my mind to probe my own sickness, using the methods of analysis laid down by Husserl. My wife had no idea of what was wrong with me, and her anxiety made it twice as bad. It is lucky that we have no children; otherwise, I would certainly have been forced to surrender.
After a fortnight, I was so exhausted that I could barely swallow a teaspoonful of milk. I made an immense effort to rally my forces, reaching down to my deepest instinctive levels. In that moment, I became aware of my enemies. It was like swimming down to the bottom of the sea and suddenly noticing that you are surrounded by sharks. I could not, of course, ‘see’ them in the ordinary sense, but I could feel their presence as clearly as one can feel toothache. They were down there, at a level of my being where my consciousness never penetrates.
And as I tried to prevent myself from screaming with terror, the fear of a man facing inevitable destruction, I suddenly realized that I had beaten them. My own deepest life forces were rallying against them. An immense strength, that I had never known I possessed, reared up like a giant. It was far stronger than they were, and they had to retreat from it. I suddenly became aware of more of them, thousands of them; and yet I knew that they could do nothing against me.
And then the realization came to me with such searing force that I felt as if I had been struck by lightning. Everything was clear; I knew everything. I knew why it was so important to them that no one should suspect their existence. Man possesses more than enough power to destroy them all. But so long as he is unaware of them, they can feed on him, like vampires, sucking away his energy.
My wife came into the bedroom and was astounded to find me laughing like a madman. For a moment, she thought my mind had collapsed. Then she realized that it was the laughter of sanity.
I told her to go and bring me soup. And within forty-eight hours, I was back on my feet again, as healthy as ever—in fact, healthier than I had ever been in my life. At first, I felt such an immense euphoria at my discovery that I forgot about those vampires of the mind. Then I realized that this in itself was stupid. They had an immense advantage over me; they knew my own mind far better than I did. Unless I was very careful, they could still destroy me.
But for the moment, I was safe. When, later in the day, I felt the persistent, nagging attacks of depression, I turned again to that deep source of inner power, and to my optimism about the human future. Immediately the attacks ceased, and I began to roar with laughter again. It was many weeks before I could control this laughter mechanism whenever I had a skirmish with the parasites.
What I had discovered was, of course, so fantastic that it could not be grasped by the unprepared mind. In fact, it was extraordinary good luck that I had not made the discovery six years earlier, when I was working for Trans-world. In the meantime, my mind had made slow and unconscious preparation for it. In the past few months, I have become steadily more convinced that it was not entirely a matter of luck. I have a feeling that there are powerful forces working on the side of humanity, although I have no idea of their nature.
(I made a special note of this sentence. It was something I had always felt instinctively.)
What it amounts to is this. For more than two centuries now, the human mind has been constantly a prey to these energy vampires. In a few cases, the vampires have been able completely to take over a human mind and use it for their own purposes. For example, I am almost certain that De Sade was one of these ‘zombis’ whose brain was entirely in the control of the vampires. The blasphemy and stupidity of his work are not, as in many cases, evidence of demonic vitality, and the proof of it is that De Sade never matured in any way, although he lived to be 74. The sole purpose of his life work is to add to the mental confusion of the human race, deliberately to distort and pervert the truth about sex.
As soon as I understood about the mind vampires, the history of the past two hundred years became absurdly clear. Until about 1780 (which is roughly the date when the first full-scale invasion of mind vampires landed on earth), most art tended to be life-enhancing, like the music of Haydn and Mozart. After the invasion of the mind vampires, this sunny optimism became almost impossible to the artist. The mind vampires always chose the most intelligent men as their instruments, because it is ultimately the intelligent men who have the greatest influence on the human race. Very few artists have been powerful enough to hurl them off, and such men have gained a new strength in doing so—Beethoven is clearly an example; Goethe another.
