The Mind Parasites

by Colin Wilson

  A point came where we had a decision to take. We had been out from earth for ten days. We had enough fuel to take us back as far as the nearest artificial satellite. The mind parasites were obviously near breaking point. Could we risk pushing on into space, and perhaps finding ourselves stranded? We had ceased to use all electrical equipment, knowing that the energy would be needed. The ship had immense photon sails which had been spread as soon as we were out of the earth’s atmosphere, and to some extent we were pushed onward by the pressure of sunlight. Much of the energy used to drive the ship’s engines also came from the sun. But, obviously, the photon sails would be of no use for returning to earth, for ‘tacking’ with a spaceship is infinitely more complicated than with a yacht. It was true that we used very little energy as we went onward; we were ‘freewheeling’ into space, the only opposing forces being the gravitational pull of distant planets, and of the meteorites that swooped past us at a rate of two or three an hour.

  We decided to risk it. Somehow, it was impossible to feel pessimistic about our prospects of returning to earth. And so we went on steadily, ignoring the problems, waiting for the parasites to loosen their grip.

  It happened on the fourteenth day, and none of us anticipated what it would be like. During the morning, I was aware of their increasing fear and of their hatred. My mind became cloudier and more turbulent than at any time since we left the moon. I was sitting with Reich near the rear port, staring back towards the earth. Suddenly his face distorted with fear, and I felt a wave of panic. I looked out of the port to see if he had seen something that frightened him. When I looked back, his face had become grey, and he looked like a very sick man. And then he shuddered, closed his eyes for a moment—and became transformed. He began to roar with laughter, but it was the healthy laughter of enormous delight. And at that moment, I felt an awful tearing feeling in the depths of my being, a pain as if some living creature were trying to eat its way out of me. Physical and mental agony became identical. It seemed obvious that I could not survive. Then I heard Reich yelling in my ear: ‘It’s all right! We’ve beaten them. They’re leaving!’ Now the thing became atrocious. Something infinitely evil and slimy was pushing its way from inside me. For a moment, I realized that I had been wrong to think of the parasites as separate beings. They were one; they were ‘It’, something I can only compare to an immense, jelly-like octopus whose tentacles are separated from its body and can move about like individuals. It was incredibly nasty, like feeling a pain under your clothes, and finding that some great carnivorous slug has eaten its way halfway into your body. Now this infinitely vile thing was coming out of its lair, and I could feel its hatred of me, a hatred so powerful and maniacal that it almost needs a new word.

  Then—the infinite, inexpressible relief of knowing it was gone. My reaction was unlike Reich’s. The happiness and gratitude that rose in me were so strong that I felt as if my heart would burst, and tears blinded my eyes so that the sun’s light became a great glare that reminded me of swimming under water when I was a child. When this passed away, I felt like a convalescent who has just seen the doctors removing some loathsome cancer from inside him.

  The others were eating in the next room. We rushed in and told them what had happened. Everyone became immensely excited and began asking us questions. No one else had started to feel the preliminary pains. I presume that it was our position—looking back towards the earth—that had caused us to experience it first. So we advised the others to move into the other room—and warned them what to expect. Then Reich and I went to the other end of the ship, where everything was in darkness, to make our first trip into the new free country of the mind.

  And this is the point where I become aware that anything I say will be a lie. So I must make an effort to explain, rather than try to make everyday language do a job for which it was never intended. Freedom is the most important experience that can happen to human beings. In ordinary life, we experience it momentarily when some emergency calls upon all our energies, and then is suddenly overcome. What happens then is that the mind becomes an eagle, no longer tied to the immediate present.

  The greatest human problem is that we are all tied to the present. This is because we are machines, and our free will is almost infinitesimal. Our body is an elaborate machine, just like a motor car. Or perhaps a better simile would be those ‘powered’ artificial limbs worn by people who have lost an arm or leg. These limbs, with their almost indestructible power units, are as responsive as our real arms and legs, and I am told that a man who has worn them for years can totally forget that they are not real limbs. But if the power unit should break down, he quickly realizes that his limb is only a machine, and that his own will power plays a very small part in its movements.

  Well, this is true of all of us. We have far less will power than we believe. This means that we have almost no real freedom. This hardly matters most of the time, because the ‘machine’—our bodies and brains—is doing what we want anyway: eating and drinking and excreting and sleeping and making love and the rest.

  But poets and mystics have moments of freedom when they suddenly realize that they want the ‘machine’ to do something far more interesting. They want the mind to be able to detach itself from the world at a moment’s notice, and float above it. Our attention is usually fixed upon minute particulars, actual objects around us, like a car in gear. Then, in certain moments, the car goes into ‘neutral’; the mind ceases to be engaged with trivial particulars, and finds itself free. Instead of being tied to the dull reality of the present, it is free to choose which reality it prefers to contemplate. When your mind is ‘in gear’, you can use your memory to recall yesterday, or to create a picture of a place on the other side of the world. But the picture remains dim, like a candle in the sunlight, or a mere ghost. In the ‘poetic’ moments, the moments of freedom, yesterday becomes as real as now.

