THE EVOLUTION OF MAN
If the history of magic is to be understood, we must begin with a discussion of evolution. For if David Foster is right, the evolution of life is not an accident; it has been shaped and guided by forces that possess intelligence and purpose. Magic also assumes the existence of such forces. On the other hand, science insists that the universe can be explained entirely in mechanical terms. If we can show this to be untrue, then we have provided the case for magic with the most solid kind of foundation.
In 1794, Goethe attended a meeting of the Natural Science Society, and there met a man whose works he disliked intensely – the poet Schiller. But as they left the building together, Schiller made a remark that caused Goethe to regard him more sympathetically; he said that he wished that scientists would not make everything so fragmentary and disconnected, because it made them hard to follow. Goethe agreed enthusiastically. ‘There is another way of apprehending nature, active and living, struggling from the whole into parts’, and he proceeded to expound his view of nature as ‘God’s living garment’. He ended by explaining his theory that all plants had developed from one original plant. Schiller shook his head. ‘That’s not an empirical experience. It’s just an idea.’
In a sense, Schiller was right; Goethe’s Urpflanze was just an idea. But what Goethe was protesting about was not the method of science, but its preconceptions, with the scientist as a glorified ‘accident investigator’. An analogy will make my point clear. The psychologist J. B. Watson believed that all human activities, from sexual intercourse to writing symphonies, can be explained in mechanical terms. Imagine a criminologist investigating a murder case from the Watsonian point of view. A man has insured his wife for a large sum of money, then poisoned her. The psychologist is not in any way concerned with the rights and wrongs of the case, or even with the man’s sanity – for to speak of sanity or insanity implies freedom of choice. The criminologist investigates it as he would investigate any other accident: let us say, a bridge that has collapsed during a storm. It is purely a matter of various pressures. In court, the prosecutor asks him: ‘But don’t you believe that the defendant might have chosen not to murder her?’ The criminologist shakes his head. ‘There is no such thing as choice. Can a bridge choose not to fall down when the wind pressure is too great for it?’ ‘But don’t you see that throughout his teens, this man deliberately chose the path of least resistance, until his character became completely corrupt?’ ‘What you have just said is meaningless. You may as well say that water is corrupt for choosing to flow downhill.’
The prosecutor sees the man’s life as a series of choices – bad choices in which he has never thought of anything but his own immediate pleasure or gain. It seems clear to him that with a different series of choices, and perhaps a certain amount of help, the man might have become a decent citizen. In other words, the prosecutor sees the man’s life as a series of possibilities, any one of which might have been realised. The Watsonian psychologist does not even think in terms of possibilities, any more than he wonders why a mountain is not a valley. To him, the ‘fact’ of the crime, the ‘fact’ of the criminal, are the realities, and he studies these as a geologist might study a mountain.
Such an attitude may call itself the ‘scientific method’, but it is obviously not the real thing; it is too dogmatic. Poets such as Blake and Goethe have always objected to this narrow view of science, pointing out that the human mind doesn’t work like that. It works by a series of intuitive leaps, not by this negative, cautious plodding. It is possible to stick too close to ‘facts’. If I examine a painting through a microscope I shall learn about the texture of the paint, but nothing about the artist’s intention in painting the picture. And I cannot learn about this intention while I stick to the microscope; I must stand back and see it as a whole before I can understand it.
In 1931, H. G. Wells produced (in collaboration with Julian Huxley) a book called The Science of Life, which can be taken as a typical example of this kind of ‘science’. And since it offers a sketch of the evolution of life on earth, it provides a clear-cut contrast to the approach on which this book is based.
Wells is very positive that there is no mystical ‘life urge’, and no purpose behind evolution. Life is a chemical process that somehow originated in the warm seas of the Pre-Cambrian era. It differs from other chemical processes in being somehow self-propagating. It is hard to imagine a chemical process managing to keep itself going indefinitely, although we can imagine, let us say, a snowball getting bigger as it rolls downhill. But when it reaches the bottom of the hill, it stops. A forest fire will spread until it reaches the end of the trees, then it stops. Wells is asking us to accept that life is a kind of forest fire that goes on indefinitely, or a snowball that can roll up hills as well as down.
From this accidental beginning, evolution continues by accident. The horse’s speed, Wells points out, is a response to the increasing speed of its devourers. (And conversely, no doubt, the devourers had to increase their speed to catch up with the horse.) The fast horses survived and bred more of their kind; the slow ones died out. And this is the way that evolution has progressed for half a billion years. The method is wasteful but infallible. It depends only on physical laws, not on the will of the individual. Of course, a horse may learn to run faster because it wants to escape jackals, but it cannot pass on its speed to its children; at least, not genetically.
Now, this process of accident may strike the nonscientific reader as unnecessary. My own experience teaches me that life is a purposive process. When I first try to roller-skate or play a trumpet, it seems impossible that I can ever control such a difficult process; it is all I can do to maintain my balance, or get a single squeaky note out of the trumpet. What then happens is that I concentrate; I increase my mental pressure, just as I might tighten my grip on a revolver I am about to fire. And slowly I become master of the difficult process. If I make no effort at all, blowing aimlessly into the trumpet and hoping for the best, I shall never learn to play it, or it may take years instead of weeks.
As soon as I have observed the enormous difference between purposeful concentration and aimless drifting, I find it hard to believe that life has reached its present stage by drifting. Eddington said that if a tribe of monkeys pounded aimlessly on typewriters for thousands of years, they would eventually write every book in the British Museum; but we may find that equally hard to believe. It seems obvious that a monkey would not produce an intelligible sentence – by accident – in a year of strumming on a typewriter, and there is therefore no reason to suppose it would produce half a billion intelligible sentences in half a billion years. And we may also find it hard to believe that life has evolved from the amoeba to Beethoven in half a billion years of ‘accidental selection’.
