Posted by The Outsider often exhibits feelings of despair related to his existence in this world. HG Wells’ Mind at the End of Its Tether is an example of this. Wells (writing at the end of his life, after WWII), ends the short booklet’s first chapter by saying: “There is no way out or round or through”.
Ernest Hemingway’s First Forty Nine Stories (his first publication) also ends in despair about living on earth. A wife has died, and the husband remarks that “he should find things he cannot lose”. This leads the man to an ethic (a system designed to control behaviour) of renunciation and discipline.
Humans are weak. Wilson comments that “man is not a constant, unchanging being: he is one person one day, another person the next. He forgets easily, lives in the moment, seldom exerts willpower, and even when he does, gives up the effort after a short while, or forgets his original aim and turns to something else”.
Wilson says that it is no wonder that the poet, the thinker, feels such despair when they seem to catch a glimpse of some more intense state of consciousness (‘the peak experience’), and know with absolute certainty that there is nothing they can do to hold on to it.
Hermann Hesse’s 1922 classic novel Siddhartha is an example of how existence in the physical realm is just a journey of knowledge development, and spiritual development, and has no specific end goal beyond that, where happiness and fulfilment are fleeting.
In the story, Siddhartha practices rigorous disciplines that give him great control of body and mind. But to Siddhartha, this self-control is not ultimate self-realisation, so he goes to listen to Gautama, the Buddha. Gautama reinforces the conclusion that Siddhartha has already reached: that extreme asceticism is not an essential part of self-realisation, for its purpose is only to test the will.
The Buddha teaches ‘the middle way’ that depends on achieving a state of contemplation, of complete separation from all the human faculties. This state achieved, the monk, having extinguished every tendency to identify himself with his body, emotions, senses or intellect, knows himself to be beyond all, and achieves freedom from the ‘wheel of rebirth’.
Siddhartha’s story continues with Siddhartha accepting this philosophy, but doubts whether this will bring him self-realisation. The Buddha says each man is an island unto himself, he must teach himself and find his own way. Everyone’s journey to enlightenment is different.
So, Siddhartha carries on searching. He experiences the worldly life, love, material possessions, but neither asceticism, nor the Buddha, nor the material world can satisfy his search.
Finally he becomes a ferryman, concluding that there is no success or failure, it is just a journey, like the river, which flows on. The river never stops flowing. Existence is just a journey of the soul.
Hesse follows a similar path in his subsequent novels Steppenwolf and Narziss and Goldmund. (primarily, asceticism versus worldliness). Siddhartha’s conclusion is a good as it gets though, which is that life is simply a journey, life flowed before us, and will flow on after us.
Wilson’s main theme in all his books across half a century of writing centres on consciousness, and how we reach states of consciousness that are what Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences”, above and beyond normal states of consciousness.
An example is his reference to Hesse’s Steppenwolf, who speaks of a sudden ecstasy, a’ timeless moment’. The unfortunate thing is that humans cannot sustain this ‘strange happiness’, and quickly return to feelings of emptiness about their life on Earth. Or, at least, the Outsider does. [The theme of Maslow’s “peak experience”, the main theme of Wilson’s writings, the search for that moment when we feel the divine around us, the momentary infusion of higher frequencies and energies].
The Outsider is always thinking thoughts such as ‘what shall we do with our lives’?, ‘is there a meaning or purpose to it all’?, and generally the feeling is one of wretchedness with the world as a result of these unanswerable thoughts.
But a person who is interested to know how he should live, rather than simply taking life as it comes, someone who thinks deeply about life, is most likely to be “an Outsider”. By not being able to live up to the desired level of intensity they once experienced (the peak experience) however, they feel defeated by life; that it is not worth the effort of living with a trivial way of life.
TE Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (written in 1922) is another piece of classic writing that is searching for meaning in life beyond triviality and meaninglessness. A clairvoyant schoolteacher from Lawrence’s school days who reviewed his book said (amongst other things) “he is never alive in what he does, he is not himself”. It suggests (to Wilson) that the Outsider’s business is to find a course of action in which he is most himself, that is, in which he achieves the maximum self-expression.
That course seems difficult to achieve in this world though, and “Outsiders” struggle to stay inside the boundaries and thought processes set by the Authorities, (the controllers of the world). Controlling thought is the key to control by the Authorities, and Outsiders seem to have programming which doesn’t respond to mind-control as well as the brains of the masses do.
Lawrence (known as “Lawrence of Arabia”) sought purity of mind. In The Seven Pillars he wrote of his extensive travels in the desert with Bedouin Arabs. The Arabs told him of the forty thousand prophets that had been part of their culture. These prophets from long ago had been born into crowded places, which wasn’t suitable for their minds.
