Beyond the Occult (19 page)

I fancy that I heard from Mrs Gall

That mushrooms can be cooked another way —

I never read the works of Juvenal —

I think I will not hang myself today.

It was Chesterton who coined the phrase ‘absurd good news’ to express these flashes of ‘immortality’.
And in
The Man Who Was Thursday
he demonstrates his insight into Faculty X when he makes the hero ask, ‘When you say, “thank you” for the salt, do you mean what you say?
No.
When you say, “the world is round”, do you mean what you say?
No.
It is true, but you don’t mean it.’
A moment before Proust’s hero tastes the madeleine dipped in tea he could have said, ‘I was a child in Combray,’ but he would not have meant it.
As he tastes the madeleine he can say, ‘I was a child in Combray’, and
mean
it.
Yet in a sense he has only grasped the obvious: the reality of the past.
But he ‘knows’ the past is real anyway.
Proust’s experience only underlines the fact that our normal consciousness is a consciousness of unreality.
Our left-brain perception separates us from reality as if
we were enclosed by a wall of sound-proof glass.
In fact it is easy to fall into a pessimistic view of the left brain as our jailer.
Eliot writes:

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Yet, as already pointed out, it would be a serious mistake to think of ‘Ollie’ as the villain.
On the contrary, it is left-brain perception that makes life interesting and exciting.
This emerges with almost painful clarity in a passage of a letter written in 1887 by Mrs Sullivan, the teacher of a blind deaf-mute child called Helen Keller.
Mrs Sullivan tells her friend:

In a previous letter I think I wrote you that ‘mug’ and ‘milk’ had given Helen more trouble than all the rest.
She confused the nouns with the verb ‘drink’.
She didn’t know the word for ‘drink’, but went through the pantomime of drinking whenever she spelled ‘mug’ or ‘milk’.
This morning, while she was washing, she wanted to know the name for ‘water’.
When she wants to know the name of anything, she points to it and pats my hand.
I spelled ‘w-a-t-e-r’ and thought no more about it until after breakfast.
Then it occurred to me that with the help of this new word I might succeed in straightening out the ‘mug/milk’ difficulty.
We went out to the pump-house and I made Helen hold her mug under the spout while I pumped.
As the cold water gushed forth, filling the mug, I spelled ‘w-a-t-e-r’ in Helen’s free hand.
The word coming so close upon the sensation of cold water rushing over her hand seemed to startle her.
She dropped the mug and stood as one transfixed.
A new light came into her face.
She spelled ‘water’ several times.
Then she dropped on the ground and asked for its name and pointed to the pump and the trellis, and suddenly turning round she asked for my name.
I spelled ‘Teacher’.
Just then the nurse brought Helen’s little sister into the pump-house,
and Helen spelled ‘baby’ and pointed to the nurse.
All the way back to the house she was highly excited, and learned the name of every object she touched, so that in a few hours she had added thirty new words to her vocabulary… .

PS … Helen got up this morning like a radiant fairy.
She has flitted from object to object, asking the name of everything and kissing me for very gladness.
Last night when I got into bed, she stole into my arms of her own accord and kissed me for the first time, and I thought my heart would burst, so full was it of joy.
^*

It is almost impossible for us to imagine the world of a blind deaf-mute.
But as we read these lines, we can suddenly grasp the overwhelming happiness of the child who realizes that
everything has a name
.
Before that she was in a state of confusion about ‘mug’ and ‘milk’ — she thinks that words are interchangeable.
And now, suddenly, this seven-year-old child has been handed the key to the understanding of all life, and her excitement is so immense that she learns thirty new words in a few hours.
And from then on, she wants to know the name of everything she touches; she drops the signs and pantomimes and prefers to spell out her desires in words.
In a few hours she has become the
master
of her environment.
She has ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, helpless, mortal… .
And all this because she has learned the proper function of the left brain:
mastery
of life.

This recognition is of central importance, for it is too easy to fall into the error of regarding the left brain merely as a jailer who prevents us from having peak experiences.
The left brain is, on the contrary, the key to our evolutionary destiny.
‘Vision’ is important, but control is even more important.
The point is powerfully underlined by the novelist Joyce Collin-Smith in her autobiography
Call No Man Master
.
In the 1960s she became a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was convinced that the world could be transformed by transcendental meditation.
The Maharishi
‘initiated’ her one day by teaching her to repeat her personal mantra, then left her to meditate.
She described how she immediately slipped into a state of blissful serenity that lasted for most of an afternoon and evening.
After this she found it easy to achieve states of ‘inwardness’ in which hours passed like minutes.
According to the Maharishi, the mind will turn naturally towards the source of its own being if it is shown an easy technique.
This is the ‘kingdom of God within’, and the source of all existence.
‘Great happiness, energy, creativity, love, can be tapped by this simple means,’ he said, ‘for the mind easily transcends this world and enters the field of the Being.
So the initiate finds all tensions, world-weariness and all negative emotions falling away from him.
He goes deep within and emerges renewed and refreshed.’

