by Colin Wilson
‘“I said yesterday” . . .
‘No sooner had I pronounced the word “I” than a number of ideas began to turn in my head about the meaning of the word, in a philosophical, in a psychological and in every other sense. This was all so important, so new and profound, that when I pronounced the word “said”, I could not understand in the least what I meant by it. Tearing myself away with difficulty from the first cycle of thoughts about “I”, I passed to the idea “said”, and immediately found in it an infinite content. The idea of speech, the possibility of expressing thoughts in words, the past tense of the verb, each of these ideas produced an explosion of thoughts, conjectures, comparisons and associations. Thus, when I pronounced the word “yesterday” I was already quite unable to understand why I had said it. But it in its turn immediately dragged me into the depths of the problems of time, of past, present and future, and before me such possibilities of approach to these problems began to open up that my breath was taken away.
‘It was precisely these attempts at conversation, made in these strange states of consciousness, which gave me the sensation of change in time which is described by almost everyone who has made experiments like mine. This is a feeling of the extraordinary lengthening of time, in which seconds seem to be years or decades.
‘Nevertheless, the usual feeling of time did not disappear; only together with it or within it there appeared as it were another feeling of time, and two moments of ordinary time, like two words of my sentence, could be separated by long periods of another time.
‘I remember how much I was struck by this sensation the first time I had it. My companion was saying something. Between each sound of his voice, between each movement of his lips, long periods of time passed. When he had finished a short sentence, the meaning of which did not reach me at all, I felt I had lived through so much during that time that we should never be able to understand one another again, that I had gone too far from him. It seemed to me that we were still able to speak and to a certain extent understand one another at the beginning of this sentence, but by the end it had become quite impossible, because there were no means of conveying to him all that I had lived through in between.’
It is worth mentioning, at this point, the experiences of another ‘experimental mystic’, R.H. Ward, the author of a remarkable work called A Drug-Taker’s Notes. The book is mainly devoted to his accounts of ‘controlled’ experiments with LSD; but, in an earlier chapter, he also describes an earlier experience under dental gas—nitrous oxide:
‘On this occasion it seemed to me that I passed, after the first few inhalations of the gas, directly into a state of consciousness already far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary waking consciousness, and that I then passed progressively upwards (for there was an actual sensation of upward movement) into finer and finer degrees of this heightened awareness. But although one must write of it in terms of time, time had no place in the experience. In one sense it lasted far longer than the short period between inhaling the gas and “coming round”, lasted indeed for an eternity, and in another sense it took no time at all. In terms of time, however, the first phase of the experience was comparatively brief (though perhaps it would be more exact to say that it was comparatively unimportant): a confusion of sensations in which, while I was already hardly aware of my body, I was still able to think in the ordinary way, and with some surprise that I was not being made unconscious by the gas I was inhaling, but very much the reverse. For already I knew, I understood, I actually was, far more than I normally knew, understood and was. I put it in this way because I had no impression of suddenly receiving new knowledge, understanding and being. Rather I felt that I was rediscovering these things, which had once been mine, but which I had lost many years before. While it was altogether strange, this new condition was also familiar; it was even in some sense my rightful condition. Meanwhile, what was becoming unreal, slow and clumsy was the ordinary world which I was leaving behind, but of whose shadowy existence I was still vaguely aware; indeed it presented itself to me as being like the receding shadow which fades across a landscape when the sun comes out.’
Like Ouspensky, Ward records the sheer happiness of the experience, its emotional richness:
‘As for the emotional tone of this phase of the experience, I can only describe it as being compounded of wonder, joy, and a wholly peaceful inevitableness for which there is no name. This sensation, which yet had nothing to do with my already anaesthetized senses, had an emotional depth which does not belong to waking sensation, and to which our waking word-values do not belong, so that it is all but indescribable. Meanwhile, the extraordinary feeling of the rightness of things increased, became more poignant, and was accompanied as it did so by a peculiar sensation of upward and bodiless flight. This sense of upward movement continued until it seemed to me that I was rapidly passing through what I afterwards told myself was a “region of ideas”. The emphasis had shifted, that is to say, from the emotional to the intellectual.’
It is clear that this ‘region of ideas’ corresponds to Ouspensky’s world of mathematical relations. Ward compares it to Plato’s world of forms or ideas—recalling Ouspensky’s comment that ‘a fork is an atom of a Great Fork’.
Both Ouspensky and Ward describe the disappointment of returning to ordinary consciousness. This is Ward:
‘Thereafter the upward flight became a downward flight; whereas one had risen into the pure light of the sun, now one fell again towards the shadows of earth. I was once more aware of being in the “region of ideas”, and this time, as consciousness diminished towards the consciousness of everyday life (or, paradoxically, as my anaesthetized body “regained consciousness”), the “region of ideas” took form; on its nether fringes the symbols we need in the waking state if we are to comprehend “intuition” were supplied. In a flash, as it seemed to me, I saw the meaning; the meaning, that is, of the universe, of life on earth, and of man. As the darkness of what we flatter ourselves is consciousness closed in upon me, and even as I began dimly to be aware that I was “coming to”, the sum of things appeared before my inward eyes as a living geometrical figure, an infinitely complicated and infinitely simple arrangement of continually moving, continually changing golden lines on a background of darkness. (“Geometry,” it has often been recorded, is a common form for such visions to take.)’ [We note here again the need to fall back on a mathematical analogy.]
