Posted by The Outsider (Book #3)
Colin Wilson addresses “imagination” and its importance to our existence here. It is perhaps the most important feature of living, as it defines whether a person is part of the herd, the collective, or whether that person is an “outsider”, someone stepping beyond material reality.
Imagination is not about “this is who I am”, but about “this is who I want to be”, as Ayn Rand put it. Proper use of the imagination creates and changes a person’s reality.
Imagination can take us anywhere we like, the only restriction on this is our value system. Wilson says: “What is the relationship between a writer’s sense of values and his or her imagination, and how does one affect or direct the other”?
This is what Robert Munroe called the “belief-system”, and we can only mentally move as far as our belief system will allow. To step into an alternative reality (whether in this life or after transition), we need to discard belief-systems, which are part of an addiction to being human, to the physical sensation of living inside a human body, to the attachment to the physical body and the identity of the body in this life, rather than the reality that we are more than our physical body.
Belief-systems of people are the conditioning we receive about life from the time we are born. Wilson says “Man may possess the equipment to become a god, but he does not possess the energy to make use of the equipment”. Wilson’s view was that this is because of the continuing domination of our culture by the materialist outlook through its control of crucial elements of society, including the media and educational systems. This understanding put Wilson ahead of his era.
Wilson says the way out of the realm of matter is to imbue it with the force of life: “This world of matter is not our home; that lies beyond us in another world. But for those with enough strength and imagination, it will become our home”.
Today we would call that “taking action”. Prayer, visualisation and desire for something is not enough. The construct we live in just sees that as the state we are happy with. We need to start doing something to change our reality. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl called this ‘intentionality’.
Wilson was a long way ahead of his time in the early 60s. How do we escape the futility of existence, which authors such as Sartre, Camus, Greene, Huxley, Poe, Dostoevsky, Lovecraft, Yeats, Owen and others wrote about, using imagination as a way to stay sane in a world that horrified them.
The doom and torment was well expressed by the Russian novelist Andreyev in his 1918 story of the return of Lazarus from the dead: Lazarus has ‘faced reality’ (death) and all he can do now he is alive again is to stare gloomily into space and look forward to dying again. He then meets Christ, who asked why he is weeping, and Lazarus replies “I was dead; you brought me back to life. What should I do but weep”?
Wilson says escape from the futility of existence is the ability to understand the way in which the unknown world impinges on the known. “Imagination is man’s act of increasing his freedom. Its only enemy is the notion that man has no will. Its only limit is our beliefs. Blake said that “five windows light the cavern’d man” (1794) in reference to the five senses, but imagination is the sixth sense. It is our step to a new reality beyond ‘consensus reality’.
The problem is getting beyond the ‘devil’s world’ that we exist in now. The only way is to detach and accept that life is a journey, and that we are simply pilgrims passing through, as Hesse would say. The authors like Sartre (above) who have focused on the torment of living here have used the device of self-delusion to get around the torment. Sartre’s view, expressed in his famous novel “Nausea” was that no one has the right to begin living until he knows why he is alive. He then goes on to recognise that no one has ever had any idea of why he is alive, so all men would experience the total moral collapse, the “nausea”, if they saw as clearly as he did. In other words, life depends on self-delusion, or fantasy. Yeats created a world of fairies as his refuge from the materialistic world.
Dostoevsky expressed the concept of moral collapse in The Brothers Karamazov through the thesis that most people cannot bear freedom, so it is better to take away the freedom and give them happiness and bread. Huxley’s Brave New World expressed this too.
Huxley used a different device in The Doors of Perception saying that divine insight can be induced by drugs; others have attempted divine insight through long ascetic discipline. Yeats and Gurdjieff also said people needed self-deception, by using systems to ‘act’ our way through life (a ‘necessary deception’). Wagner said that people needed to be kept happy with the lies of religion, only the king must stand apart from the deception, unhappy in his knowledge, but god-like.
All are self-deception methods, rather than accepting that there is only the one purpose in existence, which is soul development. There is no winning or losing, gain or loss. It is all irrelevant in the end.
In the words of Wilfred Owen’s 1918 war poem “Exposure”, perhaps the greatest poem ever written, he wrote the line “What are we doing here?”, not long before he died at the Front in a pointless cause. This expresses the futility of life, the pointlessness. And that is true, if one expects something more than a simple journey of learning, and developing through life experiences.
The ‘reality’ is that we are simply on a journey passing through. There is nothing here for a soul except living, learning, developing. The key is to exit the construct we find ourselves in, and this can only be done when we have completed our journey and are ready for a different world.
Graham Greene, an author whose novels largely centred around failure, had a moment of enlightenment when he wrote at the end of Brighton Rock: “The world seems foredoomed to damnation, and if the mercy of God is rational, there is no hope for us. But one can never tell”.
That is in effect the parable of the Prodigal Son, which is how life should be lived. We make mistakes, we make a mess, then we return, a better person, and are welcomed back, and can pass on then to a new world. We have become an “outsider”.
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