The Essential Colin Wilson (24 page)

'Oh yes!' I said, after feeling a pang pass through me. 'I am in F's wine shop.'

The officer's face was distorted with alarm, and he wept.

'What is the matter?' I said to him.

'That was dreadful,' he answered. (pp. 92-93)

We may, of course, dismiss the whole thing as Strindberg's imagination, excited by emotional stress. On the other hand, this event is consistent with the theory of 'psychic faculties' that I have tried to outline, and has the ring of truth. (Strindberg is a remarkably honest man, in spite of his neuroses, as the reader discovers when it is possible to check his version of events against someone else's.) Again, he was exhausted—physically and emotionally. He was pushing himself to his limits as he exerted his powers of persuasion. And, as he remarks in the same book: 'In the great crises of life, when existence itself is threatened, the soul attains transcendent powers.'

One of the most interesting and consistent accounts of these powers is to be found in a book called
Psychic Self Defense
(1930), by 'Dion Fortune', a Freudian psychologist whose real name was Violet Firth. At the age of twenty (in 1911) she was working in a school, under a domineering principal, who took a dislike to her, and (so Violet Firth believed) directed a stream of psychic malevolence at her, using yogic and hypnotic techniques. The result was traumatic, a feeling of bewilderment and misery greater than would be caused by an actual physical attack. A need for self-analysis led her to study psychology (on which she wrote a number of books); later, she came to feel that even the theories of Freud and Jung fail to do justice to the complexity of the human mind, and became a student of occultism. (She had always possessed some degree of mediumistic powers.) She joined the Order of the Golden Dawn (a magical society that will be discussed in the second part of this book), and had further psychic clashes with Mrs. Mathers, the wife of its founder. As a result of these alarming experiences, she came to believe that the human mind can repel the hostile psychic forces that emanate (often unconsciously) from malevolent people. Even more interesting is the implication that a healthy and optimistic mind repels ordinary misfortune, and that 'accident proneness' or general bad luck are the result of a psyche made vulnerable by defeat or stagnation.

And at this point, I must outline my own basic theory of these powers of the mind.

In Johnson's
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia
, there is a scene in which the hero looks at the peaceful pastoral scenery of the Happy Valley where he lives, and wonders why he cannot be happy like the sheep and cows. He reflects gloomily: 'I can discover within me no power of perception that is not glutted with its proper pleasure, yet I do not feel myself delighted.
Man has surely some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification
, or he has some desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy.' (Chapter 2)

The italics are my own. The 'latent sense' is man's evolutionary appetite, the desire to make contact with reality. But that is not all. Who has not experienced this strange frustration that comes in moments of pleasure and fulfillment? As a child, I had this feeling about water. If my parents took me on a bus excursion, I used to crane out of the window every time we went over a bridge; something about large sheets of water excited a painful desire that I found incomprehensible. For if I actually approached the water, what could I
do
to satisfy this feeling? Drink it? Swim in it? So when I first read the passage from
Rasselas
, I understood immediately what Johnson meant by 'some latent sense . . . or desires
distinct from sense
which must be satisfied before he can be happy.'

I labeled this 'latent sense' Faculty X. And I came to see that Faculty X has something to do with 'reality'. In
Swann's Way
Proust describes how he tasted a madeleine dipped in tea, and was suddenly reminded of his childhood in Combray—reminded with such an intensity that for a moment he was actually there. 'An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses . . . And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory . . . I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal . . . '

Five minutes earlier, he could have said, 'Yes, I was a child in Combray,' and no doubt described it in detail; but the madeleine suddenly meant that he could say it
and mean it
. Chesterton says, 'We say thank you when someone passes us the salt, but we don't mean it. We say the earth is round, but we don't mean it, even though it's true.' We say something and mean it only when Faculty X is awake, that painful reaching-beyond-the-senses. Faculty X is the key to all poetic and mystical experience; when it awakens, life suddenly takes on a new, poignant quality. Faust is about to commit suicide in weariness and despair when he hears the Easter Bells; they bring back his childhood, and suddenly Faculty X is awake, and he knows that suicide is the ultimate laughable absurdity.

Faculty X is simply that latent power that human beings possess
to reach beyond the present
. After all, we know perfectly well that the past is as real as the present, and that New York and Singapore and Lhasa and Stepney Green are all as real as this place I happen to be in at the moment.
Yet my senses do not agree
. They assure me that this place, here and now, is far more real than any other place or any other time. Only in certain moments of great inner intensity do I know this to be a lie. Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, and it is the possession of it—fragmentary and uncertain though it is—that distinguishes man from all other animals.

But if the oppressive reality of this place and time is an illusion, so is my sense of being uniquely here, now. 'I am not here; neither am I elsewhere,' says Krishna in the
Bhagavad Gita
. So that if Faculty X can make Strindberg clearly aware of the reality of a place several hundreds of miles away, is it not conceivable that it might 'transport' him there in another sense?

It would be a mistake to think of Faculty X as an 'occult' faculty. It is not; it is the power to grasp reality, and it unites the two halves of man's mind, conscious and subconscious.

Think: what happens if a piece of music or a smell of woodsmoke suddenly reminds me of something that happened ten years ago? It is like touching the leg of a dead frog with an electric wire. My mind convulses and contracts, suddenly grasping the
reality
of that past time as though it were the present. The same thing happens to Marcel in Proust's novel
Swann's Way
when he tastes a madeleine dipped in tea—his past floods back as a reality. What happens is that our normally lazy and diffused consciousness
focuses
, as I might-clench my fist. The tune or smell only provides the stimulus; my inner strength does the rest—
an inner strength of which I am normally unaware
.