And this explains precisely why it is so important for the mind vampires to keep their presence unknown, to drain man’s lifeblood without his being aware of it. A man who defeats the mind vampires becomes doubly dangerous to them, for his forces of self-renewal have conquered. In such cases, the vampires probably attempt to destroy him in another way—by trying to influence other people against him. We should remember that Beethoven’s death came about because he left his sister’s house after a rather curious quarrel, and drove several miles in an open cart in the rain. At all events, we notice that it is in the nineteenth century that the great artists first begin to complain that ‘the world is against them’; Haydn and Mozart were well understood and appreciated by their own time. A
s soon as the artist dies, this neglect disappears—the mind vampires loosen their grip on people’s minds. They have more important things to attend to.
In the history of art and literature since 1780, we see the results of the battle with the mind vampires. The artists who refused to preach a gospel of pessimism and life devaluation were destroyed. The life-slanderers often lived to a ripe old age. It is interesting, for example, to contrast the fate of the life-slanderer Schopenhauer with that of the life-affirmer Nietzsche, or that of the sexual degenerate De Sade with that of the sexual mystic Lawrence.
Apart from these obvious facts, I have not succeeded in learning a great deal about the mind vampires. I am inclined to suspect that, in small numbers, they have always been present on earth. Possibly the Christian idea of the devil arises from some obscure intuition of the part they had played in human history: how their role is to take over a man’s mind, and to cause him to become an enemy of life and of the human race. But it would be a mistake to blame the vampires for all the misfortunes of the human race. Man is an animal who is trying to evolve into a god. Many of his problems are an inevitable result of this struggle.
I have a theory, which I will state here for the sake of completeness. I suspect that the universe is full of races like our own, struggling to evolve. In the early stages of its evolution, any race is mainly concerned to conquer its environment, to overcome enemies, to assure itself of food. But sooner or later, a point comes where the race has progressed beyond this stage, and can now turn its attention inward, to the pleasures of the mind. ‘My mind to me a kingdom is’, said Sir Edward Dyer. And when man realizes that his mind is a kingdom in the most literal sense, a great unexplored country, he has crossed the borderline that divides the animal from the god.
Now I suspect that these mind vampires specialize in finding races who have almost reached this point of evolution, who are on the brink of achieving a new power, and then feeding on them until they have destroyed them. It is not their actual intention to destroy—because once they have done this, they are forced to seek another host. Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle. Their purpose, therefore, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards. I think there can be no possible doubt that the wars of the twentieth century are a deliberate contrivance of these vampires. Hitler, like De Sade, was almost certainly another of their ‘zombis’. A completely destructive world war would not serve their purposes, but continual minor skirmishes are admirable.
What would man be like if he could destroy these vampires, or drive them away? The first result would certainly be a tremendous sense of mental relief, a vanishing oppression, a surge of energy and optimism. In this first rush of energy, Artistic masterpieces would be created by the dozen. Mankind would react like children who have been let out of school on the last day of term. Then man’s energies would turn inward. He would take up the legacy of Husserl. (It is obviously significant that it was Hitler who was responsible for Husserl’s death just as his work was on the brink of new achievements.) He would suddenly realize that he possesses inner-powers that make the hydrogen bomb seem a mere candle. Aided, perhaps, by such drugs as mescalin, he would become, for the first time, an inhabitant of the world of mind, just as he is at present an inhabitant of earth. He would explore the countries of the mind as Livingstone and Stanley explored Africa. He would discover that he has many ‘selves’, and that his higher ‘selves’ are what his ancestors would have called gods.
