The Essential Colin Wilson

by Colin Wilson

  Just as the body feels healthiest when you are taking plenty of exercise, so the emotions feel healthiest when the will is well exercised. And as soon as the alcoholic recognized this, he instantly ceased to be an alcoholic. In a sense you could say that he changed drugs, and used will instead of alcohol. Now this seems to me to be getting very close to a solution of the problem of 'impoverished reality'.

  Graham Greene stumbled upon another clue, which he describes in an essay called The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard. He describes how, in his teens, his schoolmasters became alarmed because he appeared to dislike sport and sent him to a psychiatrist. After six months of analysis, Greene was much better 'socially adjusted', but found that he was in a state of total depression. He said that everything he looked at appeared to be grey and dull. He could look at some scene which he saw visually to be beautiful but about which he felt nothing whatever. He was in this state of inner-deadness when he discovered in a corner cupboard a revolver belonging to his older brother. He took this on to Berkhamsted Common and played Russian roulette—put one bullet in the chambers, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger, When there just a click, he looked down the barrel and saw that the bullet had now come into position. So he had missed death by just one chamber. He said that he instantly experienced an overwhelming feeling of ecstasy and happiness. He said, 'It was as if a light had been turned on and I suddenly saw that life is infinitely beautiful'.

  I was excited by this story, when I came across it in my early teens, because it shows so clearly what goes wrong with us. When we are bored and tired we are, so to speak, 'spread out'; the will is slack; you are passive, like an exhausted swimmer lying on a beach. The moment Greene pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger, he went into violent tension. And when he heard the click, he relaxed. And that is the essence of the peak experience. It is a tensing of the will, followed by total relaxation. A movement of contraction followed by expansion. Moreover, the relaxation doesn't work unless you become tense first. It is like those handbrakes on old cars, where you have to pull it towards you and tighten it before it can be released.

  Using Greene's insight, I evolved a technique for inducing peak experiences. What I did was this: I would take a pencil and hold it up against a blank wall. I would concentrate intently on the pencil until I saw nothing but the pencil; then I'd let go completely, until I could see the whole background of the wall behind the pencil. Then I would concentrate intently on the pencil again, and then let it go again, and so on. When I had done that about ten times, I would begin to feel a kind of pain behind the eyes. When you feel that pain, press on as hard as you can, because you are almost there. Two or three more times and suddenly you relax totally into the peak experience. And if you do it with total conviction, it always works. Not long ago in Finland, I was explaining this technique to a class, and in the following session I explained to them about Wilhelm Reich's breathing techniques. Reich said that in order to breathe properly you must take a deep breath, then allow it to go out first of all from the chest, then from the stomach, and then finally from the genitals. As Reich made his patients do this, he would say, 'Out, down, through.' I was explaining the Reichian breathing to them as we all lay around on the floor and then, on the spur of the moment, I decided to try and combine it with the 'pencil trick'. Breathing slowly and deeply, we held the pencil up against the ceiling, concentrated intently, and then let go. To my astonishment, the two combined perfectly. Within a few minutes, I felt almost as if I had floated up from the floor towards the ceiling. The curious thing is that the total concentration of the pencil exercise and the total relaxation of the breathing exercise somehow combine in the most peculiar way to produce an instant peak experience. We all lay there quietly for well over half an hour, until I looked at my watch and said, 'Hey! We're missing lunch!'

  But why does it work? I discovered the answer only a few years ago, when I was reading a book about the split-brain experiments of Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. I must admit it came to me as a revelation.

  What it amounts to is this. If you could take off the top of your head and look down on the brain, it would look like a walnut joined together by a kind of bridge. This bridge is called the corpus callosum, or commissure—a block of nerve fibres. In the 1930s it was discovered that severing the commissure would prevent epileptic attacks: it appears to prevent the electrical storm from passing from one side of the brain to the other. Oddly enough, this operation appeared to make no difference whatever to the patient. No one could quite understand why this should be so. Somebody even suggested that the only purpose of the corpus callosum is to stop the brain from sagging in the middle. It wasn't until Roger Sperry began repeating these experiments in the 1950s that he discovered that, in fact, there is a basic difference in split-brain patients. The difference is that you become two people.

  We have known for about a century that the left side of the brain deals with speech, reason, coping with the external world. The right side of the brain deals with pattern recognition and intuition. To put it crudely, the left side is a scientist and the right an artist. For some odd reason, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa—no one knows why. We could also say—I am deliberately oversimplifying—that the left cerebral hemisphere controls the right eye and the right hemisphere controls the left eye. Now if you show a split-brain patient an apple with the left eye and an orange with the right—so that one cannot see what the other is looking at—and ask, 'What have I just shown you?', he will reply, 'An orange'. But if you say, 'Write with your left hand what I have just shown you', he will write, 'Apple'. And if you say, 'What have you just written?', he would reply, 'Apple'. In the same way, a patient who was shown a dirty picture with the right side of her brain blushed. When asked why she was blushing, she said, 'I don't know.' One split-brain patient tried to embrace his wife with his right hand while the left tried to push her away. Another tried to do up his flies with his right hand—connected to the logical half of the brain—while the left tried to undo them. Obviously, the two different sides of the brain had completely different intentions.

