Beyond the Occult (67 page)

We can see that King was in a relaxed right-brain state and that he was also applying the discipline that Daskalos recommends, paying full attention to the external world.

Suddenly the entire aspect of the surroundings changed.
The whole atmosphere seemed strangely vitalized and abruptly the few other persons on the platform took on an appearance hardly more important or significant than that of the doorknobs at the entrance to the passengers’ waiting-room.
But the most extraordinary alteration was that of the dun-coloured bricks.
They remained, naturally, dun-coloured bricks, for there was no concomitant sensory illusion in the experience.
But all at once they appeared to be tremendously alive: without manifesting any exterior motion they seemed to be seething almost joyously inside and gave the distinct impression that in their own degree they were living and actively liking it.
This impression so struck the writer that he remained staring at them for some minutes, until the train arrived and it was necessary for him to mount the steps and enter a car.
^*

On another occasion, when he was returning home from New York feeling rather tired, Daly King had a quite different kind of experience:

Once more the scene altered unexpectedly and with a startling abruptness, as if one stage-set had been substituted instantly for another.
But it was now chiefly the
other people who held the focus of attention.
They looked dead, really dead.
One expected to see signs of decay but of course there were none.
What one did see was stark unconsciousness, scores of marionettes not self-propelled but moved by some force alien to themselves, proceeding along their automatic trails mechanically and without purpose.
Some of the mouths were open and they looked like holes in cardboard boxes.
The faces were blankly empty: even those upon which otherwise some expression would have been noticeable had been drained of any significance and one saw that those expressions were unrelated to the entities that wore them.
For the first time the concept of the zombie became credible.

King says he experienced a curious mixture of compassion and contempt.

If we look more closely at these experiences we can see that the first was basically due to a surge of vitality: any sudden feeling of happiness brings the same experience in a lesser degree.
In his autobiographical novel
Sinister Street
Compton Mackenzie describes his hero waiting at a street corner for a girl he has just fallen in love with, and says, ‘ … In his present mood of elation he could enjoy communication even with bricks and mortar.’
But then Mackenzie’s hero is waiting for his ladylove, and Daly King had no similar reason for delight.
What happened in his case was slightly different.
Everyday human consciousness is like a tyre with a slow puncture: we
leak
.
Energy has to be continually created as it drains away.
We observe this most when we are bored or suddenly discouraged: we actually feel the energy draining out of us like a deflating tyre.
Concentration closes the leaks.
Daly King had accidentally succeeded in closing all his leaks simultaneously, and the result was a sudden surge in the pressure of consciousness and an almost ecstatic sense of
control
.

On the second occasion he was tired, so the closing of the leaks brought no surge of inner pressure, only an awareness of his own freedom, by contrast with which the un-freedom
of most other people became obvious.
Ouspensky had once had a similar vision in which he saw that people were literally asleep, with their dreams hovering like clouds around their heads.
In his heightened state of awareness Daly King was suddenly grasping the truth about human beings: that they are little more than machines that respond to stimuli from the environment.
Such a vision also explains why the future may be regarded as more or less predetermined: because we do very little that is not purely mechanical.

Yet if we consider both experiences together the total insight is by no means depressing.
What Daly King was grasping was that it is after all fairly easy to rise to this higher state of inner pressure.
Our ‘mechanicalness’ prevents us from becoming aware of it, but the moment we become aware we can begin to do something about it.
Hence the feeling of ‘absurd good news’.

This is the essence of ‘the occult vision’.
The philosopher Fichte once remarked, ‘To be free is nothing: to
become
free is heavenly.’
The reason should now be obvious.
When we suddenly become free, when some crisis suddenly evaporates or new and fascinating prospects suddenly open before us, we respond with a
surge of energy
.
This surge of energy lifts us up above our normal ‘mechanicalness’ and makes us aware of
connections
, and of the extent of our freedom.
But since it is impossible to live without ‘the robot’ we soon sink back into our usual condition of ‘unconnected’ passivity.

I have described elsewhere the experience of a girl of my acquaintance who suddenly ‘became free’.
She was married to an American academic who was unfaithful to her and had finally decided to leave him — a hard decision since they had young children.
Her brother had recently been offered an appointment in Ohio and suggested that she should come and keep house for him.
Then her husband was offered another academic post in Oregon and begged her to go with him.
For days she agonized about whether to go to Oregon with her husband or Ohio with her brother.
Suddenly, as she was wrestling with the problem, it dawned upon her, ‘I don’t
have to go to Oregon
or
Ohio.
I’m
free.’
She said that the experience filled her with a sense of overwhelming joy and lightness, so that she felt as if she was walking on air.
Even her tennis improved.