He says:
“An unintelligible, passionate yearning drove them out into the desert. They lived there a greater or lesser time in meditation and physical abandonment. The impulse into the [desert] had been ever irresistible, not that they found God dwelling there, but that in solitude they heard more certainly the living word they brought with them….their profound reaction from matter led them to preach barrenness, renunciation and poverty.”
The desert was for Lawrence a symbol of purity; of escape from the human.
Lawrence went on:
“The Bedouin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his soul this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free….this faith of the desert was impossible in the towns. It was at once too strange, too simple and too impalpable for common use.”
This is great writing, and gets to the heart of the disgust with living around humans that most Outsiders feel. Lawrence was someone who thought deeply, too deeply for this material world.
Wilson references Oliver Gauntlett’s writing in relation to Lawrence’s dilemma: “The ignorant, the deceived, the superficial, were the happy amongst us”.
Lawrence disliked most humans, calling them ‘the mob’, who were ‘chattering, snivelling, scolding’. There comes a point where the Outsider simply can’t go on, deal anymore with human life, he needs rest. The end can’t come fast enough, to exit from the human body he inhabits.
The mystical features of the “peak experience” are never far from Wilson’s writing. He references William James on the mystical use of alcohol: “The power of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour.” [There is no doubt that alcohol can have uplifting features in small quantities, such as a glass of wine while relaxing at home at the end of a hard day, this accesses the zone that takes us to the ‘peak experience’. Psychedelic drugs tend to be less controllable, and therefore are less desirable].
“Mystical faculties” referenced by James refers to that flood-tide of inner warmth and vital energy that human beings regard as the most desirable state to live in. The ‘sober hour’ carries continuous demands on the energy; sense-impressions, thoughts, uncertainties, suck away the vital power minute by minute. James implies that alcohol accumulates a sort-of reservoir of warmth.
This concentration of the energies is undoubtedly one of the most important conditions of the state the saints call Innigkeit – inwardness.
The saint achieves Innigkeit, inwardness, by a deliberate policing of the vital energies. [noted at p102].
Evil: Men become no longer ‘real beings (Wilson’s words).
Wilson references the poetic words of TS Eliot from “The Hollow Men” after the First World War:
Think of us, not as lost, violent souls
But only as the hollow men, the stuffed men.
If the hour should strike for me as it struck for him,
Nothing I possess could save me…
A personal favourite piece of writing of mine comes from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov where Dostoevsky writes of “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”:
[This is the case against religion, the section below reproduces Wilson’s ‘take’ on Dostoevsky’s great story]
“Christ returned to Earth once, Ivan tells Alyosha, in Seville, at the time of the Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor had him seized and cast into prison. The same evening he visited him, and explained why he could not allow him to resume his ministry in Seville.
This in summary is what he tells Christ: ‘What message did you preach in Palestine? That all men must strive for more abundant life, that they must Will unceasingly to realise that the “Kingdom of God is within them”, that they should not be content to be men, but should strive to be “Sons of God”?
You raised the standard of conduct of the Old Testament; you added to the Ten Commandments. Then you left us to build a church on your precepts. What you didn’t seem to realise is that all men are not prophets and moral geniuses.
It is not the Church’s business to save only those few who are strong-willed enough to save themselves. We are concerned about raising the general standard of the human race, and we can’t do this by telling every man that he had better be his own Church – as you did. This is tantamount to telling every man that he must be an Outsider – which cannot be allowed! The Outsider’s problems are insoluble, and we, the elect, know this.
You raised the standard too high, and we have had to haul it down again. We the elect, are unhappy – because we know just how terribly difficult it is to “achieve salvation”. But we have always kept this a secret from the people – who are not much better than dogs or cats after all.
Now you come back, proposing to give the show away! Do you suppose I can allow that? I am afraid I shall have to have you quietly done away with and it is entirely your own fault. Prophets are all very well when they are dead, but while they are alive there is nothing for it but to burn or crucify them…”
The Inquisitor says that “only we, who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy”. It is kinder to men to think of them as insects. [The problem is one of control: once created, it is hard to control the creation]. “No man is good enough to be another man’s master”.
As mentioned earlier, the ‘peak experience’ is central in Wilson’s writing. The search for that feeling that is beyond normality, the feeling that takes us to higher planes. Sometimes man’s humdrum existence, where he knows nothing about who he really is or what he is doing here, is broken suddenly, and the resulting glimpse is of ‘sudden complete understanding’.
