Chapter Twenty One
Dreaming to Some Purpose
In July 1986, Joy came down to my work room to say
that a Japanese friend was on the phone, asking if we would like to fly to Tokyo, and go on a tour of Buddhist monasteries. Joy was included in the invitation, and they were offering to pay all travel expenses - first class - and a fee of several thousand dollars. Naturally, I accepted immediately.
Ever since The Outsider was published in Tokyo in 1957, the Japanese had been enthusiastic about my work, and translated virtually everything - even magazine articles. One delightful day in 1976, when I had just staggered home exhausted from making a television programme in Bristol, Joy had said: 'You're not going to believe this', and held out a cheque for £10,000. My Japanese publisher
was bringing out a new edition of The Occult, and this was payment in advance. The money came just in time for a holiday we had booked in France, and for the next two weeks we stayed in the best hotels, ate the best food and drank the best wine. Understandably, I felt considerable affection for the Japanese.
In mid-1986 I was in need of a long holiday. Since finishing The Psychic Detectives, I had written a novel called The Personality Surgeon, a short biography of Rudolf Steiner, and a study of the evidence for life after death called Afterlife. And at the time of the phone call from Tokyo, I had recently finished a fantasy novel called Spider World.
This had come about through my meeting with a neighbour called Donald Seaman, a retired foreign correspondent from The Daily Express. When the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had defected to Moscow in 1951, Don had been asked to cover the case, and had ended by writing a book about it. And since the spy novels of John Le Carre and Len Deighton had become so popular, Don had decided to apply his knowledge of espionage to writing a thriller. The result was The Bomb That Could Lip Read, which sold a respectable number of copies and established his name as a spy novelist. So when he was offered early retirement and a 'golden handshake', Don decided to move to Cornwall and supplement his income by writing a thriller every year.
He and his wife Irene found themselves a beautiful little cottage in a hamlet called Penare; a wishing well in the garden made it look like a set from a Walt Disney film. Unfortunately, the cottage was owned by the National Trust, and Don spent most of his golden handshake renting it on a long lease. His next four spy novels were reasonably successful, but by the time I met him in 1983, he was
already beginning to experience the difficulties of most authors who try to live by writing alone.
Don and I used to walk our dogs on the cliffs between Gorran Haven and Penare every afternoon, and discuss our work and current problems. His were mainly financial, and one day, when he was in urgent need of money to pay the rates, I suggested that we might collaborate on a sequel to the Encyclopedia of Murder I had written with Pat Pitman in 1960. The same publisher - Weidenfelds - accepted it, and the advance enabled Don to clear his debts.
Don had travelled all over the world as a foreign correspondent, and had some amazing stories; I often suggested that he should, like Negley Farson, write his autobiography. But the truth was that Don lacked Negley's drive and charisma. His idea of heaven was simply to walk on the Dodman - the peninsula between Gorran Haven and Penare - twice a day, and relax with a glass of whisky in the evening.
After An Encyclopedia of Modern Murder, Don suggested that we might write an encyclopedia of scandal. The idea struck me as too journalistic, but the more I thought about it, the more interesting it seemed - after all, there were some marvellous historical scandals, like the South Sea Bubble and the Dreyfus affair
and Queen Caroline's adulteries; so we got the book commissioned, and once again Don was able to pay his rates and tax bill. The only problem was that he was a far slower writer than I was, so I ended by writing two thirds of both books.
Bored with writing spy thrillers, Don decided to transfer his scene to the late 19th century, about a plot by the IRA to assassinate Queen Victoria. His agent was enthusiastic, and assured him that the book - called Chase Royal - would transform his lifestyle. It did - but in the wrong direction, and poor sales made
his financial problems worse than ever. I sometimes had to lend him the money to avert severe crises - to Joy's disgust, since our overdraft was far larger than Don's. But we had collateral, since we owned our house, and Don didn’t.
He toyed with the idea of writing a science fiction novel, about a nuclear-powered spacecraft that crashes into a Canadian lake and causes nightmarish mutations; but his heart was not in it. One evening, after watching a television programme about insect defence, I had a flash of inspiration. And the next day I
said: 'I think I've got it. A novel called Spider World, about a future date in which the earth is taken over by giant telepathic spiders, who breed human beings for food'. But Don wrinkled his nose. 'It doesn't sound my cup of tea.' But by now I had become enthusiastic about the idea. 'Then why don't we write it together? I'll get my
publisher to commission it, and give you the first part of the advance'.
My publisher accepted the idea, and paid us £5,000, half the advance, which I gave to Don. We agreed that we would write alternate chapters, and that I would write the first. I began Spider World at the end of March 1985.
I set the first scene in an underground burrow in the desert, where a small family of human beings, including the 17 year old hero Niall, hide from the spider balloons that patrol overhead. The spiders are telepathic, and can pick up the
thought-vibrations of humans. And for some unknown reason, they regard humans with a virulent hatred, and are determined that none shall remain free. As their thought-beams scan the desert like radar, the human have to learn to restrain their panic, which would give them away immediately...
As I wrote, I found myself becoming increasingly
absorbed. I had done a great deal of research on deserts and their
inhabitants, such as tiger beetles and trapdoor spiders - which hide
underground and leap out on their prey - so there was no shortage of
interesting, and often rather gruesome, material. And as I wrote I
experienced a sensation like an aeroplane taking off. I had never felt
so completely gripped by anything I had written.
Every other day Don would ask me 'Would you like
me to start writing my bit yet?', and I would answer: 'No, let me do a
few more pages...' Then one day, Don said: 'Look, you're obviously
enjoying this so much that I don't want to interrupt you. Why don't you
go ahead and do the whole book?' I agreed that he could keep the
advance we had received, and I told my publisher that Spider World had
ceased to be a collaboration, and would appear under my name only.
The main problem was that the book was going to be
far longer than I had intended. It was supposed to be a hundred
thousand words long - about 250 pages. But by the time I had reached a
hundred thousand words, it was obvious that I was not even halfway
through. Niall's family have been captured by the spiders, and taken
to the spider city, where they are enslaved. Niall escapes, and makes
his way to a strange white tower in the centre of the city, which
proves to be a kind of time capsule, left by an earlier race of human
beings before they abandoned earth to escape the impact of a giant
comet. And as Niall learns about his forebears, he begins to
grasp the possibility of restoring the human race to freedom... And at
that point there was still a long way to go. It was not finished until
the end of February 1986, exactly eleven months after it had been
started.
. My publisher was impressed with it, but said that
it was obviously too long - a quarter of a million words. The
solution was to publish it in two volumes. And, to my delight, Grafton
also agreed to double the advance. We used this to pay a tax bill of
£5,400.
By the time we received the invitation from Tokyo,
I had already started my next book, an Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries.
