The Mind Parasites

by Colin Wilson

  I was not entirely with him so far. I could not see what these speculations had to do with the mind parasites.

  ‘You will in a moment. If we correlate the various flood myths, we arrive at the conclusion that the flood took place in fairly recent human history—say around five thousand BC. Supposing, then, the flood was caused by the moon circling closer to the earth, as Hörbiger suggests? Could this mean that our present moon has been circling the earth for only about seven thousand years?’

  ‘I agree it’s possible.’8

  ‘But as an archaeologist, would you say there is any real evidence to support the idea—or is it just wild guesswork?’

  ‘I think there’s a great deal of evidence—I said as much in a book I wrote twenty years ago. But I still can’t see any connection with the parasites.’

  ‘I’ll tell you. I’ve been brooding on this question of the origin of the parasites. Weissman said he thought they landed on earth about two hundred years ago. But we know they don’t like outer space. So where did they come from?’

  ‘The moon?’

  ‘Possibly. But that’s still supposing that they can exist apart from the human mind.’

  And, suddenly, I saw what he meant. Of course! We now had an important clue about the origin of the parasites—they didn’t like existing apart from the mass of mankind. Why shouldn’t they?

  The answer was so shatteringly simple that it was unbelievable. They couldn’t exist apart from mankind because they were mankind. The clue was there in the first sentence of Weissman’s Historical Reflections: ‘It has been my conviction… that the human race is being attacked by a sort of mind cancer’. A cancer. And a cancer cannot live apart from the body of its host.

  But what causes a physical cancer? This was one of the problems whose answer is self-evident to anyone who has explored his own mind. It springs from the same root as the ‘split personality’. Man is a continent, but his conscious mind is no larger than a back-garden. This means that man consists almost entirely of unrealized potentialities. The so-called ‘great men’ are the men who have had the courage to realize some of these potentialities. The ‘average man’ is too timid and cowardly to make the attempt. He prefers the security of the back-garden.

  Now a ‘split personality’ occurs when some of these unrealized potentialities take their revenge. So, for example, a timid man, who possesses a strong sexual urge which he tries to suppress, wakes up one day to find that he has committed a sexual assault. He tries to excuse himself by saying that it was as if ‘another being’ took over his body and committed the assault. But that ‘other being’ was really himself—a part of himself that he was too cowardly to recognize.

  Cancer is also caused by the ‘unrealized potentialities’ taking their revenge. The earliest cancer research workers noticed that it is a disease of frustration or of old age. Men who have the courage to fulfil themselves do not die of cancer. But men who possess potentialities, but lack the courage to express them, form a high proportion of cancer patients. Their life-mistrust poisons their souls.

  Both cancer and split personality become impossible as soon as a man learns to descend into his inner-being, for it becomes impossible for these pockets of frustration to build up.

  In a sense, Karel Weissman was right: the ‘parasites’ did appear about two centuries ago. The men of previous centuries were so preoccupied with holding body and soul together that they had no time to be frustrated. They were more ‘unified’ than modern man; they lived on a more instinctive level. Then man reached a watershed in his evolution, a point where he had to become a more conscious, more intellectual and self-critical being. The gap between his conscious level and his instinctive level grew wider. And suddenly, cancer and schizophrenia ceased to be rare diseases and became commonplace. But what was the significance of the moon in all this?

  Again, cancer provides the clue. Cancer is due to a general drop in the level of vitality, due to frustration or old age. But this in itself is not sufficient to start the cancer. There has to be some specific irritant, a bruise, for example. If we consider life as a kind of electrical force that inhabits a human body, as magnetism inhabits a magnet, then we could say that the bruised flesh is no longer capable of carrying the same magnetic current as the rest. It slips to a lower level and proceeds to develop on its own, a kind of ‘split personality’.

  If oysters were higher organisms, the irritant of the pearl would be enough to cause cancer.

  Reich’s theory of the mind parasites was roughly this:

  About ten thousand years ago, the moon was pulled slowly towards the earth by earth’s gravitation. It was probably earth’s third or fourth moon. It took about two thousand years before it finally crashed on the earth, splitting in pieces. The sea, which had been held near the equator by the moon’s gravity, was now able to rush back over the earth in a huge tidal wave, destroying all that existed of civilization. (But not the Kadath civilization; that had been destroyed by a much earlier moon.)

  For a thousand years or so, earth had no moon, and very little life. Then it captured another space-wanderer, another giant meteorite—our present moon. But it had captured an exceedingly dangerous satellite. For this new moon was ‘radioactive’ with strange forces, forces that could exercise a disturbing effect on the human mind.

  Any theories about the origin of these forces is guesswork. Reich’s theory—which I think as likely as any—was as follows: the moon had once been part of some larger body, perhaps a sun, and had been inhabited by creatures who were ‘bodiless’ in the physical sense. This is less absurd than it sounds. Scientists used to declare that certain planets could never contain life because life could not survive under their conditions; they discovered that life can gain a foothold under the most unpromising conditions. Life that could gain a foothold on the sun would certainly not be ‘physical’ in the sense that we understand it.