Wells’s type of argument depends upon a kind of dogmatising scepticism, a pose of refusing to believe anything that cannot be tested and verified. But what he chooses to believe seems oddly arbitrary. He states flatly: ‘The molten earth, after throwing off the moon, cooled down gradually …’ Recent examination of moon rock seems to indicate that the moon came from elsewhere. Wells is not to be blamed for not knowing this, but he is to be blamed for the dogmatic tone in which he declares the moon broke off from the earth. Why is he so dogmatic? Because it would be ‘fanciful’ to assume that the moon came from outer space; it is ‘more likely’ that it was thrown off by the earth. This makes it a fact. We are all hard-headed scientists here, and there’s no mystical nonsense about us ...
But a likelihood is not the same thing as a fact, and an argument that proceeds by a series of hard-headed likelihoods may be as wrong as the wildest guesswork. Moreover, it may miss the whole point, as the microscope misses the point of a painting. Wells admits that he has no idea of where life came from, but it is ‘most likely’ that it is a chemical process that started in the sea. And since he knows no more about the origins of life than anyone else, it follows that he does not know whether there is a ‘mystical life-urge’ or whether evolution is purposive. But in the name of hard-headed scepticism, these also become ‘facts’. He knows that individuals and races can be highly purposive, but he is not willing to allow purpose to play any part in evolution because our vital characteristics are determined by the genes, and the genes are determined by random shuffling, like a pack of cards. But it seems odd that if my hand and my brain can both be made to obey my sense of purpose, that another part of my body, the genes, should be totally beyond my control. In fact, how can I be certain that the genes cannot be affected by the vital forces of my will?
Wells would reply: We have no evidence that they can be, and evolution can be explained purely in terms of natural selection. That, again, makes it a ‘fact’.
And so, starting from the ‘chemical’ picture of life as some sort of self-renewing process, we build up a logical and scientific view of history that explains religion and magic in terms of superstition. The end result is man as we know him today, trapped in his technological civilisation, a victim of forces greater than himself, doing his best to avoid an atomic war. Wells, it is true, took an optimistic view of human evolution; but he called his final postscript to his Short History of the World ‘Mind at the end of its tether’.
The picture remains depressing only so long as we accept that the ‘scientific method’ that Wells admired so much is really as reasonable and honest as it looks. It is determined to do without ‘teleology’, the notion of purpose.
Why is science so opposed to purpose? Because it has suffered so much from it in the past. The savage who believes that the eclipse of the moon is a sign of God’s anger is actively blocking the progress of science, for he has closed the question. The Churchmen who burned Giordano Bruno and made Galileo recant were blocking the progress of science. Science has reason to be wary of teleology. But while admitting that a non-purposive science may discover many valuable truths, we may still point out that there is no sound scientific reason for actually outlawing the idea of purpose.
Let us consider an alternative to Wells’s account of evolution. We may agree that it is just conceivable that life is some sort of ‘chemical’ process that started in warm seas. But when I think about a chemical process (for example, if I drop a piece of iron into hydrochloric acid, and watch it fizz and dissolve), it seems somehow quite different from a vital process (for example, the way cheese ripens through bacteria in the air). I cannot help thinking of life as a principle of organisation inside the purely chemical process that is involved when cheese becomes maggots. In fact, I know that the maggots develop from bacteria in the air; if the cheese is kept in a sterile vacuum, it will remain sterile. It is difficult for me not to think of life as a process that comes from outside the chemicals involved, and which imposes its own organisation on them.
There is, as I have already said, an immense difference between an accidental process and a process upon which I concentrate my sense of purpose. There is even an immense difference between doing something absent-mindedly and really concentrating on it. Life is inseparable from the idea of purpose. It is true that I can easily think of a living creature without much purpose – a cow chewing the cud, Oblomov yawning on his stove – but this is because they are enjoying a breathing space from purpose; earlier effort has paid for their relaxation in advance. The simplest living organisms have to fight continually for existence.
Life increased in the warm seas, and developed its own kind of purpose – instinctive purpose – and its own kind of senses. And as the tiny organisms developed into fishes, birds, mammals and insects, they also developed their most important instinct: the community sense. And it is arguable that this community instinct, like the homing instinct and the premonition of danger, was telepathic.
In African Genesis, Robert Ardrey mentions an example that seems to me a conclusive argument against total, uncompromising Darwinism: the flattid bug. He was standing with the anthropologist L. B. S. Leakey, looking at a coral-coloured blossom like lilac. Leakey touched the twig, and the flower dissolved into a swarm of tiny insects. A few minutes later the insects re-settled on the twig, crawled over one another’s backs, and once again became a coral-coloured blossom, a flower which does not exist in nature. Some of the insects were green; some were half green and half pink; others were deep coral; they arranged themselves so as to look like a flower with a green tip.
Now Darwinian selection can explain most examples of ‘imitation’ in nature; for example, the stick bug, which even has thorns on its back. Random mutation produces a creature that looks rather like a twig, and it survives better than its brothers who look more appetising. And as birds continue to eat the non-imitative bugs, nature ‘polishes up’ the resemblance. But how can that principle be applied to a whole community? ‘Natural selection’ works in terms of individuals; we cannot imagine a whole community created by some mass accident of the genes, and then learning, accidentally, to imitate a flower. But if we assume that the flattid-bug community is, in a sense, a single individual, a single mind, the problem becomes less complicated.
