Beyond the Occult (69 page)

So Frank Harris’s problem, as he steps into this centre and recognizes that the circle spreads out to infinity, is that he momentarily ceases to be Frank Harris: a moment later he has no way of understanding what he has glimpsed.
So what can he
do
about it?
Daskalos would say that he must keep on maturing until he grasps the paradoxical fact that he is not his present personality.
But this answer is bound to be disappointing for the rest of us, who feel that we would like some more specific recommendation.
The alternative — trying to dive head first into mystical experience like Merrell-Wolff — is hardly more satisfying since as Merrell-Wolff himself admits, the experience evaporates and refuses to return when we want it.

In the course of this book I have tried to suggest that there
is
a more pragmatic and straightforward route to these insights.
Ever since Plato Western man has realized that he has the power to put complex insights into clear and simple language.
Many of the great philosophers expressed themselves with appalling obscurity, yet any intelligent commentator can explain their meaning in words that can be understood by a reasonably bright child.
When the problems of mysticism are approached in the same spirit they begin to seem less bafflingly paradoxical.

The essential clue emerged in the third chapter of Part One of this book: the concept of ‘upside-downness’.
This, we saw, is the basic reason that our outlook tends to be negative.
We have three sets of ‘values’: physical, emotional and intellectual.
The intellect aims at a rational, objective view of the world but is continually being undermined by negative emotions.
When we allow these emotions to overrule the intellect the result is a state of ‘upside-downness’.
And the world seen from a state of ‘upside-downness’ is a horribly futile and meaningless place.
‘Upside-downness’ produces ‘the Ecclesiastes effect’, the feeling that ‘all is vanity’.
It also produces what Sartre calls ‘magical thinking’, a tendency to allow our judgement to be completely distorted by emotion so that we cannot distinguish between illusion and reality.

Most murders are committed in a state of ‘upside-downness’, for ‘upside-downness’ involves loss of control.
In
A Criminal History of Mankind
I pointed out that our energies operate on a counterweight system, like up-and-over garage doors.
The forces involved could be referred to as Force T — standing for tension — and Force C, standing for control.
When I become angry or impatient or tired, Force T clamours to be released, producing an uncomfortable sensation exactly like wanting to urinate badly.
It attempts to destabilize me.
On the other hand if I become deeply interested in something I deliberately ‘damp down’ these forces of destabilization to bring them under control.
We can see that when Barbara Tucker went into a state of mystical insight as she listened to the Beethoven quartet she had achieved what might be called ‘a condition of control’.
All the forces of destabilization had been soothed into deep serenity.

All this seems so simple that it is hard to see why we cannot achieve conditions of control whenever we listen to music.
The answer goes to the very heart of this problem.
It is because our
intellectual values are still ‘upside-down’.
Our underlying, instinctive feeling is that life is grim and difficult and something awful might happen at any moment.
In other words, as absurd as it sounds, the basic problem is an intellectual one.
It is not simply that our emotions are negative, but that our intellect
agrees with them
.
Our judgement ratifies the ‘upside-down’ view of the world.

In fact the solution should be fairly straightforward.
Whenever some minor crisis disappears I experience a sense of relief and a recognition of how delightful it is to be rid of the problem.
If I have been suffering from toothache and then it stops, I deeply appreciate the condition of
not
being in pain.
Absurdly enough, I am grateful for a negative state — not having toothache.
If if could make proper use of my imagination I could be grateful for a hundred other negative conditions: not having a headache, not having earache, not having gout in my big toe … .
Then why is it so difficult for me to make use of this simple method of enjoying life?

This brings me to the most important recognition so far.
Our minds are inclined to accept the present moment as it is, without question.
Of course we ask questions when we are unhappy or in pain.
But in ordinary, everyday consciousness — what we might call ‘neutral consciousness’ — we accept the present moment
as if it were complete in itself
.

A little reflection reveals that this is a mistake of gargantuan proportions.
Every dullard and stick-in-the-mud is a dullard because he makes this assumption.
A few years ago, in a Cornish village not far from here, there died a man who boasted that he had never left the village during the entire course of his life.
He had never even experienced the curiosity to go to the next village, less than a mile away.
He was apparently a completely normal individual with no disabilities — except a complete lack of imagination.
One imagines that he suffered from the same problem as Sartre’s cafe proprietor in
Nausea
: ‘When his cafe empties, his head empties too.’
The present always struck him as self-complete.

Now the truth is that the present moment is always incomplete, and the most basic activity of my mind is ‘completing’ it.
Imagine that a being from some distant galaxy suddenly finds himself, by some curious accident of space-time, travelling in a bus through Piccadilly Circus.
For
him the world appears to be a meaningless chaos, for he cannot understand a single thing he can see.
When you and I see a man raising a match to his lips we know he is only going to light a cigarette, not set his hair on fire.
When we see a woman place a handkerchief to her nose we know she is going to blow it, not tear it off.
When we see a man climbing a ladder we know he is not hoping to reach the sky.
When we see flashing lights advertising a toothpaste we know they are not announcing the end of the world.
Our star dweller knows none of these things.
His world is meaningless because he cannot ‘complete’ things.
Anything he looks at might signify anything.