  If we could learn the trick of putting the mind in and out of gear, man would have the secret of godhead. But no trick is more difficult to learn. We are ruled by habit. Our bodies are robots that insist on doing what they have been doing for the past million years: eating, drinking, excreting, making love—and attending to the present.

  Now my first discovery of the existence of the parasites enabled me to break the ‘habit’, which the parasites had been carefully fostering and strengthening. What it meant was that I suddenly realized that it is not in the nature of things that man should get brief glimpses of freedom, his ‘intimations of immortality’, and then lose them immediately. There is no reason why he should not experience them for ten hours a day if he likes. (More than that would be harmful, because after all, we have to attend to the trivialities of the moment sometime.)

  Since the beginning of August—when I first read Karel’s Historical Reflections—I had been continually awake to the possibilities of my own freedom, and this in itself meant that I had broken the chain that binds most human beings. The parasites relied mainly on habit and ignorance to keep the human race in chains. But they had also established themselves at a deep level of the human psyche, where they could ‘drink’ the energies that human beings draw from their wellspring of vitality.

  I should try to make this point quite clear. If man had not been an ‘evolutionary animal’, the parasites would have found a permanent host. There would never have been the faintest chance of man discovering their existence. They could have spent eternity happily ‘tapping’ man’s power cable, and man would never have been any the wiser. But a small percentage of the human race–about a twentieth, to be precise—are evolutionary animals with a deep and powerful urge to become truly free. These men had to be ‘distracted’, and for this reason, the parasites had to move towards the surface of the mind, to manipulate their puppets. This was how they had given themselves away.

  I have said that man draws his power from a secret life source in the depths of his being. This source is man’s inviolable centre of gravity, his real being. It is completely indestru
ctible. The parasites therefore had no access to it. All they could do was to ‘steal’ energy in transit from this deep source to man’s conscious being.

  And now I can perhaps explain something of what I discovered when I made a fresh attempt to enter into myself, although my warning about language must be constantly borne in mind.

  First of all, I observed an extraordinary stillness in my mind. There was no longer any turbulence of any kind. This was because it was at last my mind, with no interlopers. At last, it was my own kingdom.

  This also made an immense difference to my dreams and memories. Anyone who has tried to sleep when his brain is overtired, or he has a touch of fever, knows that awful sensation when all the thoughts seem to be fishes rushing about at a great speed, and they all seem alien. The inside of the head, which should be a ‘fine and private place’, is like a fairground crowded with strangers. Well, I had never realized until this moment how far the brain is always a fairground crowded with parasites. For now it was completely calm and silent. My memories stood in orderly arrays, like troops at a royal salute. At a single order, I could make any one of them step forward. I realized the truth of the statement that everything that has happened to us is carefully stored in the memory. Memories of my earliest childhood were as accessible as memories of yesterday. What is more, memories of previous lives were now connected in a continuous sequence with memories of my present life. My mind was like a completely calm sea, that reflects the sky like a mirror, and whose water is so clear that the bottom is as visible as the surface. I understand what Jacob Boehme meant when he talked of a ‘sabbath of the spirit’. For the very first time in my life, I was in contact with reality. No more fever, no more nightmare, no more delusions. The thing that astounded me most was the tremendous strength of human beings, to have succeeded in living, in spite of the terrible veil of insanity that hides them from reality. They must be one of the hardiest species in the universe.

  Now I descended through my mind like a man walking through the halls of a castle. For the first time, I knew what I was. I knew that this was me. It was not ‘my mind’, because the adjective ‘my’ refers to only a minute section of my being. It was all me.

  I penetrated through the ‘nursery’ layers, those bright energies whose purpose is to establish man’s moral balance, to act as moral policemen. When a man is tempted to believe the world is evil, and has to be fought with evil, these powers are drawn to the surface as white blood corpuscles are drawn to an infected area of the body. All this was clear to me for the first time.

  Below them was the great sea of motionless life. It was now no longer a sea of darkness and nothingness. As I descended into it, I became aware that it had a quality of luminescence and warmth. This time, there was no obstacle, no force of blindness and malevolence to push me back.

  And then I began to understand something which is almost impossible to express. There was no point in going deeper. Those depths contained pure life, and yet, in a sense, they also contained death, the death of the body and of consciousness. The thing we call ‘life’ on earth is a combination of the pure life forces with the body; it is liaison between life and the inanimate. I say ‘the inanimate’ because ‘matter’ would be the wrong word. All matter is alive in so far as it exists. The key word here is ‘existence’. No human being can understand the word ‘existence’ because he is in it. But to exist is not a passive quality; it is to thrust out from nonexistence. Existence in itself is a shout of affirmation. To exist is to defy nonexistence.

  You can see that it is all a problem of language. I am being forced to make do with one or two words when I need about fifty. It is not quite analogous to describing colours to a blind man, because no human being is entirely ‘blind’; we all have glimpses of freedom. But freedom has as many colours as the spectrum.7

  All this means that in trying to descend towards the ‘source’ of my life I was leaving behind the realm of existence, for the source does not exist; that is to say, it does not stand out from nonexistence.

