‘There exists a reciprocal influence between the heavenly bodies, the earth, and the bodies of living creatures.’ So said Dr Charles D’Eslon, physician to the Comte D’Artois, in an appearance before the Royal Society of Medicine in Paris on September 18, 1780. This influence, claimed the speaker, was due to an unknown ‘fluid’ which pervades all space. The health of human beings was governed by the movement of this mysterious influence, which, because of its similarity to magnetic attraction, might be called animal magnetism. (To a later generation of occultists it became known as the ‘astral light’, and to a still later generation of scientists as the luminiferous ether.)
D’Eslon was not expounding his own doctrine, but that of his admired master, Dr Franz Anton Mesmer, who had come to Paris two years previously. Mesmer believed literally in the curative power of large magnets, an idea he may have picked up from Paracelsus, who had stumbled on the discovery more than two centuries earlier. When patients were ‘magnetised’—stroked with large magnets—their aches and pains vanished. Moreover, if a tree was ‘magnetised’, and patients leaned against it, the effect seemed to be just as powerful.
Inevitably, the doctors and scientists were opposed to Mesmer’s ideas, perhaps with some reason. Mesmer’s ‘magnetic’ sessions were crowded with half-naked men and women who increased the flow of magnetic fluid with mutual caresses; doctors suspected that the invigorating effects were not entirely the result of the cosmic ether. Mesmer never achieved professional recognition, and Dr D’Eslon’s attempt to convince his colleagues of the Royal Society of Medicine was a total failure; they voted to disqualify any doctor who advocated or practised animal magnetism. Mesmer died, forgotten and embittered, in 1815.
In the same year that the Royal Society rejected Mesmer’s claims, one of his pupils made a discovery that was to revolutionise the future of medicine. Armand Marie-Jacques, Marquis de Chastenet de Puységur, was an aristocrat who lived on an estate near Soissons with his younger brothers, Viscount Jacques Maxime and Count Antoine-Hyacinthe. They had paid Mesmer four hundred louis for instruction in the art of magnetism, which they then proceeded to practise on the local peasantry. In accordance with Mesmer’s instructions they magnetised a lime tree in the park and made their patients lean against it to absorb its influence. One day in 1780, the Marquis was treating a twenty-year-old shepherd named Victor Race. He had tied him loosely to the tree and was making passes with a magnet over his head and body, to induce a flow in the magnetic fluid. To Puységur’s surprise, Victor closed his eyes and fell asleep. The Marquis ordered him to wake up and untie himself; with eyes still closed, Victor did as he was told. Then, walking like a somnambulist, he wandered off across the park. Puységur knew enough about medicine to know that he had induced some kind of trance, but he had no idea of its nature.
Two centuries later, we are still in ignorance. We know that most people can be hypnotised if they fix their eyes on some monotonous movement, like the swinging of a pendulum. Contrary to general belief, this has nothing to do with weakness of will. Weak-minded people are more difficult to hypnotise than intelligent, normal people, and it is impossible to hypnotise idiots.
The puzzling thing about hypnosis is that it appears to work by making the patient fall asleep—the monotonous movement of a train has the same effect. But in hypnotic sleep, some part of the mind remains fully awake, so the subject can answer questions or obey suggestions. Most books on the subject contain a chapter called ‘What is Hypnosis?’ The answer could be summarised in three words: ‘We don’t know.’
Yet Janet’s observation of his hysterical patients1 offers a clue. When patients were in a state of nervous hypertension, Janet found that he could hold whispered conversations with them without the patient’s conscious self being aware of what was going on. Part of the personality had gone into ‘eclipse’, leaving only a contracted and anxiety-ridden ego; yet the eclipsed part of the mind could still answer questions and respond to suggestions.
It seems clear that we are dealing with a closely related phenomenon in hypnosis. Ordinary sleep seems to have a chemical basis; poisons accumulate in the brain, and the order to sleep is transmitted to various centres by a chemical called acetylcholine. In hypnosis, the chemical system seems to be by-passed; there is nothing to prevent a person being hypnotised immediately after a good night’s sleep. Hypnosis seems to cause the same kind of ‘narrowing’ of consciousness as hysteria, but the contracted part of consciousness falls asleep, while the eclipsed part remains awake, capable of responding to stimuli. Moreover, the hypnotised person becomes capable of feats that would be impossible while awake; everyone has heard of the stage-hypnotist’s trick of making someone lie rigid across two chairs with a heavy weight on the stomach.
What happens in hypnosis? The phenomenon appears to be clearly associated with passivity, that is, the ‘robotic’ part of the mind. For centuries before the Puységurs made their discovery, farmers knew that if you held a chicken’s head against the floor and drew a chalk line extending from the tip of its beak, the bird would lie still, apparently fascinated by the line. Placing blinkers over a horse’s eyes seems to have a similar ‘tranquilising’ effect, not only preventing it from seeing oncoming traffic, but reducing its level of nervous excitability. And in human beings, hypnosis causes a similar ‘switching off’ of the active part of the consciousness.
From our point of view, one of the most interesting things about hypnosis is that seems to be capable of activating Jung’s ‘creative imagination’. In the winter of 1976, I was present at an experiment in the BBC television studios in Bristol, to determine whether a hypnotised person could be made to ‘see’ a ghost. A volunteer—a housewife who was known to be a good hypnotic subject—was placed under hypnosis by a doctor. She was told that when she awakened, she would be taken to another place, where I would approach her (followed by a television camera). As I spoke to her, she would ‘see’ the sinister figure of a seventeenth-century clergyman standing nearby; the man’s appearance was described in detail. She was awakened and taken to the Bristol docks, where I was waiting. As I walked towards her, she smiled at me, then her eyes strayed across the water to an abandoned wharf. Her smile vanished, and she asked me with amazement; ‘Where did he go?’ ‘Who?’ ‘That man …’ She pointed to the dock and described the unpleasant, sallow-looking man dressed in old-fashioned clothes, who had been standing on the wharf, then vanished. Even when the hypnotist explained that she had been responding to a suggestion made under hypnosis, she was obviously only half-convinced. Several times during the rest of the afternoon, she tried to persuade us to admit that it had been a joke and she had seen a real man. She said there was nothing ‘ghostly’ about him; he looked quite solid and normal.2
Hypnotism appears to be one method of reaching the ‘wider’ areas of the self, beyond the narrow little wedge of ego-consciousness that most of us think as ‘me’. This was why hypnosis was the logical way of re-integrating the dissociated personalities of Doris Fischer and Sybil Dorsett—and also why it released the mischievous fragment of Christine Beauchamp like a genie from a bottle. This fragment—Sally—had been floating around in the ‘eclipsed’ area, what we would normally call the unconscious, without being able to struggle into conscious existence because Christine guarded the door to consciousness. When Christine fell asleep under hypnosis, Sally was able to emerge from the true ‘unconscious’ into that subliminal or twilight area that lies on either side of it. (For the sake of simplicity, I shall refer to this twilight area as ‘penumbral consciousness’.) Prince’s mistake was in trying to suppress her again instead of trying to integrate her with Christine.
What is the mechanism of ‘expansion’? What happens when the opposite takes place—when a man ‘completes his partial mind’ and ‘laughs aloud, his heart at peace?’
This is a question that took on an urgently personal note during my ‘panic attacks’, and some of the observations that I made during that period may provide a convenient starting point. To begin with, there was that basic recognition that I was causing the panic. A part of me was gripping my own windpipe, cutting off the air. Obviously, I didn’t want to go through this particularly unpleasant experience. So how did I manage to split into these two warring factions?
The answer, I realised, lay in the personality I have been forced to acquire since I reached the ‘age of responsibility’. When I now look at my face in the mirror—battered and lined with its forty-five years—I realise that the person most of my friends know as Colin Wilson has come into existence over the past quarter of a century. He hardly existed in my teens. This ‘me’ is conscientious, hard-working, a passable husband and father. Most people regard him as fairly tolerant and good-natured, and he enjoys a glass of wine with friends. The only characteristic he shares with his ancestor of thirty years ago is a certain tendency to obsessiveness; once he gets his teeth into a task, he finds it difficult to let go.
That earlier Colin Wilson was not much liked. He detested the dreariness of everyday living and its tedious responsibilities. Ever since childhood he had regarded most adults as fools, and now he still found most people irritating and stupid. He hated modern civilisation because he felt it was designed to encourage mediocrity. He had no idea of what he wanted to do with his life, except for some vague idea of becoming a scientist or a writer. All he knew was that he wanted as little as possible to do with the world around him.
I say all this without any implied condemnation. I think that my instinct was basically sound. But it certainly made life difficult. When I left school at the age of sixteen and took a job in a warehouse (having no qualification for any other kind of work), I found it all exhausting and depressing. Yet it was through this exhaustion that I made a discovery that I still regard as one of the most interesting and important of my life. It was the trick I call ‘gliding’.
When I came home from work, I would feel physically tired and mentally depressed; it seemed that I was trapped in a system that made no allowances for ‘outsiders’. I would go to my bedroom, where I kept my books, and spend a whole evening reading poetry. I would start by reading poems that reflected my pessimism: Eliot’s Waste Land and Hollow Men, Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night. This would produce a catharsis of the loathing, and a gradual sense of relaxation and expansion. Suddenly, I would notice that my mental energies had returned, although I was still physically tired. The result was an astonishing state of susceptibility. I could turn to any poet and totally immerse myself in his mood. There was an identification so complete that it was like becoming the person I was reading. And this power of identification could be applied to poets who had nothing in common. I could turn straight from Milton to Lorca, from Whitman to Verlaine, from Poe to G. K. Chesterton, without any loss of sympathy or any feeling of disparity. In each case, there was a feeling of entering the poet’s world and momentarily living a part of his life. What I was experiencing—although I did not know it then—was a form of Faculty X.
The analogy that best seemed to describe the process was that of gliding. There was the initial period when the glider had to be towed gently up into the air. It was important not to release it too low, or it would bump straight back to earth. But once the mood of relaxation had been induced, I was safe. Then I could float gently in any direction I liked, taking advantage of the air currents. There was an amazing sense of freedom; I could dive or climb or turn somersaults. No negative emotions could interfere with this mood of exaltation, and if I thought back on some event that had made me miserable or embarrassed at the time, it seemed laughably trivial. Moreover, it seemed self-evident to me that this mood of relaxed detachment should be normal for all human beings.
The main problem, of course, is getting up there, where the winds will allow you to float freely. Here, my exhaustion obviously played an interesting part. It prevented the practical part of me from interfering. The everyday self sat there passively, allowing this other self slowly and carefully to induce a mood of relaxation and freedom. If I tried to induce this mood on a Sunday, when I had all day to do it, it might take me until evening. The problem was that I felt too free to begin with; my energies ran around like a flock of sheep and declined to be herded into one single act of attention. And I might be distracted by a noise or a sudden impulse to rearrange my books. It was better when exhaustion gave my mind a certain unity.
The result of these moods of freedom was an instinctive loathing of the everyday world which I later called ‘the Bombard effect’, after the Frenchman Alain Bombard, who sailed across the Atlantic in a rubber dinghy, to prove that shipwrecked mariners did not have to die of thirst and starvation. He lived on plankton, the juices of squashed fish, and small quantities of sea water, until one day he made the mistake of accepting the invitation of a passing ship to go on board for a meal. This was disastrous, for when he returned to his dinghy, his stomach rejected the squashed fish and sea water, and he vomited for days before it readjusted. I felt that these states in ‘gliding’ were normal, and I found my everyday diet of experience revolting after such glimpses of freedom. Like Yeats, I found the act of getting up in the morning unspeakably tedious. As an employee I was thoroughly unsatisfactory—bored, inefficient and resentful.
And yet as my teens drew to a close, I found that I was learning to make the adjustment to physical reality. I had to if I wanted to escape the treadmill of frustrating jobs. After a brief stint in the RAF, I became a kind of tramp, taking any labouring job that was offered, and giving it up the moment I grew tired of it. Basically, I remained what I had always been—one of Isaiah Berlin’s ‘hedgehogs’,3 preferring to ignore the practical side of existence and unwilling to spare a thought for anything except ideas. But I found that I had to develop another personality, a beast of burden, capable of dealing with the boring problems of keeping me alive and able, like the camel, to go for days without water—that is, without relaxation or moments of intensity.
When, at twenty-four, my first book brought me sudden notoriety, it looked as if the hedgehog were going to have things all his own way. I soon found out my mistake. The camel proved to be more necessary than ever. There were deadlines to meet, letters to be answered, trains to catch. And eventually, like everybody else, I found myself paying off a mortgage, driving the kids to school and mowing the lawn. What was even stranger was that I, who had once agreed with Villiers de L’Isle Adam’s Axel that our living ought to be done for us by servants, now found myself deriving pleasure from repairing a broken window or sawing logs for the fire.
That alliance of hedgehog and camel has never been entirely amicable. The hedgehog remains preoccupied with the mystery of human existence and the paradox of human freedom; the camel has to make sure that articles are delivered on time and that the bills get paid. They usually regard one another with wry tolerance; but when things get difficult, they tend to quarrel. That is what happened in the autumn of 1973, when the camel decided to meet his obligation to the encyclopedia of crime, and the hedgehog turned away in disgust and curled up into a ball.
In less metaphorical terms, I pushed myself too hard, ventured too far from the subconscious ‘source of power, meaning and purpose’. The camel ran out of water. I found myself reduced to the state of one of Janet’s hysterics, and it tended to be self-perpetuating. Anxiety about my work pushed me into ‘contracted consciousness’, and anxiety to escape kept me there. Every time I tried to relax, a new challenge would cause me to flinch back into a state of hypertension.
But I knew, intellectually speaking, that the problem was to relax, to expand out of the hysteria. It was a question of de-conditioning myself, and the old experience of gliding now proved invaluable. Admittedly, this time I was trying to ‘glide’ under totally different conditions, in something more like a storm. A dozen times in the course of an evening (it tended to happen mostly when I was tired), the glider went into a sudden dive, and a dozen times I managed to get the nose up again. It was frightening to realise how easy it would be to plunge into total depression and destroy all my inner resources. When you let yourself ‘crash’, the world looks self-evidently meaningless and dangerous, and your energies are poisoned at their source. Yet after half a dozen nose-dives and recoveries, I began to realise that the situation wasn’t half as bad as I thought; that was the first step towards recovery.
What was so fascinating about it all was to realise how much our lives and our sanity depend on the winds that blow from the subconscious. The actual mechanism of gliding, the rudder, is one’s attention. When one is earth-bound—as most of us are most of the time—it seems to be a purely practical device for steering one through the working day; one’s attention merely switches from one object to another. Some things raise the spirits; others depress them, but because one is on the solid earth, one doesn’t move far in one direction or another. It takes a fairly powerful stimulus, like falling in love, to make one feel one is ‘walking on air’. But when one has succeeded in getting off the ground, the same slight changes of attention can hurl one a hundred yards one way or the other. Ramakrishna spent so much time ‘in the air’ that the mere thought of God was enough to make him unconscious with ecstasy. Nietzsche’s ecstasy brought him a vision of the superman and an equally mystical vision of a giant stable universe in which everything recurs eternally, but his depressions hurled him into insanity. Van Gogh’s ecstasies revealed nature as a living flame; his depressions convinced him that ‘misery will never end’, and drove him to suicide.
At least the habitual glider is aware of a fundamental truth about the universe: that it is his own will, his own moods, his own attention, that determines ecstasy or misery. Everyone else remains trapped in the delusion that happiness and misery are a logical response to external circumstances. So they waste their lives struggling with the circumstances and feel cheated when they realise that an improvement for the better often leaves them as unfulfilled as before. If they are intelligent enough to express themselves in general terms, they probably explain that human beings are ‘creatures of circumstance’ and that all our effort is ‘vanity of vanities’.
This tendency to hold things upside down, to put the cart before the horse, matters a great deal more than we realise. Even ‘on the ground’, our moods and reactions permanently colour the world we see around us. We are always declaring that things ‘are’ good or bad, when we merely mean that we are wearing rose-tinted or dark-coloured spectacles. We think we are reacting to the outside world when we are merely reacting to our involuntary inner feelings. We are like bats who mistake shadows for solid objects. Because our moods change so quickly, we change direction from moment to moment, imagining that we are steering to avoid obstacles. It takes a sudden crisis, or a surge of deep purpose, to make us see things as they really are; otherwise, the shadow-play of our own mental states keeps us in a condition analogous to trance.
‘Gliding’ rescues us from the dream by permitting a bird’s-eye-view. Once we are off the ground, we realise that most of our strength is wasted in-dealing with trivial or negative emotions; we are like wrestlers who tie themselves in knots. These emotions keep us confined to the ground. This in turn explains the observation made in an earlier chapter: that we all spend most of our lives in a state analogous to Janet’s ‘hysteria’, and that we regard this as normal consciousness. In fact, it is so contracted that we can hardly breathe. A narrow, anxiety-ridden consciousness is inevitable when we spend our lives in such a state of psychological confusion. So is a great deal of violence and over-reaction; gliding makes us aware that we over-react to almost everything.
The mind has a series of internal barriers, like lock-gates on a canal. Once you have got inside a certain barrier, it is difficult to get out, as I discovered when I became trapped within the panic barrier. Our ‘normal’ consciousness is another such barrier. And each barrier represents a further separation from the ‘source of power, meaning and purpose’, the spring of vitality whose origin is in the subconscious mind. Many philosophers of the nineteenth century—including Schopenhauer and Nietzsche—believed that man fell into ‘sin’ when he learned to think. It enabled him to grasp the world more clearly, but it separated him from his subconscious mind. There is more than an element of truth in this view. If you wake up in the middle of the night and begin to think about money, or try to work out a mathematical puzzle, you will find it difficult to get back to sleep. The use of reasoning faculty has dragged you away from the warm depths of the subconscious. If you can fill your mind with images—velvet curtains, drifting clouds, immense buildings—you sink gently back into the world of the unconscious.
As you pass into unconsciousness, you linger briefly in a twilight realm that has been labelled the hypnogogic state.
Everyone has experienced these states, if only for a few seconds. And anyone who takes the trouble to reflect on them will observe the most astonishing thing about them: that these images seem totally independent of ‘you’; it is like watching a surrealistic film on television or in the cinema. It is almost as if you had another person inside you, hurling these images up into your brain like a child throwing coloured balls over the roof. This might be an alarming thought if we were not fairly certain that the child is also ‘you’. In his important book about the mystic Swedenborg,4 Wilson Van Dusen, a professional psychologist, writes: … Whatever is true of the individual at that moment tends to be spontaneously represented or symbolised. For instance, I was meditating on the richness of the hypnogogic state and heard someone say “my liberal arts course.” The liberal arts course is a representation of my feeling that the inner is varied and informative. I did not have the idea of liberal arts course in mind at that moment…’
He also notes that the subconscious seems to have a sense of humour. As Swedenborg, on the edge of sleep, was reflecting, that desire for position and wealth is vanity, ‘I seemed to hear a hen cackling, as takes place at once after she has laid an egg.’ Van Dusen cites his own experience as well: ‘One morning while awakening, someone said, “Here is a mondo for you,” and I opened my eyes to see the world. A “mondo” is a Japanese Zen term for a problem given by a master to plague the student in a productive way. My higher self was playing with me, saying: “You want a problem from your master? Here is a little one. Existence itself!” …’ Van Dusen has no doubt that these messages come from the ‘higher self’, not from some Freudian subconscious, and he speaks of his everyday personality as his ‘little self’. His contention is that this higher self can contact us when we are on the edge of sleep—and perhaps in dreams—in a symbolic way, and that what it tells us is usually the truth about our own lives.
The same view has been developed by an English psychologist, Dr Rachel Pinney, who writes: ‘When I have a problem that has touched me acutely and at depth I need to consult my unconscious about the problem; I also need to consult my God, the cosmos, the universal unconscious … I need to consult on the total human well-being which will emerge from the problem, not just my own.’ She goes on to describe two methods of doing this: to be wakened shortly before her normal time, and to have a ‘sleep-satiated dream’.
The example she cites concerns a prison officer with whom she clashed during a period she spent in prison for defying a court order. The female officer was widely disliked for her unpleasantness, which was directed particularly against lesbian inmates. Finally, Dr Pinney herself clashed with the warder, and her prison liberties were severely curtailed. ‘I hated her for what she had done, but at some level I couldn’t totally hate her because one of my good friends liked her.’ She decided to consult her ‘dreams’. She asked the officer on night duty to wake her up earlier than usual by merely repeating her name. The dream she was having as she woke up concerned the hated warder.
In the dream, the officer was driving a car. It was something like a station wagon, with plenty of room behind. I noticed she was dropping off to sleep. I went up to her and very gently got near enough for body contact … and asked her if I could take over. She shook herself awake, denied being asleep, and went on driving. I stayed with her and saw that she again fell asleep. I took the wheel from her with concern and gentleness and successfully steered the car off the road.’
Her dream-self had realised that the woman was not evil, but only ‘asleep at the wheel’, slave of some automatic function. The insight enabled her to treat the warder with a certain sympathy and often to help some of her intended victims. In her paper describing the experience, she even speculates on whether it might not have been possible to do the same for Eichmann.
Van Dusen is convinced that Swedenborg’s ‘visions’, in which he conversed with angels and brought back messages from the dead, were a kind of controlled hypnogogic state. It was basically the technique that Jung discovered in 1913: confrontation with the unconscious, and the ability to explore it through active imagination. ‘One doesn’t explore ‘these things for long’, says Van Dusen, ‘without beginning to feel there is a greater wisdom in the inner processes than there is in ordinary consciousness.’ And he concludes that the ‘individual’s sphere, in which he rules within his mind, is relatively small’, the conclusion reached by every major psychologist of the past century.
How can this technique of ‘dream study’ be developed? Everyone who has written about it seems to agree that it is simply a matter of being sufficiently interested to make the effort. I accidentally discovered an interesting technique almost twenty years ago. I was sitting in an armchair in the cottage where we were then living, while a friend was playing a recording of Strauss’s Salome. I was exceptionally tired and drifted off to sleep; but Salome is a fairly noisy opera, and it kept waking me up. Whenever I woke up, I listened to the music in a trance-like state, with intense enjoyment, and would feel myself slowly drifting towards sleep again. The music kept me hovering in the borderland between sleep and waking, and I was surprised that the sensation was so delightful. There was a languid feeling of total relaxation and also an ‘expanded’ sensation; it was like lying on the grass on a sunny afternoon with eyes half-closed, listening to birds and the sound of the sea. I have practised this technique many times in the intervening years. If I feel pleasantly tired in the evening, I put on a record of music I enjoy—something with climaxes is a good idea, otherwise you tend to drift into sleep—and make a gentle effort to stay awake as I listen. The only effort required is to avoid plunging into ordinary sleep, and this is aided by the music. The condition achieved is a variant on ‘gliding’, and it is easy to observe the strange images and ideas that float through the mind. Van Dusen remarks:
Those who have explored these states come to feel like a vessel into which life is poured. Moreover, after much watching of thoughts coming forth on their own, one can detect the same process in normal waking consciousness. The little fringe thought that pops into one’s head in the daytime is no longer seen as one’s own creation… Some will be frightened by the idea that there is little that we actually rule in our mind. But this is the normal, common state. We are some kind of coming and going, flowing life process. The main effect of watching this coming and going is a greater humility about how much one is master of.
This, says Van Dusen, is why Swedenborg, the proud author of many scientific works, felt that he had no right to put his name on his theological works.
For the modern psychologist, perhaps the most fascinating thing about Swedenborg is that his great religious ‘conversion’ was preceded by all kinds of strange dreams, of which he kept a record in a volume that has survived. Swedenborg was born in 1688, the son of a bishop, and became an engineer and geologist. Scientific works poured out of him in a flood until his fifty-sixth year, when he began to experience increasing distress and dissatisfaction. His dreams all involved images of anxiety and mistrust. He was standing by a machine and was caught up in a great wheel, which carried him into the air (this sounds like a symbolic warning against science); he was in a garden thinking of purchasing a fine bed when he noticed someone picking out bed bugs; he was lying beside a woman and felt between her thighs to discover her vagina had a set of teeth. The strains and dissatisfactions of his subconscious were forcing their way into consciousness; finally, he spent a whole night—eleven hours—in a semitrance-like state, between sleeping and waking, observing hypnogogic images. Fortunately, Swedenborg was exceptionally good at interpreting his dream symbols; like Jung, he learned to come to terms with his unconscious. The culminating dream was unambiguous; after a great wind had flung him on his face, he held a conversation with Jesus, who urged him to do something about his life. It was then that he began to study the Bible, to experience ecstatic trances, and to see the ‘visions’ that have made his works a matter of controversy ever since.
Swedenborg claimed that he visited heaven and hell and conversed with spirits; he also gave accounts of travel to the moon and the planets. He described the inhabitants of the moon as being like children with thunderous voices, while those of Mars were piebald and lived entirely on fruit and vegetable seeds. But then, when the widow of the Dutch ambassador wanted to know the whereabouts of a receipt for a silver tea service—the silversmith was demanding a second payment—Swedenborg contacted her husband in ‘heaven’ and told her that the receipt would be found in a secret drawer in the bureau, and the information proved to be accurate. He was able to give the Queen of Sweden an equally accurate message from her dead brother, the Prince Royal of Prussia. How can we reconcile the contradiction? The answer becomes clear if we turn to his accounts of his visits to the spirit world. The following is taken at random from The True Christian Religion (para 332):
I once heard loud shouts which sounded as if they were bubbling up through water from lower regions; from the left came the shout: ‘Oh, how just!’, from the right: ‘Oh, how learned!’, and from behind: ‘Oh, how wise!’ And as I wondered whether there could be any just, learned or wise persons in hell, I strongly desired to see the truth of the matter. A voice from heaven then said to me: ‘You shall see and hear.’ So I departed in the spirit and saw before me an opening, which I approached and examined; and behold!, there was a ladder, and by this I descended. When I had got down, I saw a plain covered with shrubs intermixed with thorns and nettles. I inquired whether this was hell, and was told that it was the lower earth which is immediately above hell…
He goes on to tell how he saw a group of corrupt judges who were crying, ‘Oh, how just.’ The description of the building they were in is extraordinarily precise, as are all Swedenborg’s descriptions of places. A man who is merely writing in parables does not bother with this kind of accuracy: ‘an amphitheatre built of brick and roofed with black tiles. In the midst of the amphitheatre appeared a fireplace, into which the stokers were casting pine-pitch dipped in sulphur and bitumen, the light of which, by its flickerings and plastered walls, formed representations of birds of the twilight and night.’ We feel that Swedenborg is describing something he has seen; not with his physical eyes but in a hypnogogic trance. A few pages later he confirms this: ‘Once, when I awoke at daybreak, I saw … diversely shaped apparitions floating before my eyes; and when it was morning I saw a various display of false lights.’ These, he says, were like rising and falling meteors. And then: ‘Presently, my spiritual sight was opened’; and there followed a typical vision involving angels and spirits.
Apparently some kind of spontaneous hypnogogic vision, encountered on waking, could be turned into a kind of waking dream. So we might expect that his visions of the moon and planets would possess all the weird—if precise—features of a dream. However, the trance state is not unlike that of mediums. Swedenborg could have obtained his information about the secret drawer from the same source that map dowsers obtain information about mineral deposits or underground springs. That is to say, in the hypnogogic state, Swedenborg had escaped from the ‘normal’ state of contracted consciousness; he had ‘completed his partial mind’, or at least expanded it well beyond the normal limits, as far as the next set of ‘lock gates’.
It was Armand Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, the Marquis de Puységur, who discovered that hypnosis had the power of releasing the subject’s telepathic abilities. A girl called Madeleine was so susceptible to ‘mental suggestion’ that Puységur was able to use her for public demonstrations. Madeleine was hypnotised and stood with her eyes firmly closed. Then Puységur would point at some object in the room, or simply stare at it. With tightly closed eyes, Madeleine would walk over to it and touch it.
In itself, this experiment is hardly conclusive; Madeleine might have been peeping through half-closed eyelids; or she and the Marquis might have arranged the whole thing in advance. The Marquis would allay these suspicions by offering to allow anyone in the audience to direct Madeleine. All that was necessary, he said, was to concentrate unwaveringly on the object she was to find. The results were highly convincing. If someone fixed her firmly with his eyes, she would make her way to some object and touch it with her hand; if the person were timid or uncertain, Madeleine would waver and hesitate as she made her way towards it. One sceptic, whom Puységur calls ‘the Baron de B.’, suggested changing the locale of the experiments from Puységur’s house to that of another sceptic, M. Mitonard. Mitonard was told to ‘control’ Madeleine, and for several minutes he made her walk around the room, sit down and take up various objects. Then Mitonard stood in front of her and simply stared hard at her. After a few moments, Madeleine reached into his pocket, took out three small screws, and handed them to him. Both Mitonard and Baron de B. were convinced.5 As we have already seen,6 the same phenomenon was demonstrated under laboratory conditions by Dr Paul Joire in the 1890s.
Telepathy was not the only unusual ability manifested by hypnotic subjects. In the 1820s, a certain M. Didier was hypnotised so frequently that he developed a curious habit of falling into spontaneous trances. He occasionally did this at the breakfast table, while reading the morning paper. His two young sons, Alexis and Adolphe, would watch fascinated as their father continued to read aloud from the newspaper, unaware that he had dropped it on the table. Sometimes the boys would remove the paper to another room, but their father would continue reading aloud as if he still held it.
In the early 1840s, Alexis took a job as a clerk in the office of an ex-cavalry officer, J. B. Marcillet, whose business was transport. One day at the theatre, Alexis answered a stage hypnotist’s call for volunteers and proved to be an excellent subject, so good that Marcillet decided to become his manager. Alexis became one of the most celebrated ‘somnambulists’ in Europe. His brother Adolphe showed similar powers and was almost as famous. A typical Didier séance is described in the English journal The Zoist—which was largely concerned with hypnotism—for July 1844. Alexis was hypnotised by Marcillet, who simply made a few passes over him. Then Marcillet had Alexis stretch out his legs in front of him (he was seated in an armchair), and a man stood on his thighs without causing them to move. Alexis’ eyes were bandaged with wadding and handkerchiefs and he was given a pack of cards which he opened and proceeded to run through, discarding the smaller cards at a great speed. Still blindfolded he played a game of ecarté with a certain Captain Daniell. When the narrator—E. S. Symes—played cards with him, he noticed that Alexis often left the cards lying face downward on the table and played without making mistakes. Finally, a large book was placed upright on the table, making a screen between the two players. Unable to see the cards that his opponent threw down, Alexis still played impeccably. It was evident that he was able to see the cards in his opponent’s hands, as well as his own cards, lying face downward on the table.
Later, Captain Daniell held Alexis’ hand and suggested that he travel with him mentally to his father’s house. Didier was able to describe correctly the positions of doors and windows, pictures, ornaments and furniture. Daniell said that he made one mistake—about the colour of the curtains. But, on returning home, Daniell discovered that Alexis had been right.
The power Alexis displayed is known as ‘travelling clairvoyance’. As described here, it sounds more like telepathy—except that he was correct about the colour of the curtains. E. J. Dingwall’s account of Didier7 cites dozens of other examples; in one case, he ‘projected’ himself from Cambridge to Fontainebleau, went into a house, located a bureau in a certain room and described (with an expression of disgust) a skull standing on it. What is even more curious is that Alexis was unable to see the skull but was able to describe it when ordered to ‘touch’ it.
Like many clairvoyants, Alexis felt his powers were diminished by the presence of sceptics. He was usually able to describe correctly the contents of sealed packages or envelopes; but if a sceptic handled the package first, his mind became a blank. The explanation seems to be provided by the classic ‘sheep and goats’ experiment, described on page 198; sceptics seem capable of generating a subconscious will not to make the experiment work.
We have so far discussed four methods of establishing contact with the unconscious: active imagination, hypnogogic experience, hypnotism and ‘gliding’. Of the four, ‘gliding’ is probably the simplest and most accessible to the ordinary person, and there are few people unlucky enough never to have experienced it. It happens frequently when you relax in front of the fire and pour yourself a drink, or when you’re having a pleasant conversation with someone you like and trust. It happens to children at Christmas time, when a whole range of reinforced stimuli—presents, Christmas carols, attractive decorations, smells of turkey and Christmas pudding, paper hats and crackers—build up a mood of intensity and delight. (When I was a child, I seem to recall that those bright silver ornaments on the Christmas tree exercised a kind of hypnotic effect; and if I stare at the blue-silver strip at the end of my typewriter ribbon, I experience a momentary flash of the same distinctive joy.)
In all these cases, it is easy to see how the effect operates. The mind relaxes into a state of trust, and what might be called ‘pleasant expectancy’. Among the normal anxieties and tensions of modern life, we grow accustomed to a fairly constant flow of negative stimuli, and we finally slip into a state of negative expectation, as if flinching away from a blow. If we try to relax, this negative element may shatter the mood in a split second, as easily as you can destroy half-formed crystals by shaking the liquid. When ‘pleasant expectancy’ is slightly higher than usual, we can gradually de-condition ourselves out of the negative responses. And as we persuade the robot to cease its negative interference, our capacity for positive response steadily increases and redoubles with each positive stimulus. A person who has unusually strong reasons for feeling happiness or relief may quickly reach the normal ‘ceiling’ for positive response and pass straight through it into a ‘floating’ state of ecstasy. Such states are, in fact, fairly ‘normal’; there is nothing ineffable or mystical about them. Yet because they make us realise that our everyday self is a mere fragment of ‘us’, they can produce an effect of stunning paradox and overwhelming joy that can produce floods of tears or an ecstatic sense of the goodness of the universe.
The state of ‘gliding’ also brings the feeling of ‘absurd good news’; this is based on the astonished recognition of how easy it is to leave behind normal anxieties. There is also the realisation that most people fail to make the effort to get beyond their emotional debris because they fail to realise how little effort it takes. Most people spend their lives among scum and floating seaweed because they have no conception of the purity of the open sea. They fail to learn from their brief glimpses of a more relaxed consciousness, because what it tells them is so paradoxical and fails to fit in with their preconceptions about the world. Moreover, they are inclined to accept these glimpses as their ‘due’, as some kind of reward for past discomforts. So instead of trying to grasp and analyse them, they go to the opposite extreme and abandon all their critical faculties, relaxing into a kind of vapid ecstasy.
Gurdjieff was one of the few ‘mystical’ philosophers to recognise this truth and state it in so many words. By providing us with certain drives and instincts, nature has guaranteed our evolution up to a certain point. The basic need for sex, security and self-respect drives most of us to a certain level of achievement. But nature is totally uninterested as to whether we go beyond this point; we serve its purposes well enough if we produce healthy children. If we choose to take experience just as it comes, without thinking about it, nature has no objection, because healthy fools reproduce themselves just as efficiently as philosophers and saints, more so, in fact. So the man or woman who attempts to generate an intenser form of consciousness will get no help from nature, none of the pleasant ecstasies of sexual intercourse or the exhilaration of fighting. He will have to go it alone. And this is as it should be. For the peculiar, lonely exhilaration of the ‘search for truth’ is far more rewarding because it is ‘unsubsidised’. Moreover, the sense of having done it solely by one’s own effort brings a sudden recognition of freedom, a knowledge of the possibilities of the will. The process could be compared to the experience of a teenager who lives away from home for the first time and discovers that he or she is capable of cooking his own meals and making his own bed. This freedom can be bewildering, and offers possibilities of mistakes and disasters; yet it is also the beginning of adulthood.
Oddly enough, there are human beings for whom ‘gliding’ is a purely instinctive skill. Ramakrishna is an example. Even as a child, his natural response to beauty was so intense that he once fainted at the sight of a flock of white cranes flying across a black thunder cloud. Ramakrishna never tired of teaching his disciples to ignore negative emotions, to avoid saying: ‘I am a fool, I am a weakling, I am a sinner.’ Such notions, he said, prevented a man’s spiritual progress; if he had been a sinner, he had better forget about it and concentrate on union with God. William Blake was another ‘natural’ mystic; at the age of eight, he looked up into a tree and saw that it was full of angels; on another occasion, he saw angels walking among the hay-makers. But eighteenth-century London was a less propitious place for a mystic than nineteenth-century India; Blake spent most of his life in poverty whereas Ramakrishna lived in the security of the temple of Kali.
