Beyond the Occult by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

hand had slipped numbingly under my skull and was pressing another brain on top of mine.
    I felt a thrilling liquidity of being and an indescribable sensation, as if the whole universe was being poured into me, or perhaps rather as if the whole universe was welling up out of me from some deep centre. My ‘soul’ thrilled and swelled and my consciousness passed out across the ocean and the land in all directions, through the sky and out into space. Within moments I was among the stars and planets and strange entities of space. Somehow I was aware of great beings, millions of miles high, moving in space, through which the stars could be seen. Wave after wave of revelation swept through my whole being, too fast for my normal mind to record other than the joy and wonder of it. *
    I had never experienced anything as overwhelming as this. But ever since childhood I had been prone to drift into those moods of intense happiness and affirmation that the psychologist Abraham Maslow calls peak experiences. One of the most vivid had occurred when I was nineteen and was hitch-hiking my way across France to Strasbourg. A lorry-driver had given me a lift to a little
routier
, and I had eaten a hot meal and drunk a glass of wine. So far I had found it rather a strain being in a foreign country with very little money; but as I walked out of the
routier
and looked across the rolling countryside to the mountains in the distance, I experienced a feeling of joy that was so complete that all the problems of my life vanished into insignificance. It was like a
shift of viewpoint
, as if I had suddenly left my body and was looking down on my own life. No doubt the wine had something to do with it, but that is beside the point, for what I experienced was not just a ‘feeling’ but a
seeing
. Once again, as on so many other occasions, I could see that the real problem of human beings is that we live too
close up
to life, like a short-sighted painter who has to paint with his nose within an inch of the canvas, and that close-upness deprives us of meaning. We accept this as inevitable — for, after all, we are men, not birds, and modern life requires constant attention to detail. But the ‘moments of vision’ reveal that this assumption is a mistake. Apparently we possess a faculty that can instantly ‘distance’ us from present reality — just as the short-sighted painter could, if he wanted, stand back from the canvas and put on a pair of strong glasses. If we could learn to call on this faculty at will our lives would be transformed, for we waste 90 per cent of our time in coping mechanically with minor problems and vastly overestimating them. And if many people could learn to do it our earth itself would be transformed, for most of the ugliness and evil of our lives is due to stress and ‘close-upness’.
    Perhaps the most important aspect of these ‘moments of vision’ is that they suggest that there is a way of acquiring knowledge that is quite unlike the ordinary method of ‘learning from experience’. When the visionary faculty is switched on the mind seems to be able to penetrate reality — rather in the manner of X-rays — and to grasp meanings that normally elude it.
    In 1969 a man named Derek Gibson was travelling to work by motorcycle when he noticed that the sound of his engine had faded to a murmur:
    Then everything suddenly changed. I could clearly see everything as before with form and substance, but instead of looking
at
it all I was looking
into
everything. I saw beneath the bark of the trees and
through
the underlying trunks. I was looking
into
the grass too, and all was magnified beyond measure. To the extent that I could see moving microscopic organisms! Then, not only was I seeing all this, but I was literally
inside
it all.
At the same time
as I was looking into this mass of greenery I was aware of every single blade of grass and fold of the trees as if each had been placed before me one at a time and