by Colin Wilson
He goes on to elaborate:
‘Reviewing the evidence in this field, Devereux was struck by an observation which repeatedly occurs in reports by witnesses to mysterious light phenomena, that their experience of reality is somehow affected. Some tell of visions and psychic revelations, and a common feature is that witnesses feel aware of a mental link between themselves and the phenomena. In his category of earth lights Devereux includes manifestations which are recognised by science, though not fully explained or understood, such as will-o’-the-wisps and ball lightning. Such things certainly seem to be related to the earth’s energy field, but their behaviour is unpredictable, and they often give the impression of acting in an intelligent or purposeful way towards those who see them. Devereux’s conclusion, forced upon him by the overwhelming weight of evidence, is that the Earth’s vital energies have a component of intelligence, similar to our own intelligence and capable of interacting with it.’
And he summarises:
‘There is little doubt, especially as the astonishing events of 1990 continue to unfold, that the patterns in the corn have a meaning, and the meaning of such things is to be found in the way people are affected by them. Jung discerned the meaning of UFOs as agents and portents of changes in human thought patterns, and that function has clearly been inherited by crop circles, which are a continuation—a solidification, one might say—of the UFO phenomenon. We have seen earlier how exposure to the influence of crop circles has changed the attitudes and mentalities of many investigators. Such changes, if they are in accord with the spirit of the times, are both permanent and contagious. Judging by what has happened so far, there seems to be every justification for extending Jung’s characterization of UFOs to crop circles, and thus for regarding them as signs of ‘great changes to come which are compatible with the end of an era’.’
If Ted Holiday had lived for another decade, he would undoubtedly have changed his mind about his decision not to publish The Goblin Universe. From the point of view of the last decade of the 20th century, it seems more relevant than ever.
* * *
1. See my book Mysteries, Chapter 1.
1. The Crop Circle Enigma, edited by Ralph Noyes, Gateway Books, 1990, p. 83.
16
The Expansion of Consciousness
AT THE BEGINNING of this book we spoke of Ouspensky and his obsession with ‘secret knowledge’. Now, at the end, we must return to him.
Pyotr Demianovitch Ouspensky was born in Moscow on March 5, 1878, the son of a government official and a talented artist, and his earliest experience of mystery came from sudden flashes of the feeling: ‘I have been here before’, which began when he was six. When he discovered the writing of Nietzsche, he concluded that his ‘I have been here before’ feeling was what Nietzsche’s Zarathustra meant by ‘Eternal Recurrence’, the notion that human beings live their lives over and over again. And when, at the age of 18, he lost his mother, he decided to travel to foreign countries in search of the ‘hidden knowledge’ which he was certain existed. His travels took him around Russia, Europe and India in search of ‘masters’ who could teach him the meaning of life. He wrote a rather gloomy novel called The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin about a character who has to keep on reliving his life. (To do Ouspensky justice, he did not believe that the repetition is identical; rather, our lives are like a play which has to follow the script, but which the actor himself can turn into a triumph or a flop.)
Back in Russia, he wrote a remarkable work called Tertium Organum (which was quoted in the first chapter). This work was later to make him famous in the west, for at the end of the First World War, it was read by a young Russian, Nicholas Bessarabov, who lived in America, and was published by a writer and architect called Claude Bragdon. It was an instant success, with the result that Bragdon tried to contact the author to send him his royalties. His letter caught up with Ouspensky in Constantinople; Ouspensky had fled from the Russian Revolution and was virtually destitute when the money arrived. He asked Bragdon if he could help him to emigrate to England. A few weeks later, with the help of another Ouspensky admirer, Lady Rothermere—wife of the newspaper magnate—Bragdon was able to send Ouspensky the money to travel to London. There he discovered that Tertium Organum had already gone into a second edition, and that a circle of admirers was waiting eagerly to learn what he had to teach them.
What he had to teach them was—as we know from the twelfth chapter of this book—what Gurdjieff had taught him in Russia: that human consciousness is a form of sleep, and that our problem is to awaken. Ouspensky remained identified with the teaching of Gurdjieff—who quickly became as well known in Europe as Ouspensky himself—and is still generally labelled a ‘Gurdjieff disciple’. This is a major mistake. If Ouspensky had died after he had written Tertium Organum, he would still be recognised as a thinker of remarkable freshness and originality. And if he had died after he had written his second book, A New Model of the Universe—still before he met Gurdjieff—he would be known as one of the most original thinkers of the 20th century. In a sense, his meeting with Gurdjieff, which was the most important event of his life, was also a misfortune which prevented his own genius from being recognised.