  All this was freedom; the beautiful, inexpressible intoxication of freedom. My mind was my own; and I was the first human being to achieve superhumanity. And yet I had to leave these fascinating prospects to consider the problem that had brought us into outer space: the earth and the mind parasites. So I came reluctantly back to the surface. And I looked on Reich as a stranger, and saw that he was looking at me in the same way. We smiled at one another, like two actors who have just finished rehearsing a scene in which they are enemies. I said: ‘What happens now?’

  He said: ‘How far did you get?’

  ‘Not far. There was no point.’

  ‘What powers can we draw upon?’

  ‘I’m still not sure. I’d like the advice of the others.’

  We went back into the other room. Fifteen of them had lost their parasites, and were helping the others. Some of the new recruits were in such agony that they were likely to damage themselves, like a mother who writhes around the floor as she gives birth. It cost us a considerable effort to soothe them, since force would have been of no use—it would only have intensified their terror. One man kept screaming: ‘Turn the ship, turn the ship, it’s killing me.’ The creature inside him was obviously trying to force him to make us return to earth. His release came twenty minutes later, and he was so exhausted that he immediately fell asleep.

  By eight o’clock that evening, it was all over. Most of the new recruits were so dazed that they could hardly speak. They were suffering from an extreme version of the ‘double exposure’ effect. They knew they were not themselves—not the people they had always taken themselves for—but they had not yet discovered that these strange depths of alien being were themselves. There was no point in trying to explain, since this would confine them to the conscious part of the personality; they had to find out for themselves.

  At all events, about ten of us were perfectly clear headed. We now realized that there could be no problem about fuel for the rocket. Our united PK powers could drive this rocket as far as Pluto at a thousand times its present speed. But that would serve no purpose. We had to go back to earth, and to decide how we intended to fight the parasites. It would not be difficult to destroy Gwambe and Hazard, but this would only be a temporary expedient. The parasites could create new Gwambes and Hazards at will. And we could not destroy all their followers, or undertake to ‘reprogramme’ their minds. We had to play this game according to the parasites’ rules. It was like a game of chess, with human beings for pawns.

  We discussed it far into the night without arriving at any definite plan. I had a feeling that we were on the wrong track altogether. We were thinking in terms of out-generalling the parasites. But there must be some other way…

  At three o’clock in the morning, Reich woke me up. I should say that his mind woke me up, for he was in the next room. We lay in the dark, and conversed telepathically. He had not been to sleep; instead, he had been thinking back, slowly and methodically, over the whole problem. He said:

  ‘I’ve been trying to correlate everything we know about these creatures. Because there’s one thing that baffles me. Why should they hate leaving the earth so much? If they’re in the mind, it should not make any difference to them where they are.’

  I suggested: ‘Because they exist at a level of the mind that’s common to all human beings—Jung’s racial unconscious.’

  ‘That’s still no answer. Distance makes no difference to thought. I can communicate telepathically with someone on earth as easily as with you. So we’re still a part of the human subconscious mind. In that case, they ought to be as comfortable here as back on earth.’

  I asked: ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I still think it has something to do with the moon.’

  ‘You think they use it as a base?’

  ‘No. It’s something far more complicated than that. Listen to me, and tell me if this makes sense to you. Let’s start with the Kadath business. We know that all that stuff about
the ‘Great Old Ones’ was untrue. We assume therefore that there is no real connection between the mind parasites and Kadath—that they simply used it as a gigantic red herring to keep man looking for his enemies outside himself. Now this is probably true. But even so, doesn’t Kadath offer us certain clues? The first thing it proves beyond all shadow of doubt is that the usual dating of human history is a mistake. According to geology, man is about a million years old. All that means is that we haven’t found any human remains that date back further than that.’

  ‘And the earliest remains indicate that he hadn’t progressed far beyond the ape a million years ago,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Who hadn’t? Pekin Man? Australopithecus? How do we know they were the only kind of man? Don’t forget that the Romans had a high degree of civilization when the British were still savages. And the Hittites were civilized when the Romans and Greeks were still savages. It’s all relative. Civilization tends to develop in pockets. Well, the one thing we know about the evolutionary process is that it favours intelligence. So why should we make the curious assumption that man only appeared a million years ago? We know that dinosaurs and mammoths and giant sloths—and even horses—existed millions of years before that. Man must have had some kind of primitive, ape-like ancestor back in the Jurassic. He didn’t just appear from nowhere.

  ‘You’ll agree that the existence of Kadath bears out this theory? The only alternative theory is that the inhabitants of Kadath came from another planet.

  ‘So we concede that man is a great deal older than a million years. But that raises the problem of why civilization didn’t develop sooner. And there again, I’m inclined to pay attention to the various myths about the destruction of the world—the great flood, and so on. Now, supposing the various moon-cranks are right, and there is some truth in the notion that the great flood was caused by the moon falling on the earth?’