Here we can see that the freedom experience is basically a recognition that certain limits we took for granted were an illusion.
But what precisely are these limits?
For normal, healthy people they are not physical limitations.
As I sit in this room I do not feel imprisoned by its four walls.
The real limitation is my sense of
what is worth doing
.
If I have just received some crushing disappointment every effort becomes a drain on my vitality.
If I have just received some unexpectedly good news I have so much energy that I feel like turning cartwheels.
I allow the things that happen to me to determine my sense of freedom.
And because our lives are to a large extent repetitive, we begin to assume that we possess a certain precise degree of freedom, no more and no less.
We might say that ordinary consciousness is a kind of ‘habitual assessment’ of our freedom, with a tendency to be on the low side.

We can also see that when Maslow’s young mother had a peak experience as she watched her husband and children eating breakfast, this ‘habitual assessment’ was suddenly swept away by a surge of energy and she ‘became free’.
A moment before she
was
free but took it for granted: now she
became
free.
She had
remembered
how much she had to feel delighted and relieved about.
Our habitual feeling of unfreedom is a kind of forgetfulness.

Now this is in a sense one of our most cheering observations so far.
After all nothing is easier to remedy than ordinary forgetfulness.
I can tie a knot in my handkerchief, leave a note for myself, set the alarm on my watch … .
We can understand, for example, that after Daly King had
seen
the bricks glowing with interior life, he would never again look at those same bricks without remembering what he had seen and making an effort to regain the vision.
And because he remembers, the vision becomes progressively easier to regain.
This is why Maslow’s students began having peak
experiences all the time when they began talking and thinking about peak experiences.
Here we have one of the most basic methods for recreating the peak experience or mystical experience: deliberately trying to remember, to conjure up that strange feeling of joy and serenity that lies at the heart of the peak experience.
More often than not nothing seems to happen: the essence of the experience refuses to return.
Then, perhaps five minutes later, it comes wandering into the head like a forgotten tune.
And the more often we remember the tune the easier it becomes to recall it at will.

What has struck me again and again in discussing peak experiences and mystical experiences with those who have experienced them is that they happen so
easily
.
We merely have to do something which breaks an old habit and the result is the peak experience.
In other words our real problem is that we have a habit of
not
having peak experiences, of remaining preoccupied with the routines of everyday life.
But the peak experience is a particular kind of insight, and once it has been experienced it tends to recur.
Barbara Tucker, the wife of Albert Tucker, provided me with an interesting example.
She described it quite casually as she was driving me to an outlying suburb of Melbourne, in response to some remarks I had made about Maslow.
At the age of twenty she had suddenly become deeply interested in music.
Her mystical experience came one day as she was listening to Beethoven’s late quartet, Opus 132.
‘I suddenly had the experience of seeing the entire universe.’
She had taken no interest in mysticism and read nothing about it, so the experience came as something of a shock.

And suddenly this vast horizon opened up to me.
And suddenly I knew — or I saw — that time, past, present and future, were all one, and that I was God, and yet at the same time was only the minutest grain of sand.
I can remember thinking, ‘How incredible — how can you be two things at once?’
And also I saw that the entire universe is on a grid system — I actually saw the grid stretching out into infinity — that every thought, every
deed, every word, anything that happened, was not accidental.
Everything in the universe was interconnected: every time you meet someone, it’s not a chance meeting — there’s a purpose for that meeting, and it all ties up with everything else in the universe.
It was the most incredible thing to see — everything linking up, everything tying in.
And that experience changed my life — it made me see things very differently.

Clearly she had ‘seen’ precisely what Ouspensky saw.

Barbara Tucker had three or four similar experiences within twelve months, all of them far less revelatory than the first yet each giving her a glimpse of the original vision.
In a typical one she was at a party given by friends, feeling rather ambivalent about it.
(‘I tend to sit in a corner and not really enjoy them very much.’)

All the people round me were laughing and chatting and doing the things people do at parties — and then again, I suddenly saw all the connections between these people — how they all interconnected — how all this show that was going on was not, in fact, idle chatter.
It was all interconnecting into their relationships with one another in the most extraordinary way.
But what I thought was interesting was that I wasn’t part of it.
I was just a total outsider, a person looking in.
I was not connected to them … .

It is of course very difficult to grasp exactly and precisely what she saw: as I listen to the tape she made for me, with its long pauses, I am conscious all the time of her attempt to force language to express the inexpressible.
This is not because her experiences were ineffable but simply because language was made to express concrete facts and ideas: it is helpless to describe even the difference between the smells of an orange and of a lemon.
What she saw obviously struck her as in some way self-evident, and the memory has remained with her quite clearly ever since.

What is also clear is that the capacity to grasp this type of
experience can also lead to more straightforwardly ‘psychic’ experiences.
Here again an event described by Albert Tucker provides a typical illustration.
Partly as a result of the curious experiences already described he had become deeply interested in self-suggestion and self-hypnosis.
He developed the habit of lying down for half an hour after lunch and inducing a state of deep relaxation, then giving himself all kinds of positive suggestions:

In the course of doing this I’d had some rather odd little experiences, one of which was that the mattress and the bed would seem to convulse like a wave, and I’d feel this as a very distinct and unmistakable sensation, as if different waves of energy were coming through.
I really felt that something was starting that I wasn’t ready for.
I didn’t know where it was all leading, and I shied away from it.