From Colin Wilson’s  Access To Inner Worlds

Chapter 7

All of which makes it clear that the certainty that ‘all is well’ is a recognition of this ‘other self’, with its immense, crude vitality. Man has slowly developed a left-brain personality, capable of dealing with the intricate minutiae of existence—unlike animals and young children, who are quite incapable of handling complications. As the complexity of civilization has increased, and survival of the fittest has ensured the development of left-brain efficiency, the left brain has come to seem the ‘dominant hemisphere’ and the right correspondingly the ‘minor hemisphere’. The right has slipped into the position of an overworked housewife, a downtrodden drudge.

For most of the time, this hardly matters, for the right carries on with its essential task of supplying ‘reality’ with a third dimension, a dimension of meaning. When we are thoroughly relaxed—perhaps on holiday—the right is treated as an equal partner, and we are suddenly surprised to notice that reality can be so pleasant and rich. But the moment we are placed under stress, the left dispenses with this dimension of meaning, and contents itself with a symbolic representation of the world; these moving creatures who jostle me are merely ‘people’; those noisy objects that roar past me are merely ‘traffic’. In effect, the left is holding its breath, like a swimmer under water, making do without meaning. But if it does this for too long, it begins to feel tired and depressed. And at this point, as we have seen, this deadly ‘negative feedback’ mechanism slips into gear, and the result can be depression, panic attacks, nervous collapse, even insanity. (‘Meaning starvation’—for example, sensory deprivation in a black room—can produce hallucinations, as the right brain tries to replace the missing dimension.)

Human beings have developed various ways of attempting to escape this negative feedback circuit. The simplest is to allow our instincts to take over: eating, drinking, hunting, making love, making war, seeking adventure. All these activities can rescue us from left-brain impoverishment. But the left brain has its own remedies, ways of reminding itself that the impoverished, two-dimensional reality is not the whole truth. The most powerful and effective of these methods is religion, which requires the recognition, as an article of faith, that there is another dimension of reality beyond this world which is visible to our senses. So when the savage has completed his ritual sacrifice to his gods, or when a man rises from his knees after the Sacrament, he experiences a sense of comfort, of release from anxiety, of contact with meaning and purpose.

Later still, man developed art as a method of ‘reminding’ himself of that other dimension. It originated as a servant of religion, but eventually assumed its own identity. Art is, in fact, a collaboration between the right and left hemispheres; the right provides the insights, the left translates them into words or shapes or musical notes. Keats pointed out that the essence of art—he was speaking of poetry but it applies to all art—is ‘negative capability’, openness, receptivity, when the left brain is prepared to remain silent and wait for the right to speak. Since art is a collaboration between left and right, it can hardly avoid serving as a reminder of the existence of the right.

Science came later than religion or art, and in the past century, has gained itself a bad reputation among the religious and the artistically inclined. But this is because scientists have taken it upon themselves to dogmatize about reality, unaware that the reality they perceive through their microscopes is the two-dimensional reality of the left brain. Science is nothing more than a reference system, like the index at the end of a book, which is meaningless without the reality that occupies the rest of the book. And now this slow, plodding method of ‘indexing’ reality is beginning to reveal its true value. For the left brain is never entirely convinced by the ‘revelations’ of religion and art; it is inclined to discount them as mere ‘emotions’. But today its own investigations of the structure of the brain have made it aware that reality is unreal until it is completed by a third dimension.

And so we have been enabled to grasp through the intellect the truth we already knew by instinct: that if the left brain is to grasp the reality of the world, it must slow down until it is walking at the same pace as the right. For the first time, we are able to grasp objectively what happened when the romantics experienced their ‘moments of vision’, and why they found them so dishearteningly elusive. We can also see the baffling nature of the problem faced by the romantics. They were, in effect, trying to re-live the whole history of mankind. Animals are instinctive, right-brain creatures, who have no capacity for self-detachment. But at least they remain in constant contact with the three-dimensional world of reality. When human beings leave their childhood behind, they have to learn to cope with a world of symbols; and so they lose hold of their sense of reality. The romantics discovered how to use art to restore the contact; but in doing so, they were inclined to drift back into the world of the child. Thomas Mann describes in Buddenbrooks how young Hanno Buddenbrook loves his holidays at the seaside; yet his family can never understand why these holidays seem to leave him weaker, not stronger. It is because a return to right-brain reality creates a revulsion from the left. The romantics thought that this was inevitable: that the man who is capable of experiencing this deeper reality (and it is deeper in the quite literal sense of possessing a third dimension) will inevitably be a ‘loser’. It became part of the romantic myth that man can choose either crude vitality and success, or sensitivity and failure. From Blake to D.H. Lawrence, the romantics were united in denouncing the left brain and all its works.

We can see that the conflict was quite unnecessary. It is not a choice between going forward into the world of the scientist or backward into the world of the child. Left-brain consciousness must remain as dominant and powerful as ever, prepared to take over at a moment’s notice. Yet it must also be capable of remaining silent; of suspending its dominance to allow the right to develop its own powers of self-expression.

Now we can see the implications of Brad’s experiences. One of the main problems of western man is that his left brain is hyperactive. Like some enormous factory, it hums and roars with deafening activity. Yet much of this activity is automatic; machines have been left running when they could equally well be switched off.

When we are subjected to unexpected stress or sudden crisis, the factory noise rises to a hysterical crescendo. Disappearance of the stress brings a startling silence, as we become aware that the anxiety is unnecessary—and that the normal level of tension is far in excess of our need for alertness. We realize we could afford to relax and treat life as a holiday. This mechanism explains Greene’s ‘vision’ after playing Russian roulette.

There is another method of silencing the machinery—to remain relaxed but alert for fairly long periods of time—which is the basis of the technique of enlightenment discovered by the Buddha. He dismissed the strenuous self-torment of Hindu ascetics and yogis, and insisted that it was enough to sit quietly, holding the mind calm and steady. ‘This trembling, wavering mind, so difficult to guard and to control, this the wise man makes straight as the fletcher straightens his shaft.’ ‘Will is the way to Nirvana; laziness is the way of death. The wise man guards his vigour as his greatest possession.’ But one of the chief difficulties encountered by those who try to meditate—to silence the mind—is our tendency to drift into ‘free association’. As Brad lay beside his wife, there was no tendency to free association; he was listening intently for the first signs that she was returning to normal. He was, in effect, asking his mind to be quiet. He was like a man listening intently for a distant sound. After a while, his mind obeyed; and then ‘listening’ became a habit. And at that point, Brad had achieved his own version of enlightenment. From now on, the other self could make itself heard.

Brad’s method, like the Buddha’s, is fundamentally simple and easy to use. As soon as we relax and close our eyes, we become conscious of the roar of the machinery, the tension of the body, the forward-drive of the will. It is the opposite of what you experience when you awaken from a deep sleep, thoroughly relaxed. But the aim is not now to relax. It is to bring the automatic activity of the mind under control, to silence the machinery.

Since we are full of automatic tensions, the direct approach—simply to ‘unwind’—is seldom successful. It is better to begin by deliberately increasing the tension. Concentrate the mind, as if lifting an enormously heavy weight, and allow the attention to move from part to part of the body, enlisting the cooperation of each part in the collective effort. Clench and unclench the fists; tense and relax the muscles of the arms, the stomach, the thighs. After half a minute or so, relax. Then do it again.

My own experience is that after ten minutes or so there is a sense of a tidal flow of energy around the body. Mesmer believed that the universe is full of vital currents, and that human beings can tune in to these currents. Certainly, the sensation produced by this constant effort of ‘vigilance’ is of waves of energy running through the body like an in-coming tide.

This effort also makes one aware that we are normally full of unused energy. If I am forced to keep breaking off my writing to check facts in reference books, I become aware of an increasing exasperation; it is rather like holding my breath. These ‘trapped’ energies can produce migraine or depression. The exercise of ‘controlled tension’ makes one aware of these energies, as they are slowly discharged. A point comes at which so much ‘trapped’ energy has been discharged that we can afford to relax. And now, like a tired athlete, we can accept relaxation with gratitude, and without the protesting voice of unused energies.

This is an interesting state. For once the protesting voices have been silenced, there is nothing to prevent us from opening the door and walking into the world inside us.

This can be a stage of delightful exploration. In a story called ‘The Man of the Crowd’, Edgar Allan Poe describes how, recovering from an illness, he sat in the window of a coffee house in London. ‘With returning strength, I found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui—moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs…’ In this case, illness had switched off the ‘machinery’, and returning health had not yet switched it on. Poe describes his immense interest as he studied the passing crowds. But in the same state, we can study the passing crowds inside the mind. It is my own experience that in these states, mental pictures are exceptionally clear. The sensation is not unlike getting a good picture on a television screen on which we have become accustomed to poor reception. And suddenly, it becomes obvious that this world has been there all the time, waiting for us to enter. It is like some cave in the Arabian Nights, entered by raising a massive stone slab. And below the slab there is a flight of stone steps, leading down to an underground palace.

It is important to grasp that we are not now speaking of a world of dreams or fancies. Sir Karl Popper made this point when he coined the term ‘World 3’. World 1 is the physical world outside us; World 2 is the subjective world of which we become aware when we close our eyes. But then, there is the world that man has created or discovered, and which he stores in libraries. If our civilization was destroyed tomorrow, but all the books were still left intact, it would be possible for our descendants to rebuild the world within a few generations. But if all the books and records were also destroyed, man would have to start from scratch, and it might take two thousand years or so. World 3, the world of what we have discovered, is an independent entity, like World 1 and 2. It has objective existence, like the physical world.

Those who have succeeded in gaining ‘access to inner worlds’ have discovered with surprise that they are quite unlike dreams or hallucinations. In Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley made this point in a now-famous remark: ‘Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins.’ And he adds: ‘Like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable. Nevertheless they exist…’ He goes on to point out that some people can be transported to these regions under hypnosis. Huxley comments that we are still ignorant of how hypnosis produces its effects. Since he wrote these words, in 1956, we have a fairly shrewd idea of how it produces its effects: by putting the left brain to sleep, and leaving the right wide awake. And, as we know, either putting the left brain to sleep, or silencing the noise of its machinery, can open the doors to the world inside us.

