by Colin Wilson
This experience led us to formulate another theory about the parasites. Clearly, they did not keep watch on every human being all the time. In that case, why did not people simply ‘recover’, as we had, when there were no parasites around?
The question bothered us for twenty-four hours. It was Reich who came up with the answer. He happened to talk to the wife of Everett Reubke, the President of A.I.U.; her husband had just gone off for a fortnight to the moon as a ‘rest cure’. She admitted that his nerves were ragged. ‘But why?’ asked Reich. Surely things were going excellently for the company? ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘But when a man is President of a concern as big as A.I.U., he gets into the habit of worrying, and sometimes can’t stop.’
That was it! Habit! How obvious, how self-evident, when you thought about it! Psychologists had been telling us for years that the human being is largely a machine. Lord Leicester compared human beings to grandfather clocks driven by watch springs. A single traumatic experience in childhood could be the foundation for a lifelong neurosis. One or two happy experiences in early childhood can make a man an optimist for life. The body will destroy the germs of a physical illness within a week; but the mind will preserve germs of morbidity or fear for a lifetime. Why? Because the mind tends to be stagnant, as far as the life-forces go. It works on habit, and these habits are tremendously difficult to break, particularly the negative ones.
In other words, once a human being has been ‘conditioned’ by the mind parasites, he is like a clock that has been wound up; he only requires attention once every year or so. Besides, Weissman discovered, human beings ‘condition’ one another, and save the parasites work. The parents’ attitude to life is passed on to the children. One gloomy and pessimistic writer with a powerful style affects a whole generation of writers, who in turn affect almost every educated person in the country.
The more we learned of the parasites, the more we realized how terrifyingly simple the whole thing was, and the more it seemed an impossible piece of luck that we should have stumbled on their secret. It was to be a very long time before we understood that ‘luck’ is as unsatisfactory and vague as most of the abstract nouns in our language, and that something quite different was at issue.
Naturally, we spent a lot of time discussing who else could be entrusted with our secret. This was a difficult problem.
We had made a good start, but one false step could ruin everything. First of all, we had to make sure that we picked people who were mentally ready to receive what we had to say. This was not so much a matter of being thought insane—we were no longer very worried about that—but of making sure that some carelessly chosen ‘ally’ did not give the whole thing away.
We did much reading of psychology and philosophy, to find out whether there were other minds that were already thinking along the right lines. We found several, but we were still cautious. By luck, Reich and I had quickly picked up the techniques of phenomenology; because neither of us were philosophers, and had no preconceptions to get rid of, Husserl’s seed fell on fertile ground. But since this was a battle, we had to work out a way of training people to this mental discipline. It was not enough to rely on their ordinary intelligence. They had to be taught to defend themselves against the mind parasites in the shortest possible space of time.
The fact, you see, is this. Once you have got the knack of using the mind properly, everything follows easily. It is a matter of breaking a habit that human beings have acquired over millions of years: of giving all their attention to the outside world, and thinking of ‘imagination’ as a kind of escapism, instead of recognizing that it is a brief excursion into the great unknown countries of the mind. You had to get used to thinking how your mind worked. Not just your ‘mind’ in the ordinary sense, but your feelings and perceptions as well. I found that by far the most difficult thing, to begin with, was to realize that ‘feeling’ is just another form of perception. We tend to keep them in separate compartments. I look at a man, and I ‘see’ him; that is objective. A child looks at him and says: ‘Ooh, what a horrid man’. The child feels about him, and we say that is ‘subjective’
. We are unaware of how stupid these classifications are, and how much they confuse our thinking. In a sense, the child’s feeling is also a ‘perception’. But in a far more important sense, our ‘seeing’ is also a feeling.
