Beyond the Occult (10 page)

In fact closing the senses to these finer shades of meaning can be extremely dangerous: it results in a sense of futility and boredom, the feeling of Ecclesiastes that all is vanity and there is nothing new under the sun.
To avoid this problem we merely have to understand that we have
two
instruments for grasping the world around us, not — as we naturally tend to assume — just one.
One part of the mind has the power to encounter reality as simply and directly as drinking a glass of water.
The other part can only come to terms with reality by strapping it into a kind of rigid iron framework and measuring it with rulers and clocks.

Now in fact science has recently come to recognize the physical existence of these two ways of grasping reality, and that they are located in the left and right halves of the brain — the cerebral hemispheres.
The science of split-brain physiology has uncovered the fact that we have two people living inside our heads: the person you call ‘you’, and a total stranger who lives in the other half of the brain.

Our brains are divided into two, like a walnut.
The left hemisphere deals with language and logic, the right with intuition and ‘recognition’ — you could say that the left side is a scientist and the right an artist.
The two halves are joined by a mass of nerve fibre called the commissure or
corpus callosum
.
If this is severed — as it is occasionally to cure epilepsy — the patient begins to act like two separate people.
One split-brain patient tried to zip up his flies with one hand and unzip them with the other.
Another tried to hit his wife with the left hand while the right held it back.
(For some odd reason the right half of the brain controls the left side of the body and vice versa, so it was the intuitive side that was trying to hit her and the rational side that was holding it back.) When a female patient was shown an indecent picture the right half of her brain caused her to blush with embarrassment: when asked why she was blushing she replied, ‘I don’t know.’
The ‘I’ that spoke was, of course, her left-brain self.

What this clearly demonstrates is that the person you call ‘you’ lives in the left cerebral hemisphere — the ‘logical’ half — while the ‘stranger’ lives in the ‘intuitive’ half.
At first it seems difficult to account for anything so odd, until we recollect that man has been forced to develop his ‘logical’ aspect in order to build civilization.
And this — as we observed in the case of Peter Hurkos — involves
suppressing
faculties that are not essential for survival.
In fact brain physiologists call the left hemisphere — the ‘you’ — the dominant hemisphere and refer to the right as the non-dominant hemisphere.
They could be compared to two partners in a marriage, where the husband is highly dominant and the wife unobtrusive and shy.

It is a pity that Bergson did not live long enough to see his philosophy scientifically justified — for that is what split-brain physiology has accomplished.
The right brain is concerned with pattern-recognition — which means that a patient with right-brain damage might have difficulty recognizing his own mother, except by
telling
himself that she has grey hair and brown eyes.
An undamaged right brain recognizes faces in a flash, without the need to analyze.
And the same faculty responds to poetry and music and pretty girls and mountain scenery.
And our response to these things is a valid
recognition
, not just a ‘feeling’.
If science insists on confining itself to those things that can be grasped by the left side of the brain, then it is ignoring a half of reality.

But it would be a mistake to blame the left brain for being too dominant.
It is not really a male chauvinist bully.
The problem is that in our complex modern civilization, it
has
to work hard just to survive.
It can easily become exhausted and overworked, in which case we begin to experience the ‘Ecclesiastes effect’, the feeling that all is vanity.
T.
S.
Eliot was complaining about his left brain when he wrote:

And I pray that I may forget

These matters that with myself I too much discuss

Too much explain,

and Yeats was speaking of the same thing when he wrote about:

… the old mill of the mind

Consuming its rag and bone …

But this feeling of aridity and futility is simply due to having
forgotten
that we have another faculty for grasping reality.
In effect the husband has become so overworked and exhausted that he has forgotten that he has a wife — and, moreover, a wife who can offer him extremely powerful support.
So when he feels abandoned and miserable, it often comes as an extremely pleasant surprise to realize that
he is not alone after all
.
He collapses from sheer exhaustion and is amazed to be suddenly overwhelmed by an exquisite sensation of relaxation and pure serenity: the recognition that the world
is
a delightful place after all.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow called such moments ‘peak experiences’ — those moments of bubbling, overwhelming happiness when we realize we had forgotten how marvellous life can be.
Maslow offered as a typical example the case of a young mother who was watching her husband and children eating breakfast when it suddenly dawned on her how lucky she was, and she went into a peak experience.
She had been taking them for granted, then stopped taking them for granted.

An even better example concerns a marine who had been stationed in the Pacific for a long period without seeing a woman.
When he went back to base and saw a nurse, he had a peak experience — because, he said, it suddenly struck him
that women are different from men
— that they’re soft and curved and gentle and as different from men as horses are from cows.
Anyone who is enjoying a holiday has a similar sensation — the delighted feeling that the world is a far larger and more interesting place than we had given it credit for.
It is then that we realize that our ordinary workaday awareness tell us lies.
It tells us that reality is rather dull and repetitive, and that if we were somewhere else it wouldn’t really be all that different from where we are now.
And now we see that
this is outrageously untrue: the world is full of infinite variety and strangeness.
And connectedness.