This had been commissioned by Harrap (who had already
published an anthology of my work called The Essential Colin Wilson)
and they paid an advance of £10,000, half on signature. This I decided
to write in collaboration with my son Damon, who was now 21, and
had still not quite decided what he intended to do with his life.
‘Teaching him to write’ sounds more laborious than it
was; in fact, my main piece of advice was simply to go through every
sentence and strike out each unnecessary word.
It cost me a struggle with my conscience not to
ask Don to collaborate, for I knew he needed the money. But his
financial problems were unending, and I had my own family to think
about.
When Don's bank manager wrote to him forbidding him to write
any more cheques, I had to rescue him again, to Joy's indignation; but
I felt I owed him a debt for allowing me to take over Spider World.
Joy and I set out for Japan in late October; by
that time, Damon and I had completed the Encyclopedia of Unsolved
Mysteries, and he was already writing like a professional.
The friend who had arranged our trip was an
interpreter named Kazue Kobata; I had met her when she came to
interview me for Japanese Playboy. Our hosts there were to be the
monks of Koyasan, one of Japan's greatest Buddhist monasteries, which
was celebrating its thousandth anniversary. It had been founded by a
monk named Kobo daishi or Kukai, whose sect was known as Shingon
(or Esoteric) Buddhism.
Although I had been deeply influenced by Buddhism
in my teens, my attitude towards it had become slowly less
wholehearted. It seemed to me that compared to Hinduism, whose aim is
union with God (or Brahman), Buddhism seems basically negative. The
legend tells how the parents of Prince Gautama decided that he should
be protected from all knowledge of evil, and so kept him in their
palace. But one day the boy was out with his tutor when they saw a
sick man. The prince asked 'What is wrong with him?', and the tutor
replied 'He is sick - it is something that happens to everyone'. The
next day they saw a very old man, and again the prince asked 'What is
wrong with him?', and the tutor replied: 'He is old - it happens to
everyone'. Finally they saw a dead man's funeral procession; again,
the prince asked 'What is wrong with him?', and was told 'He is dead -
it happens to everyone'. And Gautama was so shocked that he began to
wonder how human beings could escape misery and death.
His answer was the eightfold path, which involves
a high level of religious self-discipline. This enables men to achieve
complete detachment from their desires, and to attain the state of
nirvana, union with the absolute.
Yet it had always seemed to me that the aim of
self-discipline is not detachment; it is an attempt to understand the
unknown potentialities of human consciousness - those amazing
potentialities of which I had become aware through the study of
subjects like psychometry, precognition and out-of-the-body
experience. Yeats, I felt, was right: the aim is 'profane perfection
of mankind'. Man does not realise that he is potentially a god.
But on that drive through the snow (described in
Chapter 1), I had seen clearly that it is possible to achieve an
intenser form of consciousness.
Now shortly before we set out, I had read a book
about Kobo daishi, the founder of Esoteric Buddhism, which had been
sent to me by my future hosts, and had been delighted to see that one
of his main teachings is 'enlightenment in this very life'. This,
surely, described my own aim. Which is why, when we caught our flight
from Heathrow, I felt much happier about what lay ahead of me.
Our plane took off at 2.45 in the afternoon, and
we halted in Anchorage, Alaska, at 3 pm local time - it seemed strange
to be in blazing sunlight when my body knew it was midnight. It was
even stranger to have dinner on the plane at 2 o'clock in the morning,
and stranger still to arrive in Tokyo at 8.30 in the morning London
time and discover that it was 4.30 in the afternoon. I felt completely
disoriented. We then caught a flight to Osaka - the nearest city to
the monastery of Koyasan - arriving at 7 o'clock in the evening,
although my body knew it was only 11 in the morning.
Two hours later, we sat down to dinner with the
Rev. Matsunaga, the rector of Koyasan University, another monk, a
representative of Mainichi newspaper, which was sponsoring our trip,
and our friend and interpreter Kazue. The Japanese dinner consisted
of endless courses of raw fish, sea weed, turtle soup and rice, washed
down with sake. That night I slept very badly, largely because my body
could not understand why I had gone to bed at three in the afternoon.
(I should have asked my doctor for sleeping tablets - it would have
saved me a great deal of maladjustment.)
After a press conference at which I was dopey with
fatigue, we were given lunch and taken to look at Osaka, after which
we caught a train to Koyasan. The monastery lies ten miles up a
mountain, and on the cable car, which climbed at 45 degrees through
lovely autumn woods, I disregarded Kazue's advice and fell asleep, a
mistake that would cost me another night's sleep.
It was cold at Koyasan, so that after our vegetarian
dinner we retired to Rev. Matsunaga's room, where we sat
around a table covered with a thick cloth that reached the floor, and
a hot stove under the table close to our knees. The monks had a taste
for scotch whisky, which they drank in surprising quantities; I, being
a wine drinker, avoided it and stuck to sake. After that, I took a
bath in a huge stone tub, with water about four feet deep. A young
Japanese professor named Hirose Yoshiji (who asked me to call him
Hiro) joined me in the steaming water, and startled me by remarking:
'Ah, Mr Wilson, in England you must be as famous as Charles Dickens!'
He was too young for me to suspect him of sarcasm, and when I replied:
'In England, few people have heard of me' he looked astonished.
That night I slept on a mat in a small room in a
temple, and after two hours sleep, lay awake for the rest of the
night. The result was that when I dressed in the morning I felt not
only exhausted but hung over.
An 'English breakfast' consisting of two cold
fried eggs on toast did nothing to improve it. After that we were
taken on a tour of the temple complex, which was vast. In a kind of
cemetery, consisting of elaborate tombs, I felt like nothing so much
as lying down on one of them and falling asleep. (Joy, who had been
sensible enough to keep herself awake on the train, was wide awake and
full of curiosity.) A point came where I realised that I had to make a
real mental effort to throw off this fatigue. So I concentrated very
hard, and did the 'St Neot Margin trick' - that is, awakened myself to
a sense of crisis. To my relief, it worked, and I suddenly began to
feel less like a zombie. The Master Kobo daishi was obviously right -
the answer lay in the mind itself.
Nevertheless, it was a relief to catch a cable car
back to Osaka around midday, then take the 'bullet train' - which
travels at 120 miles an hour - to Tokyo. Mount Fuji looked
unbelievably beautiful as we passed. We were in Tokyo by six, and took
a taxi past the Emperor's palace (Hirohito was still alive), and
arrived at the magnificent Akasaka Prince Hotel, where we had a suite
that overlooked the whole of Tokyo. There Kazue presented us with our
air tickets to Australia, the next leg of our journey (for which our
generous hosts had also paid), and a further million yen as my fee for
coming to Japan (more than £4,000), as well as 'pocket money' of about
£50, a day (each) for lunch and dinner. (In 1986, Japan was at the
height of its economic boom and the sense of wealth was
awe-inspiring.)
I was worried in case I was still suffering from
jet lag when I had to deliver my first lecture at midday the next day.