In fact, in 1910, soon after he returned from India, Ouspensky began a series of ‘experiments’ in mysticism that brought him some of the profoundest insights of his life. They deserve to be regarded not merely as a watershed in Ouspensky’s life, but as a watershed in the history of human consciousness.
It is a pity that Ouspensky refuses to go into the techniques he used for achieving ‘mystical’ states of consciousness. This, I suspect, is because he was ashamed of them. I believe he simply used the gas that dentists used to use for putting their patients to sleep: nitrous oxide. It was discovered in 1795 by a young chemist called Humphry Davy, who was heating a mixture of damp iron filings and nitric acid, and, as he sniffed it, experienced a pleasant sensation of dizziness and a tremendous gaiety, so that he burst out laughing. Then he lost consciousness. When he woke up he exclaimed: ‘What a wonderful discovery—laughing gas.’
The philosopher William James remarked: ‘Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seem revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Nevertheless, the sense of profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.’1
Ouspensky had also undergone training in yoga, and it may be that this was why he was able to cling on to so much of the revelation, instead of losing it as he returned to consciousness.
Significantly, Ouspensky mentions James’s remarks on mysticism and the use of narcotics at the beginning of his chapter ‘Experimental Mysticism’ in A New Model of the Universe.
What Ouspensky discovered was that as soon as he began the experiment, a change in his state of consciousness began to occur. The problem was that this state offered so much that was new and unexpected, and these insights flashed by so quickly, ‘that I could not find words . . . which would enable me to remember what had occurred even for myself, still less to convey it to somebody else.’
The first sensation, he says, was an odd sense of duality, as if he had become two people. This, I suspect, was an activation of both sides of the brain, so that his ‘I’ became double. The right side had the mystical experience; the left did its best to observe and remember it.
But now he makes his most important observation: that the problem in describing this state is that everything is linked together. To describe something, we need a starting-point. Ouspensky found that ‘in order to describe the first impressions, the first sensations, it is necessary to describe all at once. The new world with which one comes into contact has no
sides, so that it is impossible to describe first one side and then the other. All of it is visible at every point.’
In other words, what he saw in this state is that everything is connected with everything else, so that trying to describe it is like trying to pick up a heap of chain when you have no idea where to find its beginning . . .
In fact, we are all familiar with this experience. When you listen to a piece of music for the first time—particularly if it is a complex piece of music, like a symphony—you only ‘register’ small parts of it. The more often you hear it, the more these parts come together, until finally you have the whole work ‘in your head’. A young child listening to a symphony simply fails to understand it; it sounds like an incomprehensible jumble of notes. But when the child is old enough to understand and enjoy the symphony, he still could not explain it to his younger brother. He could only say: ‘Ah yes, now I see.’
Ouspensky offers an example of the way in which he actually ‘saw’ the connectedness:
‘I remember once sitting on a sofa smoking and looking at an ashtray. It was an ordinary copper ash-tray. Suddenly I felt that I was beginning to understand what the ash-tray was, and at the same time, with a certain wonder and almost with fear, I felt that I had never understood it before and that we do not understand the simplest things around us.
‘The ash-tray roused a whirlwind of thoughts and images. It contained such an infinite number of facts, of events; it was linked with such an immense number of things. First of all, with everything connected with smoking and tobacco. This at once roused thousands of images, pictures, memories. Then the ash-tray itself. How had it come into being? All the materials of which it could have been made? Copper, in this case—what was copper? How had people discovered it for the first time? How had they learned to make use of it? How and where was the copper obtained from which this ash-tray was made? Through what kind of treatment had it passed, how had it been transported from place to place, how many people had worked on it or in connection with it? How had the copper been transformed into an ash-tray? These and other questions about the history of the ash-tray up to the day when it had appeared on my table.
‘I remember writing a few words on a piece of paper in order to retain something of these thoughts on the following day. And next day I read:
‘“A man can go mad from one ash-tray.”
‘The meaning of all that I felt was that in one ash-tray it was possible to know all. By invisible threads the ash-tray was connected with everything in the world, not only with the present, but with all the past and with all the future. To know an ash-tray meant to know all.
‘My description does not in the least express the sensation as it actually was, because the first and principal impression was that the ash-tray was alive, that it thought, understood and told me all about itself. All I learned from the ash-tray itself. The second impression was the extraordinary emotional character of all connected with what I had learned about the ash-tray.
‘“Everything is alive,” I said to myself in the midst of these observations; “there is nothing dead, it is only we who are dead. If we become alive for a moment, we shall feel that everything is alive, that all things live, think, feel and can speak to us.”’