I have another theory, which is so absurd that I hardly dare to mention it. This is that the mind vampires are, without intending it, the instruments of some higher force. They may, of course, succeed in destroying any race that becomes their host. But if, by any chance, the race should become aware of the danger, the result is bound to be the exact opposite of what is intended. One of the chief obstacles to human evolution is man’s boredom and ignorance, his tendency to drift and allow tomorrow to take care of itself. In a certain sense, this is perhaps a greater danger to evolution—or at least, a hindrance—than the vampires themselves. Once a race becomes aware of these vampires, the battle is already half won. Once man has a purpose and a belief, he is almost invincible. The vampires might serve, therefore, to inoculate man against his own indifference and laziness. However, this is no more than a casual speculation…
The next problem is more important than all this speculation: How is it possible to get rid of them? It is no answer simply to publish ‘the facts’. The historical facts mean nothing at all; they would be ignored. In some way, the human race has to be made aware of its danger. If I did what would be so easy—arranged to be interviewed on television, or wrote a series of newspaper articles on the subject—I might be listened to, but I think it more probable that people would simply dismiss me as insane. Yes, indeed, this is a tremendous problem. For short of persuading everyone to try a dose of mescalin, I can think of no way of convincing people. And then, there is no guarantee that mescalin would bring about the desired result—otherwise, I might risk dumping a large quantity of it in some city’s water supply. No, such an idea is unthinkable. With the mind vampires massed for attack, sanity is too fragile a thing to risk. I now understand why my experiment at Trans-world ended so disastrously. The vampires deliberately destroyed those people, as a kind of warning to me. The average person lacks the mental discipline to resist them. This is why the suicide rate is so high…
I must learn more about these creatures. While my ignorance is so complete, they could destroy me. When I know something about them, perhaps I shall also know how to make the human race aware of them.
The part of the statement I have quoted was not, of course, where I began; I have selected its central passage. The Historical Reflections were actually lengthy reflections on the nature of these mind parasites and on their part in human history. The work is in the form of a diary, a diary of ideas. Inevitably, it is extremely repetitive. He is a man who is trying to hold tight on to some central insight, and who keeps on losing it.
I was struck by the fact that he was able to concentrate for such long periods. Under his circumstances, I would certainly have found it harder to suppress my nervousness. But I came to believe that this was because he felt that he was now relatively safe from them. He had beaten them in the first battle, and he had the elation of victory. His main problem, as he said, was to get other people to believe him. Apparently, he did not consider this as too urgent. He knew that if he published his findings as they stood, he would be regarded as a madman. In any case, as a scientist, he had the habit of trying to verify his facts and to enlarge them as far as possible before announcing them. What puzzled me—and continues to puzzle me—is that he did not try to confide in anybody, not even in his wife. This in itself shows a peculiar state of mind. Was he so absolutely certain that he was now in no danger that he felt time no longer mattered? Or was this euphoria another trick of the parasites? Whatever happened, he went on working at his notes, convinced that he was fighting a winning battle—until the day they drove him to suicide.
I think my feelings as I read all this can be guessed. At first, incredulity—in fact, the incredulity kept returning all day; then excitement and fear. I think I might have dismissed the whole thing as insanity if it had not been for my experience on the wall at Karatepe. I was ready to believe in the existence of these mind vampires. But what then?
Unlike Weissman, I had not the strength to keep it to myself. I was terrified. I knew that the safest thing would be to burn the papers and pretend I had never read them; I was fairly sure that, in that case, they would leave me alone. I felt very close to insanity. All the time I was reading, I kept glancing around nervously, and then realizing that, if they were watching me, it was from inside. This was an almost unbearable thought until I came across the passage in which Weissman compares their method of ‘eavesdropping’ to listening over a radio. Then I
saw that this was reasonable. They were apparently in the depth of consciousness, in the realm of the deepest memories. If they came too close to consciousness, they were in danger of revealing themselves. I came to the conclusion that they probably dared to come close to the surface late at night, when the mind was tired and attention was exhausted; this explained what had happened on the wall at Karatepe.
I already knew what would be my next move. I would have to tell Reich; he was the only man I liked and trusted deeply enough. Perhaps Karel Weissman’s tragedy was that he liked and trusted no one as much as I liked and trusted Reich. But if I intended to tell Reich, then the safest time would be in the morning, when we were both wide awake. And I knew I was incapable of keeping this secret overnight.
And so I called Reich—on our private code—at the digging. As soon as his face appeared on the screen, I felt closer to sanity. I asked him if he felt like having a meal with me that evening. He asked me if I had any particular reason, and I said no—only that I was feeling better and felt like company. Luck was with me; some directors of A.I.U. were over there that afternoon and would be returning to Diyarbakir by rocket at six o’clock. He would be with me by half past.
As I pulled out the plug, I had my first insight into why Weissman had kept silent about them. This idea of being ‘overheard’—as if someone was tapping the telescreen line—led one to play safe, to behave calmly, to try to keep the thoughts restrained, running on common matters.