A few years ago, psychologists performed a classic experiment with a cat. A wire was connected to the nerve between the cat's ear and its brain, and the other end of the wire was connected to a dial for measuring electrical impulses. When a loud noise sounded near the cat's ear, the needle of the dial swung over violently. Then a cage of mice was placed in front of the cat. It watched them intently. The same loud noise was sounded close to its ear. But the needle did not stir. The cat was so intent on the mice that it ignored the sound—and somehow it 'switched off' the physical impulse between the ear and the brain.
It chose to focus on something else
.

All living creatures have this power to 'focus' on something that interests them, and 'switch off' everything else. Someone accustomed to a modern city probably cuts out as much as 99 per cent of the stimuli that fall on the senses. We all know about this. But what we have not yet grasped is the extraordinary power we possess in being able to focus upon particular aspects of reality. This power
is
Faculty X, but at the moment, we hardly make use of it, unaware of its potentialities.

It is worth asking the question: What is consciousness
for
? When you are deeply asleep, you have no consciousness. When you are very tired, your consciousness is like a dim light that hardly illuminates anything. When you are wide awake and excited, consciousness seems to increase in sheer candle-power. It's purpose is to illuminate reality, to reach out into its recesses, and thus to enable us to act upon it and transform it. It is obvious that our basic aim should be to increase its candle-power. When it is low, reality becomes 'unreal'; as it becomes stronger, reality becomes 'realer': Faculty X.

One of the clearest examples of the working of Faculty X can be found in the tenth volume of Arnold Toynbee's
Study of History
, in which he explains how he came to write that work. He speaks of the sense of 'reality' that suddenly comes to historians: 'The writer of the present study had an authentic minor personal experience of the kind on the 23rd May, 1912, as he sat musing on the summit of the citadel of Mistrá, with the sheer wall of Mount Taÿgetus bounding his horizon in the western quarter of the compass, towards which he was bound, and the open vale of Sparta stretching away in the opposite eastern quarter, from which he had made his way that morning. . . '

'The sensuous experience that activated his historical imagination was not a sound of liturgical chanting; it was the sight of the ruins among which he had wound his way upwards to the peak; and this spectacle had been appalling, for in this shattered fairy city Time had stood still since that spring of A.D. 1821 in which Mistrá had been laid desolate . . . One April morning, out of the blue, the avalanche of wild highlanders from the Màni had overwhelmed her; her citizens had been forced to flee for their lives and had been despoiled and massacred as they fled; her deserted mansions had been sacked; and her ruins had been left desolate from that day to this. . . '

What struck Toynbee on this occasion was not simply the question of 'the cruel riddle of Mankind's crimes and follies', but the total
reality
of the scene conjured up by his imagination. He mentions half a dozen other experiences in which there was this same hallucinatory effect of reality. Reading how one of the proscribed leaders of the Italian Confederacy was refused help by his wife, and committed suicide in front of her eyes, he was 'transported, in a flash, across the gulf of Time and Space from Oxford in A.D. 1911 to Teanum in 80 B.C., to find himself in a back yard on a dark night witnessing a personal tragedy. . . ' He records similar experiences—all very brief—when reading Bernal Diaz describing the Spaniards' first sight of Tenochtitlan, Villehardouin describing his first sight of Constantinople during the Crusades, a Greek soldier describing how he tried to save a girl from rape. And finally, an experience in which the dividing line between Faculty X and mystical experience becomes blurred:

On each of the six occasions just recorded, the writer had been rapt into a momentary communion with the actors in a particular historic event through the effect upon his imagination of a sudden arresting view of the scene . . . But there was another occasion on which he had been vouchsafed a larger and a stranger experience. In London in the southern section of the Buckingham Palace Road, walking southward along the pavement skirting the west wall of Victoria Station, the writer once, one afternoon not long after the date of the First World War . . . had found himself in communion, not just with this or that episode in History, but with all that had been, and was, and was to come. In that instant he was directly aware of the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current, and of his own life welling like a wave in the flow of this vast tide. The experience lasted long enough for him to take visual note of the Edwardian red brick surface and white stone facings of the station wall gliding past on his left, and to wonder—half amazed and half amused—why this incongruously prosaic scene should have been the physical setting of a mental illumination. An instant later, the communion had ceased, and the dreamer was back again in the everyday cockney world which was his native social milieu . . .[1]

These pages of Toynbee are among the clearest descriptions of the operation of Faculty X that exist, and they underline the point I have tried to make. When I am half asleep, my sense of reality is restricted to myself and my immediate surroundings. The more awake I am, the further it stretches. But what we call 'waking consciousness' is not usually a great deal better than sleep. We are still wrapped in a passive, sluggish daydream. But this is not because there is some natural limit to consciousness, but only because we remain unaware that it can be stretched. We are like dogs who think they are on a chain when in fact they are free.

Faculty X is not a 'sixth sense', but an ordinary potentiality of consciousness. And it should be clear from what I have written above that it is the key not only to so-called occult experience, but to the whole future evolution of the human race.

From
Mysteries,
, 1978

At the time when I was still collecting materials for this book, I had a nasty but curiously fascinating experience: a series of attacks of 'panic anxiety' that brought me close to nervous breakdown. What surprised me most was that I was not depressed or worried at the time. I was working hard, and therefore under a certain amount of strain, but I seemed to be taking it all in my stride. For the past eighteen months I had been involved on the editorial board of a kind of encyclopedia of crime; but as every meeting ended in disagreement, it began to look as if the whole project would have to be abandoned. Then, at short notice, the publisher decided to go ahead. Suddenly, everything had to be completed in a few months; and I, as co-ordinator, was asked to produce around a hundred articles—3,000 words each—at a rate of seven a week. I began to work at the typewriter for eight or nine hours every day and tried to unwind in the evenings with a bottle of wine and a pile of gramophone records.