Colin Wilson is one of my favorite writers and “Super Consciousness” is a kind of “Super Consciousness for Dummies” approach to the subject.
Let me quote a few excerpts:
“A musician friend told me how he had returned home one day feeling weary, and had poured himself a large whisky and put on a record of the baroque composer Praetorius — and had suddenly soared into ecstatic happiness — the ‘other mode.” A BBC producer told me how he had been alone in an empty control room and played himself a record of the Schubert Octet and had suddenly become Schubert — that is, he felt as if he was composing the music, and knew just why Schubert had written each bar. This experience is obviously what Sartre means when he remarked in What is Literature that to read a book with understanding is to rewrite it.”
In speaking of what Abraham Maslow terms “peak experiences” (PE), Wilson says: “A young mother was sitting watching her husband and children eating breakfast, when she was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of how much she loved them and how lucky she was: she went into the ‘peak experience,’
“But note this: she was lucky before she went into the peak experience. The peak experience simply involved becoming aware of how lucky she was. It really amounts to what G.K. Chesterton once called ‘absurd good news’ — a sudden sense of wonderful optimism about the future, the feeling that life is infinitely complex and infinitely exciting.”
Wilson goes on to say “that man is on the point of an evolutionary leap to a higher phase. Moreover, I [have] come to feel that, in some paradoxical sense, we have already achieved this. But, like Maslow’s young mother, who was ‘lucky’ before she was conscious of it, we are not yet aware of it.”
Here’s an excerpt on Dostoevsky: “As a young man, he was touchy and paranoid. Then, along with several associates, he was arrested as a revolutionary and sentenced to death. In front of the firing squad, with three minutes to live, he divided his time into three one-minute periods: one to think about the past, one to contemplate the present, one to think about the future. And at that point, a messenger rode up with a pardon for the condemned men. Dostoevsky never forgot that ‘crisis vision’ — the recognition that the world is an incredibly beautiful place and that we are prevented from seeing this mainly by laziness, negativity and force of habit.”
Wilson speaks of Rousseau’s 1761 novel The New Heloise which tells the story of “a penniless young tutor who falls in love with his beautiful pupil Julie, who becomes his mistress. Rousseau argues that if two people are in love, then they have a right to become lovers. In 1761, this attitude caused shock all over Europe, since a girl’s virginity was regarded as the property of her future husband — and a valuable asset in acquiring one.”
” . . . Both the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution quickly turned into bloodshed and tyranny. Rousseau’s vision of an ideal society ended in the guillotine; Marx’s dream of a just society led to Stalin and Mao. And this as not an unfortunate accident of history. The bloodshed was already inherent in the dream of Rousseau and Marx because they were unrealistic. They left out of account the fact that human beings are subject to boredom. Every schoolboy knows that feeling of delight on the first day of a holiday, and how quickly it turns into habit. The German philosopher Frichte made this observation when he said: ‘To be free is nothing; to become free is heavenly.’ That is because when we suddenly become free, the freedom is a pleasant shock. But it is soon taken for granted and becomes mechanical.”
Wilson quotes Richard Maurice Bucke speaking of his own experience of “Cosmic Consciousness” in the third person: ” . . . All at once, without warning of any kind, he found himself wrapped around as it were by a flame colored cloud. For an instant he thought of fire, some sudden conflagration in the great city, The next he knew that the light was within himself. Directly afterwards came upon him a sense of exaltation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination quite impossible to describe. Into his brain streamed on momentary lightning-flash of the Brahmic Splendor which has ever since lightened his life; upon his heart fell one drop of Brahmic Bliss, leaving him thenceforward for always an aftertaste of heaven. Among other things he did not come to believe, he saw and knew that the Cosmos is not dead matter but a living Presence, that the soul of man si immortal, that the universe is so built and ordered that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all, that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love and that the happiness of every one is in the long run absolutely certain . . ..”
