The Essential Colin Wilson

by Colin Wilson

  They have another purpose which is even more interesting. In a book called The Occult, I wrote about what I called 'Faculty X'. In his Study of History, Arnold Toynbee described the experience that led him to begin writing the book. He had been climbing Mount Taygetus in Greece, and was sitting on the ruined walls of the citadel of Mystra, staring out over the plain of Sparta, when suddenly it struck him like a revelation that a few hundred years ago a hoard of barbarians had poured over that wall and destroyed the town, and that ever since then it had been a ruin. This realization was so powerful that he could almost see the barbarians clambering over the wall. Now this sudden curious sense of total reality is what I call Faculty X. Chesterton once said that we say thank you when someone passes us the salt, but we don't really mean it. We say the earth is round, but we don't really mean it, even though it is true. But when the astronauts went into space, they could say 'the earth is round' and mean it. That is Faculty X. When Proust tasted a biscuit dipped in tea, it filled him with a curious feeling of delight as it flooded him with memories of his childhood. He wrote, 'I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.' And when he tried to remember why it had caused him such pleasure, he recalled that when he was a child in Combray, his aunt had always given him a cake dipped in her herb tea when he went to see her, and this taste had suddenly revived the whole of his childhood. That is to say, a moment before he tasted the madeleine, he could say, 'Yes, I was a child in Combray', but he wouldn't have meant it. As soon as he tasted the madeleine he could taste it and mean it: Faculty X.

  We can see what has happened. The unconscious part of the brain—and the right appears to be the gateway to the unconscious—has stored up memories of everything that has ever happened to us. But this library of tape recordings is not accessible to you unless you can relax sufficiently to somehow clear the telephone line. Or, to use my other analogy, get the two trains running at the same speed.

  As absurd as it sounds, the reason we have two identical halves in the brain is so that we can be in two different places at the same time. We should be capable of being in the present and somewhere else. When we are stranded in the present, we lose all sense of perspective. We become lost in mere material reality. Our powers remain blocked and passive until we can achieve that double glimpse of the near and the far. In these moments we cease to be trapped in the worm's-eye view and a bird's-eye view.

  And because we are almost permanently trapped in a worm's-eye view, our instinctive feelings about the world tend to be negative. Normal consciousness can be compared to those nightmares when we try to run, but our legs seem too heavy. It is only in those moments of double-consciousness, the near and the far, that we seem to contact some source of power inside ourselves. Hence Proust's comment: 'I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.' The underpinning of everyday consciousness is basically negative.

  I can recall sitting in a cinema as a child, and as the film ended suddenly realizing that I was feeling intensely happy and optimistic. I thought, 'Why am I feeling so happy?' and then remembered, 'Of course, we broke up from school today, and it's the beginning of the August holiday.' I was feeling happy, and yet the happiness had retreated into my subconscious mind. Not, please note, into the unconscious—only into that twilight realm between consciousness and the unconscious: the subconscious. You could compare these states of subconscious optimism to a kind of underfloor lighting which creates a kind of rosy glow and makes us feel happy and relaxed. The playwright Granville Barker called it: 'The secret life'. Healthy people have their underfloor lighting permanently switched on—which is why they find it so easy to have peak experiences. But consider again Graham Greene's experience of Russian roulette. When he pulled the trigger and there was just a click, 'It was as if a light had been turned on and I saw that all life was infinitely beautiful.' He had switched on his underfloor lighting by deliberately inducing a crisis.

  In the same way, I had an old friend who told me that his dog was subject to fits of depression. One day, he accidentally locked the dog in the cupboard and when it came out, it was bouncing with joy. From then on, whenever the dog became depressed, he would lock it in the cupboard for five minutes, and it would always emerge full of delight.