And if we make this assumption, then we must also drop the idea that the genes cannot be influenced by telepathy. The alternative is to imagine thousands of flattid-bug communities teaching themselves to imitate flowers, but being wiped out in the next generation as their children fail to inherit their colouring, until one day nature kindly takes a hand and allows the trick to become inheritable.
Darwin himself was not entirely convinced that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited. The entomologist Fabre asked him to explain the case of the French Ammonophilas wasp, which provides food for its grubs by stinging a caterpillar in its nerve centre and paralysing it. Fabre argues that the wasp must be totally accurate with its sting, for if it stings too deep, it will kill the caterpillar, and if it fails to sting deep enough, the caterpillar will wriggle around and crush the grubs. Fabre points out that the wasp must have learned this trick the first time, and then somehow passed it on to its children – otherwise, there would have been no children. Darwin was inclined to agree. Wells (in The Science of Life) accuses Fabre of exaggeration, and describes the wasp’s accuracy as ‘a rough and ready reflex of no great complexity’ (basing his criticism on the American variety of Ammonophilas); but this makes no fundamental difference to Fabre’s argument that the species could not have survived without somehow passing on the trick in the first generation.
Again, we might ask: How did man develop the thickened skin on the soles of his feet? Obviously, by walking on them. But why have all men this same characteristic? Do we suppose that there were once men with thin skin on their soles, but they stepped on thorns and died out? That seems unlikely, since having thin soles would not be a great evolutionary disadvantage. On the contrary, it might cause its possessors to become thinkers rather than hunters. Is it not more sensible to assume that man wanted thick soles as a matter of general convenience, and influenced his genes to give him thick soles?
In his Gifford Lectures, The Living Stream, Sir Alister Hardy (who was professor of zoology at Oxford and a respectable Darwinian) cites an even odder phenomenon. A flatworm called Microstomum has developed a unique defence system. It eats the polyp Hydra for the sake of its stinging capsules (called nematocysts). When the Hydra has been digested, the stinging bombs are picked up in the lining of the flatworm’s stomach, passed through to another set of cells, which now carry them – like builders’ labourers carrying bricks – to the flatworm’s skin, where they are mounted like guns, ready to fire their stinging thread. It is a curious feature that the stinging capsules do not explode when the flatworm eats the Hydra. What is even stranger is that the flatworm does not eat the Hydra for food, but only to steal its ‘bombs’. Once the flatworm has enough bombs mounted in its skin, it will not touch a Hydra, even if starving.
The behaviour of the Microstomum is enough to give an orthodox Darwinian grey hairs. How the flatworm learned the trick, and then passed it on to its children by accidental selection – is only the first of the problems. Dr. A. W. Kepner ‘was driven to postulate a group mind among the cells of the body to account for the internal behaviour of the Microstomum’.
After discussing various similar problems, Sir Alister Hardy takes the immense step of suggesting that telepathy can, in fact, influence the genes, although he is careful to emphasise that this is only guesswork. The analogy he uses – remarking that it is ‘only an analogy and not part of the hypothesis’ – is of a painter selecting colours for a painting that is going to be reproduced thousands of times. He may decide to keep varying the colours – the DNA genes – to try to obtain the maximum effect. Sir Alister postulates a ‘group mind’ among the animals of a species, and the group mind plays the part of the painter. But a painter selects his colours with a view to the overall effect. In short, we are back with the notion of purpose; and, even more important, with the notion that the ‘group mind’ can directly affect the DNA code.
What all this amounts to is that the accidental selection that Wells insists upon leaves too much unexplained. No one doubts that accidental selection is a major force in evolution. But then, no one doubts that various kinds of accident play an important part in the lives of city dwellers; I may accidentally meet a man who gives me a bad cold, or changes the whole course of my life. This does not mean that everything I do, from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night, is without purpose. On the contrary, the accidents take place against a general background of purpose. And the same goes for evolution.
None of the examples discussed above presents the slightest problem for the ‘telepathic theory of evolution’. We suppose that life is basically purposive. It organises matter for its own ends, and its aim is to become more complex, more free. To begin with, it concentrated on developing telepathic forces – the same forces that enable the flattid bug to understand its place in the ‘blossom’. These forces also enabled it to pass on important discoveries to the genes. This ‘instinctive mind’, the group mind, has many levels. On one level, it organises a group of flattid bugs into a flower and makes sure that some of them are green and some are half green and half coral, and some completely coral. On another level, it organises the cells of the flatworm’s stomach to carry stinging capsules to the outer skin. For all we know, the flatworm may be able to ‘order’ the cells to carry the stinging capsules, just as I am now ordering my fingers to type this page; in organisms as simple as the flatworm, instinctive connections may be more direct. And this speculation emphasises, in turn, that all kinds of processes are now taking place in my own body, although I am apparently unconscious of them. Kepner’s postulate of a group mind among the cells of the body applies on every level of life.
The skills developed by birds and animals indicate that life has come a long way towards its objective: power over its material form. But while the homing instinct of birds, the flower-building instinct of flattid bugs, the ‘sixth sense’ of dogs are very remarkable achievements, they are, in a way, dead ends. For their purpose is mere survival. After nearly half a billion years of evolution, life’s chief characteristic was cruelty: baby wasps eating a live caterpillar, a snake eating a live frog. And the power of telepathic communication with its own kind did not involve any sympathy with other species. For all its ‘psychic faculties’, life remained narrow and vicious.
It had to take the next great step – the most dangerous step yet. It had to discover new ways to conquer the world of matter, which operates by its own complex laws. It had to learn to understand these laws, to grasp them as generalisations. The increasing complexity of the forms it was learning to handle meant that it needed a hierarchic structure. The boss of a small business can keep in touch with everything himself, but if the business becomes very large, he needs a whole structure of managers, under-managers, foremen, shop stewards and so on. The boss’s job is to take an overall view, and leave all the routine jobs to his deputies. Every human being is, in effect, the boss of a giant corporation.
But he is the boss. He may not know everything that goes on all the time, but he has an overall idea. And there is nothing to stop him from visiting any office or workshop in the combine. If he wants, he can even take off his coat and repair one of the machines. He no longer has the immediate control that the flatworm has over the cells of its stomach; but if he really needs it, he can get it. If he needs to recover the power of telepathy, or subconscious premonition of danger – ‘jungle sensitiveness’ – he can re-activate this faculty by an intense effort.
But here is the central point. His chief danger is a kind of amnesia. The complexity of the business may strain him so much that he spends all his time worrying ineffectually in his office, staring dazedly at balance sheets and statistics, and wishing he was still just a small family business. He forgets how much real power he possesses. When he reaches this stage – becoming ‘stale’ – it is important for him to get down on the shop floor and roll up his sleeves, to re-contact his simpler, more instinctive self.
And this is a point whose importance goes far beyond this discussion of the occult. We are considering the most important law of human nature. Man is at his best when he has a strong sense of purpose. When my consciousness is doing its proper work – grasping some of the immense complexity of the universe, and calculating how to increase its control and power – its energy flows into the subconscious, and arouses all the forces of the subconscious mind. When conscious purpose fails, everything else slowly breaks down.
Why has man developed consciousness? I suggested the answer in my foreword. He may have lost his animal powers of telepathy. but he has also lost his colour-blindness. When he delights in the contrast of a blue sky with green fields. or the colours of the clouds at sunset, he is operating at a higher level of vitality than any animal can achieve.
And his sense of beauty is the direct outcome of his evolutionary urge. It is related to the power of grasping and mastering complexity. If I look at an old Tudor house set in green lawns and flower beds, with a river at the foot of the garden, my sense of beauty is actually a sense of complexity and order. The more wide-awake I feel, the more I ‘take in’ these chimneys, gables, oak beams, leaded windows, bright flower beds. They give pleasure because they give a sense of the mind’s power to control its environment. I may see an equally complex scene from the window of a train – slag heaps, factory chimneys, slum houses – and although it is equally complex, it does not produce pleasure because it seems evidence of the human failure to control the environment, of people who have let life ‘get them down’. On the other hand, I may look at a piece of natural scenery that is equally chaotic with jagged rocks, bare hills. a stormy sky – but because I feel no need to control it, it strikes me as beautiful, for I can savour its complexity.
The sense of beauty, then, is a sense of complexity, and of power over it. Neither is sufficient without the other. A neurotic sees the complexity, but he feels overwhelmed by it; he lacks purpose. When Alexander the Great cried for fresh worlds to conquer, he possessed the sense of purpose but lacked the sense of complexity; he felt he had come to the end of ‘the world’.
Now, ideally there should be a continual ‘feedback’. Increased complexity should produce an increased sense of purpose, an increased appetite for life. And the increased appetite for life should stimulate the mind to broaden its limits, to grasp new complexities. What happens in practice is that human beings, even the greatest, reach a certain point where they lose courage. They don’t want any more complexity, and their appetite for life also slackens. But it is possible to imagine a human being who has passed this danger point, whose mind reaches out endlessly for new complexities, and whose sense of delight is stimulated to achieve new levels of purpose by the new complexity. If man’s mind could reach this point like the ‘critical mass’ in an atomic explosion – he would become godlike. Think of a schoolboy going for a swim in the river on a hot afternoon: the way the senses feel drunk with the blueness of the sky, the cool smell of the water; the kind of excited ecstasy with which he changes into his swimming costume, somehow afraid that the water will run away before he gets to it. This kind of excitement and affirmation is peculiarly human; the senses reach out eagerly to the world, as if to embrace it. Man often feels this same ecstasy of affirmation as he confronts the universe: sheer delight in its complexity, and the desire to plunge into it with a splash. But, like the schoolboy, he gets tired; the excitement fades. And this failure is purely a lack of self-discipline. An adult can increase his mental stamina by deliberate training, so that, for example, he can listen to a complete Wagner opera without exhaustion.
And this should make clear why we differ so much from the lower animals. No animal possesses that capacity for reaching out ecstatically to grasp the universe. Their instincts are sharper than ours, and they are closer to nature. But they can never know that supreme delight of the imagination taking fire and becoming drunk with its own visions. That is what human evolution is about.
But man had chosen a hard, uphill road. It is true that this power to understand the world brought tremendous results. For example, when he learned that wild grass could be sown and cultivated, that wild animals could be tamed and bred for their meat and their skins, life became immeasurably easier. Professor K. A. Wittfogel has estimated, in his book on Chinese economic history, that agriculture can feed between twenty and fifty times as many people as hunting. That means that man has between twenty and fifty times as much leisure. But on the other hand, this new, highly conscious life was narrow and hard, and rather dull compared to hunting and warfare. Romantic modern writers like to declare that peasants are ‘closer to nature’ than city dwellers; but that is not entirely true. A man like John Cowper Powys has a mystical bond with nature because he has the leisure to think and use his imagination. But the Bronze Age peasant worked too hard to be able to cultivate his imagination. And so, although the plough had, in a sense, freed him from his dependence on the day’s hunting, it had confined him in a new prison: his home, his fields, his cowbarn.
What happened was inevitable. The men who retained a high degree of their old ‘psychic faculties’ were rare. Psychic ability springs from a kind of inner stillness, during which the mind becomes clear, like a pond in which the mud is allowed to settle. The men who possessed this faculty became doctors, priests, oracles. This is as true today as five thousand years ago. A recent report on the Huichol Indians of the Mexican Sierra Madre, whose religion is a survival of the pre-Columbian age, describes the shaman, Ramon Medina (who is also, significantly, the tribe’s principal artist). Visiting the village of San Andres, the shaman sensed death, and walked to a locked house, where the corpse of a murdered man was discovered in the roof. Norman Lewis comments that the body was discovered ‘through what is completely accepted in this part of the world – even by Franciscan missionary fathers – as extra-sensory perception’.*
This power revealed by the shaman could be developed, like water divining, by anybody. It is a perfectly normal part of the make-up of living creatures. But we are unaware of our potentialities, in spite of the increasing interest in ‘para-psychology’. One of these potentialities was revealed by the researches of Dr. J. B. Rhine at Duke University. A gambler suggested that the para-psychology team investigate the gambler’s superstition that the fall of a dice can be influenced by the human mind. Eighteen series of tests were conducted over no less than eight years. And when this vast amount of statistics was examined carefully, a curious result was discovered. When people were first tested, their score was always a great deal above ‘chance’. On the second ‘run’, the score fell radically, and in the third run, more radically still. In other words, the mind could best influence the fall of the dice when it was fresh and unbored. Repetition of the same old routine gradually blunted its power of ‘psycho-kinesis’ (PK for short). The figures for these tests, published in 1943, were overwhelming and conclusive.
At first, it might seem that Rhine’s results contradict what I have just said: that such powers can be deliberately developed. But the contradiction is only apparent. What the tests do seem to prove is that when the mind is ‘fresh’ – wide-awake and interested – its powers are considerable. Repetition blunts them. But what is boredom? It is a kind of discouragement, a slacking of the will due to a feeling that ‘it’s just not worth it …’ What Rhine’s results show clearly is that man’s ‘psychic powers’ are greatest when his will is aroused, and fall off radically when it slackens. And if we assume a certain psychic element in accident-proneness. this would also be explained by the result.
Perhaps the most important part of this result is that the scoring falls off so fast after the first run. Rhine remarks that when they examined the figures for 123 first runs, there were 134 ‘hits’ above chance. In the 123 second runs, this had dropped to a mere 19, and in the third runs, to only 4. This tells us something of vital importance about human beings. Our powers literally crumble and collapse under boredom. Our human tendency to defeat-proneness, to will-less drifting, has more serious results than we can imagine. It de-fuses our powers.
In modern civilisation, most people are involved in boring routine jobs that seldom stir the will, and certainly not the imagination. The result is inevitable. We are like four-engine aeroplanes running only on one engine. And our natural psychic powers are ‘damped’ almost to extinction.
But this observation is less depressing than it sounds. For what actually causes the tremendous falling-off in our powers? Boredom, defeat-proneness. But what is defeat-proneness? It is basically a frame of mind induced by ignorance. One thinks of the story of the man who hung all night from the edge of a cliff, and when the daylight came, realised there was only a three-foot drop below him. Once he can see clearly, the fear vanishes. In the case of human beings, the defeat-proneness is due to that separation from our subconscious origins. We are ‘stranded’ in consciousness. Place a man in a completely black and silent room, and within a few days he will go insane, or at least suffer extreme mental strain. Why? For the same reasons that Rhine’s PK results fell off so radically after the first test; the will crashes into collapse when it is blinded, and the collapse is out of all proportion to its cause. A little boredom causes total demoralisation.
But the more man learns to shine a searchlight into his lower depths, the more he can understand his actual strength, and the less he is liable to this panic-collapse. Once again, we have to recognise that his most urgent need, at this point in evolution, is to reanimate his sleeping ‘psychic’ powers.
In this respect, primitive man had one great advantage over modern man: he knew that he possessed them. If, therefore, he wanted to develop them, it was simply a question of the best possible method. The insight must come first; the method follows.
In the remainder of this chapter I want to examine both these aspects – the insight and the method – more closely.
It must be understood first of all that there is no basic difference between ‘mystical’ experiences and experiences that belong to the realm of magic or the occult. Because his consciousness has evolved too fast, man has lost contact with his real identity. When his inner pressure is low – when he is in a state of boredom or aimlessness – he is aware only of the most superficial level of his identity. The more deeply he feels, the more of himself he is aware of. This is why Yeats says:
When ... a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace ...
The important line here is: ‘He completes his partial mind.’
The fundamental problem of human beings was stated with beautiful clarity by L. H. Myers at the beginning of his novel The Near and the Far. Young Prince Jali stands on the battlements of a palace, which he has been travelling all day to reach, and looks at the sunset on the desert. As he does so, he reflects that ‘There were two deserts: one that was a glory for the eye, another that it was weariness to trudge. Deep in his heart he cherished the belief that some day the near and the far would meet. Yes, one day he would be vigorous enough in breath and stride to capture the promise of the horizon.’ The promise of the horizon – that is the problem, not only for poets and mystics, but for every human being. And our problem is that we have to live with ‘reality’ constantly under our noses, like a bull in front of which the matador constantly dangles his cloak, never allowing it to see more than a few feet. It is not quite true to say that we are permanently trapped in the present, for we are always getting those ‘breathing spaces’, these moments when the heart seems to expand with relief and delight.