This sensation was intensified when he tried his ‘experiments’ when walking down the street:
‘On such occasions the whole of the ordinary world changed in a very subtle and strange way. Everything became different, but it is absolutely impossible to describe what happened to it. The first thing that can be said is that there was nothing which remained indifferent for me. All taken together and each thing separately affected me in one way or another. In other words, I took everything emotionally, reacted to everything emotionally. Further, in this new world which surrounded me, there was nothing separate, nothing that had no connection with other things or with me personally. All things were connected with one another, and not accidentally, but by incomprehensible chains of causes and effects. All things were dependent on one another, all things lived in one another. Further, in this world there was nothing dead, nothing inanimate, nothing that did not think, nothing that did not feel, nothing unconscious. Everything was living, everything was conscious of itself. Everything spoke to me and I could speak to everything. Particularly interesting were the houses and other buildings which I passed, especially the old houses. They were living beings, full of thoughts, feelings, moods and memories. The people who lived in them were their thoughts, feelings, moods. I mean that the people in relation to the “houses” played approximately the same role which the different “I”s of our personality play in relation to us. They come and go, sometimes live in us for a long time, sometimes appear only for short moments.
‘I remember once being struck by an ordinary cab-horse in the Nevsky, by its head, its face. It expressed the whole being of the horse. Looking at the horse’s face I understood all that could be understood about a horse. All the traits of horse-nature, all of which a horse is capable, all of which it is incapable, all that it can do, all that it cannot do; all this was expressed in the lines and features of the horse’s face. A dog once gave me a similar sensation. At the same time the horse and the dog were not simply horse and dog; they were “atoms”, conscious, moving “atoms” of great beings—“the great horse” and “the great dog”. I understood then that we also are atoms of a great being, “the great man”. Each thing is an atom of a “great thing”. A glass is an atom of a “great glass”. A fork is an atom of a “great fork”.’
He records many other strange insights in his ‘mystical’ states, including one that seems typical of their paradoxical nature:
‘I will try to describe in short what I met with in this strange world in which I saw myself.
‘What I first noticed, simultaneously with the “division of myself into two”, was that the relation between the objective and the subjective was broken, entirely altered, and took certain forms incomprehensible to us. But “objective” and “subjective” are only words. I do not wish to hide behind these words, but I wish to describe as exactly as possible what I really felt. For this purpose I must explain what it is that I call “objective” and “subjective”. My hand, the pen with which I write, the table, these are objective phenomena. My thoughts, my mental images, the pictures of my imagination, these are subjective phenomena. The world is divided for us along these lines when we are in our ordinary state of consciousness, and all our ordinary orientation works along the lines of this division. In the new state all this was completely upset. First of all we are accustomed to the constancy of the relation between the subjective and the objective—what is objective is always objective, what is subjective is always subjective. Here I saw that the objective and the subjective could change places. The one could become the other. It is very difficult to express this. The habitual mistrust of the subjective disappeared; every thought, every feeling, every image, was immediately objectified in real substantial forms which differed in no way from the forms of objective phenomena; and at the same time objective phenomena somehow disappeared, lost all reality, appeared entirely subjective, fictitious, invented, having no real existence.
‘This was the first experience. Further, in trying to describe this strange world in which I saw myself, I must say that it resembled more than anything a world of very complicated mathematical relations.
‘Imagine a world in which all relations of quantities, from the simplest to the most complicated, have a form.
‘Certainly it is easy to say “imagine such a world”.
‘I understand perfectly well that to “imagine” it is impossible. Yet at the same time what I am saying is the closest approximation to the truth which can be made.
‘“A world of mathematical relations”—this means a world in which everything is connected, in which nothing exists separately and in which at the same time the relations between things have a real existence apart from the things themselves; or, possibly, “things”
do not even exist and only “relations” exist.’
Equally fascinating is his observation that, in this state of intense excitement (he also mentions that he was seething with a sense of sheer joy and delight), time seemed to slow down. It became impossible to communicate with anyone because his mind was moving so much faster than his words:
‘I tried my experiments under the most varied conditions and in the most varied surroundings. Gradually I became convinced that it was best to be alone. Verification of the experiments, that is, observation by another person, or the recording of the experiences at the very moment they took place, was quite impossible. In any case I never obtained any results in this way.
‘When I tried having someone near me during these experiments, I found that no kind of conversation could be carried on. I began to say something, but between the first and second words of my sentence such an enormous number of ideas occurred to me and passed before me, that the two words were so widely separated as to make it impossible to find any connection between them. And the third word I usually forgot before it was pronounced, and in trying to recall it I found a million new ideas, but completely forgot where I had begun, I remember for instance the beginning of a sentence:
