by Colin Wilson
Years later, I was excited by an example recounted to me by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. One of his patients was a girl who had sunk into such a state of lassitude that she had even ceased to menstruate. Instead of assuming that there was some deep-seated sexual problem, Maslow asked her about her everyday life, and learned that she had been a brilliant student at college, who wanted to become a sociologist. Then America had been hit by the depression, and she became the sole support of her family, working as the personnel manageress in a chewing-gum factory. Sheer boredom was draining away her vitality.
Maslow said: ‘Why don’t you take your degree in sociology at night school?’ As soon as the girl did as he suggested, the symptoms quickly vanished. Merely doing something with a sense of purpose was enough to recharge her batteries.
James put the essence of what he learned from his near-breakdown into one of his most important essays ‘The Energies of Men’. This is one of its key passages:
‘Every one is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Every one knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions, with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe.
‘Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum. In elementary faculty, in co-ordination, in power of inhibition and control, in every conceivable way, his life is contracted like the field of vision of an hysteric subject—but with less excuse, for the poor hysteric is diseased, while in the rest of us it is only an inveterate habit—the habit of I inferiority to our full self—that is bad.’
Everyone knows what he is talking about: how a cold, grey day when you have nothing to do can lower the spirits until everything seems oddly meaningless. It is no good telling someone in the state to pull themselves together, because they can see no reason to pull themselves together. In order to act, we need an immediate sense of purpose, of gain, like scratching yourself when you itch. If, through lack of motivation, a gap has opened up between my will and my sense of what is to be achieved by willing—imagine that when you scratch yourself, it takes a full minute for the itch to feel scratched—then it is very hard for me not to sink into a state of dislocation of the sense of purpose.
It is like a watch spring becoming so slack that the watch begins to run slow. But imagine you are the watch, and because your spring is slack, you feel no desire to wind yourself up. The solution is either to go and find yourself something that will give you an immediate return in pleasure (like pouring yourself a drink—which is why it is so easy for poorly-motivated people to become alcoholics or drug addicts or even rapists), or disciplining yourself into making the effort that will recharge your batteries.
Maslow called these little floods of pleasure ‘peak experiences’.
It was my recognition of my own tendency to ‘inferiority to the full self’ that caused me to write The Mind Parasites. I had always been excited by Yeats’s lines from his last poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’:
You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard
‘Send war in our time, O Lord!’
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace…
This image—the ‘partial mind’—suggests that in everyday consciousness, the mind is somehow incomplete, like the moon before it reaches the full. Yet just as you can stare at the moon and fail to discern the slightest outline of the missing portion, so the limitations of consciousness prevent us from grasping the essential incompleteness of everyday awareness. It always comes as a ‘shock of recognition’, like Proust’s ‘awakening’ as he tasted the madeleine dipped in tea, a delighted recognition of ‘absurd good news’.
So this is the underlyng conviction I was trying to express in The Mind Parasites: that human beings possess enormous reserves of power, of which they are unaware.
The Mind Parasites was written in the early sixties. But it would not be until 1969 that I began to recognise its full implications.This came about when my New York agent, Scott Meredith, asked me if I would undertake a commission from Random House to write a book on ‘the occult’. This was a subject that had become fashionable since the publication of a book called The Morning of the Magicians in 1960, which had become a worldwide best-seller. It was an absurd farrago of speculation about alchemy, ‘psychic powers’, conspiracies, whether Hitler was a black magician, and other similar absurdities. But I needed the money, and had always been interested in such matters as ghosts, precognition and out-of-the-body experiences. So I accepted the commission and prepared to write the book with my tongue in my cheek.
To my astonishment, a little careful research soon made me aware that I was not dealing with superstitions and wishful thinking, but with well-authenticated facts. There were so many sober witnesses to precognition, ‘second sight’, out-of-the-body experiences, and a whole range of psychic powers, that I could maintain a basic attitude of scepticism and still recognise that I was dealing with genuine mysteries, not with superstitions and self-deceptions. It slowly dawned upon me that the human mind is like an iceberg, whose larger part is under water. Then why did Freud, who arrived at the same insight, dismiss ‘occultism’ as a ‘black tide of mud’? The answer, as far as I could see, was that he was somehow afraid of venturing beyond the limitations of 19th century rationalism, experiencing a twinge of that same panic that had gripped me when I realized that science has no answer to the question of infinity.
