Below the Iceberg
by Colin Wilson
From Issue #57 of Magical Blend Magazine
When awareness focuses to a laser-like beam, the meaning and magic of life spill forth.
Recently I was asked to choose what I regard as the most important of my nonfiction books. I replied without hesitation, "Beyond the Occult," first published in 1988. It unites two main currents in my thinking: the "existentialist" ideas developed in The Outsider, and the ideas that developed from my study of "the occult." Beyond the Occult is my most important synthesis.
Oddly enough, I had no desire to write it. It came about because I was approached by an old friend who had been the editor of many of my early books-among them, The Space Vampires and A Criminal History of Mankind. He was now working for another publisher and wanted to commission another "occult" book from me. I was anxious to oblige, but had no desire to write another book about the occult. Finally, I allowed myself to be persuaded. In retrospect, I have never been so satisfied with any decision I have ever made.
My first book, The Outsider, appeared in 1956, and brought me overnight notoriety that I found astonishing and exhausting. Since the ideas of The Outsider play such an important part in Beyond the Occult, I must begin by trying to explain them.
Ever since childhood, I have been baffled by a strange phenomenon: how can we want something badly and then feel bored almost as soon as we get it? I had noticed it particularly at Christmas time. For months before Christmas Day, I would look forward to owning some long-coveted toy, yet a few hours after receiving it, I was already beginning to take it for granted and even to find it slightly disappointing. I noticed the same thing about school holidays-how eagerly I would look forward to them during the school term, and how easily I became bored with them.
The Limitless Realm
I glimpsed the solution to this problem when I was still a thirteen-year-old schoolboy. One day, at the beginning of the six-week long August holiday, I went to a church bazaar and bought for a few pence some volumes of an encyclopedia called Practical Knowledge for All. It contained courses on every imaginable subject, from accountancy, aeronautics, astronomy, biology, botany, and chemistry to philosophy and zoology. I had been fascinated by astronomy and chemistry since the age of ten, and now I conceived the preposterous idea of trying to summarize all the scientific knowledge of the world in one notebook. I gave it the grandiose title of A Manual of General Science, and wrote steadily throughout that August holiday, filling four notebooks with my round schoolboy handwriting.
And I noticed that I never became bored. Learning and writing about geology, biology, and philosophy kept me happier than I had ever been in my life. And I continued writing the book over Christmas, when I began the seventh volume-devoted to mathematics. All the time I was writing this book, I had an almost drunken sensation of the sheer immensity of the world of ideas, which seemed to stretch, like some marvellous unknown country, to a limitless horizon. Every day, when I began writing, I felt like a traveller preparing to discover new lakes and forests and mountain ranges. I felt sorry for the other boys at school, who were ignorant of this magical kingdom where I spent my evenings and weekends.
I had learned a basic lesson: that the secret of avoiding boredom is to have a strong sense of purpose. Unfortunately, when I had finished the book, the problem of boredom returned, for I had no idea what to do next. I spent one long school holiday trying to read all the plays of Shakespeare and his major contemporaries: Marlowe, Jonson, Middleton, and the rest. During another holiday, I read all the works of the major Russian writers: Aksakov, Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Tchekov. During yet another, I studied the history of art, and discovered Van Gogh and Cezanne. Yet, because I was merely reading and not writing about them, even this left me bored and dissatisfied.
When I was sixteen, however, I came upon another important clue. It was soon after the war, and a British publisher had started to reissue the novels of Dostoevsky. I bought Crime and Punishment with my pocket money. In the Translator's Preface, I read Dostoevsky's letter to his brother Mihail describing how he-and other condemned revolutionaries-were taken out on the
They barked orders over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by prisoners condemned to execution. Being third in the row, I concluded I had only four minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones, and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tatoo, and we were unbound, brought back to the scaffold and informed that his Majesty had spared our lives.
One of his fellow prisoners went insane.
It struck me that if Dostoevsky had been offered his pardon on condition that he promised never to be bored for the rest of his life, he would have accepted gladly and been quite certain that it should be possible-indeed, that it should be easy. And it seemed for me he would obviously be correct. Surely, someone who had been through such a crisis would only have to remember being in front of the firing-squad in order to be ecstatically happy.
A Cause For Rejoicing
In fact, it was this episode-and the years in Siberia that followed-that turned Dostoevsky into a great writer. Before he was arrested, he was a good but minor writer-in the tradition of Dickens and Gogol. But, as a human being, he was touchy and self-obsessed to the point of paranoia. His arrest and long imprisonment in Siberia made him aware that even to be alive is a cause for rejoicing. The result of this new insight is expressed in a passage in Crime and Punishment where the hero is afraid he may be executed for the murder of an old woman. He thinks: "If I had to stand on a narrow ledge for ever and ever, in eternal darkness and tempest, I would still rather do that than die at once." He had seen that "life failure"-to be bored, miserable, tortured by guilt-is a form of childish spoiltness.