The problem is that an efficient left brain is a ‘workaholic’.
This word — which has entered the current vocabulary since the sixties — means a person who has become so accustomed to making an effort that he can no longer enjoy relaxation.
He is too tense to relax for long.
In the past few thousand years of human evolution the left brain has developed into a workaholic — and this applies to
all
human beings, even the laziest.
This is why we have forgotten the sheer variety and strangeness of the universe, and why it took a philosopher like Bergson to even notice that something had gone wrong.

The peak experience makes us aware of the same thing: this is why it is so important.
It descends upon us as a flash of
recognition
— the same kind of recognition that made Archimedes leap out of his bath shouting, ‘Eureka!’
What we recognize is what Bergson put into words: that we have two modes of perception, and that they are
equally valid
.
Maslow also made another important observation: that most healthy people have peak experiences every day.
The reason is obvious.
We have peak experiences when we are full of energy and optimism.
But the peak experience is not a mere overflow of energy and optimism: it is a
perception
that comes to us when the brain is highly energized.
This explains another important observation made by Maslow.
He discovered that when his students began talking and thinking about having peak experiences, they began having peak experiences all the time.
This is because the peak experience is a perception — something suddenly
grasped
, like Archimedes’ perception of the law of floating bodies.
It is not easy to grasp, because of the ‘logical’ limitations of the left brain.
But once it has been seen, once it has become an
insight
, it can be recreated by a kind of mental flick of the wrist.

This is an exciting recognition, for it means that we are on the way to grasping how the peak experience — or even the mystical experience — can be recreated at will.
We find it difficult to hold on to such experiences because our words
and ideas are too crude and simplistic.
(We have seen, for example, how Bergson’s insight can actually enable us to understand what happens in the peak experience by providing us with a more complex set of ideas.) A person who is overwhelmed by the mystical experience could be compared to someone who is given a glimpse of a city from an aeroplane, and then told to make a drawing of it from memory.
This
is why the mystical vision is ineffable — not because it is impossible to express in language, but because our language is at present too crude.
Once we have learned to make some kind of simple map of the main features of the city, we have taken a major step towards learning how to recreate the peak experience — or the mystical experience — at will.

It must be admitted that Maslow once remarked that peak experiences should not be confused with mystical experiences.
But he was only pointing out that they are different in degree, not in kind.
In fact it is obvious that the two have a great deal in common.
Consider, for example, the following mystical experience described by Anne Bancroft, a lecturer in comparative religion:

‘When I was young … I felt sure that there was a wonder and a mystery and all the world was somehow full of a meaning which I couldn’t really understand and couldn’t reach … I was sure that I truly belonged to it and that it had a great deal to do with God, whom I called the Presence because he seemed often to be present to me when I was alone in the fields and woods.

‘But when I was sixteen I became afraid and stopped it all.
I was afraid that I might lose myself altogether and although I had wanted this when I was younger, now the outer, everyday world had attractions for me too and I began to reject the inner, solitary quest.’

That is to say, she deliberately suppressed the right-brain mode of grasping reality in favour of a more practical approach.

When I was very young I married and started a family.
The years began to trickle past but the marriage was not a happy one, we were completely unsuited to each other, and it ended with a bitter sense of guilt and failure.
I kept the children and took them to America, where I remarried.
But this marriage too was founded on sand and not on rock, and in a last-ditch effort to keep it going I persuaded my husband to return with us to England, hoping that a calmer and saner society might help us both.
I think it did, but it was too late to save the relationship.
It was when this marriage too seemed doomed to end in a wasteland of quarrels, jealousy, fear and hatred, that I suddenly woke up to the fact that something had gone badly wrong, not just with this situation but with me.
Looking hard at myself I saw that I had become really futile, so much a slave to my emotions, so involved with my own feelings, so centred on myself that my life had narrowed down to the compulsive behaviour of a zombie.
Where was the true?
I saw clearly that something vital was missing in me.
It lay there out of my reach, even beyond my imagination, because I could not see what it was: I only knew I was without it.

I then came to a time of great despair.
In the middle of ordinary life — of looking after my children and sending them to school and playing with them, trying not to be inadequate for them — I saw myself as a person of no light, a person who was thick, opaque and joyless, not a real person at all.
A tremendous sense of remorse came over me for the years I had messed up so badly, and an enormous depression closed down … .

One night I could not go to bed and I sat still all night, feeling a great repentance and sadness of mind.
When the morning light came and the birds began to sing, I suddenly found myself strangely aware of them.
I looked into the garden and saw a blackbird and it was as though I had never seen a blackbird before.
It had a significance that was completely new to me and I suddenly felt that this blackbird was the most real thing I had ever seen, and
that just to see a blackbird in this way would make life worth living.
The days that followed were different from any that had passed before.
I was suddenly intensely aware of sound and light and found myself more vulnerable to the impact of other people.
Other things — a group of trees — would fleetingly take on the significance of the blackbird.
I realized I was coming close to something, some new quality.