Beyond the Occult (11 page)

One evening I was looking at a branch of rhododendron which I had put in a vase.
As I looked, enjoying its beauty but without any purpose in my mind, I suddenly felt a sense of communication with it, as though it and I had become one.
It seemed to come from my forehead and the feeling was immeasurably happy and strong … that strange sense of oneness with the rhododendron seemed to have come about because I was still, and not wanting anything, and therefore somehow free to see it properly and know it as itself.

I wished I could know everything in this way, and then I found myself thinking, why not?
It was only myself that was stopping me.
There was no limit to the amount of love that I could give to everything that I saw.
And then I realized that for most of my life I had never done this.
I had thought lots of things not worth my attention because they gave me nothing in return.
But now I could not imagine how I could have spent so long turning away from things or being indifferent to them … .

A few days later a new and somehow crowning experience came.
It was in the morning and I switched on the wireless to hear a concert.
As the first note of music sounded, there was an almost audible click in my mind and I found that everything was transformed.
I was in a different state of consciousness altogether.
It was as though the separate feeling of ‘me’ which we all feel had gone, clicked away, and instead there was a sense of clarity, of utter beneficent, wonderful emptiness.
And in that emptiness there were no barriers.
The stones on the road were exquisitively beautiful and as significant as a
person.
An upright, old-fashioned bicycle propped up by the road was wonderfully funny.
It was as though my mind could now embrace, without reserve, all that it encountered, whether people or animals or things, because it was living in clearness and emptiness.
I was in this state of the completest and greatest happiness for three days … .
^*

She goes on to tell how this experience led her to decide to investigate religion, and how reading Aldous Huxley’s
The Perennial Philosophy
led her to decide that her own experience fitted in with Buddhism.

The Buddha’s teaching was wholly concerned with untying the knots in men’s minds so that they can be open to reality and free from the greed and ignorance which bind them like chains.
I discovered, through meditation, that seeing things in their suchness — the word Buddha uses for the essential nature of all things — seeing them as I did once without any barrier of ‘me’ to get in the way, was one of the great aims of Buddhism.
This was a big relief to me because I didn’t want pious talk or a guilty feeling that I should attend some sort of church.
I wanted, and found, a straightforward acceptance that man’s deepest need is not to live by bread alone but to transcend all his thoughts and feelings and to
know
the meaning of timeless reality, and of God.

In this account phrase after phrase confirms the analysis suggested by split-brain physiology.
As a child her intuitive self was aware of ‘the Presence’ in nature.
She suppressed this because ‘the everyday world had attractions for me too’ — and it is the logical, left-brain self that has to be cultivated in order to deal efficiently with the everyday world of experience.
But an overdose of everyday experience — what Wordsworth meant when he said, ‘The world is too much
with us’ — left her feeling that she had become ‘really futile’ — the Ecclesiastes effect.
The dominant self had forgotten the existence of its non-dominant partner.
A night of deep introspection made her once again aware of the existence of this hidden self.
She began seeing the world through the eyes of the ‘other self’, and experience became intense and direct, no longer strained through what T.
E.
Lawrence called ‘the thought-riddled nature’.

Her ‘crowning experience’ consisted of what Douglas Harding has called ‘having no head’.
In his book
On Having No Head
(1972), Harding described how, looking out over the Himalayas, he suddenly lost all sense of identity:

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking.
A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me.
Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down.
For once, words really failed me.
Past and future dropped away.
I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine.
It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, innocent of all memories.
There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it.
To look was enough.
And what I found was khaki trouserlegs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in — absolutely nothing whatever.
Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing.
On the contrary, it was very much occupied.
It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything — room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky.
I had lost a head and gained a world.

Harding describes the sensation as being ‘utterly free of “me”, unstained by any observer… .
Lighter than air, clearer
than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.’

Yet split-brain physiology suggests that we should not regard this ‘me-less’ (i.e.
‘left-brain-less’) state as entirely desirable.
After all we possess left brains for a perfectly good reason — to enable us to cope with the complexity of everyday life.
We may recall that Anne Bancroft deliberately began to develop her left-brain faculties at the age of sixteen because she found the real world so interesting.
The same reasoning suggests that Buddhism may not be the ultimate solution to the world’s problems.
The fundamental parable of Buddhism tells how Prince Gautama was brought up by his father in total ignorance of pain and suffering; but in three unauthorized excursions from the palace, he saw an old man, a sick man and a dead man.
These led him to recognize that human life is basically suffering, and that the answer lies in relinquishing all desire and regarding the world with total indifference.
This attitude of wholesale world-rejection will strike most Westerners as another name for pessimism — or the tendency to throw out the baby with the bath water.
The left brain is a kind of microscope whose purpose is to examine the world in detail; the right is a kind of telescope whose purpose is to scan wide vistas of meaning.
It is true that ‘close-upness’ deprives us of meaning, but that is not the fault of the microscope but our own stupidity in forgetting that we can correct its limitations with the telescope.