The odd thing is the strange inability of consciousness to maintain this insight. It is as if some simple element was missing that allows consciousness to become frayed and tangled. When I was at school, we used to learn to make hosiery on machines with banks of needles. Once the machine was knitting the fabric, a heavy weight had to be hung on the bottom of the fabric to prevent it fouling the needles. If one forgot about the weight, and allowed the fabric to reach the floor, the wool immediately climbed up the needles, and within seconds the knitting was a tangled mess. Similarly, when human consciousness ‘idles’ in neutral, it narrows and loses all sense of values. When this happens, man ceases to reach out, to experience the desire to expand. The sense of ‘worthwhileness’ fades. And when that happens, any kind of negation and stupidity becomes possible. It might be said that the essential difference between a man of genius and an ‘ordinary man’ is that the man of genius has a greater power to focus steadily upon his real values, while the ordinary man is always losing sight of his aims and objectives, changing from hour to hour, almost from minute to minute. A criminal is a man in whom this process of ‘devaluation’ has slipped further.
Why do I spend so much time emphasising the inefficiency of human consciousness? Because once this is understood, we catch a glimpse of the potentialities of an efficient consciousness. The great mystics, saints and ‘initiates’ of the past were simply men who had realised a few of these potentialities. But they were groping instinctively, in a kind of semi-darkness of intuition, like men trying to find their way in a fog. Modern man has the possibility of understanding the mechanism of consciousness, and marching directly towards his objective, with the will flexed to its maximum efficiency.
Man’s trouble is not his inability to achieve the kind of concentration necessary for maximum use of his powers, but his unawareness of what can be achieved by such concentration. And this recognition leads to a formulation of central importance: ‘occultism’ is not an attempt to draw aside the veil of the unknown, but simply the veil of banality that we call the present.
The basic mechanism for doing this is very simple. I am normally ‘bound up in myself’. If I have nothing in particular to do, I may simply allow my mind to ramble vaguely: to think of some gossip, try to recall the words of a popular song; I may brood on some worry or resentment, or about a programme I saw on television last night. I choose what I use my consciousness for. You could say that consciousness is like a box, and I decide what to put in the box.
Now, suppose I am on a walking tour in the Lake District. I see impressive scenery, but I see it through a kind of veil – a veil of myself and my trivial preoccupations. I am allowing the scenery to become associated with mediocre ‘vibrations’.
But consider what happens if the scenery I am looking at happens to be associated with a deeper vibration; for example, suppose I am looking at the moors around Haworth Parsonage, and they make me think of Wuthering Heights and the tragedy of the Brontës. What happens as I experience the sudden vibration of seriousness? Simply that I am rescued from my close-up, personal, worm’s-eye view of life; I am reminded that it is bigger, more exciting, more important, more tragic, than I had realised. Or rather, I ‘knew’ this all the time, but had allowed myself to ‘forget’ it.
All art does its work in this way – by rescuing us from our self-chosen triviality, to which we are so prone. It is like a deep organ note that makes my hair stir and a shiver run through me. I ‘pull back’ from life, like a camera taking a long-shot with a wide-angle lens. I quite simply become aware of more reality than before.
It is obvious that I can either resist my own tendency to sink into triviality, or accept it and take it for granted. What Shaw calls the period of ‘moral awakening’ – which occurs in most intelligent people in their early teens, or even sooner – is a deliberate effort to leave behind the triviality of childhood and to focus the mind on greater issues: art, science, music, exploration.
The ‘vibration of seriousness’ is accompanied by an inner tightening, as if slack cables had suddenly taken a weight.
This ‘tightening’ may occur through a certain effort of the will or imagination, or it may occur spontaneously – that is, without any apparent conscious effort (in sexual excitement, for example).
And it must be emphasised that this inner tightening, the ‘vibration of seriousness’, is the aim of all religious, mystical and occult disciplines; for when it occurs, man feels his sense of power increase.
It is a sad thought that most people take their triviality for granted; accept that they will remain fundamentally unchanged for the rest of their lives. The first and most important step towards self-transformation is to grasp intellectually what I have explained in the preceding pages: that man was not intended for a lifetime of the ‘worm’s-eye view’, any more than a bird was intended to spend its life on the ground. We have a natural faculty for ‘pulling back’, for seeing things through the wide-angle lens, for switching on to more serious vibrations. For human beings, boredom and depression are abnormal – a failure to grasp their natural powers. My powers are wasted so long as my vision is narrow and personal. They are like a boxer who cannot get any force behind his punches at close quarters. And when my will has become passive through ‘close-upness’, I fall into a dreamlike state in which illusion and reality are inter-mingled. I become trapped and tangled in my own narrow values, instead of remaining open to values that are greater than myself. For human beings are intended to ‘connect’ with values outside themselves and to become unaware of themselves as ‘personalities’.
Having defined the object of the quest, the next question is the method.
If the major human problem is a certain diffuseness and tendency to make mountains of molehills, clearly the answer must lie in the realm of concentration. This has always been the fundamental religious discipline. But there is an important point to be grasped here. Concentration is exactly like learning mathematics at school: it can be a highly disagreeable exercise that provokes nothing but negative emotions. If I hate mathematics, this is almost certainly because I am badly taught, and because I have a certain inner resistance to the subject. A good teacher will get the students so interested and excited that all fear disappears. The famous teacher Trachtenberg. who devised his ‘system’ in a concentration camp during the war, could turn the worst pupils into enthusiastic mathematicians. And this was because his rules are so simple and easy to remember that students lost their fear of the subject, and took a certain pride in their ability to leap hurdles.
