by Colin Wilson
What Miller points out is that the brain is basically an enormous computer. It was the surgeon Wilder Penfield who discovered that if, during brain surgery, he accidentally touched a point in the temporal cortex, the patient was suddenly flooded with detailed memories of his childhood. The experiment makes it very clear that our brain is an enormous library.
In the same way, when a tune gets stuck in your head, you feel as if your brain contains a gramophone record that has got stuck in the groove. We have, in other words, a feeling that we have no control over our own mental states.
Yet, said Miller, let us try a different experiment. Try closing your eyes and conjure up a mental image. You will quickly realize that you can, on demand, evoke from the brain any image you desire, and cause it to be projected on a kind of inner mental screen. Order your brain to produce an image of yourself on the beach, see yourself there in total reality, visualize the colour of your bathing suit, the feel of the sand, the heat of the sun . . . Now instantly order the scene to be changed; ask a new film to be brought out. Imagine yourself at the base of a very tall mountain, look up to its summit, feel the sting of the frosty air, hear the feet crunching on the icy snow—and now on command, dissolve the entire mountain. If you take the trouble, you can become aware of the distinction between your 'observer' and the scene you are observing. These scenes were being called into existence by the thought that preceded them. Your 'unit of pure thought' gave the order and your brain obeyed. You are in control of the computer.
What is wrong with human beings is basically that we do not realize that we are in control. 'Lack of this awareness', says Miller, 'has kept us from picking up the reins and taking control of our own brains.' The situation could be compared to a man sitting in the cinema, watching a film that seems completely scrambled and haphazard, and wondering what on earth has gone wrong in the projection room. He goes up into the projection room and discovers that, in fact, there is no one there. And then, with a sudden shock, he remembers: he himself is the projectionist. We can only take control of our brains, says Miller, when we recognize that we are the projectionists.
Now I would suggest that we have stumbled upon two basic ideas that might form the foundation of a new religion. The first of these is the recognition that the 'you' is basically the master of consciousness: it is in charge of what goes on inside our heads. The second is that the way in which we can establish contact with the enormous powers of the 'hidden self is by reprogramming the subconscious mind into a positive instead of a negative attitude. The Hindu saint Ramakrishna did it accidentally. He was in a state of misery and despair because his inner life had become dull and inert. In desperation, he seized a sword, and was about to drive it through his heart when he said, 'Suddenly, the Divine Mother revealed herself, and I was overwhelmed by waves of shining light.' The ecstasy was so intense that he became unconscious. He had experienced the state called samadhi. And from this time on, he only had to hear the name of the Divine Mother to go into samadhi. In other words, the experience had totally reprogrammed his subconscious mind, and he could induce samadhi by pushing a kind of mental button.
Now I think you should be able to see what I mean about reprogramming the subconscious. Whenever you experience any kind of delight, whenever you experience those momentary visions of intensity, it is important to hang on to them and use the insight to reprogramme your subconscious, because this is the best time to do it. Provided you do it in the moment of vision or insight, the subconscious can be totally reprogrammed. What you are trying to do is to grasp that 'bird's-eye vision' so that you can never forget it. It could be compared to trying to take a kind of aerial photograph, remembering all the salient points of the landscape below you before you plunge back to earth again.
One more example. When I was lecturing in Vancouver at Simon Frazer University, I spent a whole week talking to my students about these things, and at the end of that time I felt exhausted. I had been trying to teach them the 'pen trick'—the trick of driving yourself to a point of concentration where the brain almost rebels, and then deliberately forcing yourself one stage further. I told them about a friend of mine, Bill Powell, who used to climb Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square. He used to do this by putting a huge belt around the Column and then edging his way up until his feet were level with the belt. He would then hitch the belt up, momentarily bending his knees and then walking up again until he was level with the belt. Bill said, "The trouble is, when you are halfway up, your knees hurt like mad and you just want to relax. But, of course, if you do, you would go straight down to the bottom.' Well, it's the same with the discipline of the mind. And I told my students, 'When it hurts, for God's sake don't let go. You are nearly there.' A couple of hours later, driving home to the motel where I was staying, I could look down on the whole of Vancouver and its bay. The lights were just coming on, and it looked beautiful. I found myself thinking, 'Isn't it absurd. It looks beautiful but I am too bloody tired to appreciate it.' And then suddenly I thought, 'Wilson, you fool, you have been telling them all day that when they are in this state, they are almost there.' I made a tremendous effort, and it happened instantly: the whole bay seemed to explode and become suddenly incredibly beautiful.
The absurd thing was that I had almost forgotten. I was allowing my brain to churn on mechanically, merely looking forward to getting back home and pouring myself a drink. This is the danger: giving way to our automatic mechanisms. Yet because I knew, intellectually, that I could do it, I was able to side-step the mechanisms and achieve the peak experience. And I did it basically by suddenly remembering to make the additional effort.
We can do it. The power is already there in the brain. Everything is already there inside us. The Buddha was right: the key to peace lies inside us and always has. And now we can begin to understand it in Western scientific terms, it means that 'enlightenment' is no longer one of those mystical words with no precise meaning.
