The Essential Colin Wilson (43 page)

Yes, the problem begins with the individual, because in an ideal society you could still not guarantee an end to all crimes of frustration. It is obviously necessary, as Schumacher says, to think in terms of religion. Bernard Shaw was one of the first people to recognize this clearly, and to state, 'Modern man cannot live without a religion.' Arnold Toynbee made this one of the central theses in
A Study of History
. And Schumacher is the third important thinker of this century to put his finger on this basic problem.

Now religion is fundamentally something that you live by. Whitehead once said, 'Religion is what a man does with his solitude.' Religion is also the ability to induce in oneself a certain inner peace. For me, one of the most important sections in
The Outsider
deals with the novelist Hermann Hesse. (In fact, I was the first person to write about him extensively in England.) I was particularly excited by his novel
Steppenwolf
, which seemed to me to express this central problem with unparalleled clarity. Steppenwolf is a would-be writer who is fairly well-off; he lives in a comfortable room in a comfortable lodging house; he has plenty of books and gramophone records; he has a girl-friend; in fact, he seems to have most of the things that a human being needs to be happy. And yet, for some reason, Steppenwolf is not happy. His problem is a continual feeling of boredom and frustration, that inability to break through to forms of deeper mental intensity. He feels that his consciousness is somehow boring and lukewarm. In the early pages of the book, he describes his frustration and the occasional temptation to commit suicide. Then, later that day, he wanders along to a restaurant for a meat, and as he tastes his first glass of Moselle he experiences that curious sense of deep relaxation that Maslow calls the peak experience. He says, 'The golden bubble burst and I was reminded of Mozart and the stars.'

And this goes to the heart of the matter. If
only
there were a way in which you could push a button and induce that experience instantly—make the golden bubble burst so that you are reminded of Mozart and the stars. If only we could do that—if we could even find some drug or chemical that would do it—then we would have solved the basic problem of modern civilization. No more crime, no more war, no more frustration and hatred. Aldous Huxley, you may remember, even suggested that we should all take mescalin for that purpose: but the trouble with mescalin is that it makes you so ecstatically lazy and happy that you don't want to do anything at all. A pile of unwashed dishes looks so beautiful that nobody would ever want to wash them. So clearly, this is not the answer. Yet you can see that, if we could find a method of inducing Maslow's peak experience at will, we
would
have found the answer to this problem.

Schumacher makes another point of fundamental importance in
Guide for the Perplexed
, in the section called 'Adaequatio': that the problem is that the information that comes in through our senses is
not
reality. He points out that we see not only with our eyes, but with a great part of our mental equipment as well. And since this mental equipment varies greatly from person to person, there are inevitably many things some people can see while others can't. 'Or to put it differently, for which some people are adequate while others are not. When the level of the knower is not adequate to the level of the object of knowledge, the result is not factual error but something much more serious: an inadequate and impoverished view of reality.' Now there, it seems to me, Schumacher has gone to the very heart of the fundamental problem of human existence.

This problem has to do with our senses, and with the curiously 'impoverished view of reality' that we hold. And this, I could see from my
Outsider
days, was the heart of the problem. Steppenwolf solves it for a moment by taking a drink of Moselle, but wine doesn't always work, and if you rely upon it you become an alcoholic. Wine, mescalin, pot—all these chemical ways of solving the problem tend to let us down half the time. This was something Maslow discovered when he and a psychologist called Hoffer were treating alcoholics. Maslow concluded that alcoholics are very often more intelligent than the average person, and consequently they find the world more dreary and boring than most people; like Wordsworth, they find that 'the world is too much with them'. They drink because drinking gives them a brief peak experience, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes you can feel completely ecstatic on a glass of wine or beer; at other times you can drink a whole bottle of gin and still feel depressed. The alcoholic nevertheless keeps on drinking because this to him seems to be the only way back to the peak experience. And, of course, as they become more resistant to the alcohol, they need larger quantities, and the problem is complicated by a feeling of guilt . . .

Now Maslow started from the assumption that the alcoholic was probably more intelligent than the average person. He would ask, 'What kind of things gave you a peak experience before you became an alcoholic?' Some would mention visual things—paintings, beautiful scenery; others, poetry, music, ballet. What Maslow and Hoffer then did was to administer a psychedelic drug which produced a kind of artificial 'lift', and then would induce intense peak experiences by means of colours blending on a screen, music, poetry read aloud, and so on. They discovered that they got something like an 85 per cent permanent cure rate. Why? Because the alcoholic was like a man on a kind of descending escalator, doing his best to induce peak experiences but remaining essentially passive, allowing the will to remain half-asleep—waiting, in other words, for the alcohol to carry him like a magic carpet into the peak experience. But as soon as he was carried into a far more intense peak experience by the mescalin and poetry, he would recognize clearly that the peak experience depends upon
health
, and that health in turn depends upon a powerful will-drive.

Just as the body feels healthiest when you are taking plenty of exercise, so the emotions feel healthiest when the will is well exercised. And as soon as the alcoholic recognized this, he instantly ceased to be an alcoholic. In a sense you could say that he changed drugs, and used will instead of alcohol. Now this seems to me to be getting very close to a solution of the problem of 'impoverished reality'.

Graham Greene stumbled upon another clue, which he describes in an essay called
The Revolver in the Corner Cupboard
. He describes how, in his teens, his schoolmasters became alarmed because he appeared to dislike sport and sent him to a psychiatrist. After six months of analysis, Greene was much better 'socially adjusted', but found that he was in a state of total depression. He said that everything he looked at appeared to be grey and dull. He could look at some scene which he saw
visually
to be beautiful but about which he felt nothing whatever. He was in this state of inner-deadness when he discovered in a corner cupboard a revolver belonging to his older brother. He took this on to Berkhamsted Common and played Russian roulette—put one bullet in the chambers, pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger, When there just a click, he looked down the barrel and saw that the bullet had now come into position. So he had missed death by just one chamber. He said that he instantly experienced an overwhelming feeling of ecstasy and happiness. He said, 'It was as if a light had been turned on and I suddenly saw that life is infinitely beautiful'.