This makes us aware that the process of education is simply the process of ‘completing’ whatever we see.
When my telephone rings I know that someone is ringing my number, but a baby has no idea of what is happening.
When I look at a house I know that it has two or three sides that are invisible to me, but for all a baby knows it may be merely a façade.
I ‘complete’ it in my mind without even realizing that I am doing so.
This ‘completing’ is the most basic activity of all intelligent beings.
And because we do it every waking moment of our lives we accept it as naturally as our heartbeat.

But our ‘completing’ activities tend to vary from moment to moment.
When I am tired I may watch the television without taking it in: I cannot be bothered to ‘complete’ it.
On the other hand when I set out on holiday the world seems to me an extraordinarily interesting place — I cannot understand why I ever thought it was dull.
My mind is now doing its ‘completing’ work with enthusiasm and efficiency.

This is why we all crave experience.
It is the only way of developing this all-important ‘completing’ faculty.
Imagination helps, but it can never be a real substitute.
Imagine two people watching a television programme about the pyramids of Egypt; one has visited the pyramids, the other has not.
For the person who has visited the pyramids the programme has a whole extra dimension of meaning.
He is able to ‘complete’ what he sees on the screen.

Of course we may ‘complete’ things quite wrongly.
A paranoiac imagines that the whole world is engaged in a conspiracy against him: he believes that the window cleaner across the street is spying on him in order to report to the CIA.
He is ‘completing’ the present moment but adding some quite unwarrantable assumptions.
This example makes us aware that ‘completing’ is not as natural and instinctive as it looks.
It is to some extent a precise intellectual activity.
Even to ‘complete’ a detective novel, I have to use my powers of reason.
But that kind of ‘completing’ is fairly obvious and presents no problems.
It is the purely instinctive ‘completing’ that makes life so difficult, for we have a deeply ingrained habit of accepting the present moment as complete in itself and of consequently taking it for granted.
Life is what it appears to be.
If I am bored, that is because life is boring.
If I am tired, that is because life is tiring.
If I am confused, that is because life is confusing.
I gaze at the world as passively as a baby and wonder why, on the whole, it all seems so oddly meaningless.
Kierkegaard expressed this confusion when he wrote:

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell what land one’s in; I stick my finger into existence — it smells of nothing.
Where am I?
Who am I?
How did I come to be here?
What is this thing called the world?
What does the word mean?
Who is it that has lured me into the thing, and now leaves me there?
… .
How did I come into the world?
Why was I not consulted … .
And if I am compelled to take part in it, where is the director?
I would like to see him.

These words were written in 1843.
When Kierkegaard was ‘discovered’, almost a century later, critics found his attitude remarkably ‘modern’ and he became — together with Kafka — one of the culture-heroes of the existentialists.
Yet we can see plainly that Kierkegaard’s sense of bewilderment arose from a simple misunderstanding.
He reminds us of a man who pushes frantically at a door, convinced he has been locked in and failing to realize that it opens inwards.
His problem is a
simple failure of ‘completing’.
This becomes obvious if we think of Dostoevsky in front of the firing squad, suddenly realizing that life is infinitely interesting and infinitely exciting — a feeling he expressed in
Crime and Punishment
when his hero says that he would prefer to stand on a narrow ledge for all eternity, in darkness and tempest, than die at once.
In the urgency of the crisis his mind is galvanized into doing its proper work of ‘completing’.
And as soon as he does this, he sees that far from being meaningless, life consists of infinite vistas of meaning.

This, I repeat, is the central problem of human existence: we are inclined to accept the present moment as ‘self-complete’, like a painting on the wall of an art gallery.
Of course, there are moments when fate presents us with such a delightful richness of experience that the moment
is
virtually self-complete.
A child on Christmas day, a lover kissing the girl he adores, a mountaineer on the summit of Everest — these people experience such a breathtaking sense of the richness of life that the very thought of defeat or despair seems preposterous.
But such glimpses of the ‘bird’s-eye view’ are rare.
For the most part we have to be content with a worm’s-eye view
and ‘complete’ it from inside our own heads
.
This is why all young people long to travel, to fall in love, to experience conquest: because they will then have the necessary materials for ‘completing’ stored in a lumber room behind the eyes.
That at any rate is the theory.
As I sit outside a Paris cafe on a sunny morning smelling the odour of Gauloises and roasting coffee beans and watching the passing crowds, it now seems to me that fate has handed me an insight that will always save me from despair — or even depression.
I merely have to remember how wonderful life can be and I shall see that temporary setbacks are unimportant.
In such a state of mind even the worst miseries and humiliations are seen to be merely interesting challenges, like high waves to a surfer.

The artist has always seen it as his task to remind himself of these moments when he can see that the ‘disasters of life are innocuous’.
Wordsworth asked:

Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

But he believed that the answer lay in ‘recollection in tranquillity’.
So did Proust.
The problem is that recreating lost delight is more difficult than it looks: as Proust’s Marcel remarks, ‘It is a labour in vain to try to recapture it; all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile.’