Beyond the Occult (9 page)

Something strange also happened to his sense of time, so that when his companion spoke, there seemed to be an immense gap between each of his words.
‘When he had finished a short sentence, the meaning of which did not reach me at all, I felt I had lived through so much during that time that we should never be able to understand one another again, that I had gone too far from him.’

All this, says Ouspensky, was accompanied by immensely powerful emotional states.
‘I took in everything through feeling, and experienced emotions which never exist in life.’
His inner world became a kaleidoscope of ‘joy, wonder, rapture, horror, continually changing one into the other’.
The state seemed to allow access to infinite knowledge, but when he looked for the answer to any particular question, it ‘began far away and, gradually widening, included everything, so that finally the answer to the question included the answers to all possible questions’.
He encountered the same problem when he looked at physical objects: an ashtray seemed to arouse an infinite succession of meanings and associations, so that he scrawled on a slip of paper, ‘A man can go mad from one ashtray.’
And the ashtray, like everything else, seemed to be
communicating
with him, almost as if it had a voice.

The remainder of Ouspensky’s description is too long and detailed to quote here even in summary (although I shall have occasion to mention specific items elsewhere in this book).
His experiments usually ended in sleep, and his awakening the next morning was a dreary and disappointing experience.
The ordinary world seemed unutterably dull:

… this world contained something extraordinarily oppressive: it was incredibly empty, colourless and lifeless.
It was as though everything in it was wooden, as if it was an enormous wooden machine with creaking wooden wheels, wooden thoughts, wooden moods, wooden sensations; everything was terribly slow, scarcely moved, or
moved with a melancholy wooden creaking.
Everything was dead, soulless, feelingless.

They were terrible, these moments of awakening in an unreal world after a real one, in a dead world after a living, in a limited world, cut into small pieces, after an infinite and entire world.

In other words it is as if man found himself stranded on a planet whose gravity was so enormous that he was unable to stand upright — unable even to crawl on his hands and knees without immense effort.
(Gurdjieff once said that our world is the cosmic equivalent of Outer Siberia.) In this iron world even thought is trapped by the tremendous gravity, so that it has to drag itself along the ground like a wounded animal.
For the most part consciousness is little more than a mere reflection of the environment, and life is basically a mere succession of visual images, of being ‘here and now’.
This
is why our world seems to be ‘cut into small pieces’, why its basic characteristic is ‘separateness’.
If you were utterly exhausted as you read this page it would dissolve into separate words, and even if you succeeded in grasping the meaning of an indivudal sentence the total meaning of the paragraph would still elude you.
This is what our world is like.
Everything stands separate and disconnected, and we have become so accustomed to this state of affairs that we assume that it is natural and inevitable.
Yet it is
not
natural, any more than it is natural to fail to grasp the meaning of a sentence.
And we realize this every time a spring morning fills us with a sense of the sheer
interestingness
of the world.
‘Separateness’ is unnatural; the true and natural state of affairs is a basic ‘connectedness’, just as Ouspensky realized during his mystical experiments.

In short this world, which seems to us so oppressively real, has been robbed of a dimension of reality by the feebleness of human consciousness and its inability to function efficiently in the powerful gravitational field of our universe.
This is only a part of the problem.
What turns a difficult situation into a dangerous one is that our mental numbness deprives
us of all sense of direction, so that most human beings have given up any attempt to see things as a whole.
In effect most of us waste our lives battling against the difficulties of the present moment, and when life offers us the occasional breathing space we are inclined to waste it in boredom or the search for amusement.
This is why man, who is fundamentally a well-disposed and sociable creature, is capable of so much evil where his fellow creatures are concerned; the harsh Siberian environment has made him brutal and shortsighted.
Yet every flash of poetic or mystical insight makes us instantly aware that such a view is, quite literally, an absurdity.

One thing seems clear: the world glimpsed in these moments of insight is
more
real than the world of everyday reality.
And by this time it should also be quite clear that everyone who has experienced these glimpses has
seen
the same thing.
It always involves the recognition that our usual sense of being at the mercy of circumstance, of being a slave of material reality and our own bodies, is an illusion.
We possess ‘hidden powers’, tremendous reserves of unsuspected strength.
One simple consequence of this insight is the power to heal sickness, in oneself and sometimes in others.
The schoolgirl Moyra Caldecott described how, after her marriage, she developed angina, then had another mystical experience that left her healed.
And Lawrence LeShan decided to test the validity of mystical experience by training himself to go into ‘altered states of consciousness’ through meditation, and developed the power to heal.
A chapter of his book
The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist
is devoted to a description of some of his cases, including that of a boy who broke his back on a trampoline and was diagnosed as being permanently paralysed — until a group led by LeShan tried ‘distant healing’ and restored feeling to his legs in just about one hour.

But the main insight of all mystical experiences is obviously a sense of
meaning
— a feeling that the universe is not just an accidental conglomeration of matter, the chance result of some unexplainable big bang, but has the same kind of
overall pattern and purpose that we can perceive in living organisms.
Nobody feels that a flower or a kitten are chance occurrences, like a broken bottle; they obviously are not.
And the mystic feels — or rather ‘sees’ — that the whole universe is a gigantic pattern, like some enormous flower.
Mystical experiences invariably seem to instil courage and optimism.

