Posted by The Outsider (Book #2)
In Gary Lachman’s 2017 review of Religion and The Rebel as a historical introduction to the 1957 book, Lachman described the Outsider as “a man who felt himself lonely in the crowd of the second rate”.
Lachman says that Wilson ended The Outsider with the thought that his “heroic figure’s” journey through the modern wasteland may end with him becoming a saint. If Religion and the Rebel is not about achieving sainthood, it is certainly, as its title suggests, about investigating a religious answer to the Outsider’s “challenge”.
In Wilson’s own introduction to Religion and the Rebel, written for the 1984 edition of the book, he said that the “Outsider’s challenge” is how to “extend the range of consciousness” so that he or she is not blunted by the “lack of spiritual tension in a materially prosperous civilisation”.
Wilson’s drive was always towards the peak experience moments which transcended everyday life, which extended everyday consciousness. Wilson said that the real problem is how to learn those mental disciplines that can raise us momentarily into states of ‘mystical’ perception – the insight that GK Chesterton called the feeling that resembled hearing ‘absurd good news’.
Wilson said that the more he considered the Outsider, the more he felt him to be a rebel; and what he was in rebellion against was the lack of spiritual tension in a materially prosperous civilisation.
In the Introduction to the original publication in 1957, Wilson states that an individual tends to be what his environment makes him. If a civilisation is spiritually sick, the individual suffers from the same sickness. If he is healthy enough to put up a fight, he becomes an Outsider.
The problem for the Outsider is that the range of everyday activity in a modern civilisation builds a wall around the ordinary state of consciousness and makes it almost impossible to see beyond it. The conditions under which we live do this to us, and leave no time for peace and contemplation.
The more we have to fight against, the more alive one can be. That is why (for Wilson) the problem of living resolved itself into the question of choosing obstacles to stimulate his will. Civilisation is flowing in the opposite direction; culture and science is directed towards enabling us to exercise as little will as possible.
The automatic pilot
Wilson often discussed the concept of automatism, and the title to Gary Lachman’s biography of Wilson’s life and works was called “Beyond the Robot”. A long period of working in the average job makes it hard to escape the intolerable sense of being what society wished humans to be, which was merely another human being in a human anthill. There was no time for individuality.
Yet, as Wilson says, the problem of automatism is the problem of life itself. In childhood we respond freshly to everything, and nothing is automatic, but as we get older, life becomes more complex, and part of our activities end up being handed over to the ‘automatic pilot’. We need challenges and stimulation, but life rarely offers that.
This brings the book to its core premise: that the visionary disciplines himself to see the world always as if he had only just seen it for the first time. Men come and go, and society changes; civilisations rise and fall, but men always remain as stupid. Automatism causes development to cease.
TS Eliot understood this well when he said (in the chorus to his poem The Rock):
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
For the Outsider, all men lose their lives in living them. The Outsider is haunted by a sense of the futility of life. Spiritual standards have ceased to exist, and his desire for increased intensity of mind cannot be met in the world we live in. The Outsider’s despair derives from his vision of the vast sea of mediocrity that makes up humankind, and his rebellion at the idea of belonging to it.
Behind it there lies the feeling that men ‘lose their lives’ because they turn away from it. Rainer Maria Rilke, the German philosopher, lamented the fact that humanity doesn’t feel enough, hides emotions, limits themselves. His feeling was that we waste our lives and the experience of living:
We wasters of sorrows.
The moments of supreme detachment, where we stand above our own experience and somehow see a meaning in it, come too rarely. We need to spend time in isolation and contemplation as well as living life, find a balance, to attain the state where mystical insight comes.
To cope with living in society, the Outsider develops a technique of “withdrawal and return”. These solitary creative individuals withdraw from society into solitude and there wrestle with the problems alone. There, in solitude their vitality and insight increases; and when they emerge, it is with the power to stimulate the rest of society to overcome the challenges.
This was the technique, for instance, of Hermann Hesse, who though largely reclusive, became a huge influence on the direction of sections of humanity through his writing after he emerged from periods of solitude.
The purpose of most men, which is simple and basic, is to house, feed and clothe themselves and their families. These physical demands save men from a sense of futility with life. “Bread and circuses” are enough for most men – physical demands and entertainment. The masses are happy with material necessities and a leader to obey. But this is not enough for the Outsider. The Outsider needs a secondary plane of the imagination and the intellect. (Wilson went on in his next book, the Strength to Dream, to discuss this concept further).
Religion for the masses
Christ’s teaching of “be your own leader” was never going to work for the majority of men.
Consequently, this was set aside by St Paul and replaced with a different version of Christianity: “Regard me as your master, and I will do some special pleading for you on Judgment Day (by virtue of a bargain I made with my Father, that I should submit to the unpleasantness of dying in order to become your judge and advocate)”. This was a far more acceptable and easier concept than Christ’s own concept, and led to a huge spread of Christianity.
