Beyond the Occult (74 page)

Yet we know enough about the robot to know that this feeling is as untrustworthy as the depression induced by a hangover.
The trouble with living ‘on the robot’ is that he is a dead weight.
He takes over only when our energies are low.
So when I do something robotically I get no feedback of sudden delight.
This in turn makes me feel that it was not worth doing.
‘Stan’ reacts by failing to send up energy and ‘Ollie’ experiences a sinking feeling.
Living becomes even more robotic and the vicious circle effect is reinforced.
Beyond a certain point we feel as if we are cut off from reality by a kind of glass wall: suddenly it seems self-evident that there is nothing new under the sun, that all human effort is vanity, that man is a useless passion and that life is a horrible joke devised by some demonic creator.
This is the state I have decribed as ‘upside-downness’, the tendency to allow negative emotional judgements to usurp
the place of objective rational judgements.
Moreover this depressing state masquerades as the ‘voice of experience’, since it seems obvious that you ‘know’ more about an experience when you’ve had it a hundred times.
This is the real cause of death in most human beings: they mistake the vicious circle effects of ‘upside-downness’ for the wisdom of age, and give up the struggle.

On the other hand it takes only a flash of non-robotic consciousness — the delight of a spring morning, the sudden relief when a crisis disappears — to make us aware that ‘upside-downness’ is an appalling mistake.
Here it is
we
who are in control, instead of being controlled by the robot, and non-robotic states are characterized by this sense of being in control.
In these ‘conditions of control’ our vitality is so high that everything looks fresh and interesting; the result is the overwhelmingly authentic sense of ‘absurd good news’.
If you asked someone who is experiencing this state to define exactly what he ‘sees’, he would reply that it is a clear and objective recognition that the universe really
is
infinitely exciting and beautiful.
It also brings a dazzling vision of how human life might be
transformed
.
For we can see, instantly and intuitively, that the ‘Ecclesiastes effect’ is a confidence trickster who makes life seem dull and boring by assuring us that it
is
dull and boring — the process is closely akin to hypnosis.
In ‘conditions of control’ we can see through the lie, and the effect is a kind of revelation.
Suddenly everything is clear.
Now we are free of the robot we can see that the world is full of infinite and fascinating variety; it is the robot who irons out our perceptions and makes everything look alike — makes every house look like every other house, every tree look like every other tree.
More importantly we can see the way that the mechanisms of the robot produce ‘upside-downness’ and that it is our unconscious conviction of the truth of ‘upside-downness’ — the feeling that life is not worth
too much
effort — that really obstructs us from spending far more time in the non-robotic states.
(If you wish to measure your own unconscious level of ‘upside-downness’, observe your feelings next time you do something ‘pointless’ like
picking up something you have dropped or closing a door that should not have been left open: in moods of ‘upside-downness’ it causes a sinking of the heart and costs a real effort.) In conditions of control we suddenly recognize that ‘upside-downness’ is a
logical
error, and that if we could once grasp this with the conscious mind, as we can grasp the trick of doing long division or extracting a square root, a tremendous load would be lifted from the mind and the peak experience would become an everyday occurrence.

In fact this load
is
lifted from the mind every time some crisis disappears and we see the world without ‘upside-downness’.
This explains why Maslow’s students found it so easy to have peak experiences once they began thinking and talking about them.
The peak experience enabled them, in a flash of insight, to see through the mechanisms of ‘upside-downness’ and to recognize that there is no earthly reason why we should not live on a far higher level of optimism.
The peak experience is not a trick but a
perception
.
This is why it always produces a feeling that could be interpreted ‘Of
course
.‘

Understanding the robot also enables us to grasp the mechanism of depression and neurosis.
In non-robotic consciousness — freedom consciousness — we experience a continual feedback of interest from all our activities and this recharges our vital batteries.
When we are ‘on the robot’ there is no feedback and our batteries become flat.
So people who spend too much time living robotically find themselves engaged in a continual struggle against discouragement, the suspicion that life is a losing battle.
A few extra problems and the vicious circle effect can lead to nervous breakdown.
Yet once we can grasp that this is a logical error, one of the nastier tricks of
‘upside-downness’, we can see that it is an almost laughable absurdity on the level of a schoolboy howler.
Goethe’s Mephistopheles describes himself as ‘the spirit that negates’, and it is almost as if most of us had a tiny Mephistopheles living inside our heads waiting to turn our certainties upside down and whisper, ‘It isn’t really worth the effort … .’
Yet it should now be possible to see that ‘upside-downness’ involves a simple mistake, analogous to the mistake of a man who walks into a dimly-lit room and suspects that he is going blind.
The moment he realizes there is nothing wrong with his sight he heaves a sigh of relief and the anxieties vanish like hobgoblins.
If we could once grasp that nausea and depression are simple forms of ‘upside-downness’, they would immediately cease to be dangerous.

