Revisiting Colin Wilson
“The Will feeds on enormous vistas; deprived of them, it collapses”
“What does he expect his obituaries to say? ‘I don’t really care. I said at the end of Voyage to a Beginning [his first autobiography, written 40 years ago] that I regarded myself as the most important writer of the 20th century and I’d be a fool if I didn’t know it, and a coward if I didn’t say it. And I still feel that. With a little luck, the world will agree with me by the time I die.’”
I am sitting down to read, “The Occult, A History,” by Colin Wilson. I have read it before but it was long ago, and Wilson shares some primary sources with me, such as Psychological Commentaries on the Teachings of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. His fellow eccentric Englishman, John Cleese, told a biographer that the collected lectures on these teachings, by Maurice Nicoll, are his favorite set of books. He said that people with those books on their shelf are not like other people.
The central focus of Nicoll’s Commentaries is esoteric Christianity, which can’t be understood by those who can’t read symbols.
The enormous vistas Wilson refers to are the big picture, which is from the right hemisphere. This is what is perceived directly, and the meaning has not been separated out from it. It is one thing, before elements are separated out, and one of those elements is the initial response. When it is described it becomes distorted, deliberately or not. As Brugh Joy used to say, “The mouth lies. It does not know that it lies. But it lies.” This is a similar observation to, “The part which speaks does not know, and the part that knows does not speak.”
Because of this original dance of responses, there is a level of direct communication as the responses synchronize. This happens in the present moment. Everything else follows on, but nothing can change that primary communication of the two systems. It is at that level where the truth cannot be separated from the quality of the response. The quality of the response is esthetic, and in it the truth and the good are one thing.
Curly (Jack Palance), in City Slickers: The meaning of life is one thing. For Wilson, this one thing is developing Faculty X.
Wilson has long been preoccupied with a state of consciousness in which opposites resolve, and we are, at least for the moment, in the state of grace described by W.B. Yeats:
“I sat, a solitary man, In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless.”
Wilson was absorbed by the idea that this state of consciousness is a faculty which can be developed by the exercise of the will toward a higher level of vibration. He was versed in Gurdjieff and in the esoteric image of the Ray of Creation, which changes to higher frequencies as you move toward the sun frequency and beyond it to the stars. Or, you go back to the moon frequency, which is very weak vibration.
The expanded state of consciousness is an escape from a prison of mechanical consciousness, and the density of laws which proliferate at the lower end of the spectrum. We get boxed into our containers, our belief systems, our personal history, religious doctrine, etc, and the more laws we fall under in this regard, the less freedom we experience. Our mental health declines as we try to process a lot of different things at once, and claustrophobia becomes paranoia. When just one thing is being processed, the shift is like from a goldfish bowl to a lake.
The entire system of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (like Tibetan Buddhism or pretty much any school of conscious evolution) is based in removing the static and aligning with this Ray of Creation. The static is sometimes compared to parasites who use up the energy, so that we never experience the higher vibrations. It’s like a virus which drains the energy but keeps you alive so that it knows where its next meal is coming from. Burroughs famously said words are a virus. He was on to this.
Wilson explored the idea in a novel, “The Mind Parasites.” In the Gurdjieff system the parasites are called, “I’s,” because they gain access to our energy by using the word, “I.” Because we identify them as being ourselves, we can’t separate from them. It is an engineering problem, much the same as described by Castaneda’s Don Juan.
He called the parasites self-importance, and said if you get rid of this self importance, the energy it was consuming is freed, and will accomplish the transformation by itself. Ego level consciousness is not doing it and cannot do it. We stop wasting energy on self importance, and it does us. In the Gurdjieff school it is “non identification with negative emotion,” and a small “i” is negative emotion because it is one-sided. It doesn’t matter which side.
Nothing one-sided gives energy. It always consumes energy.
When we get into religious philosophy, the theory is that sacred impulses split time. I first heard this from Mircea Eliade, when reading about ritual time. He believed there is a form of recurrence when we participate in ritual. His concept is one of a mythological realm where the ritual is in eternal time. The snake dance exists in eternal time. When the ritual is performed it is performed in eternal time.
By “splitting time,” he meant that the human experience is split into sacred time and profane time.
My interpretation of this (confirmed by Iain McGilchrist) is that the right hemisphere is where the creative impulse, Blake’s one god, originates. It knows the big picture. It knows the past and future because it reads the patterns, and patterns play out the same way every time. If you want something different to happen, do something you would not ordinarily do.
Sacred time is the uncollapsed wave, the yin yang balance, the flow of the tao, the graces, poetry, literature; all these direct the attention to the possibility of moving the seat of consciousness to the right hemisphere, where we would have direct knowledge. With luck we’d do math like Rain Man and have the witty personality of Stephen Colbert.
We navigate by aligning with our own core, itself aligned with the source of life. What we know about this source is that life begins as cells which begin to vibrate together. This becomes the heart. It is the creative urge. This is why heart centering is the advanced, advanced, spiritual practice.
As above, so below
Death is the end of time, and without time there is no memory, if for no other reason than that it appears consciousness always moves toward increasing entropy. The Gurdjieff school of thought is that our lives are created as one thing, as a movie is created, and that, like a film, it plays in sequence over and over again, but we cannot remember it.
The practice of self-remembering requires the realization that eternal time is in the moment, and nowhere else. The esoteric meaning of the cross is the intersection of the eternal moment, (vertical line), with sequential time (horizontal line). The sacrifice is on the cross with the heart at the intersection of these lines.
The ability to focus the mind, by force of will, into oneness with this eternal moment, is, perhaps, the elusive Faculty X, the white whale of the most important writer of the 20th century. Just ask him.
(Adelia Ritchie said she had no idea that the cross was anything other than an instrument of torture. Esoteric Christianity is a school of self development, and has no interest in our dreadful toadying.)