After Paul, Christianity ceased to be the gospel of “redeem yourself” and became the gospel of “let me redeem you”. Those across the centuries that opposed this philosophy became Rebels (the Cathars, for instance). Ultimately, the church doctrine became corrupt, where the church said it could redeem men’s sins, as long as they paid the church for the privilege.
The Outsider’s way of thinking is called Existentialism. Existentialism states that the most important fact about man is his ability to change himself. No one else is needed in this process. The church’s view on this is stated above, but the scientist’s view is that all that is needed is to change man circumstances, his environment, to progress. Outsiders know that change requires looking inwards. This requires vision and intensity, becoming a visionary. The mystic (as Blake wrote) is a ‘mental traveller’. This is not for the masses.
The spiritual war
If an architect wants to improve a town, he will get a map of the town. If a man wants to change his soul, the first thing he needs to do is get a map of his soul. A man, Jacob Boehme said, can learn about his soul by ‘self-observation and experiment’. The first thing that must be understood though in advancing the soul is the reality that a spiritual war is in progress.
Boehme wrote in his Confessions (at the start of the 17th century!):
The soul liveth in great danger in this world; and therefore this life is very well called the valley of misery, full of anguish, a perpetual hurly-burly, pulling and hauling, warring, fighting, struggling and striving. But the cold and half-dead body does not always understand this fight of the soul….it doth not understand the fight of the spirit, how the same is sometimes down and sometimes uppermost.
We understand this pull and tug between the soul and the body (ego) better today, but Boehme was far ahead of the era he lived in.
Wilson said:
When a man begins his unseen warfare against the world, he becomes an Outsider; if he fights long and hard enough, he develops into what men call a mystic. But this is not an end in itself; a mystic is only a man with a higher degree of perception and vitality.
Once we have seen a higher vision of life, Wilson says that we are perpetually dissatisfied with the ordinary world. This makes the person an ‘Outsider’. From there, the vision pushes some Outsiders onwards into the hard road of spiritual discipline, and to the level of mystics.
One such mystic was Emanuel Swedenborg, who, in long periods of intense concentration, disciplined his body to make its presence almost imperceptible. He had in effect moved ‘out of body’. He learned to work for long hours without mental fatigue, and his concentration was so great that at times his breathing seemed to stop. This concluded with Swedenborg asserting through his mental travels that “hell is a mental state, not a place”.
This assertion of Swedenborg’s was that the mind must learn to be independent of the physical world. Men should find a balance in the physical world between enslavement and contempt for it. Swedenborg, like Blake, had no desire for the monastic world though. Although he withdrew from the world to write, he maintained that men are meant to live in the world.
Hermann Hesse’s view of the world aligned closely with Swedenborg. Wilson says that the moral of most of Hesse’s novels is that man must become greater by living in the world with the moral strength of a saint and the willpower and discrimination of a great artist.
In analysing Steppenwolf, Wilson comments that Steppenwolf’s first comment in Hesse’s novel is that when a man has embarked on the life of the mind, he has left the solid land of the physical world, and may easily steer himself into insanity. But the life of the mind, even if it brought about the Fall of Man, is the road to becoming more than man, and it must be embarked on.
As opposed to the life of the body – life on a primary level of physical experience – it involves living in a different world – a world of spiritual perception. Hesse was a key writer of the Bildungsroman tradition, which has as its main concept the maturing of its central character through the impact of his experience. We grow through our experience of life into spiritual beings. Life should be about the movement towards the conquest of matter by the spirit over the course of a life (though our lives are rarely long enough).
Again, when Wilson discusses the work of William Law (a leader of the English church in the 17th century) [pp230 onwards], he states that Law’s solution to the struggle against the power of the material, physical, world is discipline and asceticism.
Law wrote (in his book A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life):
If religion requires us sometimes to fast, and deny our natural appetites, it is to lessen that struggle and war that is our nature.
His rule for judging whether men are religious is to ask:
Do they live as if they belonged to different worlds, had different views in their heads, and different rules and measures of all their actions?
This is the essence of the Outsider.
George Bernard Shaw outlines the credo of the Outsider in the words of Don Juan (from Shaw’s play Man and Superman)
I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it. This is the law of my life. That is the working within me of Life’s incessant aspiration to higher organisation, wider, deeper, intenser self-consciousness, and clearer self-understanding. It is the supremacy of that purpose that reduced love for me to the mere pleasure of a moment…
Ultimately though, what all Outsiders have in common is the feeling that the world is “too much for them”. The desire of the Outsider is to escape the endless confusion of the outer world and retreat deep into themselves.
The struggle for the Outsider has always been, in spite of the difficulties of the exterior world, to find the source of power within himself, away from the trivialities and madness of the physical world. The physical world is of no real importance to him. It is just part of the soul’s journey.
22 January 2023
Piers Morris Blogspot 