But all went well; I got a good night's sleep, and woke at 9 the next
morning, feeling greatly refreshed, and ate an English breakfast of
bacon, egg and tomato. My guardian angel was back on the job again.
Lecturing to a vast audience who were all
listening through earphones was an odd experience, for I had to speak
slowly so Kazue could translate; the result was that there was no
'response' from the audience. But I was used to talking into a tape
recorder - I had been keeping my diary on cassette for the past three
years - so it came easily. But it was good to hear later that my
lecture had been received with enthusiasm.
That afternoon, after a late lunch of suchi (eaten
out of a square wooden box with a sliding lid), we were taken on a
shopping expedition to the Ginza, then back to the hotel to attend a
symposium on mandalas. I was by now so tired that I wanted nothing
except to go back to my room and rest. I knew I was due to attend a
reception in the evening, but since most receptions consist of
standing around holding a glass and accepting canapes from trays I
felt I would hardly be missed.
I was just drinking a glass of French wine that I
had been able to buy at a reasonable price in the Ginza when the phone
rang. It was Kazue asking where we were. So we hurried down - and
discovered that everyone was waiting for us to arrive. When we
appeared, they clapped, then we had to walk between two lines of
applauding guests to our place at the table. I had not been so
surprised since 1973, when arrived in Beyrout to find the mayor
and corporation waiting for us.
It took me some time to realise that in Japan I
was as well known as I had been in the Middle East, and that Hiro had
been perfectly serious in assuming I was as famous as Charles Dickens.
When I appeared at a large bookstore, the queue for my lecture
stretched around the block, and many had to be turned away.
Another charming Japanese custom was to hand me an
envelope after press interviews or broadcasts; these contained
anything from £50 to £250. In Hiroshima, where I lectured and made two
television appearances in the Peace Park, they paid me more than £800;
Joy, who felt we ought not to be making money out of the miseries of
Hiroshima, wanted to donate the money to the Hibakshi - survivors of
the atom bomb - but our hosts flatly refused to take it.
During the rest of that tour I had to make
constant use of the 'St Neot Margin trick': arousing my mind to a
state of intense concentration by envisaging some crisis. (That
episode of losing Sally in Cheltenham was a useful starting point.) It
was not the temples that caused my vitality to slump - they were often
fascinating, with their rock gardens and pools and demon guardians.
The problem lay in the lunches, even if they were only noodles and
beer. After this there might be hundreds of steps to climb, often
covered with cherry blossoms, to reach a temple that looked down on
a precipitous valley with a waterfall. There was no point in climbing
mechanically; the mind had to be concentrated until all this was more
than a kind of dream.
This point had struck me forcefully after reading
a passage in the writings of Kobo daishi. It was a discourse by the
Taoist monk Kyobu, after listening to the remarks of a Confucian monk.
He explains that, in olden times, people drank the blood of a
sacrificial animal and made a vow before listening to the doctrines
of the Emperor Huang, and were therefore in the right state of
attentiveness to absorb them. Wisdom cannot be attained by merely
listening to words of wisdom without preparation.
So when I entered a temple, I did my best to still my
mind completely, to achieve simultaneously a state of relaxation
combined with wide-awakeness, as if listening for some very faint
sound, or perhaps to the silence itself. And if I did this for a few
minutes, my relaxation would deepen - my panic attacks had taught me
how to do this - and the silence would seem to yield new depths, as if
I had penetrated to the other side of silence. I believe it was the
temples themselves that caused this to happen. Centuries of prayer and
meditation had imprinted themselves on the place itself, so that I
responded to it like a dowser to water. It made no difference if I was
tired after climbing hundreds of steps; a state of deep inner calm
would descend fairly quickly. And in this state, I occasionally
experienced brief flashes of an underlying reality that was not
normally accessible to the senses, the timeless reality I had
occasionally glimpsed in my teens when meditating on the
Bhagavad Gita.
I was also struck by Kyobu's remark: 'When you see
a beautiful girl with a slender waist, think of her as a devil or
ghost'. Kobo daishi recognised what had become increasingly clear to
me since writing the Criminal History: that sex is an illusion that is
designed to persuade us to propagate the species, and that it does so by
filling us with a kind of fever. At that time, the American murderer
Ted Bundy was a great deal in my mind, since I had written about him
in the Criminal History. Bundy had been passing a lighted window on
the campus of the University of Washington, in Seattle, when he had
glimpsed a girl getting undressed. It had produced such a violent fever
of desire that from then on he had spent all his evenings peering
through windows; he had, in his own words, 'turned it into a project'.
Inevitably, he finally began breaking into the bedrooms and attacking
the women. Then he graduated to abducting the girls, driving them to
some distant place, and spending hours violating them. And now, at the
time I was in Japan, he was on Death Row in Florida, awaiting
execution - an appalling example of a man who had been dragged down to
the depths by the sexual illusion.
On that first trip to Japan, I had met a man who had been
caught in the same whirlpool. His name was Issei Sagawa, and ten years
before he introduced himself to me at a book signing, he had killed a girl
and eaten parts of her body.
He had been a student at the Sorbonne at the time, taking
a degree in literature, and had become fascinated by a Dutch classmate
named Renee Harteveldt. Ever since he had been a teenager, Issei had
dreamed about beautiful blondes – not making love to them, but
killing them and eating them. One day he invited her to his flat,
ostensibly to teach him German, and as she sat reading poetry aloud,
shot her in the back of the neck. Then he undressed her, raped her,
then sliced off one of her buttocks and ate part of it raw. He told me
that as he did so, he was in an intense state of sexual excitement.
He dismembered the body in the bath, then bought
two suitcases with wheels, and asked a taxi driver to take him to
the Bois de Bologne. When a couple approached, he fled, leaving
the suitcases, and the mystified pair looked inside…
He was easily caught – the taxi driver took the police
to the flat. In the refrigerator, they found more of her body, wrapped
in greaseproof paper.
At first investigators assumed it to be a crime passionel.
But when he told the examining magistrate about his lifelong
desire to eat a girl, he was certified insane and confined in a mental
home. Eventually he was released and returned to Japan, where he
became a celebrity. A book he wrote about the murder sold
hundreds of thousands.
What fascinated me as I listened to his story was
his explanation of how it had all come about. He had been born
prematurely, so was always a tiny child. When he was 3, his father
and uncle had played a game in which his uncle was a wicked giant
and his father a good knight. They fought over Issei and his brother,
and the good knight were killed, and the two children placed in
a cooking pot.
From then on, Issei’s daydreams were about being
cooked and eaten, which gave him a peculiar sexual thrill. And
when, as a teenager, he began to experience sexual desire, it was not
to make love to a girl, but to eat her. In Paris, he stared at the
bare arms of girls in cafes, and dreamed of how they would taste.
Finally, with only a few weeks to go before he returned to Japan,
he felt it was now or never. That was when he bought a carbine,
and invited Rene Haarteveldt back to his flat.
