Supernatural (89 page)

At Level 6—’magic consciousness’—we seem to be floating in a sea of meaning and find it hard to understand how we could ever have been unhappy, or how anyone else could be.
Even the worst experiences of the past now seem deeply interesting attempts to teach us something, essential steps on the upward path to this sense of optimism and control.
The only tragedy in the universe seems to be that so many people lack the courage and sheer dogged stubbornness to
keep going
and so miss this literally ‘heavenly’ sense of wonder and reconciliation.

Level 7, with its sense of freedom, of mastery over time, is only a short step from the mystical level, just as Level 6—’magic’—is only a short step from Faculty X.
A sudden additional effort can carry the mind over the threshold into that strange realm where ‘separateness’ is seen to be a delusion caused by fatigue and everything is
seen
to be connected.
One of the most encouraging things about this insight into the levels is that each level is only a short and easy step away from the previous one.

Now if you look at this list you will notice an interesting thing about Level 4—our ordinary everyday consciousness.
At the ‘bottom end’ it is still dull and heavy, like waking up with a hangover.
Life is no longer horrible and meaningless, as it is in Level 3 (‘nausea’), but it is still an uphill struggle.
But as you continue to fight back, your ‘engine’ warms up, and you begin to experience an increasing sense of optimism, a feeling that obstacles are being overcome.
‘Three down, seven still to go.’
And a point comes—about halfway—when suddenly you are enjoying life, and even the struggle gives you pleasure, like a strong swimmer who enjoys battling against a powerful current.

The turning-point is Level 3½.
And three and a half is precisely half of seven.
Until you reach 3½, life is an uphill struggle.
After 3½, it is all downhill.
And at the top end of Level 4, we are bubbling with optimism, and what Maslow calls the peak experience, the experience of overflowing happiness, carries us up to Level 5, ‘holiday consciousness’.
You could say that the peak experience is a spark that leaps the spark-gap between levels 4 and 5.

In other words, below 3½ you are toiling uphill;
beyond
Level Level 3½, it is all downhill.
The odd thing is that most healthy people spend their days fairly close to Level 3½.
If they made a slightly larger effort, they would be over the top of the hill.

Let me put this another way.
You could say that, for practical purposes, you are normally 50% robot, and 50% what you might call ‘real you’.
When you feel tired, you sink to 51% robot, and 49% ‘real you’.
On the other hand, when you feel cheerful and optimistic, you are 49% robot and 51% real you.
In moods of great optimism—setting out on holiday, for example—you become 52% real you and only 48% robot.

That ‘turning point’—the 50/50 level—is also what we have called ‘Level 3½’.

And now it should be possible to see the answer to what I called ‘the Outsider problem’ (in the first chapter of this book).
Those 19th-century Outsiders had marvellous glimpses of sheer delight, when it seemed self-evident that the whole universe is marvellous.
Then they woke up the next morning, and the old depression was back again.
They told themelves that the ‘moments of delight’ were an illusion, or that they are bound to disappear as the ‘shades of the prison house begin to close’ around us.
This is why so many of them committed suicide or died of wasting diseases that were caused by discouragement.

What we can see clearly is that they were making a simple mistake.
The ‘moments of delight’ are not an illusion.
They are a perfectly normal consequence of raising consciousness above level 3½.

But how do we
do
that?

The answer is obvious.
The romantics were defeated by their sense of gloom, by their conviction that life is a trap and that ‘you can’t win’.
It was this conviction that kept them below Level 3½.
Notice that as soon as you
feel
optimistic, your energy levels rise.
And if you were in a 50/50 state, the optimism has the effect of pushing you up to 51% ‘real you’ and 49% robot.
The mere
knowledge
that we are so close to the ‘turning point’ is enough to push us ‘over the top of the hill’.
Maslow noticed that people who constantly had ‘peak experiences’ were all cheerful and healthy people.
The peak experiences made them cheerful and healthy, and the health made them have peak experiences.
The romantics, on the other hand, were convinced that life is one long defeat, so they immersed themselves in gloom and self-pity.
There is no better formula for remaining below Level 3½.
They were in a state of ‘negative feedback’.

