Seen in retrospect, human life has a curious quality of unreality.
A child would find this idea almost impossible to grasp. To him the world seems, if anything, too solid and real. It strikes him as incredible that adults can handle so much complexity—and even stranger that they can spend so much time immersed in practical affairs without dying of boredom. Every child has an urgent need to retreat into a world of imagination for a few hours every day, through fairy tales or dolls or soldiers, or just television. By comparison, the real world seems singularly uneventful and dreary. He hopes that his own life is going to be exciting and romantic; but it never enters his head that it might seem unreal.
The rest of us grow up, find a job, get married, produce children, struggle to create a home. It all seems interesting and exciting enough at the time. But a point arrives when we realise that our most important years are behind us, and we contemplate the passage of time with a kind of bewilderment. Was that all? No matter how we may have succeeded in our chosen aims and objectives, there is still a sense of anti-climax. It is like arriving at the end of a book much sooner than you expected and wondering if you somehow missed out a hundred pages in the middle.
No animal has this trouble, because animals lack our remarkable capacity for mental experience. If I read a book or see a film that absorbs me, I feel as if the experience has lasted for months; then I look at the clock and realise that it has taken only a few hours. I have a similar feeling if I wake up from a nightmare and find myself in the familiar bedroom. Mental experience happens so much faster than physical experience that the world around us seems to be as permanent as the mountains. And my actual life seems to share this quality of permanence; it moves forward with reassuring slowness.
It is this permanence that provides human beings with their basic sense of security, the security without which it would be impossible to live. People whose sense of security is continually undermined by accidents or difficulties, soon become nervous wrecks and can easily go insane. If I look into myself with honesty, I have to recognise that I seem to live and act upon a basic assumption of permanence, as if I had a certain guaranteed ‘security of tenure’ on this earth. In fact, as Hazlitt pointed out in a well-known essay, the young proceed on the assumption that they are immortal.
Because of its serenely unconscious nature, this sense of security can easily be shaken. I have elsewhere1 cited the experience of the novelist Margaret Lane, who, in a state of extreme sensitivity after having a baby, read John Hersey’s account of the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and went into a state of shock in which she ceased to be capable of any sort of feeling or response. Again, I can recall the description of a woman friend, the wife of a poet, of how she plunged into nervous breakdown; it was shortly after the Second World War, when the Allies had entered concentration camps like Buchenwald and Belsen, and the newspapers were full of photographs of enormous piles of emaciated corpses. She described waking up in the middle of the night, and brooding on them, and suddenly realising that living people like herself were gassed or thrown alive into furnaces. It struck her that the millions of people who had seen those photographs of corpses had failed to grasp their meaning; had erected a kind of mental defence, as if it were all a kind of make-believe. And now she suddenly grasped what it would be like for a mother to stand in the queue in front of a gas chamber, holding her child, and something seemed to collapse inside her; she began to tremble uncontrollably and sob. It was the beginning of a long period of deep depression and total inability to cope with life.
We are now entering the territory of the existentialist philosophers. There is one minor difference in approach. Existentialists like Kierkegaard and Sartre are concerned less with problems of good and evil than with the apparent meaninglessness of human existence. They want to know why we are in the world and what we are supposed to do now we are here. They find human life and experience similar to waking up in a strange place with no memory of one’s identity. This image occurs frequently in existentialist literature. The hero of Tolstoy’s Memoirs of a Madman wakes up in the middle of the night in a distant province with the feeling: What am I doing here? Who am I? Roquentin, the narrator of Sartre’s Nausea, recalls a time in Indo-China, ‘when suddenly I woke from a six-year slumber … What was I doing in Indo-China?’
The existentialists imply that we take our narrow, everyday values for granted, like a man walking along with his eyes fixed on the ground, concerned only with avoiding puddles; then suddenly, he looks up and realises with a shock that he has no idea where he is.
One of the best examples of this kind of ‘change of focus’ occurs in an autobiographical essay by the French ‘common sense’ philosopher Theodore Simon Jouffroy.2
I shall never forget that night in December in which the veil that concealed from me my own incredulity was torn. I hear again my steps in that narrow naked chamber where long after the hour of sleep had come I had the habit of walking up and down. I see again that moon, half-veiled by clouds, which now and again illuminated the frigid window panes. The hours of the night flowed on, and I did not note their passage. Anxiously I followed my thoughts, as from layer to layer they descended towards the foundation of my consciousness, and, scattering one by one all the illusions which until then had screened its windings from my view, made them every moment more clearly visible.
What Jouffroy was doing was questioning the emotional certainties by which he had so far lived:
Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor clings to the fragments of his vessel; vainly, frightened at the unknown void into which I was about to float, I turned with them towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was clear and sacred to me: the inflexible current of my thought was too strong; parents, family, memory, beliefs; it forced me to let go of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more severe as it drew near its term and did not stop until the end was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind nothing was left that stood erect.
That moment was a frightful one; and when towards morning I threw myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so smiling and full, go out like a fire, and another life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must live alone; alone with my fatal thought which had exiled me thither, and which I was tempted to curse. The days which followed this discovery were the saddest of my life.
Jouffroy’s motive in this exercise in ruthless self-analysis was to discover whether the use of the mind, the power of reason, can provide human beings with a solid foundation of certainty. His conclusion, like that of so many other philosophers, was negative. His ‘fatal thought’ led him to conclude that life is a tissue of illusions, and that without self-deception human beings would find it intolerable. Sartre’s nausea is a physical revelation of the same disturbing truth.
But is it a truth? When we look more closely at the nausea experience, we detect an element of fallacy, especially if we compare it, for example, to Bennett’s experience in the forest of Fontainebleau.
As I recalled [Ouspensky’s] words I said to myself: ‘I will be astonished.’ Instantly, I was overwhelmed with amazement, not only at my own state, but at everything I looked at or thought of. Each tree was so uniquely itself that I felt I could walk in the forest forever and never cease from wonderment. Then the thought of ‘fear’ came to me. At once I was shaking with terror … I thought of ‘joy’, and I felt that my heart would burst from rapture.
Bennett was careful to point out that these were not mere ‘feelings’. His heightened state of consciousness enabled him to see what was already there. Consciousness is a beam of light; in this case, the beam had suddenly become far more powerful than usual; consequently, it illuminated more.
By comparison, the state of mind described by Jouffroy, Tolstoy and Sartre is essentially passive. They merely contemplate the world and wait for meaning to reveal itself. This is like sitting in a car and waiting for it to drive itself. Consciousness is basically directional; it must be fired at its target like an arrow or a grappling hook. Meaning does not ‘reveal itself’; it cannot be grasped by staring blankly and formulating questions.
Most of us believe that consciousness is already fully awake and that what we see around us is the world ‘as it is’. In fact, every experience is a kind of engineering feat. It needs to be ‘constructed’. Every act of grasping reality demands a highly complicated response of the senses, which must act in unison. The ‘I’ is like the conductor of an orchestra. Suppose, for example, I am walking in a garden on a sunny day. My eyes see many colours, my nostrils smell various scents, my ears hear the sounds of birds and bees, my skin feels the movement of the air. There is a noisy confusion of sensual impressions, like an orchestra tuning up. If I am feeling tired or depressed, I can concentrate on only one or two impressions at a time; I may actually increase my enjoyment by closing my eyes and excluding visual impressions. On the other hand, on those days when I feel fully alive, overflowing with vitality, the garden somehow becomes real, a complex and harmonious pattern that I can grasp all at once, without effort.
Why do these moments of ‘reality’ occur so seldom? Because passivity is so deeply ingrained, especially in civilised man. As babies, we rest passively in our mothers’ arms. As children, we are made to attend school, where we listen passively to teachers. And the modern educational system means that any person of average intelligence can go on to secondary school, then a university, after which there is always the possibility of a job in some large corporation. The modern world as a whole creates a habit of conformity, of obedience to pressures. We become unaccustomed to the exercise of freedom.
Passivity is also induced by all forms of waiting. If I stand waiting for a bus, something inside my brain ‘switches off’; I enter into a state of suspended animation until the bus arrives. As I sit on the bus, waiting to get to work or to get home, consciousness again ‘switches off’, and I stare blankly at the passing scenery. If the bus is late or delayed in traffic jams, waiting becomes tinged with impatience or anxiety, and all possibility of creative use of consciousness vanishes. I am like a man who is slightly off-balance; the slightest push can send me backwards into a negative and irritable state of mind.
Consciousness doesn’t wake up until I experience some positive drive, some sense of purpose. Yet the pattern of human existence is that we spend ninety per cent of our time in a passive state, wondering what to do next. It is hardly surprising that we habitually waste most of our potentialities.
It may seem that these ‘philosophical’ questions have no place in a volume on the paranormal. Yet the paranormal often leads directly to questions of philosophy. For example, common sense tells us that ‘life is a one-way street’. Yet Lethbridge reached the conclusion that the future has, in some sense, already taken place. There is obviously something wrong with the common-sense view of the nature of time.
Jane O’Neill’s accident near London Airport undermined her sense of security, making her feel that life is continually at the mercy of chance. This might have been expected to lead to depression or a general sense of meaninglessness; instead, it led to strange flashes of second sight and to a ‘time slip’ into the past. This experience throws an entirely new light on the existential problem of nausea. What Jouffroy, Roquentin and Tolstoy’s ‘madman’ have in common is a sudden realisation that life is not what it seems to be. Our senses confine us in a kind of prison; we are like blinkered horses, unable to see beyond the present moment. Most human beings are so preoccupied with their everday concerns that they are unaware of this lack of freedom. But they suddenly awakened to their lack of freedom, and their immediate reaction was like that of a person who awakes to find himself bound hand and foot—they felt a frantic desire to escape. Gurdjieff used the same basic fear to galvanise his pupils when he compared human beings to a flock of sheep who have been hypnotised by a magician to keep them quiet until they are ready for the slaughter house.
Experiences like Jane O’Neill’s point to a less frightening possibility. When her blinkers are removed she is confronted by a profusion of bewildering and useless ‘paranormal’ experience. What good did it do her to know what Fotheringhay church looked like four or five hundred years ago? From the point of view of her everyday life and her personal development, it was a totally useless piece of information. Which seems to suggest that the purpose of the blinkers may not be to keep us quiet until the butcher arrives but to provide the basic condition for self-control and self-development.
Bennett’s experience at Fontainebleau supports this view. He says: ‘I wanted to be free from this power to feel whatever I chose, and instantly it left me.’ This sounds paradoxical. If he had achieved a higher degree of freedom than most human beings glimpse in a lifetime, why should he want to get rid of it? He explains: ‘I felt that if I plunged any more deeply into the mystery of love, I would cease to exist.’ He felt that the experience was undermining the foundations of his personality. And the personality is the basis of our control over our experience; weak personalities find life overwhelming. Ramakrishna once compared the personality to the peel of an orange, which prevents the juice from evaporating. It may be ‘false’, but it is indispensable. Bennett recognised instinctively that he was not yet ready for this degree of freedom; he had not reached it through a genuine process of personal evolution. He had to return to an earlier stage to continue the slow process of internal development. He still needed the ‘skin’.
An experience like Bennett’s leaves no doubt that the blinkers are not protecting us from a vision of meaninglessness, but from too much meaning. Gurdjieff went to the heart of the problem when he said: ‘Life is real only when “I am”.’ Our total being is far larger than we can grasp with our daylight-consciousness. The problem is to expand into the darkened areas.
The real importance of these insights is that they establish evolution—mental evolution—as a basic law of the universe. Scientists continue to insist that evolution is a purely mechanical process, driven ‘from below’ by the need to survive. Experiences like Bennett’s suggest that our mental evolution is drawn upward, from above. It is as if a higher level of consciousness was trying to persuade us to bring it into actuality. All of which suggests that mind is not an accidental product of the material world, a mere spectator of a process it did nothing to inaugurate. In a deeper sense, the material world is its plaything, its instrument. Nature’s meanings remain incomplete without the activity of mind, as the nausea experience demonstrates. And this again points to the conclusion that the ecstasies of the romantics and mystics were a glimpse of the possibility of the true relation between mind and nature.
How far does all this help us towards answering the fundamental question: Who are we? What are we doing here?
Bennett’s experience at Fontainebleau has something in common with the experience of all mystics in all ages; it was a glimpse of some ultimate reality. The glimpse convinces the mystic that his normal feeling of limitation is false. Man is like a gramophone record that has got stuck in a groove, so it repeats the same phrase over and over again, instead of going on to play the whole symphony. Or, differently put, man is a god who has forgotten his identity.
Again, there is remarkable unanimity in the solutions proposed by various religions. Man is in a fallen state. Some religions, like Gnosticism and Christianity, attribute the fall to sin. Others, like Hinduism, prefer what might be called the ‘Game theory’—the notion that God descended voluntarily into matter as a kind of game.
Science, of course, rejects the whole notion of a ‘fall’. It insists that man is merely the result of two hundred million years of evolution. But this raises questions even for scientists themselves. If man has developed purely through ‘survival of the fittest’, then his intelligence ought to be strictly proportional to the challenges he has so far had to overcome. But this is not so. His brain has a complexity out of all proportion to the problems of survival. Calculation, for example, is a fairly recent art, in the evolutionary sense; our ancestors of a few thousand years ago could not count beyond the number of their fingers and toes. Yet certain children—known as calculating prodigies—are able to work out sums involving enormous numbers inside their heads in a matter of seconds.
One five-year-old boy, Benjamin Blyth, out walking with his father one morning, asked at precisely what hour he had been born. A few minutes later he announced the exact number of seconds he had been alive, taking into account two extra days for Leap Years. The Canadian ‘lightning calculator’ boy, Zerah Colburn, was asked whether the sixth number of a Fermat series was a prime (not divisible by any other number). The number was over four thousand million. After a brief calculation, Colburn replied, ‘No, it can be divided by 641.’ Yet there is no known method of finding out whether a number is a prime except by painstakingly dividing every possible smaller number into it. Ten-year-old Vito Mangiamele, son of a Sicilian peasant, was asked to calculate the tenth root of 282,475,249 (i.e., a number that, multiplied by itself ten times, gives the above figures). It took him only a few moments to give the correct answer: seven.
Calculating prodigies tend to lose their powers as they grow up, but in a few rare cases they actually increase them. The electrical genius Nikolai Tesla had such an incredible capacity for visualisation that he never had to write mathematical problems down on paper; he merely closed his eyes and wrote them down on a blackboard inside his head. This power also extended to physical objects; he had only to close his eyes to be able to conjure up a solid object and to maintain the image for any length of time. One day he decided to create new thought-forms. He wrote: ‘I saw new scenes. These were at first blurred and indistinct and would flit away when I tried to concentrate my attention on them. They gained strength and distinctness and finally assumed the concreteness of real things … Every night, and sometimes during the day … I would start on my journeys, see new places, cities and countries…’ In Budapest park, walking with a companion, he suddenly had a clear vision of how to construct an alternating-current motor. (At that time, the only form of electricity known was direct current.) He actually saw, as if with his eyes, every detail of the motor. He made no attempt to set this down on paper for another six years, when he simply transformed his mental blueprint into actuality, creating the first alternating-current generator.
A hard-line evolutionist could argue that nature has created the brain on the principle of a computer and that, like any computer, its capacities exceed the demands usually made upon it. But Tesla’s power to focus a mental object was a form of Faculty X; there is no obvious ‘demand’ for it in nature. It makes more sense to think of Tesla as a freakish breakthrough to unknown areas of the human mind, a kind of short-circuit to a higher level that, paradoxically, already exists.
All animals show this same curious tendency to a higher level of intelligence than is strictly necessary according to Darwinian principles. The naturalist Birute Galdikas-Brindamour, for example, discovered this in her study of orang-outans. Even the shark possesses ‘unnecessary’ intelligence. For 300 million years, it has remained unchanged, with senses that guide it automatically to its food. With no choices to make, and no natural predators, it has no need of intelligence. Yet when tested in laboratory mazes, it proves to have an intelligence equal to that of a rabbit, a creature far higher on the evolutionary scale, and with far more need for intelligence. It would seem as though nature has a simple bias in favour of intelligence—or rather, as if intelligence itself experienced some compulsion to develop beyond the demands of nature.