  Now you observe that when the patient is asked, 'What have you seen?', it is the left side of the brain that answers the question. In other words, the person you call 'you' lives in the left side of your head. The person who lives over there in the right-hand side is a total stranger. Now you will say that this is obviously untrue because we are not split-brain patients. Yet, in an important sense, we are. Mozart said, for example, that melodies were always walking straight into his head fully formed. What he meant was: melodies were walking out of his right brain into the part of the brain in which he lived. And this is true for all of us. Although we are vaguely aware of the right brain and its activities, we are not closely connected to it. This explains, for example, why you become self-conscious if someone looks over your shoulder when you are writing. When you are engaged in any interesting task, you 'forget yourself' and become absorbed in what you are doing. The left and right brain enter into close collaboration, the right supplying the intuition, the left supplying the mechanical skills. When someone looks over your shoulder, the left becomes 'self-conscious' and promptly loses contact with the right. The flow of meaning stops, and you feel somehow 'stranded' in the present moment. The same thing would happen if you tried to play a piano attending to your fingers. You would play very badly indeed. A good pianist ignores his fingers—he attends from the fingers to the music. Attending to things is a sure way of screwing yourself up. You must attend from them to the meaning.

  I could recognize the same process in my activity as a writer. When I first started writing, I found that trying to capture intuitions on paper seemed to strangle the life out of them. When I went back to look at what I'd written the next morning, it wasn't there anymore. The words seemed dead and lifeless. The meaning had evaporated. I even began to suspect that words are a straightjacket that cripple the intuitions. But I kept on tryi
ng, because that was all there was to do, and eventually I found that I got good at it. One day, I re-read what I'd written the night before, and it was still there. And after that, I recognized that good writing was an interplay between two halves of the brain, very much like a game of tennis. The right produces the insights and the left turns them into words. If the left verbalizes an insight with particular neatness, the right gets excited and says, 'Yes, yes, that's exactly what I meant!' And the left would say, 'Really? Thank you', and would proceed to do it even better. And then suddenly the two of them were working together like a couple of top-class tennis players, or like two lumberjacks at either end of a double-handled saw. States like this are obviously what we call inspiration—and they consist of perfect cooperation between the right and the left.

  Another interesting thing discovered by Sperry is that the left brain works much quicker than the right. The left is the go-getter. It is turned towards the external world: it copes with reality. The right, on the other hand, appears to be turned inwards, towards our inner world. Its business is to supply us with energy, with strength and purpose; hence, of course, the peak experience.

  But because the left is fast and the right is slow, they find some difficulty in reaching a state of empathy. This explains why the peak experiences are relatively rare. The right saunters along slowly with its hands in its pockets; the left walks with a kind of nervous haste. The result is that there is soon a large gap between them and they can no longer hear one another. There seem to be two ways of getting the two halves to work at the same speed. One is to make the left go slower, the other is to make the right go faster. We can make the left go slower by meditation and relaxation. We can make the right go faster by deliberately working ourselves into a state of excitement—this is the aim of African drumming or the repetitious beat of pop music.

  Now when this happens you can compare the situation to two trains running on parallel tracks that are suddenly running side by side, so that the people can lean out of the windows and talk to one another. Here you can see we are beginning to grasp the mechanics of the peak experience.

  Our basic problem, as you can see, is that the 'you' who lives in the left side of the brain is not even aware that it has this immensely powerful co-worker. You notice this particularly when you feel tense and anxious: the more anxious you become, the more the 'you' tends to take over, and the more it becomes separated from the source of power in the right brain. The more anxious we become, the weaker we become. You can see why I say that we are, in a factual sense, all split-brain patients. In the peak experiences, or those curious moments of total happiness and relaxation, we simply recognize that we have a powerful supporter, a companion who can take half the work from our shoulders.

  For here is the important point: the right half of the brain is the creator of energy. He is the one who keeps us supplied with energy and vitality. You could compare the left and right halves to Laurel and Hardy in the old films. The left brain is Ollie, the fat one and the leader of the two. The right brain is much more vague and easy-going—that's Stan. When you wake up on a dull Monday morning, 'you' wake up—that is, Ollie wakes up—and he looks out of the window and thinks, 'Oh God, it's Monday and it's raining . . . ' Stan overhears him and Stan is, unfortunately, immensely suggestible. So he promptly sinks into depression. 'Oh God, it's Monday and it's raining . . .' For the trouble with Stan is that he is inclined to over-react. When Ollie is cheerful, Stan is delighted, when Ollie is gloomy, Stan is almost suicidal. But since Stan is in charge of the energy supply, he stops sending up energy when he feels depressed. So when Ollie goes down to breakfast, he feels curiously low and depressed. So he cuts himself while shaving, and trips on the pavement and drops his umbrella, and thinks, 'This is just one of those days when everything goes wrong . . . ' And again Stan overhears him and plunges into even deeper gloom. In short, you will have what you might call a negative feedback situation, in which the misery of one keeps reinforcing the misery of the other.