This is the fundamental reason that I am convinced that the human race is on the point of an evolutionary leap to a higher stage.
Our evolution has been brought about by the long, slow acquisition of knowledge, from the moment one of our ape-like ancestors learned to use a sharp stone as a hatchet.
Now we have acquired the most important piece of knowledge of all: the knowledge of how close we are to Level 3½.
What it means, in effect, is that human beings are close to the level at which they will
recognise
that they possess the power to remain above Level 3½.

And precisely how do we
do
this—in terms of everyday living?
Again, we all know the answer without realising that we know it.
When I walk out of my room and into a busy street, I am inclined to wince at the impact of ‘everyday reality’.
I am, in effect, 49% ‘real me’.
But I
can
make that small additional effort to cope with reality, to expect positive instead of negative things to happen—in short, to
push
myself up that extra 1% that will make all the difference and, having achieved it, to push myself up another 1%, beyond Level 3½.

At this point a personal experience may help to make my point.
In 1987, I was on a lecture tour in Japan.
I do not enjoy travel—I have the natural Outsider’s preference for my own home—and I found that it was important to make a conscious effort not to allow myself to slip into a state of boredom and indifference in the crowded streets of Tokyo or Hiroshima.
One evening, after a particularly crowded day, my wife and I were being taken to a theatrical performance by our interpreter.
I would greatly have preferred to stay in my hotel room and rest, and have to admit that I had allowed myself to lose interest in the evening ahead.
I had slipped, without noticing it, into a state of ‘upside-downness’.

The theatre was in a very long street, with metal barriers on either side to force pedestrians to cross at the traffic light.
But the traffic light was several hundred yards away.
The street was empty, and our interpreter ducked underneath the barrier, and beckoned us to follow her.
As we started to cross, the lights changed, and a sports car roared towards us at 50 miles an hour.
I jerked myself out of my state of indifference, grabbed my wife’s arm, and hauled her across the road as fast as I could.
And that ‘awakening’ made me aware that I had permitted myself to slip into a state of upside-downness.
As I sat in the theatre a few minutes later, I reflected that if my boredom had resulted in my wife being struck by a sports car, I would never have forgiven myself.
My ‘indifference’ vanished, and I made a determined attempt to give my full attention to the play.

Early the next morning, we were on our way out of Tokyo, being taken to some distant place in the country; and roaring along the crowded freeway at 70 miles an hour, I reflected on the incident of the evening before, and on my recognition that it is of vital importance never to allow ourselves to sink into states of bored resentment.
And now I recalled an image that I had used in the final chaper of my book
The Quest for Wilhelm Reich.
It had struck me that ‘ordinary consciousness’ has a substratum of boredom.
It is disorganised, like billiard balls spread at random over a billiard table.
As soon as something arouses our interest, we make a mental effort which pulls all the billiard balls together into the centre of the table.
When we lose interest, or become tired, they spread all over the tabletop again.

If we become deeply absorbed, we make an additional effort of concentration, and this seems to have the odd effect of compressing the billiard balls still further, so they seem to climb on top of one another, forming a second tier.
And at this point, I become aware of the power of my own mind.
I realise that if I made a still greater effort of concentration, I could make the billiard balls climb up into a third layer, and even a fourth.
What is so interesting about this procedure is that as I become increasingly ‘absorbed’ (T.E.
Lawrence once remarked ‘Happiness is absorption’) my mental power seems to increase, and I can see that if I could maintain this level of energy, it should be possible to make the billiard balls form into a pyramid.
It is a process of ‘positive feedback’, where interest releases further energy and excitement, and the excitement deepens our interest.
And, that being so, the pyramid need
never collapse.
The billiard balls ‘spread out’ only because we lose vigilance.
We
forget.
And if we could once achieve that intense level of excitement and interest, the universe would be so obviously fascinating that we would never be tempted to allow our attention to lapse.