In my mid-teens, my problem was not simply boredom with my working-class existence (My father was a boot and shoe worker who earned about £3 a week.), it was a longing to escape from it and to retreat into that magical world of the mind that I had discovered when writing the Manual of General Science. This was intensified by my discovery-through Practical Knowledge for All-of the realm of English poetry. I left school when I was sixteen, and for a few months worked in a factory while I prepared to take the mathematics exam a second time. Factory work made me so miserable that I spent my evenings and weekends reading poetry-all kinds of poetry, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Eliot's
The only problem with this state of mind-the bird's eye view-was that it made it twice as difficult to go back to work the following morning and accept the worm's eye view of boredom and triviality. Years later, when I read Thomas Mann's novel, The Buddenbrooks, I recognized my own problem in the episode where young Hanno Buddenbrook goes to the opera to see Wagner's Lohengrin, and is so transported into ecstasy that he feels he is walking on clouds. But when he has to get up in the freezing dawn and make his way to school through the dark, icy streets, his despair is twice as deep because he has experienced ecstasy the night before.
It then seemed to me the problem of human existence can be expressed very simply. At long intervals, we experience moments of strength and happiness in which we feel that we have the power to change the world and our lives. But such moments are brief. For most of the time, we experience the sense of being victims of circumstance, like dead leaves carried along by a river, with no ability to choose our course. And, when circumstances become especially difficult, it is easy to imagine that fate will afflict us with a series of misfortunes, like Job, that will destroy all our security and leave us completely helpless.
Being and Becoming
As I read my favorite writers-Plato, Hoffman, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Eliot-or listened to the music of Beethoven, or looked at the paintings of Van Gogh, it seemed to me that all shared an awareness of this problem. Plato said that the universe is divided into a world of being and a world of becoming. The world of "becoming" is this everyday world of matter, of endless change, in which we are trapped. The world of "being" is the world of intellect and ideas, the world of truth and values that lies hidden behind the facade of the material world. As he prepares to commit suicide, Socrates declares that the philosopher spends his life trying to live in a world of true being, and, therefore, that he should welcome death which finally frees him from the distractions of the world of mere "becoming."
This, I realized, was why so many romantics were fascinated with death. Yet I still found the idea of death stupid and repellent. It was an attempt to escape from reality. And the moments of ecstasy, of "bird's eye vision," seemed to promise that life could be lived on the level of continuous joy and affirmation.
When, in my late teens, I began to write a novel, it was inevitable that it should be about this problem of the bird's eye view and the worm's eye view. The hero of Ritual in the Dark is a young man who has spent years working in boring jobs, and whose strongest desire is to have the freedom to read and think and listen to music. Then he receives a small legacy which enables him to rent a cheap room and spend his days in libraries and art galleries. And he finds that this kind of freedom is curiously boring. Then he becomes accidentally involved with a man he suspects of being a murderer, and feels ashamed that, because he now has something to maintain his "interest," he no longer feels bored. He is ashamed, because it has taken an external stimulus to renew his sense of being fully alive, when he feels that he ought to be able to do it himself. Surely he ought to wake up every morning with a feeling of immense gratitude for not having to go to an office? What is wrong with the human mind that makes it so incapable of freedom?
It was while I was writing this novel that I decided to break off and try to express some of its basic ideas in a volume of philosophy. Inevitably, this book was about "Outsiders," people who felt a longing for some more purposeful form of existence, and who felt trapped and suffocated in the triviality of everyday life. It was a book about "moments of vision" and about the periods of boredom, frustration, and misery in which these moments are lost. It was about men like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, T.E. Lawrence and William Blake, who have clear glimpses of a more powerful and meaningful way of living, yet who find themselves on the brink of suicide or insanity because of the frustration of their everyday lives. The problem of the Outsider is summarized in the life of Vincent Van Gogh. His painting Starry Night is full of mystical vitality; yet Van Gogh committed suicide and left a note that read: "Misery will never end."
Here, then, is the vital question: Was the tragedy of Nietzsche and Van Gogh inevitable, or should there be some way in which human beings can live on a higher level of intensity?
Tradition of Defeat
My own conclusion was that tragedy was not inevitable. Many Outsiders caused their downfall through self-pity. In other words, they allowed themselves to become weak. Why? Because they were inclined to feel that life is futile and meaningless-or, at least, that it is so difficult that it is not worth the effort. In the twentieth century, this feeling has been expressed most clearly in the works of Samuel Beckett. It is recorded that when he was a young man, he stayed in bed all day because he could see no reason to get up. And his works are part of a long tradition of "defeatism" that goes back to Ecclesiastes, with his "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," and "There is nothing new under the sun." This is the feeling that haunts so many Outsiders, particularly when they become tired and discouraged. It was expressed with a certain gloomy power in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. I labelled this sense of boredom and futility "the Ecclesiastes effect."
This sense of meaninglessness was also expressed by a Greek philosopher who died fifty years before Plato was born. Heraclitus argued that the world of "becoming" is the only reality. Everything changes constantly. Permanence is an illusion of the senses. Therefore man can make no real "mark" on the world, for any "mark" we make vanishes again as quickly as the tide washes away words written in sand. This view also implies, of course, that there is no such thing as good or evil, and that "values" are an illusion.
This is certainly the feeling we get when we are exhausted with effort, and life seems to be an endless vista of problems and complications. Yet the truth is that it is impossible to be a genuine follower of Heraclitus. According to Heraclitus, death is inevitable, and it is therefore no use making any efforts. Yet if Heraclitus had fallen into a river, he would have struggled to get out again. And if someone had put a knife to his throat and asked: "Shall I cut your windpipe and save you the trouble of living?" he would have shouted: "No!"
Still, Heraclitus has undoubtedly put his finger on our most basic problem: that everything is soon undone by time. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus writes: "Rising, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, according to the same rhythm But one day, the "why" arises, and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement." Camus calls this sudden revelation "the Absurd," a word he borrowed from his friend Sartre, who also coined a word for man's reaction to the Absurd: "nausea." Nausea is the recognition that we are "unnecessary" and that the world of matter that surrounds us is the only reality. "Meaning" is an illusion.
A Little More Like Gods
Yet Heraclitus, Sartre, and Camus contradicted themselves. Sartre recorded that he had never felt so free as when he was working for the French Resistance and was likely to be arrested and shot at any moment. And, on the evening before his execution, the hero of Camus's novel, The Stranger, is overwhelmed by a feeling of happiness and affirmation that sounds like Van Gogh's starry night. He writes: "I had been happy, and I was happy still."
And this, obviously, brings us back to Dostoevsky facing the firing squad. He suddenly knows that life is not pointless and meaninglessness. And we all know the same thing whenever we are faced with any serious problem or crisis. We know that the statement, "Life is meaningless," or "Nothing is worth doing," is the self-indulgence of a philosopher who is both lazy and weak.
But moments of crisis are not the only moments in which we recognize that the philosophy of Heraclitus and Samuel Beckett is nonsense. The same thing happens in all moments of sudden happiness-the feeling we experience on a spring morning or when setting out on holiday. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence describes such an experience:
We started on one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun, while the intellect, tired of the thinking of the night, was yet abed. For an hour or two, on such a morning, the sounds, scents, and colors of the world struck man individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought: they seemed to exist sufficiently by themselves, and the lack of design and carefulness in creation no longer irritated.
This is the basic poetic vision, the sheer affirmation experienced by Wordsworth and Shelley and William Blake. And Lawrence has also identified the problem: the "tired intellect" which questions everything. Elsewhere he referred to it as his "thought-riddled nature."
It is the "thought-riddled nature" that causes Outsiders to see life as meaningless. They are in a position of someone who wears dark glasses and complains that the world is dark.
But, if it is thought that has caused this problem, surely thought is also capable of identifying and overcoming it.
Let me again define the problem. It is the feeling that "nothing is worth doing," that life is so complicated, and the world is in such a state of endless flux that all our actions our futile. It is the feeling that we cannot do.
Yet this feeling vanishes-and is seen to be an illusion-every time we experience "the spring morning feeling" described by T.E. Lawrence. Optimism gives us the certainty that action is worthwhile and that the use of the intellect can bring freedom. We only have to look around us to see the truth of this assertion. We are living in a world that has been completely transformed in the course of little more than a century by science and optimism. In fact, since the days of the cave man, human effort and optimism have steadily transformed the world. Individual men have died in failure and misery, yet the efforts of the human race have altered our lives until we are no longer mere animals, living and reproducing and dying. We are slowly learning to become something a little more like gods.
