The Essential Colin Wilson
Page 37
Yet clearly, it would be impossible for us to be 'mindful' of even a tiny percentage of these 'reasons for delight'. Is not this in itself a sufficient explanation for the narrowness of everyday consciousness?
The answer is no. For here we come to the most interesting part of the story. Again and again, these half-forgotten 'reasons for delight' emerge from the storage cupboard of their own accord, and 'reactivate' themselves. It happens most frequently when I solve another problem. The feeling of relief causes the 'green light' to glow in my subconscious mind, and quite suddenly, it has ceased to be a particular feeling of delight, and has turned into something far more broad and general. Suddenly, all life seems good—even a life crowded with problems. But there is even more to it than that. We experience a strange sense of excitement and optimism as we realize that this sense of delight is always accessible to consciousness. There is no need to wait for the solution of yet another problem. We can do it ourselves.
How? The answer becomes clear if we study the mechanism of the delight experience—what Maslow calls the peak experience. I have said that when we are confronted with some problem of anxiety, a 'red light' goes on in the subconscious. When the problem is overcome, a green light goes on. In fact, a whole range of coloured lights are switched on until the subconscious mind looks like the Blackpool illuminations. We might refer to this as 'underfloor lighting'.
What has happened? If we think in terms of the 'Laurel and Hardy theory of consciousness' (described elsewhere in this book), Ollie has passed on the good news to Stan—the right brain—and Stan switches on the underfloor lighting. Note that Ollie merely has to tell Stan. Or rather, Ollie tells himself ('Thank God, everything's all right after all!'), and Stan overhears. The moment the underfloor lighting is switched on, consciousness takes on a third dimension. Husserl says: 'The natural wakeful Me of the ego is a perceiving.' And this 'perceiving' consciousness is flat, two dimensional. The moment I am flooded with joy or relief, everything is affected. Reality becomes more real. Everything I look at is seen to be more meaningful, more interesting than I had realized when my consciousness was 'flat'. I see that I have a thousand reasons for delight and optimism.
As soon as this happens, I am struck by an exhilarating realization. If this is true, if reality is really 'three dimensional', then I do not have to wait for the solution of some problem, or the disappearance of some crisis, to feel delight. I have a permanent reason in the fact that reality is three-dimensional. If I can grasp this, I can get rid of two-dimensional consciousness once and for all.
But if two-dimensional consciousness is 'dispensable', then why do we have it? In the '3-D' states, the answer is quite plain. Because everyday consciousness is quite unnecessarily negative. It is almost entirely a matter of bad habits. We are always working ourselves up into states of anxiety about trivialities. So we spend a large part of our lives in an unnecessary state of 'discouragement' and disenchantment. The result is an effect of 'negative feedback', with discouragement producing a flat, bored state of perception, and this state of perception confirming us in the view that nothing is really worth the effort.
The source of this problem is the 'emotional body'. Anyone who pays attention to the ebb and flow of mood and feeling becomes aware that we possess an emotional as well as a physical body. But while the physical body reaches maturity at the age of twenty or so, the emotional body in most of us remains in a state of arrested development from about the age of ten. This is one of the penalties of civilization, which protects us from the cradle to the grave. Our ancestors had a far harder time of it, and had to acquire a far higher degree of self discipline, enabling the emotional body to reach a higher level of maturity (say, fifteen instead of ten years of age.) Prod most civilized men, and you find a child just below the surface.
All this explains why we have a craving for adventure, for excitement, even for danger and discomfort; we know instinctively that this is the most direct way of forcing the emotional body into some kind of maturity, and preventing it from ruining our lives.
But the insights of 'three-dimensional consciousness' are themselves a direct method of overcoming the problem. If we make the effort to grasp their meaning, the result is the flash of what is traditionally called 'enlightenment'. It suddenly becomes self-evident that knowledge itself can break this vicious circle of negativity. Once 3-D awareness has achieved even a toe-hold, it can gradually dislodge the old bad habit of 2-D awareness.
The chief danger here is failure to grasp exactly what is happening when we experience 3-D consciousness. If it comes as a result of a holiday, or some relief from anxiety, or a sudden reason for celebration, we may feel that it is merely a temporary break from 'normality', and that, like a pleasant weekend, it has to be followed by a return to the old dreary routine. Worse still, we may experience the feeling 'This is too good to last', and expect it to vanish like a dream. This, in fact, is how most of us tend to react to glimpses of 'completer consciousness'. This particular problem can be solved by thoroughly absorbing the arguments of the preceding pages. In a sense, that is the least of our problems.
