The Essential Colin Wilson

by Colin Wilson

  One of our highest human attributes is our power of concentration. But it involves a major disadvantage. When I concentrate on something, I ignore everything else in the universe. I lock myself into a kind of prison. If I stay in this prison too long, I begin to suffocate. This is what happens when we overwork or become obsessed by some trivial worry. We forget the universe that exists outside us until it becomes only a distant memory. Even when the task is finished, we often forget to re-establish contact and open the windows. The inner watchspring can get so overwound that we become permanently blind and deaf.

  This is one of the worst habits we have developed in the course of our evolution. There is a parable of two Zen monks who encounter a girl waiting at a ford; one of them picks her up and carries her across the river, then sets her down on the farther bank. Ten miles farther on, the other monk bursts out: 'How could you do that? You know we're not allowed to touch women.' 'Put her down,' says his companion, 'You're still carrying her.' Most human beings carry a dozen invisible burdens.

  The tendency is dangerous because our mental health depends on the 'meaning' that comes from the world around us. Meaning is something that walks in through the senses on a spring morning, or when you arrive at the seaside and hear the cry of the seagulls. All obsession cuts us off from meaning. My panic attacks began when I had overwound the watchspring and lost the trick of unwinding it. I was like a man slowly suffocating to death and, what is more, suffering because I was gripping my own windpipe.

  It is important to realize that this throttling effect is quite automatic. It is the result of an aspect of the mind that I have called 'the robot', that unconscious servant who performs all the automatic tasks of everyday life. The 'robot' is now typing this page for me, while the 'real me' does the thinking. When I am feeling energetic and cheerful, the robot stays in the background, and I walk around with my senses wide awake. As I get tired, the robot takes over more and more of my functions, and the reality around me becomes less and less real. If I become nervously exhausted, the robot takes over completely and life becomes a permanent unreality. If, in this state, I am subjected to further pressures instead of being allowed to unwind, anxiety escalates into panic. It is the robot whose accelerator is jammed in the top-speed position.

  I have always been fascinated by the way that shock or crisis can release us from the 'suffocation', bursting open the locked windows and often producing an almost mystical vision of meaning; my first book, The Outsider, discussed many such cases. There was, for example, the experience of Nietzsche on a hill called Leutsch; he describes it in a letter to his friend von Gersdorff:

  Yesterday an oppressive storm hung over the sky and I hurried to the top of a nearby hill . . . At the summit I found a hut, where a man was killing a kid, while his son watched him. The storm broke with tremendous force, gusting and hailing, and I had an indescribable sense of wellbeing and zest, and realized that we actually understand nature only when we must fly to her to escape our cares and afflictions . . . lightning and tempests are different worlds, free powers, without morality. Pure will, without the confusions of intellect—how happy, how free!

  Even more significant is the experience of the modern Hindu saint Ramakrishna. He describes his first mystical ecstasy:

  I was suffering from excruciating pain because I had not been blessed with a vision of the Divine Mother . . . life did not seem worth living. Then my eyes fell on the sword that was kept in the Mother's temple. Determined to put an end to my life, I jumped up and seized it, when suddenly the Mother revealed herself to me . . . The buildings . . . the temple and all vanished, leaving no trace; instead there was a limitless, infinite shining ocean of consciousness or spirit. As far as the eye could see, its billows were rushing at me from all sides . . . I was panting for breath. I was caught in the billows and fell down senseless.

  From this time onward, the mere name of the Divine Mother could send Ramakrishna into samadhi, a trance of ecstasy.

  In both these cases, the release was preceded by a sense of oppression and narrowness, the 'overwound watchspring' effect. Their senses were closed, so that both were suffering from 'meaning starvation'. Human beingsaccept lack of meaning with stolid fatalism, as an animal accepts illness and pain. So the release comes like a thunderclap, like a sudden reprieve from death, bringing a sense of overwhelming joy and gratitude, and the recognition that meaning is always there. It is we who close our senses to it.

  Once a man has experienced this revelation, he can never wholly forget it. He may still be subject to moods of fatigue and depression; but always, at the back of his mind, there is the memory of a paradoxical truth: that men are far stronger than they suspect. Their energies seem limited, their powers circumscribed, only because in some strange unconscious way, they set the limits themselves.

  As my own energies became more constricted by the panic attacks, I had to learn to become conscious of these mechanisms. I was particularly intrigued by the 'schoolmistress effect'. The 'schoolmistress' seemed to be a higher level of my being, which became operative when I shook off my panic and forced myself into a state of vigilance and wakefulness. It reminded me of the experience of an academic friend who was subject to moods of depression and self-doubt. One summer holiday, he came to see us looking completely transformed; he had lost weight and radiated vitality. I asked him what had happened. He explained that his doctor had ordered him to lose weight and the thought had filled him with a sense of defeat. However, he tried eating less and walking to the university, and to his astonishment found it less difficult than be had expected. As the weight melted away his optimism increased; he began to feel that alproblems could be solved with a little common sense and determination. He looked back on his earlier self with pitying condescension. A 'higher level' had taken control, and he felt it to be realer and truer than the old self.

  Obviously, Ramakrishna's attempt at suicide had produced a more powerful version of the 'schoolmistress effect' and raised him to a higher level still. On the other hand, boredom and lack of purpose tend to produce the opposite effect: surrender to a conviction of weakness and general unworthiness. (As all sociologists know, this condition incubates crime.) If we revert to the image of a whole series of 'selves', arranged like the rungs of a ladder, we may say that consciousness can move up or down the ladder, identifying with different 'selves'.

  But reflecting on this image, it struck me that the ladder is unusual in one respect: it is shaped like a triangle, so that the higher rungs are shorter than the lower ones. When I move up the ladder, I experience a sense of concentration and control. When I move down—through depression or fatigue—my being seems to become diffused, like a cloud, and I begin to feel at the mercy of the world around me. In this state, it seems obvious that 'I' am weak, selfish and incapable of doing anything worthwhile.

  The interesting question, of course, is: what lies at the top of the ladder? Some ultimate 'me'? A mystic would say, God. Edmund Husserl talked about the 'transcendental ego', the being that presides over all consciousness, and defined philosophy as the attempt to uncover the secrets of the transcendental ego. Gurdjieff agreed, except that he doubted the value of philosophy. He insisted that the only way to explore the ladder is to climb it.

  When I decided to write a sequel to The Occult, I considered restricting it to the question of human survival of death. But these insights introduced new complications into the project. To begin with, what precisely is it that dies? Biologically speaking, I am more like a city than an individual. I am full of colonies of bacteria called mitochondria, which are quite separate from 'me', yet are essential to my vital maintenance. Then, of course, my body is made up of billions of cells, all of which die off and are replaced every eight years, so that there is not now a single atom left of the person I was eight years ago. When a man is decapitated, every cell in his body goes on living as if nothing had happened—this is why the hair and nails continue to grow. Then what actually dies as the blade severs his neck? Cle
arly, some higher principle of organization, one or more of the 'higher selves'. But the higher selves do not die if a man falls into depression or takes to crime; they remain dormant or latent. Is there any logical reason to believe that they die with the death of the body?

  This approach seemed to throw new light on all kinds of questions connected with the 'occult' or paranormal. For example, since I wrote The Occult, I have become fascinated by the subject of dowsing, particularly when I discovered that I could use a divining rod, and that it produced powerful reactions around ancient standing stones. But I have seen dowsers suspending their pendulums over a map and accurately locating hidden streams. They can even ask the pendulum questions—'When was this stone circle erected?'—and get precise answers. The ancients knew about these effects, and assumed that the answers were given by spirits. It seems to me more logical to suppose that one of the 'higher selves' has access to the information and can transmit it through the pendulum, or the yarrow stalks, or the Tarot Pack, or whatever method of divination is being used.