Concentration should also be an entirely pleasurable exercise, pursued for the sheer joy of it. For when it is done correctly, it induces an immediate feedback of delight, that same sense of heightened vitality that is experienced in the sexual orgasm, or when a crisis is suddenly overcome.
What must be grasped here is the aim of concentration. Consider the opening scene of Faust, in which Faust has worked himself into a state of defeat and despair. The reason is clear: his thinking has become arid and purposeless, and he has sunk into a state of lowered vitality in which further effort brings no feedback. When he is about to commit suicide, the Easter bells ring, suddenly reminding him clearly of his childhood, and ‘call him back to life’. He recalls the time when ‘heaven’s love rushed at me like a kiss’, and says:
An inconceivably sweet longing
Drove me to roam through woods and fields,
And with a thousand burning tears
I felt a world rise up in me.
He is back in contact with external reality; he has broken his way out of the glass bubble that surrounded him.
It can be seen immediately that if Faust had decided to throw off his suffocating despair with an effort of concentration, the crucial question would be what he concentrated on. The Easter bells immediately directed his efforts to ‘reality’; without them, he might have made enormous efforts and only exhausted himself. If a traveller is dying of thirst in a desert, it is important that he direct all his remaining energy in the direction of the nearest oasis.
T. S. Eliot has a similar passage in the sixth section of Ash Wednesday, after describing fatigue and resignation:
... though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings
And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell ...
Here again we have the Easter bells experience, in this case triggered by the smell of the sea and of golden-rod, and the surge of delight and power: ‘Unbroken wings’. This capacity to evoke sheer ecstasy is present in us all the time; but it needs to be understood before it can be controlled. The surge of power that makes ‘the lost heart stiffen’ is a power that leaps out to meet the sense of reality.
This same glimpse can also be achieved through crisis. Graham Greene’s whiskey-priest in The Power and the Glory experiences total certainty only as he is about to be shot by a firing squad; then he suddenly realises ‘that it would have been quite easy for him to have been a saint’, and ‘he felt like someone who has missed happiness by seconds’. Quite. It is almost funny. We spend our lives peering at things so close-up that we simply fail to grasp their obvious meaning. A kind of laziness drags us down. There is no hurry. Plenty of time. You, who are now reading these words, feel precisely that. There is tomorrow and the day after. But try to focus what happens to the whiskey-priest in front of the firing squad. With a terrible shock he knows that he is going to die, now, within seconds. His inner being revolts; his energies surge like a tidal wave. He makes a more powerful effort than he has made in his whole life. He is like Sinbad the Sailor hurling the Old Man of the Sea from his shoulders. For a second, he experiences freedom, and then realises with despair that he could have made this same effort in any of the billion-or-so seconds of his previous life ... He has wasted his life in a kind of dream. We are all in this position, all human beings. If you can clearly focus this realisation, you have grasped what the Church means by ‘original sin’. We – you and I – are infinitely stronger than we ever realise.
This is what concentration should be focused on. It can be nothing more than another form of dreaming. It can also be an attempt to burst the bubble of dreaming.
There is a certain danger in taking the whiskey-priest episode as a starting point for concentration: the danger of a negative outlook. There is no harm in using the imagination to invoke a sense of panic, if the panic succeeds in its effect of breaking the bubble, establishing contact with reality. But if it fails, it can only increase the oppressive anxiety.
The basic method involved here is perfectly ordinary learning, like learning to ride a bicycle or memorise a poem. Every ‘peak experience’ (to use Abraham Maslow’s phrase), every surge of ‘contemplative objectivity’, shows the mind its own ability to grasp reality by reaching out. The only way to acquire a skill is to keep repeating the attempt until you have learned the knack. Now, it is true that most healthy people have ‘peak experiences’ fairly often. But they fail to make a determined effort to build on them. They take them for granted, and allow themselves to slip back into their dull, non-expectant state of mind, the old plodding attitude towards existence.
An altogether more sensible approach is to recognise that every time you can induce the Faustian flash of pure affirmation, you are a step closer to being able to do it at will. The closer together the experiences occur, the quicker you can learn. Bear in mind that you are trying to ‘pull back’ from your worm’s-eye view, to get the wide-angle shot of the world. Bear also in mind that Faust, for all his intelligence and perception, is convinced that he has the soundest reasons for despair – until the Easter bells remind him of what ‘reality’ is really like, blowing away the depression like mist. The ‘trick’ is not only to take advantage of every flash of optimism, to attempt to amplify it into a ‘peak experience’, but also to grasp that this is an objective exercise, a skill like reading a newspaper, and that it can be practised at any moment when you have nothing else to think about – on a bus, a tube train, walking along a corridor, drinking tea.
This explains the attraction of drugs – particularly psychedelics – for intelligent people. They have an intuition that if a ‘peak experience’ could be summoned at will, or maintained for half an hour, it would quickly become possible to learn to re-create it without drugs. There is a fallacy here. Most drugs work by reducing the efficiency of the nervous system, inducing unusual states of consciousness at the expense of the mind’s power to concentrate and learn. You only have to try to memorise a short list of foreign words when you are slightly drunk to realise this. The mind is usually absorbent, like blotting paper; when you are under the influence of alcohol, it turns into a sheet of glossy paper with no power to absorb. Drugs work by temporarily paralysing certain levels of the mind, like a local anaesthetic, thereby reducing its energy consumption. Worse still, they inhibit ‘feedback effects’. When Lady Chatterley feels the park surging beneath her feet like the sea, this is a feedback effect of her intense concentration on her sexual activities: an ecstatic 100 per cent concentration that pumps up enormous subconscious energies from her depths. It is these energies that continue to surge and spread as she returns home. The Kabbalah describes the creation of the world as being a total concentration of energy into a single luminous point. (Captain Shotover’s ‘seventh degree of concentration’ in Shaw’s Heartbreak House is related to it.) All drugs, without exception, produce the reverse of concentration, a relaxation of the mind. In the case of the psychedelics, the nervous system is ‘shortcircuited’, so that nervous impulses cease to follow their own track, and spread sideways, creating a series of ‘feelings’; it is like opening the lid of a grand piano and running your fingers over its strings, producing an effect like a harp. But these ‘feelings’ have nothing to do with the clear focusing upon reality achieved by the whiskey-priest.
Drugs, then, are the worst possible way of attempting to achieve ‘contemplative objectivity’. They increase the mind’s tendency to accept its own passivity instead of fighting against it. But any of the more normal ‘peak experiences’ are an ideal starting point. Sexual intensity is one of the most powerful, since it produces, in effect, a momentary burst of the Easter bells insight, a flash of the power which is a normal human potentiality. This was recognised in India and Tibet by the Tantric yogis, who deliberately utilised sexual ecstasy to create new habit patterns of intensity (for that is what it amounts to). In more recent years a German ironmaster named Karl Kellner was initiated into Tantric yoga in India, and founded the Ordo Templi Orientis (Order of Oriental Templars) on his return to Germany in 1902. This order was founded entirely upon the ‘secret’ that sexual ecstasy can be used by human beings as a stairway to new levels of power.
Kellner taught a Westernised form of Eastern Tantra worship, which concentrates its attention on the female aspect of the deity under various names and forms (Devi, Radha, Kali, Durga). As Christian ritual involves bread and wine, Tantric ritual involves wine, meat, fish, grain and sexual intercourse (called maithuna), and the worship of Durga and Kali (the fierce forms of the goddess) are often associated with violent sexual orgies. This is known as the ‘left-hand path’. (The right-hand path, called Dakshinachari, is relatively gentle and restrained; it worships the milder goddess Devi.) In all forms of maithuna, the ‘suspended orgasm’ is practised; the important thing is to use the sexual intensity as a ladder to ascend to still greater heights of intensity, focusing upon the illumination rather than upon the sexual pleasure.
In due course Kellner persuaded the English ‘magician’ Aleister Crowley to become head of the English branch of the Oriental Templars, and for the remainder of his life Crowley placed great emphasis on ‘sexual magic’, taking to heart the Tantric belief that sexual and magical powers are basically the same thing. Unfortunately, his addiction to heroin and later to gin counteracted the positive effects of his ‘sexual magic’.* I shall deal with Crowley more fully in a later chapter. But it may be comented here that Crowley’s chief drawback as an ‘adept’ was an intense self-preoccupation that was the opposite of what I mean by the ‘wide-angle lens’. In this important sense, H. G. Wells or Albert Einstein were closer to ‘adeptship’ than Crowley. In occultism, as in science, intellect and disinterestedness are the cardinal virtues.
Let me summarise the conclusions of this chapter.
Although the science of the nineteenth century called itself ‘organised common sense’, it was actually based on Descartes’ method of doubting everything that could be doubted, and hoping that what was left over would be ‘truth’. It decided to make do without the concepts of will and purpose. At the time, this made no serious difference to physics, biology or even psychology. Today, it is beginning to make an important difference. I have tried to outline a scientific view of life in which will and purpose are not excluded.
In essence, this view of man was outlined by F. W. H. Myers, one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Myers suggested that consciousness could be regarded as a kind of spectrum. In the middle of the spectrum are the powers we know about – sight, hearing, touch and so on. Below the red end of the spectrum there are organic processes which we somehow ‘control’ without being conscious of doing so – like the Microstomum transporting the Hydra’s ‘bombs’ to its skin. But beyond the violet end of the spectrum lie other powers, of which we are almost totally ignorant.
Similarly, Aldous Huxley once made the suggestion that if the human mind has a ‘basement’ – the Freudian world of instinct and repressions – why should it not also have an attic: a ‘superconscious’ to balance the ‘subconscious’?
The powers of the ‘superconscious’ are within reach of the human will, provided it is fresh and alive. As soon as habit takes over – or what I have called elsewhere ‘the robot’ – they dwindle. In the same way, general passivity or defeat-proneness or depression will blunt them, just as they also blunt the powers at the lower end of the spectrum. (In a case of one of Maslow’s patients, she became so bored with a routine job that she even ceased to menstruate.)
All disciplines aimed at increased use of these powers depend upon a high level of optimism and will-drive.
Which brings me back to my initial assertion that a science – or knowledge system – which has no place for will or purpose is an obstruction to human evolution, and at this particular point in history, a dangerous nuisance.
* The Survivors, The Sunday Times, April 26, 1970.
* I used Crowley (see Part Two, Chapter 7) as the basis of Caradoc Cunningham in my novel The Man Without a Shadow (also called The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme), and there is an account of a Tantric sect in The God of the Labyrinth (in America, The Hedonists). W. Holman Keith’s Divinity as the Eternal Feminine (New York, Pageant Press, 1960) is an interesting attempt to create a Westernised version of sexual worship. A letter that accompanied my copy of the book indicated that a group in America have put its theories into practice.