  A great burning fragment had been torn from this sun by a passing comet, and the hot gases had condensed into the moon as we know it today, gradually destroying its inhabitants. But since they were not ‘bodies’ in the earthly sense, they could not die in the ordinary way. They tried to adapt to the cooling matter of their world, becoming a part of the molecular structure of the solid as they had once been apart of the structure of the hot gas.

  So the moon remains ‘radio-active’ with a strange, alien life.

  If the moon had not been captured by our earth, this alien life would have died long ago, for life can only exist where the second law of thermodynamics operates—that is to say, where there is energy flowing from a higher to a lower level. But the moon was kept ‘alive’ by the closeness of the earth, a planet seething with life and energy. Its presence was like the continual smell of a hot dinner to a starving man. And as the human race slowly gained a new foothold on the earth, men were dimly and instinctively aware of the living presence of the moon.

  And here, I believe, we have the answer to the question about the origin of the parasites—of the ‘irritant’ that caused the cancer. Lower forms of life—fishes and mammals—are unaffected by the ‘watchers’; they live on an instinctive level, and the alien presence seems quite natural to them. But man slowly proceeds to become the master of the earth, and he does this by developing his intellect, his conscious mind. So he becomes ‘split’, separated from his instinctive drives. Frustrations build up, and turn into fiery little pockets of suppressed energy. And at this point, the ‘irritant’ of the moon, the constant psychic pressure of half-frozen life, begins to produce its predictable effects. The mind-cancers begin to develop.

  It may seem that all this theorizing was built upon rather slender evidence. This is not true. It was all built upon logic—starting from that puzzling question: Why were the parasites afraid of outer space?

  An immediate answer suggested itself. As man loses touch with his ‘inner being’, his instinctive depths, he finds himself trapped in the world of consciousness, that is to say, in the world of
other people. Any poet knows this truth; when other people sicken him, he turns to hidden resources of power inside himself, and he knows then that other people don’t matter a damn. He knows that the ‘secret life’ inside him is the reality; other people are mere shadows in comparison. But the ‘shadows’ themselves cling to one another. ‘Man is a political animal,’ said Aristotle, telling one of the greatest lies in human history. For every man has more in common with the hills, or with the stars, than with other men.

  The poet is a more or less unified being; he has not lost touch with his inner powers. But it is the other men, the ‘shadows’, who are subject to mind-cancer. For them, human society is the reality. They are entirely concerned with its personal little values, with its pettiness and malice and self-seeking. And since the parasites are a projection of these creatures, is it surprising that the parasites themselves cling to human society? They had no place in our spaceship, for we were all men who knew the secret: that man is never ‘alone’, for he is directly connected to the universal powerhouse.

  In other words, even if we had not gone out in space, our minds would have been no harbour for the parasites. In us, the cancer was slowly dying of starvation. Our journey into space had only hastened the process. As we separated from the rest of humankind, our first sensation was a terrible fear and loneliness, like a child being separated from its mother for the first time. In that moment, one faces the great question. Is man really a social being who has no existence apart from other men? If that is true, then all our human values are lies: goodness, truth, love, religion and the rest—for these values are, by definition, absolute, more important than other human beings.

  That fear caused a new turning-inward, to the ‘source of power, meaning and purpose’. Those false telephone wires that connect us to other human beings are cut. This does not mean that other human beings cease to be important. They become far more important, for you realize that, in a certain sense, they are immortal. But you become aware that all our so-called ‘human’ values are false, based on man’s devaluation of himself.

  That was why the parasites were forced to leave us. The deeper we journeyed into space, the more certainly we faced that truth: that other men do not supply our values. Other men do not matter in the sense we have always believed. Man is not alone. You could be the last man alive in the universe, and you would not be alone.

  Reich and I talked for the rest of the night. And when dawn came—or the hour that would be dawn on earth—something had happened to both of us. Within the past few hours we had changed. The chrysalis had become the butterfly.

  We no longer belonged to the earth. This empty space around us was our home just as much as that absurd little green globe that was two million miles behind us.

  It was a little frightening. It felt like being a beggar who suddenly inherits a fortune. He looks at the rows of servants waiting for his orders; he contemplates all the things he could do with so much money; he looks at the vast estates that now belong to him… and his mind reels; he experiences a certain vertigo, a terror of freedom.

  There was so much to be explored, so many things we didn’t know…

  But first, there was another task: to bring home this knowledge to the others.

  And although the earth was no longer our home, there could be no doubt of what we had to do next. We had become policemen of the universe.

  I went across to the robot control panel. A week earlier, I’d had to get detailed instructions from Colonel Massey. Now the thing seemed as simple as a child’s toy. I quickly made the necessary adjustments and pressed the reprogramming switch. The ship immediately retracted its photon sails, and fired a turning rocket. We began to turn in a slow, gentle arc. The others woke up and came to see what was happening.

  I said: ‘We’re returning to earth. Give me your help in making this ship go faster.’

  We locked our minds in parallel, and began to induce a delicate alternating current of will. And then, very slowly, we allowed it to discharge over the back of the ship. It was as if a giant hand had squeezed the ship like a great fish. We felt the spurt of acceleration, and did it again. Again the ship responded. We tried stronger charges; the ship vibrated but responded. This was a delicate and dangerous business. We could apply a force equal to a dozen hydrogen bombs, but it had to be applied in such a manner that it would be transformed into linear velocity. Carelessly applied, it could wreck the ship and disintegrate it into atomic dust. Reich and I could now survive this, but the others couldn’t.

  There was something amusing in being two million miles out in space in this absurd, crude tin rocket, that seemed to have been designed by imbeciles. Reich and I agreed that one of our first tasks on reaching the earth would be to show men how to construct a real spaceship.

  The easiest and quickest way to explain to the others was to communicate telepathically. For this purpose, we all held hands in a circle, as in a seance. It took only about five seconds to communicate to them what had taken us most of the night to understand. For, in a sense, it was something they already knew. We had explored the road in the dark; they were walking it by daylight.

  This was in itself an interesting experience. I had not looked at Reich during the night—we had been in different rooms. Neither had I bothered to look at my own face in the mirror. But as soon as we had transmitted our knowledge to the others, we saw a remarkable change come over them. It was, of course, to be expected, and yet to see it on so many faces at once was a strange sight. The usual adjectives fail to express it. I could say that they became ‘nobler’ or greater, but that is a long way from the truth. It would be more accurate to say that they became child-like. But the sense of this must be understood. If you look into the face of a very young baby—say six months old—and then into that of an old man, you suddenly understand that subtle quality known as life, joy, magic. No matter how wise and good the old man is, he lacks it. But if the child is happy and intelligent, it radiates this quality, and it is almost painful to see, because he obviously belongs to a brighter universe. He is still half-angel. Adults—even the greatest—devalue life: a baby trusts and affirms with its whole being.

  It was this quality of pure life that suddenly descended into the breakfast room of the space rocket, and it is no exaggeration to say that it felt like the dawn of creation. Seeing it in one another deepened the power and certainty in each one of us.

  And it was this that brought a new level of knowledge. When I had said to them: ‘Man is not alone’, I had understood what I meant, but all its implications were not clear to me; I was speaking about the source of power, meaning and purpose. Now I realized that, in a far more obvious and simple sense, we were not alone. We had joined the police of the universe, and there were others. Our minds now made instant contact with these others. It was as if we had sent out a signal which had instantly been picked up by a hundred receivers, who immediately signalled their presence back to us. The nearest of these receivers was situated only about four thousand million miles away, a cruising ship from a planet in the Proxima Centauri system.

  I shall say no more about this, since it plays no further part in my story.

  We were travelling at a speed of about a hundred thousand miles an hour. With two million miles to cover, this meant we were about twenty hours from earth. The moon, of course, revolves about a quarter of a million miles from earth, and it was still between us and the earth—which meant that we would be passing it in about seventeen and a half hours. Our business, we knew, lay with the moon.

  There was no thought, at this stage, of actually moving the moon. Its weight is approximately 5 x 1015 tons—that is to say, five thousand billion tons. As yet, we had no idea of how much mass our combined PK powers could move, but there seemed little enough chance that they were great enough for this task. Besides, what if we did succeed in pushing off the moon into outer space? The constant irritant upon the human psyche would vanish; but it had now done its work. The mind parasites would survive
in any case.

  In spite of this, it was obvious that the moon was the key. It was something that demanded immediate investigation.

  We were within fifty thousand miles of the moon before we again became aware of its pull. Reich and I looked at one another. The significance of this fact was obvious. In some obscure way, the moon was ‘aware’ of us. On our way out from the earth, it had been aware of us from the moment we left the earth, and its ‘attention’ had continued to focus on us long after we had passed beyond it. Now we were approaching from behind, and it did not ‘notice’ us until we were within a mere fifty thousand miles.

  The clouding of the faculties that we had experienced on the way out was now less marked. We knew what it was: trapped life forces that somehow observed us hopefully. The ‘clouding’ was actually an emotional disturbance. But once you became aware of its nature, it was not difficult to combat.

  This time, we turned the spaceship directly into the moon. We began to brake immediately. Half an hour later, we landed gently, throwing up a great cloud of silvery moon dust.

  I had been to the moon before, and it had merely seemed a dead rock. Now it was no longer dead; it was a tortured living landscape, and the sense of tragedy was enormous, like looking on the burnt-out shell of a building where you know a thousand people had died.

  We wasted no time in trying the experiment that had brought us here. Without leaving the spaceship (for we had no space suits, not having expected to land anywhere), we directed a beam of will power at an immense mass of porous rock that looked like a great ant hill. Twelve of us were linked in parallel, and the power we exerted could have blasted a crater ten miles wide. The whole of the ‘ant-hill’—a mass about a mile high—disintegrated like the Abhoth block, turning into a fine dust that formed a kind of fog around the spaceship. There was also considerable heat that made us all uncomfortable for ten minutes. And yet as the rock disintegrated, we all experienced for a moment a tingling of pure joy, like a very faint electric current. It was impossible to doubt. We had released the trapped life forces. But since they now had no ‘body’, they vanished, dissipated in space.