This sounds unexceptionable.
But it soon became clear that ‘plunging within’ had some disadvantages.
‘A desire to withdraw from life, and to be committed to no one and to nothing, seemed to be growing in them’ [the initiates].
Some initiates could not be prevented from remaining in meditation almost permanently.
A few began to have alarming experiences — a kind of cataleptic trance in which they were unable to move or open the eyes.
As we shall see in a later chapter, such a state often precedes an ‘out-of-the-body experience’.
Finally Joyce Collin-Smith began to experience doubts about the Maharishi himself, as success changed the childlike guru into a kind of super-tycoon, and after a period of disillusionment she left the movement.
Then, quite suddenly, she was oppressed by a sense of boredom and futility:

Then slowly everything began to turn, not just depressing and heavy, but completely sinister.
I found I couldn’t hold my mind steady at all.
I perceived what the intellect had always known but experience had not as yet appreciated: that everything in life is in a perpetual state of flux; that there is no stability anywhere; that the only constant is continual unrelenting change.

Looking at my hands, I saw them dissolving from the competent ring-clad hands of a middle-aged woman to the
slim, smooth young hands of a girl, the little fists of a small child, the tiny curled buds of the baby in the womb.
And at the same time they were old and gnarled with the knuckles of an aged crone, and finally the skeleton hands crossed in the grave.

Soon this experience began to happen with everything she looked at: a cup would become a heap of china clay and a few broken shards, a table would be simultaneously a pile of unplaned timber and broken fragments of worm-eaten firewood; nothing would ‘hold still’.
After a night in which she saw the world as a kind of Dante’s Inferno, full of helpless misery, she decided to kill herself.
She took a rope and sat underneath an oak tree, trying to decide how to go about it.
As she did so she noticed that the rope was ‘holding steady’.

In my recent state the rope would have been dissolving into strands, into hemp, into flax growing in a field, flowering and seeding, being gathered, soaked and plaited, and at the same time fraying and disintegrating… .

Now I saw that my deep concentration on the moment, on the rope as it was at that time — not what it had been or what it would become — had caused it to hold steady in its present moment of time… .
The tree had also remained steady, neither dying nor becoming a sapling or a seed.
It was like the television technique of stopping characters and situations in mid-action, leaving everything poised and immobile … .

The secret of recovering ‘normality’, then, must lie somehow in holding attention steady in the present moment; not allowing any slippage in the mind … .
The intense concentration and narrowing down of my mind as I contemplated my own intention with the rope had apparently triggered off a mechanism that, in the normal state, enables one to function in the world.
It was evidently an automatic function, operated in some way
by attention, or perhaps by
intention
, but normally completely unobserved.

This led Joyce Collin-Smith to realize that ‘directed attention … must somehow be the key to getting back my sanity’.
And she soon re-acquired the trick of focusing upon the present moment.
‘For months I had been looking at life as through an unfocused microscope, seeing far too much, far more than I could use profitably in any way at all.’
As soon as she grasped that, she again became ‘normal’.

Her symptoms had been very like those of a bad psychedelic trip.
Transcendental meditation had taught her the knack of escaping the limitations of the left brain and of relaxing ‘into the right’, with all its wider connections with other areas of being.
Her terrifying experience taught her that the purpose of evolution is not to escape the limitations of the left brain, but to put them to good use.

Since we have got hold of this problem by the coat tails it would be a pity to let it go without a determined attempt to get to the bottom of it.

We can see that Toynbee’s flashes of Faculty X were a
controlled
version of Joyce Collin-Smith’s unnerving ‘glimpses’.
Toynbee was also catching a glimpse of reality — so that he was able to say something and
mean
it.
Because he was actually in the citadel of Mistrà looking down on the plain of Sparta, he could say, ‘A century ago, invaders came over that wall
there,’
and almost
see
them doing it.
Whether that was all that happened is a matter we shall discuss in a moment.
But the ‘flash of reality’ was certainly the starting point of the experience.

Why, in that case, can we not summon the experience at will?
We can see, to begin with, that Toynbee summoned the experience by
telling
himself that it was true.
And because he was in Mistrà, and because the place held for him such fascinating associations, he was somehow able to ‘convince’ his senses that it had happened five minutes ago.

It seems clear that when the senses are ‘convinced’, they are perfectly willing to reveal another dimension of reality.
And this in turn raises the natural question, why do our senses not normally show us ‘reality’?
Part of the answer is plain enough.
The left brain is always in a hurry.
Its job is to ‘cope’ with everyday life and its endless complications.
It has very little time to ‘stand and stare’.
When I am driving in heavy traffic I cannot afford to notice the make of every car that comes towards me, or even its colour; all that concerns me is its speed and what it intends to do next.
So, for perfectly sound reasons, the left brain reduces the real world to a set of symbols.
The problem is to persuade the brain to go behind these symbols — to galvanize it into a sense of reality, as Graham Greene’s Russian roulette galvanized his devitalized senses.
William James said that what we need is ‘the moral equivalent of war’, meaning some imaginative experience that would galvanize us like the trumpet for battle.

But if we examine this problem more closely we can see that it is not entirely a matter of symbols.
The real problem is the way we interpret these symbols.
The trouble is that faced with a rather dull-looking world (which is dull because we have turned it into symbols), we allow ourselves to groan with despair and turn away in disgust.
When this happens we experience what Sartre calls ‘nausea’, and Camus ‘the absurd’.
In Sartre’s novel
Nausea
the hero, Roquentin, describes how it first happened to him.
When he was in Cambodia, an acquaintance tried to persuade him to accompany him on an archaeological mission.
He happened to be staring at a Cambodian statue at the time.
Then, suddenly, he seemed to wake up ‘from a six-year slumber’: