The Mind Parasites

by Colin Wilson

  Over the course of the year 1999, we increased the moon’s speed of revolution from 28 days to 14. This was not a difficult task; by this time, I already knew enough about the secrets of the mind and its relation to the material universe to have been capable of doing it alone. It was now a million miles away from the earth, which meant that its speed of orbit had been multiplied by ten. We calculated that this speed would have to be doubled (to forty thousand miles an hour) before the moon would ‘escape’. It would then be drawn automatically towards the sun. This finally happened on February 22nd of the year 2,000. The earth lost its moon, to the accompaniment of violent protests from sentimentalists, which we ignored. We had made one slight miscalculation; three months later, when crossing the orbit of Mercury, the moon was caught in the planet’s gravitational field. But since the mass of Mercury is approximately the same as that of the moon, there was no question of the moon becoming its satellite. Mercury was pulled seven million miles closer to the sun; the moon finally fell into orbit around the sun at an average distance of nineteen million miles. At this distance, the surface temperature is high enough to keep the rocks in a perpetually molten state. The moon’s ‘life’ has at least been granted a certain degree of freedom.

  There is a point at which I have to stop; not because there is no more to say, but because what remains to be said is too difficult to express in this context.

  To the average human being of today, it must seem that we ‘initiates’ have achieved the status of gods. In a sense, we have—compared with the human beings of the twentieth century. In another sense, we are as far from that goal as ever. We are no longer limited by ignorance and lack of purpose; but our ignorance is still enormous. The road we have to travel still stretches into the distance. It is impossible for me to explain the nature of the problems that confront us. If human beings were capable of understanding, there would be no need to explain.

  I do not know whether to regard myself as fortunate or unfortunate. I am fortunate in having been the spearhead of this great movement in human evolution. I now understand what remains to be done. I am unfortunate in the sense of having lost contact with the rest of the human race—with a few important exceptions. Man is lazy by nature, and laziness is by no means to be condemned. It means he dislikes inconvenience, and he has created civilization to escape inconvenience; so his laziness has been an important factor in his evolution. But this also means that he prefers to evolve at his own slow and deliberate rate. The battle against the mind parasites has geared me to a faster rate of evolution; it has made me impatient to move on. I cannot be contented to know that the endless realms of mind now lie open for man’s exploration; this does not seem enough. There are too many questions unanswered. It is true that man can no longer be separated from his sense of evolutionary purpose, and it now seems likely that men will live for centuries instead of dying out of boredom and defeat at the age of eighty. But we still do not know what happens when a man dies, or when existence is created from nonexistence. We know there is a benevolent principle of purpose in the universe, but we still do not know whether this principle is the ultimate Creator of the Bible, or whether it depends upon some still deeper source. The mystery of time remains untouched; so does the fundamental question asked by Heidegger: Why is there existence rather than nonexistence? The answer may lie in a completely different dimension, as different from the world of mind as mind is different from the world of space and time…

  (We have chosen to conclude the account at this point, with a section from Austin’s unpublished journals, because it seems to the editor that these passages offer a possible solution to the mystery of the Pallas.

  So many words have been devoted to this ‘Marie Celeste of space’ that the facts have tended to become blurred. The following extract from Captain James Ramsay’s Autobiography sets out the known facts clearly:

  In January of the year 2007, the government of the United States announced that it had placed its space vehicle Pallas, the largest space craft yet built, at the disposal of an expedition that was to be led by Professors Reich and Austin. Their announced purpose was an archaeological expedition to the planet Pluto, in the hope of uncovering traces of vanished civilizations: Two days before the expedition’s departure, an article by Horace Kimmell in World Press News stated that the true purpose of the expedition was to discover whether Pluto could be the base of the immense spaceships that had been reported in the upper atmosphere… This was categorically denied by Professor Austin.

  The Pallas, with a crew of 2,000, all carefully chosen by the leaders of the expedition (and including, incidentally, all but seven members of the earlier expedition of 1997), set out from Washington on February 2nd, 2007, and was last contacted shortly before midnight on that day, when Professor Austin’s voice announced that the ship had covered about a million miles. After this, all attempts to establish contact with the Pallas failed…

  Exactly ten years later, on February 10, 2017, an expedition headed by myself set out with the specific purpose of discovering traces of the Pallas. There were three space craft, the Centaur, the Clio and the Leicester. Pluto was reached on January 12th, 2018. A month later, after four circuits of the planet, we prepared to return to earth. It was then that the Clio picked up the distinctive radio signals of the Pallas… It was finally located on March 2, 2018, floating about two million miles from Pluto. The lights of this enormous ship were all burning, and its freedom from external damage gave us reason to hope that some of its crew might have survived. However, when there was no response to signals. I agreed that this was unlikely, and ordered Lieutenant Firmin to cut through the ship’s emergency lock. A party led by myself then entered the Pallas, and found it completely deserted. There was no sign of violence, and the condition of the personal belongings of the crew seemed to indicate that they had not expected to evacuate the ship. The log of the Pallas had been filled in up to June 9, 2007, and showed that the ship had spent some time on Pluto, and intended to make its way to Neptune when Pluto’s perihelion corresponded to Neptune’s aphelion. The ship’s automatic recording instruments had continued to function normally since that date, but indicated that the Pallas had been floating freely in space. There was no indication that the ship had been approached by any foreign body larger than a fifty pound meteor, which had been automatically repelled. They also indicated that the doors of the Pallas had not been opened since it left Pluto. A theory put forward by the Clio’s chief physician, to the effect that the crew of the Pallas had been spontaneously atomized by some exploding source of cosmic rays that would affect only organic matter, was disproved by the evidence of a Dunbar Assimilator.

  The engines of the Pallas had been switched off normally at 9:30 p.m. on June 9th, and the ship had been brought to a halt. The engines still proved to be in perfect working condition when tested by us.

  The Pallas was brought back to earth, piloted by Lieutenant Firmin, and arrived on December 10, 2018. Subsequent investigations did nothing to clear up the mystery, and later expeditions to Pluto and Neptune failed to produce new evidence.

  The view of the present editor, as I have made clear elsewhere, is that the disappearance of the Pallas was planned, and that when the space craft set out from earth in February 2007 every man aboard knew that he would never return. No other theory fits the facts. There is no evidence whatever that the Pallas was the victim of a surprise attack, and that its instruments were somehow reset to destroy the evidence. Neither is there any evidence to indicate that the crew of the Pallas intended to build a new civilization on another planet. There were only three women on board. The number would surely have been higher if any such plan had been contemplated?

  In my own view, the present edition of The Mind Parasites offers definite clues about what became of the Pallas. The passage on page 271 and 272 dealing with the ‘universal police’, drawn from Austin’s unpublished papers, seems to us the most important of these. He says: ‘The nearest of these receivers was situated o
nly about four thousand million miles away, a cruising ship from a planet in the Proxima Centauri system’. In November 1997, at the time this refers to, Pluto was almost at its aphelion distance from the sun (4,567 million miles). It is possible therefore that the ‘receiver’ Austin speaks of was somewhere near Pluto—although of course, it could have been in any other direction. Could the ‘universal police’ from Proxima Centauri have had some sort of a base on Pluto? Again, where did Kimmel gain access to the information that the real purpose of the expedition was to see whether Pluto could be the base of the saucer-like spaceships that had been seen by so many people in the early years of this century? Kimmel died in a rocket plane accident two months after the Pallas set out for Pluto, and never revealed the source of the rumour. But he was known as an honest and level-headed journalist who stuck close to the facts. It seems unlikely that he simply invented the story.

  Finally, we have Austin’s own words, written only a month before that final expedition, stating that he had ‘lost contact with the rest of the human race’, and that the battle against the parasites had ‘geared him to a faster rate of evolution’. In the light of the passage about the ‘universal police’, could anything be more natural than that Austin should plan to leave earth and join them?

  But above all, what could be stranger than the brevity of Austin’s reference to the ‘space police’? This is surely a matter on which one might have expected him to spend several pages? Some clue as to his reason for this silence is given in a manuscript of Dagobert Ferris, another member of that original expedition, and author of Towards a Psychology of the Golden Age. Ferris also vanished on the Pallas, but he left behind an account of a conversation that took place between himself and Professor Reich after they had become aware of the existence of these ‘space police’. In part, it runs as follows:

  ‘We speculated about the appearance of these Beings. Were they the same as ourselves, with arms and legs? Or would they resemble some strange animal or fish—perhaps an octopus? Would they simply take over the government of the earth and restore peace, or would they take stem repressive measures against people like Hazard and Gwambe?’

  [This passage in itself is strange enough. Why should he assume that the ‘police’ would be taking over the earth? Had Austin actually spoken to them about this possibility? And had it been finally decided that Austin and his associates could handle the Gwambe crisis?]

  ‘I felt happy at this prospect of a new “government” for the earth. Ever since the “death of God” in the eighteenth century, man has had a feeling of being alone in an empty universe, the feeling that it is no use looking to the heavens for guidance. He is like a child who has wakened up one morning to be told that his father is dead and that he must now take over the position as head of the family. This feeling of fatherlessness is surely one of the greatest psychological shocks that anyone can suffer? We can all remember that feeling we had at school, where hard work brought immediate rewards, prizes at the end of term, praise from the headmaster, favours from the prefects. Then you leave school and there is no one “above” you any more. You are out on your own. (I must admit that I was tempted to join the army when I left school, merely to have that feeling of “belonging” to a group again.) And you get a strange feeling of emptiness, of the meaninglessness of anything you do. Surely this is what lies behind the “moral bankruptcy” of the twentieth century?

  ‘And now all this was over. There were greater powers than man, powers that we could look up to. Life would be really meaningful again, the emptiness would be filled… The human race could go back to school. And why not, since it was largely composed of schoolboys?