  Conversely, when a child wakes up on Christmas morning, his 'Ollie' says, 'Marvellous, it's Christmas!' And from then on, everything reinforces his feeling of delight and optimism: the decorations on the Christmas tree, the smell of cooking, the Christmas music on the radio . . . And both Stan and Ollie finally relax into such a state of trustful happiness that life seems totally transformed. Suddenly, everything is marvellous, and all the problems of yesterday appear trivial and quite unimportant. If we could cling on to this state of mind, human beings would become gods within the next century. And the key undoubtedly lies in the 'feedback mechanism' between Stan and Ollie.

  Of course, it is true that there are drugs that will induce this state of intensified consciousness: Thomas De Quincey did it with laudanum. Yet neither alcohol nor drugs are a solution. Their basic effect is to produce a kind of animal consciousness. If you could get inside the skin of a cow or a dog, you would feel just as if you'd had three or four large whiskies. The world would seem pleasantly warm and real. They probably experience permanently the state that we experience only occasionally on beautifully spring mornings. You could say that animals are permanently drunk.

  This, incidentally, could be the reason that animals appear to have certain paranormal powers—for example, second-sight. The wife of the Scottish poet Hugh McDiarmid told me that she always knew when he was coming back from a long journey because the dog would go and sit at the end of the lane waiting for him a couple of days before he arrived. Human beings can also achieve these powers when they relax completely; I have noticed this again and again in myself. I am totally ESP-thick until I am either very relaxed or very excited, and when that happens, the two halves are obviously in collaboration and my right begins to tell me the answers. Three or four years ago, I discovered to my astonishment that I could dowse. When a friend offered me a dowsing rod, I told him these things never work for me. He asked me to show him how I held it, and then said, 'You are holding it the wrong way. Twist the two ends in your hands so that there's a spring on the rod.' I did what he said, and walked towards a standing stone in the circle called the Merry Maidens. To my astonishment, the rod suddenly shot up. I was convinced that I had done it accidentally by twisting it, so I walked towards the next one—and it shot up again. Every tine I went between the standing stones the dowsing rod twisted in my hands. It was quite obvious that something inside me was reacting to something in the ground or in the stones, but I, who live in my left brain, could feel nothing whatever. What was happening, I suspect, was that my muscles were tensing unconsciously—the striped muscles that are in the control of the right brain. The message was coming from the standing stones into my right brain, and the right brain was telling me that I was near something interesting by causing my muscles to convulse.

  This seems to be confirmed by an experiment devised by Sperry. He tried flashing red and green lights at random into the blind eye—the left eye—of split-brain patients, and would ask, 'What colour have you just seen?' Of course, the split-brain patient had no idea. But if he was allowed a second guess he would always get it right, because if he said 'red' and the colour was actually green, he'd convulse as if someone had kicked him under the table. The right brain had heard the wrong guess, and was telling him so by making his muscles convulse—as in dowsing.

  All this is to say that we have inside us—as Plato declared—a being who knows far more than we do, and who is perfectly willing to tell us. He is also perfectly willing to send us up any amount of energy; for where energy is concerned, he is the quartermaster whose job is to keep us supplied. Then why doesn't he always do so? Because, more often than not, the telephone line between the two halves is out of order. Tension isolates us in the left brain and separates us from the other half.

  There is, of course, another side to this problem. When a man is drunk, he cannot insert the key into the keyhole. He is in a pleasant state of right-brain relaxation—he may even have a beautiful bird's-eye view of the universe—but his ability
to concentrate microscopically on details no longer works. We can pay for right-brain relaxation with a certain loss of precision and accuracy, just as we pay for left-brain precision with a loss of right-brain relaxation. It is as if all of us had a telescope attached to one eye and a microscope to the other—the aim being to see into the distance and to be able to study things close-up. But when you look through a microscope, you close one eye. We tend to go around with one eye permanently closed, so we lose our distance-vision. Life becomes a kind of permanent worm's-eye view, an endless, boring close-upness, as unsatisfactory as going into a picture gallery and being forced to peer at all the pictures with your nose only an inch from the canvas. It is only in those curious moments of peak experience that we open both eyes and suddenly can see into the distance as well as what it is in front of our noses. On these occasions, we see the near and the far simultaneously.

  L. H. Myers wrote a novel called The Near and theFar which expresses this very precisely. At the beginning of the novel, the young Prince Jali has travelled over the desert with his father to some congress of princes called by Akbar the Great. Standing on the battlements of Akbar's castle, he looks out over the desert and thinks, 'What a pity that the desert looks so beautiful and feels so exhausting to walk over.' It is as if there were two deserts, one of which is a glory to the eye and the other one a weariness to the foot. Isn't it a pity that we are unable to grasp the mystery and delight of the 'far'? Unfortunately, if you tried to grasp the ecstasy of the distance by rushing downstairs and out of doors, you would just get your shoes full of sand. It appears, Myers said, to be impossible to reconcile the near and the far.

  Well, we can see that it is not. This is what the two halves of the brain were intended to do. When they work together, we can grasp the near and the far simultaneously.