Beyond the Occult (15 page)

Each man is in his Spectre’s power

Until the arrival of that hour,

When his Humanity awake

And casts his own Spectre into the Lake.

Anne Bancroft’s ‘humanity awoke’ and cast her spectre into the lake.

Blake’s image makes us aware that the spectre — or robot — can become a kind of octopus that strangles our senses
and
limits our vision
.
In other words our normal perception is diluted and debased by the robot; when we open our eyes in the morning what we see is
not
objective reality but a highly subjectivized reality, coloured by our doubts and miseries.
Epictetus said, ‘What alarms and disturbs man are not real things, but his opinions and fancies about things.’
And since our civilization has been nurturing these opinions and fancies for several thousand years, most of us find ourselves trapped in a totally false ‘communal reality’.

Of course it would be unfair to think of the robot only as a kind of spectre.
He is simply a computer — a computer thousands of times more complex than anything that has been developed by IBM — and we would find it impossible to live without him.
But when we slip into the ‘vicious circle’ situation he becomes a kind of Old Man of the Sea, sitting on our shoulders and strangling the life out of us.

Graham Greene’s autobiography
A Sort of Life
provides an insight into the mechanisms of the vicious circle.
He describes how, at public school, the ‘interminable repetitions’ of his life finally broke him down.
It is clear from his account that it was not a particularly unpleasant public school and he had no real reason to be unhappy.
But boredom and a naturally gloomy outlook (probably rooted in self-pity) finally drove him to a number of suicide attempts.
He drank a bottle of hypo developing fluid under the impression that it was poisonous, drained his blue glass bottle of hay fever drops, ate deadly nightshade picked on the common and went swimming in the school baths after taking twenty aspirin.
(He says it produced a sensation like swimming through cotton wool.) After an attempt to run away he was sent to a psychiatrist in London, and thoroughly enjoyed the break from routine.
But the psychiatrist’s efforts to ‘normalize’ him only increased his manic depressive tendencies, and he comments, ‘For years, after my analysis, I could take no aesthetic interest in any visual thing: staring at a sight that others assured me was beautiful I felt nothing.
I was fixed, like a negative in a chemical bath.’

It was at this point that he discovered a revolver left in a
corner cupboard by his elder brother.
He had read in some Russian book about Russian roulette, and now took the revolver on to Berkhamsted common to try it for himself.
He inserted one bullet, then spun the chambers behind his back, put the revolver to his right ear and pulled the trigger.
‘There was a minute click, and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into the firing position.
I was out by one.
I remember an extraordinary sense of jubilation, as if carnival lights had been switched on in a dark drab street.
My heart knocked in its cage, and life contained an infinite number of possibilities.’

We can see that what had happened is simply that the self-induced ‘crisis’, followed by relief, had jerked Greene out of a state of self-induced laziness which was based on a feeling of futility and a
decision
that ‘nothing was worth doing’.
He had been thoroughly trapped in the negative feedback effect until he was half-strangled by the ‘spectre’.
When he pulled the trigger, the Old Man of the Sea gave a shriek of alarm and leapt off his shoulders.
However when Greene continued to play Russian roulette — six times in all — the effect of the ‘drug’ wore off and he ceased to experience the sense of renewal.

Greene’s use of the word ‘drug’ makes it clear that he had failed to grasp the essence of the experience.
He thought of Russian roulette as a way of releasing adrenalin, failing to grasp the insight that the answer lay in
energising his perceptions
, making a deliberate effort to throw off boredom and laziness.
Twenty years later, in
The Power and the Glory
, Greene again made use of the experience.
When his ‘whiskey priest’, another manic depressive, is about to be shot, he suddenly realizes ‘that it would have been quite easy to have been a saint’.
But the boredom that hangs over the novel like a stifling fog makes it clear that once again Greene has not grasped the import of his own insight.

What is beginning to emerge is perhaps the most important single insight that any human being could experience.
Peak experiences and mystical experiences are not glimpses of
some ineffable, paradoxical truth, but simply a
widening
of our ordinary field of perception.
The mechanism is described precisely by William James when he says that he was 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
[my italics] of which I could give no articulate account.’
That is to say something reminded him of something else, and that of something else, and that of something else, until — like a flash of lightning — he was grasping a
far wider
range of ‘facts’ than usual.
What he ‘saw’ was not some mystical vision of God or the universe — merely facts.
But he saw them all together, in relation to one another.
We are reminded of Ramakrishna’s parable of the blind men touching the elephant: the one who touches its leg thinks it is like a pillar, the one who touches its ear thinks it is like a winnowing fan, the one who touches its tail thinks it is like a rope, and so on.
But anyone who possessed the power of sight, no matter how stupid, would instantly have seen how all these parts combine to make an elephant.
It is as if the problem with our normal perception is that it has somehow been crippled or ‘damped down’ so that it only works at a mere fraction of its proper efficiency.
So instead of perceiving the horizons of distant fact that our brains are capable of grasping we grope short-sightedly at the surface of immediate reality and mistake ears for winnowing fans and tails for ropes.