On a second visit to Tokyo, I agreed to do a long
interview with Issei for a magazine. It took place in my hotel suite.
Joy was horrified at the idea of meeting him, and went out for
the afternoon. But when she returned, Issei was still there. As I
introduced her she shrank away and did not offer her hand. And
when she heard me inviting Issei to the Press Club for dinner, she
drew me aside and whispered: ‘If they recognise him they’ll
order you both to leave’.
She was wrong. We had an excellent dinner – I
think Issei ate raw lamb – and Joy sat next to him. He was small,
with hands like a child, and obviously shy and nervous. And after
we had put him in a taxi, she said: ‘What a delightful man!’ She
had recognised – what I knew from the beginning – that Issei was
not a monster, but simply a man who, for reasons he did not even
understand, had been hypnotised by the sexual illusion.
Such thoughts were a great deal in my mind as we
visited the temples. I recall attending an official meal when a geisha
knelt beside me, refilling my glass or replenishing my plate. It was
easy to see how, in this culture where women occupied a subordinate
position, such a girl might also be expected to perform sexual
services. And since she was slim and pretty, the thought induced a
pleasant excitement. Yet another part of me, the part that had learned
to sink into deep relaxation in the temples, looked on with total
detachment, aware that she was like a sticky sweet that would make
me feel sick.
Compared to these insights, the actual ceremony to
celebrate the thousandth anniversary of Koyasan seemed almost
anticlimactic. The temple was vast, and was open on four sides. The
three guests - myself, Lyall Watson and Fritjof Capra - sat in the
centre of this temple, with an enormous mandala behind us, so that
three quarters of the audience could not even see us. In the morning
there was a Buddhist service, and we watched the monks parade in. It
was cool, but I was wearing a leather overcoat and scarf, and when my
feet got cold, I slipped them into my hat. Lyall Watson and Capra were
thinly clad and sat there with their teeth chattering - at 2 o'clock
they rushed back to their rooms for warm underwear.
In the afternoon I opened the symposium by briefly
explaining the 'pyramid of consciousness', a concept I had
developed in my book on Reich: that everyday consciousness has a
disjointed quality that could be compared to a billiard table covered
with scattered balls. When we concentrate, they come together into the
middle of the table. But in moments of intense concentration, it is as
if the balls started climbing on top of one another to form a second
layer. If we could concentrate so hard that they formed a pyramid, it
would never collapse, for sheer intensity would create a feedback
effect that would make it permanent. This is what Shaw’s Captain Shotover had called ‘the seventh degree of concentration’ , and is probably close
to what Kobo daishi called 'enlightenment in this very existence'. And
later, in a longer address, I expanded the concept by talking about
Faculty X.
Meanwhile, the audience of a thousand or so sat in
the cold, most of them unable to see the speakers, while Joy and I
thanked our lucky stars that we were among the guests of honour who
had been provided with blankets to cover our knees, and small bags of
chemicals which glowed like a hot water bottles. That afternoon made
me realise that the monks who founded Koyasan must have had enough
discomforts to turn them all into saints.
Forty eight hours later, Joy and I landed at Sydney,
and there we separated, Joy on her way to see her brother Neil in
Townsville, and I for Melbourne.
There I immediately became aware of the contrast
between the manners of the Japanese and those of the Australians. I
needed a phone card, and went into the office of the airline to ask
where I could buy one. The girl behind the counter stared at me as if
I was mad, then told me I would have to apply to the telephone
company. I walked fifty yards down the concourse and enquired at
the newsagent; they immediately sold me one. So on my way back to
my gate, I called in the airline office and told the girl that if anyone
asked about a phone card in future, she could simply direct them to
the newsagent. She glared at me virulently and snapped 'Oh thenk-you!'
In Melbourne I was scheduled to give more lectures, the
main one being at Latrobe University, where my friend Howard Dossor,
who was writing a book about me, was an administrator. He was waiting
at the gate to meet me, and beside him was my old girlfriend of my
Coffee House days, Carole Ann - still, in her mid-forties, as pretty
as ever.
After our affair in 1955, Carole Ann had gone to a
singing teacher, and discovered she had an excellent soprano voice.
She had met an Australian actor named Terry Gill, married him, and
emigrated to Australia. In Melbourne they had opened a restaurant and
music hall called The Naughty Nineties, and become a celebrated
husband and wife team. They enjoyed performing duets from light
operas, and musicals like The Phantom of the Opera. I spent a pleasant
evening there and was amazed that Carole Ann had become such a fine
soprano.
Her husband Terry was a big, good natured man who
reminded me of my younger brother Barry, so I liked him instantly.
I had seen Carole Ann in London over the years,
for she was the kind of person who likes to keep in touch with old
friends. She had kept her figure trim with daily workouts in the gym,
whereas I had put on a great deal of weight - a writer's occupational
hazard.
As to Howard Dossor, who had arranged this lecture
trip to Melbourne, he had written to me two years earlier, and then
come to see me. Before becoming a university administrator, he had
been a clergyman - a profession that might be guessed from his gentle,
earnest manner. Then he had become ill with cancer, and been told that he
had only a year to live. He had always been interested in my ideas,
and now decided to devote the time he had left to writing a book about
me. The cancer had been cured, but by then he had lost his Christian faith -
an outcome he attributes partly to me, and partly to his study of the
Greek novelist Kazantzakis, whom I also admired. So he became an
academic, and also began a collection of my work which must be the
largest in the world.
Latrobe, where I was staying, proved to be a
beautiful campus, green and spacious. But what startled me about it
was the amount of litter that had been left lying around. This was not
due to the lack of janitors or of litter bins, but to the fact that
students preferred to throw newspapers, plastic bags, beer cans or
paper cups on the ground or in a flower bed when there was a litter
bin a few feet away. After the cleanness of Japan's streets and
campuses, there was something oddly shocking about this untidiness,
and I made a note in my journal for the book on serial killers I was
planning, to the effect that this lack of a sense of responsibility is
the beginning of criminality.
The point seemed to be underlined by a murder case
that was making the headlines on the day I landed. A married couple
from Perth, David and Catherine Birnie, had been arrested and charged
with the abduction and murder of four women in the past four weeks.
Birnie, a slightly built man in his 30s, was apparently sexually
insatiable, and needed sex six times a day. He worked in a
car-wrecker's yard and sold spare parts. And when a 22 year old
student came to the house to buy tyres, Birnie was unable to resist,
and forced her into the bedroom at knife-point, then raped her while
his wife looked on. She was then taken to a lonely place, where he
raped her again, then strangled her. The same thing happened to three
more girls, the only difference being that Birnie kept them captive
for days while raping them. One was strangled by the wife, who felt
her husband was taking too much interest in her. A fifth victim, a 17
year old girl, succeeded in escaping after three days, and gave the
alarm.
