Beyond the Occult (16 page)

Now clearly, this view of perception contradicts the whole ‘negative’ trend in philosophy from Ecclesiastes and Plato to Schopenhauer and Sartre.
These philosophers insist that we
should distrust our senses because their evidence is ‘relative’; therefore the statement that the universe (and human existence) is meaningless is just as valid — or as invalid — as the statement that it has an ultimate purpose and direction.
But if the insights of the mystics are valid then this ‘melancholy relativism’ (as Thomas Mann called it) is quite simply a fallacy.
The trouble lies in the curious limitations of everyday consciousness — limitations that seem even more puzzling when we realize that they can vanish in a flash and leave us staggered and overwhelmed by a sense of infinite vistas of meaning.

Oddly enough it was Thomas Mann who gave classic expression to this ‘melancholy relativism’ in an early story called ‘Disillusionment’.
The author describes a conversation he had with an unknown man in St Mark’s Square in Venice.
After asking him whether Venice comes up to his expectations the stranger goes on, ‘Do you know what disillusionment is?
Not a miscarriage in small, unimportant matters, but the great and general disappointment which everything, all of life, has in store?’
He goes on to tell how, as a child, he expected life to be infinitely strange and exciting.
His first great disappointment came when his family’s house caught fire and they were all forced to watch it burn down in their night clothes: he stood there thinking, ‘So this is what it is like to be burned out of house and home?
Is that all there is to it?’
When he fell in love and the girl rejected him, he thought, ‘So this is what it is like to suffer agonies of jealousy — is that all?’
And it was just as bad when his desires were satisfied: the same feeling of ‘Is this all?’
Even the first sight of the sea was an anticlimax, for it had horizons, and he had hoped that it would be infinite.
It will probably be the same, he concludes, when death arrives: he will confront it with the feeling, ‘Is this all?’

Mann’s character is obviously suffering from the same sense of boredom that led Graham Greene to play Russian roulette.
‘Staring at a sight that others assured me was beautiful, I felt nothing.
I was fixed, like a negative in a chemical bath.’
This last comment offers us an important clue.
Greene had become ‘fixed’ in a condition of total
passivity
.
But passivity is a highly dangerous condition for human beings, because our natural
laziness immediately takes advantage of it until it seems to us self-evident that
nothing
is worth doing.
This is the condition in which Samuel Beckett’s characters sit around in dustbins or lie on their faces in the mud.
Yet all this is an absurd misunderstanding.
Man has gained power over the world by turning it into symbols — by turning real men into matchstick men, and so on.
But he has gained this mastery at the expense of losing touch with external reality and spending far too much of his time in an unreal world of symbols.
In effect modern man spends most of his time inside a sound-proof room inside his own head, staring at a computer screen.
This enables him to handle reality with far more efficiency than a child or a savage, but it also means that he tends to forget that there is a ‘real’ reality
out there
.
And when he grows tired and bored with the computer, he thinks he has grown tired and bored with life and decides that all effort is futile and that life is an endless disenchantment.

Having landed himself in this ‘unreal’ situation, Greene had to ‘galvanize’ himself out of it by playing Russian roulette.
His situation could be compared to that of a man who has convinced himself by logic that his limbs are paralysed, but is forced to swim for dear life when he falls into a river.
Greene’s real problem was that he failed to
grasp
the insight produced by the Russian roulette: that a certain kind of
mental effort
can produce the recognition that ‘life contains an infinite number of possibilities’.
It is as if the man had scrambled out of the river and immediately fallen victim again to the delusion that he could not move his limbs.

The point is interestingly underlined in a series of case studies made by the psychologist J.
Silverman.
He reported that schizophrenic patients, after a stay of more than three years in a hospital ward, simply stopped
seeing
things as clearly as they had (or, as Silverman put it, suffered ‘changes towards diminished field articulation and diminished scanning’).
The same thing was found to be true of convicts who had been in prison for very long periods.
Their perceptions became blurry and they tended to notice far less.
Their
consciousness, says Silverman, had shifted from the ‘active mode’ to the ‘receptive mode’ (i.e.
passive mode).
^*
In other words boredom had the effect of making their eyes less efficient, so that they actually
saw
the world as a duller and more boring place.
Here, we could say, science is providing us with a kind of proof of the mystic’s statement that our senses are telling us lies and that they ought to show us a far richer and more fascinating world.

It must be acknowledged that the main problem here is that it is very hard to see what Greene could actually have
done
about his state of ‘diminished perception’, short of playing Russian roulette.
For this is obviously the most important question of all: what can we actually
do
?
The Russian novelist Artsybashev has a novel called
Breaking Point
about a small Russian town where an increasing number of people become convinced that life is futile and meaningless, and the book ends with an epidemic of suicides.
How would a psychologist — or a mystic — go about convincing these people that they are actually committing a schoolboy howler about the nature of consciousness?

Silverman’s observation of convicts and schizophrenic patients makes it clear that the trouble was that they had stopped
noticing
things, and finally stopped seeing them.
They were not paying attention.
A Zen parable tells how a common man asked the Zen Master Ikkyu to write down for him some maxims of the highest wisdom.
The Master wrote one word: ‘Attention.’
‘Will you not add something more?’
asked the man, whereupon Ikkyu wrote, ‘Attention.
Attention.’
The disgruntled man said he couldn’t see much wisdom in this, whereupon the Master wrote, ‘Attention.
Attention.
Attention.’
‘What does attention mean?’
asked the man, whereupon Ikkyu replied, ‘Attention means attention.’