'Completer consciousness' involves another insight that seems to contradict our everyday assumptions. When I open my eyes in the morning, it is natural for me to feel that I have emerged from an 'inner' world of unconsciousness into the 'real' world that I share with my fellow human beings. I am now, so to speak 'in' that external world, and shall stay in it until I close my eyes tonight and sink back into my inner world.
In flashes of objective consciousness, we can see that this is a misconception. There is a world 'out there', stretching around me as far as the eye can see; and there is an equally vast world 'in here'. In Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley pointed out that 'like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas and Amazonian basins'. He was discussing the strange insights that came to him as a result of taking the psychedelic drug mescalin. But this 'inner world' may be understood in an altogether more practical and down-to-earth sense. In 1933, Dr Wilder Penfield, a neurosurgeon, was performing a brain operation on a conscious patient, using only local anaesthetic, when he happened to touch the temporal cortex with an electric probe. The patient instantly recalled in detail an event from his childhood; in fact, he virtually re-lived the event. Penfield performed the same experiment over many years, and found that it always had the same effect; part of the vast memory archives of the brain suddenly disgorged their content.
As pointed out elsewhere in this book[1], Proust had the same experience when he tasted a cake dipped in herb tea, and was suddenly flooded with a sense of the reality of his childhood. Proust makes the interesting comment: 'I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal . . . ' Three-dimensional consciousness had produced the 'god-like sensation', the sudden recognition that we all underestimate ourselves and our powers.
When some crisis had disappeared, and we heave a sigh of relief, the feeling of 'absurd good news' is accompanied by a sense of the reality of this world inside my head. In fact, when I relax deeply, I am aware of sinking into this world inside my head. Most children can do it easily: you can watch a child stick his thumb into his mouth, gaze into the fire, and float off into that inner world on a kind of magic carpet. Some adults retain this capacity. In his book on Shelley, Thomas Jefferson Hogg remarks that the poet was always reading—over meals, in bed, even walking along the street—and that he became totally absorbed in the book, to the exclusion to the outside world. He also had a capacity to fall asleep at any moment like a baby; he would often move from his chair to the floor, curl up like a cat and sleep deeply. Like most poets, Shelley was very much a 'right brainer', and 'access to inner worlds' came easily to him.
Once we have grasped this concept of an 'inner world', we can see that we always inhabit it, even when we feel most trapped in external reality. And when I intensely enjoy any experience, it is because I am simultaneously in two worlds at once: the reality around me and the reality inside me. Wh
en a man deeply enjoys a book, it is as if he has taken the book into a cave inside himself, where he can be free from interruption. When he is absorbed in playing golf, he has taken the golf course inside him. When he is absorbed in making love, he has taken the girl inside him. The deeper he can retreat into that inner world, the more he can enjoy his experience of the outer world. Conversely, when he feels trapped in the outer world by boredom or tension, all his experience becomes unsatisfying and superficial. In order to begin to understand the mechanism of 3-D consciousness, we need to recognize the independent reality of that inner world, and to grasp the error of the view that we are creatures of the physical world around us.
We should also note that Shelley's capacity for 'absorption' meant that he could 'enter into' a book and abandon himself to its reality. When a man is in a state of boredom of tension, he cannot 'enter' the book, and so cannot experience its reality. What do I do if I read some description by Dickens or Balzac and feel so absorbed that I actually seem to be there? I somehow add my own experience to the description, so it 'becomes real'. This is what Proust did spontaneously as he tasted the cake dipped in tea. This is what Arnold Toynbee did spontaneously as he sat in the citadel of Mistra and became aware of the reality of its destruction. In short, we are speaking of the capacity I have labelled 'Faculty X'.
As soon as we experience the flash of 'three-dimensional consciousness', we recognize that this is 'normal' consciousness—or at least, a step in the right direction. Ordinary consciousness is a mistake. It is an error that has been created by our 'intermediate' stage of evolution. Left-brain awareness—the ability to examine the world through a magnifying glass—is essential, but its 'close-upness' has deprived us of meaning. We are stranded in an oversized world of magnified objects, and we can see the trees but not the wood. And at this point, the emotional body intervenes, with its negativity and self-pity and mistrust, and turns the wood into a forest of nightmare. This is the state that Sartre calls 'nausea', and that I have called 'depression'. It can be overcome only by recognizing that it is a mistake. And the 'absurd good news' is the recognition that this insight, it itself, can transform subjective into objective consciousness. The bogies created by the mind can be destroyed by the mind.