Supernatural (88 page)

Broadbent
: .
.
.
I find the world quite good enough for me—rather a jolly place, in fact.

Keegan
(looking at him with quiet wonder): You are satisfied?

Broadbent
: As a reasonable man, yes.
I see no evils in the world—except of course, natural evils—that cannot be remedied by freedom, self-government and English institutions.
I think so, not because I am an Englishman, but as a matter of common sense.

Keegan
: You feel at home in the world then?

Broadbent
: Of course.
Don’t you?

Keegan
(from the very depths of his nature): No.

This is the essence of the Romantic dilemma, the problem that caused so many of the men of genius of the 19th century to commit suicide or to die in despair—for the Romantics also experienced this same sense of revulsion on returning to the everyday world.
The crucial question is therefore:
is the anticlimax necessary and inevitable
?
If the answer is yes, then we are admitting that our human reality is a kind of trap, and that life is fundamentally futile.

But if life is futile, if all effort is a waste of time, then why have we devoted this book to asking so many questions and formulating answers?
Why did we bother to launch into this exploration of the unknown in the first place?
Is it not because, in spite of our rather unstable sense of reality, we have a curious certainty that these questions will
lead
somewhere, will provide us with answers that could transform our lives?
And if that is so, then surely it means that it is possible to
do something
about human consciousness, to behave in such a way that we can live on a far higher level of happiness and purpose—in a state that is far closer to what Abraham Maslow called ‘the peak experience’?

This, I am convinced, is true.
I have spent more than forty years attempting to answer this question.
Now, as I approach sixty, I am certain that I know the answer.
I have glimpsed it again and again, and lost it again and again.
It is like trying to do an enormous jigsaw puzzle which is spread out over the whole floor of the room.
You find half a dozen pieces that interlock, and you quickly fit them together.
But then you pass on to another part of the puzzle in another part of the room, and the part you have ‘solved’ gets forgotten and buried under other pieces as you move them around.
And one of the greatest problems is that this room called everyday consciousness is too small; you know that the floor is simply not big enough to hold the whole puzzle in its completed state.
In an attempt to maintain some kind of order, you try classifying the ‘completed’ bits of the puzzle under different headings.
This book, for example, contains about 25% of the bits I have labelled ‘occult’ or ‘paranormal’.
(A book with the off-putting title
Beyond the Occult
—it was imposed on me by the publisher—contains about 25% more.) Some of the most promising of the ‘completed’ sections are to be found in bocks like
The Outsider
or
The New Existentialism,
which could be labelled ‘philosophy’.
Oddly enough, my books on criminology also contain some of the most interesting parts, and one single page (
111
–
12
) in a book on sexual deviation called
The Misfits
contains one of the most important paragraphs in all my work:

‘Our human senses show us only a small part of the world—the present.
We have to
supplement
this present-awareness with memory and imagination.
The reason I feel more ‘alive’ when I set out on holiday is that my memory and imagination are finally pulling their weight, and supplementing the present moment with all kinds of other times and places.
It is as if I am in two places at once.
The same is true if I am sitting in front of a blazing fire on a cold winter night, with the snow pattering against the windows.
I am in two places at once; my body is in the warm room, while my imagination is out there, in the cold.
But it would be a mistake to assume that we are talking about mere imagination.
We are talking about something that might be called the
sense of reality
—what the psychologist Pierre Janet called ‘the reality function’.
Whenever the reality function is awake, we are happy.

‘In short, before we can feel really alive, the mind needs to add a dimension of reality to the world of the senses.
If there is such a thing as the “great secret” of human existence, this is it.’

Let me try to explain why I feel that Ouspensky’s attitude about the ‘wooden world’ was a kind of premature defeatism, the defeatism of a man who was in some ways a great thinker, but who was also a typical 19th-century romantic.

