The Essential Colin Wilson

by Colin Wilson

  One of the most interesting and consistent accounts of these powers is to be found in a book called Psychic Self Defense (1930), by 'Dion Fortune', a Freudian psychologist whose real name was Violet Firth. At the age of twenty (in 1911) she was working in a school, under a domineering principal, who took a dislike to her, and (so Violet Firth believed) directed a stream of psychic malevolence at her, using yogic and hypnotic techniques. The result was traumatic, a feeling of bewilderment and misery greater than would be caused by an actual physical attack. A need for self-analysis led her to study psychology (on which she wrote a number of books); later, she came to feel that even the theories of Freud and Jung fail to do justice to the complexity of the human mind, and became a student of occultism. (She had always possessed some degree of mediumistic powers.) She joined the Order of the Golden Dawn (a magical society that will be discussed in the second part of this book), and had further psychic clashes with Mrs. Mathers, the wife of its founder. As a result of these alarming experiences, she came to believe that the human mind can repel the hostile psychic forces that emanate (often unconsciously) from malevolent people. Even more interesting is the implication that a healthy and optimistic mind repels ordinary misfortune, and that 'accident proneness' or general bad luck are the result of a psyche made vulnerable by defeat or stagnation.

  And at this point, I must outline my own basic theory of these powers of the mind.

  In Johnson's Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, there is a scene in which the hero looks at the peaceful pastoral scenery of the Happy Valley where he lives, and wonders why he cannot be happy like the sheep and cows. He reflects gloomily: 'I can discover within me no power of perception that is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted. Man has surely some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy.' (Chapter 2)

  The italics are my own. The 'latent sense' is man's evolutionary appetite, the desire to make contact with reality. But that is not all. Who has not experienced this strange frustration that comes in moments of pleasure and fulfillment? As a child, I had this feeling about water. If my parents took me on a bus excursion, I used to crane out of the window every time we went over a bridge; something about large sheets of water excited a painful desire that I found incomprehensible. For if I actually approached the water, what could I do to satisfy this feeling? Drink it? Swim in it? So when I first read the passage from Rasselas, I understood immediately what Johnson meant by 'some latent sense . . . or desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy.'

  I labeled this 'latent sense' Faculty X. And I came to see that Faculty X has something to do with 'reality'. In Swann's Way Proust describes how he tasted a madeleine dipped in tea, and was suddenly reminded of his childhood in Combray—reminded with such an intensity that for a moment he was actually there. 'An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses . . . And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory . . . I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal . . . '

  Five minutes earlier, he could have said, 'Yes, I was a child in Combray,' and no doubt described it in detail; but the madeleine suddenly meant that he could say it and mean it. Chesterton says, 'We say thank you when someone passes us the salt, but we don't mean it. We say the earth is round, but we don't mean it, even though it's true.' We say something and mean it only when Faculty X is awake, that painful reaching-beyond-the-senses. Faculty X is the key to all poetic and mystical experience; when it awakens, life suddenly takes on a new, poignant quality. Faust is about to commit suicide in weariness and despair when he hears the Easter Bells; they bring back his childhood, and suddenly Faculty X is awake, and he knows that suicide is the ultimate laughable absurdity.

  Faculty X is simply that latent power that human beings possess to reach beyond the present. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as this place I happen to be in at the moment. Yet my senses do not agree. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertain though it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals.

  But if the oppressive reality of this place and time is an illusion, so is my sense of being uniquely here, now. 'I am not here; neither am I elsewhere,' says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. So that if Faculty X can make Strindberg clearly aware of the reality of a place several hundreds of miles away, is it not conceivable that it might 'transport' him there in another sense?

  It would be a mistake to think of Faculty X as an 'occult' faculty. It is not; it is the power to grasp reality, and it unites the two halves of man's mind, conscious and subconscious.

  Think: what happens if a piece of music or a smell of woodsmoke suddenly reminds me of something that happened ten years ago? It is like touching the leg of a dead frog with an electric wire. My mind convulses and contracts, suddenly grasping the reality of that past time as though it were the present. The same thing happens to Marcel in Proust's novel Swann's Way when he tastes a madeleine dipped in tea—his past floods back as a reality. What happens is that our normally lazy and diffused consciousness focuses, as I might-clench my fist. The tune or smell only provides the stimulus; my inner strength does the rest—an inner strength of which I am normally unaware.

  A few years ago, psychologists performed a classic experiment with a cat. A wire was connected to the nerve between the cat's ear and its brain, and the other end of the wire was connected to a dial for measuring electrical impulses. When a loud noise sounded near the cat's ear, the needle of the dial swung over violently. Then a cage of mice was placed in front of the cat. It watched them intently. The same loud noise was sounded close to its ear. But the needle did not stir. The cat was so intent on the mice that it ignored the sound—and somehow it 'switched off' the physical impulse between the ear and the brain. It chose to focus on something else.

  All living creatures have this power to 'focus' on something that interests them, and 'switch off' everything else. Someone accustomed to a modern city probably cuts out as much as 99 per cent of the stimuli that fall on the senses. We all know about this. But what we have not yet grasped is the extraordinary power we possess in being able to focus upon particular aspects of reality. This power is Faculty X, but at the moment, we hardly make use of it, unaware of its potentialities.

  It is worth asking the question: What is consciousness for? When you are deeply asleep, you have no consciousness. When you are very tired, your consciousness is like a dim light that hardly illuminates anything. When you are wide awake and excited, consciousness seems to increase in sheer candle-power. It's purpose is to illuminate reality, to reach out into its recesses, and thus to enable us to act upon it and transform it. It is obvious that our basic aim should be to increase its candle-power. When it is low, reality becomes 'unreal'; as it becomes stronger, reality becomes 'realer': Faculty X.

  One of the clearest examples of the working of Faculty X can be found in the tenth volume of Arnold Toynbee's Study of History, in which he explains how he came to write that work. He speaks of the sense of 'reality' that suddenly comes to historians: 'The writer of the present study had an authentic minor personal experience of the kind on the 23rd May, 1912, as he sat musing on the summit of the citadel of Mistrá, with the sheer wall of Mount Taÿgetus bounding his horizon in the western quarter of the compass, towards which he was bound, and the open vale of Sparta stretching away in the opposite eastern quarter, from which he had made his way that morning. . . '

  'The sensuous experience that activated his historical imagination was not a sound of liturgical chanting; it was the sight o
f the ruins among which he had wound his way upwards to the peak; and this spectacle had been appalling, for in this shattered fairy city Time had stood still since that spring of A.D. 1821 in which Mistrá had been laid desolate . . . One April morning, out of the blue, the avalanche of wild highlanders from the Màni had overwhelmed her; her citizens had been forced to flee for their lives and had been despoiled and massacred as they fled; her deserted mansions had been sacked; and her ruins had been left desolate from that day to this. . . '

  What struck Toynbee on this occasion was not simply the question of 'the cruel riddle of Mankind's crimes and follies', but the total reality of the scene conjured up by his imagination. He mentions half a dozen other experiences in which there was this same hallucinatory effect of reality. Reading how one of the proscribed leaders of the Italian Confederacy was refused help by his wife, and committed suicide in front of her eyes, he was 'transported, in a flash, across the gulf of Time and Space from Oxford in A.D. 1911 to Teanum in 80 B.C., to find himself in a back yard on a dark night witnessing a personal tragedy. . . ' He records similar experiences—all very brief—when reading Bernal Diaz describing the Spaniards' first sight of Tenochtitlan, Villehardouin describing his first sight of Constantinople during the Crusades, a Greek soldier describing how he tried to save a girl from rape. And finally, an experience in which the dividing line between Faculty X and mystical experience becomes blurred:

  On each of the six occasions just recorded, the writer had been rapt into a momentary communion with the actors in a particular historic event through the effect upon his imagination of a sudden arresting view of the scene . . . But there was another occasion on which he had been vouchsafed a larger and a stranger experience. In London in the southern section of the Buckingham Palace Road, walking southward along the pavement skirting the west wall of Victoria Station, the writer once, one afternoon not long after the date of the First World War . . . had found himself in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come. In that instant he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide. The experience lasted long enough for him to take visual note of the Edwardian red brick surface and white stone facings of the station wall gliding past on his left, and to wonder—half amazed and half amused—why this incongruously prosaic scene should have been the physical setting of a mental illumination. An instant later, the communion had ceased, and the dreamer was back again in the everyday cockney world which was his native social milieu . . .[1]

  These pages of Toynbee are among the clearest descriptions of the operation of Faculty X that exist, and they underline the point I have tried to make. When I am half asleep, my sense of reality is restricted to myself and my immediate surroundings. The more awake I am, the further it stretches. But what we call 'waking consciousness' is not usually a great deal better than sleep. We are still wrapped in a passive, sluggish daydream. But this is not because there is some natural limit to consciousness, but only because we remain unaware that it can be stretched. We are like dogs who think they are on a chain when in fact they are free.

  Faculty X is not a 'sixth sense', but an ordinary potentiality of consciousness. And it should be clear from what I have written above that it is the key not only to so-called occult experience, but to the whole future evolution of the human race.

  THE LADDER OF SELVES

  From Mysteries,, 1978

  At the time when I was still collecting materials for this book, I had a nasty but curiously fascinating experience: a series of attacks of 'panic anxiety' that brought me close to nervous breakdown. What surprised me most was that I was not depressed or worried at the time. I was working hard, and therefore under a certain amount of strain, but I seemed to be taking it all in my stride. For the past eighteen months I had been involved on the editorial board of a kind of encyclopedia of crime; but as every meeting ended in disagreement, it began to look as if the whole project would have to be abandoned. Then, at short notice, the publisher decided to go ahead. Suddenly, everything had to be completed in a few months; and I, as co-ordinator, was asked to produce around a hundred articles—3,000 words each—at a rate of seven a week. I began to work at the typewriter for eight or nine hours every day and tried to unwind in the evenings with a bottle of wine and a pile of gramophone records.

  One day, a couple of journalists came to interview me. In fact, they did most of the talking. They were young and enthusiastic, with a tendency to interrupt one another. When they left, at about two in the morning, my eyes were glazed with boredom, and I felt as if I'd been deafened with salvos of cannon fire. This, I later realized, was the trouble. When you become bored, you 'let go'; you sink into a kind of moral torpor, allowing your inner-pressure to leak away as if you were a punctured tyre. The next day they came back for another session with the tape recorder. When they left I felt too dull to do any work; instead I took the opportunity to perform a number of routine household chores.

  That night, about 4 A.M., I woke up feeling unrested and lay there thinking about all the articles I still had to write, and the books I ought to be writing instead. Anxiety hormones began to trickle into my bloodstream, and my heartbeat accelerated. I actually considered going to my workroom and starting another article then realized that if I did that, I'd really be letting things get on top of me. Lying there, with nothing else to think about, I felt my energies churning, like a car being accelerated when the engine is in neutral. It was rather like feeling physically sick, except it was the emotions that were in revolt. When it was clear that I was not going to improve the situation by ignoring it, I tried making a frontal assault and suppressing the panic feeling by sheer will power. This proved to be a mistake. My face became hot, and I felt a dangerous tightness across the chest, while my heartbeat increased to a point that terrified me. I got up, went to the kitchen and poured myself a glass of orange juice. Then I sat down and tried to soothe myself as I might try to calm a frightened horse. Gradually, I got myself under control and went back to bed. As soon as I was in the dark, the process started again: rising panic, accelerating heartbeat, the feeling of being trapped. This time I got up and went into the sitting-room. I was inclined to wonder if I was having a heart attack. Quite clearly, something had gone wrong. The panic kept rising like vomit; the calm, sane part of me kept saying that it was absurd, some minor physical problem that would resolve itself within twenty-four hours. Like nausea, it came in waves, and between each wave there was a brief feeling of calm and relief.

  The attack differed from nausea in that there was no point in giving way to it and making myself sick. This panic caused energy to disappear, like milk boiling over in a saucepan. There was a vicious-circle effect; the anxiety produced panic, the panic produced further anxiety, so the original fear was compounded by a fear of fear. In this state, it seemed that any move I made to counter the fear could be negated by more fear. In theory, the fear could overrule every attempt I made to overrule it. Like a forest fire, it has to be somehow contained before it destroyed large areas of my inner-being.

  I had experienced something of the sort in my teens, but without this sense of physical danger. One day at school, a group of us had been discussing where space ended, and I was suddenly shocked to realize that the question seemed to be unanswerable. It felt like a betrayal. It suddenly struck me that a child's world is based on the feeling that 'Everything is OK'. Crises arise, apparently threatening your existence; then they're behind you, in the past, and you've survived. Or you wake up from a nightmare, and feel relieved to realize that the world is really a decent, stable sort of place. The universe looks baffling, but somebody, somewhere, knows all the answers . . . Now it struck me that grown-ups are, in this respect, no better than children; they are surrounded by uncertainty and insecurity, but they go on living because that's all there is to do.

  For years after that i
nsight, I had been oppressed by a sense of some terrible, fundamental bad news, deeper than any social or human problem. It would come back with a sudden shock when life seemed secure and pleasant—for example, on a warm summer afternoon when I saw a ewe feeding her lambs, looking a picture of motherly solicitude, unaware that both she and her lambs were destined for someone's oven.

  Now, as I sat in the armchair and tried to repress the panic, I realized that it was important not to start brooding on these fundamentals—our total ignorance, our lack of the smallest shred of certainty about who we are and why we are here. That way, I realized, lay insanity, a fall into a kind of mental Black Hole.

  I suppose that what seemed most ironical was that I had always felt that I understood the cause of mental illness. A couple of years before I had written a book called New Pathways in Psychology in which I had argued that mental illness is basically caused by the collapse of the will. When you are making an effort, your will re-charges your vital powers as a car re-charges its battery when you drive it. If you cease to will, the battery goes flat, and life appears to be futile and absurd. To emerge from this state, all that is necessary is to maintain any kind of purposeful activity—even without much conviction—and the batteries will slowly become re-charged. That is what I had said. And now, struggling with the panic, all the certainty had vanished. Instead, I found myself thinking of my novel The Mind Parasites, in which I had suggested that there are creatures that live in the depths of our subconscious minds, draining our vitality like leeches. That seemed altogether closer to what I was now experiencing.

  Finally, I felt sufficiently calm—and cold—to go back to bed. I lay there, staring at the grey square of the window to keep my mind from turning inward on itself; some automatic resistance seemed to have awakened in me, and I suspected that the daylight would make the whole thing seem as unimportant as a bad dream. In fact, I woke up feeling low and exhausted, and the 'bad-news' feeling persisted at the back of my mind as I worked. But the effort of writing another article made me feel better. In the evening I felt drained, and the fear began to return. I suspected myself of wanting to ignore something frightening and felt myself sinking into depression as into a swamp. I would make an effort, rouse myself to mental activity, and suddenly feel better. Then something on television or in what I was reading, would 'remind' me of the fear; there was a kind of inner jerk, like a car slipping out of gear, and the panic was back.