Huxley’s simile about our mental Borneos and Amazonian basins may be too picturesque. The first thing we discover when the left brain can be persuaded to let go of our coat tails is that we are in a large and rather interesting library. Yet it differs from an ordinary library in one basic respect. In libraries, the books sit on the shelves, with their backs to you, and you have no way of finding out about their contents except by removing them and looking inside. But this mental library is rather more like a sound library where the records are being played continuously. If you place your ear close to the covers of any book, you can hear the memories it contains. Perhaps you catch the sound of a musicbox that belonged to your elder sister when you were a baby, or the long-forgotten barking of the hysterical pekinese they used to have next door, or the warm, tarry smell of the garden fence in the sunlight, together with a vivid memory of the way the paint blistered on the back door, or the reflections of light on the boating pond in the park, or the taste of over-roasted chestnuts that burnt the tongue…Even the briefest glimpse of these memories produces a sense of pure delight and astonishment, that feeling of ‘immortality’ that Proust described. And why do we feel astonished? To begin with, because the sheer profusion, the sheer quantity, of these memories seems unnecessary. Why has the brain carefully stored up everything that has ever happened to us since birth, if we are never going to make use of it, and if the brain is going to start decomposing within minutes of death? Somehow, this seems unlikely. There must be some other purpose behind human existence, some immense, complex, unfathomable purpose…This is not a reasoned conclusion; it is a feeling, a kind of perception, and it explains why Proust ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal, and why Camus’s Meursault could suddenly realize that he had been happy and was happy still. It explains why Scrooge burst into tears and ceased to be a miser when he had been allowed a brief glimpse of that library inside the head.

But this library inside us is not merely a repository of separate memories. What is so exciting is that these memories can blend together and connect into something much bigger. The tarry smell of the sun-warmed fence is connected with the smell of grass, and an odd cold sensation that seems to be a memory of water, which in turn brings back the cold of a winter day and the sogginess of melting snow…And at this point, it becomes difficult to pinpoint the sensations because they seem to be spreading outwards, so that every one evokes half a dozen others, and so on in geometric progression. There is a dazzling sensation of hovering above your own life, seeing it as a whole, like some enormous landscape. And as we glimpse these ‘distant horizons’, we also become aware that this is what memory is for. Not fragmentary, piecemeal perceptions, but a total grasp. And not only of my own life, but, by some process of deduction, of other lives, of all life.

Our ‘normal’ way of perceiving the world could be compared to a man who is so short-sighted that, whenever he goes to a picture gallery, he has to peer at the paintings through a magnifying glass. Naturally, he can never see more than a few square inches. If he is very intelligent and very diligent, he can put together a general idea of the whole picture. But if he tries to stand back and see it as a whole, it turns into a blur. If someone presented him with a pair of powerful spectacles that would enable him to look at pictures from the proper distance, the result would be a revelation—very much like Plato’s image of the man who is allowed outside the cave.

The absurd thing is that, in the case of this inner picture gallery, we know there is nothing wrong with our eyesight. We were intended to have these glimpses of things as a whole. Then what is it that prevents us? The answer seems to be our lack of desire, our failing to recognize that this is one of our perfectly normal possibilities. We take it for granted that living means ‘coping’ with the external world, and that the moments of relaxation, when we retreat inside ourselves, are no more than ‘breathing spaces’, holidays from the everyday business of living. All children know better, of course. When they become absorbed in a fairy tale, with its magical landscapes, they know perfectly well that life was intended to be more than this dreary business of ‘living’. They know precisely what William Blake meant when he wrote:

Father, O father, what do we here

In this land of unbelief and fear?

The Land of Dreams is better far,

Above the light of the morning star.

They feel increasingly that this world is a kind of prison. Yet there genuinely seems to be no alternative. Their fathers have to go out to work to support them, and they, in due course, will have to learn to force this difficult world to grant them subsistence. So they also learn to ‘cope’, and to take brief holidays in the ‘land of dreams’.

This certainly seems to be inevitable. Man has become the most dominant creature on earth because he has learned to ‘cope’ better than any other animal. And animals certainly have very little capacity for ‘access to inner worlds’. When a stranger comes into your house, your dog either recognizes him or he doesn’t. The dog has no capacity to search his memory or ask, ‘Now where have I seen him before?’ It seems reasonable to suppose that man’s memory, that rudimentary access to inner worlds, is simply one more evolutionary development to enable him to ‘cope’.

Those deeper glimpses of ‘inner worlds’ reveal that this is not so. If we possess such a vast inner library, were we not intended to make more use of it than we do? We were intended to have a deeper, more vivid type of consciousness. But how are we to achieve it? Brad’s experience leaves no possible doubt about the answer. We have to know the library is there, and start using it. We have to learn deep relaxation, learn to still the left brain and the senses. The Aladdin’s cave is there, waiting for us to walk in. The only thing that stops us from doing so is ignorance of its existence.

And yet we cannot claim to be really ignorant. When, for example, I read Raskolnikov’s statement that he would rather stand on a narrow ledge for ever and ever than die at once, I know perfectly well what he means, and I know I would feel the same. When I hear about some tramp who says that all he wants out of life is a country cottage with roses round the door and a small income, I understand exactly why he believes that this would keep him happy for the rest of his days. In fact, Raskolnikov would probably commit suicide after a few weeks on a narrow ledge; the tramp would probably become bored and dissatisfied after a winter in his ideal cottage. But a simple act of identification makes us aware of why they thought otherwise. The life of a hunted criminal is one of continual uncertainty; so is the life of a homeless tramp. They make continuous demands on the ability to ‘cope’. And it is so easy to see how, when we have the chance to relax and appreciate life, we merely have to sigh with relief and slow down. If you asked Raskolnikov what he would do on his ledge, he would reply: ‘Be grateful that I am still alive.’ If you asked the tramp what he would do in his garden, he would reply: ‘Just look around.’ For each of them, the answer lies in simply calming the senses, slowing down the left brain until it walks at the same pace as the right.

This is only the first step. There is obviously far more to it than that. Consider more closely what happens when we ‘slow down’. Let us suppose that I feel tired after a hard day’s work. I pour myself a glass of wine, drop into my armchair, and heave a sigh of relief. In effect, I tell myself: now you can relax. It is a kind of hypnotic command. Then I pick up a novel. I read only one paragraph—a description of an autumn day—yet as I read, I seem to smell that distinctive smell of damp earth and rotting leaves. What has happened is that, because my left brain has slowed down, my right can perform its proper function of supplying a third dimension to experience. The experience is, in this case, purely fictional; yet the right hemisphere dutifully supplies those smells and sounds and colours. It can do so because I am in no hurry. I am prepared to listen without impatience.

If I push the book aside and stare out of the window, the right brain is just as willing to do its own specialized job. I get a feeling of dozens of possible sensations hovering on the edge of consciousness, like willing servants, ready to obey my instructions. If I choose to think about last year’s holidays, I can close my eyes, and momentarily travel back to that rented cottage with its noisy plumbing and that dangerous back doorstep. But my right brain is just as willing to give me a glimpse of my schooldays, or the science lab at the technical college, complete with that acrid smell of nitrogen peroxide. If I choose to open a volume of poems, it will supply a ‘third dimension’ for a poem of Robert Service just as willingly as for W.H. Auden; the right brain is no cultural snob. And if I want to put on a record of a Haydn symphony, it will happily supply a whole kaleidoscope of images and impressions.

All these sensations clearly belong to the faculty called imagination. But we normally think of imagination as the ability to conjure up mental images: I can imagine what it would be like to win the football pools, or to go hang-gliding. In fact, imagination is far more than this. It is the ability to re-create experience, in all its complexity and richness. And the right brain is able to do precisely that.

The problem is that it seldom gets a chance. I read a book about ancient Rome, and imagine that I now have an excellent grasp of the world of the Romans. My right brain shakes its head in despair; if only I had allowed it to cooperate, it could have re-created ancient Rome for me. How? By drawing upon its immense store of memories and impressions. I have galloped through the book at such a speed that it is little more than a series of blurred impressions. But it is not simply a question of speed—the right can move with surprising speed when it wants to. It is a kind of forgetfulness. We forget that when we relax, the right brain will supply reality with a third dimension.

And now it becomes possible to understand the direction of human evolution. The ‘reality’ experienced by animals is no doubt far richer and more complex than our human reality, because they experience it with the whole brain, not just with a half. And their experiences are also stored away in the brain-library. But their access to this library is then limited. They lack reflective self-consciousness. It is doubtful whether a dog can lie on the mat and recall images of its past. It lacks any kind of detachment from itself.

The first step in human evolution was to achieve ‘detachment’. Slowly, and no doubt very painfully, man learned to use his powers of reason. It must have been an uphill task, as hard as a child learning to cope with the adult world. But it was necessary to survival. Our ancestors had to learn how to ambush the mammoth and the great elk, and how to outwit the natural cunning of predators who wanted to make a meal of their children. Their success led to the creation of surprisingly complex societies, with shamans who taught them how to achieve success in the hunt by means of magic. The shamans eventually became priests, and cities sprang up around temples. Man had to learn to cope with a complex and ‘unnatural’ social life. Cities were intended to protect their inhabitants; but the archaeology of Mesopotamia teaches us that almost as soon as the first cities appeared—around 6000 BC—the first wars began. The city dwellers were squabbling about territory. No matter how hard he tried, it seemed that man could not escape stress and uncertainty. So he used his ingenuity to create cities with massive walls and underground water supplies, to withstand siege. He also created war chariots and siege engines to destroy other people’s cities.

The result was that by the year 3000 BC, the history of mankind had turned into an almost continuous tale of slaughter. Three thousand years before the Nazis, the Assyrians practised torture and genocide, and boasted about them in their inscriptions and bas-reliefs. The fictional brutality of the James Bond novel shocks us; but if we imagine something of the sort happening continuously for century after century, we can begin to understand why man grew like a hot-house plant. To the student of early history, it seems incredible that Plato was writing the Republic only five thousand years after the foundation of the first cities. And that ten thousand years before that, our ancestors lived in caves. But it was almost certainly because human life was so bloody and violent that man developed the powers of his left brain, the ability to think, to calculate, to look ahead.

And now he possessed these powers, a new phase began. Spartans and Persians and Macedonians continued to slaughter one another and burn cities. But now so-called ‘learned men’ were studying the heavens and the forces of nature, and committing their observations to scrolls and sheepskins. Man began to build a new world, the world of knowledge—Popper’s ‘World 3’. And some remarkable men made a very creditable attempt to transfer the whole sum of human knowledge into their own small brains—their left brains. Nowadays, names like Paracelsus and Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and Cardano mean very little to us; in their own time, they were regarded as intellectual supermen. By the nineteenth century, such men were no longer a rarity; universities produced them by the dozen. Men like Kant, Hegel, Carlyle, Ruskin, Soloviev, Tolstoy, lived in World 3 as naturally as a fish lives in water, and so did thousands of ‘intellectuals’ we have never even heard of.

Yet such men were not necessarily happy in their self-chosen element; Ruskin even went insane. They despised mere physical existence; they wanted life raised to a higher level by the power of the mind. Yet most of them were thoroughly dissatisfied with their cold world of intellect. The romantics expressed this dissatisfaction most clearly: the longing for something warmer, richer, more real, than this attenuated realm of philosophy and art.