  Then there is the curious mystery of 'multiple personality'. In The Occult I wrote briefly about Morton Prince's case of 'Miss Beauchamp', who was periodically 'possessed' by a totally different personality called Sally. In 1973, I worked on a series of BBC television programmes on the 'paranormal' and had a chance to study the case more closely, which in turn led me to re-examine the whole phenomenon of multiple personality. Dr Flora Schreiber's 'Sybil' exhibited no less than sixteen different personalities. The psychiatric view is that the personality becomes fragmented by shock, but that, like a broken mirror, each fragment retains a kind of identity. I found myself wondering whether that may not apply to all of us—that our everyday selves are a mere fragment of some ultimate personality towards which we are all striving. Professor Ian Stevenson, a parapsychologist of the University of Virginia, reported a case of reincarnation which has even stranger implications. A three-and-a-half-year-old Indian boy, Jasbir Lal Jat, apparently died of smallpox, but revived a few hours later with a totally new personality. The 'stranger' identified himself as a man from another village who had died after eating poisoned sweets, and his detailed knowledge of the man's life convinced his parents—and later Stevenson—that he was telling the truth. The strangest feature of the case was that the man had died at about the same time the child went into his 'death trance', suggesting the complete transfer of the personality from one body to another.

  I was struck by the parallels between cases of multiple personality and those involving poltergeist activity. Another of the television programmes dealt with one of the best authenticated poltergeist cases on record, the 'Rosenheim spook'. The poltergeist played havoc with the electronic equipment in a lawyer's office; the culprit turned out to be a young clerk named Annemarie Schaberl. Yet Annemarie was clearly ignorant that she was the cause of the trouble. And this is so in the majority of poltergeist cases. (Professor Hans Bender, who investigated the Rosenheim poltergeist, emphasizes the importance of 'breaking it gently' to the children who are the unconscious cause of the disturbances, to avoid frightening them.) 'Miss Beauchamp's alter-ego, Sally, was mischievous and given to practical jokes; it is easy to imagine a disembodied Sally behaving exactly like the Rosenheim poltergeist.

  I was intrigued when the producer of the programmes, Anne Owen told me that she had been through a period when she could predict the future. Before a concert with a celebrated cellist, she had a premonition that he would break a string and asked the producer what they should do if this happened; he dismissed it as unlikely. But the string broke eight minutes before the end of the concert. (The cellist, hearing about her prediction, jumped to the conclusion that she had somehow made it happen, and refused to speak to her.) At a race meeting with her husband and some friends, she suddenly knew with certainty which horse would win the next race. Everyone rushed off and backed the hone, which won. But her husband had somehow mis-heard her and put the money on the wrong horse. Her conclusion was that such powers cannot be used for one's own profit. The number of famous psychics and 'occultists' who have died in poverty seems to bear out that judgment.

  I found myself looking around for evidence that might link powers of prediction with my 'ladder of selves' theory. Dowsers have told me that the pendulum can answer questions about the future, and I have seen convincing evidence that this is true; but dowsers rely on the divining rod or pendulum, not upon some mystical illumination. Then I came across Alan Vaughan's book, Patterns of Prophecy, and found the example I was looking for. Vaughan describes how, in 1965, he bought an ouija board to amuse a friend who was convalescing. When the radio announced the death of newspaper columnist Dorothy Kilgallen from a heart attack, they asked the board if this was correct; the board replied that she had died of poison. Ten days later, an inquest revealed this to be true.

  One of the 'spirits' who made contact through the board identified herself as the wife of a Nantucket sea captain; she was called Nada. 'Then, both to my fascination and fear, "Nada" got inside of my head. I could hear her voice repeating the same phrases over and over again.' Asked about this, the board replied: 'Awful consequences—possession.'

  In the presence of a friend who understood such matters, another spirit called 'Z' made Vaughan write out the message: 'Each of us has a spirit while living. Do not meddle with the spirits of the dead.'

  As I wrote out this message [writes Vaughan] I began to feel an energy rising up in my body and entering my brain. It pushed out both 'Nada' and 'Z'. My friends noted that my face, which had been white and pinched, suddenly flooded with colour. I felt a tremendous sense of elation and physical wellbeing. The energy grew stronger and seemed to extend beyond my body. My mind seemed to race in some extended dimension that knew no confines of time or space. For the first time, I began to sense what was going on in other people's minds, and, to my astonishment, I began to sense the future through some kind of extended awareness . . .

  Vaughan's brief glimpse of 'extended powers' led him to embark on a programme of research into powers of 'prevision', whose results are described later in the book.

  The phrase 'a tremendous sense of elation and wellbeing' brings to mind Nietzsche's 'indescribable sense of wellbeing and zest' and Bennett's 'influx of an immense power'. Here, then, we have a case in which the orgasmic upsurge of energy not only brings the typical sense of power and illumination, but also seems to trigger psychic faculties—telepathy and knowledge of the future.

  This raises an interesting point. Most recorded instances of telepathy and prevision have taken place without the surge of heightened consciousness. The same goes for mediumship, thaumaturgy, second sight, telekinesis and the rest. So it would seem that if such powers depend upon our 'higher centres', then there are two ways of establishing contact: either clambering up the ladder, or through some form of short circuit that connects the higher self and the everyday self without the everyday self being aware of it. The first is Gurdjieffs way, the second Rasputin's.

  Faculty X seems to be a combination of the two: a flash of extended awareness without the surge of energy. Proust's famous flash of 'remembrance of things past' occurred when he was tasting a cake dipped in tea and was suddenly made aware of the reality of his childhood. He writes: '. . . 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.' William James, describing a similar experience, also says that it began when he was suddenly reminded of a past experience, and that this 'developed into something further . . . this in turn into something further still, and so on, until the process faded out, leaving me amazed at the sudden vision of increasing ranges of distant fact. . .' James makes it sound almost as if he had been snatched into the air, to a height where he could see reality spread out panoramically below him. Something similar happened to the historian Arnold Toynbee when he sat in the ruined citadel of Mistra and had a
sudden vision of the reality of the day it was destroyed by barbarians; the experience produced a sense of history as a panorama, and led to the writing of A Study of History. Gibbon's Decline and Fall seems to owe its origin to the same kind of experience in the Capitol.

  Perhaps the most interesting thing about these experiences is the sense of security, the feeling that 'all is well'. Which brings us back squarely to the central problem, not only of this book, but of human existence itself. A sense of security is essential to all conscious life. The happiest moments of childhood are filled with it; John Betjeman writes about a security that 'holds me as I drift to dreamland, safe inside my slumberwear'. Life gradually erodes this blissful security—but not the belief that security is achievable. This is why we work and scheme and buy houses on mortgage and furniture on hire-purchase; this is why we open savings accounts and accumulate possessions. And although we know about earthquakes and disasters and sudden death, the world around us still has a comforting air of permanence; if I fall asleep watching television, everything is still going on as usual when I wake up.

  But then, if we are honest, we have to admit there is something wrong with this basic assumption. The child views the universe from the security of his mother's arms, and things look pleasantly reasonable. It may be puzzling, of course, but all puzzles can be solved. And puzzles are the grown-ups' problem. Some people manage to pass their whole lives in this undisturbed state of mind. Others become aware that life is not as rosy as it looks. People die of disease or accident, or of old age after years of slow decay. Worse still, there seems to be something fundamentally queer about the universe. It contradicts our assumption that there are no questions without answers. The greatest questions are not only unanswered; they seem to be unanswerable. We cannot form even the concept of an answer to the question, 'When did the universe begin?' or, 'Where does it end?' On earth, everything has a beginning and end; space and time seem to have neither. The same riddle confronts me when I think about myself. My birth certificate tells me I had a beginning; but the idea violates my sense of logic, so that I am naturally inclined to think of something before my birth: perhaps a disembodied existence in some kind of heaven, or a whole series of previous incarnations. I also know from observation that I shall die in due course. I can imagine simply 'fading out', because it happens to me every night in bed; yet again, my logic rejects the idea of extinction. It demands some kind of continuation.