This was the problem that I had discussed in the second volume of The Outsider (called in England Religion and the Rebel.) Now, in Beyond the Occult, I attempted to bring together this philosophy of "Outsiderism" and the insights I had gained from the study of "the occult."
The New Synthesis
Yet I began to write the book reluctantly, feeling that I was merely regurgitating something I had already expressed in previous books. But I soon realized I was creating a new synthesis. The problem of human beings is that it is possible to "know" something without really knowing it. The adult Proust thought he "knew" he was a child in Combray, but the madeleine taught him that this "adult" knowledge was superficial. I thought I knew the ideas I had expressed in books like The Outsider and The Occult. Writing about them again made me realize that my knowledge of them was superficial. In order to really know something we must meditate upon it until we have absorbed it into our being. (I have to confess that even writing this article has once again made me aware of this truth.)
Beyond the Occult is an attempt to draw together all the insights I have discussed in this article, and many more-particularly the insights of those who have had sudden "mystical" experiences. They all teach us the same thing: that our "ordinary" consciousness of ourselves is superficial and deceptive. We are all like Simone de Beauvoir, looking in the mirror and "feeling that we can never grasp ourselves as an entire object."
Here is a typical example of one of these experiences. A girl describes how, when she was sixteen, she set out to walk up a lane towards a wood. "I was not feeling particularly happy or sad, just ordinary." As she stood in a cornfield looking towards the wood, everything suddenly changed. "Everything surrounding me was this bright, sparkling light, like 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 can compare with that glorious moment; it was blissful, uplifting, I felt open-mouthed wonder. Then the tops of the tree became visible once again, then a piece of sky and gradually the light was no more, and the cornfield was spread before me. I stood there for a long time, trying in vain to make it come back, but I only saw it once; but I know in my heart it is still there-and here-around us."
The girl-who describes this in a book called Seeing the Invisible (which consists of letters about mysticism written to the Alister Hardy Foundation)-obviously had an experience which, in some ways, resembled that of Proust. Something "triggered" this marvellous perception of sparkling light. And she remains convinced that "it is still there"-that our everyday consciousness somehow filters it out, just as if we were wearing a pair of dark glasses.
It is, of course, deeply frustrating that we cannot learn how to contact these depths "below the iceberg" at will. Yet-as I have tried to show-it is not as difficult as it sounds.
The conclusion I have reached over the years are as follows. The romantics of the nineteenth century had many of these "glimpses," because they knew how to "relax." (The girl in the anecdote does not say so, but it is clear that she was deeply relaxed.) But because these romantics were inclined to weakness-like Samuel Beckett most of them could see no reason for getting out of bed-they failed to grasp the most important clue: that such experiences bring a feeling of strength, and that the best way to achieve them is certainly not to indulge in weakness and self-pity. Abraham Maslow, who called such moments "peak experiences," discovered that his "peakers" were usually strong and healthy people who coped well with their lives.
Snowbound
In Beyond the Occult, I described an interesting example of how I succeeded in achieving "higher consciousness" for most of an afternoon in 1979.
It was the New Year, and I had gone to a remote farmhouse in Devon to give a lecture to a group of extra-mural students. During that evening it began to snow, and by the following morning the snow was so thick that it would have been impossible to drive back home. I was forced to stay there another night. The following morning, the weather forecast announced more snow, and it was obvious that I might be unable to leave for a week. I determined to try to escape, and a group of us began to clear the snow in the farmyard with shovels. When the farmyard was clear, each of us tried to drive our cars up the slope that led to the gate; mine was the only car whose tires would grip the slippery surface.
There was still half a mile of snow-covered farm track between the farmyard and the main road. I would drive a few yards, then get out and help to shovel snow. At one point, I even risked driving straight across a field to avoid a long bend in the road. And finally, after several hours of hard work, I walked back to the farmhouse to eat some lunch and collect my bags. Then I walked back to the main gate, and began the long drive back home.
Yet even now it was impossible to relax my vigilance, because the narrow country roads were covered in snow, and it was impossible to see the ditch on either side. It would have been easy to drive off the road and become stranded again, perhaps all night. So I sat forward in my seat, peering out of the windscreen, and focusing all my concentration.
Several hours later, I arrived at the main road, where heavy traffic had turned the snow into muddy slush, and it was possible to relax and drive normally again. And it was now that I realized that I was full of a sense of power and concentration. Everything I looked at was obviously fascinating, and I had a sense of meanings stretching around me into the distance. Everything I saw reminded me of something else-for example, of Christmases in my childhood. It was as if my normally narrow and limited consciousness had been widened and deepened by concentration, until the whole world was seen to be fascinating. It taught me that "higher consciousness," or "positive consciousness," can be achieved by an act of focused concentration.
Plato at the Dentist's
In Beyond The Occult, I also quote the experiences of a writer called R. H. Ward, whose book about psychedelic drugs, A Drug Taker's Notes, is a modern classic. Early in the book, Ward describes how he once had a remarkable experience under dental gas. He writes: "I passed, after the first few inhalations of the gas, directly into a state of consciousness far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary consciousness." He had a sense of enormously extended vision, so that his mind was aware of all kinds of things that would normally have been beyond his natural range of awareness. Like Robert Graves behind the cricket pavilion, he seemed to understand everything. And as he continued "rising," he seemed to pass through a "region of ideas" where "All was idea, and form did not exist." And he adds: "It seems to me very interesting that one should thus, in a dentist's chair and in the twentieth century, receive practical confirmation of the theories of Plato." In short, Ward had seen the truth of Plato's notion that the universe consists of two worlds: a world of becoming, and a world of true being. He had also seen the falseness of Heraclitus's belief that the only world is the world of becoming.
If we think once more of Dostoevsky in front of the firing squad, we can see the expectation of death galvanized him to a new level of attention, in which he concentrated the mind as never before-and as I concentrated my mind as I drove through the snow. It is this act of concentration-like pulling back a spring loaded piston, or the string of a crossbow-that gives the mind the ability to become aware of the immense depths that lie "below the iceberg."
POSTSCRIPT
After finishing this piece, I took my dog for a walk in the woods. I was tired-I had been working since early morning-yet in spite of my tiredness, I experienced a powerful sense of beauty and euphoria that filled me with optimism. This, I realized, was because the contents of this piece had penetrated to my unconscious mind, and made me clearly aware that the world of everyday consciousness is only the surface of the mind. For me, this underlines the certainty I have always felt: freedom does not have to come from some religious or yogic discipline. The most reliable way of achieving it is through intellect, through knowledge.
Colin Wilson, Below the Iceberg
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