My own panic attacks, described in
chapter 1
of Part Two, reveal how dangerous they can be: I felt that I was slipping down a slope that led to insanity.
At its worst ‘upside-downness’ produces a feeling of standing on the edge of an abyss.
I have cited elsewhere
^*
an interesting case in point concerning the novelist Margaret Lane.
In 1945 a prolonged and difficult labour had left her in a condition of total exhaustion.
She was delighted to be a mother but found herself in a dangerous state of emotional oversensitivity: when the cat caught its paw in the door she felt it was a major tragedy.
At this point a copy of the
New Yorker
arrived containing John Hersey’s famous account of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima.
She said that it seemed so terrible that it blew all her emotional fuses.
Suddenly she ceased to be capable of feeling; life became completely grey and uninteresting.
She continued to be a good wife and mother by behaving as she ‘ought’ to behave; but she felt drained of all emotional response.
One of the symptoms of this inner ‘deadness’ was that grass looked like blue paper and leaves looked like green tin.
(These are well-known symptoms of schizophrenia.)

This state continued for a long time.
Every time some pleasant circumstance started to arouse a response in her she became aware of what was happening and the feeling promptly disappeared.
Living became a kind of ritual, without any love or hatred.
But one day she and her husband were tempted to buy a cottage in Hampshire and went to view it.
Naturally she was feeling more cheerful than usual, but as she walked alone in the field behind the cottage, the grass still looked like blue paper and the leaves looked like
green tin.
Suddenly she noticed some blue flowers: their blue was so intense that she stared at them with a flash of pleasure.
As she did so the ‘emotional freeze-up’ vanished.
The grass and leaves suddenly looked normal again.
She burst into tears as she realized that the ‘thaw’ had started.
And over the next few days the capacity to feel and respond slowly came back again.

Here the problem of ‘upside-downness’ can be studied in detail.
The physical fatigue of a difficult birth had left her drained; Hersey’s account of Hiroshima had the effect of plunging her into ‘nausea’, the feeling that human life is meaningless, brutish and short.
When human beings are in a healthy state of mind their natural response to evil is a sensible desire to prevent it happening again, but ‘nausea’ brings a feeling of helplessness and passivity.
So Margaret Lane found herself trapped in a vicious circle of negativity and ‘upside-downness’, which she was unable to escape because it seemed to her to be based upon a
logical
recognition.
As her vitality fought back, her resistance increased.
The pleasure of seeing the blue flowers produced a peak experience that lifted her clear of ‘nausea’ and freed her from the vicious circle of negativity, the ‘Mephistophelean point of view’.

In Margaret Lane’s experience we can see on a magnified scale something that happens to most of us a dozen times a day — that sudden feeling of ‘let down’, that life is, after all, rather an uphill struggle, and that perhaps we are fools to put so much effort into it.
This feeling is accompanied by a mini-version of the collapse experienced by Margaret Lane.
Because it is a mini-version, a mini-peak experience is enough to bring about a quick recovery — a dry martini, a favourite programme on television, the sound of a child laughing.
But recognizing the mechanisms of the mini-collapse would be enough to prevent them from happening.

In Grace Metalious’s
Return to Peyton Place
the heroine has a serious car accident because the accelerator of her car jams.
The author comments that if she had been a more experienced driver she would have realized that she only had to put
her toe underneath it and unjam it.
The same applies to the ‘vicious circles’ that produce so many nervous breakdowns and suicides.

It now becomes possible to attempt an answer to the earlier question, What are we
doing
in this ‘wooden world’?
In states of visionary ecstasy mystics like Ouspensky
see
the answer to the basic problems of human existence, but it all happens so quickly that they cannot even begin to pin it down in language.
And that is the problem:
to pin it down
.
It could be compared to a traveller who is lost in a forest and who is suddenly whisked up into the air by an angel and shown the way to the nearest main road.
But as soon as he is back on the ground he forgets what he saw.
His problem is how to retain enough of it to draw a map.

When R.
H.
Ward was returning to waking consciousness, he remarks, ‘the symbols we need if we are to comprehend “intuition” were supplied.’
In our ‘wooden world’ we need words and symbols to pin down meanings because we cannot
see
the meanings all the time: we keep losing them, like a man who goes into a room to get something then forgets what he went in for.
Robert Graves’s friend Smilley was unusual in this respect: he could ‘see’ the answer to a complex mathematical problem in one ‘bird’s-eye view’ and did not need the mathematical symbols and formulae that enable the rest of us to grope our way to a solution.
Symbols — and words and concepts — are our way of struggling towards the meanings we cannot grasp ‘in a flash’.
(Of course every one of us has sudden flashes of insight: the trouble is that we cannot connect them up to other insights.) Which explains, incidentally, why Ouspensky compared the ‘mystical realm’ to a world of complicated mathematical relations: mathematics is a model of the way we struggle from smaller to greater meanings.

So what we are doing with our slow and clumsy logic is advancing step by step into the realm of pure intuition, the mystical realm glimpsed by Ward and Ouspensky.
It is of course very pleasant to have mystical glimpses of the meaning of life, but what gives human beings really deep
satisfaction is to
pin them down
in words so that they cannot escape.

Please note that although most of us feel that life is painful and difficult — so that poets like to refer to it as a ‘dim vast vale of tears’ and to suggest that we are here to improve our characters — we all realize, in states of ‘spring morning consciousness’, that it
can
be a perpetual delight.
Ouspensky is not being quite accurate when he talks about the ‘wooden world’.
In all states of consciousness above Level 4 the ‘resistance’ of the ‘wooden world’ is a source of delight: think of the pleasure of a skier who feels the wind whistling past his ears, of a racing driver travelling at top speed, of a strong swimmer forging his way against the current, and it is obvious that life experiences itself most intensely in the face of resistance.
And this may explain why the force of life decided to undertake the hazardous venture of invading the realm of matter.