by Colin Wilson
I have occasionally been asked by the uninitiated whether I actually ‘saw’ them, or felt that they had a definite shape. The answer is no. My sensations can best be envisaged if you imagine how it feels when you are hot and tired, and everything seems to be going wrong. Every time you start to cross the road, a bus almost runs over your feet. You feel as if the whole universe were hostile, like two lines of thugs between whom you have to run a gauntlet. Your feeling of security vanishes, and it seems that everything about your life is horribly brittle and destructible. Well, this gives an idea of the form that the attacks took. In the old days, I would have assumed they were merely attacks of pessimism and self-pity, and would have promptly found something to worry about, so that they seemed reasonable. We all fight such battles a hundred times a day, and those who win them conclusively do so by hurling aside their tendency to be negative, to worry about life, and by thinking in terms of conquest, of important purposes. We all know this trick of drawing on the ‘secret life’ inside us. My training over the past months had simply made this secret life far more accessible. My strength came from optimism, from ‘positive thinking’, if I might borrow that dubious phrase.
For perhaps an hour, I skirmished with them. I did not let myself worry about what would happen if there were millions of them, enough to keep attacking me for weeks until my mind was exhausted. When this thought presented itself, I suppressed it. And yet, of course, it was the basic danger.
By five o’clock, I was a little tired, but not at all depressed. It was then that I got the impression that they had received reinforcements, that they were massing for attack. This time, I decided to risk letting them get in close. I wanted to find if I could hurt them. So I let them press in on me, like a great crowd. I let them press closer and closer, until I felt I was suffocating. It was a terrifying sensation, like allowing someone to close a vice on your hand. The weight increased. Still I made no resistance. Then, when it seemed to become too heavy to bear, I gathered all the force of my mind, and lashed out at them, as if firing a cannon right into the midst of them. This time, there was no mistake. They may have been as light as a swarm of flies, but they were massed so thickly that they could not retreat quickly enough, and I had the satisfying feeling of damaging a large number.
Now, for half an hour, there was peace. They were still there, but it was obvious that they were badly shaken. I discovered later why this was. With my months of preparation, I had learned to call on an inner-strength that would be the mental equivalent of a hydrogen bomb. It was the first time I had ever used it, so even I had no idea of its power. They had mobbed me like a horde of rats mobbing a kitten—and then discovered they were attacking a full grown tiger. No wonder they were startled.
I also felt well satisfied. Although I had exerted my full strength in repelling them, I had not exhausted myself. I felt as fresh and strong as ever, and the exhilaration of their defeat made me feel as if I could carry on for weeks.
But as the daylight began to come through the curtains, I knew I was facing something for which I had not been prepared. It was a curious sensation, like suddenly feeling cold water round your feet, then feeling it slowly rising up your legs. It took me some time to realize that they were attacking from some part of my mind of whose existence I was unaware. I had been strong because I was fighting them out of knowledge, but I should have known that my knowledge of mind was pitifully small. I was like an astronomer who knows the solar system, and thinks he knows the universe.
What the parasites were doing was to attack me from below my knowledge of myself. It is true that I had given some small thought to the matter; but I had—rightly—postponed it as a study for a more advanced period. I had reflected often enough that our human life is based completely on ‘premises’ that we take for granted. A child takes its parents and its home for granted; later, it comes to take its country and its society for granted. We need these supports to begin with. A child without parents and a regular home grows up feeling insecure. A child that has had a good home may later learn to criticize its parents, or even reject them altogether (although this is unlikely); but it only does so when it is strong enough to stand alone.
All original thinkers develop by kicking away these ‘supports’ one by one. They may continue to love their parents and their country, but they love from a position of strength—a strength that began in rejection.
In fact, though, human beings never really learn to stand alone. They are lazy, and prefer supports. A man may be a fearlessly original mathematician, and yet be slavishly dependent on his wife. He may be a powerful free thinker, yet derive a great deal more comfort than he would admit from the admiration of a few friends and disciples. In short, human beings never question all their supports; they question a few, and continue to take the rest for granted.
Now I had been so absorbed in the adventure of entering new mental continents, rejecting my old personality and its assumptions, that I had been quite unaware that I was still leaning heavily on dozens of ordinary assumptions. For example, although I felt my identity had changed, I still had a strong feeling of identity. And our most fundamental sense of identity comes from an anchor that lies at the bottom of a very deep sea. I still looked upon myself as a member of the human race. I still looked upon myself as an inhabitant of the solar system and the universe in space and time. I took space and time for granted. I did not ask where I had been before my birth or after my death. I did not even recognize the problem of my own death; it was something I left ‘to be explored later’.
What the parasites now did was to go to these deep moorings of my identity, and proceed to shake them. I cannot express it more clearly than this. They did not actually, so to speak, pull up the anchors. That was beyond their powers. But they shook the chains, so that I suddenly became aware of an insecurity on a level I had taken completely for granted. I found myself asking: Who am I? In the deepest sense. Just as a bold thinker dismisses patriotism and religion, so I dismissed all the usual things that gave me an ‘identity’: the accident of my time and place of birth, the accident of my being a human being rather than a dog or a fish, the accident of my powerful instinct to cling to life. Having thrown off all these accidental ‘trappings’, I stood naked as pure consciousness confronting the universe. But here I became aware that this so-called ‘pure consciousness’ was as arbitrary as my name. It could not confront the universe without sticking labels on it. How could it be ‘pure consciousness’ when I saw that object as a book, that one as a table? It was still my tiny human identity looking out of my eyes. And if I tried to get beyond it, everything went blank.
