by Colin Wilson
What happens if somebody returns a book that he borrowed from me a long time ago? I look at the book with a kind of delight, as though it were a returned prodigal: perhaps I open it and read a chapter. Yet if the book had stayed on my shelf for six months I might not even have bothered to glance at it. The return of the book has made me focus my beam of interest, like an athlete gathering for a leap.
When something occupies my full attention, it is very real to me. When I have put the book back on the shelf, I have un-real-ized it, to some extent. I have pushed it back to a more abstract level of reality. But I have the power to real-ize it again. Consider the mental act I make when I feel glad to see the book again. I 'reach out' my invisible mental tentacles to it, as I might reach out my hand to a friend I am delighted to see, and I focus my beam of interest on it with a kind of intensity—the kind of intentness with which a sapper de-fuses an unexploded bomb.
We do this 'real-izing' and 'un-real-izing' all the time—so automatically that we fail to notice that we are doing it. It is not just 'happening'. Like the athlete gathering himself to leap, it is the deliberate compression of mental muscles.
All this suggests that Maslow is mistaken to believe that peak experiences have to 'come' without being sought. A little phenomenological analysis, like the kind we have conducted above, reveals that the P .E. has a structure that can be duplicated. It is the culmination of a series of mental acts, each of which can be clearly defined.
The first pre-condition is 'energy', because the P .E. is essentially an overflowing of energy. This does not mean ordinary physical energy; Maslow points out that sick people can have P.E's as easily as healthy ones, if the conditions are right. If you say to a child: 'I'll take you to the pantomime tonight if you'll tidy your bedroom', he immediately seethes with a bustling energy. The normally boring act of tidying a room is performed with enthusiasm. And this is because he—figuratively—'takes a deep breath'. He is so determined that the tidying shall be satisfactory that he is prepared to devote attention to every square inch of the floor. And the 'mental act' that lies behind this is a certain concentration and 'summoning of energy', like calling 'All hands on deck'. If I am asked to do a job that bores me, I summon only a small quantity of energy, and if the job is complicated, I skimp it. If I am determined to do it thoroughly, I place the whole of my interior army and navy 'on call'. It is this state—of vigilance, alertness, preparedness— that is the basis of the peak experience.
Healthy people—like Maslow's housewife—are people with a high level of 'preparedness'? This can be expressed in a simple image. My 'surplus energy' is stored in my subconscious mind, in the realm of the robot: this is like money that has been invested in stocks and shares. Nearer the surface of everyday consciousness, there are 'surplus energy tanks', energy which is ready-for-use, like money in my personal account at the bank. When I anticipate some emergency, or some delightful event (like a holiday) which I shall need energy to enjoy to the full, I transfer large quantities of 'ready energy' to these surface tanks, just as I might draw a large sum out of the bank before I go on holiday.
'Peakers' are people with large quantities of energy in the ready-energy tanks. Bored or miserable people are people who keep only small amounts of energy for immediate use.
But it must be borne in mind that both types of people have large amounts of energy available in their 'deep storage tanks' in the realm of the robot. It is merely a matter of transferring it to your 'current account'.
In a paper called 'The Need to Know and the Fear of Knowing', Maslow describes one of his crucial cases.
'Around 1938, a college girl patient presented herself complaining vaguely of insomnia, lack of appetite, disturbed menstruation, sexual frigidity, and a general malaise which soon turned into a complaint of boredom with life and an inability to enjoy anything. Life seemed meaningless to her. Her symptoms closely paralleled those described by Abraham Myerson in his book When Life Loses Its Zest . . . As she went on talking, she seemed puzzled. She had graduated about a year ago and by a fantastic stroke of luck—this was the depression, remember—she had immediately got a job. And what a job! Fifty dollars a week! She was taking care of her whole unemployed family with the money and was the envy of all her friends. But what was the job? She worked as a sub-personnel manager in a chewing-gum factory. And after some hours of talking, it became more and more clear that she felt she was wasting her life. She had been a brilliant student of psychology and was very happy and successful in college, but her family's financial situation made it impossible for her to go on into graduate studies. She was greatly drawn to intellectual work, not altogether consciously at first because she felt she ought to feel fortunate with her job and the money it brought her. Half-consciously then she saw a whole lifetime of greyness stretching out ahead of her. I suggested that she might be feeling profoundly frustrated and angry simply because she was not being her own very intelligent self, that she was not using her intelligence and her talent for psychology and that this might well be a major reason for her boredom with life and her body's boredom with the normal pleasures of life. Any talent, any capacity, I thought, was also a motivation, a need, an impulse. With this she agreed, and I suggested that she could continue her graduate studies at night after her work. In brief, she was able to arrange this and it worked well. She became more alive, more happy and zestful, and most of her physical symptoms had disappeared at my last contact with her.'
It is significant that Maslow, although trained as a Freudian, did not try to get back into the subject's childhood and find out whether she experienced penis envy of her brothers or a desire to murder her mother and marry her father. He followed his instinct—his feeling that creativeness and the desire for a meaningful existence are as important as any subconscious sexual drives.