This, then, is the basic philosophy I reached after The Outsider. Dr Johnson once said: "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." The pessimism of Heraclitus and Samuel Beckett is basically due to a lack of concentration. Our sense of futility, the feeling that life is just one damned thing after another," is an illusion due to fatigue.
But how can we rescue ourselves from this feeling? First of all, we have to study it and understand it, as I tried to understand it in The Outsider. Our most important ally in this battle is the imagination. If you can imagine the feelings of Dostoevsky as he stood in front of the firing squad, then you are already learning to overcome the petty annoyances and childish weaknesses that make most people feel unhappy. The truth is that we have no right to be unhappy. It is an insult to the spirit of life. A man who is dying of AIDS knows that, if only he could be cured, he would live his life on a far higher level of purpose and optimism.
In the first part of this article (Magical Blend, October 1997), English philosopher and writer Colin Wilson examined the curious human interaction of desire and malaise that first sends us scrambling to acquire something and then leaves us bored as soon as we get it. Noting that this same dynamic often interferes with our highest aspirations, Wilson reminds us that talented "Outsiders" like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, T.E. Lawrence, and William Blake had clear glimpses of a more powerful and meaningful way of living, yet found themselves on the brink of suicide or insanity because of the frustration of their everyday lives.
Noting that T.E. Lawrence found inspiration in the "clear dawn" while "the intellect [is] yet abed," Wilson wrestles with the intellect's role in creating misery or happiness. The intellect can free us, he says, but achieving spiritual insight and serenity often requires a shock, as was the case with Dostoevsky, whose genius flourished only after narrowly escaping being shot by a firing squad. It is at such times of crisis, says Wilson, that desire and intellect focus in the realization "that we have no right to be unhappy. It is an insult to the spirit of life."
The Future Present
Until the late 1960s, I had considered myself a kind of "existentialist philosopher," who was attempting to rescue existentialism from the pessimism of Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger. But at this point, I came upon a new subject of study that turned my thoughts in an entirely different direction. An American publisher asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about "the occult." It was not a subject that interested me greatly. As a child, I had been fascinated by "spiritualism" and the question of whether there is life after death. But as soon as I began to study chemistry, physics, and astronomy, this interest seemed to evaporate like a dream.
After the request from the publisher, I began to give the matter some new thought. I also began to ask people of my acquaintance whether they had ever had any "paranormal" experiences, and I was surprised by the number who said yes.
One friend was a concert pianist called Mark Bredin. He told me how he had been returning, very late at night, from a concert in central London, and travelling in a taxi along the Bayswater Road. Suddenly, he knew with absolute certainty that, at the next traffic light, a taxi would try to "jump" the light, and would hit them sideways. He wondered if he ought to warn his driver, but felt that he might be regarded as slightly mad. And at the next traffic light, a taxi tried to "beat" the light at Queensway and hit them sideways.
It seemed to me that there was a certain parallel between Mark's experience and that of T.E. Lawrence in the early dawn. Both had been tired, and the "intellect" was therefore "asleep." But what peculiar power could make Mark aware of something that would happen in the future? I had already recognized that the mind possesses the power to escape from pessimism and defeat by meditating on a firing squad. But this was something altogether more strange and unusual.
Another friend, the historian A. L. Rowse, told me how he had been leaning out of a window in Oxford. The window frame was very heavy, and it occurred to him that, if it fell, it might easily kill him. Since he was in a bad mood, he thought: "Let the damn thing fall!" A few moments later, just after he had withdrawn his head, the window fell.
Rowse also told me how, one quiet afternoon, he had a premonition that if he went into the college library, he would find two young men embracing. He crossed two quadrangles and walked into the library-and saw two young men embracing.
Even stranger was the experience described to me by a middle-aged friend named Kay Lunnis, who spent several days a week in our house, helping to look after our children. Kay described how once she had been seriously ill, and had felt herself rise up above her body so she could look down on it; then she had descended and re-entered her body.
A few years earlier I would have at least considered the possibility that this was some kind of hallucination due to fever. But in gathering material for The Occult, I had come across far too many cases of out-of-the-body experiences to doubt that it was possible. Another friend, Lyall Watson, had described how, when his vehicle overturned in Canada, he suddenly found himself hovering above the bus, and looking at the head and shoulders of a boy who had been hurled halfway through the canvas roof. It occurred to him that if the bus rolled any further, the boy would be crushed. A few minutes later, he recovered consciousness in the driver's seat, got out of the vehicle, and rescued the boy, who was in exactly the position he had seen a few moments earlier.
Now if these friends were telling the truth-and I was strongly inclined to believe that they were-then human beings possess at least two "powers" that were unsuspected by Heraclitus, Schopenhauer and Samuel Beckett: the power to "see" the future, and the power to "leave the body."
