Supernatural (87 page)

He records many other strange insights in his ‘mystical’ states, including one that seems typical of their paradoxical nature:

‘I will try to describe in short what I met with in this strange world in which I saw myself.

‘What I first noticed, simultaneously with the “division of myself into two”, was that the relation between the objective and the subjective was broken, entirely altered, and took certain forms incomprehensible to us.
But “objective” and “subjective” are only words.
I do not wish to hide behind these words, but I wish to describe as exactly as possible what I really felt.
For this purpose I must explain what it is that I call “objective” and “subjective”.
My hand, the pen with which I write, the table, these are objective phenomena.
My thoughts, my mental images, the pictures of my imagination, these are subjective phenomena.
The world is divided for us along these lines when we are in our ordinary state of consciousness, and all our ordinary orientation works along the lines of this division.
In the new state all this was completely upset.
First of all we are accustomed to the constancy of the relation between the subjective and the objective—what is objective is always objective, what is subjective is always subjective.
Here I saw that the objective and the subjective could change places.
The one could become the other.
It is very difficult to express this.
The habitual mistrust of the subjective disappeared; every thought, every feeling, every image, was immediately objectified in real substantial forms which differed in no way from the forms of objective phenomena; and at the same time objective phenomena somehow disappeared, lost all reality, appeared entirely subjective, fictitious, invented, having no real existence.

‘This was the first experience.
Further, in trying to describe this strange world in which I saw myself, I must say that it resembled more than anything a world of
very complicated mathematical relations.

‘Imagine a world in which all relations of quantities, from the simplest to the most complicated, have a form.

‘Certainly it is easy to say “imagine such a world”.

‘I understand perfectly well that to “imagine” it is impossible.
Yet at the same time what I am saying is the closest approximation to the truth which can be made.

‘“A world of mathematical relations”—this means a world in which everything is connected, in which nothing exists separately and in which at the same time the relations between things have a real existence apart from the things themselves; or, possibly, “things” do not even exist and only “relations” exist.’

Equally fascinating is his observation that, in this state of intense excitement (he also mentions that he was seething with a sense of sheer joy and delight), time seemed to
slow down.
It became impossible to communicate with anyone because his mind was moving so much faster than his words:

‘I tried my experiments under the most varied conditions and in the most varied surroundings.
Gradually I became convinced that it was best to be alone.
Verification of the experiments, that is, observation by another person, or the recording of the experiences at the very moment they took place, was quite impossible.
In any case I never obtained any results in this way.

‘When I tried having someone near me during these experiments, I found that no kind of conversation could be carried on.
I began to say something, but between the first and second words of my sentence such an enormous number of ideas occurred to me and passed before me, that the two words were so widely separated as to make it impossible to find any connection between them.
And the third word I usually forgot before it was pronounced, and in trying to recall it I found a million new ideas, but completely forgot where I had begun, I remember for instance the beginning of a sentence:

‘“I said yesterday” .
.
.

‘No sooner had I pronounced the word “I” than a number of ideas began to turn in my head about the meaning of the word, in a philosophical, in a psychological and in every other sense.
This was all so important, so new and profound, that when I pronounced the word “said”, I could not understand in the least what I meant by it.
Tearing myself away with difficulty from the first cycle of thoughts about “I”, I passed to the idea “said”, and immediately found in it an infinite content.
The idea of speech, the possibility of expressing thoughts in words, the past tense of the verb, each of these ideas produced an explosion of thoughts, conjectures, comparisons and associations.
Thus, when I pronounced the word “yesterday” I was already quite unable to understand why I had said it.
But it in its turn immediately dragged me into the depths of the problems of time, of past, present and future, and before me such possibilities of approach to these problems began to open up that my breath was taken away.

‘It was precisely these attempts at conversation, made in these strange states of consciousness, which gave me the sensation of change in time which is described by almost everyone who has made experiments like mine.
This is a feeling of the extraordinary lengthening of time, in which seconds seem to be years or decades.

‘Nevertheless, the usual feeling of time did not disappear; only together with it or within it there appeared as it were another feeling of time, and two moments of ordinary time, like two words of my sentence, could be separated by long periods of another time.

‘I remember how much I was struck by this sensation the first time I had it.
My companion was saying something.
Between each sound of his voice, between each movement of his lips, long periods of time passed.
When he had finished a short sentence, the meaning of which did not reach me at all, I felt I had lived through so much during that time that we should never be able to understand one another again, that I had gone too far from him.
It seemed to me that we were still able to speak and to a certain extent understand one another at the beginning of this sentence, but by the end it had become quite impossible, because there were no means of conveying to him all that I had lived through in between.’

It is worth mentioning, at this point, the experiences of another ‘experimental mystic’, R.H.
Ward, the author of a remarkable work called
A Drug-Taker’s Notes.
The book is mainly devoted to his accounts of ‘controlled’ experiments with LSD; but, in an earlier chapter, he also describes an earlier experience under dental gas—nitrous oxide:

‘On this occasion it seemed to me that I passed, after the first few inhalations of the gas, directly into a state of consciousness already far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary waking consciousness, and that I then passed progressively upwards (for there was an actual sensation of upward movement) into finer and finer degrees of this heightened awareness.
But although one must write of it in terms of time, time had no place in the experience.
In one sense it lasted far longer than the short period between inhaling the gas and “coming round”, lasted indeed for an eternity, and in another sense it took no time at all.
In terms of time, however, the first phase of the experience was comparatively brief (though perhaps it would be more exact to say that it was comparatively unimportant): a confusion of sensations in which, while I was already hardly aware of my body, I was still able to think in the ordinary way, and with some surprise that I was not being made unconscious by the gas I was inhaling, but very much the reverse.
For already I knew, I understood, I actually was, far more than I normally knew, understood and was.
I put it in this way because I had no impression of suddenly receiving new knowledge, understanding and being.
Rather I felt that I was rediscovering these things, which had once been mine, but which I had lost many years before.
While it was altogether strange, this new condition was also familiar; it was even in some sense my rightful condition.
Meanwhile, what was becoming unreal, slow and clumsy was the ordinary world which I was leaving behind, but of whose shadowy existence I was still vaguely aware; indeed it presented itself to me as being like the receding shadow which fades across a landscape when the sun comes out.’