  ‘Reich disagreed with me. He asked: “Don’t you think that’s our job?” I said: “No, I’d rather learn than teach”. At this point, Austin interrupted with the remark: “I agree with Reich. Nothing could be more dangerous for the human race than to believe thai its affairs had fallen into the hands of supermen”.’

  For my own part, I believe that this is the reason why Austin refused help from the ‘space police’. I believe it is also the reason why he decided that a time had come when he himself should vanish—vanish in such a way that the human race could never be certain of his death.

  And since it seems certain that no further evidence will ever be forthcoming, we have no alternative than to keep an open mind on the subject.

  AFTERWORD FOR THE MIND PARASITES

  I HAVE DESCRIBED IN THE INTRODUCTION how I came to write this novel as a result of a challenge from Love-craft’s friend and publisher August Derleth. I expected it to be my only venture into science fiction; in fact, I soon wrote a kind of sequel called The Philosopher’s Stone, an exploration of Shaw’s notion that men will one day have to learn to live to be three hundred; then I wrote a third, The Space Vampires, probably my best purely as a piece of science fiction. Years later, I even wrote a vast sequel to this called Metamorphosis of the Vampire, whose sheer size frightened off publishers so it still remains in typescript.

  One of the central scenes in The Mind Parasites, Austin’s nightlong battle with the mind parasites, was already prefigured in a passage in my first book The Outsider (1956) in which I described the terrifying experience that came to the psychologist William James, as well as to his father, Henry James Sr., and which the latter called (borrowing the word from Swedenborg) ‘the vastation’.

  Here, first, is the father:

  ‘One day towards the close of May, having eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at the table after the family had dispersed, idly gazing into the embers of the grate, thinking of nothing and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion, when suddenly—in a lightning flash, as it were—‘fear came upon me, and trembling made all my bones to shake’. To all appearances it was a perfectly insane and abject terror without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape, squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck, that is, reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy. I felt the greatest desire to shout for help to my wife…but by an immense effort I controlled these frenzied impulses and determined not to budge…until I had recovered my self-possession. This purpose I held to for a good hour…beat upon meanwhile by an ever-growing tempest of doubt, anxiety and despair. ’

  James Senior’s ‘vastation’ eventually drew him to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and to a kind of religious conversion that led him to write a book Society, the Redeemed Form of Man.

  His son’s experience happened in 1870, when he was 28, during a period when he was beginning to doubt whether he would ever make anything of his life, and whether he had not already wasted too much of it:

  ‘Whilst in a state of philosophic pessimism, and general depression of spirits about my prospects, I went one evening into a dressing-room in the twilight…when suddenly there came upon me, without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously, there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient I had seen in the asylum, a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day…moving nothing but his black eyes, and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing I possess can defend me from that fate if the hour should strike for me as it struck for him. There was such a horror of him, and such a perception of my own merely momentary discrepancy from him, that it was as if something hitherto solid in my breast gave way, and I became a mass of quivering fear. After this, the universe was changed for me altogether. I awoke morning after morning with a horrible dread at the pit of my stomach, and with a sense of the insecurity of life that I never knew before.’

  The most interesting phrase here is that ‘if the hour should st
rike for me…nothing could defend me from that fate’. That is to say, James felt completely passive and helpless. It was as if he possessed no free will. This sounds absurd—you only have to wiggle your fingers to demonstrate that you have free will. But we have to understand that there was at that time a powerful movement in philosophy that insisted that man is an automaton, and that everything we do is a response to a stimulus, like a coin in a vending machine. And in moods of weariness and depression, when every effort is painful, that seems all too plausible.

  At this point, James came across a passage in one of his favourite philosophers, Charles Renouvier, who pointed out that the reality of free will is shown by the fact that we can sustain a thought when we could just as easily think of something else. That struck James as irrefutable, and he wrote in his diary: ‘My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will’. And from that moment his depression began to lift.

  All this was at the back of my mind as I wrote The Mind Parasites, for I had spent one of the gloomiest periods of my early teens wresting with this same problem. As a committed believer in science, I had been struck at the age of 13 by the thought that even science has no answer to the problem of where space ends. Renouvier solved it to his own satisfaction by deciding that the word infinity is meaningless, like the square root of minus one. But my own increasing conviction that science has no solid foundations filled me with a feeling of insecurity which occasionally produced a sensation like falling into emptiness.

  Fortunately, this negativity was frequently counterbalanced by the sudden upsurge of the sensation that G. K. Chesterton called ‘absurd good news’, the mystical conviction that everything is good. This often came when I set out on long cycle rides in the country, or reading my favourite poets, and had on me the same effect as James’s conviction that free will really exists. Its effect was to cause my will to bestir itself—which, of course, begins to recharge the vital batteries that have been drained by inaction, like a car left standing for too long in the garage. The moment the engine roars into life, the batteries begin to recharge.