Beyond the Occult (21 page)

And here, at last, we have come to grips with the very heart of the problem: the tendency of intellect to confirm our negative judgements on life.
A child can feel just as depressed and miserable as an adult, yet a child seldom commits suicide.
Why?
Because he merely
feels
depressed.
The adult
thinks
depressed, and — if he happens to be a Sartre or Samuel Beckett — tells himself that life is meaningless and futile anyway.

In an amusing story called ‘The Unknown’ Maupassant provides an illustration of the workings of this ‘negative mechanism’.
A young man-about-town describes his acute embarrassment at being overtaken by sexual impotence.
He has frequently passed a dazzlingly attractive girl in the street and wondered how to make her acquaintance — once even trying to follow her home.
One day he summons up his courage to speak to her and, to his surprise, finds that she has
no objection to coming to his apartment.
(This already begins to worry him — it is a little too easy.) A few caresses, and she begins to take off her clothes — asking him, as she does so, not to look at her.
He glances at her naked back — and sees that she has a curious black stain between the shoulder blades.
Absurd ideas flash through his mind — of fatal enchantresses in the
Arabian Nights
who lure men into their clutches.
And when it comes to the time to ‘sing his song of love’, he finds he has no voice.
The girl looks at him with mild contempt, says, ‘It seems a pity to have put me to so much trouble’, and walks out on him.

Maupassant’s story only underlines a mechanism with which we are all familiar.
The machine I am using to type these words has an erase key, a highly convenient modern development.
If I strike the wrong key or write ‘hte’ instead of ‘the’, I merely press the erase key, and the mistake vanishes.
Our brains already have an erase key, so that we can correct our conversation as we go along.
It will even cancel something I am
about
to say or do: if I am about to make a tactless remark, I can catch myself just in time and say something else.
If I am feeling very nervous or embarrassed, my finger hovers permanently over this erase key, to the great detriment of my spontaneity.
The sight of the black birthmark causes Maupassant’s hero to press the erase key and destroy his own sexual desire.
And Sartre’s hero is in such a permanent state of nausea that he keeps his finger on the erase key most of the time.

Let us look a little more closely at the way this mechanism works, for it is obviously the key to the question, what prevents us from experiencing ‘duo-consciousness’ at will?

What actually
happens
when Maupassant’s hero suddenly loses his potency or Roquentin feels that a chestnut root has become frightening and menacing?
The answer is obvious: the intellect has been overruled by a negative emotion.
This is the basic mechanism of nausea and mistrust.
Or to put it another way, his intellectual values have been overruled by his emotional values.
(A value, of course, is simply a feeling that something is good or bad.)

We have, in fact, three distinct sets of values: physical, emotional and intellectual.
And of these three, the intellectual values are by far the most reliable.
My physical values have a nasty habit of changing from one hour to the next, so that I can feel marvellous at nine in the morning and utterly miserable by ten, merely because I feel hungry, or tired, or have a headache.
There is an excellent example of the awful power of our physical values in C.
S.
Lewis’s
Screwtape Letters
, when the demon Screwtape explains to his nephew Wormwood one of his most effective techniques for preventing human beings from thinking clearly:

I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum.
One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way.
The Enemy [i.e.
Jesus], of course, was at his elbow in a moment.
Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty years’ work beginning to totter.
If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a rational argument I should have been undone.
But I was not such a fool.
I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch.
The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion … that this was more important than lunch … .
When I said, ‘Quite, in fact much
too
important to tackle at the end of the morning,’ the patient brightened up considerably; and by the time I had added, ‘Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind’, he was already halfway to the door.

The first major obstacle to our powers of insight is the body itself, with its continually changing moods.

The second set of obstacles was clearly recognized by Anne Bancroft.
‘I saw that I had become really futile, so much a slave to my emotions, so involved with my own feelings … that my life had narrowed down to the compulsive behaviour of a zombie.’
This sounds like a contradiction in terms — surely feelings should make you feel more alive,
not less?
Yet we all know precisely what she means.
When we are truly happy, there is a blissful sense of being free of our emotions.
Emotions are like heavy mist, while real happiness is like being surrounded by clean, pure air.

But my intellect stands above these physical and emotional values.
For example, when I am feeling angry or jealous or upset, another part of me looks down on it all with cool detachment and tells me not to be such a fool.
On the whole my intellect tells me the truth — or at least does its best.
My physical and emotional values tend to distort my perception of reality and often assure me that life is horrible or futile or meaningless.
My rational self tells me that I am lucky to be alive.