I was not doing all this thinking for fun. I was trying to fight my way down to some solid bedrock on which I could take my stand against them. They had simply been cunning enough to show me that I was standing over an abyss. For my mind leapt on to recognize that we also take space and time for granted, although death takes us beyond them. I saw that what I call ‘existence’ means existence in space and time, and that this universe of space and time is not an absolute. Suddenly, everything became absurd. For the first time, a dreadful sense of insecurity and weakness gripped my stomach. I saw that everything I take for granted in this universe can be questioned—that they could all be a trick. As a thinker, I had got into the old romantic habit of feeling that the mind is beyond the accidents of the body, that it is somehow eternal and free; that the body may be trivial and particular, but the mind is universal and general. This attitude makes the mind an eternal spectator, beyond fear. But now I suddenly felt: ‘But if the universe itself is arbitrary, then my mind is as casual and destructible as my body’. This is the point where one remembers the times of sickness and delirium, when the mind seems altogether less durable than the body, when one suspects that it is mainly the body’s toughness that is preventing the mind from disintegrating.
Suddenly, abysses of emptiness were open beneath my feet. It did not even produce fear; that would be too human a reaction. It was like
contact with an icy reality that makes everything human seem a masquerade, that makes life itself seem a masquerade. It seemed to strike at the heart of my life, something I had thought untouchable. I felt like a king who has always given orders and had them obeyed, and who suddenly falls into the hands of barbarians who drive a sword into his bowels. It was so horribly and instantly real that it negated everything I had ever been, made everything an illusion. In that moment, it became totally unimportant whether the parasites won or not. All my strength, all my courage, ran away. I felt like a ship that has struck a rock, and suddenly realized that it is vulnerable.
The parasites did not attack. They watched me, as they might have watched a poisoned animal wriggling. I tried to gather my forces to prepare for attack, but I felt paralysed, exhausted. It seemed pointless. My mind’s strength was against me. Instead of flickering inattentively, as in the old days, it contemplated this emptiness unblinkingly.
They made a mistake not to attack then. They would have over-come me, for I had lost most of my strength, and had not time to recover it. This was how they had killed Karel Weissman—I knew this with certainty. For this vision of futility, of nothingness, also brings the thought that death cannot be worse than this. One feels that life means clinging to the body and its illusions. One looks back on the body just as one looks down on the earth from a spaceship; but in this case, there is a feeling that there would be no point in returning.
Yes, they should have attacked then. Perhaps Karel’s death convinced them that I would die in the same way, by committing suicide. But there was no such temptation in my case, for my mind was free of the neurotic pressures that would have made me dream about release. Only a neurotic woman faints when someone attacks her; a strong-minded woman knows that this is no solution.
Now a thought came that helped to turn the tide. It was this: that since these creatures had deliberately induced this feeling of total meaninglessness, they must be in some way beyond it. As soon as this idea floated into my mind, strength began to return. I saw that they had set out to get me into this state, just as turtle hunters used to turn them on their backs; they knew that this was a direction from which human beings were vulnerable. But if this was so, then presumably they themselves knew it was some kind of illusion, this sense of emptiness. My mind was doing its best, but it was making a mistake. An adult can easily browbeat a small child by taking advantage of his ignorance. He could, for example, drive a child insane by filling his mind with horror stories—of the Dracula-Frankenstein variety—and then pointing to Buchenwald and Belsen to prove that the world is even more horrible than these. In a sense it would be true, but it would take an adult to see through the fallacy: that Belsen and Buchenwald are not necessary horrors in the nature of the universe; that they can be fought by human decency. Perhaps these creatures were taking advantage of my ignorance in the same way? My reasoning seemed accurate enough: that our ability to go on living depends upon a series of supports that have the nature of illusions. But, then, a child can cease to believe that its parents are infallible without ceasing to love them. In other words, there is still a reality left there to love, when the illusions have vanished. Could it be that this awful agony—or, rather, this awful lack of agony, this feeling of utter coldness and reality—was no more dangerous than a child’s pain when it falls down?
I grasped at this possibility and clung to it. Then another thought came that strengthened me. I realized that when I contemplated this alien ‘universe’, and felt it to be arbitrary and absurd, I was making the oldest of human errors: of believing that the word ‘universe’ means ‘universe out there’. The mind, as I well knew, was a universe of its own.
They had made their first mistake in not attacking me when I was shattered and exhausted. They now made an even greater one. They saw that I was somehow recovering, and they attacked in force.
I was panic-stricken. I knew I had not the strength to fight them off. This glance into the abyss had drained off all my courage; now it had to seep back slowly.
At that moment, the full implications of my argument about the child dawned on me. A child can be browbeaten in its ignorance because it underestimates its strength. It does not realize that it is potentially an adult, perhaps a scientist, a poet, a leader.
In a flash, I saw that perhaps I was doing the same thing. And I suddenly remembered Karel’s words about his first battle with the parasites: about how his own deepest life forces had rallied to beat them. Were there actually deeper levels of strength that I had not yet called upon? At the same moment, I remembered my frequent feeling, over the past months, that there was some strange force of luck on our side—what I used to call ‘the god of archaeology’, some benevolent force whose purpose was to preserve life.
No doubt a religious man would have identified that force with God. For me, this was irrelevant. I only knew suddenly that I might have an unexpected ally in this fight. And as I had this thought, it was as if I heard the trumpets of an army coming to relieve me. The most frenzied exaltation I have ever known swept through me. No form of emotional expression could have been adequate for that sense of relief and triumph; crying or laughing or screaming would have been absurd, like trying to empty the sea with a thimble. As soon as it started, it spread like an atomic explosion. I was almost more afraid of it than of the parasites. Yet I also knew that this power was being released by myself. It was not really some ‘third force’, outside me and the parasites. It was some great passive benevolence that I had contacted, something that had no power of action in itself, but which had to be approached and used.
I overcame my fear and seized it. I clamped my teeth together and grasped this power with my will. To my amazement, I could control it. I turned my attention-beam on the enemy, and then let the power blast down it, dazzled and drunk by it, seeing meanings that were beyond anything I had ever suspected, and quite unable to grasp them in any way. All my words, ideas, concepts, were like leaves in a hurricane. The parasites saw it coming too late. Obviously, in a sense they were as inexperienced as I was. It was the blind fighting the blind. The inexpressibly searing blast hit them like some enormous flame thrower, destroying them as though they were earwigs. I had no desire to use it for more than a few seconds. Somehow, it would have seemed unfair, like using a machine gun on children. I deliberately turned it off, and felt wave after wave of it roar through me, crackling around my head like sparks of electricity. I could actually see a sort of blue-green glow emanating from my chest. It went on and on in waves, like thunder, but I no longer used it. I knew there was no reason to use it further. I closed my eyes, and let my body take it, aware that it could destroy me. Gradually it subsided, and in spite of my ecstasy and gratitude, I was glad to see it go. It had been far too great.
Then I was back in the room—for I had been elsewhere for many hours. The sound of traffic came from below. The electric clock said half past nine. The bed was soaked with sweat—so wet that it seemed as if I had emptied a bath of water over it. My eyesight was affected; I tended to see slightly double, as if everything had an outer ring of light. Things seemed incredibly bright and clear, and I understood for the first time the visual effects produced by mescalin on Aldous Huxley.
I also knew that I was in another kind of danger: that I must not try and think about what had happened, because I would only get hopelessly confused and depressed. In fact, the danger was greater than it had been half an hour or so before, when I had looked into an abyss. So I determinedly directed my thoughts elsewhere, to everyday things. I did not want to ask myself why I was fighting the mind parasites if I had such strength, why human beings are fighting life when they could overcome every problem instantaneously. I did not want to speculate whether the whole thing was some kind of play. I hurried to the bathroom and washed my face. I was startled that I looked so fresh and normal in the mirror. There was no physical sign of the conflict, except that I seemed slightly thinner. When I stood on the bathroom scale, I had another surprise:
I was two stones lighter.
The telescreen rang. It was the head of A.I.U. I looked at him as if he was from another world. I also noted that he looked somehow relieved to see me. He told me that reporters had been trying to contact me since eight o’clock. For twenty of my colleagues had died in the night: Gioberti, Curtis, Remizov, Shlaf, Herzog, Klebnikov, Ames, Thomson, Didring, Lascaratos, Spencefield, Sigrid Elgström—everybody, in fact, except the Grau brothers, Fleishman, Reich, myself—and Georges Ribot. The first four had apparently died of heart failure. Sigrid Elgstroim had slashed her wrists, then her throat. Klebnikov and Lascaratos had jumped from high windows. Thomson had apparently broken his neck in some kind of epileptic fit. Herzog had shot his whole family and then himself. Others had taken poison or overdoses of drugs. Two died of brain lesions.
Reubke was in a state of nerves, thinking about the bad publicity for A.I.U., since almost every one of the victims had been my guests—and guests of A.I.U.—in the past weeks; Reubke had met most of them himself. I soothed him as best I could—I was shaken myself—and told him not to allow any reporters to get on to me. When he said he had tried to ring Reich, but got no reply, I felt as though my stomach had turned to ice. Reaction was setting in heavily now. I would have preferred to sleep. But I used my own special dialling code, and rang Reich’s number. When his face appeared on the screen, my relief was unspeakable. Reich’s first words were:
‘Thank God you’re all right.’
‘I’m all right, but how about you? You look awful?’
‘Did they come to you in the night again?’
‘Yes, all night. They came to all of us.’
In five minutes, I was with him—pausing only long enough to tell Reubke that Reich was all right. But when I saw him, I realized this was an overstatement. He looked like a man who is just recovering from a six months’ illness. His flesh had become the colour of cooked veal. He looked older.