Ouspensky expresses an even stronger sense of rejection of ‘normal consciousness’:
‘The strangest thing in all these experiences was the coming back, the return to the ordinary state, to the state which we call life. This was something very similar to dying or to what I thought dying must be.
‘Usually this coming back occurred when I woke up in the morning after an interesting experiment the night before. The experiments almost always ended in sleep. During this sleep I evidently passed into the usual state and awoke in the ordinary world, in the world in which we awake every morning. But this world contained something extraordinarily oppressive, it was incredibly empty, colourless and lifeless. It was as though everything in it was wooden, as if it was an enormous wooden machine with creaking wooden wheels, wooden thoughts, wooden moods, wooden sensations; everything was terribly slow, scarcely moved, or moved with a melancholy wooden creaking. Everything was dead, soulless, feelingless.
‘They were terrible, these moments of awakening in an unreal world after a real one, in a dead world after a living, in a limited world, cut into small pieces, after an infinite and entire world.’
Ouspensky’s own vision of an ‘entire world’ had been oddly reminiscent of Ward’s living geometrical figure:
‘Once when I was in the state into which my experiments brought me, I asked myself: “What is the world?”
‘Immediately I saw a semblance of some big flower, like a rose or a lotus, the petals of which were continually unfolding from the middle, growing, increasing in size, reaching the outside of the
flower and then in some way again returning to the middle and starting again at the beginning. Words in no way express it. In this flower there was an incredible quantity of light, movement, colour, music, emotion, agitation, knowledge, intelligence, mathematics, and continuous unceasing growth. And while I was looking at this flower someone seemed to explain to me that this was the “World” or “Brahma” in its clearest aspect and in the nearest possible approximation to what it is in reality—“If the approximation were made still nearer, it would be Brahma himself, as he is,” said the voice.’
The main difference between the two accounts is that Ward describes only ‘mystical’ insights, while Ouspensky—no doubt because he repeated the experiment so often—also had certain experiences that are closer to some of the paranormal experiences described in this book. He heard ‘voices’, and was able to ask them questions. From the beginning he mistrusted the voices; but on at least one occasion, when he asked them a question about alchemy, they were able to tell him the name of the book in which, in fact, he found the answer to his question (although, he adds, ‘not the complete answer’.)
In these states, Ouspensky also found that he was able, to some extent, to foresee the future—or rather, that some inner voice was able to predict it. Thinking about going to Moscow that Easter, he was suddenly ‘told’ that he would not be able to go, and he was able to foresee the chain of events that would prevent him from going. It was only just before Easter, when these events began to happen—and prevented him from going to Moscow—that he remembered he had known about it in advance. In states of intensified consciousness—as Alan Vaughan discovered—the mind is able to see future events.
The sense of world-rejection experienced by both Ouspensky and Ward as they returned to ‘normality’ raises again one of the most basic of all questions: what might be called ‘the great Outsider question’. In Shaw’s John Bull’s Other Island, the mystic Father Keegan explains that he has discovered the answer to the mystery of human suffering: this world is actually Hell, and we are all here to expiate sins commited in some other existence. And for the epigraph of my first book, The Outsider, I had chosen another passage from the same play:
Broadbent: . . . I find the world quite good enough for me—rather a jolly place, in fact.
Keegan (looking at him with quiet wonder): You are satisfied?
Broadbent: As a reasonable man, yes. I see no evils in the world—except of course, natural evils—that cannot be remedied by freedom, self-government and English institutions. I think so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.
Keegan: You feel at home in the world then?
Broadbent: Of course. Don’t you?
Keegan (from the very depths of his nature): No.
This is the essence of the Romantic dilemma, the problem that caused so many of the men of genius of the 19th century to commit suicide or to die in despair—for the Romantics also experienced this same sense of revulsion on returning to the everyday world. The crucial question is therefore: is the anticlimax necessary and inevitable? If the answer is yes, then we are admitting that our human reality is a kind of trap, and that life is fundamentally futile.
But if life is futile, if all effort is a waste of time, then why have we devoted this book to asking so many questions and formulating answers? Why did we bother to launch into this exploration of the unknown in the first place? Is it not because, in spite of our rather unstable sense of reality, we have a curious certainty that these questions will lead somewhere, will provide us with answers that could transform our lives? And if that is so, then surely it means that it is possible to do something about human consciousness, to behave in such a way that we can live on a far higher level of happiness and purpose—in a state that is far closer to what Abraham Maslow called ‘the peak experience’?
