Beyond the Occult (75 page)

There its problems began.
Before it could establish a foothold in matter it had to create the robot, and the robot soon became a Frankenstein’s monster that came close to destroying its master.
Its immense complexity robs life of spontaneity and undermines it with discouragement.
Yet it should also be plain that human beings are now close to a turning-point in their evolution.
It is at the lower levels of consciousness that life is most enslaved by the robot: at higher levels its influence becomes progressively less powerful until, at the mystical level, it vanishes entirely.
At Level 4 human beings already catch repeated glimpses of Level 5 — ‘holiday consciousness’ and the peak experience.
What prevents us from establishing a secure foothold on this higher level is the problem of ‘upside-downness’, and the peak experience makes us aware that
this is not a real problem
.
Once we have grasped this insight and pinned it down in language, the problem will evaporate.

The basic weapon in this evolutionary struggle is language.
Consider the following sobering reflection: if Voltaire could read the last dozen pages of this book he would not have the slightest idea of what we are talking about.
He
thought in cruder categories (atheism versus superstition, etc.), and for all his intelligence he would be as baffled as if I were talking Chinese.
Yet most fairly intelligent modern readers can understand what we are saying without any difficulty.
This is because language has succeeded in pushing so far into the realms of the unknown since the late eighteenth century.
Every new concept — the fourth dimension, intentionality, the peak experience, Faculty X — is a bridgehead thrown out into that region of the inexpressible — Ouspensky’s mystical level where everything is ‘seen’.
The business of language is to make these connections that Ward and Ouspensky
saw
as soon as they passed beyond the level of ordinary physical consciousness.
And once these connections have been pinned down in language they become, so to speak, permanent revelations of meaning, like Margaret Lane’s blue flowers.

This was an insight that suddenly struck me in the early 1970s when a friend came to see me to ask if I had any research he could do for me: he felt he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and wanted something to occupy his mind.
I had to explain apologetically that I had nothing to offer.
But as he left I gave him a copy of my book on Maslow,
New Pathways in Psychology
.
A few days later he rang me.
‘You knew what you were doing when you gave me that book, didn’t you?’
He told me that the first chapter, describing Maslow’s concept of the peak experience, had lifted him straight out of his depression.
Maslow’s ideas had enabled him to
get to grips
with his problem, which until then had seemed a dangerous and invisible enemy.
As he read the book the depression had simply evaporated.

The story underlines a point of central importance: it is surprisingly easy to move from one level to another; the chief obstacle is doubt — that moment-to-moment feeling that the efforts demanded by life are not really worth it.
And, as Blake says:

If the sun and moon should doubt

They’d immediately go out.

Yet it is doubt that offers us the essential key to this problem.
Consider what happens when you experience that sinking feeling, or when you force yourself to do some task that strikes you as a waste of time.
You ‘leak’, and your energies drain away.
Most of us spend a great deal of our lives trying to cope with leakage, with an underlying lack of enthusiasm for everyday tasks.
Doubt causes our energies to become
scattered and diffused
.
They could be compared to billiard balls scattered over a table-top.
The moment we pay attention we draw the balls towards the centre of the table.
If we become absorbed in something the balls press together into a tight cluster.
If I am galvanized into intense concentration the pressure causes some of the balls to climb on top of the rest.
But this is as far as most of us can get: the effort exhausts us, or some doubt intervenes, and we allow the balls to scatter once again.
But occasionally, if some crisis or sense of purpose causes us to make some desperate effort of will — like a man standing before a firing squad — we can cause the balls to form a second tier and then even begin to form a third.
As this happens the sense of meanings, of ‘connections’, becomes so exciting that we momentarily grasp the real purpose of our powers of concentration: to ‘concentrate’ the billiard balls into a pyramid.
If we could actually achieve the ‘pyramid’ our minds would be fed by such a powerful sense of meaning from the ‘ranges of distant fact’ that ‘doubt’ would become an impossibility: there would be no temptation to allow the balls to scatter, any more than a child might be tempted to fall asleep in the middle of his birthday party.
This is Faculty X, the level of concentration that precedes the mystical experience.
It is a recognition of what human consciousness is one day destined to achieve, what Shaw’s Captain Shotover called ‘the seventh degree of concentration’.
It would be a state in which man would be totally in control of his ‘hidden powers’, and in which the evolutionary struggle would be conducted in the full conscious daylight of awareness.
At that stage the negative forces that at present obstruct us would have been left far behind.

The history of human evolution reveals that such a development is inevitable.
We have already noted that for its first half billion years, life on earth was little more than a ruthless struggle for survival, an endless record of brutality.
This was hardly a recipe for Utopia, so the next step was a drive towards the development of intelligence.
This was an astonishingly successful venture, and as recently as two-and-a-half thousand years ago a remarkable number of human beings began to grasp that the major aim of human existence is the development of intelligence and the creation of circumstances that will foster it.
The invention of the drama in ancient Greece was one of the most important steps in this development.
It taught men that they possess a theatre inside their own heads, and in this theatre Socrates and Plato taught their pupils to stage dramas of ideas.
The evolution of man over the next two thousand years was the evolution of this inner theatre.
Another name for it is imagination, for what it actually means is that man is playing out the dramas of the external world on an internal stage.
And the development of imagination made man realize that this inner world is independent of the accidents and contingencies of matter.
It was this recognition that transformed him from a remarkably intelligent ape into a being who recognized — no matter how dimly — that he was potentially a god.

What is imagination?
It is the power to make connections.
An uncle of mine once sat on the branch of a tree as he sawed it off at the trunk and was surprised when he landed on the ground: he had failed to make the necessary ‘connections’ in advance.
That sounds absurd, but I have just done something almost equally absurd.
I broke off work to make myself a cup of tea and absent-mindedly filled the kettle to the top, failing to ‘see’ that it would take much longer to boil.
Imagination is the power to anticipate reality by conjuring up mental connections.

Now when imagination is working well it spreads like a forest fire and I ‘see’ all kinds of connections.
(I am emphasizing the word ‘see’ because Ouspensky and Ward insist that they literally
saw
that everything in the universe is
connected.) When I feel tired or dull, it is as if the forest is soaked in rain, and the fire fails to spread.
But when I am feeling full of energy on a spring morning, my mind and my senses seem to combine to make dozens of connections — with past spring mornings, with childhood, with memories of the countryside, with water sparkling in the sunlight … .
C.
S.
Lewis once said that the very
idea
of autumn filled him with deep longing, and again we can see that this longing is compounded of yellow leaves, the smell of bonfires, soft grey skies and the thought of toasted muffins, and a thousand other things.
Our minds obviously have this power to ‘spread sideways’ into a thousand connections, but the wood is usually too damp to burn.
Or to put it another way, our brains are too dull, so that the great treasury of memory hidden inside us is inaccessible to ordinary consciousness.

Sex is a particularly potent releaser of connections.
It is easy to imagine that as Antony made love to Cleopatra for the first time, or Paris to Helen, they experienced an almost mystical sense of total reconciliation, a sense that everything in the universe is good.
This explains the perennial popularity of love stories: we only have to read about a boy falling in love with a girl to experience that warm surge of interest that means that the imagination is touched.
It also explains the popularity of pornography — and here we encounter one of the most remarkable of human evolutionary developments.
Man is the only creature on earth who can imagine a sexual act in such realistic detail that he can carry it through to a physical climax.
As absurd as it sounds, masturbation is one of humankind’s most remarkable evolutionary advances.
But we can also see that the invention of the drama, and later of the novel, were remarkable extensions of the human power of imagination.
With a novel in her hands the daughter of some nineteenth-century country vicar could live as richly as Helen of Troy — in a sense more richly, for the real Helen spent her days carding flax and trying to stave off boredom.

It was this development of imagination that gave rise to what we call the romantic movement, every one of whose poets and artists and musicians glimpsed this vision of the
sheer variety of the universe.
The vision always filled them with courage and pure affirmation, so that Shelley wrote:

I vowed that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine — have I not kept that vow?

With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now

I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave …

We can also see that Shelley is speaking of the same ‘glimpse’ that overwhelmed Proust as he tasted the madeleine.

These poets recognized that we should not blame the universe — or God — for the problems of human existence, but the narrowness of our senses.
Blake wrote, ‘Man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern,’ while Goethe declared:

The spirit world is never closed

Your heart is dead, your senses shut …

Yet what made the romantics so miserable — sometimes to the point of suicide — was the feeling that there was nothing they could
do
about this narrowness: that man is trapped in a kind of prison and sentenced to life.
It was true that the world of imagination permitted a certain freedom, yet indulgence in its delights only seemed to make them less capable of coping with the problems of the physical world.
After a trip to the ‘land of dreams’ they usually felt completely debilitated.
It seemed obvious that imagination was merely an
escape
from the harshness of ‘real’ reality and that it only made things worse when you had to cope with the dreariness of a cold Monday morning.
Now a person who regards the world of the mind as unreal yet who feels he still prefers it to the stupidity and coarseness of reality is an ‘Outsider’, and the human race is still in the ‘Outsider’ phase of its evolution.

The ‘Outsider’ problem was perfectly defined by Carlyle when he talked about the conflict between Everlasting Yes
and Everlasting No.
In other words it was the problem of
which is true
: those moments of sheer affirmation when it is self-evident that life is infinitely fascinating, or the depressing sense of ordinariness that fills most of our waking lives.
Some of Van Gogh’s paintings are the most powerful expression of the affirmation experience ever made, yet he left a suicide note that read, ‘Misery will never end.’
Nietzsche’s philosophy is the most penetrating and wholesale rejection of romantic pessimism ever made, yet he died insane.
All the romantics were dragged down by this suspicion that their moments of vision were illusions and that optimism is only another name for whistling in the dark.
Every one of us experiences a smaller version of the same problem a dozen times a day: a beam of sunlight brings a glow of happiness that is immediately succeeded by a ‘sinking feeling’ at the thought of the electricity bill.
With these continual swoops from optimism to pessimism and back again it is not surprising that Shakespeare’s Macbeth thought life a tale told by an idiot.