This seems to suggest that there is something unsatisfactory about the Darwinian theory of evolution. It might be compared to the theory, generally accepted in the nineteenth century, that the pyramids were built by slaves who were forced to work by overseers with whips. But when this theory was examined more closely, a number of questions arose. Why did the overseers drive the slaves? Because they were ordered to by their masters, the pharaohs. Why did the pharaohs want pyramids? To serve them as tombs or monuments. So thousands of people were forced to work to serve the vanity of a few individuals.
But in the 1960s, a German physicist, Kurt Mendelssohn, became intrigued by the mystery of the strangely shaped pyramid of Meidun, in which a giant, step-like structure rises from a heap of debris. He reached the conclusion that, about 3000 BC, there had been an immense disaster during the final stages of building, a collapse that may have cost thousands of lives. The pyramid was abandoned. But the lesson of the disaster was, Mendelssohn believes, taken into account in the building of the ‘Bent Pyramid’ at Dahshur, where the angle of the sides suddenly becomes less steep halfway up, to lessen the danger of a similar collapse. This, and other evidence, suggests that the two pyramids were being built at the same time; in fact, it has been suggested that the king who was responsible—Snofru—had three pyramids under construction at the same time. Obviously he could not be buried in all three. Mendelssohn therefore advances the highly reasonable theory that the real purpose of the pyramids was to unite many tribes and villages into a nation state by giving them a common task.3
If he could be proved correct, it would mean that while the pharaohs may have been autocratic, they were not necessarily vain or cruel. And instead of a ‘Darwinian’ society based on ruthless compulsion, we would have something closer to the modern idea of a benevolent despotism, whose basic approach could be described as idealistic.
Is there a similar alternative to the Darwinian theory of evolution? We have already seen what happened when Driesch and Lysenko tried to revive Lamarck’s theory about the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Since then, many scientists have expressed their misgivings about the claims of strict neo-Darwinism. In 1968, a group of them met at Alpbach, in the Austrian Tyrol, to voice their dissatisfaction with ‘the totalitarian claims of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy’ (Arthur Koestler’s phrase). Yet none of them attempted to formulate an alternative theory. Only Koestler himself, who, after all, has no scientific reputation to lose, continued to attack the notion that the inheritance of acquired characteristics has been disproved. In The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971), Koestler defended the reputation of the Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer, who committed suicide in 1926 after being accused of faking certain crucial results. Kammerer had claimed that male toads, raised entirely in water so they had no chance of copulating on land, developed on their thumbs the same kind of horny pads possessed by ordinary frogs to hold on to their mates in the water, and that they passed these on to the next generation. One of Kammerer’s critics discovered that the pads of one specimen were injections of Indian ink beneath the skin. The scandal destroyed Kammerer’s reputation and also the last vestiges of support for Lamarckian vitalism in Vienna. Koestler points out that even though these specimens were undoubtedly tampered with (probably by an over-enthusiastic assistant), there is also plenty of evidence that other specimens were genuine, and that the horny pads really existed.
A less direct approach to the problem has been adopted by the psychologist Stan Gooch, whose views on ‘the Neanderthal question’ have been discussed in an earlier chapter.4 In Total Man (1972), Gooch argued that man is a dual being, consisting of the rational Ego, and a darker, more instinctive being that he calls the Self. The Ego, which most of us think of as ‘the real me’, is the daylight consciousness of the ‘cerebrum’, the new brain, which has evolved at an explosive speed over the past half million years. The Self inhabits the ‘old brain’ which man inherited from the mammals, the cerebellum. (In fact, man also possesses a third brain—the brain stem and medulla—inherited from our reptile ancestors, but this seems to be mainly concerned with reflex actions and with controlling our sleep mechanisms.) Gooch believes that all the legends of dark, sinister creatures—the devil, vampires, dwarves, troglodytes, doppelgängers—come from the depths of the cerebellum, which is the seat of the unconscious. When we experience hypnogogic visions on the edge of sleep, these have come from the cerebellum. When we have a strange feeling that a thought has been thrust into our minds, as if someone whispered it aloud, this is the doing of the cerebellum. When Carl Jung made his ‘descent into the Unconscious’ and conversed with dream creatures, it was the Ego conversing with the Self.
To see how this notion helps us to understand evolution, we have merely to cast our minds back to the violent inner conflicts of adolescence. There is the clash between thought and feeling, the drive of instinct—particularly sexual instinct—and the social need for self-control. All this adds up to a continual and painful inner battle between what Fulke Greville called ‘passion and reason, self-division’s cause’. A youth meets a pretty girl, and his rational part wants to talk to her, to establish a contact of ideas and sympathies; behind this façade, a cave man clamours for him to tear off her clothes. The stronger the two antagonists, the more likely he is to be reduced to a nervous wreck. On the other hand, if he has the strength to stand firm and to reconcile the two antagonists, he will learn something of the secret of creativeness; he may become a Beethoven or Dostoevsky or Nietzsche. The conflict presents him with the possibility of evolution.
Regrettably, it also presents him with the possibility of various kinds of surrender, or various kinds of short-cuts. Robert Irwin is an example;5 the attempt to emasculate himself amounted to an effort to subdue the ‘lower self’ by violence. When that failed, he went to the opposite extreme and committed a double murder, thus effectively surrendering to the lower self. Arther Koestler has argued6 that the sudden development of the ‘new brain’ constitutes the greatest danger to human survival, since it has led to the outbreaks of mass insanity that have punctuated human history. This is surely true; but it is also true that the very possibility of evolution implies the possibilities of evolutionary failures like Robert Irwin—or Adolf Hitler. Without the conflict, we would be a stagnant species, like the shark or the skylark.
The incredibly fast evolution of the new brain raises another question. Why has it developed so fast when there was no biological need for it? It is the problem of the calculating prodigies all over again. Cro-Magnon man possessed a brain that is, in all essentials, the equal of Einstein’s; yet he used it only for hunting. Koestler illustrates the point with an amusing parable of an Arab shopkeeper who is poor at arithmetic and prays to Allah to send him an abacus—a simple counting frame. The prayer somehow goes to the wrong department, and he finds himself presented with a modern computer with thousands of knobs and dials. Baffled by its complexity, he gives it a kick, and a dial lights up with a figure 1. He kicks it twice, and the figure changes to two. So he uses his giant computer as an abacus, administering kicks instead of sliding beads.
Which again raises the question: how did we develop the computer? It is possible to see how man has gradually learnt to use it, through the conflict between the old and new brain. But where did it come from in the first place?
In his second book, Personality and Evolution (1973), Stan Gooch has a tentative explanation. As far as he is concerned, the main objection to Darwin is the theory of random mutations. The climate gets colder, and it is the polar bear with the thickest coat who survives and propagates the species. But an ice age can arrive with such catastrophic suddenness that natural selection would not have time to do its work; all the bears would freeze to death. Darwin makes the assumption that mutations occur more or less exactly when required.
Gooch explains this in terms of ethologist Niko Tinbergen’s discovery of certain stimuli which he called ‘releasers’. The sight of a baby releases a mother’s maternal instinct; the sight of a girl undressing releases a man’s sexual instinct; and so on. But Tinbergen discovered that some animals and birds respond to releasers that are not found in nature. The ringed plover responds more strongly to white eggs with black spots than to its normal light brown eggs with darker brown spots. Oyster catchers prefer a clutch of five eggs to their normal three and respond more strongly to an enormous egg than to their own natural-sized one. Grayling butterflies can be deceived by plastic models, but they prefer larger models; they also prefer black to the natural colours. Gooch likens this behaviour to the preferences shown by men for women in girly magazines—exaggerated breasts and hips, black underwear, and so on.
He goes on to suggest that Darwin may be wrong in believing that animals do not evolve a response to a natural challenge until that challenge appears. ‘Super-normal releasers’ suggest a certain inner freedom to develop responses to situations that have not yet arisen. In which case, perhaps they have an inner selection of responses to cope with new situations.
It is not difficult to carry Gooch’s logic one stage further. Among human beings, the ‘bigger and better’ response is usually produced by a combination of frustration and imagination. For example, an imaginative and sexually frustrated male usually develops some sexual abnormality—a preference for enormous breasts, large behinds, pink silk underwear, black leather boots, or whatever. He has learned to trigger the sexual response with a simple ‘releaser’ that can be easily obtained in pornographic bookshops or off clothes lines. We find it easy to understand how imagination combines with frustration to produce this response. But we cannot credit oyster catchers and grayling butterflies with imagination in the ordinary sense. We can suppose only that some impulse inside them strives naturally to a kind of ‘ideal’. And plainly, this ideal will influence evolution, if some bird or butterfly displaying the ‘super-normal releaser’ comes along. Again, we seem to be positing some kind of evolution ‘from above’ rather than from below.