I was excited by this story, when I came across it in my early teens, because it shows so clearly what goes wrong with us. When we are bored and tired we are, so to speak, 'spread out'; the will is slack; you are passive, like an exhausted swimmer lying on a beach. The moment Greene pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger, he went into violent tension. And when he heard the click, he relaxed. And
that
is the essence of the peak experience. It is a tensing of the will, followed by total relaxation. A movement of contraction followed by expansion. Moreover, the relaxation doesn't work unless you become tense first. It is like those handbrakes on old cars, where you have to pull it towards you and tighten it before it can be released.

Using Greene's insight, I evolved a technique for inducing peak experiences. What I did was this: I would take a pencil and hold it up against a blank wall. I would concentrate intently on the pencil until I saw nothing but the pencil; then I'd let go completely, until I could see the whole background of the wall behind the pencil. Then I would concentrate intently on the pencil again, and then let it go again, and so on. When I had done that about ten times, I would begin to feel a kind of pain behind the eyes. When you feel that pain, press on as hard as you can, because you are almost there. Two or three more times and suddenly you relax totally into the peak experience. And if you do it with total conviction, it always works. Not long ago in Finland, I was explaining this technique to a class, and in the following session I explained to them about Wilhelm Reich's breathing techniques. Reich said that in order to breathe properly you must take a deep breath, then allow it to go out first of all from the chest, then from the stomach, and then finally from the genitals. As Reich made his patients do this, he would say, 'Out, down, through.' I was explaining the Reichian breathing to them as we all lay around on the floor and then, on the spur of the moment, I decided to try and combine it with the 'pencil trick'. Breathing slowly and deeply, we held the pencil up against the ceiling, concentrated intently, and then let go. To my astonishment, the two combined perfectly. Within a few minutes, I felt almost as if I had floated up from the floor towards the ceiling. The curious thing is that the total concentration of the pencil exercise and the total relaxation of the breathing exercise somehow combine in the most peculiar way to produce an instant peak experience. We all lay there quietly for well over half an hour, until I looked at my watch and said, 'Hey! We're missing lunch!'

But why does it work? I discovered the answer only a few years ago, when I was reading a book about the split-brain experiments of Roger Sperry and Michael Gazzaniga. I must admit it came to me as a revelation.

What it amounts to is this. If you could take off the top of your head and look down on the brain, it would look like a walnut joined together by a kind of bridge. This bridge is called the
corpus callosum
, or commissure—a block of nerve fibres. In the 1930s it was discovered that severing the commissure would prevent epileptic attacks: it appears to prevent the electrical storm from passing from one side of the brain to the other. Oddly enough, this operation appeared to make no difference whatever to the patient. No one could quite understand why this should be so. Somebody even suggested that the only purpose of the
corpus callosum
is to stop the brain from sagging in the middle. It wasn't until Roger Sperry began repeating these experiments in the 1950s that he discovered that, in fact, there
is
a basic difference in split-brain patients. The difference is that you become two people.

We have known for about a century that the left side of the brain deals with speech, reason, coping with the external world. The right side of the brain deals with pattern recognition and intuition. To put it crudely, the left side is a scientist and the right an artist. For some odd reason, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa—no one knows why. We could also say—I am deliberately oversimplifying—that the left cerebral hemisphere controls the right eye and the right hemisphere controls the left eye. Now if you show a split-brain patient an apple with the left eye and an orange with the right—so that one cannot see what the other is looking at—and ask, 'What have I just shown you?', he will reply, 'An orange'. But if you say, 'Write with your left hand what I have just shown you', he will write, 'Apple'. And if you say, 'What have you just written?', he would reply, 'Apple'. In the same way, a patient who was shown a dirty picture with the right side of her brain blushed. When asked why she was blushing, she said, 'I don't know.' One split-brain patient tried to embrace his wife with his right hand while the left tried to push her away. Another tried to do up his flies with his right hand—connected to the logical half of the brain—while the left tried to undo them. Obviously, the two different sides of the brain had completely different intentions.

Now you observe that when the patient is asked, 'What have
you
seen?', it is the left side of the brain that answers the question. In other words, the person you call 'you' lives in the left side of your head. The person who lives over there in the right-hand side is a total stranger. Now you will say that this is obviously untrue because
we
are not split-brain patients. Yet, in an important sense, we are. Mozart said, for example, that melodies were always walking straight into his head fully formed. What he meant was: melodies were walking out of his right brain into the part of the brain in which
he
lived. And this is true for all of us. Although we are vaguely aware of the right brain and its activities, we are not closely
connected
to it. This explains, for example, why you become self-conscious if someone looks over your shoulder when you are writing. When you are engaged in any interesting task, you 'forget yourself' and become absorbed in what you are doing. The left and right brain enter into close collaboration, the right supplying the intuition, the left supplying the mechanical skills. When someone looks over your shoulder, the left becomes 'self-conscious' and promptly loses contact with the right. The flow of meaning stops, and you feel somehow 'stranded' in the present moment. The same thing would happen if you tried to play a piano attending
to
your fingers. You would play very badly indeed. A good pianist ignores his fingers—he attends
from
the fingers to the music. Attending
to
things is a sure way of screwing yourself up. You must attend
from
them to the meaning.