The central problem of human existence is that our lives are dominated by these ‘trivial’ values of the body and the emotions, so that we are in a permanent state of confusion — like someone who is blindfolded at the beginning of a game of blind man’s buff, then whirled round a dozen times until he is dizzy.
There are times when our ‘trivial’ values and our rational values fight a duel to the death.
William James tells the story of a man who suddenly fell out of love.
For two years he had been violently enamoured of a girl who was a coquette.
His reason told him that she was simply not the right person for him but his emotions — and no doubt his physical desires — were so involved that he remained a slave.
Then one day, on his way to work, he felt as if ‘some outside power lay hold of me’, and he rushed home and burned all her letters and photographs, feeling ‘as if a load of disease had suddenly been removed from me’ — as, in a sense, it had.
It is significant that he felt as though some ‘outside power’ had laid hold of him, when it was merely his common sense that had revolted.
He had come to so identify himself with his ‘trivial’ values that he could not recognize that it was his own mind that had intervened to release him from his slavery.
All that had happened was that his mind had resumed its
rightful place
as the ruler and controller of his emotions.

Sartre once remarked that he had never felt so free as during the war when he was in the French Resistance and in
constant danger of arrest.
The reason is obvious.
With the threat of danger hanging over him he could not
afford
to allow trivial emotions to dominate his judgement.
The same is true of Graham Greene when he placed the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
In the surge of alarm, all his negative emotions were scattered to the four winds and a more mature ‘self’ took charge.

Maslow’s story of the young mother makes the same point.
As she watched her husband and children eating breakfast, she was preoccupied with immediate problems — getting her husband off to work and the children off to school — and therefore with ‘trivial’ values.
Then, in a flash, her mind rose above such trivialities, and she
grasped her situation objectively
, as if she were coolly assessing someone else’s life.
The result was a perception, ‘My God, aren’t I lucky!’, and a surge of joy.
Here we can see that
the peak experience is simply the experience of grasping the world clearly and rationally
.
The real trouble with physical and emotional values is that they are so
short-sighted
.
And when we feel tired or depressed or bored — or simply passive and indifferent — it is because we are allowing our ‘trivial’ values to dominate our intellectual values.
In effect we are holding our values
upside-down
.

This is a recognition of vital importance.
When a clear state of rationality is suddenly overcast by heavy clouds of emotion and
we allow ourselves to be taken in by them
, it is exactly as if our feet have turned into gas-filled balloons and we are suddenly floating upside-down.
And when we come to recognize this state we realize with horror that most human beings spend their lives ‘upside-down’.
It applies even to philosophers, which is why the history of philosophy is so full of pessimism and confusion.

We might turn this insight into a parable in the manner of Confucius, and say that when the intellect is the emperor and emotion is the grand vizier, the kingdom is harmonious and happy.
But when emotion usurps the throne and forces intellect to become its servant, the kingdom falls into chaos and misery.

The chief problem of being ‘upside-down’ is that the
‘trivial’ values are so short-sighted and tend to plunge us into a state in which the difficulties of life seem just not worth the effort.
‘Trivial’ values induce the ‘Ecclesiastes effect’.
When I am driven by a powerful sense of purpose, my intellect tells me that it
is
worth making tremendous efforts and I summon my vital energies accordingly — or rather, Stan summons them for me.
When emotional values are allowed to dominate, my vitality sinks — for it is Ollie who suddenly feels that life is just not worth the effort and whose pessimism infects Stan.

It is important to emphasize that we are not now talking about some relatively rare state of anger or jealousy or self pity.
The ‘upside-down’ state happens to us a hundred times a day, so that we literally forget whether we are on our head or our heels.
Most of us recognize the problem and do our best to fight against it.
But we all know people who have allowed themselves to become completely dominated by envy or self-pity or a sense of defeat, and who seem bent on ruining their own lives and the lives of everyone they come into contact with.
Permanent ‘upside-downers’ are the most dangerous people in the world.

Yet our proneness to ‘upside-down’ states is an inevitable consequence of human evolution.
Human beings can cope with more complexity than any other animal.
To cope with this complexity we have developed a ‘microscopic’ vision, rather like a watchmaker’s eyeglass.
But the eyeglass condemns us to ‘close-upness’, and close-upness (another name for nausea) deprives us of meaning.
Nausea is a kind of ‘collapsed consciousness’, a consciousness
minus
a dimension of meaning.
And once we recognize that, we have to face the depressing insight that ‘normal’ human consciousness
is
a form of nausea.
And human beings who are stuck in this narrow, ‘collapsed’ consciousness are particularly prone to ‘upside-down’ states — for ‘close-upness’ also makes us easily discouraged.

Now we have grasped the true nature of our everyday consciousness, we can see that far from being ‘normal’, it is actually subnormal.
It lacks a whole dimension of meaning,
like the television with the sound turned down.
On the other hand we can also see that Toynbee’s glimpses of Faculty X at Mistra or Pharsalus were ‘everyday consciousness’
plus
a dimension of meaning.
In other words Toynbee was experiencing a brief flash of genuinely normal consciousness.

This recognition is the all-important first step in answering the question, how can human beings set about achieving Faculty X at will?
We must recognize
precisely
what is wrong with our subnormal everyday consciousness.
We must also recognize that our tendency to ‘upside-downness’ constitutes a major obstacle to learning to achieve genuinely normal consciousness.
‘Upside-downness’ blinds us to reality.
A philosopher who tries to understand the ‘meaning of life’ without grasping this insight is in the position of a matador who tries to give a good performance even though his hat keeps slipping over his eyes.