As we drove along the Tokyo freeway, I experienced a state of intense excitement.
I felt that I had achieved a ‘bird’s eye view’ of the problem of human existence—what I sometimes call ‘a hole in one’.
(I do not play golf, but the analogy seems apt.) This, I saw, was
the
answer, the key to the next phase of man’s evolution.
And because I was able to formulate that insight so clearly
in words,
it has remained with me ever since.
I recognise that this is the solution of the ‘Outsider problem’ that preoccupied me throughout my teens.

You may feel that this problem hardly concerns the average ‘insider’ who goes about his daily business.
This is untrue.
The Outsider problem permeates our civilisation.
Every serious thinker and artist in the world has to struggle with it to some extent.
And most of them are still trapped in the pessimism that led so many of the romantics to despair.
Think of any ‘serious’ writer of the 20th century, and you will immediately recognise that basic pessimism—Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Musil, Valery, Hemingway, Sartre, Camus, Greene, Beckett, Derrida and the rest.
It permeates the attitudes of philosophers, painters and musicians.
When our ancestors look back on the 20th century, they will shake their heads and say: ‘They lived in a negative culture’.

Consider again what happens when you have been threatened by some crisis, which is then averted.
You not only experience a sense of relief.
You also experience a curious sense of insight, of what G.K.
Chesterton called ‘absurd good news’.
Hans Keller, the director of BBC music programmes, described how he had been in Germany during the late 1930s.
As a Jew, he was in danger of disappearing into a concentration camp.
He records that he prayed: ‘O God, let me escape from Germany and I promise I will never be unhappy again for the rest of my life.’
It suddenly seemed to him that it would be
so easy
to remain ecstatically happy for the rest of his life,
if only
he could escape from the Nazis.
In fact, he did not keep his promise—he was generally known as a rather touchy and oversensitive little man.
But then, human beings have never learned to keep that particular promise—not because they are lazy, but because they don’t yet know how.

But think what happens when you are in some situation of crisis.
Suddenly, you are giving your full attention to the crisis.
And you feel that, when the crisis is over, you will continue to give the same full attention to life without crisis.
This is why Keller thought it would be ‘so easy’ to be happy for the rest of his life.

Think of being in bed on a freezing winter morning, when you have to get up in ten minutes.
The bed has never seemed so warm and comfortable.
Yet on a Sunday, when you can stay in bed as long as you like, you can no longer re-create that feeling of comfort and warmth.
Why?

Because when you have to get up in ten minutes, it is as if you are looking in a mirror, conscious of yourself and of your situation.
It is the same for a man standing on the scaffold, waiting to be hanged.
He is paying total attention to his situation.

We have returned to John Cowper Powys and the subject of
Chapter One
.
As Wolf Solent sits in the railway carriage, he is paying total attention to his situation—to the seaside posters with their fly spots, to the telegraph poles flashing past the window.
Yet he is also totally aware of himself, like a man relaxing in a warm bath.

Whenever human beings experience that deep sense of happiness and meaning, it is because they are ‘paying attention’.
If you eat a meal without paying attention, you do not enjoy it.
But the reason that you can experience that sense of expanding happiness when setting out on a journey is that you are paying attention, and attention is somehow
expanding,
so you are aware of far more than your immediate situation.
In some strange way, you are aware of other times and other places.
It is almost as if you are in two places at once.
This is what human consciousness
should
be like all the time.
This is what it
will
be like when we have taken that next evolutionary step.

When I was a child, I was often told to chew my food properly, or it would give me indigestion.
What I am now pointing out is that when we are happy, it is because we are chewing our experience properly—as you do in bed on a cold winter morning.
Otherwise, we tend to swallow experience unchewed, and it does no good.
This is what Socrates meant when he said: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living.’