One of my most basic insights came one day when I was reflecting upon this problem of defeatism and pessimism.
I was also considering this interesting fact that any kind of
crisis
immediately arouses us to a higher level of drive and purpose, so that when it goes away, we momentarily experience a sense of total freedom.
In
Crime and Punishment,
the hero Raskolnikov (who has committed a murder) realises that that he might be executed, and reflects: ‘If I had to stand on a narrow ledge for ever and ever, in eternal darkness and tempest, I would rather do that than die at once.’
We all know exactly what he means—that if someone placed a revolver against your head, and said: ‘What is it to be: immediate death, or a narrow ledge for the rest of your life?’, you would reply without hesitation: ‘Narrow ledge, of course.’
But consider: what would you actually
do
on a narrow ledge?
What is that strange secret that you glimpse, when threatened by crisis, that convinces you that a narrow ledge is preferable to death?

These reflections led me to recognise that one of our most basic problems is what I labelled ‘upside-downness’.
You could say that you have three ‘selves’—a physical self, an emotional self, and an intellectual (or mental) self.
My physical values have a nasty habit of changing from one hour to the next; I may feel marvellous at ten in the morning, and rather depressed a few hours later merely because I am hungry or feel tired.
But then, we are used to these physical ups and down, and do not let them bother us too much.
Much more dangerous are our emotional ups and downs.
We can have every reason for being pleased with ourselves and with life, and then some minor problem—a tax demand, someone being rude to us, a flash of alarm—can hurl us into a thoroughly negative state of mind.
Emotions seem to drag us down like a heavy weight.

On the other hand, my intellect stands above these physical and emotional problems.
When I am feeling angry or jealous or upset, another part of me looks down on it with cool detachment and tells me not to be such a fool.
On the whole, my intellect tells me the truth—or at least, does its best.
It is my emotions that often manage to creep in and distort this truth.

We might turn this insight into a Chinese parable.
When the intellect is the Emperor, and emotions are the Grand Vizier, the kingdom is peaceful and happy.
But when the Grand Vizier overthrows the Emperor and usurps the throne, everything becomes confused and chaotic.

In our internal political organisation, intellect was meant to be ‘on top’.
Emotions were intended to be the servant.
What happens when we are upset is that we turn ‘upside down’—almost as if our feet had turned into gas-filled balloons and made us stand on our heads.
What is so dangerous is that this can happen without us even noticing it.
We think we are still clear-headed and rational, but emotion has sneaked in and taken control.
Without realising what has happened, a fog of depression settles over us.
Life seems futile and boring.
We are convinced that we have good reason for feeling that life is a cheat and that free will is an illusion.
All that has happened is that we have turned ‘upside down’, and the world from this position looks alien and somehow frightening.
I have described in
Mysteries
(and again, in
Beyond the Occult
) how, during a period of severe overwork, I began to suffer from a series of ‘panic attacks’ that brought me to the verge of nervous breakdown.
All that had happened was that I had been overwhelmed by sheer exhaustion, and I could no longer keep my feet on the ground; every hour or so, I kept finding myself dangling upside down, seeing the world as meaningless and dangerous.
Only my total
intellectual
certainty that this negative vision was an illusion allowed me to struggle ‘the right way up’ and stay in that position.

The real trouble is the
passivity
of human consciousness.
We are like cows standing around in a field, accepting whatever happens as inevitable.
Of course, as soon as some crisis arises, it has the effect of
shaking the mind awake,
and we respond magnificently.
Suddenly, we recognise that we are free, and that we can change our lives.
But as soon as the crisis is over, we go back to sleep again, and to chewing the cud.

To explain why this happens, I have to repeat a point I made in the first chapter.
We have to recognise that we all have a robot inside us, whose job is to do things for us.
I learn to type slowly and painfully; then the robot takes over and does it twice as fast as
I
could.
He also drives my car and talks French for me.
The problem is that he not only does the things I want, but also the things I would rather do myself.
If I go for a walk with my robot switched on, I don’t enjoy the walk; if I eat a meal robotically, I don’t enjoy the food.
Although the robot was intended to make our lives more easy and pleasant, he often goes too far and
lives
them for us.

When this happens, we
sink to a lower level of consciousness.
What is more, we assume that this lower level of consciousness is telling us the truth about the world.
In fact, it is telling us lies, because it is so dim and dull.
Once we begin to see this, we can also grasp that there are a number of distinct levels of consciousness that every one of us experiences during the course of a lifetime.