Birnie was the perfect example of what I meant by
the sexual illusion. My friend Ronald Duncan had often questioned me
about my interest in crime, evidently suspecting some sinister
perversion. He could not understand that when I studied a murder case
I suddenly became aware of this problem of illusion and reality. In
Koyasan and the other temples I caught a clear glimpse of reality; such
glimpses are not easy to find in the modern world. But a
murder case made me aware of these values by their absence, like a
shadow cast on a whitewashed wall. I experienced the same thing to a
far lesser degree looking at the beer cans on the Latrobe campus. It
was not, of course, that Australia lacked these values more than
England or America, but that the contrast with Japan made it more
obvious.
Where evil was concerned I had always been a
platonist - that is, I felt that there is no evil as such, but that
everyone is striving towards his own ideal of good. But the
Birnie case raised some doubts, and I found myself wondering whether
this might be more than a case of clinical hypersexuality, and be some
kind of 'possession' by an active force of evil.
Another story I heard in Melbourne strengthened that
suspicion. Howard Dossor introduced me to a remarkable painter
called Bert Tucker, whose work was as highly regarded as that of
Sidney Nolan. And Bert told me of an extraordinary experience
that made me deeply thoughtful.
Some years earlier, Bert had spent an evening eating dinner
at the home of friends, and set out to walk home late at night. He was living
in a room in a boarding house. But as he came closer to home, he began
to experience a curious sense of reluctance to go back. He told
himself this was absurd, and forced himself to walk on, yet the
feeling became stronger, and as he mounted the stairs, overpowering.
As he walked into the room he was assailed by a revolting stench - like
the smell of hot, wet fur in zoos. As he stood fighting off terror -
still convinced that this was all absurd - he saw something on the
coverlet of his bed. It was a dead mouse. It was lying with its legs
spread out, and a trail of urine behind it that had still not soaked
into the bedsheet. And when he reached out and touched it, the body
was still warm - it had only just died.
Suddenly he knew that if he spent the night in
the room he would not walk out alive. So he hurried back to his
friends and spent the night there.
What was it? He told me that the landlady had an
idiot son, who was in an asylum most of the time, but occasionally
came home for the weekend. He was home that weekend, in the room
below Bert's. His presence, Bert felt, had brought something evil into
the house.
And some other force - perhaps his 'guardian angel' - had
done its best to warn him. And when he refused to accept that warning,
had killed the mouse on his bed.
The conclusion, it seemed, was that there were indeed
forces of good as well as evil, and both could intervene actively in
our world.
It was a good time to start thinking again about the
problems of the paranormal, for my editor at Harper-Collins,
Jim Cochrane, had asked me if I would like to write another book
on ‘the occult’. At the time, it was the last thing I wanted to do;
I felt I had said everything I had to say in The Occult and Mysteries.
But my experiences in Japan, and Bert’s story about the mouse,
made me feel there was still a great deal I had overlooked. I spent a
great deal of time during that week in Melbourne and the journey
home thinking about the new book.
A good starting point seemed to be an extraordinary story told to
me by my friend Mark Bredin, a concert pianist. One late evening after a
concert, he was returning home in a taxi along the Bayswater Road, when
he suddenly knew with absolute certainty that at the Queensway traffic
light, a taxi would try to jump the light and hit them sideways. He
wondered if he should tell his driver, then felt the man would think
him mad. But at the next traffic light, a taxi tried to jump the light and
hit them sideways.
How could he know the future? Presumably because
he was totally relaxed and was using some odd ability we all possess.
The historian A.L. Rowse had told me how one afternoon , in
his college rooms, he suddenly knew that if he crossed two
quadrangles and went into the library, he would find two young men
embracing. He hurried there and found them, as he expected, in one
another’s arms.
Another friend told me a story that seemed equally
odd. Kay Lunnis, who often spent days in our house helping
Joy to look after the children, told us how, when she was seriously
ill in hospital, she had felt herself rise above her body so she
could look down on it. I would once have dismissed this as a
hallucination due to fever, but I had come across too many such
cases of ‘out-of-the-body experiences’ since I began studying
the paranormal.
I had used these stories in The Occult, yet it had never
struck me that it implies some unknown power of the human mind,
which becomes available when we are deeply relaxed. How could I
call myself an existentialist if I failed to take such powers into
account?
T. E. Lawrence was obviously in the same state of
relaxation when he experienced that feeling of complete wakefulness
as he set out in the dawn that ‘awakened the senses before the intellect’.
(p..) Relaxation seems to be the common denominator of such
experiences.
But I was also aware that too much relaxation can
be dangerous. I recalled a strange story told to me by a friend
called Joyce Collin-Smith, the sister-in-law of one of Ouspenky’s
most brilliant disciples, Rodney Collin. In August 1960, she became
a follower of the Hindu guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was
convinced that the world could be transformed by ‘transcendental
meditation’.
She described how she had gone to the house
the Maharishi had rented near Regents Park, taking a flower
as an offering. The Maharishi, a little man with a high voice
and a sing-song Indian accent, taught her a brief mantra
in Sanskrit, which immediately brought a strange, deep sense of
peace. He told her to go and sit near the window, on the carpet;
as she did so, the mantra seemed to be repeating itself in her
brain without her volition. Time slipped peacefully by - three hours -
before she noticed the evening traffic in the street, and realised she
had to get home to cook her husband’s dinner.
From then on, the mantra would plunge her into
the same deep state of blissful serenity. She saw the Maharishi do the
same thing repeatedly; once a long queue stretched down the corridor of
a hotel in Oxford, and the Maharishi saw each person in turn, accepted
the flower, then touched the donor on the forehead and told him to
go and sit down; all obviously experienced the same instantaneous
feeling of peace.
Joyce was by then acting as the Maharishi’s unpaid
secretary, and it was she who took a phone call from the management
saying that an old lady who lived on the same floor was complaining
about the noise and threatening to leave. Joyce asked the Maharishi:
‘What shall we do?’ ‘Do nothing’ said the Maharishi, smiling benevolently,
‘It will be all right’. And so it was. They heard nothing more from
the old lady.
This was one of many examples of the Maharishi’s
odd powers, which were to some extent telepathic – as was illustrated on
another occasion, when he read Joyce’s mind as she sat in the audience
listening to him, and answered the question she meant to ask.
Every one of the Maharishi’s followers seemed to be
happy and light-hearted; he was surrounded by an atmosphere of
gaiety.
But Joyce soon noticed that not all was well. Some of
the disciples began spending more and more time sitting in
a state of bliss, and it was obvious that they were becoming less
and less capable of coping with everyday life. They didn’t want to
come back and face reality.
Joyce herself began to experience something more
disturbing. She found it increasingly difficult to focus her mind, and
seemed to see too deep into the underlying reality of things. She had
always understood intellectually that everything changes, but now she
could actually see it happening. Looking at her hands, she would see
them change into the hands of a child, and at the same time into the
hands of an old woman., then into a skeleton. Looking at a chair,
she could see it as new timber still smelling of sap, and as a worn out
old chair about to be thrown on the bonfire. Everything fluctuated
all the time.