Now, quite clearly, if this was true, then it should be taken into account in any attempt to create a philosophy of human existence. Such a philosophy demands that we try to understand what man is. And if, in certain moments, man can see into the future, then he is certainly more than Heraclitus assumed.
Man-A Useless Passion?
Inevitably, I also had to reconsider the question of life after death. Another friend, Professor G. Wilson Knight, was a convinced spiritualist, and told me a circumstantial story that seemed to prove beyond all doubt that his mother had survived death. Now Dostoevsky had once remarked that if there is such a thing as life after death, it would be the most important thing that human beings could possibly know. And Dostoevsky was the most profound of the "existential" philosophers. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov argues that the world is so full of suffering that no religion can justify it; Ivan says that he wants to "give God back his entrance ticket." Here he is expressing the philosophy of Heraclitus and Ecclesiastes and Sartre-that in a world dominated by brute matter, "man is a useless passion" who is doomed to defeat. Yet Dostoevsky recognized that if there is life after death, this fact would change everything.
This, then, is why I regarded the evidence of the paranormal as so important. According to modern Western philosophy, it is the philosopher's duty to "doubt everything" until he has achieved some area of ultimate certainty-no matter how small-on which he can take his stand. Unfortunately this method has failed to yield any kind of certainty. It led Bishop Berkeley to doubt the existence of the material world and David Hume to doubt cause and effect, and even the existence of the "self." It led Sartre to conclude that "it is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die," and Camus to regard life as "absurd." The most fashionable of contemporary French philosophers, Jacques Derrida, is quite simply a descendant of Heraclitus, who believes that there is no such thing as "underlying meaning" (which he calls "presence") in the universe; the only reality is the endless flux of matter.
When The Occult appeared in 1971, it soon became apparent that many people who had regarded me as a kind of maverick existentialist now believed that I had turned to more trivial topics and abandoned the rigor of my "Outsider" books. To me, such a view was incomprehensible. It seemed obvious to me that if the "paranormal" was a reality-as I was increasingly convinced that it was-then any philosopher who refused to take it into account was merely closing his eyes.
"Created by the Gaze of Others"
To begin with, most modern philosophers seem united in denying that man has a central "self" (or soul). The Scottish philosopher David Hume started this revolution in the eighteenth century when he declared that, "when I enter intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other . . . I never catch myself at any time." Sartre declared that man has no "self"; what he thinks of as "himself" is really created by "the gaze of others." And this is the position that has been accepted by French philosophers ever since. Derrida, who is celebrated for his theory of "deconstruction," believes that the "self" is a delusion that has been created by "metaphysical" philosophers, whom he rejects with contempt.
Sartre's close ally Simone de Beauvoir, expressed the same notion when she wrote (in Pyrrhus and Cineas): "I look at myself in vain in a mirror, tell myself my own story, I can never grasp myself as an entire object, I experience in myself the emptiness that is myself, I feel that I am not." In other words, man is a purely superficial creature; the sense of selfhood is like a mere reflection on the surface of a pond. Sartre carried this view to its logical conclusion when he declared that there is no such thing as the "unconscious mind."
Yet as soon as we begin to study the paranormal, we immediately encounter the existence of all kinds of powers that contradict Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Far from being a mere reflection on the surface of a pond, man seems to be like an iceberg whose most important part is hidden below the surface. Of course, Freud and Jung have already told us about the "unconscious" (the word was actually invented by Leibniz) but it would seem that even they underestimated its powers. Even the anecdotes I have recounted above seem to indicate that the part of the "self" hidden below the water-line possesses virtually magical powers.
And of course-as Dostoevsky recognized-the ultimate contradiction of the view that we possess "no self" would be an actual proof of life after death, for without a self, there would be nothing to survive death. This ultimate proof eludes us; but the existence of other paranormal powers seems to leave us in no doubt of the truth of the "iceberg" view of the human mind.
Moreover, some of these powers that lie below the surface seem to "contradict" the scientific view of man. Science tells us that the future has not yet happened; therefore we can only guess what is going to happen. Yet when he was deeply relaxed, Mark Bredin had a clear premonition of what would happen when his taxi reached the traffic light.
Behind the Pavilion
Robert Graves, the friend to whom The Occult was dedicated, drew my attention to another curious example of these unknown powers. It is described in one of his autobiographical stories called The Abominable Mr. Gunn. In Graves's class at prep school there was a boy called F. F. Smilley, who was apparently a mathematical prodigy, a "lightning calculator." When the master (Mr. Gunn) had given the boys a difficult mathematical problem, Smilley simply wrote down the answer. He explained that he did not have to work it out, because "it had just come to him." Mr Gunn accused him of looking up the answer in the back of the book. Smilley denied this, and pointed out that the answer at the back of the book had two figures wrong. Mr Gunn regarded this as impertinence, and sent Smilley to the headmaster to be caned. After that, he bullied Smilley into doing problems "the normal way."
In the same story, Graves records a curious anecdote about himself. One summer evening, as he was sitting behind the cricket pavilion (and presumably in a deeply relaxed state of mind, like T.E. Lawrence and Mark Bredin), he received "a sudden celestial illumination . . . It occurred to me that I knew everything . . . I remember letting my mind range rapidly over all the familiar subjects of knowledge; only to find that this was no foolish fancy. I did know everything. To be plain: though conscious of having come less than a third of the way along the path of formal education . . . I nevertheless held the key to truth in my hand, and could use it to open any lock or door. Mine was no religious or philosophical theory, but a simple way of looking sideways at disorderly facts so as to make perfect sense of them.
This, of course, is precisely what existentialism wants to do and precisely what I am trying to do in this article: to "look sideways" at the disorderly facts of human existence and try to find some way of making sense of them. Graves, apparently, did it when he was fifteen. He says that he tried out his insight "on various obstinate locks" and found that they all opened smoothly. The insight was still intact when he woke up the next day. But when he tried to record it in the back of an exercise book, "my mind went too fast for my pen." He had another try later, but the insight had vanished.
It is worth looking a little more closely into this mystery. There are certain numbers called "primes," which cannot be divided by any other number without leaving a remainder-numbers like 3, 5, 7, and 11. Nine is not a prime because it can be divided exactly. The actual number of primes is infinite, but if a number is very large, there is no way of telling whether it is a prime or not-except by a long and painful process of dividing every small number into it. Yet a Canadian "calculating prodigy" named Zerah Colburn was asked whether a certain ten digit number was a prime, and replied after a moment: "No, it can be divided by 641."
There is no logical way of doing this. The psychiatrist Oliver Sacks has described a pair of subnormal twins in a New York mental hospital who amuse themselves by swapping twenty-four figure primes. Obviously the twins somehow rise into the air, like birds, over the whole number-field, and instantly see which number is a prime and which is not.
I would suggest that the ability that enabled Mark Bredin to "know" that his taxi would be struck by another taxi is closely related to the ability of Zerah Colburn and Sacks's twins, and that both are related to T.E. Lawrence's feeling on the morning when "the senses awoke before the intellect."
Now long before I became interested in the occult, I had been fascinated by another example of the powers that lie "below the iceberg." (I say "below the iceberg" rather than "below the visible part of the iceberg" because it has always seemed to me that man's hidden powers are located in the sea below the iceberg as much as in the iceberg itself.) As everyone knows, Proust's vast novel A la recherche du temps perdu sprang from a single incident in his childhood, just as Graves's theories in The White Goddess sprang from his experience behind the cricket pavilion. One day, feeling tired and depressed, Proust's hero is offered by his mother a small cake (called a madeleine) dipped in herb tea. As he tastes it he experiences an exquisite sensation of sheer happiness. "I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal." After taking another bite, he recalls what has caused this feeling of power and happiness: the madeleine had revived memories of his childhood in a small country town called Combray, where his Aunt Leonie used to give him a taste of her own madeleine dipped in the same herb tea.
Glimpses of the Depths
Why should this make him feel so happy? Because it reminded him of the depths below the iceberg. He had been feeling bored and depressed-in other words, superficial. Now he catches a glimpse of the depths of his own mind, and of its hidden powers. He also realizes that if only he could learn the "trick" of bringing back this feeling, he would never be unhappy again. This is why he sets out to revive it by writing his enormous autobiographical novel. Yet this deliberate intellectual activity fails. When he catches other glimpses of this magical feeling of power and strength, it is always by accident, when he is thinking of something else.
In the tenth volume of his Study of History, Arnold Toynbee describes several occasions on which he also had these strange glimpses into the reality of the past-not his own past, but that of history. On each of these occasions, he actually seemed to see the past, as if he had been transported by a time machine. On one of these occasions, he seemed to see the battle of Pharsalus, which had taken place in 197 BC, and saw some horsemen-of whose identity he was ignorant-galloping away from the massacre. It seems clear from his description that he felt this was not "imagination," but some kind of glimpse of the past like Mark Bredin's glimpse of the future. (In Beyond the Occult I cite many other examples of more distant glimpses of the future which proved to be accurate.)
On a snowy day in Washington in 1966, thinking about this curious ability to "make real" other times and other places, I labelled it "Faculty X." But Faculty X should not be regarded as some paranormal faculty. It is simply the opposite of feeling "mediocre, accidental, mortal," which all of us feel when we are tired and depressed, and which Sartre calls "contingency." And whenever Faculty X awakens, it tells us that we are not contingent, not mediocre, accidental, mortal. Our powers are far greater than we realize.
In The Occult, I had pointed out that animals seem to possess all kinds of "paranormal" powers. The wife of the Scottish poet Hugh McDiarmid told me that her dog knows when her husband will return from a long journey, and goes and sits at the end of their lane several days before he arrives. On one occasion, the dog knew he was going to return before he did-circumstances had caused him to make a sudden decision to return home.
Jungle Sensitiveness
In his book Man Eaters of Kumaon, the tiger hunter Jim Corbett describes how he came to develop a faculty which he called "jungle sensitiveness," which told him when he was in danger. I argue that all our remote ancestors possessed such a faculty, and that we have gradually lost it because we do not need it. Yet many people have not lost it. The archaeologist Clarence Weiant described how the Montagnais Indians of eastern Canada are able to contact distant friends and relatives by telepathy. When they wish to make contact, the Indians go into a remote hut in the forest, and build up the necessary psychic energy ("mana") through meditation. Then the relative would hear his voice-distance made no difference.
Now it is obvious that it is simpler to pick up the telephone when we want to contact a distant relative. Yet this does not mean that picking up the telephone is "just as good" as contacting him or her through clairaudience. The Indian who is able to call upon these faculties from the depths of his own mind has an understanding of nature, a sense of connection with the rest of the universe, and a deeper knowledge of himself, that the rest of us have lost.
What has happened is obvious. Even towards the end of the nineteenth century, the English poet Matthew Arnold was mourning that Victorian man no longer had access to "Wordsworth's healing power," while Tennyson was complaining that science had destroyed faith and left man in an empty universe, trapped in his own smallness. But the problem had started long before the nineteenth century-perhaps when Euclid systematized geometry and Archimedes rolled a weight down an inclined plane. This kind of knowledge-which Graves called "solar knowledge"-gradually eclipsed man's "lunar knowledge" or his intuitive awareness of the hidden part of the iceberg.
This was the problem that I had discussed in the second volume of The Outsider (called in England Religion and the Rebel.) Now, in Beyond the Occult, I attempted to bring together this philosophy of "Outsiderism" and the insights I had gained from the study of "the occult."
The New Synthesis
Yet I began to write the book reluctantly, feeling that I was merely regurgitating something I had already expressed in previous books. But I soon realized I was creating a new synthesis. The problem of human beings is that it is possible to "know" something without really knowing it. The adult Proust thought he "knew" he was a child in Combray, but the madeleine taught him that this "adult" knowledge was superficial. I thought I knew the ideas I had expressed in books like The Outsider and The Occult. Writing about them again made me realize that my knowledge of them was superficial. In order to really know something we must meditate upon it until we have absorbed it into our being. (I have to confess that even writing this article has once again made me aware of this truth.)
Beyond the Occult is an attempt to draw together all the insights I have discussed in this article, and many more-particularly the insights of those who have had sudden "mystical" experiences. They all teach us the same thing: that our "ordinary" consciousness of ourselves is superficial and deceptive. We are all like Simone de Beauvoir, looking in the mirror and "feeling that we can never grasp ourselves as an entire object."
Here is a typical example of one of these experiences. A girl describes how, when she was sixteen, she set out to walk up a lane towards a wood. "I was not feeling particularly happy or sad, just ordinary." As she stood in a cornfield looking towards the wood, everything suddenly changed. "Everything surrounding me was this bright, sparkling light, like sun on frosty snow, like a million diamonds, and there was no cornfield, no trees, no sky, this light was everywhere . . . The feeling was indescribable, but I have never experienced anything in the years that followed that can compare with that glorious moment; it was blissful, uplifting, I felt open-mouthed wonder. Then the tops of the tree became visible once again, then a piece of sky and gradually the light was no more, and the cornfield was spread before me. I stood there for a long time, trying in vain to make it come back, but I only saw it once; but I know in my heart it is still there-and here-around us."
The girl-who describes this in a book called Seeing the Invisible (which consists of letters about mysticism written to the Alister Hardy Foundation)-obviously had an experience which, in some ways, resembled that of Proust. Something "triggered" this marvellous perception of sparkling light. And she remains convinced that "it is still there"-that our everyday consciousness somehow filters it out, just as if we were wearing a pair of dark glasses.
It is, of course, deeply frustrating that we cannot learn how to contact these depths "below the iceberg" at will. Yet-as I have tried to show-it is not as difficult as it sounds.
The conclusion I have reached over the years are as follows. The romantics of the nineteenth century had many of these "glimpses," because they knew how to "relax." (The girl in the anecdote does not say so, but it is clear that she was deeply relaxed.) But because these romantics were inclined to weakness-like Samuel Beckett most of them could see no reason for getting out of bed-they failed to grasp the most important clue: that such experiences bring a feeling of strength, and that the best way to achieve them is certainly not to indulge in weakness and self-pity. Abraham Maslow, who called such moments "peak experiences," discovered that his "peakers" were usually strong and healthy people who coped well with their lives.
Snowbound
In Beyond the Occult, I described an interesting example of how I succeeded in achieving "higher consciousness" for most of an afternoon in 1979.
It was the New Year, and I had gone to a remote farmhouse in Devon to give a lecture to a group of extra-mural students. During that evening it began to snow, and by the following morning the snow was so thick that it would have been impossible to drive back home. I was forced to stay there another night. The following morning, the weather forecast announced more snow, and it was obvious that I might be unable to leave for a week. I determined to try to escape, and a group of us began to clear the snow in the farmyard with shovels. When the farmyard was clear, each of us tried to drive our cars up the slope that led to the gate; mine was the only car whose tires would grip the slippery surface.
There was still half a mile of snow-covered farm track between the farmyard and the main road. I would drive a few yards, then get out and help to shovel snow. At one point, I even risked driving straight across a field to avoid a long bend in the road. And finally, after several hours of hard work, I walked back to the farmhouse to eat some lunch and collect my bags. Then I walked back to the main gate, and began the long drive back home.
Yet even now it was impossible to relax my vigilance, because the narrow country roads were covered in snow, and it was impossible to see the ditch on either side. It would have been easy to drive off the road and become stranded again, perhaps all night. So I sat forward in my seat, peering out of the windscreen, and focusing all my concentration.
Several hours later, I arrived at the main road, where heavy traffic had turned the snow into muddy slush, and it was possible to relax and drive normally again. And it was now that I realized that I was full of a sense of power and concentration. Everything I looked at was obviously fascinating, and I had a sense of meanings stretching around me into the distance. Everything I saw reminded me of something else-for example, of Christmases in my childhood. It was as if my normally narrow and limited consciousness had been widened and deepened by concentration, until the whole world was seen to be fascinating. It taught me that "higher consciousness," or "positive consciousness," can be achieved by an act of focused concentration.
Plato at the Dentist's
In Beyond The Occult, I also quote the experiences of a writer called R. H. Ward, whose book about psychedelic drugs, A Drug Taker's Notes, is a modern classic. Early in the book, Ward describes how he once had a remarkable experience under dental gas. He writes: "I passed, after the first few inhalations of the gas, directly into a state of consciousness far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary consciousness." He had a sense of enormously extended vision, so that his mind was aware of all kinds of things that would normally have been beyond his natural range of awareness. Like Robert Graves behind the cricket pavilion, he seemed to understand everything. And as he continued "rising," he seemed to pass through a "region of ideas" where "All was idea, and form did not exist." And he adds: "It seems to me very interesting that one should thus, in a dentist's chair and in the twentieth century, receive practical confirmation of the theories of Plato." In short, Ward had seen the truth of Plato's notion that the universe consists of two worlds: a world of becoming, and a world of true being. He had also seen the falseness of Heraclitus's belief that the only world is the world of becoming.
If we think once more of Dostoevsky in front of the firing squad, we can see the expectation of death galvanized him to a new level of attention, in which he concentrated the mind as never before-and as I concentrated my mind as I drove through the snow. It is this act of concentration-like pulling back a spring loaded piston, or the string of a crossbow-that gives the mind the ability to become aware of the immense depths that lie "below the iceberg."
POSTSCRIPT
After finishing this piece, I took my dog for a walk in the woods. I was tired-I had been working since early morning-yet in spite of my tiredness, I experienced a powerful sense of beauty and euphoria that filled me with optimism. This, I realized, was because the contents of this piece had penetrated to my unconscious mind, and made me clearly aware that the world of everyday consciousness is only the surface of the mind. For me, this underlines the certainty I have always felt: freedom does not have to come from some religious or yogic discipline. The most reliable way of achieving it is through intellect, through knowledge.