Authors: Colin Wilson
But, as we have seen, the great problem seems to be that when ‘life’ descends into solid matter, it
loses its memory
.
It could be compared to a child who has been sent out on an errand, but who has forgotten his instructions halfway.
For human beings, this ‘forgetfulness’ leads to the feeling of being trapped in a dreary world of matter, and to Sartre’s conviction that ‘it is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die’.
Under the circumstances, it seems quite plain that the basic problem for the ‘life force’ is how to prevent us from forgetting our instructions, and wandering back home with nothing accomplished — or, as in the case of a Hitler or Jack the Ripper, leaving the world a great deal worse than we found it.
Let us consider this problem as though we were Higher
Intelligences — or Angels — sitting up in heaven, looking down on human beings, and wondering how we can find a permanent solution to this problem of ‘forgetfulness’.
The one thing on which we all agree is that the purpose of life is to increase its power over matter, to ‘enlarge the leak’ of freedom.
So the last thing we want is a race of creatures who feel that life is pointless and futile, and that the sooner they can escape from ‘this dim vast vale of tears’, the better.
Ideally, we want creatures who feel that life is immensely interesting and exciting, and that no problem need remain permanently insoluble.
We want creatures with an enormous ‘appetite for reality’.
And the trouble with these human beings is that they all
start out
full of the feeling that life is going to be marvellous, and that the world is ‘apparelled in celestial light’, and end up bored, disillusioned and defeated.
What makes it more annoying is that they are now
so close
to achieving their objective.
For hundreds of thousands of years, they have fought grimly against cold and starvation and predators.
Again and again, they have missed extinction only by the skin of their teeth.
Then they began to use their intelligence to make weapons to hunt their food, and to build weather-proof shelters, and from then on, life began to improve steadily.
They created civilisation, and although this involved two undesirable by-products — war and crime — they refused to be deterred, and gradually learned to make life more and more worth living.
Then they took one of their greatest steps forward, and created art and literature — the first steps towards the conquest of the world of the mind.
At last, it began to look as though they were close to achieving their basic purpose — an impregnable bridgehead in the world of matter.
Then a new and unexpected problem arose.
They began to grow
bored
with the civilisation their ancestors had built with so much labour.
The trouble, of course, was that it had all happened too quickly.
They had spent millions of years struggling for survival, and then achieved the security of civilisation overnight.
It left them bewildered and confused.
Instead of struggling for more consciousness, they began to choose the road of least resistance, and to waste their lives looking for immediate satisfactions.
Now in the remote past, the ‘Higher Intelligences’ had kept in touch with the human race through certain individuals who were highly sensitive ‘receiving sets’.
These people — called prophets and messiahs — could be
shown
the purpose of life
through mystical revelations, and then they used their enormous powers of persuasion to induce everyone to live as if the purpose of life was to earn a passport to heaven.
For thousands of years, this method of preventing human beings from ‘forgetting their instructions’ was immensely successful, and the great religions kept man working at the central aim of increasing human optimism and intelligence (for that, in the last analysis, is what it amounts to).
But the development of his intelligence caused man to outgrow his religions.
And the complexity of civilisation created more and more ‘drop-outs’, people who took it for granted that life is totally meaningless — a brief sojourn in prison, followed by oblivion.
There actually came a point, in the nineteenth century, when the steady increase in human knowledge led man to the conclusion that matter is the only reality …
It was at this point that a sub-committee of Angels decided to try out the idea of a more direct form of communication, to convince men that there
was
a life after death.
This experiment started in the 1840s, and in the form of a religious movement known as Spiritualism, it spread across the world.
Unfortunately, it tended to attract the wrong type of person — feeble-minded sentimentalists — and the scientists and philosophers remained aloof.
Later, another committee of Angels suggested the increasing use of the near-death experience as a ‘teaching method’, and this also achieved some success — but on far too small a scale to do much good.
Moreover, the whole Spiritualist project was undermined by the constant interference of mischievous ‘earth-bound spirits’ — the criminals, layabouts and juvenile delinquents of the ‘other world’ — who succeeded in creating widespread confusion.
On the whole, the Spiritualist experiment is not regarded by the Higher Intelligences as one of their more outstanding successes.
Which, of course, leaves us with the original question: how
can
human beings be prevented from ‘forgetting their instructions’ and wasting their lives?
This, we recognise instinctively, is the central question of human existence, the Life Question.
It is this instinctive recognition that explains why the evidence of spiritualism has made such a surprisingly small impact on the human race.
You would expect it to be a matter of passionate interest to every human being.
Dostoevsky wrote in
The Diary of a Writer:
‘There is only a single supreme idea on earth: the concept of the immortality of the human soul; all other profound ideas by which men live are only an extension of it.’ Yet
in the century and a half of its existence, spiritualism has made no real progress: it has merely marked time.
This is because we all feel, deep down, that the Death Question is of far less importance than the Life Question.
One thing is clear: that this matter of the Life Question is no longer a problem that concerns only the ‘Higher Intelligences’.
For more than a century now, human beings have also been applying their own intelligence to its solution.
(As we have seen, the Society for Psychical Research began when two philosophers asked whether the evidence for the paranormal might help to solve the ‘riddle of the Universe’.) Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietszche, Shaw, Jaspers, Camus and many others have made the Life Question — the ‘Lebensfrage’ — the central issue of their work.