  You see the absurdity? We feel bored or depressed, or just indifferent. A crisis presents itself and fills us with alarm. Then the crisis disappears, so the situation is basically the same as it was before the crisis presented itself. And yet we are now filled with a sense of delight. Moreover, this is not just a 'feeling'. We can see, now the crisis has vanished, that we have a thousand reasons for being glad to be alive. It is as if normal consciousness was somehow blinkered, like a blinkered horse. And crisis tears off the blinkers.

  This is the absurd paradox of human existence. Man knows what he doesn't want far more clearly than he knows what he does want. As Fichte says: 'To be free is nothing; to become free is heaven.' There is something preposterous about this. It is like buying an expensive car, and discovering that it will do 90 miles an hour in reverse and only 10 miles an hour going forward. Nature seems to have made some kind of basic error in the human design.

  Camus makes the same point in his novel L'Etranger. His hero Meursault, who has gone through the novel in a state of bored indifference, suddenly wakes up when he is on the point of death, about to be hanged for a murder he did not commit. As the priest tries to persuade him to repent, he suddenly loses his temper and shakes him until his teeth rattle. The result of this discharge of emotion is a sense of immense relaxation and happiness—a feeling of oneness with the universe. He makes the curious statement: 'I realized that I had been happy and I was happy still.' Is it possible to be happy and not to know it? Sperry discovered the answer to that question. It is perfectly possible for one side of the brain not to know what the other is feeling. But real happiness, such as Meursault experiences at the end of the novel, only happens when the left and right sides of the brain both feel the same thing.

  The director of the BBC's music programme, Hans Keller, once described how, when he was in Germany in the 1930s and Jews were being put into concentration camps, he swore, 'If only I could get out of Germany alive I promise that I would never be unhappy for the rest of my life.' And, to a man whose life was in danger, it would seem obvious that it would be so easy to keep that promise. All he would have to do is to remember what it was like to expect to be arrested and thrown into a concentration camp.

  In the same way, Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, says, when he thinks he is going to be arrested and executed for murder, 'If I had to stand on a narrow ledge for ever and ever, in eternal darkness and eternal tempest, I would rather do that than die at once.' But what would he do on his narrow ledge? It is difficult to put into words, yet everyone of us can see the answer. Dr Johnson said that when a man is to be hanged in the morning, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. When the mind is totally concentrated, full of a deep sense of purpose, the right and left brain suddenly begin to work in concert, and consciousness is transformed. Raskolnikov feels that he could stand on a narrow ledge for all eternity because he has the world inside his brain. He is like a man with the whole British Museum library inside his head. And we somehow know instinctively that this library is accessible to us when we can galvanize ourselves into a sense of urgency.

  What we are now speaking about is what the Buddha meant by enlightenment. We have nearly translated this into Western terms. We are talking, in other words, about religion. Whenever we are able to relax and see life from a bird's-eye view, we recognize that we are happy and that life is intensely beautiful. This never fails to happen. Any crisis, any stimulus, will release that handbrake inside us, and enable us to go into deep relaxation and the peak experience.

  Why then can we not do it except by dangerous expedients like Russian roulette or alcohol or drugs? The problem, we can see, lies in the underfloor lighting. When it is switched off, life is like a dull Sunday afternoon. Let me remind you again of Schumacher's wo
rds. 'We see not simply with our eyes but a great part of our mental equipment is well, and since this mental equipment varies greatly from person to person, there are inevitably many things that some people can see and others can't. In other words, for which some people are adequate and others not. When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level of the object of knowledge the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.' You could compare this impoverished view of reality to someone who went into a picture gallery lit only by dim lights, and who insists that he can see the pictures perfectly well. And so, in a sense, he can—in the sense of being able to describe any one of them. Yet if someone raised the blinds and let in the sunlight, he will suddenly recognize that he was not seeing the pictures. He was only half-seeing them.

  And now, I think, we can begin to see our way towards the solution. At least, we have now started to define our terms fairly clearly. We know that everyday consciousness is narrow because it is restricted to left-brain awareness. It lacks that third dimension which is added by right-brain participation. Because we easily slip into boredom, our subconscious premises tend to be negative. We feel the world is basically rather a dull place. Sudden crisis has the effect of shaking the mind awake, and making us realize that the world is full of infinite potential. We were seeing the pictures with the blinds drawn.