And we, at last, are in a position to understand precisely what they wanted. With their heads stuffed with all kinds of knowledge, they wanted to make it live, as Combray suddenly ‘lived’ for Proust as he tasted the madeleine. That is why human beings have such a passion for knowledge: because it somehow frees them from the personal, allows them to enter a wider world where there is a sense of freedom, like standing on a mountain top. This in turn makes us aware of the extraordinary and paradoxical fact that human beings were not primarily intended to live in ‘this world’. This sounds absurd; for when we look at a dog or a bird, we can see plainly that its ‘purpose’ is to keep itself alive—to survive—and to propagate its kind. That is its primary purpose and, as far as we can see, its only obvious purpose. Man is an animal: ergo, the same thing should apply to him. Yet human beings who are restricted to such an existence feel there is something wrong. They begin to crave some ‘other’ form of existence; this is the origin of religion. And when we read of a Newton discovering the law of gravity, a Harvey discovering the circulation of the blood, a Kant discovering that the mind influences our perceptions, a Freud discovering that man’s unconscious mind is far more powerful than his conscious mind, we see in a flash that man was intended for more than mere survival. He was not intended for ‘personal’ existence; he was intended for impersonal existence. This sounds bleak and uncomfortable, but that is only because we are confusing the impersonal with our left-brain, two-dimensional consciousness. When the right brain adds its third dimension, the realm of the impersonal becomes far more rich and exciting than the personal. Ants labour impersonally at their ant-hills; wasps labour impersonally at their nests: these are their homes. Man labours impersonally at this gigantic edifice that is World 3: that is his home.

And now we come to the most absurd, the most preposterous part of the story. What would we think of a man who lived out on the lawn in a tent, while he built himself a magnificent home, and then absent-mindedly went on living in the tent and left the house empty? For that is precisely what man has done. We have only to glance at the enormous volumes of history, philosophy, theology, anthropology, sociology, on library shelves, to see that very few of the writers actually lived their knowledge. Arnold Toynbee admits as much in the last volume of A Study of History, where he describes certain brief moments in which he experienced history as a living reality. Those few moments of ‘living history’ were enough to provide the stimulus for half a century’s labour. Similarly, Proust’s few ‘glimpses’ led to the writing of his immense novel, and the writing itself was an attempt to fathom the mystery of those glimpses, with their tantalizing implication that it could all be ‘so easy’. Proust created a masterpiece, yet he failed to solve the mystery.

But why does man live in a tent? Why does he treat the mansion as a museum which is open for only a few minutes a week? The answer probably lies in the past few thousand years, with its high level of violence. Man developed his intelligence to avoid extinction, and in the past few millennia, that threat has actually increased—its source being his own kind. So intelligence has developed in association with the need for alertness, for scanning the external world for problems and threats. In short, intelligence sprang from a sense of urgency. And now the urgency has diminished, and man can afford to relax and enjoy this magnificent civilization he has created, he finds it impossible to escape the old sense of urgency. Like a man who has been driving all day, and who keeps waking up at night, imagining he is still behind the wheel, mankind has slipped into an insidious habit—of anxiety, of tension, of over-alertness.

But intelligence is the ability to adjust to new circumstances. And compared to some of the problems he has solved in the past—problems of survival that make our own lives seem like a non-stop holiday—this problem of left-brain over-alertness is relatively trivial. It has remained so persistent largely because we have made no real attempt to solve it. When things are going well, we tend to switch on the ‘automatic pilot’, and do what we did yesterday and the day before. This is another legacy of the past: that we need crisis to keep alert. But when we consider this matter more closely, we realize that we already know the answer.

Let us first of all restate the problem. It is our inability to ‘retreat inside ourselves’, to make use of our freedom. We can be free and yet bored. And when we are bored, we feel trapped in this material world, ‘as if that were all there is’. When we are faced with difficult problems, we know that to be without problems would in itself be delightful. But after being without problems for a day or two, we feel ‘at a loose end’. It is infuriating to feel that you are a victim of your own moods, and that you lack the ability to carry out long-term decisions. This is why ascetics flagellated themselves and slept in hair shirts; they felt instinctively that the answer lay in self-discipline. Yet we feel instinctively that this is not the answer either; this is trying to open the door with a battering ram when it ought to open of its own accord.

The problem is ‘generalized hypertension’; our minds refuse to stop running. Yet we possess a natural ‘brake’. If someone raises his finger and says: ‘Listen!’, we automatically apply this brake and slow down our senses (another way of saying: sharpen our perceptions).

Again, consider what happens when you finally get hold of a book you have been wanting to read for a long time. You make sure that you will not be disturbed, and then ‘switch off’ your interest in the external world—so that if someone speaks to you, you don’t even hear them. It is exactly as if you had taken a large funnel, inserted it into the book, and then poured all your attention into it.

Sex can have this same ‘funnelling effect’, concentrating the senses and focusing the vital energies, giving us again a glimpse of that Proustian sense of power and control. This is why sex means so much more to human beings than to any other animal. Equally revealing, from our point of view, is the popularity of pornography. After all, we enjoy eating, but few of us bother to read books about it. But the actuality of sex is often a disappointment. Why? Because it easily becomes diluted by habit—the robot. Our senses drift back into their old habit of ‘scanning the external world’. And the quantity of attention that goes down the funnel diminishes steadily. A book enables us to by-pass the robot; we deliberately focus full attention on the description of sex, and again achieve the ‘funnelling effect’.

And here we can see how far human beings have evolved beyond all other animals. For a chimpanzee, a book or a photograph or a blue film would be as abstract as an algebraic formula. Our right brain obligingly adds a third dimension of reality, so that we are sexually stimulated by an abstraction. We can even imagine a sexual stimulus and experience the same response.

All of which demonstrates that we already know the answer. It lies in the deliberate use of ‘the funnel’.