One of the most interesting clues to the development of Gooch’s ideas occurs towards the end of Total Man, when he mentions casually that he himself has experienced the ‘mediumistic trance’, which he seems to associate with the cerebellum. The point is expanded in his book The Paranormal.7 There he tells how, at the age of twenty-six, he attended a seance in Coventry with a friend. Quite suddenly, he felt light-headed. ‘And then suddenly it seemed to me that a great wind was rushing through the room. In my ears was the deafening sound of roaring waters … As I felt myself swept away I became unconscious.’ (The resemblances to Ramakrishna’s experience of samadhi are obvious.) When he regained consciousness, he discovered that several ‘spirits’ had spoken through him. It was, he writes, like being possessed, or as if another being had arisen or materialised within one’s body—a sensation like someone else putting on yourself as he might a suit of clothes.
Gooch’s views on life after death will be discussed in the last chapter. All that need be noted at this point is his conviction that paranormal experience arises from the cerebellum, the seat of the unconscious. But this raises as many questions as it answers. It is easy to believe that the sixth sense of danger arises from the cerebellum; our animal ancestors needed it to survive. The same is probably true of the ability to dowse both for water and for earth forces. Telepathy and the ability to see ghosts also seem to belong to the old brain. But what of experiences of super consciousness like Bennett’s at Fontainebleau? Or glimpses of the future, like the one Alan Vaughan experienced when the spirit of the Nantucket captain’s wife was driven out of his head? At first it is difficult to see how such experiences could be associated with a more primitive part of the brain, until we recollect that the cerebellum is the source of sexual excitement and of orgasm. And that Gooch’s experience of mediumship resembled Ramakrishna’s samadhi. If man’s evolution is the result of a conflict between the old and new brain, resulting in a degree of reconciliation, then is it not conceivable that glimpses of higher consciousness are the result of a momentary integration of the old and new brains? At the moment, our three brains—reptile, mammal and human—are virtually independent systems, each with its own identity.
The psychologist Robert Ornstein has suggested that the left and the right sides of the brain are also separate entities, joined by an intercommunications system. Man seems to be a colony rather than an individual. At the moment, his independent parts are at war as often as not; particularly the old brain and the new. In Steppenwolf, Hermann Hesse symbolised these as a wolf and a human being and wrote a novel about their long-drawn-out conflict. But at certain moments, the man and the wolf seem to be at peace with one another, and that when this happens, Steppenwolf feels akin to the gods. Hesse recognised that the higher states of consciousness come from a new relation between the old antagonists.
This view is supported by research conducted into the brain patterns of creativity by Elmer and Alyce Green of the Menninger Foundation.8 They discovered that hypnogogic images are accompanied by strong theta rhythms, which, if our speculation is correct, suggests that the cerebellum is the source of theta rhythms. Their research into biofeedback also showed that, while relaxation states are accompanied by alpha rhythms, deeper states of reverie produced long trains of theta rhythms. This led them to speculate that states of creativity might be accompanied by theta rhythms, since so many poets and scientists have received sudden bursts of inspiration when they were in states between sleeping and waking. Elmer Green himself developed an ability to slip into a meditative reverie when he had a problem to solve. The EEG machine showed that these states were accompanied by theta rhythms. Whether these would appear in more controlled forms of creativity—such as writing a novel or a symphony—is doubtful, because the ‘inspiration’ has to be monitored by the critical consciousness (which produces beta waves). On the other hand, most creators have observed certain moments when the novel or play or symphony seems to be ‘writing itself’ moments when ideas well up into consciousness with the spontaneity of hypnogogic images; it is a reasonable, though so far untested, supposition that such states are accompanied by theta rhythms.
But, as Grey Walter comments, theta rhythms are also associated with outbursts of rage and with violence; they are often found in pathological criminals. Outbursts of rage are governed—if that is the right word—by the cerebellum. So it seems that the part of the brain associated with creativity and deep meditation is also associated with crime and violence. And if we reflect on a man like Robert Irwin, who was capable of both, we can begin to see the relation between them. Violence arises from the conflict between the old and new brain, or rather, when the Ego fails to control the conflict. Creativity and the godlike moments arise from a close co-operation between the two and can be sustained only by a higher type of control. Again, crime can be seen as a failure to reconcile the old and the new, while higher states of consciousness result from a normally unprecedented degree of collaboration.
This history of science and philosophy shows that few important ideas occur to only one thinker at a time. Gooch’s theory of evolution through inner conflict is no exception. In the mid-1960s, when he was still brooding on the role of the cerebellum in paranormal experience, a Hungarian refugee named Charlotte Bach had begun to consider the problem from a totally different angle.
Charlotte Bach came to England with her husband in 1948, after the Communist takeover; they had both lectured in philosophy at the University of Budapest, where she had taken her degree in philosophy and psychology. In 1965, she experienced a double tragedy when her husband died and her only son was killed in a car crash two weeks later. For nine months she felt numb, unable to think or work. Finally, the need to make a living forced her out of her apathy. Unable to sustain long bouts of concentration, she decided to compile a popular dictionary of psychological terms, which she hoped might open the way to a university appointment.
It was when she came to the definition of various sexual perversions that she began to experience bafflement. Sexual perversion itself seemed to defy definition. Where precisely does one draw the line between ‘normal’ and ‘perverted’ sex? Freud, Kinsey and the rest struck her as curiously abstract and theoretical. She began questioning homosexual acquaintances and discovered that most of them were perfectly willing to talk; in fact, they began to bring friends along. Soon she had compiled a large dossier on male and female homosexuals, sadists, masochists, fetishists and transvestites. And it struck her at an early stage that the usual definitions of these peculiarities are too simplistic. For example, homosexuality is defined as the attraction of like to like—a man to another man, a woman to another woman. But some homosexuals are really females in male bodies, so their attraction to a masculine male should actually qualify as heterosexuality. Similarly, some married couples may be attracted by the ‘likeness’ in the partner—a masculine man to a masculine woman; their heterosexual relationship obviously has a strong homosexual element.
The problem of fetishism has similar complications. The ‘normal’ male fetishist is attracted by some symbol of the female—a kind of distillation of the ideal: female underwear, shoes, hair. It struck Charlotte Bach that some males feel a compulsion to wear excessively male clothes—leather jackets, chains and so on. Conversely, some females go in for ultra-feminine clothes and perfumes. These also struck Charlotte Bach as varieties of fetishism.
She was struck by another observation that had never, apparently, occurred to psychologists. Transvestites seem to be in some way quite different from other kinds of ‘inverts’. She went to interview a transvestite university professor, who asked her if she would mind if he behaved normally. When she said no, he removed his trousers, put on black stockings, high heeled shoes and a wide leather belt, then lit up his pipe and proceeded to talk with as little embarrassment as if he had been wearing old tweeds. He obviously felt no guilt whatever about his ‘perversion’. And she discovered that this seemed to be typical of transvestites.
Light began to break when she came across a paper by Desmond Morris on the behaviour of the zebra finch and the ten-spiked stickle-back. If sexually excited female sticklebacks are placed in a tank without males, one of them may begin to perform the male courting dance and the others to respond in the appropriate female fashion. Odder still, if the male zebra finch is rejected by the female while intent on sex, he may suddenly begin to do the female courting dance.
Plato observes in the Symposium that men and women were originally halves of a single creature, which was divided into two by the gods; now we all wander around searching for the other half. As a man holds a woman in his arms, he experiences a desire to blend with her, and the actual penetration of her body is only a token union. If we assume that sexual attraction is based on a desire of the male to become female, and vice versa, then various perversions suddenly begin to fit into a neatly symmetrical pattern.