  If only we could clearly recognize this, if we could say it to ourselves again and again until we know it to be true, we could gradually reverse this negative assumption that underlies consciousness. In short, what we must do is to reprogramme our underftoor lighting.

  In the 1890s, an American newspaper editor called Thomson J. Hudson became fascinated by hypnosis, and went on to write a classic book called The Law of Psychic Phenomena. His interest seems to have begun when he witnessed a hypnotic session in which a rather commonplace young man was placed in a trance by a professor of physiology. The young man was a Greek scholar and the professor pointed to an empty chair and said, 'Allow me to introduce you to Socrates.' The young man bowed reverently to the empty chair. The professor told him that he could ask Socrates any questions he liked—adding that as Socrates was a spirit, the rest of them could not hear him. He asked the young man to repeat aloud what Socrates said. The young man proceeded to ask Socrates various questions, and then repeated his answers, which were so brilliant and apposite that some people present thought that perhaps the spirit of Socrates really was sitting in the chair. After Socrates, they introduced him to various other modern philosophers, and in each case the answers formed a brilliant and self-consistent system of philosophy.

  What was happening, of course, is what happens when we dream that we are composing a piece of music, and actually hear magnificent music in our sleep. The right brain seems to have this capacity for sheer creativity.

  Hudson observed many such cases, and concluded that we have two people living inside our heads—this was in 1893—which he called the objective mind and the subjective mind. The objective mind looks out towards the external world and copes with everyday reality—in other words, the left brain. The subjective mind looks inward towards our inner being, and is in charge of our intuitions and our vital energy—in other words, the right brain. The subjective mind, said Hudson, is far more powerful than the objective mind. Under hypnosis, the objective mind is put to sleep, which explains why people become capable of far more under hypnosis than when they are awake. An old trick of stage hypnotists was to tell someone that he would become as stiff as a board, and that when he was placed between two chairs, with his head on one and his feet on the other, two men would jump up and down on his stomach without making him bend in the middle. And of course, he was able to do it. Yet it would have been totally impossible if he was awake. In other words, his 'subjective mind'—or right brain—could make him do extraordinary things under the orders of the hypnotist, and yet would not do them under the orders of his own left brain. Why not? Because the right brain believes the hypnotist, but it doesn't believe your left brain. If your left brain told it that it was going to lie between two chairs and support the weight of two men, it would sense the left brain's lack of confidence, and feel totally undermined.

  The astonishing conclusion is that what is wrong with us is lack of 'left-brain confidence'. To our generation, this sounds an appalling heresy. D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller have told us again and again that 'head consciousness' is dangerous and stupid and that we ought to trust the 'solar plexus'—by which they mean our instincts. That sounds very plausible, until we think about hypnosis, then we can see that the problem is not that 'head consciousness' is overconfident and conceited, but that it is far too weak and diffident.

  The translator, Richard Wilhelm, tells an interesting story that underlines the point. A remote Chinese village was suffering from drought, and they finally sent for a rain-maker from some distant province. When he arrived, he asked to be conducted to a house on the edge of the village and ordered them not to disturb him. For three days, no one heard or saw him. Then suddenly it began to rain heavily; in fact, it began to snow too. When the man emerged from the hut, Wilhelm asked him how he had succeeded in making rain. The rainmaker replied, 'I didn't make rain.' 'But it is raining', said Wilhelm. 'But I didn't make it rain', said the rain-maker. 'I come from a region where everything is in order. It rains when it should and is fine when that is needed. The people are also in order and in themselves. But that was not the case for the people here. They were all out of order and out of themselves. They were not living in the way of Tao. Their attitude infected me when I arrived, so I had to go away on my own for three days until I was once more in Tao. As soon as that happened, it rained naturally.'