Anne Bancroft’s account contains several more important clues — for example her remark that she wished she could know everything in the same way that she knew the rhododendron and the sudden realization, ‘Why not?
It was only myself that was stopping me.
There was no limit to the amount of love that I could give to everything that I saw.’
Here again she is making an observation that can be explained in simple psychological terms.
Because the left brain is always in a hurry it turns things into symbols, because symbols are simpler to handle than complex realities: you could say it turns real men into matchstick men.
And it
has to make continual decisions about how much attention to give each of these symbols or ideas — for, as Whitehead observed, movements of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle: you can only make so many of them.
When tired or worried the left brain tends to ration its attention to a minimum, and the world begins to look increasingly unreal.
A peak experience instantly restores the sense of reality and makes us aware that it was our own fault for failing to give
enough attention
to the world around us.
Anne Bancroft had simply rediscovered the central recognition of the philosopher Edmund Husserl: that perception is
intentional
.
That is to say that when we look
at
something, we fire our attention at it like a grappling hook.
When you walk into a picture gallery you automatically ‘fire’ more attention at each picture than you would bestow on a passing bus.
We
control the amount of energy we put into perception, so Anne Bancroft was quite correct when she said, ‘Why not?
It was only myself that was stopping me.’
The answer lies in
energizing the perceptions
.
Our minds have a ‘concentrative faculty’, a certain power of intensifying our power of ‘focusing’, which could be compared to pulling back a spring-loaded piston or the bolt of a rifle.
This faculty has the power of suddenly increasing our sense of reality; in fact, it might be labelled — in a phrase borrowed from the French psychologist Pierre Janet — ‘the reality function’.
The ‘reality function’ is undoubtedly one of the major keys to the problem of mystical experience.

The ‘Bergsonian’ approach to the problem has certainly yielded unexpected dividends.
Let us see whether it is possible to build on these insights to reach some general understanding of the ‘visions’ of the mystics.

Bertrand Russell’s objections make a convenient starting point.
Almost without exception, mystics claim to have achieved some kind of flash of understanding
of the universe
.
Now Russell admits that the aim of philosophy is to understand the universe.
But he points out that before we can understand
anything
, we have to add one and one together to
make two.
The ‘one-and-ones’ that the scientist adds together are
facts
.
And Russell objects that the mystics cannot possibly be in possession of enough facts to understand the universe.
Nobody is.

To this objection, the mystic replies as follows:

All insights involve a kind of
leap
.
When a psychologist puts a banana outside a monkey’s cage just out of his reach but leaves a walking stick in the cage, the monkey has to make a
leap
of insight before it sees it can use the stick to reach the banana.
When our minds become tired, it is hard for us to make these leaps.
On the other hand the mind is apparently a very strange kind of computer.
Some mathematical prodigies can work out twenty-four-figure primes within seconds.
So is it not conceivable that in certain moments, our minds might make a series of leaps that suddenly reveal the meaning?

William James describes such an experience in an essay called ‘A Suggestion about Mysticism’:

In each of the three like cases, the experience broke in abruptly upon a perfectly commonplace situation and lasted perhaps less than two minutes.
In one instance, I was engaged in conversation, but I doubt whether my interlocutor noticed my abstraction.
What happened each time was that I seemed all at once to be reminded of a past experience; and this reminiscence, ere I could conceive or name it distinctly, developed into something further that belonged with it, this in turn into something further still, and so on, until the process faded out, leaving me amazed at the sudden vision of increasing ranges of distant facts of which I could give no articulate account.
The mode of consciousness was perceptual, not conceptual [James means it was right-brain rather than left] — the field expanding so fast that there seemed no time for conception or identification to get in its work.
There was a strongly exciting sense that my knowledge of past (or present?) reality was enlarging pulse by pulse,
but so rapidly that my intellectual processes could not keep up the pace
.
[My italics.] The
content
was thus lost entirely to introspection — it sank into the limbo into which dreams vanish when we awake.
The feeling — I won’t call it belief — that I had had a sudden
opening
, had seen through a window, as it were, into distant realities that incomprehensibly belonged with my own life, was so acute that I cannot shake it off today.

We can see that James had simply experienced a less powerful version of Ouspensky’s mystical insight.
In between two words of the conversation his intuition suddenly zigzagged towards the horizon like a flash of lightning, revealing the basic ‘connectedness’ of everything and operating at such a speed — and revealing so many connections — that language was left behind, dragging its feet.
Like Ouspensky, James
saw
this vast continuum of interconnected ‘fact’ — ‘the mode of consciousness was perceptual, not conceptual.’
And if he had had time to investigate the experience he would undoubtedly have found, like Ouspensky, that he could have answered any question, because ‘the answer to [any] question included the answer to all possible questions.’