The Essential Colin Wilson

by Colin Wilson

  The right seems essentially to look inward. It is concerned with patterns, with over-all meanings and values. It is the part of us that appreciates music and poetry and beautiful scenery. And for this, it needs to be left alone. If the left starts muttering 'Do hurry up,' the right cannot function properly: if the phone keeps on ringing or your husband—or wife—keeps on nagging, the right quickly gives up. It is basically shy and easily discouraged. The right has very little sense of time—although it has quite enough for its purposes. (It can, for example, wake you up at precisely a quarter past seven in the morning . . . ) It needs to be allowed to amble along comfortably at its own pace.

  But the real business of the right seems to be to add a dimension of meaning to our lives. When I have finished my day's writing, at about five in the afternoon, I take a hot bath, then pour myself a glass of white wine and switch on the evening news. Then, at six fifteen or so, I pour another glass of wine, and put on a gramophone record, and play myself music until dinner is ready. If I am successful, the 'verbal me' relaxes and goes off duty, and another aspect of me begins to voyage in the world of music. 'Verbal me' retires quietly to a corner and dozes, and 'I' become a being with a completely different kind of awareness—for example, with a strong sense of the reality of history, of the fact that Mozart and Beethoven and Schubert really existed. During the day, when I am writing, I can say Mozart existed, yet in an odd sense, I don't believe it. I don't believe it even though it's true.

  This change in my 'centre of gravity' from left to right is an interesting phenomenon. My usual sense of identity involves my ego, my conscious 'me'. If I become deeply absorbed in music ('Happiness is absorption' said T. E. Lawrence), I become aware that this conscious ego is not really me. He is only the front-man, only a complicated series of responses. The 'real me' seems to be a voiceless observer who lives behind the scenes of everyday consciousness. Whether this is the genuine 'real me' is anybody's guess, for I can easily imagine a yet further retreat 'inside' myself, to a level where non-verbal me would also seem to be a particular set of responses.

  This experience of non-verbal me makes me aware that my so-called ego is not me. So, for example, I may be reacting to some annoyance or crisis with the appropriate anger or anxiety, while another level of me looks on, totally uninvolved. When I was young, this self-division worried me, since it seemed to suggest that 'I' am an illusion. Now I regard this recognition that 'I' am an illusion as a piece of good news, since it makes me aware that my real existence is to be found on a deeper level, and that my main purpose in life should be to learn to relax into that deeper level, while maintaining my faculty of analysis and verbalization.

  As I expounded my 'alternative theory of neurosis' in my book on Reich—a theory, oddly enough, which is by no means in opposition to Reich's own brand of Freudianism—it struck me that this left-brain ego seems to be emerging as something of a villain. (This, of course, is the view held by D. H. Lawrence, who called it 'head consciousness'; Reich is also basically a Lawrentian.) In civilized man, it can usually be found in the role of nagging housewife, interrupting his spontaneity, questioning his intuitions, filling him with self-doubt and inner conflict. To put it crudely, you could say it is as if you had Bertrand Russell in one side of your head and D. H. Lawrence (or Walt Whitman) in the other; and the result is non-stop hostility.

  But the more I thought about it, the more I saw that this view is fundamentally mistaken. 'Head consciousness'—dominance of the left-brain ego—is the cause of many of the problems of modern man. Yet the answer is not to hand over full control to the 'intuitive self. Consider, for example, what happens in 'stage fright'. The rational-self is something of a hysteric; faced with any important problem, it is likely to over-react. It does this when you are confronted with a large audience and proceeds to 'interfere'. The familiar negative-feedback mechanism occurs, and you find yourself blushing and stammering. And yet, every great actor will tell you that some degree of nervousness is essential to a great performance—as distinguished from a merely good one. Instead of 'interfering', it stimulates the two 'selves' to a new level of co-operation. The actor who is completely at his ease, completely relaxed, seldom turns in more than a workmanlike performance.