Anyone who knows my own work will see why Maslow's approach appealed so much to me—and why mine, apparently, appealed to Maslow. My first book, The Outsider, written when I was 23, was about people like Maslow's girl patient—men driven by an obscure creative urge that made them dissatisfied with everyday life, and which in some cases—T. E. Lawrence, for example—caused them to behave in a manner that seemed masochistic. The book sprang from my own obsession with the problem of 'life failure'. Auden wrote:
Put the car away; when life fails
What's the good of going to Wales?
Eliot asks in The Rock: 'Where is the life we have lost in living?' And Shaw says of the Ancients in Back to Methuselah: 'Even at the moment of death, their life does not fail them.' Maslow's patient was suicidal because she felt she was losing her life in the process of living it. Quite clearly, we were talking about the same thing. I had asked repeatedly in The Outsider: 'Why does life fail?' Maslow was replying, in effect: Because human beings have needs and cravings that go beyond the need for security, sex, territory. He states it clearly in the preface to the Japanese edition of Eupsychian Management, asserting that 'human nature has been sold short, that man has a higher nature which is just as "instinctoid" as his lower nature, and that this higher nature includes the need for meaningful work, for responsibility, for creativeness, for being fair and just, for doing what is worthwhile and for preferring to do it well.'
I must outline my own approach to this problem, as I explained it in subsequent correspondence with Maslow. The Outsider had developed from my interest in the romantics of the 19th century—Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Wagner, Nietzsche, Van Gogh. What fascinated me was their world rejection. It was summed up by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's hero Axel in the words 'Live? Our servants can do that for us.' Axel asserted that 'real life' is always a disappointment. The heroine, Sarah, has a long speech in which she speaks of all the marvellous places they might visit now they have found the treasure. Axel replies that the cold snows of Norway sound marvellous, but when you actually get there, it's just cold and wet. L. H. Myers had made the same point with fine precision in The Near and the Far, where the young Prince Jali stares at a s
plendid sunset over the desert, and reflects that there are two deserts: one that is a glory to the eye, and one that is a weariness to the feet. If you tried rushing towards that sunset, you would only get your shoes full of sand. It seems impossible to grasp 'the promise of the horizon'. And it was this feeling of despair about the near and the far—the feeling that they can never be reconciled—that led to so many early deaths among the romantics: suicide, insanity, tuberculosis. Obermann, in Senancour's novel of that name, says that the rain depresses him, yet when the sun comes out it strikes him as 'useless'. This is life-failure.
But man's achievement is to have created a world of the mind, of the intellect and imagination, which is as real in its way as any actual country on the map. Sir Karl Popper, in one of his most important papers, calls it 'the third world.'[1] The first world is the objective world of things. The second world is my inner subjective world. But, says Popper, there is a third world, the world of objective contents of thoughts. If some catastrophe destroyed all the machines and tools on this earth, but not the libraries, a new generation would slowly rebuild civilisation. If the libraries are all destroyed too, there could be no re-emergence of civilisation, for all our carefully stored knowledge would have gone, and man would have to start regaining it from scratch. Teilhard de Chardin calls this 'third world' the noösphere—the world of mind. It includes the works of Newton, Einstein, Beethoven, Tolstoy, Plato; it is the most important part of our human heritage.
A cow inhabits the physical world. It has almost no mind, to speak of. Man also inhabits the physical world, and has to cope with its problems. But he has built civilisation because the physical world is not enough. Nothing is so boring as to be stuck in the present. Primitive man loved stories for the same reason that young children do. Because they afforded an escape from the present, because they freed his memory and imagination from mere 'reality'. Einstein made the same point: ' . . . one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is to escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness . . . A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared to the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains . . . '[1]
But my central point is this. Man is a very young creature: his remotest ancestors only date back two million years. (The shark has remained unchanged for 15,000,000 years.) And although he longs for this 'third world' as his natural home, he only catches brief glimpses of it. For it can only be 'focused' by a kind of mental eye. This morning, as I cleaned my teeth in the bathroom a fragment of Brahms drifted through my head and caused that sudden feeling of inner-warmth. The person labelled 'Colin Wilson' ceased to matter: it was almost as if I had floated out of my body and left him behind, as if the real 'I' had taken up a position somewhere midway between myself and Brahms. In the same way, when I am working well, I seem to lose my identity, 'identifying' instead with the ideas or people I am writing about. But very often, I cannot even begin to focus the 'third world'; the real world distracts me, and keeps my attention fixed on its banal 'actualities' like some idiot on a train who prevents you from reading by talking in a loud voice.
All the same, this 'third world' is a place; it is there all the time, like China or the moon; and it ought to be possible for me to go there at any time, leaving behind the boring person who is called by my name. It is fundamentally a world of pure meaning. It is true that my small personal world is also a world of meaning; but of trivial, personal meaning, distorted and one-sided, a worm's eye view of meaning.
It is man's evolutionary destiny to become a citizen of the third world, to explore it as he might now explore Switzerland on a holiday.