Think for a moment of what happens if you are trying to adjust a pair of binoculars. You turn the little wheel, and everything is a blur. Suddenly, a single extra turn makes everything become clear and sharp. Now think what happens if someone says to you: ‘Old So-and-so died last night’. Usually, your mind is so full of other things that you don’t feel anything at all—or rather, your feeling is indistinct, blurred, just as if the binoculars are out of focus. Perhaps weeks later, you are sitting quietly in your room reading, when something reminds you of old So-and-so who died, and quite suddenly you feel acute grief for a moment. The feeling has come into focus. What more is necessary to convince us that feeling and perception are basically the same thing?
This is a work of history, not of philosophy, so I do not propose to go into phenomenology at any length. (I have done so in other books, and I would also suggest the books of Lord Leicester as an excellent introduction to the subject.) But this much philosophy is necessary to understand the history of the fight against the mind parasites. Because, as we realized when we thought about this matter, the chief weapon of the parasites was a kind of ‘mind-jamming device’ that could be loosely compared to a radar jamming device. The conscious human mind ‘scans’ the universe all the time. ‘The wakeful life of the ego is a perceiving’. It is like an astronomer scanning the skies for new planets. Now an astronomer discovers new planets by comparing old star photographs with new ones. If a star has moved, then it isn’t a star, but a planet. And our minds and feelings are also constantly engaged in this process of scanning the universe for ‘meanings’. A ‘meaning’ happens when we compare two lots of experience, and suddenly understand something about them both. To take an extremely simple example, a baby’s first experience of fire may give it the impression that fire is wholly delightful: warm, bright, interesting. If he then tries putting his finger into the fire, he learns something new about it—that it burns. But he does not therefore decide that fire is wholly unpleasant—not unless he is exceptionally timid and neurotic. He superimposes the two experiences, one upon another, like two star maps, and marks down that one property of fire must be clearly separated from its others. This process is called learning.
Now supposing the mind parasites deliberately ‘blur’ the feelings when we try to compare our two experiences. It would be as if they had exchanged an astronomer’s spectacles for a pair with lenses made of smoked glass. He peers hard at his two star maps, but cannot make much out. We do not learn clearly from experience when this happens. And if we happen to be weak or neurotic, we learn entirely the wrong thing—that fire is ‘bad’ because it burns, for example.
I apologize to non-philosophical readers for these explanations, but they are quite essential. The aim of the parasites was to prevent human beings from arriving at their maximum powers, and they did this by ‘jamming’ the emotions, by blurring our feelings so that we failed to learn from them, and went around in a kind of mental fog. Now Weissman’s Historical Reflections were an attempt to examine the history of the past two centuries to discover exactly how the parasites had conducted their attack on the human race. And this was one of the first things he realized. Take those ‘romantic’ poets of the early nineteenth century—men like Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Goethe. They were quite different from the poets of the previous century—Dryden, Pope and the rest. Their minds were like powerful binoculars with a sharper power of focusing human existence. When Wordsworth looked down on the Thames from Westminster Bridge in the early morning, his mind suddenly roared like a dynamo, and superimposed a great many experiences on top of one another. For a moment, he saw human life from above, like an eagle,
instead of from our usual worm’s eye view. And whenever a man sees life in this way—whether he is a poet or a scientist or a statesman—the result is a tremendous feeling of power and courage, a glimpse of what life is all about, of the meaning of human evolution.
Well, it was at this point in history, just as the human mind had taken this tremendous evolutionary leap forward—evolution always proceeds by leaps, like an electron jumping from one orbit to another—that the mind parasites struck in force. Their campaign was cunning and far sighted. They proceeded to manipulate the key minds of our planet. Tolstoy glimpsed this truth in War and Peace, when he declared that individuals play little part in history, that it moves mechanically. For all of the protagonists of that Napoleonic war were moving mechanically—mere chess men in the hands of the mind parasites. Scientists were encouraged to be dogmatic and materialistic. How? By giving them a deep feeling of psychological insecurity that made them grasp eagerly at the idea of science as ‘purely objective’ knowledge—just as the parasites had tried to divert Weissman’s mind into mathematical problems and chess. The artists and writers were also cunningly undermined. The parasites probably looked with horror upon giants like Beethoven, Goethe, Shelley, realizing that a few dozen of these would set man firmly on the next stage of his evolution. So Schumann and Hölderlin were driven mad; Hoffmann was driven to drink, Coleridge and De Quincey to drugs. Men of genius were ruthlessly destroyed like flies. No wonder the great artists of the nineteenth century felt that the world was against them. No wonder Nietzsche’s brave effort to sound a trumpet call of optimism was dealt with so swiftly—by a lightning-stroke of madness. I shall not go into this matter at length now—Lord Leicester’s books on the subject document it exhaustively.