Finally she could stand it no longer, and decided to
commit suicide. She took a rope and went to a tree in the garden.
But as she looked at the rope, she suddenly noticed
that it was staying still, remaining unchanged. Instead of dissolving
into strands, then into flax, or becoming old and frayed, it was
holding steady. The emergency had shaken her subconscious
mind awake. Which meant that she had to set out to train her mind
to fix her attention on the present. And as soon as she learned to do
this, the problem went away.
By this time she was becoming disillusioned with the
Maharishi, who was changing from a child-like guru into a super-tycoon,
so she left the movement.
Joyce had discovered same trick I had learned to
control the panic attacks: focusing the mind to prevent it from
wavering. The answer lies in one word: attention.
The Japanese master Ikkyu was asked by a workman
to write something on his tablet. He wrote: ‘Attention’. The workman
looked disappointed. ‘Can’t you write something else?’ So Ikkyu wrote:
‘Attention, attention’. The workman asked: ‘But what does attention mean?’
Ikkyu replied: ‘Attention means attention’.
In fact, concentrated attention enables us to push the
mind up to the level that I have labelled ‘higher focus’. And in states
of higher focus we experience a rush of energy, and the feeling
Chesterton called ‘absurd good news’.
So I began writing the book that would be become
Beyond the Occult, into which I tried to put everything about mysticism
and the paranormal I had learned in the past twenty years. I regard it as
my best book.
It contains two insights that I feel are among the
most important I ever had.
The first illustrates how difficult it is to recall them later.
It came when I was driving up to Plymouth to meet someone at BBC Television to discuss a series about the paranormal. As it flashed into my head, I saw at once that it was one of those basic unifying insights that I ought to make an intense effort to remember. Luckily, I had a pocket tape recorder with me, and talked into it as I drove along. Then I had lunch with the producer, drove home – and totally forgot about the insight.
Some months later, I was driving again to Plymouth when I recalled that I had had an important insight on this same stretch of road. But it simply refused to come back. Then I remembered the tape recording. It was hard to find – I had made
several tapes since then – but I finally located it. And I realised that it was, indeed, a major insight, and how close I had come close to losing it permanently.
I called the insight ‘upside downness’, meaning the state in which negative emotions can stand us on our heads, producing a mild form of insanity. A person suffering from frantic jealousy is suffering from upside-downness; so is someone consumed by hatred or egoism or envy.
When we are ‘the right way up’ we see the world practically and rationally. Strong emotions or unpleasant physical sensations can completely distort our normal view of things.
You could say that most of us can be divided into three people, and these correspond to the mind, the emotions and the body. In our social lives, the mind is, in effect, the ruler. If we become very ill – if, for example, if we are suffering from high fever - the body becomes the ruler. But this is rare, and in any case, we are accustomed to the body’s vagaries, so it doesn’t bother us all that much.
Emotions are a different matter. Strong emotions can be like a violent storm that sweeps away all rationality. And if we allow ourselves to be taken in by them, it is exactly as if our feet have turned into gas-filled balloons and we suddenly find ourselves floating upside down.
We might turn this into a parable in the manner of Confucius, and say that when the intellect is the emperor, and the emotions the grand vizier, the kingdom is harmonious and happy. But when emotions usurp the throne and force the emperor
to become their servant, the kingdom descends into misery and chaos.
Moreover, when we allow ‘upside downness’ to provoke us into doing something absurd and self-defeating, we invariably tell ourselves that we were justified because we were placed under intolerable pressure.
Here is an example. An American friend of mine, who had been a close friend of the film star James Dean, told me that he had become so angry at being stuck in a New York traffic jam that he simply abandoned his car and went into the nearest cinema. Of course, he was heavily fined – but he told me it was ‘worth it’. He genuinely felt that he had made a justified protest, in the true spirit of James Dean, against New York traffic,
Many serial sex killers operate on the same logic, declaring that all women are whores, and deserve what they get. Without exception, they are ‘Right Men’.
Of course, such instances convince you and me that we are not in the least like that. But we are forgetting that ‘being the right way up’ requires a kind of effort similar to the effort a baby has to make to walk upright; most people experience dozens of brief episodes of ‘upside downness’ every day, while some apparently normal people are like it most of the time.
The appalling truth is that upside-downness is one of the worst perils we face. You could almost imagine it as a kind of homicidal demon whose job is to depress and discourage us, and whose ultimate triumph would be to make us commit suicide. He seldom shows his face, preferring to inject depression and weariness by stealth. But his activities are easy enough to observe when you feel energetic and confident– that is, in a state of ‘spring morning consciousness’. Then you notice how easy it is to slip into fatigue and self-doubt. And before you know where you are, the
vizier has tossed the emperor off the throne and taken his place.
As a teenager I woke up almost every morning with a watery feeling of anxiety in the pit of my stomach, expecting the day to bring unspecified miseries and humiliations. That was upside-downness. But the sense of revelation that came on spring mornings was a sudden glimpse of the man’s future destiny - consciousness without upside-downness. It brought the recognition that a tendency to dream does not have to make us incapable of coping with the everyday world; it is possible to learn the technique of ‘dreaming to some purpose’. This explains why Maslow’s students had peak experiences as soon as they began to talk and think about peak experiences: they saw that consciousness without upside-downness is a normal potentiality of human beings, and that only optimism is needed to transform dreams into realities. And the moment they saw this they turned the right way up.
The second of my insights came when I was in California in 1987.
Two friends had driven me from San Francisco to the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, where I had to lecture the following weekend. As I climbed into the car for the return drive, I began thinking about levels of consciousness, and seeing how many I could distinguish.
I decided to begin with the basic state of non-consciousness we experience in deep sleep, and to call this Level 0. So Level 1 is the dream state, which shades off into the hypnogogic (semi-waking) state.
Level 2 is ‘mere awareness’, as when you are gazing blankly out of the window, thinking of nothing. In a sense, ‘you’ are not really there at all.
In Level 3 we have become self-aware, but consciousness is dull and heavy. Sartre calls it ‘nausea’. Every act of will costs a tremendous effort.
Level 4 is our ordinary everyday consciousness. But life still seems a hard battle, and it is easy to sink back towards ‘nausea’. This is what Emily Bronte meant when she wrote:
‘Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Right to the very end…’
But as you struggle on, sheer doggedness seems to generate an odd feeling of strength, and at about halfway up Level 4, you begin to get a suspicion that perhaps you can win after all. Consciousness ceases to be dull and passive, and suddenly becomes active. And a rising feeling of optimism often culminates in the peak experience. This might be regarded as a kind of spark that leaps the gap between Level 4 and Level 5.