Like Ouspensky, Ward records the sheer happiness of the experience, its emotional richness:

‘As for the emotional tone of this phase of the experience, I can only describe it as being compounded of wonder, joy, and a wholly peaceful
inevitableness
for which there is no name.
This sensation, which yet had nothing to do with my already anaesthetized senses, had an emotional depth which does not belong to waking sensation, and to which our waking word-values do not belong, so that it is all but indescribable.
Meanwhile, the extraordinary feeling of
the rightness of things
increased, became more poignant, and was accompanied as it did so by a peculiar sensation of upward and bodiless flight.
This sense of upward movement continued until it seemed to me that I was rapidly passing through what I afterwards told myself was a “region of ideas”.
The emphasis had shifted, that is to say, from the emotional to the intellectual.’

It is clear that this ‘region of ideas’ corresponds to Ouspensky’s world of mathematical relations.
Ward compares it to Plato’s world of forms or ideas—recalling Ouspensky’s comment that ‘a fork is an atom of a Great Fork’.

Both Ouspensky and Ward describe the disappointment of returning to ordinary consciousness.
This is Ward:

‘Thereafter the upward flight became a downward flight; whereas one had risen into the pure light of the sun, now one fell again towards the shadows of earth.
I was once more aware of being in the “region of ideas”, and this time, as consciousness diminished towards the consciousness of everyday life (or, paradoxically, as my anaesthetized body “regained consciousness”), the “region of ideas” took form; on its nether fringes the symbols we need in the waking state if we are to comprehend “intuition” were supplied.
In a flash, as it seemed to me,
I saw the meaning;
the meaning, that is, of the universe, of life on earth, and of man.
As the darkness of what we flatter ourselves is consciousness closed in upon me, and even as I began dimly to be aware that I was “coming to”, the sum of things appeared before my inward eyes as a
living geometrical figure,
an infinitely complicated and infinitely simple arrangement of continually moving, continually changing golden lines on a background of darkness.
(“Geometry,” it has often been recorded, is a common form for such visions to take.)’ [We note here again the need to fall back on a mathematical analogy.]

Ouspensky expresses an even stronger sense of rejection of ‘normal consciousness’:

‘The strangest thing in all these experiences was the coming back, the return to the ordinary state, to the state which we call life.
This was something very similar to dying or to what I thought dying must be.

‘Usually this coming back occurred when I woke up in the morning after an interesting experiment the night before.
The experiments almost always ended in sleep.
During this sleep I evidently passed into the usual state and awoke in the ordinary world, in the world in which we awake every morning.
But this world contained something extraordinarily oppressive, it was incredibly empty, colourless and lifeless.
It was as though everything in it was wooden, as if it was an enormous wooden machine with creaking wooden wheels, wooden thoughts, wooden moods, wooden sensations; everything was terribly slow, scarcely moved, or moved with a melancholy wooden creaking.
Everything was dead, soulless, feelingless.

‘They were terrible, these moments of awakening in an unreal world after a real one, in a dead world after a living, in a limited world, cut into small pieces, after an infinite and entire world.’

Ouspensky’s own vision of an ‘entire world’ had been oddly reminiscent of Ward’s living geometrical figure:

‘Once when I was in the state into which my experiments brought me, I asked myself: “What is the world?”

‘Immediately I saw a semblance of some big flower, like a rose or a lotus, the petals of which were continually unfolding from the middle, growing, increasing in size, reaching the outside of the flower and then in some way again returning to the middle and starting again at the beginning.
Words in no way express it.
In this flower there was an incredible quantity of light, movement, colour, music, emotion, agitation, knowledge, intelligence, mathematics, and continuous unceasing growth.
And while I was looking at this flower
someone
seemed to explain to me that this was the “World” or “Brahma” in its clearest aspect and in the nearest possible approximation to what it is in reality—“If the approximation were made still nearer, it would be Brahma himself, as he is,” said the voice.’

The main difference between the two accounts is that Ward describes only ‘mystical’ insights, while Ouspensky—no doubt because he repeated the experiment so often—also had certain experiences that are closer to some of the paranormal experiences described in this book.
He heard ‘voices’, and was able to ask them questions.
From the beginning he mistrusted the voices; but on at least one occasion, when he asked them a question about alchemy, they were able to tell him the name of the book in which, in fact, he found the answer to his question (although, he adds, ‘not the complete answer’.)

In these states, Ouspensky also found that he was able, to some extent, to foresee the future—or rather, that some inner voice was able to predict it.
Thinking about going to Moscow that Easter, he was suddenly ‘told’ that he would not be able to go, and he was able to foresee the chain of events that would prevent him from going.
It was only just before Easter, when these events began to happen—and prevented him from going to Moscow—that he remembered he had known about it in advance.
In states of intensified consciousness—as Alan Vaughan discovered—the mind is able to see future events.

The sense of world-rejection experienced by both Ouspensky and Ward as they returned to ‘normality’ raises again one of the most basic of all questions: what might be called ‘the great Outsider question’.
In Shaw’s
John Bull’s Other Island,
the mystic Father Keegan explains that he has discovered the answer to the mystery of human suffering: this world is actually Hell, and we are all here to expiate sins commited in some other existence.
And for the epigraph of my first book,
The Outsider,
I had chosen another passage from the same play: