Posted by How do we get glimpses of the Absolute while we are still trapped inside our physical body?
At the end of his life, the existentialist writer Colin Wilson wrote a short book entitled Super Consciousness in which he explained his lifelong research into peak experiences. These are moments when we move beyond normal consciousness and can briefly experience something cosmic while we are alive.
His first book, The Outsider (1955), examined the highs of the peak experience and the lows beyond it. An example was the Romantic poets who wrote about reaching states of ‘transcendent consciousness’ but the next morning would realise they were back in a trivial, dull and ordinary life where they felt trapped.
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about these ‘down’ periods in his 1938 novel Nausea where he went as far as to say “It is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die”.
Life was one long drawn-out defeat. This is the same existentialist view that the Gnostics (amongst others) held that this physical world is actually designed as a place of suffering and misery by a ‘God’ that is not a loving god.
But the converse to Sartre’s desperate vision was the ecstatic vision of ‘cosmic consciousness’ produced by the peak experience, where the consciousness field expanded so fast that there was no time for thought or reasoning to interrupt anything.
RM Bucke wrote about this feeling in Cosmic Consciousness (1901) where we can see into another distant reality and can ‘understand everything’ momentarily, as if everything in the universe is connected by invisible threads. We cease to be mediocre, accidental, mortal (as Proust said) and realise that consciousness is not restricted to the trivial, boring, present.
Wilson took the view that ‘ordinary consciousness’ was incomplete. The peak experience allowed a glimpse of the Absolute, a moment of completeness. In Yeats’ poem Under Ben Bulben, he references the partial mind and how just for a moment it was complete:
Something drops from eyes long blind/He completes his partial mind/For an instant stands at ease/Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
So how can we reach this peak experience, this glimpse of the Absolute?
Wilson says it requires that consciousness be ‘pushed’ beyond its normal mechanical level, the automatic robot level we operate in much of the time. We should break pattern, stand back and look beyond the usual triviality of life. Abraham Maslow, who examined people who had had peak experiences, stated that they were all happy. They were not lazy, consumed by self-pity or lacking in imagination.
It transpires that these experiences came about through what Edmund Husserl called “intentionality”. When we ‘see’ something, it doesn’t just walk in through our eyes. We have to fire our attention at it, like an arrow. If we look at our watch without this act of intentionality, (absent-mindedly), we don’t see the time, and we have to look again. We must have a complete mind, be fully immersed. Gurdjieff achieved this for himself and his pupils through “intentional suffering”, through effort of will undertaking specific exercises, which pushed participants often beyond their mental boundaries. George Bernard Shaw stated that “every dream can be willed into reality by those who are strong enough to believe it”.
But the key is happiness. Everything troubling has an ending. Life doesn’t have to be as bad as we think it is.
Wilson tells the story of a man called Syd Banks who remarked to his friend: “I am so unhappy”. His friend replied “You’re not unhappy, Syd, you just think you are”. Banks realised that he just needed to change his negative way of thinking.
Suddenly Syd Banks could get peak experiences almost all the time. His friend, George Pransky, remarked later that Syd Banks was the happiest man he had ever met. He had found cosmic consciousness.
6 December 2024
Piers Morris Blogspot 