Now although it may not be immediately apparent, all this constitutes a completely new theory of the nature of reality.
For as long as philosophy has existed, philosophers have been passing negative judgements on human life.
Ecclesiastes thought that all life is vanity and vexation of spirit.
Plato compared human life to men chained up in a cave, forced to look at shadows on the wall.
Aristotle said that it is better not to have been born, and death is better than life.
The Buddha says that all life is misery and bitterness.
Lucretius says that
life is a treadmill that leads nowhere, a desire that never finds fulfilment.
And in 1818 Arthur Schopenhauer published the longest and most comprehensive attempt so far to prove that human life is meaningless and pointless and that — as Sartre later put it — man is a useless passion.
According to
The World as Will and Idea
, ‘the world is my idea’ and has no objective reality; our perceptions only show us illusions.
The only underlying reality is a blind, obstinate will that has no real purpose and therefore dooms us all to perpetual disappointment.
One of the book’s central paragraphs reads as follows:

We saw that the inner being of unconscious nature is a constant striving without end and without rest.
And this appears to us much more distinctly when we consider the nature of brutes and man.
Willing and striving is its whole being, which may very well be compared to an unquenchable thirst.
But the basis of all willing is need, deficiency, and thus pain.
Consequently, the nature of brutes and man is subject to pain originally and through its very being.
If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of desire, because it is suddenly deprived of them by a too easy satisfaction, a terrible void and ennui comes over it, i.e.
its being and existence itself become an unbearable burden to it.
Thus its life swings like a pendulum, backwards and forwards between pain and boredom.
^*

The complaint is that we all change from moment to moment and have no permanent being or purpose.
Even the pleasure of love, according to Petronius, is gross and brief, and brings loathing after it, a sentiment echoed in Dylan Thomas’s lines:

At last the soul from its foul mousehole

Slunk pouting out when the limp time came
†

The latter is probably as good a summary as any of the philosopher’s basic indictment of the world.
When a man
falls in love he experiences the same perception that he experiences on spring mornings and holidays and in peak experiences: the sense of
reality
, of the real value of the objects of his enthusiasm.
When this collapses into a feeling of satiety and fatigue it seems equally obvious that the whole thing was a mistake, that the sex instinct, whose only purpose is procreation, lured us into this situation in order to fulfil its own dubious aims.
Or as T.
S.
Eliot put it:

Birth, and copulation, and death.

Birth, and copulation, and death.

That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:

Birth, and copulation, and death.

Which is ‘true’ — the original desire, or the later feeling of disillusionment?
According to most philosophers, even this question is meaningless.
Neither is ‘true’.
We just happen to feel one thing one day and another thing another: to ask which is true is like asking whether a rainy day is ‘truer’ than a sunny one.
The same answer applies to the question, why do we experience such a clear sense of meaning and purpose when we are in love — or even merely in a state of erotic excitement?
Because the ‘conjuror’ has chosen to delude us for his own purposes.
This is why man ‘feels sad after coitus’ — because he knows he has been duped again.

Now according to the view of perception that we have developed in the last two chapters, all this is simply untrue.
The basic problem lies in the dullness of our senses and our brains, which reveal to us an extremely limited range of reality.
And it is the ‘close-upness’ that deprives us of meaning.
Or, as I have expressed it elsewhere, man is like a grandfather clock driven by a watchspring.
Or like some enormous watermill whose stream has dried up into a narrow, sluggish flow.
As William James put it in an essay called ‘The Energies of Man’:

Everyone knows that on any given day there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth … .
Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighed
upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sureness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding.
Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake.
Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked.
We are making use of only a small part of our mental and physical resources.

And he summarizes the problem by saying that our basic problem is an inveterate ‘habit of inferiority to our full self’.

If we can once
grasp
this fact — that our senses are so dull that we are little better than sleep-walkers — then we can also begin to see that when we experience a sense of meaning, it is because our senses have opened a little wider than usual, to admit a wider range of reality.
In its normal state, the brain is like a piano whose strings are damped so that each note vibrates for only a fraction of a second.
In these ‘wider’ states of mind the strings go on vibrating and cause other strings to vibrate.
One thing suddenly ‘reminds’ us of another, so the mind is suddenly seething with insights and impressions and ideas.
Everything becomes ‘connected’.
We
see
that the world is self-evidently a bigger and more interesting place than we usually take for granted.
There is no question of illusion or of being somehow ‘intoxicated’ with energy.
We are simply in a state of wider perception — both outer and inner perception.
The brain is operating a little closer to normality instead of in this grossly subnormal state that usually makes life such a burden.

In ‘wider’ states, we can also see that a man’s response to a pretty girl is not some conjuring trick of nature designed to lure him into fathering her children: it is a genuinely deeper perception of her reality.
Sexual excitement also has this effect of widening and deepening the
perceptions
: the ‘distant ranges of fact’ are, in this case, of a sexual nature.
If sadness or disappointment or even loathing succeed this excitement, it is simply because the senses have returned to their usual narrow state; we are once again ‘subnormal’.