Perhaps the most important natural mystic of the twentieth century was Yeats’s friend George Russell; and his neglected writings are full of the insights of a man for whom ‘gliding’ was almost as natural as breathing.
Three years Yeats’s junior, Russell was born in Lurgan, Northern Ireland, in 1867, the son of a clerk. Unlike Blake, he had no visions in childhood; but like Ramakrishna, he was intensely sensitive to beauty from an early age. In Song and Its Fountains,8 he records how, at the age of four or five, he wandered into a park, and was so overwhelmed by ‘some enchantment flickering about a clump of daffodils’ that he had to lie down on the grass. When he read a story about a sword with a silver hilt and a steel-blue blade, he was enchanted by the words ‘blue and silver’ and later by the colours of lilacs and primroses. He notes: ‘This love of colour seemed instinctive … and it was only in that retrospective meditation I could see that the harmonies which delighted me had been chosen by a deeper being and were symbolic of its nature.’ That sentence must have been incomprehensible to most of Russell’s contemporaries, who were unfamiliar with the doctrine of magical correspondences as applied to colours.
When Russell was eleven, his family moved to Dublin, which he found a delightful change after the sectarian bitterness of Lurgan. He proved to be a good scholar with unusual aptitude for literature and art. When he left school in Rathmines, he attended art classes in the evening, but the family was too poor to send him to art school. At the Metropolitan School of Art in Kildare Street he met Yeats in 1884. Russell had just begun to write verse, and the two were to exert a powerful influence on one another. The meeting with Yeats came at exactly the right moment; about a week before, Russell had begun to experience visions and waking dreams. Significantly, he mentions9 that at this time, his life was ‘already made dark by those desires of body and heart with which we soon learn to taint our youth’. Russell’s father—a Protestant—was deeply religious, with strong leanings towards Primitive Methodism; so these intense stirrings of sexual desire must have had a disturbing effect on the seventeen-year-old boy. The result was a build-up of psychological pressure such as we have already encountered in the cases of Jung and Swedenborg. Russell found that the pressures of the unconscious could invade the waking mind: ‘walking along country roads, intense and passionate imaginations of another world, of an interior nature began to overpower me.’
A similar effect occurs if someone is kept awake for days on end; dreams begin to force their way into the conscious mind. ‘They were like strangers who suddenly enter a house, who brush aside the doorkeeper, and who will not be denied.’ This led to the realisation that ‘they were the rightful owners and heirs of the house of the body, and the doorkeeper was only one who was for a time in charge, who had neglected his duty, and who had pretended to ownership. The boy who had existed before was an alien… Yet whenever the true owner was absent, the sly creature reappeared and boasted himself as master once more.’ This was an astonishing insight for a teenager: that his body was not his own, that his ego was a mere fragment of some larger being. Even more astonishing, he began to conclude that his ‘inner being [is] not one but many’, a whole host of personalities, who might be brought into some kind of unity by an immense inner effort.
Perhaps the sexual conflict simply acted as a kind of depth charge to fling fragments of these inner selves into consciousness. Whatever the reason, the disturbance was followed by a reconciliation of the inner forces. And, like Rarnakrishna after his suicide attempt with the sword,10 Russell discovered that these states of intensity had become accessible at will. There was a continuous sense of being close to hidden forces of nature, and a feeling that nature itself was only a veil over some deeper reality:
As I walked in the evening down the lanes scented by the honeysuckle my senses were expectant of some unveiling about to take place, I felt that beings were looking in upon me out of the true home of man… The tinted air glowed before me with intelligent significance like a face, a voice.11
A climactic ‘vision’ occurred as he lay on the hill of Kilmasheogue:
… one warm summer day lying idly on the hillside, not then thinking of anything but the sunlight, and how sweet it was to drowse there, when suddenly I felt a fiery heart throb, and knew it was personal and intimate, and started with every sense dilated and intent … and then the heart of the hills was opened to me, and I knew there was no hill for those who were there, and they were unconscious of the ponderous mountains piled above the palaces of light, and the winds were sparkling and diamond clear, yet full of colour as an opal, as they glittered through the valley, and I knew the Golden Age was all about me, and it was we who had been blind to it but that it had never passed away from the world.12
In order to make a living, Russell worked in various offices where his experiences do not seem to have been too unpleasant, as he acknowledges gratefully in Candle of Vision. He also continued the attempt to capture some of his visions on canvas. Like Blake, Russell is an important but not a great painter. One of his early paintings was conceived in a state of intense excitement; he was trying to capture the idea of God creating man. As he lay awake, wondering what to call the picture, he experienced a sense of expectancy, and when his attention was almost overstrained with anticipation, a voice seemed to say: ‘Call it the birth of Aeon.’ The word Aeon excited him although he had no idea of what it meant. In the library a couple of weeks later he was waiting for an art magazine when his eye fell on a book on the table and caught the word ‘Aeon’. It was a dictionary of religions, and Russell discovered that it was not his own invention but had been used by the Gnostics ‘to designate the first created beings’.13 This was not in fact correct. The Gnostics, as we have already noted, believed that the universe was not created by God but by some inferior god or demiurge, who falsely believes himself to be the ultimate godhead. This false god created six more demiurges, or archons, to help him with creation. The universe in which man finds himself is a vast prison, like those endless dungeons in Piranesi’s engravings, and the earth is its bottommost dungeon. Above us are a number of heavens or ‘spheres’, which are emanations of the original godhead; in most Gnostic systems there are seven, although in some there are as many as 365. These ‘heavens’ are, in fact, the Aeons. Man’s problem is to struggle upward through the Aeons to achieve reunion with God. In other Gnostic systems, the Aeons become vast epochs of time (which, say the Gnostics, is an illusion) which lie between the soul and its ultimate goal. This is how the word ‘aeon’ came to be used of epochs of time.
So Russell was mistaken in believing that Aeons is a name for the first created beings; however, the mistake is not important. What excited him was to discover that his ‘own’ word was part of one of the most ancient of all religious systems. Moreover, in the two weeks between ‘hearing’ the word and seeing it in the library, he had experienced waking dreams in which a being called Aeon was a kind of Miltonic rebel against God. Now he looked up the Gnostics in Neander’s Church History and found a story to the effect that the original demiurge who created the universe was called Aeon. The legend was part of the theology of the Sabians or Mandaeans, a small breakaway Christian sect of Lower Mesopotamia, whose religion combines Christian, Jewish and Gnostic elements. Again, it seemed a startling confirmation of his notion that there are things in the mind that have been there since remote ages. In fact, George Russell had formulated the idea of the collective unconscious at least a quarter of a century before Jung. He wrote: ‘I believed then, and still believe, that the immortal in us has memory of all its wisdom, or, as Keats puts it in one of his letters, there is an ancestral wisdom in man and we can if we wish drink of that old wine of heaven.’
Russell was so deeply impressed by the Gnostic religion, and by the concept of the rebel Aeon, that he decided to adopt the first two letters of Aeon as his pseudonym; hence the name under which he eventually became famous: AE.
From these early Gnostic studies came one of Russell’s most interesting ideas: that there might be some primeval language that sprang directly from man’s unconscious. At about this time Russell and Yeats founded the group called the Hermetic Students, and the notion of a primeval language is clearly influenced by the theory of the magical correspondences. In a strange vision, he had seen a book with magic symbols on each page; the symbols had vanished to be replaced by parts of the human body; he saw a series of fiery colours mounting the spinal column to a ball of white fire in the brain, then becoming wing-like pulses on either side of the head. As the vision closed, he saw only the symbol of the caduceus of Mercury—the rod with intertwined serpents—on the last page. It was some time before Russell learned of the Hindu doctrine of the force of kundalini, the vital force that rises from the base of the spine, vitalising the chakras or spiritual centres, until it reaches the ‘third eye’ in the brain. But if symbols and planets and colours and flowers and precious stones can be interconnected, why not individual sounds and syllables? (Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake seems to be based on a similar theory.) Russell worked for years trying to reconstruct this ‘ur-language’, although he never completed the task.
All these events convinced Russell that the external world somehow responds to the laws of man’s inner being. This is perhaps the most central and important of all ‘magical’ doctrines. Russell discovered that he encountered people—and ideas—as he needed them, so that ‘I could prophesy from the uprising of new moods in myself that I, without search, would soon meet people of a certain character, and so I met them.’ One of them was Yeats. But there were many others, even ‘people [met] seemingly by accident on country roads’ turned out to be ‘intimates of the spirit’.
I remember one day how that clerk with wrinkled face, blinking eyes and grizzly beard, who never seemed, apart from his work, to have interests other than his pipe and paper, surprised me by telling me that the previous midnight he waked in his sleep, and some self of him was striding to and fro in the moonlight in an avenue mighty with gigantic images; and that dream self he had surprised had seemed to himself unearthly in wisdom and power.
There were also the coincidences, like the library book open at the right page.
I have glanced in passing at a book left open by some one in a library, and the words first seen thrilled me, for they confirmed a knowledge lately attained in vision. At another time a book taken down idly from a shelf opened at a sentence quoted from a Upanishad, scriptures then to me unknown, and this sent my heart flying eastwards because it was the answer to a spiritual problem I had been brooding over an hour before.
All this brought a deep conviction that in the flux of life ‘there was meaning and law; that I could not lose what was my own; I need not seek, for my own would come to me; if any passed it was because they were no longer mine.’ He also came to believe that everyone with whom we come into contact has some affinity for us, and that we get as much out of their companionship as we deserve—or, perhaps, are able to understand.
Russell now discovered a new use for his power of active imagination. Most of us cannot clearly recall what happened the day before yesterday, and certainly not this time last month. Russell commenced a system of meditation which started with the present moment, then tried to recall his own past. At first he found it difficult, but practice brought increasing proficiency. No doubt his power to surrender to hypnogogic vision was helpful. He already had a certain ability to touch subconscious springs of feeling; what he was now trying to do was to tap those hidden ‘tape recordings’ of memory that Wilder Penfield was able to stimulate with an electric probe in the brain. The detailed childhood recollections of his autobiographical books were one result. But he also found that he had sudden intuitions of other existences, previous lives. He told his friend Carrie Rea in a letter that he was convinced that he had been a friend of William Blake in one of his previous lives, and had lived in ancient Assyria. He was also convinced that he had lived in Chaldea, ancient Egypt, pre-Columbian America, Gaelic Ireland, and had been a soldier in a Spanish army of the ninth century fighting the Moors.
He discovered that ancient ruins conjured up definite pictures in his mind. His biographer, Henry Summerfield, relates: ‘Visiting the remains of a chapel in Ulster, he saw the worshippers who had once prayed there, and noticed how the fervour of a kneeling red-robed woman contrasted with the pompous vanity of the altar boy and the proud detachment of an onlooker. At prehistoric mounds, he was able by a deliberate effort to conjure up visions of the Gaelic past, and to see clearly the material details of its crude civilisation.’ He even seems to have seen something that sounds like a UFO: ‘It was probably soon after [this] … that he first saw a fleet of majestic airships bearing beautifully robed passengers over the mountains; five or six years later one of the mysterious vessels reappeared and passed so close to him that it was within arm’s reach.’
Russell developed remarkable powers of telepathy. Yeats tells a story of how a young lady told Russell: ‘I am so unhappy’, and was embarrassed when Russell replied: ‘You will be perfectly happy this evening at seven o’clock’—in fact, the time she was supposed to meet her boyfriend. On another occasion, as he sat beside an office colleague, he had a sudden vision of an old man in a small dark shop and a red-haired girl behind him; his companion verified that Russell had seen his father and sister. He was sitting there with his mind momentarily emptied of thought when the ‘vision’ came. Henry Summerfield spoke to Russell’s son, who testified that his father often knew facts about people that he could not have learned by normal means.
In 1889, when he was twenty-two, Russell gave up art—he told Yeats it would weaken his will—and joined the Theosophical Society, apparently uninfluenced by the widespread belief that Madame Blavatsky was a fake. Five years earlier, a housekeeper with a grudge had ‘exposed’ her employer in a Bombay magazine, asserting that various ‘psychic’ effects were achieved by trickery; not long before, it had been discovered that parts of the famous ‘Mahatma Letters’, supposedly dedicated by a supernatural being called Koot Hoomi, were lifted from the work of an American spiritualist, Henry Kiddle. But, in spite of the scandal, Russell and Yeats became Theosophists. An article on Russell’s ‘primeval language’ had been published in The Theosophist two years before. Now Russell began to practise the Hindu system of meditation, deliberately attempting to arouse the spirit-force, kundalini. He describes how ‘once at the apex of intensest meditation I awoke that fire in myself of which the ancients have written, and it ran like lightning up my spinal cord, and my body rocked with the power of it, and I seemed to myself to be standing in a fountain of flame, and there were fiery pulsations as of wings about my head, and a musical sound not unlike the clashing of cymbals with every pulsation.’14 He suddenly recalled the danger involved in the awakening of this power—that in one who was not completely purified, it could ‘turn downward and vitalise his darker passions and awaken strange frenzies and inextinguishable desires’—and deliberately refrained from attempting to open the ‘third eye’. His friend H. W. Nevinson asserted that he had twice seen Russell deliver a speech when possessed by this power, and could see lights and hear voices; afterwards Russell could no longer remember what he said.15 Eventually, he ceased to attempt to arouse the kundalini power; his natural powers of vision were enough.
Yeats and Russell drew apart after 1890. Yeats had become a member of the Golden Dawn, and Russell distrusted ritual magic. Although he accepted all the basic principles of magic—as his work reveals—Russell remained basically a mystic, absorbed in his vision of the fundamental oneness of the universe and his certainty that individual consciousness is only a tributary of the collective consciousness of humanity.
But the difference between Yeats and Russell was more fundamental than this. Russell’s mystical and religious insights were deeper than anything Yeats ever experienced. Yeats remained hard-headed, consumed by intellectual curiosity, intent upon creating a bridge between the universe of the mystic and the universe of the ordinary man. The result is that Yeats is a great poet while Russell is a minor poet. Russell wrote at least as much poetry as Yeats, much of it delicate and beautiful:
Its edges foamed with amethyst and rose,
Withers once more the old blue flower of day;
There where the ether like a diamond glows
Its petals fade away.