(Even I have succeeded in making a small contribution.)
The outline of an answer is slowly beginning to emerge.
It is this.
Human beings have no problem maintaining a high degree of purpose when faced with emergencies or difficulties that threaten their existence.
And when this happens, we become aware of the actual mechanism of ‘enlarging the leak’ of freedom.
Whenever I am faced with some sudden challenge or danger, its first effect is to undermine my vitality.
Adrenalin rushes into my bloodstream, and my confidence drops several points.
Then I ‘steel myself’ to meet the problem; I summon energy, and discipline myself to face the challenge.
And in the moment I overcome the challenge, I experience a deep satisfaction, and a delightful sense of freedom.
I have, in fact, ‘enlarged the leak’.
And if I could spend my life facing interesting challenges, my self-control and my freedom would steadily increase.
And, as far as the Higher Intelligences are concerned, I would have done a thoroughly satisfactory job of widening the bridgehead.
In
A Criminal History of Mankind
, I speak of that initial response to a challenge — the rush of adrenalin — as ‘Force T’, the ‘T’ standing for tension.
The response to that challenge I call Force C — the ‘C’ standing for control.
This
is the central issue of human existence, the essence of the Life Question — increasing Force C to overcome Force T.
That is how we ‘enlarge the leak’.
And that explains, of course, why our most fundamental human impulse is to seek challenges.
When we lived in caves, or on the great African savannas, the problem never arose, for we had more than enough challenge to keep us up to the mark: this is why man has become the most successful
creature on earth.
But when he began to build cities, he already experienced the problem that was to become the greatest obstacle to his progress: ‘challenge-starvation’.
He responded to it by inventing war, which made his blood tingle and his heart beat faster.
In the succeeding six or seven thousand years, man has become the most aggressive and murderous creature the earth has ever seen — even in comparison with the flesh-eating dinosaurs and the sabre-toothed tiger.
He has also developed many less harmful ways of responding to challenge-starvation: climbing mountains, exploring the unknown, conquering nature.
But his enterprise has had precisely the effect he was trying to avoid: to make life less challenging.
And when life loses its challenge, it also loses its savour, and we begin to feel suffocated and bored.
The instinctive response — in adults as much as children — is to look around for some mischief to get into.
Boredom releases the destructive urge.
This is why one of the chief problems of Western civilisation in the last quarter of the twentieth century is the apparently ‘motiveless’ crime, ranging from vandalism and football hooliganism to mass murder.
Yet when we apply intelligence to this problem, the answer is plain enough.
It is mere force of habit that makes us crave a physical stimulus.
Think what happens when I face some interesting challenge.
I concentrate and set out to arouse my sleeping energies; then I set out to discipline these forces.
But there is, in fact, nothing to stop me from ‘arousing’ Force T by the same effort of concentration and will, and then setting out to control it.
In fact, saints and ascetics have always known this trick.
They have created their own challenges — fasting, meditating, tormenting the body — in order to strengthen the will.
Such exercises seem wilfully perverse until we recognise their purpose — to arouse Force T and subject it to Force C, thereby increasing the sense of freedom and widening the range of consciousness.
The methods of the saint strike most of us as disagreeably crude and painful.
And this is partly because we sense that they are unnecessarily strenuous.
The past two or three centuries have seen the development of a power with which our ancestors were barely acquainted: imagination.
Modern man takes it for granted because he has been exercising it since he was a baby: reading comic books, going to the cinema, watching television.
It is almost impossible for us to realise what life was like for a man of the fifteenth century.
From the moment he opened his
eyes in the morning, his mind was fixed on the purely practical world; by comparison with modern man, his power of imagination was as feeble as a baby’s hand compared with that of a grown man.
He had almost no ‘mental life’.
In this respect, man has increased his freedom enormously in the course of a few centuries.
(The invention of the novel in the eighteenth century was one of the most influential events in human history.) Nowadays, almost every child is familiar with the experience of becoming so totally absorbed in a story that he feels as if he is
living
in the Africa of
King Solomon’s Mines
or the France of
The Three Musketeers
.
And whenever we experience that same absorption, we know that
this
is the basic solution of the Life Question.
Imagination, properly directed and controlled, is a far more efficient means of arousing Force T and Force C than the self-flagellation of the saint, or the self-chosen discomforts of the round-the-world yachtsman.
Most people will feel doubtful about this statement.
This is because we tend to think of imagination as another name for daydreaming or fantasy — in other words, telling yourself lies.
This is an error.
Imagination is, in fact, basically the power of
escaping the present moment
.
This may sound an equally dubious activity, until we give it a little thought.
The central problem of human beings is that they are
trapped
in the present moment; their horizon is limited by ‘close-upness’.
When a child is utterly bored, he feels that the present moment is somehow unchangeable, that it will go on forever.
And although they ought to know better, adults are also subject to the same curious delusion.
Experience should have taught them that they are stronger than the matter that surrounds them — that, as Wells says, ‘if you don’t like your life, you can change it’.
Yet the moment they become bored, they become subject to that familiar sense of being trapped, like a fly stuck on flypaper.
They
know
that this is absurd, that the future will bring all kinds of changes.
Yet they still allow themselves to be bullied and discouraged into a state of passivity by the sheet ‘immediacy’ of the present moment, like a six-foot teenager giving way to a bully half his size because it has become a habit.