So what is Level 5? This is the state I sometimes call ‘spring morning consciousness’ - a bubbling sense of vitality, a feeling that ‘all is well’. Life suddenly becomes self-evidently rich and infinitely exciting. This is the state Graham Greene experienced after playing Russian roulette.
Level 6 could be called ‘magical consciousness’. It is what a child often feels on Christmas Day. Or imagine two honeymooners on a balcony overlooking a moonlit lake, with dark shapes of mountains in the distance, and a feeling that life is good and will continue to be good. In Level 6, just being awake seems to be a continuous mild peak experience.
As to Level 7, this I what I have called Faculty X (p..), a state in which we are aware of the reality of other times and places. They seem as real as the present moment.
Level 7 is the highest level that need concern us as human beings – that is, the highest level we can achieve by sheer effort. The level that lies beyond this, Level 8, is ‘mystical consciousness, and is so paradoxical and self-contradictory that it lies beyond the reach of the will. The only person I can recall who offered a more-or-less comprehensible description is Gurdjieff’s disciple P. D. Ouspensky; it is to be found in his book A New Model of the Universe, in a chapter called 'Experimental Mysticism'.
Ouspensky does not tell us the details of how he achieved his states of mystical consciousness, but his biographer James Webb is probably correct in assuming that he used yogic and magical methods combined with the use of some sort of drug, almost certainly nitrous oxide - 'laughing gas'. Ouspensky states that the change took place more quickly and easily than he had expected. The account that follows is one of the most important and detailed in the whole literature of mysticism.
'The unknown', Ouspensky says, 'is unlike anything that we can suppose about it. The complete unexpectedness of everything that is met with in these experiences, from great to small, makes the description of them difficult.' And he goes on to make an observation of central importance:
‘First of all, everything is unified, everything is linked together, everything is explained by something else and in turn explains another thing. There is nothing separate, that is, nothing that can be named or described separately. In order to describe the first impressions, the first sensations, it is necessary to describe all at once. The new world with which one comes into contact has no sides, so that it is impossible to describe first one side and then the other. All of it is visible at every point. . . .'
Here we have one of the most basic assertions that all descriptions of mystical experience have in common. Everything is seen to be connected. And the word 'seen' deserves to be underlined. This world of infinite relationships, in which everything is connected with everything else, is seen all at once - from a bird's-eye view, as it were. And language instantly becomes useless, because it can only pin down one thing at a time. 'A man becomes lost amidst the infinite number of totally new impressions, for the expression of which he has neither words nor forms.'
What seems equally strange is that the normal sense of the distinction between objective and subjective disappeared:
‘Here I saw that the objective and the subjective could change places. The one could become the other. It is very difficult to express this. The habitual mistrust of the subjective disappeared; every thought, every feeling, every image, was immediately objectified in real substantial forms which differed in no way from the forms of objective phenomena; and at the same time objective
phenomena somehow disappeared, lost all reality, appeared entirely subjective, fictitious, invented, having no real existence. . . .
And he goes on to say that this strange world resembled more than anything else 'a world of very complicated mathematical relations^.
This vision of infinite meaning made it very difficult to carry on a conversation, for between each word of the sentence so many ideas occurred that it was difficult to remember what he intended to say next. He began a sentence with the words, 'I said yesterday .. .' but could simply get no further. The world 'I' raised hundreds of insights about the meaning of I, the word 'said' raised just as many ideas about speech and self-expression, each of which produced 'an explosion of thoughts, conjectures, comparisons and associations', and the word 'yesterday' led to endless thoughts and ideas about the nature of time, so that he was left with a feeling of breathlessness that made it impossible to continue.
Something strange also happened to his sense of time, so that when his companion spoke, there seemed to be an immense gap between each of his words. 'When he had finished a short sentence, the meaning of which did not reach me at all, I felt I had lived through so much during that time that we should never be able to understand one another again, that 1 had gone too far from him.'
All this, says Ouspensky, was accompanied by immensely powerful emotional states. 'I took in everything through feeling, and experienced emotions which never exist in life.' His inner world became a kaleidoscope of ‘joy, wonder, rapture, horror, continually changing one into the other'. The state seemed to allow access to infinite knowledge, but when he looked for the answer to any particular question, it 'began far away and, gradually widening, included everything, so that finally the answer to the question included the answers to all possible questions'. He encountered the same problem when he looked at physical objects: an ashtray seemed to arouse an infinite succession of meanings and associations, so that he scrawled on a slip of paper, 'A man can go mad from one ashtray.' And the ashtray, like everything else, seemed to be communicating with him, almost as if it had a voice.
The remainder of Ouspensky's description is too long and detailed to quote here even in summary. His experiments usually ended in sleep, and his awakening the next morning was a dreary and disappointing experience. The ordinary world seemed unutterably dull:
‘. . . this world contained something extraordinarily oppressive: it was incredibly empty, colourless and lifeless. It was as though everything in it was wooden, as if it was an enormous wooden machine with creaking wooden wheels, wooden thoughts, wooden moods, wooden sensations; everything was terribly slow, scarcely moved, or moved with a melancholy wooden creaking. Everything was dead, soulless, feelingless.
‘They were terrible, these moments of awakening in an unreal world after a real one, in a dead world after a living, in a limited world, cut into small pieces, after an infinite and entire world.’
In other words it is as if man found himself stranded on a planet whose gravity was so enormous that he was unable to stand upright - unable even to crawl on his hands and knees without immense effort. (Gurdjieff once said that our world is the cosmic equivalent of Outer Siberia.) In this iron world even thought is trapped by the tremendous gravity, so that it has to drag itself along the ground like a wounded animal. For the most part consciousness is little more than a mere reflection of the environment, and life is basically a mere succession of visual images, of being 'here and now'. This is why our world seems to be 'cut into small pieces', why its basic characteristic is 'separateness'. If you were utterly exhausted as you read this page it would dissolve into separate words, and even if you succeeded in grasping the meaning of an individual sentence the total meaning of the paragraph would still elude you. This is what our world is like. Everything stands separate and disconnected, and we have become so accustomed to this state of affairs that we assume that it is natural and inevitable. Yet it is not natural, any more than it is natural to fail to grasp the meaning of a sentence. And we realize this every time a spring morning fills us with a sense of the sheer interestingness of the world. 'Separateness' is unnatural; the true and natural state of affairs is a basic 'connectedness', just as Ouspensky realized during his mystical experiments.
In short this world, which seems to us so oppressively real, has been robbed of a dimension of reality by the feebleness of human consciousness and its inability to function efficiently in the powerful gravitational field of our universe. This is only a part of the problem. What turns a difficult situation into a dangerous one is that our mental numbness deprives us of all sense of direction, so that most human beings have given up any attempt to see things as a whole. In effect most of us waste our lives battling against the difficulties of the present moment, and when life offers us the occasional breathing space we are inclined to waste it in boredom or the search for amusement. This is why man, who is fundamentally a well-disposed and sociable creature, is capable of so much evil where his fellow creatures are concerned; the harsh Siberian environment has made him brutal and short-sighted. Yet every flash of poetic or mystical insight makes us instantly aware that such a view is, quite literally, an absurdity.