Now, as I have said, the moment we recognized the existence of the mind parasites, we escaped their cunningly laid trap. For it was nothing less than a history trap. History itself was their chief weapon. They ‘fixed’ history. And in two centuries, human history became a parable of the weakness of human beings, the indifference of nature, the helplessness of man confronting Necessity. Well, the moment we knew that history had been ‘fixed’, it ceased to take us in. We looked back on Mozart and Beethoven and Goethe and Shelley, and thought: Yes, great men would have been two a penny if it hadn’t been for the parasites. We saw that it is nonsense to talk about human weakness. Human beings have enormous strength when it is not being sucked away every night by these vampire bats of the soul.
This knowledge in itself was naturally enough to fill us with enormous optimism. And at this early stage, this optimism was increased by our ignorance of the parasites. Since we knew that they attached such importance to secrecy, to the human race being ignorant of their existence, we leapt to the conclusion—for which we would pay dearly—that they had no real power of doing harm. The problem of Karel’s suicide bothered us, but his widow had provided me with a plausible theory. Karel took saccharines in his tea. The bottle of cyanide tablets resembled the saccharine bottle. Supposing he was working hard, and had absent-mindedly dropped cyanide in his tea instead of saccharine? The smell would give it away, of course. But supposing the parasites had some way of blanketing the sense of smell, ‘jamming’ it, so to speak? Perhaps Karel was sitting unsuspecting at his desk, concentrating upon his work, rather over-tired, perhaps. He reaches out automatically for the saccharine, and one of the parasites gently guides his hand a few inches to the left…
Reich and I were both inclined to accept this theory, which fitted with the presence of cyanide in the tea. It also fitted with our view that the parasites were fundamentally no more dangerous than any other parasite—woodworm or poison ivy—that, provided you knew about them and took measures against them, all would be well. We told ourselves that we would not be as vulnerable as Karel Weissman. There were a limited number of ways in which the parasites could try to trick us as they had tricked Karel. They might lead us to make some error when driving a car, for example. Driving is very much a matter of instinct, and this instinct could easily be tampered with when you were driving at ninety miles an hour and concentrating on the road. So we agreed never to drive in a car, under any circumstances, or to allow ourselves to be driven. (A chauffeur would be even more vulnerable than we ourselves.) Travelling by helicopter was another matter—the automatic radar controls meant that a crash was almost impossible. And one day, when we heard that a soldier had been killed by a berserk native, we realized that this was another possibility that had to be taken into account. For that reason, both of us carried guns, and made a point of avoiding crowds.
Still, during those first months, everything went so well that it was difficult not to become over-optimistic. In my early twenties, when I was learning about archaeology under Sir Charles Myers, I experienced a delight, an intensity, that made me feel I had only just started living. But it was nothing to the intensity that I now felt continuously. It became clear that there is a fundamental mistake about ordinary human existence—as absurd as trying to fill a bath with the plug out, or driving a car with the hand brake on. Something that ought to build up into a greater and greater intensity is lost minute by minute. Once this is recognized, the problem vanishes. The mind begins to brim with a sense of vitality and control. Instead of being at the mercy of moods and feelings, we control them as easily as we control the movements of our hands. The result can hardly be described to anyone who has not experienced it. Human beings get so used to things ‘happening’ to them. They catch cold; they feel depressed; they pick something up and drop it; they experience boredom… But once I had turned my attention into my own mind, these things ceased to happen, because I now controlled them.
