The Essential Colin Wilson (44 page)

I could recognize the same process in my activity as a writer. When I first started writing, I found that trying to capture intuitions on paper seemed to strangle the life out of them. When I went back to look at what I'd written the next morning, it wasn't there anymore. The words seemed dead and lifeless. The meaning had evaporated. I even began to suspect that words are a straightjacket that cripple the intuitions. But I kept on trying, because that was all there was to do, and eventually I found that I got good at it. One day, I re-read what I'd written the night before, and it was still there. And after that, I recognized that good writing was an interplay between two halves of the brain, very much like a game of tennis. The right produces the insights and the left turns them into words. If the left verbalizes an insight with particular neatness, the right gets excited and says, 'Yes, yes, that's exactly what I meant!' And the left would say, 'Really? Thank you', and would proceed to do it even better. And then suddenly the two of them were working together like a couple of top-class tennis players, or like two lumberjacks at either end of a double-handled saw. States like this are obviously what we call inspiration—and they consist of perfect cooperation between the right and the left.

Another interesting thing discovered by Sperry is that the left brain works much quicker than the right. The left is the go-getter. It is turned towards the external world: it copes with reality. The right, on the other hand, appears to be turned inwards, towards our inner world. Its business is to supply us with energy, with strength and purpose; hence, of course, the peak experience.

But because the left is fast and the right is slow, they find some difficulty in reaching a state of empathy. This explains why the peak experiences are relatively rare. The right saunters along slowly with its hands in its pockets; the left walks with a kind of nervous haste. The result is that there is soon a large gap between them and they can no longer hear one another. There seem to be two ways of getting the two halves to work at the same speed. One is to make the left go slower, the other is to make the right go faster. We can make the left go slower by meditation and relaxation. We can make the right go faster by deliberately working ourselves into a state of excitement—this is the aim of African drumming or the repetitious beat of pop music.

Now when this happens you can compare the situation to two trains running on parallel tracks that are suddenly running side by side, so that the people can lean out of the windows and talk to one another. Here you can see we are beginning to grasp the mechanics of the peak experience.

Our basic problem, as you can see, is that the 'you' who lives in the left side of the brain is not even aware that it has this immensely powerful co-worker. You notice this particularly when you feel tense and anxious: the more anxious you become, the more the 'you' tends to take over, and the more it becomes separated from the source of power in the right brain. The more anxious we become, the weaker we become. You can see why I say that we are, in a factual sense, all split-brain patients. In the peak experiences, or those curious moments of total happiness and relaxation, we simply recognize that we have a powerful supporter, a companion who can take half the work from our shoulders.

For here is the important point: the right half of the brain is the creator of energy. He is the one who keeps us supplied with energy and vitality. You could compare the left and right halves to Laurel and Hardy in the old films. The left brain is Ollie, the fat one and the leader of the two. The right brain is much more vague and easy-going—that's Stan. When you wake up on a dull Monday morning, 'you' wake up—that is, Ollie wakes up—and he looks out of the window and thinks, 'Oh God, it's Monday and it's raining . . . ' Stan overhears him and Stan is, unfortunately, immensely
suggestible
. So he promptly sinks into depression. 'Oh God, it's
Monday
and it's
raining
. . .' For the trouble with Stan is that he is inclined to over-react. When Ollie is cheerful, Stan is delighted, when Ollie is gloomy, Stan is almost suicidal. But since Stan is in charge of the energy supply, he stops sending up energy when he feels depressed. So when Ollie goes down to breakfast, he feels curiously low and depressed. So he cuts himself while shaving, and trips on the pavement and drops his umbrella, and thinks, 'This is just one of those days when everything goes wrong . . . ' And again Stan overhears him and plunges into even deeper gloom. In short, you will have what you might call a negative feedback situation, in which the misery of one keeps reinforcing the misery of the other.

Conversely, when a child wakes up on Christmas morning, his 'Ollie' says, 'Marvellous, it's Christmas!' And from then on, everything reinforces his feeling of delight and optimism: the decorations on the Christmas tree, the smell of cooking, the Christmas music on the radio . . . And both Stan and Ollie finally relax into such a state of trustful happiness that life seems totally transformed. Suddenly, everything is marvellous, and all the problems of yesterday appear trivial and quite unimportant. If we could cling on to this state of mind, human beings would become gods within the next century. And the key undoubtedly lies in the 'feedback mechanism' between Stan and Ollie.

Of course, it is true that there are drugs that will induce this state of intensified consciousness: Thomas De Quincey did it with laudanum. Yet neither alcohol nor drugs are a solution. Their basic effect is to produce a kind of animal consciousness. If you could get inside the skin of a cow or a dog, you would feel just as if you'd had three or four large whiskies. The world would seem pleasantly warm and real. They probably experience permanently the state that we experience only occasionally on beautifully spring mornings. You could say that animals are permanently drunk.

This, incidentally, could be the reason that animals appear to have certain paranormal powers—for example, second-sight. The wife of the Scottish poet Hugh McDiarmid told me that she always knew when he was coming back from a long journey because the dog would go and sit at the end of the lane waiting for him a couple of days before he arrived. Human beings can also achieve these powers when they relax completely; I have noticed this again and again in myself. I am totally ESP-thick until I am either very relaxed or very excited, and when that happens, the two halves are obviously in collaboration and my right begins to tell me the answers. Three or four years ago, I discovered to my astonishment that I could dowse. When a friend offered me a dowsing rod, I told him these things never work for me. He asked me to show him how I held it, and then said, 'You are holding it the wrong way. Twist the two ends in your hands so that there's a spring on the rod.' I did what he said, and walked towards a standing stone in the circle called the Merry Maidens. To my astonishment, the rod suddenly shot up. I was convinced that I had done it accidentally by twisting it, so I walked towards the next one—and it shot up again. Every tine I went between the standing stones the dowsing rod twisted in my hands. It was quite obvious that something inside me was reacting to something in the ground or in the stones, but I, who live in my left brain, could feel nothing whatever. What was happening, I suspect, was that my muscles were tensing unconsciously—the striped muscles that are in the control of the right brain. The message was coming from the standing stones into my right brain, and the right brain was telling me that I was near something interesting by causing my muscles to convulse.

This seems to be confirmed by an experiment devised by Sperry. He tried flashing red and green lights at random into the blind eye—the left eye—of split-brain patients, and would ask, 'What colour have you just seen?' Of course, the split-brain patient had no idea. But if he was allowed a second guess he would always get it right, because if he said 'red' and the colour was actually green, he'd convulse as if someone had kicked him under the table. The right brain had heard the wrong guess, and was telling him so by making his muscles convulse—as in dowsing.

All this is to say that we have inside us—as Plato declared—a being who knows far more than
we
do, and who is perfectly willing to tell us. He is also perfectly willing to send us up any amount of energy; for where energy is concerned, he is the quartermaster whose job is to keep us supplied. Then why doesn't he always do so? Because, more often than not, the telephone line between the two halves is out of order. Tension isolates us in the left brain and separates us from the other half.

There is, of course, another side to this problem. When a man is drunk, he cannot insert the key into the keyhole. He is in a pleasant state of right-brain relaxation—he may even have a beautiful bird's-eye view of the universe—but his ability to concentrate microscopically on details no longer works. We can pay for right-brain relaxation with a certain loss of precision and accuracy, just as we pay for left-brain precision with a loss of right-brain relaxation. It is as if all of us had a telescope attached to one eye and a microscope to the other—the aim being to see into the distance and to be able to study things close-up. But when you look through a microscope, you close one eye. We tend to go around with one eye permanently closed, so we lose our distance-vision. Life becomes a kind of permanent worm's-eye view, an endless, boring close-upness, as unsatisfactory as going into a picture gallery and being forced to peer at all the pictures with your nose only an inch from the canvas. It is only in those curious moments of peak experience that we open both eyes and suddenly can see into the distance as well as what it is in front of our noses. On these occasions, we see the near and the far simultaneously.

L. H. Myers wrote a novel called
The Near and the
Far
which expresses this very precisely. At the beginning of the novel, the young Prince Jali has travelled over the desert with his father to some congress of princes called by Akbar the Great. Standing on the battlements of Akbar's castle, he looks out over the desert and thinks, 'What a pity that the desert
looks
so beautiful and feels so exhausting to walk over.' It is as if there were two deserts, one of which is a glory to the eye and the other one a weariness to the foot. Isn't it a pity that we are unable to grasp the mystery and delight of the 'far'? Unfortunately, if you tried to grasp the ecstasy of the distance by rushing downstairs and out of doors, you would just get your shoes full of sand. It appears, Myers said, to be impossible to reconcile the near and the far.

Well, we can see that it is not. This is what the two halves of the brain were
intended
to do. When they work together, we can grasp the near and the far simultaneously.

They have another purpose which is even more interesting. In a book called
The Occult
, I wrote about what I called 'Faculty X'. In his
Study of History
, Arnold Toynbee described the experience that led him to begin writing the book. He had been climbing Mount Taygetus in Greece, and was sitting on the ruined walls of the citadel of Mystra, staring out over the plain of Sparta, when suddenly it struck him like a revelation that a few hundred years ago a hoard of barbarians had poured over that wall and destroyed the town, and that ever since then it had been a ruin. This realization was so powerful that he could almost see the barbarians clambering over the wall. Now this sudden curious sense of total reality is what I call Faculty X. Chesterton once said that we say thank you when someone passes us the salt, but we don't really
mean
it. We say the earth is round, but we don't really
mean
it, even though it is true. But when the astronauts went into space, they could say 'the earth is round' and
mean
it. That is Faculty X. When Proust tasted a biscuit dipped in tea, it filled him with a curious feeling of delight as it flooded him with memories of his childhood. He wrote, 'I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.' And when he tried to remember why it had caused him such pleasure, he recalled that when he was a child in Combray, his aunt had always given him a cake dipped in her herb tea when he went to see her, and this taste had suddenly revived the whole of his childhood. That is to say, a moment before he tasted the madeleine, he could
say
, 'Yes, I was a child in Combray', but he wouldn't have meant it. As soon as he tasted the madeleine he could taste it and
mean
it: Faculty X.

We can see what has happened. The unconscious part of the brain—and the right appears to be the gateway to the unconscious—has stored up memories of everything that has ever happened to us. But this library of tape recordings is not accessible to you unless you can relax sufficiently to somehow clear the telephone line. Or, to use my other analogy, get the two trains running at the same speed.

As absurd as it sounds, the reason we have two identical halves in the brain is so that we can be in two different places at the same time. We should be capable of being in the present
and somewhere else
. When we are stranded in the present, we lose all sense of perspective. We become lost in mere material reality. Our powers remain blocked and passive until we can achieve that double glimpse of the near and the far. In these moments we cease to be trapped in the worm's-eye view and a bird's-eye view.

And because we are almost permanently trapped in a worm's-eye view, our instinctive feelings about the world tend to be negative. Normal consciousness can be compared to those nightmares when we try to run, but our legs seem too heavy. It is only in those moments of double-consciousness, the near and the far, that we seem to contact some source of power inside ourselves. Hence Proust's comment: 'I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.'
The underpinning of everyday consciousness is basically negative
.

I can recall sitting in a cinema as a child, and as the film ended suddenly realizing that I was feeling intensely happy and optimistic. I thought, 'Why am I feeling so happy?' and then remembered, 'Of course, we broke up from school today, and it's the beginning of the August holiday.' I was feeling happy, and yet the happiness had retreated into my subconscious mind. Not, please note, into the
unconscious—
only into that twilight realm between consciousness and the unconscious: the subconscious. You could compare these states of subconscious optimism to a kind of underfloor lighting which creates a kind of rosy glow and makes us feel happy and relaxed. The playwright Granville Barker called it: 'The secret life'. Healthy people have their underfloor lighting permanently switched on—which is why they find it so easy to have peak experiences. But consider again Graham Greene's experience of Russian roulette. When he pulled the trigger and there was just a click, 'It was as if a light had been turned on and I saw that all life was infinitely beautiful.' He had switched on his underfloor lighting by deliberately inducing a crisis.