Let us, simply as an exercise, see if we can recognise the most fundamental of these levels.
Let us start off with the basic state of non-consciousness that we experience in very deep sleep, and call this Level O.
In that case Level 1 is the level we experience as we dream, and which persists in hypnagogic experiences.

Level 2 is the most basic level of waking consciousness: that is
mere awareness.
A child experiences this when he is too tired to take any interest in anything.
He may be on his way home from a party but he gazes blankly at the passing world.
If you were to ask, ‘What have you just seen?’
he would reply, ‘I don’t know.’
His consciousness is merely a mirror reflecting the outside world.
Nietzsche once said that we envy the cows their placidity, but it would be no use asking them the secret of their happiness for they would have forgotten the question before they could give the answer.
This is Level 2.

At Level 3 consciousness has become self-aware but it is still dull and heavy—so heavy that we are only aware of one thing at a time: everything seems to be ‘merely itself’, utterly without meaning, and your own reflection in a mirror seems to be a stranger.
This is the level that Sartre calls nausea.

Level 4 is the normal consciousness we experience every day.
It is no longer too heavy to move: it has learned how to cope with existence yet it tends to think of life as a grim battle—possibly a losing battle.
Consequently it tends to sink back easily towards Level 3 and to find experience meaningless and boring.

So far the one thing the levels all have in common is a basically
passive
attitude towards life and experience.
At Level 5 this ceases to be so.
This is a level that I have labelled provisionally ‘spring morning consciousness’ or ‘holiday consciousness’.
It is characterized by that bubbling feeling of happiness we experience when life suddenly becomes more interesting and exciting and all kinds of prospects seem to be opening up in front of us.
Quite suddenly caution and doubt disappear; life becomes
self-evidently
fascinating and delightful.
This is the feeling that Hesse’s Steppenwolf experiences as he tastes a glass of wine and is reminded of ‘Mozart and the stars’.

Level 6 could be labelled the ‘magical level’.
It is what happens to a child on Christmas Day, when everything combines to make life seem wonderful.
Or imagine the consciousness of two honeymooners on their wedding night looking down from a balcony on to a moonlit lake, with the dark shapes of mountains in the distance.
In such states we feel a total reconciliation with our lives.
‘For moments together my heart stood still between delight and sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life,’ says Steppenwolf.
Problems seem trivial; we see that the one real virtue is courage.
Consciousness has become a continuous mild peak experience, what J.
B.
Priestley calls ‘delight’.

Level 7 is the state I have called (in
The Occult
) Faculty X – the odd ability to sense the
reality
of other times and places Proust says in
Swann’s Way
I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.
.
.
.’
This is more than a peak experience: it is an odd sense of
mastery over time,
as if every moment of your life could be recalled as clearly as the last ten minutes.
We suddenly realise that time is a manifestation of the heaviness of the body and the feebleness of the spirit.
We can also see that if we could learn to achieve this condition of control permanently, time would become, in a basic sense, non-existent.

The most interesting thing about the levels beyond Level 7—the levels explored by Ouspensky and other mystics—is that they seem to
contradict
the evidence of our senses and of everyday consciousness.
The inner becomes the outer, the outer becomes the inner, man is the whole universe and a mere atom, space and time are seen to be illusions and so on.
Yet we can see that these contradictions are already inherent in everyday consciousness.
At Level 2 consciousness has no kind of ‘connectedness’; it is merely a flow of meaningless impressions.
Level 3—nausea—starts to arrest this flow, to connect things together, but it keeps collapsing into a sudden perception that the world is after all quite meaningless and futile.
Level 4—ordinary consciousness—’connects’ things to a far higher degree, yet it still takes it for granted that life is an endless uphill struggle and that we have to make a continuous effort to see any meaning in it.
At Level 5—’holiday consciousness’—all this changes: there is a sense of being able to see to distant horizons, of becoming aware of ‘Mozart and the stars’.
We suddenly realize that the world around us is so fascinating in itself that no effort is required.
Everything makes us think of something else and so we are kept in a continuous state of interest and excitement.