All this enables us to see that in spite of the mystic’s insistence that they are ineffable — impossible to express in words — these experiences have a great deal in common with feelings and insights that are common to us all.
Nietzsche talked about sudden feelings of overflowing vitality, ‘the glorious delight which arises in man from the very depths of nature, at the shattering of the
principium individuationis
… the Dionysian rapture whose closest analogy is with drunkenness.’
In Hermann Hesse’s novel
Steppenwolf
the hero (a typical self-divided ‘Outsider’) spends a night with a beautiful girl and has an overwhelming feeling of affirmation about his own life:

For moments together my heart stood still between delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how thronged the soul of the wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations… .
My life had become weariness.
It had wandered in a maze of unhappiness… .
It was bitter with the salt of all human things; yet it had laid up riches, riches to be proud of.
It had been, for all its wretchedness, a princely life.
Let the little way to death be as it might — the kernel of this life of mine was noble.
It came of high descent, and turned, not on trifles, but on the stars.

This is the authentic mystical insight, yet neither Steppenwolf nor his creator were mystics — merely romantics.

Mysticism can appear on still lower levels.
William James even insists that the feeling we derive from alcohol (in the right circumstances) is a minor form of mystic experience.
And ‘Walter’, the anonymous autobiographer of the sexual classic
My Secret Life
, admits that he sometimes suffers from
what he calls ‘erotic madness’, in which he is so carried away by physical lust that he has no idea of what he says or does.
All these experiences obviously have something in common with Bucke’s cosmic consciousness.
Which inevitably raises the central question, would it be possible to build a bridge between everyday experience and the experience of the mystic, so we could cross it at any time?

In fact the scaffolding for such a bridge has already been erected by a French philosopher, Henri Bergson.
Bergson was born in 1859, in the middle of the Victorian era, and soon came to share the materialism of thinkers like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer.
His fellow students at the Ecole Normale nicknamed him ‘the atheist’ because he insisted that the universe was a product of purely natural forces and that religion and morality were delusions of the human imagination.
When his teacher reprimanded him for keeping his bookshelves untidy and asked, ‘How can your librarian’s soul stand such a mess?’
the whole class shouted in chorus, ‘Bergson has no soul.’
It was when he became a schoolmaster in the Auvergne and began taking long walks that the peace of the countryside made him aware of the poetic side of his nature.
As he looked at the woods and hills his atheistic materialism dissolved away.
But it was not so much a religious conversion as a philosophical one.
Bergson’s great insight was that if we try to grasp reality with the mind we are bound to remain empty-handed.
It passes through our fingers like a handful of water.
But this does not prove that reality — or water — does not exist, or that the insights aroused in us by nature can be dismissed as ‘mere feelings’.

When I draw a line with a ruler, says Bergson, my reason tells me that it consists of billions of points in space.
But I know that this is not true, for it is a
continuous
line.
If it really consisted of billions of points it ought to be possible to divide it into these points — or at least to imagine it divided into points.
But no matter how many points I divide it into I can still imagine billions more points — in fact an infinite number — between them.
In theory my pencil should take an infinite amount of time to draw it.
Obviously there is something
badly wrong with my reason, which tells me that a line consists of points.
The same applies to time.
How long does twelve o’clock last for?
It doesn’t last for any period of time, for you can always imagine a billionth of a second to twelve, or a billion-billionth… .
So, according to reason, time consists of an infinite number of points, each one of which has no duration.
In fact we know that time
flows
.

It is as though my rational mind suffered from some odd disability, like colour blindness.
If I try to think about a sunset, I can only think about rays of light vibrating in space.
If I try to analyze a symphony, I can only speak of wavelengths of sound.
If I look at a gramophone record through a microscope, I shall only see wavy bumps in the plastic — yet as the stylus travels over them it creates a Beethoven symphony, which in turn can induce a flash of mystical vision in a man like Warner Allen.
The mind is a marvellously powerful instrument, but it is no more capable of
grasping
reality than I can eat gravy with a fork.
It was not made for the job.

It seems astonishing that human beings have failed to recognize anything so obvious:
that when we try to grasp reality, we falsify it
.
When I respond to a baby’s laugh, to a line of poetry, to the smell of a spring morning, I am responding directly to reality.
But the moment I try to think about why I respond to these things it is like trying to pick up a soft-boiled egg with a pair of fire tongs; I simply squash it out of shape.

This is not to say we should avoid thinking about reality: thought is a powerful and valuable instrument provided we do not try to use it for picking up soft-boiled eggs.
What Bergson recognized as he walked in the countryside of the Auvergne was that our most valuable experiences
cannot
be thought about.
But that does not mean they should be ignored or dismissed as ‘mere feelings’.
All we have to remember is not to try to
reduce
them to the crude simplicity of thought.
Bergson had grasped that he had been
closing his senses
to the poetry around him (for the mind has an amazing capacity for ignoring things it considers unimportant), and
that his soul had become shrivelled and dehydrated as a result.