Let us look more closely at the mechanics of this process of ‘funnelling’. I am relaxed in an armchair. I idly pick up a child’s schoolbook that lies on the floor—an anthology of poetry. In a spirit of nostalgia I turn the pages: ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’, ‘The Daffodils’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘Full fathom five’… As I read Gray’s‘Elegy’, I conjure up a picture of a church-bell, a herd of cows, a tired ploughman. But because I am relaxed, I add other things that Gray forgot to include: the plop of cow dung on the muddy road and its not-unpleasant grassy smell, the moss on the gravestones, the cool smell of the air after a shower. Phrases like ‘glimmering landscape’, ‘drowsy tinklings’, ‘ivy-mantled tower’, ‘blazing hearth’, all bring a trickle of delight, and encourage my ‘other self’ to supply more details. When he speaks of swallows twittering in a straw-built shed, my mind supplies the smell of the straw. And when I have finished the poem, I experience a deep inner calm, a sense of relaxation, of relief. It doesn’t matter that much of the poem seems old-fashioned, and that it has more than a touch of sermonizing. Gray has demonstrated to me what my mind can do. It can take me out of this armchair, to other times and other places. When I turn to Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, my mind creates the roaring of wind in trees and the smell of autumn leaves; when Wordsworth speaks of ‘old unhappy far-off things’, my mind slips into history, and I realize that even if my own life is limited to three score and ten, I am the only animal who can look back down the corridors of history just as I can look down on the world from an aeroplane.

There can be no doubt whatever: I have re-created Gray’s country churchyard and Wordsworth’s daffodils and Shelley’s autumn woods. This ‘I’ is Howard Miller’s ‘unit of pure thought’. And it is capable of far more than conjuring up a few mental images: a beach in summer, a mountain landscape. It is perfectly willing to take me on mental voyages. When my child comes and switches on the television set, I realize that these trivial soap operas and situation comedies are based on the false assumption, that our imagination is limited. Having just returned from this mental voyage, I only feel saddened by these crude attempts to engage my attention.

Yet this is hardly the fault of the television companies. For how often do I try to use that power of the mind? When I feel tired, I pick up a newspaper, or look in the TV guide. My leisure is controlled by this assumption that that world ‘out there’ is the reality, and that if I close my eyes, I shall fall asleep.

But let me try to grasp the implications of what has just happened. The old lamp in the woodshed is an Aladdin’s lamp, which can release a genie who is willing to take me voyages on a magic carpet. The absurd thing is that I have known about him since childhood; he has been taking me on these voyages ever since my mother read me Jack and the Beanstalk. But I have made the false assumption that these voyages were a kind of dream. They also seemed to depend upon some factor that I could not control: so that even with a free evening and a good book, I could still not be sure whether the magic carpet would float off the ground, or leave me sitting there. More often than not, it left me sitting there. So I have come to feel that the carpet is thoroughly unreliable. Now can see that the fault lay in me. I have simply failed to achieve the correct conditions: to relax, to still the senses, to ‘funnel’ my mental energies into the book.

Sometimes, there seems to be some obscure dissatisfaction in me that resists the whole process, a kind of tension. If I analyse this more closely, I see that it springs from another misunderstanding. I am inclined to assume that my own role is passive; I sit down with the book, and wait for it to ‘transport’ me. But if I study the experience of being deeply moved by poetry, I see that I have to do half the work. I request my right brain to conjure up the country churchyard. I say, ‘How about some cow dung?’, ‘ How about the smell of straw?’, ‘How about some moonlight reflected on a pond ?’, and my right brain obliges. They have entered into a state of mutual understanding, of collaboration. It is a process of dialogue. So again, the lesson is: I must establish communication with my genie. It is not his fault if he is ignored and forgotten.

In short, the lesson of the experience is the recognition: ‘Now I have a partner.’ It is analogous to falling in love and realizing that your feelings are reciprocated. ‘I’ am not alone. What I now have to do is to recognize the implications of this discovery. To some extent, I have always known them. For example, if I need to wake up at seven in the morning, some inner alarm clock will awaken me at precisely seven. This depends, to some extent, on self-confidence. If I am feeling tense and nervous, I shall probably wake up half a dozen times in the night, and then oversleep. But this is because I believe I am alone. If I am feeling healthy and cheerful, my confidence somehow activates that ‘other self’, which gives me a good night’s sleep and awakens me at the right time. I must come to take the existence of this ‘other self’ for granted, as a basic, unforgettable fact, I must use it and learn to communicate with it. Once I can accept its existence as an incontrovertible fact, then I can begin to persuade it to cooperate on projects that would once have seemed impossible.

To begin with, it is the answer to the problem Maslow thought insoluble: how to summon ‘peak experiences’ at will. The technique is for the ‘me’, the left-brain self, to build up optimism and self-confidence, the certainty that ‘all is well’. (And this is the easiest thing in the world; I just did it spontaneously as I wrote the previous sentence.) We can study this simplest of all mechanisms in all moments of contentment—by recalling, for example, what it was like as a child on Christmas Day: that increasing feeling of ‘trust’, of happy expectancy. When the left brain tells itself, ‘All is well,’ the right responds with a glow of warmth, a trickle of sheer joy. I am, in effect, re-programming my subconscious, my ‘underfloor lightning’.