Men and women can react to this pull towards the opposite sex in two ways, either by resisting it or affirming it. Charlotte Bach labelled the resisters ‘denialists’, and the affirmers ‘asseverationists’. This means that we have four basic types. But then, a man can be anatomically male while psychologically female, and he can react to this situation in two possible ways. He might want to deny the pull towards becoming the opposite sex (which in this case is male—for he is psychologically a woman, and that is what counts) by dressing up in female clothes or generally behaving in a female manner. He might be a ‘drag queen’, or the femininity might emerge in subtler ways: in being obsessively tidy, a stickler for etiquette, etc. On the other hand, he might decide to affirm the desire to become the opposite sex by dressing up in excessively masculine clothes and behaving with exaggerated aggressiveness, like the leather-jacketed rowdy. Charlotte Bach labelled the drag queen a ‘male negative denialist’ (read: physically male, psychologically the opposite, denying maleness), while the leather-jacketed type is a male negative asseverationist (physically male, psychologically the opposite, asserting maleness.)
It can easily be seen that there arc eight possible types: male and female negative asseverationists and denialists. Obviously the normal male is a male positive denialist, physically and psychologically male, and denying the tendency to become feminine. A normal female is a female positive denialist, physically and psychologically female, denying the pull to become male. The counterpart of the leather-jacket type is the excessively feminine female. She is, of course, basically lesbian (femme, not butch), just as the leather-jacket type is basically homosexual. She is a female negative asseverationist. Oddly enough, the butch lesbian is psychologically female as well as physically, but she asserts the desire to become a member of the opposite sex, dressing in tweeds, wearing riding boots.
And what of her opposite—the man who is also psychologically male, yet affirms the need to become a female? This is the professor who pulled on silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. He, like the butch lesbian, seems to feel no guilt about it; he is relatively placid and stable.
Bach’s classification of human beings into eight types produced a satisfying sense of symmetry and provided a basis for explaining her multifold observations of various ‘perverts’. Clearly, the usual distinction between a ‘normal’ person and a ‘pervert’ is superficial. One variation of the drag-queen type (male negative denialist) looks perfectly normal; the charming Casanova who finds every woman irresistible. If he finally settles down, it may be with his logical opposite (female negative denialist), who may also look perfectly ‘normal’, although slightly masculine or ‘bossy’. Male negative asseverationists—the leather-jacket types—may look ‘normal’, and in fact, be normal as far as they themselves are concerned. Transvestites are ‘normal’, which is why they feel no guilt.
Bach also observed that none of these types is permanent; all tend to change. The femme lesbian may change slowly into a ‘normal’ housewife, or perhaps into the slightly masculine female negative denialist. The leather-jacket type may stop denying his femininity and become a pouf. Only the transvestite and the butch lesbian seem to be too stable to change much. What is equally important is that the various non-normal types may resolve—or at least minimise—their problems by becoming creative; the drag queen may become a poet or a novelist or painter; the leather-jacket may become a scientist or politician. The non-normals are natural pioneers.
At this point, we can see that Charlotte Bach was coming closer to Stan Gooch’s theory of evolution through inner conflict; but for her, the conflict was not between old brain and new, but between various aspects of sexual behaviour, all stemming from that fundamental ‘platonic’ pull, the desire of each sex to become its opposite, or rather, to blend into unity. But at this stage, she was still not thinking in terms of evolution; she was still searching for clues in the world of animal ethology, and she discovered more in the writing of Niko Tinbergen. The concept of ‘displacement activity’ seemed particularly important to her. Two herring gulls, glaring at one another at the boundaries of their two territories, will suddenly begin tearing up the grass. Cocks who look as if they are prepared to tear one another apart suddenly begin to peck furiously at the ground. Two male sticklebacks, after making threatening motions at one another, suddenly dive head downward into the sand and stare at one another while waving their tails. It looks as if they have suddenly thought better of it and somehow have to get rid of the energy of aggression. In human beings, we can see ‘displacement activity’ when impatient drivers honk their horns, or a bored man begins to drum his fingers on the table or whistle tunelessly. A puzzled man scratches his head or his chin. A woman who is unsure of herself may dab at her nose or run her hand over her hair.
Tinbergen recognised that displacement activities sometimes become ‘ritualised’ into what he called ‘social releasers’. When people are unsure of themselves, they smile, and a smile is a social releaser. So is talking about the weather, another response to embarrassment. It struck Charlotte Bach that sexual deviations can also be seen as displacement activities. They certainly have the same illogical quality: a fetishist caressing a crutch, or becoming excited at the sight of a black rubber apron. She preferred to call them ‘spillover activities’, because that implied an actual overflow of excess energy into some apparently irrelevant action. But then, there is something oddly pointless and comic in a man being spanked by a prostitute in a nurse’s uniform. Sexual deviations all seem oddly self-defeating.
Two more sources finally showed her the answer she was looking for. She found in the zoologists the concept of neotony. This means, quite simply, that some species remain half developed: a Peter Pan species. Imagine what would happen, if some strange genetic mutation caused human beings to achieve sexual maturity at the age of two. They would begin to have babies at the age of two and might well die at the age often, worn out by child-rearing. In a few generations, older people might disappear, never to be replaced, and we would become a race of children. This astonishing situation has occurred in the case of certain species—the axolotl lizard, for example, which is really a baby land-salamander that never grows up.
In the 1920s, a Dutch anatomist named Ludwig Bolk proposed the theory that man is also a neotonous species. The embryo of an ape is not unlike a fully developed human being without the brow-ridges, body hair and specialised teeth that the ape goes on to develop. Bolk argued that man is an immature ape. This conclusion is less insulting than it sounds. Neotonous species have far greater possibilities of development than non-neotonous ones. The simplest way to understand this is by borrowing an analogy of Alec Nisbett from his biography of Konrad Lorenz. Nisbett compares the evolutionary characteristics of a species to a vast, rambling home, occupied by a succession of individuals in each generation. Whenever some new need arises, they build on new rooms or add chimneys, until the place becomes a nightmare of passageways and inconvenient rooms. But they can never move out and re-design the whole place; they have to go on living in it, until one day there is no room for further development. Then the species either becomes stagnant—like the shark—or dies out through failure to make further adaptations.
Bolk was not concerned simply with man’s physical resemblance to an immature ape. He also observed what Shaw had noted in Back to Methuselah: that although we are sexually mature while still teenagers, we remain emotionally immature all our lives. The most obvious thing about human beings is that they are permanent adolescents; it is as if they needed a far longer life span to grow to full intellectual and emotional maturity (Shaw suggested three hundred years).
This was one piece of information that started Charlotte Bach thinking along new lines. Another came from a young man who was in the grip of religious obsessions. He told her that he had experienced an orgasm lasting eight hours. Understandably, she dismissed this as fantasy. Then one day, thinking about neotony, and about Mircea Eliade’s observations on shamanism, and the ecstasies of the great religious mystics, she had a dazzling insight. It was so great that she leapt up from her desk and said aloud: ‘That’s what it’s about—evolution!’ She describes it as one of the most exciting moments of her life.
The revelation that came to her was this. All sexual deviations seem to be self-defeating, yet stolidly normal people also strike one as somehow incomplete. There is something oddly immature about sexual deviates … Immaturity. Neotony … Could that be it? The ‘normal’ person has acquired a rather dull kind of equilibrium. In the shaman, who is ‘assexual’, the opposing forces have built up a strength that creates a glowing discharge of nervous energy that can go on for hours. These same opposing forces, on a far lower level—and in people who have not succeeded in balancing them—produce sexual deviation. The transvestite and the butch lesbian have balanced them, but on the lower level, so that they have, in effect, blocked the possibility of further evolution. Evolution springs from imbalance.
An analogy may help. Many major poets and artists have been ‘unbalanced’ and subject to severe inner conflicts. The travel writer Negley Farson once consulted a doctor in an attempt to cure his alcoholism; the doctor told him: ‘I could cure your alcoholism, but I’d probably “cure” your talent for writing at the same time.’ Yet it is not true that in order to be a great artist, you have to be unbalanced. The greatest creators—Rembrandt, Beethoven, Tolstoy—have resolved this purely neurotic type of unbalance, but they still experience inner conflict, on a higher level. Perhaps only the saint and the mystic have come close to a true ‘resolution’ of the inner conflicts; and this resolution produces inner ecstasies. As Nietzsche said, a man must have chaos within him to give birth to a dancing star. The task of the individual is not to try to escape the chaos, as the transvestite does, but to harness its energies, so that it becomes a kind of controlled atomic explosion.
This, in simplified form, is Charlotte Bach’s conception of the mechanism of the evolutionary process. We are an immature species, and we are continually torn by a deep psychological urge to blend with the opposite sex. The frequent frustration of this urge produces the ‘displacement activity’ we call sexual aberration. And sexual aberration, according to Charlotte Bach, is the mother of invention, and therefore of evolution. She makes the curious statement that a foot fetishist invented shoes, a hair fetishist invented hats… Be that as it may, we can see the way that the conflict that has produced sexual aberrations can also, when ordered and controlled, produce human culture. Her immense work, Concerning the Invention and Evolution of Writing, argues that the letters A and B are symbols of the male and female and that all other letters—particularly in Chinese ideogrammatic writing—can be interpreted as symbolic expressions of the basic sexual conflict. She also claims that alchemy is a ‘knowledge system’ that evolved in the same way, and whose inner content has now been largely forgotten. Because of these inner conflicts, man continually changes his behaviour patterns, and this is the basis of the evolutionary process. It is driven not from without but within, although, of course, it is limited by the problems of the external environment.
It is this inner stress, Charlotte Bach believes, which has transformed our instincts into intellect, and which accounts for the extraordinary development of the human brain in the past half million years. The whole notion could be compared to Newton’s theory of gravitation. Newton had to account for certain movements of the heavenly bodies. He did this by assuming one basic powerful force, gravitation. The earth and the planets are attracted towards the sun; yet they do not fall into the sun because there are counter forces; the result of these two opposing forces is their elliptical orbit. In Charlotte Bach’s evolutionary theory, the force of gravity is the basic urge of the male to become female, and vice versa. But since, unlike the planets, we are living beings, the result is not a pattern simply of equilibrium but of evolution.
In the late 1960s, Charlotte Bach began to set down her theories in a book called Homo Mutans, Homo Luminens. Various friends who were interested in her work arranged to have it duplicated. She submitted it to various biologists and zoologists for their opinion but the whole theory was too strange and new to have an immediate appeal. The sheer size of the book was disconcerting—over three thousand pages—and the style was bare and abstract, devoid of the kind of analogies and illustrations that might have made her meaning clearer. (For example, she never gives a concrete illustration of what she means by saying that displacement activites become ritualised into social releasers, although it seems to be one of her basic propositions.) Nevertheless, her ideas slowly gained ground. Now she has acquired a considerable following and become something of a cult figure.
Critics of her theory have objected that she is a kind of disguised Freudian, reducing all human behaviour to sex. This is a misunderstanding. Freud was a reductionist, in the sense that he was capable of explaining art or religion in terms of sexual conflicts or taboos. Charlotte Bach recognises the basic ‘trans-sexual’ conflict in art and religion but never asserts that they can be reduced to these terms. She is like a scientist who points out that stones and trees and human beings are all made of atoms, but who never denies that organic molecules are more complex than inorganic ones. It would be more accurate to call her a sexual mystic, who sees sex as the mysterious force that drives creation. Goethe said that ‘the eternal feminine draws us upward and on’; if he had been a woman, he might have said ‘the eternal masculine draws us upward and on’. Charlotte Bach has simply taken both points of view into account.
From the point of view of existential philosophy, Charlotte Bach’s theory has a great deal more to say than Stan Gooch’s. The basic problem of existentialism is the feeling of the total meaninglessness of human existence. Kierkegaard objected to Hegel’s philosophy of the evolution of spirit because it failed to tell him what he ought to do. But, according to Charlotte Bach, man is an emergent process, whose evolution depends upon the continual exercise of his freedom. The reward is an increased sense of freedom, perhaps even the ecstasy of the mystic or shaman. Like Sartre, she never tires of asserting that man is free; unlike Sartre, she has never contradicted herself by declaring that ‘man is a useless passion’.
By comparison, Stan Gooch’s account of human evolution is altogether more down-to-earth. At a certain point in the evolutionary chain, man’s remote ancestors developed the central nervous system, with its control of consciousness and will and voluntary movement. So far, man had made do with the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary functions like digestion and breathing. The new brain came into existence as the controller of the central nervous system. (The autonomic nervous system is controlled by the old brain.) Sooner or later, random mutation produced a creature with a slightly more developed cerebrum, and with more intelligence. But this early ancestor must have found his intelligence a burden. While his fellows ate and slept and copulated, he found himself possessed of too much self-awareness to live so naturally. But this gave him no natural advantage in hunting or fighting, for these depend on sensitivity to a deep, instinctive response, and intelligence tends to separate us from this contact with the subconscious. He may have lived as a kind of outcast, never discovering a use for his unwelcome gift. Or he may, if he was aggressive and determined, have persuaded his fellows to accept him on his own terms and then have demonstrated to them that it was easier to capture a wild boar through cunning than brute force. We can assume that his intelligence was propagated through his children, and that some of his male and female descendants mated and produced children who were even more intelligent.
Each new increment of intelligence would be a burden to its possessor, raising the same conflict all over again. For men, it might well be a disadvantage, making them less quick in battle, less brave when confronting a charging animal. At every stage of evolution it has been a disadvantage to be slightly more intelligent and analytical than one’s fellows; intelligence makes for change, and men are naturally conservative. If their hostility is to be defused, it must be done by beating them on their own ground, by efficiency and dominance. Which means that the intelligent man has to make twice as much effort as the less intelligent to become a well-adjusted human being. Yet such an effort would be the condition of his evolution.
There may appear to be a basic contradiction between this view of evolution and that of Charlotte Bach, but closer examination proves this to be untrue. Charlotte Bach asserts that the force of evolution operates through a type of sexual conflict, and that when a human being succeeds in resolving this conflict through an effort of will, the result is an increment of intelligence. Stan Gooch’s theory concerns the way that man adjusts to this additional intelligence; it takes over, so to speak, where Charlotte Bach’s leaves off. This does not necessarily imply that they would agree with one another’s theories—only that there is no fundamental contradiction.
Stan Gooch’s notion of man’s three brains provides a basis for explaining the strange phenomenon of multiple personality. It is also worth taking into account Robert Ornstein’s view that the left and right sides of the brain are also separate entities,9 the left hemisphere controlling logical thinking, the right being responsible for what he calls ‘holistic mentation’—recognising faces, painting pictures and so on. In other words, the left analyses, the right synthesises. The two sides remain in close intercommunication, like two friendly countries whose governments keep one another closely informed. But if they broke off diplomatic relations, their total independence would soon become apparent. This is not to suggest that the multiple personalities of Doris or Sybil were situated in different parts of the brain, only that brain physiology gives us additional reason for recognising that we are not ‘individuals’. We are very dividual indeed.
Stan Gooch’s theory has the additional advantage of suggesting the actual location of the seat of paranormal experience—the cerebellum. But what about the ‘superconscious’? Is this also located in the cerebellum? It seems fairly logical to assume that it is the cerebellum that tells the dowser where to locate water. In that case, it is presumably also the cerebellum that told the Abbé Mermet where to locate sunken ships on the other side of the globe, and this sounds more like an attribute of the superconscious than of the subconscious. Or are we merely quibbling about words? Is the cerebellum connected to a part of our being that ‘knows’ all kinds of things that never get into the cerebrum?
When we raise the question of Faculty X, the problem becomes altogether more complex. Faculty X can be connected with the faculty that philosophers call ‘insight’, and with the Buddhist concept of realisation.
What actually happens when we get this flash of ‘insight’? Suppose, for example, I am trying to work out a geometrical problem, and I suddenly ‘see’ the answer? What happens is that I suddenly become aware of relations that had previously escaped me. It is almost like taking off in an aeroplane and seeing the place where you live from above. You see it in a new, wider perspective. We may recall the story Arthur Koestler tells about his own flash of revelation when he was in a Spanish prison during the Civil War, expecting to be shot.10 To pass the time, he tried to recall Euclid’s proof that there is no ‘largest prime number’; as he succeeded, he was suddenly swept into a kind of mystical ecstasy, feeling that he had transcended the world of contingency and was contemplating an absolute truth. Here realisation is connected with a purely abstract insight.
The experience is analogous to that described by the jazz musician Mezz Mezzrow in Really the Blues, where he speaks of opium eating: ‘That fiery little pill was … lighting up a million bulbs in my body that I never knew were there—I didn’t even know there were any sockets for them.’ Realisation seems to be a similar experience, but it takes place in the brain. It is as if a part of the brain that was normally sleeping was suddenly awakened. We have already touched on the problem of ‘sleep’. It is caused by our automatic component, the robot. When I am tired, I begin to economise on energy and perception; but I can still recite the twelve times table, or drive my car, because these functions have been passed on to the robot. However, if I drink a glass of wine in front of a pleasant fire on a winter evening, I may find myself glowing with energy and optimism; things are suddenly seen to exist in their own right. The energy induced by relaxation has allowed the real me to take over. And this is also true of my glimpses of Faculty X.
The concept of the robot can also be used to explain evolution. Evolution is the development of the robot. Our hearts beat automatically. Our hair and nails grow automatically. Our stomachs digest food automatically. These functions have already been automatised by the evolutionary process, so that consciousness is free to deal with other problems. If I had to think about my breathing. I would have no attention to spare for anything else. At a certain point in evolution, living creatures wished to become more mobile. Since movements like walking and swimming depend on muscles that are controlled by the central nervous system, the earliest amphibians had to learn to walk. But they soon learned to make this function automatic, and in due course, the voluntary muscles submitted to the same process of automatisation as the muscles of the heart and stomach. To handle this complexity, the cerebrum had to be enlarged. Man developed the ability to think analytically and then to speak. Speech depended on intellectual memory, and man also proceeded to automatise this function. Each new step in automatisation was also a step forward in freedom. If I had to think about how to type, it would be far more difficult to write this page. As it is, my fingers do the typing for me, leaving my brain free to think about meanings. These are translated into words by my automatic speech functions, and then into letters on paper by my fingers.
For convenience, we can think of automatisation as a servant of will or spirit. (This view was first elaborated by Edouard von Hartmann in Psychology of the Unconscious, a book that has fallen into undeserved neglect in the twentieth century.) The aim is always to give will (and eventually consciousness) more freedom. But at a certain point in the process, something began to go wrong. The problem is that conscious awareness separates us from our instincts. We began to lose the sense of why we were doing all this, and so gave a free hand to the greatest enemy of evolution: laziness. If I am free, then I can choose whether to use my freedom to conquer new ground, or merely to lie in the sun and yawn. If I have lost all sense of urgency, and my conscious mind can perceive no particular purpose, then I am just as likely to choose inactivity. My robot, the perfect valet, now becomes the chief support of my laziness.
This brings us to one of the most controversial parts of the theory. Robotic functions require far less energy than willed functions. And we have all noticed how prolonged laziness causes loss of energy. When laziness becomes habitual, whole areas of consciousness go to sleep, like a limb whose circulation has been cut off by a tourniquet. And this is the state in which man finds himself today. The odd things is that the brain circuits that produce wider consciousness are not waiting to evolve; they are already there, like wings of a country house that have been closed down. The strange implication seems to be that there was a time when we made fuller use of them, and that our capacities have atrophied since those days. In fact, it looks rather as if something like the Fall in Genesis actually occurred.
In short, man’s success in achieving ‘self-automation’ has now become the chief obstacle to his evolution. Gurdjieff once said that if the human race is to be saved, man must develop an organ that would enable him to foresee the precise hour and moment of his own death. That would stir him out of his laziness. Auden was pointing to the same defect when he said: ‘Even war cannot frighten us enough.’
All this, of course, brings us no closer to an answer to the basic problem of why there is existence rather than non-existence. But it does throw a great deal of light on the problem of why human existence has a dream-like quality. The feeling of absurdity or nausea is a sense of being trapped in the present moment, without meaning or direction. And since man is an evolutionary animal, he feels oddly disconnected when he has no sense of purpose.
When consciousness is wide awake, it possesses a strong sense of meaning. If we can grasp this fact, we can see exactly what normal consciousness ought to be like. There is nothing ‘mystical’ about it, no sense of achieving some higher plane of existence. It is essentially ordinary consciousness, operating at its proper efficiency. And when we are in this state, we have a normal and proper sense of the potentialities of life. Wells’s Mr Polly said: ‘If you don’t like your life you can change it’, but most people have no idea of what they’d like to change it to. In wide-awake consciousness we can see all kinds of things we’d like to do; the world seems to be nothing but fascinating possibilities.
All this implies that everday consciousness has something missing from it, so that if fails to work with maximum efficiency, like a car that has a spark plug missing, or a clock with only one hand. And this has happened because man has allowed himself, by imperceptible degrees, to become too dependent on the robot, until low-pressure consciousness has become a part of our human heritage.
Like the Original Sin of Genesis, our low-pressure consciousness can be held responsible for most of our major defects. It produces a kind of nagging hunger for excitement that leads to all kinds of irrational behaviour. This is why gamblers gamble, sex maniacs commit rape, sadists inflict pain and masochists enjoy having it inflicted, and why men become alcoholics and drug addicts. It also explains why we are so prone to outbreaks of criminality and mass destruction. Violence and pain are preferable to boredom and frustration.
Yet the situation is by no means as disastrous as it appears. It is important to bear in mind that man is an immature species; he has not yet committed himself to an evolutionary cul de sac. So before we write the epitaph of the human race, let us examine its problems more closely.
Throughout his history, man has shown the same depressing tendency to escape his boredom through violence and destruction, and there is no reason to believe that the invention of nuclear weapons will improve his record. There is an element of absurdity in seeking out forms of crisis that will catapult him into ‘wide-awake consciousness’; it is like persuading yourself to go out for a walk by setting the house on fire. On the other hand, man has also shown a long-standing tendency to recognise the futility of mere excitement, and to attempt to get to the root of the problem. This tendency is called religion. When religious ascetics wore hair shirts and slept on bare planks, it was because they recognised instinctively that the problem was to de-condition themselves from overreliance on the robot. They were trying to shake the mind awake through pain and discomfort. But even this remedy contains traces of the old ‘original sin’, the reliance on external pressures. Discomfort can shake the mind awake; but a sense of purpose can do it more positively and effectively.
But what purpose? If we reject the various ways of galvanising the mind by indirect means—danger, gambling, love-making—what is left?
We can begin to see an answer if we consider what happens inside us in states of intense excitement or happiness. In addition to the sense of inner freedom, as if some bond that held us had been loosened or lengthened, there is a curious sense of control, an odd feeling as if we have always held the key to our freedom. Great art and literature can induce this strange sense of freedom. Music can actually sweep us away, into a milder version of Ramakrishna’s ‘samadhi’. And we observe the same thing in sexual ecstasy: the same paradoxical insight that we are freer than we realised.
It is as if a muscle in the brain—what might be called a concentrative mechanism—suddenly convulsed, producing a momentary but overwhelming sense of meaning. In sexual ecstasy, we receive the impression that this mechanism is situated somewhere at the front of the brain. The feeling of insight seems to be based on a recognition that the mechanism has an independent existence.
This is a point of central importance. Ordinarily, we vaguely assume that a crisis or emergency makes us concentrate, rather as an electric current can make a frog’s leg contract. In which case, we have no direct control over the ecstasy or excitement. But then, think what happens if I find that I am drifting into a situation fraught with danger or inconvenience. I ‘pull myself together’ and call upon vital reserves, and I do this quite voluntarily. There is nothing to stop me ignoring the danger or allowing myself to become bored and discouraged. I activate my concentrative mechanism to meet the emergency.
And now we come to an even more important insight. The concentrative mechanism is a mechanism, a kind of computer, rather than a mere ‘muscle’. If I contract a muscle and allow it to relax again, there are no after-effects. Sexual ecstasy lasts for only a few moments, therefore we conclude that it is a kind of muscular convulsion that cannot be maintained. And we tend to make the same assumption about all flashes of inner freedom. But anyone who has ever practised the simplest meditation techniques knows that this is untrue. With a little practice, meditation can induce a mood of inner freedom that can last for hours. So can the technique I have called gliding. Ouspensky learned to wander around St Petersburg in an almost continuous state of self-remembering. And Bennett’s intense efforts raised him to a completely new level of inner freedom at Fontainebleau. In both these cases the robot was made to move out of the driving seat—or at least, to relinquish some of his hold on freedom.
Again, Bennett’s account provides an important clue. He speaks of the pain of continuing the Gurdjieff ‘movements’: ‘A deadly lassitude took possession of me, so that every movement became a supreme effort of will … Soon I ceased to be aware of anything but the music and my own weakness … Time lost the quality of before and after. There was no past and no future, only the present agony of making my body move …’ In such a state of exhaustion and discomfort, a man’s movements become almost entirely automatic; the mind tries to withdraw from the suffering body. Yet sheer fatigue, the need to stop the body from collapsing altogether forces the mind to make continual efforts of concentration—sudden momentary convulsions. And, at a certain point, Bennett found that he ‘was filled with the influx of an immense power.’ The computer, the ‘concentrative mechanism’, had finally done its work and released immense supplies of ‘vital reserves’.
The point to note here is that all that was required were sudden convulsions of effort; a number of convulsions continued over a certain time period. But the convulsions seem to have a cumulative effect on the computer until, at a certain point, it releases the vital reserves. It is like an inefficient business firm that needs to receive a dozen letters of complaint before it pays any attention; but when it finally does, it goes to enormous lengths to satisfy the customer.
This analogy also makes clear why the muscle comparison is unsatisfactory. A muscle can be strengthened if it is used enough; but this may take days or weeks. On the other hand, anyone who spends five minutes making sudden convulsive efforts of concentration—as if responding to extreme danger—and relaxing between each one, will discover that it is not difficult to induce flashes of freedom.
To recognise that we can induce states of heightened awareness through a fairly simple technique is to understand what Charlotte Bach meant when she said that human freedom is continuous, from moment to moment. It also enables us to see clearly how man differs from most other animals on this planet. Animal behaviour is almost entirely ‘programmed’. This means, for example, that if two dogs are fighting, and one of them wishes to surrender, it only has to roll over and show its belly; no matter how angry the other dog might feel, it will stop fighting. Man is, by comparison, a de-programmed species; if the enemy raises his arms in a gesture of surrender, there is nothing to stop the winner from battering him to death. In a world with sophisticated weapons of war, this obviously has serious consequences for human survival. But the de-programming also means that man has far greater control over his inner freedom than any animal. And this freedom depends on intelligence—that is, on insight and knowledge. The technique of inducing inner freedom by reinforced efforts of concentration will not work for a very stupid person, because he has no clear idea of what he is trying to achieve. The more we can achieve insight into what we are trying to do, the easier it becomes.
This recognition has an interesting corollary. When we are in our usual semi-automatic state, we tend to be preoccupied with fairly trivial concerns—our immediate aims. In states of inner freedom, we become aware of wider horizons of values; matters that had previously caused us anxiety or tension now seem absurdly unimportant. But the process can be made to work the other way. We can achieve a degree of inner freedom by deliberately contemplating our wider values, the things we love and care about most. (These wider values can even be purely impersonal: philosophy, history, mountains; they work just as effectively.)
Moods of inner freedom can also induce a release from our normal physical limitations. William James noted that ‘women excel men in their power of keeping up sustained moral excitement’, and by way of evidence points to mothers who have gone without sleep for days while nursing sick children. He also cites the case of Colonel Baird-Smith, who sustained himself throughout the six-week siege of Delhi in 1857 almost entirely on brandy, yet never felt even slightly drunk; again, the sense of wider values—the town was full of women and children who would be massacred in the event of a surrender—released a capacity for endless physical effort, in spite of the pain of various wounds, sores and ulcers. The same principles can be seen in operation in Zen in the art of archery, as described by Herrigel; the archer achieves an incredible degree of accuracy simply by striving for inner freedom; the powers of the ‘real self’ are far greater than those of the robot. And to speak of Zen brings us to the dividing line between the physical and spiritual, and points to the interesting notion familiar to Hindu ascetics, that an increase in inner freedom involves a natural increase in psychic powers.
The robot is essential to all life, yet it is also a jailer. A man who has nothing to do but sit in an armchair all day or weed the garden is apparently free by all normal definitions; yet if his consciousness is largely controlled by the robot, then he is really tied hand and foot.
Darwin believed that life is basically a struggle for survival; and on the purely physical level, he is obviously right. But it is also a struggle for inner freedom. All creatures seek out stimuli that will excite them; that is why lambs gambol and kittens chase balls of wool and puppies indulge in mock battles. When a species—or an individual—has solved the immediate problems of survival, it faces the next and far more difficult problem: of preventing the robot from robbing it of its freedom. When monkeys are taken out of the wild and placed in a zoo, their sexual activity increases dramatically; it becomes a way of defeating the robot. This also explains why man’s sexual activity continues all the year round, instead of being a periodic urge, as in most animals; he uses sex as a source of excitement, to make him feel more alive. He has utilised aggression in the same way. The conquests of Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, cannot be explained in terms of any biological or territorial urge; they were absurd expressions of the urge to inner freedom—absurd because they were found to fail. The excitement of physical conquest causes a temporary increase in freedom, but it is like stretching a piece of elastic, which snaps back as soon as the end is released. When the Persians first swept on to the world scene, they were hardy nomads who could fight like demons and who quickly subdued the world from India to Egypt; yet within a generation or two, success had made them effete and lazy. When Alexander conquered the Persians, his empire was so vast that it took him five years to wander around it; when he returned home, he could think of nothing to do but set out to conquer Africa.
It may have been man’s obsessive interest in sex that led to the first major step in his inner evolution. Creatures whose main problem is survival seek only one quality in a mate: strength, the ability to be a good provider and protector. But when species has achieved a degree of leisure, other qualities become desirable: grace, elegance, charm, intelligence. Men may be chiefly interested in a girl’s sexual allure, but they rate intelligence among the desirable sexual qualities. (Even in the Arabian Nights, where women seem to be regarded chiefly as objects of male pleasure, it is the intelligence of Scheherezade that places her above the others.) So man began breeding for intelligence. And intelligence began to reveal the correct solution to the problem of the robot. War only ‘tightens the sinews’ for as long as it happens to last. Man possesses a strange ally capable of tightening the sinews while he sits in a chair. It is called imagination. And it is basically a form of inner purpose. Philosophers and artists and saints have discovered that their methods—involving imagination and disciplines of the mind—are more effective than those of the conquerors. They can produce a strange sense of widening horizons, of inner breathing-space.
In some men, this need for inner breathing-space has become so urgent that it takes precedence over all their other needs; it leads them to perform apparently masochistic acts of self-discipline. These men, whom I have labelled ‘Outsiders’, are driven by an obscure craving for wider horizons, for deeper knowledge, for greater control of their freedom. They feel an instinctive loathing of the people who are absorbed in the trivial values of everday life, and are impatient of the stupid, whose inner freedom is almost non-existent.
For the past two or three millennia, the history of civilisation could be written almost entirely in terms of these men whose major concern has been inner freedom: Socrates, Pythagoras, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Aquinas, Dante, Leonardo, Spinoza, Goethe, Nietzsche … Scientists should also be included, for, as Einstein pointed out, ‘one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is to escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires … This may be compared with the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains.’
The past two centuries have seen an interesting development: the widespread reappearance of the Outsider as a social (and literary) phenomenon. Cultural historians have pointed out that this is a sign of a disintegrating society. But the phenomenon may be viewed less pessimistically. If we think again of that early human ancestor who felt out of place because he was more intelligent than his fellows, we can see that his solution of the problem depended entirely on his own effort. If others regarded him as an awkward misfit, he would probably not survive. If he was to be accepted as an equal, he had to prove that he could hunt and fight as well as the others. So a combination of intelligence and toughness came to be favoured by natural selection. Then came a point in the history of the human race when the Outsider found an easier way of adjusting. Man had discovered religion, and religion requires priests and shamans. The Outsider became a member of the priestly caste and made a virtue out of being a misfit. Religion offered him a natural haven, and allowed him to side-step the need for inner conflict.
The past few centuries have seen the steady decline of religion, so that the Church has ceased to be the natural refuge of the Outsiders. They have been forced to stand on their own feet and try to solve their own problems. Consequently, the casualty rate has been high. But from the evolutionary point of view, this can be only an advantage. And if the inner conflict theory of evolution is correct, man is now in a better position than he has been for the past two thousand years.