My increasing interest in the paranormal led many former friends and admirers to accuse me of abandoning my scientific principals in favour of irrationalism. To me the accusation was absurd. I knew that I had simply continued to apply my old standards of rationality to an extraordinary range of evidence that I found impossible to dismiss.
But what interested me most was to realise that ‘the occult’ was not a bundle of superstitions that dated from the mid-19th century—when strange manifestations in the house of the Fox family in New York led to the formation of ‘Spiritualism—but a belief system that could be traced back to the early history of man. For example, it became clear that the cave paintings of our Cro-Magnon ancestors were not primitive attempts at art, but had a ‘magical’ purpose—to lure the game into the ambush of the hunter—and that it worked. A friend drew my attention to Sir Arthur Grimble’s book Pattern of Islands , with its account of witnessing ‘the calling of the porpoises’ by a shaman who went into a dream and summoned them ashore, and how dozens of the gigantic creatures proceeded to swim ashore and beach themselves. I soon discovered other similar accounts from anthropologists who witnessed the success of these hunting rituals. These were not superstitions, but an example of primitive man making use of an early form of science—a science we have now forgotten.
And so it came about that the writing of The Mind Parasites, then of The Occult, led me to a different understanding of human history and human evolution than anything I had dreamed of in the days when I regarded science as the paradigm of all knowledge. And this, I would argue, makes me not less scientific but more scientific than I was before. For surely no subject can be regarded as ‘scie
nce’ that attempts to ignore half the reality of our universe?
—COLIN WILSON
August 2005
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Colin Wilson has written over 100 books. At 24, he was hailed as a major existentialist thinker when his first success, The Outsider (1956) was published. But in his many books, Mr. Wilson has consistently revealed his contention that insight is achieved during moments of well-being, attained through effort and focus and that pessimism is what robs people of their vital energies. He lives on the Cornish coast in England.
1 I reckon that ‘outsiders’ are approximately .05% of the total population.
2 Mostly omitted from this popular edition.
3 Colonel H. F. Spencer, Head of the World Historical Archive, in which all Dr. Austin’s papers are preserved.
4 These remarks on Lovecraft are taken from ‘Lovecraft and the Kadath Inscriptions’, a lecture delivered by Dr. Austin before the New York Historical Society on 18th June, 1999.
5 See Dalgleish Fuller, A Study in Fanaticism, by Daniel Atherston. New York 2100.
6 A detailed examination will be found in the three volumes of Max Vie-big’s Philosophy of Karel Weissman. Northwestern University, 2015.
7 The above passage comes from a manuscript written in 2005. (M.F: WHA-3271). We have included it for the sake of continuity. This whole problem is covered in minute detail in Austin’s monumental Life, Being and Language (2025 - 2041), particularly Vol. 8, chaps 7 - 9.
8 ‘A curious line of maritime deposits can be traced from Lake Umayo, in the Peruvian Andes, (13,000 feet above sea level) extending for three hundred and seventy-five miles southward to Lake Coipusa. The line is curved, ending some eight hundred feet below its beginning, which is close to the equator. The disciples of Hörbiger and Bellamy argue–con-vincingly, in my opinion–that these strange deposits indicate that the sea once formed a kind of bulge around the equator. This could only have been due to the moon being far closer to the earth than at present, and circling at a far greater speed, so that the “tide” never had time to retreat. The ruins of Tiahuanaco, near Lake Titicaca, add another curious fragment to this puzzle. It could be said to be “above the Pacific Ocean”—twelve thousand feet above it; yet there are many indications that it was a port more than ten thousand years ago. The ruins are of such size that one can only surmise that they were built by giants—that is to say, by men who could grow to two or three times the present average height by reason of the lesser gravitational pull of the earth (which the moon would neutralize)…Stranger still is the fact that among these ruined cities of the Andes the bones of toxodons have been unearthed–and the toxodon is an animal that vanished from the earth a million years ago. Heads of toxodons are carved on some of the ruins of Tiahuanaco’. G. Austin, Frontiers of Archaeology, P. 87. London 1983.