Wilson quotes Yeats: “In his poem ‘Under Ben Bulben,’ written towards the end of his life, Yeats talks about how, ‘when a man is fighting mad’:
Something drops from the eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
In a chapter called “Strange Powers,” Wilson tells the story of the poet Richard Church. “As a child [Church] was sent to a kind of hospital to recover from an illness. One morning, he stood alone in the room, watching a gardener cut down a dead tree. Suddenly he realized that the sound of the axe did not synchronize with the blow — the sound came when the axe was on the upstroke. With a flash of intuition, Church felt that space and time are liars and fakes, and that this had suddenly been revealed to him. ‘I felt both power and exultation flooding my veins . . .’ As a sickly child, he had always felt himself a slave of space and time, and above all, of gravity. ‘Now I was free. Space and time were deceivers, openly contradicting each other . . .’ Church says that he realized that he ‘only had to reduce them by an act of will . . . ‘ ‘I exerted my will, visualising my hand and feet pressing downward on the centre of the earth. It was no surprise to me that I left the ground and glided about the room.’ He felt that he could somehow command the air to flow through his solid flesh. He then floated down the empty staircase to breakfast in the dining room. ‘I entered and took my seat, content now to live incognito among these wingless mortals.'”
And then Wilson tells the well-told tale of Jung and the scarab: “[Jung] tells how he was having considerable difficulty with a young female patient ‘who always knew better about everything’ and whose rationalism seemed impregnable. One day, as she was telling Jung about a vivid dream of a golden scarab, there was a tapping on the window: Jung opened and a gold-green scarab — a rose-chafer — flew into the room. Jung caught it and handed it to the patient. ‘Here is your scarab.” This ‘punctured the desired hole in her rationalism’ and broke the ice of her resistance.”
In my own life, I can testify to a similarly strange experience: I had given an online talk in which I said: ” We all have one lover (the Great Spirit) but he/she appears in many different faces/bodies. They are the youth and youthful, because those are the ones who are still open. Sometimes at home I find myself dancing around the room (sometimes literally) feeling in love and not remembering who it is I’m in love with. Doesn’t really matter, I guess.”
A few nights later I woke up and someone was attempting to scratch my eyes out. In fact, they succeeded. According to the VA, I had a 3 millimeter abrasion in my right eye.
To me, this was like a break in the space/time illusion. I didn’t know this kind of thing was possible.
In the chapter called “Philosophy,” Wilson’s critique of Descartes is off-base, I think. Wilson says: “If some god could endow a washing machine with self-awareness, it would probably assume that it operates of its own free will, and might well say, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ It would clearly be mistaken.”
In this day of AI, this is no joke. And, BTW, if the washing machine or the AI had self-awareness, then it would be able to operate of its own free will.
A few more riveting quotes:
From Kierkegaard: “Truth is subjectivity.”
From Rupert Brooke: “I suppose my occupation is being in love with the universe.”
Wilson speaks of the mathematician Kurt Friedrich Gödel: “Until Gödel, mathematicians had tried to create mathematical systems (like geometry) that consist of a number of self-evident axioms, and a superstructure of ‘truths’ built on these. Gödel showed that this is impossible — that in any such system, there are always certain truths that cannot be proved within the system; they can only be proved within a larger system still, a meta-system.” [As Translators can attest, a meta-system like universal truth.]
Wilson quotes H.G. Wells from his Experiment in Autobiography: “People can ask now what would have been an extraordinary question five hundred years ago. They can say, ‘Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but –what do you do?’ . . . The originative intellectual worker is not a normal human being and does not lead nor desire to lead a normal human life. He wants to lead a supernormal life. . . . We are like early amphibians, so to speak, struggling out of the waters that have hitherto covered our kind, into the air; seeking to breathe in a new fashion and emancipate ourselves from long accepted and long unquestioned necessities. At last it becomes for us a case of air or nothing. But the new land has not yet definitely emerged from the waters and we swim distressfully in an element we wish to abandon.”
And W.H. Auden:
Put the car away; when life fails
What’s the good of going to Wales?
And Auden again:
The answer that I cannot find
Is known to my unconscious mind.
I have no reason to despair
Because I am already there.
H.G. Wells again: “The fish is a creature of the water, the bird a creature of the air, and man a creature of the mind.”
And finally Colin Wilson himself: “What has been happening since 1740 [with the publication of Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela, ‘which became the first best-selling novel and turned England into a “nation of readers.” Lending libraries sprang up soon afterwards solely to supply the ravenous demand for imitations of Pamela’] is that we have gradually learned to become accustomed to this strange new medium of the mind — a medium that does not even exist for the lower animals. Our master of this medium is happening so fast that it might even be said that we are learning to ‘fly’ rather than merely walk.”