Judged simply as poetry, there is something soft about this. The language is careless; you get the feeling that he never spent more than a few moments over any line. This is true of most of AE’s poetry and, to a lesser extent, of his prose. His two ‘mystical’ books, Candle of Vision and Song and Its Fountains, from which I have quoted so extensively, are certainly among the most important of their kind; but you never cease to be aware that he was influenced by Emerson and Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. There is a certain lack of concreteness that finally becomes cloying. Typically, Russell disliked Yeats’s later poetry with its more down-to-earth flavour and was distressed at Yeats’s later alterations to the early poems.
As a result of his naturally mystical temperament, Russell never realised his potential as a writer—and, possibly, even as a human being. While Yeats was struggling to conquer literary London, Russell was working as a book-keeper at a large Dublin drapery store, Pim’s, and spending his evening with fellow Theosophists and mystics, among whom was an English girl, Violet North, who became his wife. In 1891, he moved into a house in Upper Ely Place, together with a number of other ‘disciples’, and in this semi-monastic community he lived for seven years. Since he was so late in maturing, this existence suited him ideally. He saw many visions involving celestial beings from other levels of reality (he identified them with the Hindu devas or angels) and came to recognise that human beings ‘live like frogs at the bottom of a marsh knowing nothing of that Many-Coloured Earth which is superior to this we know, yet related to it as soul to body’. At the same time, he was deeply involved with the rising Irish literary movement and became convinced that Ireland could become a spiritual centre for modern civilisation. He was as fervent an Irish patriot as Yeats. So when, in 1897, Yeats suggested that he should work for Horace Plunkett, founder of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society, Russell was able to abandon other-worldly mysticism for practical patriotism without any sense of betraying his ideals. In fact, Russell had reached the age—thirty—when he needed contact with the real world. His task was to promote the cooperative movement among backward Irish farmers. It determined his direction for the remainder of his life. For the next eight years he travelled around Ireland, making speeches and organising loans and then, from 1905 until 1914, was the editor of the cooperative movement’s newspaper, The Irish Homestead. The years of ‘the troubles’ were a difficult time for Russell, since he was an ardent pacifist, and he was often plunged into depression. In 1923, after the British had granted independence to Eire, Russell became the editor of The Irish Statesman, a ‘non-political’ newspaper, also financed by Plunkett. In this capacity he became, as Henry Summerfield calls him, ‘the conscience of a nation’, a voice of reason and sanity in a country that is inclined to allow emotion to overrule logic. His books had brought him fame in his own country and a certain amount of celebrity abroad, perhaps because of the association of his name with those of Yeats and Joyce. Yet after his death—from a cancer, in 1935—his work was largely forgotten, and there have been few reprints. The first full-length biography appeared forty years after his death.
Russell’s closest friends and associates would have argued that he was perfectly fulfilled, within his own terms. He was a mystic and a visionary, and he succeeded in living out his life without compromise. Yet when he gave up his semi-monastic existence for the work of spreading the Irish cooperative movement, he was inspired by the example of the Buddha, who renounced Nirvana to bring spiritual enlightment to other men. Russell never believed that his only business in life was to reach mystical self-fulfillment; like the Buddha, he wanted to bring it to others. And in a sense he succeeded; his kindness, his detachment, his idealism, influenced a whole generation of Irishmen who could never have been persuaded to read the Upanishads. His real influence should have been through literature; he was as great a spirit as Shaw or Yeats and deserved to become known to as many people. Yet for all his spiritual insight, for all his brilliance as a talker and his natural talent as a writer, he remains the author of only two small volumes of ‘spiritual autobiography’, one bad novel,16 one volume of assorted essays and reviews,17 and a few volumes of beautiful but essentially minor poetry. And the reason seems to be that he never achieved the kind of self-discipline necessary to make the best use of his talents. He was too close to his subconscious, and its warm security prevented him from making the kind of effort that produces great literature.
This raises a point of crucial importance to the main argument of this book. Security is essential to human existence; it is also one of our worst enemies. To begin with, it slows down the learning process. Everyone who has been in a strange town knows that the easiest way to get to know it is to walk around it alone. If you are driven around by friends who live there, it takes ten times as much effort to get to know the place. A subconscious sense of security causes your attention to go to sleep. When you walk around alone, navigating with the aid of a street map, you notice everything. Your robot is also located in the subconscious, and it is he who goes to sleep when you feel secure.
Security can even destroy life itself. This is interestingly illustrated in the story of an experiment conducted in 1958 by two zoologists, Jay Boyd Best and Irvin Rubinstein.18 Rubinstein and Best were investigating the learning powers of a primitive creature known as the flatworm or planarion worm. Planaria have no stomachs, rectums or digestive systems, and their brains and nervous systems are so primordial as to be almost non-existent. Yet planaria showed a remarkable aptitude for learning, demonstrated by means of a simple experiment. The worms were placed in a Y-shaped plastic tube with water in it. (Planaria, being aquatic creatures, need water to live.) At a certain point, the water was drained away, and the alarmed worms started out in search of more. They soon reached the parting of the ways. One branch of the Y was lighted, the other was dark. The lighted branch led to water, the other didn’t. In no time at all, the worms had learned to choose the fork that led to water.
Then a strange thing happened. The worms began choosing wrongly. After still more trials, they simply lay still and refused to move when the water was drained out, as if they were saying: ‘Oh God, not again!’ They actually preferred to die rather than move.
The scientists considered every possible explanation for this perverse conduct and rejected them all. Finally, one of them made the apparently absurd suggestion: Suppose the worms got bored? This seemed unlikely for creatures with hardly any brains, but it was the only answer left. They devised an experiment to find out. This time they made the task far more difficult. They used two tubes, one with smooth plastic inside, the other with rough plastic, so the worms could feel the difference with their bellies. In one of them the water was down the dark alleyway; in the other, down the lighted one. Starting with a new set of worms, they transferred them from one tube to the other between each trial. This time, only one third of the worms succeeded in mastering the problem and finding the water. But this third never regressed. They never chose the wrong alleyway, or lay down and died. So the problem had been boredom. The first lot of worms had learned too easily.
When we learn to do something ‘automatically’, it is transferred from the conscious to the subconscious mind. And, depending upon how much effort it has cost us to learn, it carries with it a small label which says ‘Important’ or ‘Unimportant’. Whenever we do an ‘Important’ thing, our subconscious robot sends up the appropriate amount of energy. For ‘Unimportant’ things, it sends up a very small amount. So if an ‘Unimportant’ thing goes wrong, or has to be repeated over and over again, we soon run out of energy and patience and become careless or discouraged. As we all know, repetition of some boring task leaves us exhausted and enervated. This is not because we have no energy left; there is plenty in the reservoir of the subconscious. But the robot won’t let us have it. Like planaria, human beings often die of boredom—not because they can’t be bothered to find water, but because they can’t be bothered to take some vital precaution, like remembering to turn off an oil stove before they go to bed. When the planaria had to put twice as much effort into learning, the skill was transferred to the subconscious mind with a ‘Very Important’ label, which ensured that they never became bored by it.
Russell’s writing, like his mystical experience, came to him too easily; consequently he ceased to develop beyond the age of about thirty. When he was dying in London, someone told him that Yeats was also in town; Russell said he didn’t want to meet him, because they had known one another so long they had nothing to say to one another; the sad confession of a man who had long since ceased to make new discoveries. It was Yeats, for whom writing was always a painful effort, who taught himself to use his intellect, who got ‘second wind’, and continued to develop to the end of his life. If Russell had been forced to put as much effort into achieving mystical illumination as the ‘double ambiguity’ planaria put into learning to find water, he could have become the greatest spiritual force of his age.