This is expressed in the Bhagavad Gita: “Even if you are the most sinful of sinners, this insight will carry you like a raft above all your sin”.
And by Chung Tzu as follows:
“While they dream, they do not know that they are dreaming. Some will even interpret the dream that they are dreaming and only when they wake do they know that it was a dream. By and by comes the great awakening. And then we find out that this life is really a great dream…”
HG Wells’ The History of Mr Polly is really a parable of an Outsider, like Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Mersault in Camus’ The Outsider (L’Etranger) and so on.
In The History of Mr Polly, HG Wells showed his hero setting his house on fire and leaving his wife, to tramp the roads:
“If you don’t like your life, you can change it now”.
Outsiders, such as George Fox (a leading figure of the 19th century) is revealed to be from in his Journals, understand and perceive the corruption and delusions of ‘the world’, and that there can be no way back out of that condition; only a way forward.
It meant telling the world, as loudly and as frequently as possible, that it was corrupt and deluded. [noted at p215].
In other words, his (the Outsider’s) healthy soul was being suffocated in a world of trivial, shallow, corrupted fools [p216].
The Outsider is primarily a critic, and if a critic feels deeply enough about what he is criticising, he becomes a prophet. [p224].
Fame:
Fame, William Blake believed, is unnecessary to the man of genius. Man is born alone and he dies alone. If he allows his social relations to delude him into forgetting his fundamental loneliness, he is living in a fool’s paradise. [p225].
Ernest Dowson from Poetical Works (1934):
They are not long, the days of wine and roses
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
“History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake” (James Joyce, Ulysses, p31).
WB Yeats from the poem Vacillation:
My fiftieth year had come and gone
I sat, a solitary man
In a crowded London shop
An open book and empty cup
On a 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…
[the ‘peak experience’ again, so rarely encountered by humans, but which Outsiders wish to achieve permanently].
Similarly, Edgar Alan Poe from his Man in a Crowd:
[describing a returning convalescent]: “…and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui, moments of the keenest appetency when the film from the mental vision departs…and the intellect, electrified, surpasses its everyday condition…merely to breathe was enjoyment…”
Kierkegaard on boredom:
“The Gods were bored, so they created man. Adam was bored because he was alone, so Eve was created….Adam was bored alone, then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Able were bore en famille, then the population of the world increased, and the people were bored en masse. To divert themselves, they conceived the idea of constructing a tower high enough to reach the heavens. This idea itself is as boring as the tower was high, and constitutes a terrible proof of how boredom had gained the upper hand”.
Hesse put it another way, that every man has a residue of un-fulfilment at the bottom of him: boredom, un-fulfilment, they amount to the same thing. Man doesn’t know himself, he lives in a prison. How can an individual hope to escape the general destiny of futility?
Wilson states that most men have nothing in their heads except their immediate physical needs; put them on a desert island with nothing to occupy their minds and they would go insane. They lack real motive. The curse of our civilisation is boredom.
William Blake’s solution to all this was: Go and develop the visionary faculty.
This need to develop the mind (that faculty outside of the body) can be seen from an analysis of the actions of the Chinese during the Korean War.
The Chinese discovered that they could prevent the escape of American soldiers by segregating the “leader figures” and keeping them under heavy guard, and leaving the others without any guard at all. The leaders were always precisely five percent of the total number of soldiers. This figure holds good for most species of animals too. The “dominant minority” is always five percent.
Of these five percent people, only a few are genuine “outsiders”. Most of the five percent are made up of other dominant types – soldiers, politicians, businessmen, sportsmen, clergymen, and so on – that is to say, of people whose “dominance” is by no means intellectual.
These men need other people to express their dominance, without other people they are still nothing.
The peculiarity of the poet, for instance, the man of creative imagination, is that he doesn’t need other people to express his dominance. The great writer or thinker isn’t writing primarily for other people; he is exploring the world of his own being.
Few humans yet possess the dimension whereby their mental realm can sustain them. This is proven by the black room experiments. If you put any human being in a totally black and soundless room, he goes to pieces after a day or so, because his mind is totally dependent on the outside world, upon external stimuli. [The Chinese are said to have used the ‘black room’ for brain washing, as it was far more effective than torture]. If the human was truly a creature of the mind, the black room wouldn’t worry him/her.
As yet, humans spend too much time looking at the external world to make any close acquaintance with the world of the inner mind.
Edmund Husserl said that perception was always intentional. We see nothing unless we make a subconscious effort of will to perceive.
And as Blake said in his mystical doctrine: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
12 December 2022
Piers Morris Blogspot 