One final thought. Maslow discovered that when he began to talk to his students about peak experiences, they began to remember all kinds of occasions on which they'd had peak experiences—occasions that they'd almost forgotten about. And as soon as they began to remember and discuss peak experiences, they began having peak experiences all the time. Merely talking and thinking about it had reprogrammed the subconscious.
Most Western thinkers seem to agree that the world is in an appalling state, and that the correct attitude is pessimism tempered by cautious hope. For my own part, I believe that man has arrived at the most interesting point in his evolution, and that the future has never looked more promising. It is because Schumacher shared that sense of optimism that I hold his memory in so much affection.
THE HUMAN CONDITION
A Postscript to the Schumacher Lecture, 1984
The Schumacher lecture seems to me one of the clearest and most compressed summaries of my ideas. Its conclusion—that the basic method of creating 'affirmation consciousness' is by 'reprogramming the subconscious'—goes to the heart of the matter. But how is this reprogramming to be accomplished? To explain this requires a summary of my view of 'the human condition'.
From the moment they are born, human beings are entangled in subjective emotions. Our senses do their best to give us a clear and accurate picture of the world around us. But their testimony is always being undermined by the fluctuations of our feelings, which offer us a different 'truth' every ten minutes. When you are hungry, food is self-evidently 'good'. When you are being violently sick, it seems disgusting. When a man is in love, the girl seems the most desirable creature in the world; when she is suing for divorce, she seems repulsive.
While fluctuations as great as this are the exceptions, dozens of smaller ones occur every day. As my feelings ebb and flow, my attitude towards the world changes continually. I may feel that life is infinitely exciting at ten in the morning and that it is dreary and repetitious by four in the afternoon. The commonest of all experiences is to look forward to something and then find
it rather disappointing. Occasionally it is the other way round: something we had expected to be unpleasant and boring turns out to be rather enjoyable. But it all seems to be totally unpredictable. This unpredictableness also affects my powers of action. Something I decide to do at ten in the morning seems quite futile at four in the afternoon. Decision-making in such a world can be as frustrating as Alice's game of croquet with flamingoes instead of mallets and balls that uncurl themselves and run away. This is why so many philosophers have concluded that life is 'vanity of vanities', and that the best way to avoid disappointment is to abandon all hope and expect the worst.
As we grow up and develop the power of reason, we do our best to make adjustments for these changes of mood. In many ways we succeed. We learn to smile at people we dislike. We resist various temptations. We eat food we know to be good for us even though we enjoy it less than food that is bad for us. Yet we still go on making judgements that betray total subjectivity. One man detests sport and regards people who enjoy it as idiots. Another hates pop music and is convinced that people who enjoy it must be tone deaf. Another believes that a certain political party is a collection of crooks and charlatans. If someone suggests to these people that their prejudices are purely subjective, they will become indignant, for they are convinced that their views are based on logic and reason. All this amounts to what William James called 'a certain blindness in human beings'.
It may seem that this blindness does no real harm. If I dislike sport, I can watch some other television channel. If I hate pop music, I can avoid listening to it. If I distrust a certain political party, I can vote for its rival. But the real objection to the 'blindness' is that it causes us to waste our lives by keeping us trapped in a narrow and trivial state of consciousness. And this suddenly dawns upon us when some serious challenge or crisis threatens us with major disruption—perhaps even with death. Quite suddenly, we see life front a 'bird's-eye view', and we know, beyond all doubt, that life without this threat would be a continual delight. This is the feeling of 'absurd good news'.
The worst of it is that we know perfectly well that, as soon as the threat is past, we shall sink back into the old state of narrowness and blindness. It is then that we grasp the damage caused by 'subjectivity', and the way it ruins our lives. For we can see that, objectively speaking, we have a thousand reasons for congratulating ourselves. It is true that there are many people in the world with real cause for misery: poverty, starvation, physical pain. But most people in the civilized world enjoy a fairly high degree of comfort and security. They ought to regard their lives as a perpetual holiday. The 'blindness' makes us incapable of grasping how lucky we are.
This recognition struck me forcibly during the period of 'panic attacks' (described in the introductory chapter of Mysteries). Plunged into a state of depression, weighed down with a heavy feeling of foreboding, I asked myself whether there was any objective reason to feel so miserable, and the answer was obviously no. In fact, it took very little reflection to see that I ought to be ecstatically happy. So I was in the strange position of recognizing, logically, that I ought to be bubbling with optimism while my subconscious mind sent back messages of gloom and foreboding. I discovered that, with a tremendous effort, I could impose my objective perceptions on my subjective feelings, and heave myself bodily into a state of optimism. Half an hour later, the foreboding was back again; but at least I had come to recognize that it could be made to go away.
For this reason I regard the panic attacks as one of the most important experiences of my life. They taught me something that I could never have grasped otherwise: that we do not have to accept the continual switchback of emotions that dominates everyday consciousness. It was a startling discovery—rather like realizing that when clouds obscure the sun, you do not have to wait for them to drift away: you can blow them away. The final arbiter is the mind itself.
I expressed it by saving that consciousness has a 'bass line' of subjectivity and an 'alto line' of objectivity. It could be compared to Brooklyn Bridge, with the roadway down below, and the superstructure soaring in a gigantic arch up above. It seems natural for human beings to follow the roadway. Yet in our moments of intensity, we see that this is laziness. If we want to understand what consciousness is for, we have to follow the superstructure.
The panic attacks made me understand that 'everyday consciousness' is a form of depression. Because we accept its judgements as natural and inevitable, we drift along without making any real effort. But if we begin to question its judgements, to resist its moods, to reject its over-simplifications, we gradually begin to understand the kind of consciousness we were intended to experience.
Even a brief experience of objective consciousness brings a fascinating insight: that subjective consciousness is somehow incomplete. It never achieves its natural state of fulfilment. It could be compared to an engine that has been allowed to deteriorate until it works at only a fraction of its true efficiency. The washers are loose, the piston-rings are worn, the gaskets are burnt, the plugs are oiled-up. So most of the energy it produces escapes in leakages.
'But the odd thing about the engine called the human mind is that it is self-repairing. The moment some intense stimulus causes it to build up a higher pressure than usual, it seals its own leaks, and begins to work at a far greater level of efficiency. The result is a revelation. Quite suddenly, reality becomes more 'real'. There is a curious effect as if all the colours of the world have become deeper and richer, and as if everything had become somehow more solid, more hard and real. But what is most surprising is the sudden clear recognition that this 'ordinary' consciousness, which we have always taken for granted as the only kind of consciousness, is a poor substitute for the real thing. Mystics have always experienced this insight, and found it hard to put into words simply because all our language is based upon the premise that 'ordinary consciousness' is the real thing. A writer named R. H. Ward, who experienced a glimpse of this higher type of consciousness when lying in the dentist's chair, described the sensation as follows: ' . . . I passed, after the first few inhalations of the gas, directly into a state of consciousness already far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary waking consciousness . . . '[1]
In my own experiences of these states—which, I hasten to add, have never achieved the intensity described here by Ward—there has always been a clear recognition that ordinary consciousness is limited by its lack of energy, like an electric light when the power is low. The sensation could also be compared to driving a car with a heavily frosted windscreen, in the centre of which you have scraped a circular hole that gives you a certain limited view. But until the heater has defrosted the windscreen, you are forced to lean forward, peering through the hole, driving at five miles an hour in low gear. The problem, of course, is that the small hole limits what you see, so you are only receiving enough information to stay on the road and avoid hitting something. Ordinary consciousness has this same narrow quality, so it can only offer us the most essential, basic information. Glimpses of Ward's 'completer' state of consciousness make us aware that they are not really 'higher' forms of awareness, but merely a step in the direction of true 'normality'—with the windscreen completely clear of frost.
This recognition about the nature of consciousness is in no way abstract or 'mystical'. It can be arrived at by reason. Consider what happens when I am faced with some problem or inconvenience. I am galvanized into brooding on how it can be solved; I concentrate my forces. This has the effect of switching on a kind of red light in my subconscious mind, an 'underground' sense of vigilance and anxiety. When I solve the problem, the red light changes to green, and I experience a sensation of relief and delight. If the red light has been on for a long time, then the relief and delight will also last a long time. I may wake up every morning for day after day with the feeling 'Thank God that's solved'. But sooner or later, the relief fades, and I take the solution of the problem for granted. What happens? I am not actually ungrateful for my new s
tate of non-anxiety. But I 'put it into storage', so to speak. I consign it to the realm of the 'taken for granted', a kind of 'forgetfulness'. For I am already focusing on new problems and how to solve them. And in due course, my gratitude for solving them will also be put into storage in the realm of 'forgetfulness'.
Now in a sense, this seems absurd. If a threat is really overwhelming, I tell myself that 'if only' I can solve it, I shall never cease to feel relieved . . . And I can see that this is perfectly possible. A mother whose child is dangerously ill may tell herself that, if he recovers, she will never cease to offer prayers of thanksgiving. And she may well keep her promise. The fact remains that it is extremely difficult to keep a sense of relief and gratitude alive for a long period, simply because we require our consciousness for other things. So to some extent, 'forgetfulness' is a necessity of existence.
This means that all of us have a vast cupboardful of reasons for gratitude, all labelled and preserved, but out of sight. When a man owns his first car, he looks at it with pride every morning. By the time he buys his fourth car, he is taking it for granted; his gratitude is now packed away in the storage cupboard. But if he gets into debt, and has to contemplate selling his car, his sense of its value is once again reactivated. The storage cupboard is not a graveyard; all its contents can be taken out for inspection and 'reactivated'.
So in a perfectly logical sense, we have a thousand reasons for feeling relief and delight. Moreover, our species has accumulated another million. If we could look backwards through time and see our ancestors in the Pleistocene era, six hundred thousand years ago, crouching half-starved, in caves while the snowdrifts piled up outside, we would recognize just how many triumphs, how many conquests, how many problems solved, are represented by a modern city.