It is impossible to predict what will happen to human beings when that time comes: for this reason. Meaning stimulates the will, fills one with a desire to reach out to new horizons. When a man in love sees the girl approaching, his heart 'leaps'. When I hear a phrase of music that means something to me, my heart leaps. That 'leap' is vitality from my depths, leaping up to meet the 'meaning'. And the more 'meaning' I perceive, the more vitality rushes up to meet it. As his access to the world of meaning increases, man's vitality will increase towards the superman level; that much seems clear.
Boredom cripples the will. Meaning stimulates it. The peak experience is a sudden surge of meaning. The question that arises now is: how can I choose meaning? If Maslow is correct, I can't. I must be 'surprised' by it. It is a by-product of effort.
At this point, I was able to point out to Maslow a possibility that he had overlooked, a concept I called 'the indifference threshold' or 'St Neot margin'. It is fundamentally a recognition that crises or difficulties can often produce a sense of meaning when more pleasant stimuli have failed. Sartre remarks that he had never felt so free as during the war when, as a member of the French Resistance, he was likely to be arrested and shot at any time. It seems a paradox: that danger can make you feel free when peace and serenity fail to arouse any response. It does this by forcing you to concentrate.
I stumbled on this concept in the following manner. In 1954, I was hitchhiking to Peterborough on a hot Saturday afternoon. I felt listless, bored and resentful: I didn't want to go to Peterborough—it was a kind of business trip—and I didn't particularly long to be back in London either. There was hardly any traffic on the road, but eventually I got a lift. Within ten minutes, there was an odd noise in the engine of the lorry. The driver said: 'I'm afraid something's gone wrong—I'll have to drop you off at the next garage.' I was too listless to care. I walked on, and eventually a second lorry stopped for me. Then occurred the absurd coincidence. After ten minutes or so, there was a knocking noise from his gearbox. When he said: 'It sounds as if something's wrong', I thought: 'Oh no!' and then caught myself thinking it, and thought: 'That's the first definite reaction I've experienced today.' We drove on slowly—he was anxious to get to Peterborough, and by time, so was I. He found that if he dropped speed to just under twenty miles an hour, the knocking noise stopped; as soon as he exceeded it, it started again. We both listened intently for any resumption of the trouble. Finally, as we were passing through a town called St Neots, he said: 'Well, I think if we stay at this speed, we should make it.' And I felt a surge of delight. Then I thought: 'This is absurd. My situation hasn't improved since I got into the lorry—in fact, it has got worse, since he is now crawling along. All that has happened is that an inconvenience has been threatened, and then the threat withdrawn. And suddenly, my boredom and indifference have vanished.' I formulated then the notion that there is a borderland or threshold of the mind that can be stimulated by pain or inconvenience, but not pleasure. (After all, the lorry originally stopping for me failed to arouse a response of gratitude.) I labelled it 'the indifference threshold' or—after the place I was travelling through at the time—the St Neot margin.
All that had happened, of course, was that the threat of a second breakdown had made me concentrate my attention. I spent a quarter of an hour listening intently to the engine. The threatened 'crisis' made me use my focusing-muscle, instead of allowing it to remain passive. Relaxing it—when he said we could probably make it—caused a rush of pleasure.
The same applies to Sartre. The constant danger of arrest kept him at a high level of alertness, of tension. Maslow's girl patient became so bored with her job in the chewing gum factory that she allowing the focusing-muscle to go permanently flaccid.
If you allow the will to remain passive for long periods, it has the same effect as leaving your car in the garage for the winter. The batteries go flat. When the batteries go flat, 'life fails'. These 'focusing muscles' must be used if we are to stay healthy, for they are the means by which the mind focuses on values, just as the eye muscles enable the eye to focus on distant objects. If we fail to use them for long periods, the result is a kind of mental shortsightedness, a gradual loss of the feeling of the reality of
values, of meaning. This explains what happens if you watch television for too long, or read a very long book on a dull winter day until your eyes are aching. Your 'meaning focus' relaxes as your interest flags, and if you then go for a walk, everything seems oddly meaningless and dull. It just 'is', and it doesn't arouse any response.
The Greek poet Demetrios Capetanakis wrote in the early forties: ' "Well," I thought when the war started, trying to hope for the best, "it will be horrible, but if it will be so horrible as to frighten and wake up the mind, it will be the salvation of many. Many are going to die, but those who are going to survive will have a real life, with the mind awake" . . . But I was mistaken . . . The war is very frightening, but it is not frightening enough.'
The same thought struck me when I read the article Camus wrote for the resistance paper Combat when the Germans were being driven out of Paris.[1] It is called 'The Night of Truth' and is full of noble phrases. The skyline of Paris is blazing, he says, but these are the flames of freedom. 'Those who never despaired of themselves or of their country find their reward under this sky . . . the great virile brotherhood of recent years will never forsake us . . . man's greatness . . . lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition', and so on. But Simone de Beauvoir's novel The Mandarins begins shortly after the liberation, and Camus is one of the characters. And they drift around the nightspots of St Germain and drink too much and smoke too much and waste time on pointless adulteries. What had happened to the Night of Truth?