I can still remember the greatest experience of those early days. I was sitting in the library at A.I.U. at three o’clock one afternoon, reading a new paper on linguistic psychology, and speculating whether its author could be trusted with our secret. Some references to Heidegger, the founder of this school, excited me, for I suddenly saw clearly the error that had crept into the foundation of his philosophy, and how, with this error corrected, tremendous new prospects would open up. I started to make shorthand notes. At this moment, a mosquito buzzed viciously past my ear with its high pitched whine; a moment later, it came past again. My mind still full of Heidegger, I glanced up at it, and wished that it would find its way to the window. As I did so, I had a distinct sense of my mind encountering the mosquito. It veered suddenly off its course and buzzed across the room to a closed window. My mind kept a firm grasp on it, and steered it across the room to the fan vent in the open window, and outside.
I was so astonished that I sat back and gaped after it. I could hardly have been more astonished if I had suddenly sprouted wings and started to fly. Had I been deceived in supposing that my mind had guided the creature? I remembered that the washroom had a plague of wasps and bees, for there was a bed of peonies underneath its window. I went along there. It was empty, and there was a wasp buzzing against the frosted glass of the window. I leaned my back against the door, and concentrated on it. Nothing happened. It was frustrating—there was a sense of doing something wrong, like trying to pull open a locked door. I cast my mind back to Heidegger, felt the lift of exaltation, of vision, and suddenly felt my mind click into gear. I was in contact with the wasp, just as certainly as if I was holding it in my hand. I willed it to move across the room. No, ‘willed it’ is the wrong phrase. You do not ‘will’ your hand to open and close; you just do it. In the same way, I drew the wasp across the washroom towards me; then, just before it reached me, made it turn and veer back to the window, and out. It was so incredible that I could have burst into tears, or roared with laughter. What made it so funny was that I could somehow feel the wasp’s angry astonishment at being made to do this against its will.
Another wasp buzzed in—or perhaps the same one. I caught it again. This time, I was aware of my fatigue. My mind wasn’t used to this kind of thing, and its grip was slipping. I went to the window and looked
out of the flap at the top. A large bumble bee was rifling the honey from a peony. I let my mind grasp it, and willed it to come out. It resisted, and I could feel its resistance as directly as one can feel the pull of a dog on its lead when you take it for a walk. I exerted my strength, and it buzzed angrily out of the flower. I suddenly felt mentally tired, and let it go. However, I did not do what I used to do in the old stupid days—let my fatigue plunge me into depression. I simply let my mind relax, deliberately soothing it, and turned my thoughts elsewhere. Ten minutes later, in the library, the feeling of mental cramp had disappeared.
I now wondered whether I could exercise this same mental power over dead matter. I turned my attention to a lipstick-stained cigarette butt that someone had left in an ashtray at the next table, and tried to move it. Yes, it switched across the ashtray, but it cost me a far greater effort than with the bee. And at the same time I received another surprise. I felt a distinct shock of sexual desire in my loins as my mind touched the cigarette. I withdrew from it, then touched it again; once again I felt the shock. I discovered later that the cigarette butt had belonged to the secretary of one of the directors, a full-lipped, dark-haired woman who wore very powerful horn rimmed glasses. She was about thirty-five, unmarried, rather neurotic, and neither attractive nor unattractive. At first, I assumed that the shock of desire had come from me—had been a normal male reaction to the sexual stimulus of the lipstick-stained cigarette. But next time she came to sit near me in the library, I let my mind reach out cautiously to touch her, and was almost electrocuted by the musky, animal shock of sexual desire that came from her. It was not that she was actually thinking about sex—she was wading through a volume of statistics—or that she felt desire for any particular person. She apparently lived with this high-tension sexual current, and regarded it as perfectly normal.