This, I am convinced, is true. I have spent more than forty years attempting to answer this question. Now, as I approach sixty, I am certain that I know the answer. I have glimpsed it again and again, and lost it again and again. It is like trying to do an enormous jigsaw puzzle which is spread out over the whole floor of the room. You find half a dozen pieces that interlock, and you quickly fit them together. But then you pass on to another part of the puzzle in another part of the room, and the part you have ‘solved’ gets forgotten and buried under other pieces as you move them around. And one of the greatest problems is that this room called everyday consciousness is too small; you know that the floor is simply not big enough to hold the whole puzzle in its completed state. In an attempt to maintain some kind of order, you try classifying the ‘completed’ bits of the puzzle under different headings. This book, for example, contains about 25% of the bits I have labelled ‘occult’ or ‘paranormal’. (A book with the off-putting title Beyond the Occult—it was imposed on me by the publisher—contains about 25% more.) Some of the most promising of the ‘completed’ sections are to be found in bocks like The Outsider or The New Existentialism, which could be labelled ‘philosophy’. Oddly enough, my books on criminology also contain some of the most interesting parts, and one single page (111–12) in a book on sexual deviation called The Misfits contains one of the most important paragraphs in all my work:
‘Our human senses show us only a small part of the world—the present. We have to supplement this present-awareness with memory and imagination. The reason I feel more ‘alive’ when I set out on holiday is that my memory and imagination are finally pulling their weight, and supplementing the present moment with all kinds of other times and places. It is as if I am in two places at once. The same is true if I am sitting in front of a blazing fire on a cold winter night, with the snow pattering against the windows. I am in two places at once; my body is in the warm room, while my imagination is out there, in the cold. But it would be a mistake to assume that we are talking about mere imagination. We are talking about something that might be called the sense of reality—what the psychologist Pierre Janet called ‘the reality function’. Whenever the reality function is awake, we are happy.
‘In short, before we can feel really alive, the mind needs to add a dimension of reality to the world of the senses. If there is such a thing as the “great secret” of human existence, this is it.’
Let me try to explain why I feel that Ouspensky’s attitude about the ‘wooden world’ was a kind of premature defeatism, the defeatism of a man who was in some ways a great thinker, but who was also a typical 19th-century romantic.
One of my most basic insights came one day when I was reflecting upon this problem of defeatism and pessimism. I was also considering this interesting fact that any kind of crisis immediately arouses us to a higher level of drive and purpose, so that when it goes away, we momentarily experience a sense of total freedom. In Crime and Punishment, the hero Raskolnikov (who has committed a murder) realises that that he might be executed, and reflects: ‘If I had to stand on a narrow ledge for ever and ever, in eternal darkness and tempest, I would rather do that than die at once.’ We all know exactly what he means—that if someone placed a revolver against your head, and said: ‘What is it to be: immediate death, or a narrow ledge for the rest of your life?’, you would reply without hesitation: ‘Narrow ledge, of course.’ But consider: what would you actually do on a narrow ledge? What is that strange secret that you glimpse, when threatened by crisis, that convinces you that a narrow ledge is preferable to death?
These reflections led me to recognise that one of our most basic problems is what I labelled ‘upside-downness’. You could say that you have three ‘selves’—a physical self, an emotional self, and an intellectual (or mental) self. My physical values have a nasty habit of changing from one hour to the next; I may feel marvellous at ten in the morning, and rather depressed a few hours later merely because I am hungry or feel tired. But then, we are used to these physical ups and down, and do not let them bother us too much. Much more dangerous are our emotional ups and downs. We can have every reason for being pleased with
ourselves and with life, and then some minor problem—a tax demand, someone being rude to us, a flash of alarm—can hurl us into a thoroughly negative state of mind. Emotions seem to drag us down like a heavy weight.
On the other hand, my intellect stands above these physical and emotional problems. When I am feeling angry or jealous or upset, another part of me looks down on it with cool detachment and tells me not to be such a fool. On the whole, my intellect tells me the truth—or at least, does its best. It is my emotions that often manage to creep in and distort this truth.
We might turn this insight into a Chinese parable. When the intellect is the Emperor, and emotions are the Grand Vizier, the kingdom is peaceful and happy. But when the Grand Vizier overthrows the Emperor and usurps the throne, everything becomes confused and chaotic.
In our internal political organisation, intellect was meant to be ‘on top’. Emotions were intended to be the servant. What happens when we are upset is that we turn ‘upside down’—almost as if our feet had turned into gas-filled balloons and made us stand on our heads. What is so dangerous is that this can happen without us even noticing it. We think we are still clear-headed and rational, but emotion has sneaked in and taken control. Without realising what has happened, a fog of depression settles over us. Life seems futile and boring. We are convinced that we have good reason for feeling that life is a cheat and that free will is an illusion. All that has happened is that we have turned ‘upside down’, and the world from this position looks alien and somehow frightening. I have described in Mysteries (and again, in Beyond the Occult) how, during a period of severe overwork, I began to suffer from a series of ‘panic attacks’ that brought me to the verge of nervous breakdown. All that had happened was that I had been overwhelmed by sheer exhaustion, and I could no longer keep my feet on the ground; every hour or so, I kept finding myself dangling upside down, seeing the world as meaningless and dangerous. Only my total intellectual certainty that this negative vision was an illusion allowed me to struggle ‘the right way up’ and stay in that position.