  In other words, the people of the village had become so infected with a sense of discouragement and defeat that they were somehow making things worse. As soon as they were 'in Tao'—that is, the right and left brains were working in harmony—Nature also fell into harmony, and it began to rain.

  According to Taoism, our minds can somehow influence reality. In fact, they do influence reality all the time. If our minds are out of harmony, then so is reality. Jung seems to have had the same intuition when he recognized that 'synchronicity' is not merely another name for coincidence, but is something more meaningful. Synchronicity is a type of coincidence caused by the mind.

  Maslow, as you know, died more than 20 years ago. Since then, I have come across one other thinker who seems to me to be of comparable importance. It is unlikely that you have heard his name. He is an American doctor called Howard Miller, and he wrote to me some time in the late 1970s. In his letters, he enclosed a couple of his papers. Like Thomson J. Hudson, Miller had become deeply interested in the mystery of hypnosis. One of his patients had been terrified of dental injections, and when he read in a newspaper an advertisement by a dentist that said he could draw teeth under hypnosis, Miller took his patient along to see him. The dentist placed her under hypnosis and then, to Miller's surprise, said: 'What is more, when I pull out the tooth you will not bleed.' This struck Miller as preposterous; you can't tell a person not to bleed. Yet indeed when the tooth came out the patient did not bleed.

  Miller began to try it on his own patients. He discovered that he was good at hypnosis, and tried hypnotizing terminal cancer patients. He began to obtain astonishing remissions, which convinced him once again that there is something in the brain which is far more powerful than the ordinary conscious self.

  However, Miller went a very important stage beyond Hudson. Miller asked himself, 'What is it that actually given the order to the autonomic nervous system and prevents the bleeding?' His answer was, "The hypnotist is replacing the "you" in your brain and giving the orders in its place. Which means that if the "you" in your brain could give the orders with sufficient authority, you could stop bleeding without the intervention of a hypnotist.'

  (Incidentally, there is a hypnotist in the Wirral called Joe Keeton who is curing cancer pa
tients by means of hypnosis—completely and totally curing them. He even had remarkable success with a girl whose heel had been completely destroyed in a motorcycle accident: he somehow caused her to regrow the heel under hypnosis. He believes that what he is doing is simply getting through deep into the autonomic nervous system and reactivating certain healing powers which all human beings possess.)

  Now Miller said that the key to all this is the 'you', the person who lives in the cerebral hemispheres of the brain and which he calls 'the unit of pure thought'. (Millar holds the somewhat paradoxical view that the brain is a mere amplifier of thought, which somehow originates beyond the brain. This is why he calls the creator of thought 'the unit of pure thought' )

  I read all this, and thought, 'Very interesting, but it isn't new. All Miller has done is to rediscover what the philosopher Husserl called the "transcendental ego",' So I wrote back to Miller, thanking him for his papers and telling him about Husserl. He was obviously disappointed by my response.

  About three months later, I had finished a very hard day's writing and I went out for a walk on the cliff. Now I have got used to the fact that if I have been writing hard and I go for a walk, I can't relax fully. My brain goes grinding on, and somehow I just don't enjoy the scenery. And I discovered a long time ago that the best way to induce a state of appreciation is to play a kind of 'Russian roulette' with myself. What I do is to tense myself as fully as I possibly can, and then when I am fully, totally tense, I let go. And when I do that, suddenly I can see the scenery, and I feel completely relaxed. Well, I did this on this particular occasion, and then found myself thinking, 'What precisely did you just do? What part of you gave the order?' And I answered, 'It was just me—my left brain.' Then I thought, 'No, surely, that is impossible. The left brain is just my logical self, and everyone knows that is the villain—the person who stands in the way of inspiration.' I brooded about it for the rest of my walk, and came to the conclusion that it was my left brain that had given the order. And my right had relaxed because the left gave it with sufficient determination and authority. Then, suddenly, I realized that Miller was completely right. I wrote to him that evening to tell him so. And I re-read his paper—What is Thought?—with far more attention.