Hermann Hesse stumbled upon the same insight in his small book
Journey to the East
, a kind of allegory about a group of people who wander off in search of ‘salvation’.
The narrator records, ‘I, whose calling was really only that of a violinist and story-teller, was responsible for the provision of music for our
group, and I then discovered how a long time devoted to small details exalts us and increases our strength.’
Everyone has made a similar discovery at some time: that exhaustion and fatigue can be reversed simply by becoming deeply
interested
in something and giving it the full attention.
It is as if the vital energies, which had become scattered and diluted, are somehow
funnelled
into the object of attention.
The moment Ollie murmurs, ‘How fascinating!’
Stan immediately sends up a trickle of strength and vitality.
And we only have to experience this trickle of vitality — what J.
B.
Priestley calls ‘delight’ or ‘magic’ — to grasp our true situation and to realize that the sense of being ‘cut off from reality’ is not a particularly serious condition.
We are ‘cut off from reality’ because we are standing in front of a computer screen in a sound-proof room inside our heads.
But it is easy enough to walk out of the door into the fresh air.
We merely have to know that the door is there.

This is what happened to Maslow’s students, who discovered that as soon as they began thinking and talking about peak experiences, they had peak experiences all the time.
They had recognized the simple fact that ‘reality’
is
real and should not be confused with the world of symbols.
This recognition comes very easily when we are on holiday or travelling in a strange place, for it is then self-evident that reality is real.
Sitting outside a pub, drinking cold beer and eating bread and cheese from a wooden table, or walking through some quiet old cathedral close that looks unchanged since the time of Trollope, we can see that the world is ten times as interesting as we thought and that life holds out far more promise than we had realized.
Then we experience Anne Bancroft’s insight that our normal perception is too lazy and half-hearted and that we make no real effort because we do not believe we shall see any adequate return for our energy.
The feeling of ‘absurd good news’ that comes in such moments is a sudden recognition that there is no good reason why we should return to our former ‘debased’ perceptions.
If we can merely
hang on
to this recognition, we shall have broken out of the vicious circle of Stan and Ollie and the robot.
Then it will merely be a question
of arousing ourselves to live with far more determination and effort and optimism — an optimism which, in this state of insight, we can see is richly justified.

The most important insight is the recognition that states of ‘delight’ can be produced by a more or less co-ordinated effort of will.
William James noted that it is continual
effort
that can ‘carry us over the dam’.
My own efforts to induce these states have convinced me of the truth of Ikkyu’s observation that the basic necessity is attention.
I have succeeded on a number of occasions in producing states of concentrated awareness which lasted for a period of hours, and on each occasion the first necessity was to convince myself (that is to say, my ‘other self’) that a continuous effort would produce worthwhile results, exactly like the effort devoted to reading a book — or, for that matter, writing one.

On one occasion a few years ago the initial effort was the result of being caught in a snowstorm in a remote farmhouse.
I had gone there to give a lecture to a group of extra-mural students on New Year’s Eve, and before I arrived at the farm it had begun to snow heavily.
I had arranged to stay the night, and when I woke up the next morning I found that my ground-floor bedroom window was blocked by a snowdrift.
My car, and a dozen or so others, were stranded in the farmyard, with no possibility of getting them out.
So I was forced to stay there another night.
The next morning the weather forecast announced more snow, and it was obvious that unless I wanted to spend a week there I had better make a serious effort to get out.
Some of the other ‘castaways’ felt the same, and a team of us set to work with shovels to clear the entrance to the farmyard.
Then the car that was nearest to the gate made an effort to get through.
But its wheels spun in the snow, and the driver had to admit defeat.
My car was next in line, and to my delight it had no problems in gripping the compacted snow.
But there was still half a mile of snow-covered road — much of it uphill — between the farm and the main road.
In some places the wind had blown the road clear, in others the snow was three feet deep.

We worked away all morning with our shovels — in one place I avoided a loop in the road by driving straight across a field —
and by midday I had reached the gateway that led out on to the main road.
We all walked back to the farm for lunch, then I picked up my bag and tramped back to the car.
The snow on the main road had been flattened by traffic, but the surface was treacherous.
In places, where no cars had disturbed the fresh snow, it was impossible to make out where the road ended and the ditch began.
In other places the snow had built up at the side of the road into six-foot banks.
It was necessary to drive for mile after mile with extreme caution, knowing that the slightest error might land me in the ditch and leave me stranded in the open countryside for another night.

When, several hours later, I finally arrived on a broad main road where traffic had turned the snow into slush, I experienced an enormous sense of relief.
Then as I drove on towards home I realized that instead of fading, this ‘glow’ of relief and delight was remaining constant.
The intense and continuous ‘attention’ of the past few hours, the perpetual sense of crisis, had somehow ‘fixed’ my consciousness in a higher state of awareness, so that everything I looked at seemed somehow more real.
It was not unlike the state I often experienced as a child on Christmas Day — the feeling that the world is
self-evidently
wonderful and exciting, and that no problem is too great for human will and persistence.
There was a feeling that if only I could maintain this vision, I would never experience any serious problems for the rest of my life.
The state lasted for the remainder of the drive home, and was still easy to recreate the next morning.
In fact I only have to spend a minute or so thinking about the experience to feel a renewal of the basic insight — although, of course, without that ‘heightened pressure’ of consciousness.