One thing seems clear: the world glimpsed in these moments of insight is more real than the world of everyday reality. And everyone who has experienced these glimpses have seen the same thing; it always involves me sense of being at the mercy of circumstance, of being a slave of material reality and our own bodies, is an illusion. We possess 'hidden powers', tremendous reserves of unsuspected strength.
Equally fascinating are Ouspensky’s insights about time. In his 'Experimental Mysticism' chapter, Ouspensky offers some clues about how these ideas were developed. He speaks of the curious feeling of a 'lengthening of time', a speeding up so that seconds seem to turn into years or decades. He emphasizes that the normal feeling of time remained as a background to this 'accelerated time', so that he was - so to speak - living in two 'times' at once. Our ordinary time merely has 'duration', but the second time has 'speed'. And since time has a flow from past to future, it would also seem to possess a third dimension - 'direction'.
It is because we are stuck in time, that it seems inevitable that one event follows another like the notes on a piano keyboard. But, says Ouspensky, if time has three dimensions, if it is a 'cube' and not a line, and its forward flow can go up or down or sideways within a three-dimensional space, this obviously means that the next point on the line is not rigidly predetermined. It might go up or down or sideways. Life is full of non-actualised potentialities, says Ouspensky in the 'Eternal Recurrence' chapter of A New Model of the Universe, and when it comes to an end it starts all over again, so we go on living the same life forever. (He used this idea in a remarkable novel called The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin.)
But it does not have to be exactly the same: only dull and lazy people live the same life over and over again. More determined people strive to actualise their potentialities, and although the events are predetermined, like the notes of a symphony, they can be transformed by a great conductor. So their lives are changed infinitesimally each time.
It follows that the future is, to a large extent, predetermined. On one occasion he asked himself whether communication with the dead was a possibility and immediately 'saw’ someone with whom he urgently wanted to communicate. But what he 'saw' was not the person but his whole life, in a kind of four-dimensional continuum. At that moment Ouspensky realized that it was pointless to feel guilt about his own failure to be more helpful to this particular person because the events of his life were as unchangeable as the features of his face. 'Nobody could have changed anything in them, just as nobody could have changed the colour of his hair or eyes, or the shape of his nose .. . .' In other words, what happened to the man was his 'destiny'.
It was also during these experiments that Ouspensky had a clear premonition that he would not be going to Moscow that Easter, as he fully intended to. He was able to foresee a sequence of events that would make his visit impossible. And in due course this sequence occurred exactly as he had foreseen it in his mystical state. Ouspensky, therefore, had no doubt that precognition is a reality. ( J. B. Priestley borrowed Ouspensky's idea for his third 'time play', I Have Been Here Before, in which a thoroughly unsatisfactory character who has committed suicide out of self-pity makes a determined effort the 'second time round', and makes an altogether better job of his life.)
So, excluding the weird and paradoxical Level 8, I had worked out the basic 7 ‘normal’ levels of consciousness. The above, I believe, gives a fairly complete account of my view of human consciousness and its potentialities. The interesting thing is that up to the halfway point – Level 4 1/2– consciousness is passive. Beyond four and a half, it is as if you have reached a mountain top, and the going is now all downhill; consciousness has become active.
To grasp this is obviously of immense importance, for once you know that a certain effort will take you to level 5 and beyond, you become unstoppable. There is a law of consciousness which states: the stronger it becomes, the stronger it is capable of becoming. And the method involves focused attention.
Upside-downness and the seven levels of consciousness are central to the argument of Beyond the Occult. But most of the book is taken up by examples of ‘strange powers’, like the ability to foresee the future or have out-of-the-body experiences.
Equally important are the many ‘mystical’ glimpses that have been experienced under everyday circumstances. In a book called A Drug Taker’s Notes, R. H. Ward describes his experience under dental gas – nitrous oxide - and says: ‘I passed after a few inhalations of the gas directly into a state of consciousness already far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary waking consciousness’. And
the following is an account by a 16 year old girl as she was walking up a lane towards a wood:
‘I was not feeling particularly happy or particularly sad, just ordinary’. As she stood in the cornfield looking towards the wood, everything changed.
‘Everything surrounding me was this white, bright, sparkling light, like the sun on frosty snow, like a million diamonds, and there was no cornfield, no trees, no sky, this light was everywhere…The feeling was indescribable, but I have never experienced anything in the years that followed that I can compare with that glorious
moment; it was blissful, uplifting, I felt open-mouthed wonder. Then the tops of the trees became visible once again, then a piece of sky, then the light was no more, and the cornfield was spread before me. I stood there for a long time, trying in vain for it to come back, and have tried many times, but I only saw it once; but I know in my heart it is still there – and here – around us.’*
This, it seems to me, is the kind of experience we need to recall when we discuss philosophy and the nature of reality. This, as Blake knew, is what reality is really like.
*From Seeing the Invisible, Modern Religious and Other Transcendent
Experiences, ed. Meg Maxwell and Verena Tschudin, Penguin 1990.
In August 1989, Joy and I went on a trip to a little French town called Chaise Dieu, in the Auvergne. We were travelling by bus with a group from the Torquay Gramophone Society, to hear the Bach St John Passion in the mediaeval Abbey Church. The day before we left, we were taken on a trip to a volcanic mountain called the Puy de Dome, above Clermont.
On the bus Joy was reading a French newspaper, when suddenly she began to shake with laughter. The item described how a group of East Germans who had taken refuge in Hungary (which was then a Communist country) had been given permission to picnic close to the border with West Germany, and lost no time in hot-footing it across the frontier and vanishing into the distance.
Neither of us had the least idea that we were seeing the beginning of the downfall of Communism. Yet I should have had an inkling. In a symposium called Marx Refuted (1987), which I edited with the poet Ronald Duncan, I had foretold the downfall of Communism two years before it happened. On the last page of the book, I had written:
‘The attempted uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia suggested that [the downfall of Communism] might not take as long as that: that human nature itself might revolt long before prosperity made it inevitable. Now in the 1980s, we become aware of a more startling possibility. Events in Chile, in Afghanistan, in Poland, suggest the possibility of a world in which communism has simply vanished,
overturned by the masses it is supposed to represent. History is not always gradual. The witchcraft craze’ collapsed quite suddenly, in Europe and America; at one moment it seemed as strong as ever; in the next it had disappeared….’
And so, during the next two years, I watched with awe as something I had never dared to hope actually came about. I told my mother: ‘You’re lucky. You’ve lived long enough to see the downfall of the Soviet Union’.
But then, she had never been much interested in politics, so was not all that impressed.