  And now it should be possible to grasp the real importance of the left-ego. It is, and is intended to be, the controller. Consider what happens in hypnosis. The subject is apparently reduced to sleep; yet an EEC machine shows that he is awake. What happens, I would suggest, is that the hypnotist has put the left-brain to sleep, while the right remains awake. (The nature of hypnosis is still not understood; this is my own theory.) An interesting thing now happens. The subject is capable of more remarkable feats in the hypnotic state than when normally awake. The hypnotist might, for example, tell him that he will now lie with his shoulders on one chair and his legs on another, while a strong man will stand on his stomach; yet he will remain as rigid as a board. And, incredibly, the subject does precisely that. This is, of course, the phenomenon that Charcot observed—the amazing powers of that 'other self', when not constrained and undermined by the left brain. Then why can the subject not perform such feats when in his conscious state? Because he doesn't believe he can. When the hypnotist tells the 'other self' to perform some unusual feat, he is the voice of authority, and the other self responds like a well-trained soldier. Its own left-ego lacks that authority; it is manifestly nervous and unsure of itself. If, in fact, the left-ego could somehow generate that authority, the powers it could release might well be described as superhuman.

  Lawrence, then, was mistaken. It is not true that head-consciousness has become too dominant. It is not dominant enough.

  The trouble lies not in the dominance of one side or the other, but in the failure of cooperation between the two. Think of a man defusing an unexploded bomb. The conscious ego, the 'look out', is totally in control; yet his concentration involves a high degree of 'inwardness'. His two egos are now like the two faces of Janus, one looking outward, the other inward, yet each perfectly aware of the other's activities. Moreover, the right is involved in its proper function of supplying energy, while the left makes use of that energy. There is no leakage.

  Which makes us immediately aware that one of the main problems of everyday life is a constant energy leakage, as if the connection between your hosepipe and the garden tap was loose, allowing half the water to escape in the form of spray around the tap. If I am deeply absorbed in some task, there is a steady flow of effectively-utilized energy. But if I am tense or nervous, or simply in too much of a hurry (a left-brain characteristic), half the energy leaks away. In people suffering from anxiety neurosis—what used to be called neurasthenia—inner tension and self-mistrust have reached such a pitch that 90 per cent of the energy gets lost, and the slightest effort exhausts the patient.

  And who is to blame? Again, the left-brain ego. He, so to speak, clamps the hosepipe to the tap and tightens the link. When deeply intent on some serious purpose, or galvanized by emergency, he makes sure there is a good seal, and little energy gets wasted: But in responding to everyday problems, he has become lazy and inefficient, so half the energy gets lost.

  Again, the solution is quite clear: increased control on the part of the left-brain ego. It is true that learning to stop worrying, to stop over-reacting to trivialities, is important; the psychiatrist tells his obsessive patient 'Relax and let it all hang out'. Yet the real problem with such people is not too much control, but too little. There is plenty of anxiety—far too much of it. But not enough deliberate, conscious effort.

  One of our chief problems is that what we tend to substitute for effort is stimulus. Apart from the commands that emanate from the left-ego, the 'other self' is trained to respond to various stimuli, all kinds of stimuli from food and alcohol and sex to music and beautiful scenery. If ten months of hard work at the office have left me over-tired, bored, mechanical, then I take a holiday and allow a new set of stimuli to set up a positive feedback with my 'ot
her self'. This is, in fact, a confession that the 'I', the left-ego, has abnegated control, and is relying on external stimuli to arouse its companion to cooperation. Yet if you were to tell such a person that a greater effort of self-control would do him more good in the long run than a holiday, he would be horrified, for it seems to him that such an effort might well cause him to 'snap'. He would require a high degree of insight to recognize that greater ego-control does not mean simply 'pushing himself' harder while remaining in the same negative frame of mind . . .

  This attempt to use 'stimuli' in the place of control is perhaps our most dangerous human characteristic. Just about every major human ill can be traced to it. A bored child switches on television. A bored adult lights another cigarette or pours himself a stiff drink. The bored Don Juan looks around for another girl to seduce. Each new challenge arouses the automatic response of the 'other self', which responds with a flood of vital energy. And this is by no means a modern ailment. Men have always used war and conquest as a stimulant. That sonnet of Rupert Brooke—of thanksgiving for the outbreak of the First World War—is one of the saddest confessions of civilized man:

  Now God be thanked, Who has matched us with His hour,

  And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

  With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

  To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

  Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary . . .

  In other words, thank God for the war, which has rescued me from my own sense of inadequacy. But at least Brooke had some excuse; intelligent adolescents are notoriously subject to self-division. Grown men should know better.

  The real lesson is that if we knew enough about ourselves, and if the conscious ego could achieve the necessary 'authority', we wouldn't need these dangerous stimuli. It should be totally unnecessary, for example, to call in a hypnotist to stop you from smoking: this is like calling in the man from next door to chastise your children.

  Clearly, the implications of this insight are of tremendous importance. Yet I must again emphasize that I am not beingdogmatic about its physiological aspect. A first, I spent a great deal of time reading works on brain physiology, in an attempt to place it all on a more solid foundation. Is there, for example, some known connection between the right cerebral hemisphere and the cerebellum and limbic region? But the textbooks were vague and sometimes self-contradictory: and when I asked Ornstein personally, he said I might as well ask whether there is a connection between the right hemisphere and the big toe. It seems fairly clear that the state of our knowledge of the brain is about equivalent to, say, the ancient Egyptian knowledge of anatomy. At which point, it struck me that this is unimportant. What I learned of the functions of the right and left brain from reading Sperry, Gazzaniga and the rest had merely made me clearly conscious of certain aspects of inner-being that are perfectly obvious to self-observation. I discovered, for example, that that remarkable man Gurdjieff knew all about these 'two selves' (he called them essence and personality) as long ago as 1920, and even told a London audience that they are located in different parts of the brain. Having spent more than a year looking into this interesting matter, I am fairly firmly convinced that 'essence and personality' do correspond pretty accurately to the right and left hemispheres. But it hardly matters. What matters is the insight into the functioning if the 'two selves'.

  And this, I think, is very important indeed—so much so that the above comments have hardly touched on its implications. The most exciting of these, for me at any rate, is the notion that the powers of that 'other self' are far greater than we realize, and yet that they might nevertheless be accessible to conscious control.

  Some of the implications, I agree, look gloomy, seeming to confirm the grumpiest criticisms of Jean Jacques Rousseau, D. H. Lawrence, and others who feel that civilization is sending us to hell by the shortest route. But this is a superficial view. In fact, it would be impossible to get gloomier than Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, based on the Frankenstein's monster view of the unconscious. The left-right view of the human entity gives altogether firmer grounds for optimism about man's future. It suggests that our real trouble is not that we are at the mercy of sinister dark forces, but that we are enfeebled by a completely unjustified lack of self-confidence. The problem lies in my attitude towards myself, my tendency to premature defeat, my failure to grasp that I am, in fact, in control. I could be compared to an excellent army with incompetent and inexperienced officers. And this is a far better situation than an army with good officers and hopeless soldiers. Inexperience is fairly easy to cure. Moreover, the thought of inexperienced officers—reminding us of the young officers at the beginning of War and Peace—makes us aware that human beings are young and inexperienced in the evolutionary sense, and that therefore these problems are—with luck—little more than teething pains.

  For me, the interesting question is how these insights can be used. If I am correct, this theory of the relation between right and left provides a new—empirical—foundation for psychology, and makes most of the theories of earlier psychologists—Freud, Jung, Adler et al.—redundant. That sounds such an enormous claim that even I feel startled by it, and find myself wondering if I have got it wrong somewhere. Yet the more I re-examine the question, the more convinced I become that the insight is basically valid. The unconscious may be mysterious, but it is not alien or hostile.

  I soon became convinced that if the theory is correct, then certain consequences should follow. For example, a deliberate and conscious effort of control, based upon a change of attitude, ought to bring about an immediate change in the quality of consciousness. To use my earlier simile; if we take the trouble to tighten the link between the tap and the hosepipe so that leakage becomes minimal, then our available water pressure—vital energy—ought to rise dramatically. A few days of constant effort quickly demonstrated that this is so. I have spent my life examining this question of intensity of consciousness and how to achieve it—as my books, from The Outsider onward, make clear.

  ACTIVE IMAGINATION

  From The Lord of the Underworld—Jung and the Twentieth Century, 1984

  Active imagination is certainly one of the most interesting and exciting of all Jung's ideas. But those who wish to learn more about it will have a frustrating time searching through the Collected Works; the General Index lists a few dozen references, but most of these turn out to be merely passing mentions. The earliest—and perhaps most complete—description of the method occurs in the essay on 'The Transcendent Function', written in 1916; yet here Jung does not even mention it by name. Moreover, he left the essay in his files until someone asked him for a contribution to a student magazine in 1957. It appears in Volume Eight of the Collected Works, together with a preliminary warning: 'The method is . . . not without its dangers, and should, if possible, not be employed except under expert supervision.'

  Yet if the method is as effective as Jung claims—in his autobiography—then such a danger should not be taken too seriously. After all, if active imagination really works, then Jung has solved a problem that tormented so many of the 'outsiders' of the nineteenth century, and should have provided mankind with a vital key to its future evolution. In a letter of 1871 Rimbaud wrote about the poet's need to induce visions: 'I say that one must be a visionary—that one must make oneself a VISIONARY.' He goes on: 'The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness, he seeks himself . . . ' And in A Season in Hell, he claims to have succeeded in inducing this derangement: 'I accustomed myself to simple hallucination: I really saw a mosque in place of a factory, angels practising on drums, coaches on the roads of the sky; a drawing room at the bottom of a lake: monsters, mysteries . . . '

  But when expressed in this form, we can see that it is basically the old romantic craving for wonders, marvels and ecstasies, the craving expressed in the very title of Poe's Tales
of Mystery and Imagination. We find it in the dim, misty landscapes of Novalis and Tieck, in the grotesqueries of Hoffmann and Jean Paul, in the horrors of Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu, in the courtly day-dreams of the Pre-Raphaelites, in Aubrey Beardsley's erotic imagery (and it was Beardsley who outraged readers of the Yellow Book with the image of a grand piano in a field) and in the shock tactics of the surrealists and the Dadaists. It all seems to amount to Yeats's attempt to escape the 'foul rag and bone shop of the heart' with a kind of ladder of wishful thinking. Clearly, if Jung has really created a usable technique for 'making oneself a visionary' and seeing angels practising on drums and drawing rooms at the bottom of a lake, then this alone would qualify him as one of the most significant figures of our century.

  It was in the autobiography that Jung made clear for the first time how he came to recognize the existence of active imagination: how the break with Freud brought him to the verge of total nervous collapse, and so allowed him a glimpse of the delusions suffered by psychotic patients. It was fortunate for Jung that the vision of Europe drowned in blood came true in the following year, bringing the recognition that an 'illusion' is not necessarily untrue. 'I see too deep and too much' says the 'Outsider' hero of Barbusse's L'Enfer, and this was precisely what was happening to Jung.

  When the mind is under this kind of severe stress, its natural tendency is to put up frantic resistance. Jung recognized that he was in the same position as Nietzsche and Hölderlin, and that, like them, he might lose his sanity; the result was a grim determination not to 'let go'. Then, in December 1913, sitting at his desk in a state of turmoil and pessimism, he made the momentous decision to 'let go' and see what happened. The result was not total breakdown: it was the astonished recognition that the force that had been trying to make him let go was a stranger inside his own head, and that the stranger was in perfect control of the situation. It was a blinding recognition of the 'hidden ally'. In Hudson's terms, what was happening was that the 'subjective mind' was saying to the 'objective mind': 'Look, for heaven's sake stop struggling to maintain this iron curtain between us, because you're wasting your strength in fighting yourself.' It could be compared to a wife saying to her husband, who is exhausted by driving: 'Get in the back and have a nap while I drive.' Jung was sensible enough to let go of the steering wheel, and the result was the 'waking dream' of the cave with the corpse of Siegfried.