It is true that if I have been feeling depressed, I may find it difficult to convince myself that ‘all is well’; some diminutive sceptic inside me mutters, ‘Oh yeah?’ Here it is important to grasp Howard Miller’s central recognition: that the ‘I’ is the master of consciousness. The presence of the inner sceptic is unimportant; he will eventually be overruled by majority opinion. Meanwhile, the ‘I’ must state: ‘It is an objective fact that all is well.’ For this is the very heart of the matter. We are speaking of objectivity. Most human unhappiness is due to subjectivity, our tendency to be dominated by emotions we know to be ‘false’, yet which seem to cling with the persistency of leeches. We evolve by forcing these emotions to obey the rule of law, of objectivity.

As soon as we induce these states of inner certainty, we begin to observe their effect. We become less ‘accident-prone’. Some sixth sense helps to steer us clear of trouble. Interesting coincidences begin to occur. (When I become subject to these synchronicities, I know I am in good health.) We may begin to have flashes of pre-cognition; the telephone rings and you know who it is before you answer it. You know that a letter from a long-lost friend will arrive in the post. In short, the right brain seems to control certain paranormal powers, and is willing to place them at the disposal of the left. The kahunas assert that the ‘higher self’ can control the future; and everyone who has experienced moods of relaxed self-confidence knows that curious inner certainty that nothing is going to go wrong.

The most interesting possibility remains the prospect of unlimited ‘access to inner worlds’. The ‘natural’ view of our inner world is that it consists of feelings, memories, emotions, and that these are necessarily limited. The Proustian ‘glimpses’ make us aware that this is untrue. The ‘library’ contains detailed recordings of everything that has ever happened to us, and these can be recombined in any order. Just as a simple knowledge of algebra provides me with the basis for solving any algebraic problem, so a fairly small range of experience can provide us with the material for constructing a vast range of ‘other realities’. We catch a glimpse of this inventiveness in dreams, or in ‘hypnagogic states’ (between sleeping and waking); but these are obviously some kind of random selection. Our inner librarian does his best work when we ask for his cooperation. When, for example, I am reading a book about Paris in the nineteenth century, he helpfully conjures up a vast range of images, from Balzac, Zola, Maupassant to the Impressionist painters to my own memory of the sights and smells of the Left Bank. He only does this when I am thoroughly relaxed and absorbed; but when he chooses to do it, he evokes a Paris which is actually far richer than any physical experience of the real place.

This ability to ‘realize’ another time and place I call Faculty X. It is quite clearly a natural ability we all possess, but that we fail to understand. The glimpses of the romantics were glimpses of Faculty X; and, as we have seen, they concluded that they come and go as they please. Only now, more than a century later, are we beginning to recognize that such states are within our control; not only that, but that they offer the promise of the most fascinating step in human evolution so far. When we study the long course of evolution, from the crude instinctive consciousness of the animal to our own sophisticated and complex self-awareness, it suddenly becomes clear that the main direction of this evolution has been the conscious control of Faculty X.

In Back to Methuselah, Shaw suggested that human beings would have to learn to live for at least three centuries in order to begin to realize their possibilities; seventy or eighty years is simply not enough. As to how this would come about, Shaw explained that once human beings had become conscious of the necessity, the rest would follow automatically. The unconscious mind would do the rest. ‘The brain shall not fail when the will is in earnest.’ At the time, this struck many of Shaw’s admirers as the least plausible part of his theory—human beings are used to struggling for what they want. But we can see that it is a plain statement of fact about Faculty X. The crucial step in individual evolution is quite simply to recognize the existence of that ‘other self’. When this happens, we are ready to embark upon the most interesting experiment of all: to discover what our two selves can do when they enter into active collaboration.

For myself, I must acknowledge that Brad’s description of his experiences brought new levels of insight into this whole problem of ‘visionary consciousness’ and the two selves. The pressures of writing a quarter of a million words in four months had made me aware that I had to stop treating this as a problem for ‘me alone’. I had to assume that something inside me would respond to the urgency and take on half the work. And as I slaved away, I became aware of a sensation that something was happening: rather as if someone had taken hold of the other end of the double-handed saw. There was no possibility of relaxation: I still had to do my part. But there was a comforting sense of having a willing helper. I have always been too inclined to drive myself, too inclined to grit my teeth and rely on sheer force and stubbornness. And I have a deep distrust of anything that looks like self-pity or self-indulgence, for these have been far more responsible than material hardship for the destruction of many ‘Outsiders’. But under pressure, this attitude of mind can lead to fatalism and pessimism. As I wrote chapter after chapter of the Rasputin novel, then of Poltergeist, the pessimism began to give way to a cautious, realistic optimism.

At Viittakivi, I tried to convey to my students what I felt to be the central lesson of the previous six months: that we must be in charge of our own emotions. The logical answer to someone who says, ‘I am depressed’, is, ‘Ok. Un-depress yourself.’ To demonstrate the point, I asked the students to meditate upon the most depressing thoughts they could call to mind. Within a few minutes, most of them were looking thoroughly gloomy. Then they were told: ‘Now snap out of it.’ ‘Under orders’, they found this fairly easy to do—easier than it might have been if they were alone. On the last day, all the groups met together in the main hall, and various spokesmen tried to explain what they had been doing. The woman who spoke for our group said: ‘Mr Wilson taught us how to make ourselves depressed,’ and there was a roar of laughter. Yet she had stated the essence of those group sessions. If you can raise yourself out of depression by an act of will, then you can also raise yourself out of ‘normal consciousness’ into the peak experience.

One of my literary chores during the earlier part of the year had been writing an introduction to The Occult Establishment by the late James Webb. Webb, one of the most brilliant minds of his generation, had committed suicide the previous year, after a two-year mental illness. In the latter part of his illness, he had kept up a correspondence with Joyce Collin-Smith, which she allowed me to read. It was clear that he had gone through a rather more severe version of my ‘panic attacks’, complete with delusions and hallucinations. He had allowed himself to be ‘taken in’ by the depressions and, as a result, had been drawn far deeper into ‘negative feedback’. Yet he fought back, and in those final months seemed to be regaining his balance, and recognizing that he had achieved completely new insights into the problems that interested him so deeply—the hidden powers of the mind. The suicide seems to have been due to a momentary regression into pessimism. The Introduction remained unpublished, because his wife disagreed with my view of his illness—she preferred to believe that it was ordinary insanity. But my study of Webb’s last letters made me more aware than ever of the nature of this problem. We ‘identify’ with our emotions. When I have a pain, I say, ‘It hurts.’ not, ‘I hurt.’

Yet when I experience happiness I say, ‘I am happy;’ and when I experience depression, I say, ‘I feel gloomy.’ Writing about James Webb made me more convinced that feelings—particularly negative feelings—are an irrelevancy. The ‘central ego’, the ‘unit of pure thought’, must learn to recognize that it remains the final arbiter. Feeling, like perception, is intentional.

But these prescriptions seemed negative: to decline to be ‘taken in’ by feelings, to regard a sudden depression as objectively as you would regard a bruised knee-cap or a cold in the head. These formulae amounted to self-discipline, but the problem was not self-discipline so much as how to enlist the active support of that ‘other self’. This was the problem that preoccupied me when I arrived in Finland; this was the problem to which Brad presented me with a simple and unambiguous answer. Brad told me, in effect: ‘There is no problem whatever in contacting your “other self’’. It is perfectly willing to contact you. You merely have to be willing to listen.’

‘Listening’ must here be understood as an active suspension of our automatic functions, an attitude of vigilance, of alertness. Most of us waste about 90 percent of our lives in purely automatic living. In order to suspend this, I merely have to behave as if I am listening intently for some important noise, like the ringing of a telephone. And as I remain in this condition of ‘openness’, my vital powers begin to rise in me, like water in a well.

When I asked Brad to summarize the long-term results of his experience, he replied in a long letter:

‘During all these years there has been a continuing diffusion of movement-impulse moments into all possible areas of life—not continuously timewise, but whenever I choose to let it happen. And I have chosen to do so in many different kinds of situations: when teaching, when taking part in a discussion, when in sexual intercourse, when spending a day in town, when taking a shower, when preparing a lesson or talk, very often in the preparation of these materials for you. This “choosing to do so” means making the inner gesture of becoming silent and empty for a brief moment, a letting the decision about “what next” rise to the surface and take form via movement impulses.

‘It has taken me several years to realize and learn that although this dimension of experience emerged “by chance’’ in my life, it will continue only “by choice”, i.e. by clear conscious wanting or willing to make the inner gesture of change-over from my usual mind-directed level of conscious behaviour in a situation, to the “movement-impulse level” which I feel represents a more wholly integrated level of response in which my mind is just a part, co-existing and collaborating with many other levels of myself, of my person.’

One area in which Brad feels there has been a decisive change in his life is that of human relationships:

‘In recent years, and during this last year more than ever before, some kind of “living with love” or “living in love” has characterized my living, and it has been transforming my experiences with my students, my fellow teachers, my friends and acquaintances. Earlier in my life, from my teens onward, my tendency was to limit and confine this sort of “whole open being and sharing” to one chosen relationship at a time, and, while that relationship continued, not allow myself to have other “meetings” with others. There was a popular song in the 1940s: “When I’m not near the girl I love, I love the girl I’m near.” But because I was living according to a closed-relationship morality, those words were very threatening to me then. Now, I see the possibility of giving a new interpretation to them—of understanding them to mean the deep promise of an open relationship morality. Just this transition from closed exclusive relationships to open inclusive relationships is the direction of my growth and development at present…Because so much of my life has been spent within a closed-relationship framework of values, now my venturing into the territory of open relationships is like moving in a new, unexplored territory without a map or compass. It is both thrilling and threatening.

‘Long ago, in an experience, I felt myself almost disintegrating into a flood of fear (my “baby at the bottom of the well” experience). Now I have moments when I’m almost disintegrating into a flood of joy…each cell would float off buoyantly in a different direction…Recently, I have been experiencing these “deep peaks” several times a week. It has been like riding waves from crest to crest without touching bottom in between…’

Brad seems to feel that these basic changes may be regarded as a preparation for the second part of his life. ‘I expressed this latter feeling last year when I told a friend that I felt that something in me was getting ready to be born, and that I felt as though I were the baby, the mother and the midwife, all at the same time.

Brad does not regard his present situation as some kind of ultimate. All stages are transitional. Brad seems to me to have made an important discovery about how we can enter into a new relationship with the unknown areas of the mind. Yet his own experience has not been so much one of ‘access to inner worlds’ as of an active collaboration with that ‘other self’ in this world. He remarks that new possibilities ‘will open up as I become stronger and clearer in my ability to will the inner gesture of change-over from my usual mind-directed level of conscious behaviour to the movement-impulse level’. He recognizes that the present stage is as rudimentary as a baby’s first efforts to walk or use its hand for grasping. ‘Whether the strengthening of my will will lead only to more sustained and continuous periods of living from that level, or whether it will also lead to new levels of experience, I do not know.’ Neither is it important that he does not know. All that matters is to know that in our generation, in the last part of the twentieth century, a new direction of evolution has suddenly opened up in front of us.