The Outsider (55 page)

Mescaline
plunged me into a fascinating world in which I was aware of a kind of basic universal benevolence. But it was like becoming a baby again; you are ecstatically happy—and also helpless and defenseless. It reduces you, in a way to an animal level. I tried to explain this by saying that
mescaline
destroyed my mental VHF system. (Radio sets have a VHF attachment so that you can pick up a single station clearly, without getting 20 other stations interfering.) My mind became a kind of giant receiving set, with 20 stations all clamoring away together. My capacity for concentration is usually excellent—I have, for example, been able to write this postscript in a single sitting;
mescaline
destroyed this. So while it was a superb mental holiday, destroying all the mind
’
s tensions, turning one truly into a
‘
creature of the mind,
”
it was useless and dangerous. (It can cause complete mental breakdown in a neurotic or morbid person.)

But clearly, this is the direction in which the answer must lie.
Mescaline
is no answer. We need to get its advantages—the sense of deep vision, the connection with the deepest sources of one
’
s vital powers—without its disadvantages.

Let me try to explain a little more fully. Suppose you are driving down a road at night with your headlights on. Apart from the narrow beam of light ahead of you, you feel completely isolated in your narrow world of blackness. And you can
’
t really
see
anything in your headlights, for you are moving too fast. Now if you turn off your headlights and drive on your sidelights, an interesting thing happens. Your world expands. You become aware of the shapes of trees and houses looming in the darkness. You can look out of your side windows, and see things going past. It is a far more interesting world. But
you are forced to drive at five miles an hour.

This expresses the problem of
mescaline
. It plunges you into a delightful world of twilight where you become aware of some of the strange fish that inhabit the depths of your own mind. But you become a drifter.

But now supposing someone invented a kind of open spotlight that went on the roof of your car. You could now see ahead of you
and
around you—and behind, if necessary. It would, of course, be somewhat inconvenient for other motorists—but then, in the world of the mind, this objection obviously doesn
’
t apply. Can we, in other words, create forms of
mental discipline that will produce some of the effects of
mescaline
—that sense of contact with our inner source of power, meaning and purpose—without impairing our ability to concentrate?

There are such disciplines, and, to a certain extent, I have discovered how to use them. I can create in myself most of the effects of
mescaline
by purely mental disciplines. I am not speaking of yogic disciplines, but of processes of thought, of what Husserl calls
“
phenomenological disciplines.
”
Primarily, they are concerned with the crea
tion of new language, a new con
ceptology; for our problem is that we spend too much time looking at the external world to make any close acquaintance with the world of the inner mind. We have no maps, no geography, no signposts, of this inner world. But my own work has been a consistent attempt to create such a geography.

This is obviously the point where I should be starting this postscript, not finishing it. I can only suggest that interested readers follow me through the remaining books of the Outsider sequence, and through such novels as
Necessary Doubt
and
The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme.
(The title is not mine; it was chosen by the American publisher.)

Let me offer one more clue, concerning how the
“
St Neot margin
”
notion can be applied. (For
this
is the core.) De Quincey tells an interesting story about Wordsworth. He had asked Wordsworth how he came to write poetry, and Wordsworth
’
s answer was not satisfactory. But later in the day, they went to meet the mail cart, which was coming from Keswick. Wordsworth knelt down with his ear to the ground to listen for its rumble; when he heard nothing, he straightened up, and his attention was caught by an evening star,
which suddenly appeared to him to be intensely beautiful.
Wordsworth said:
“
Now I can explain to you how I come to write poetry. If ever I am
concentrating
on something that has nothing to do with poetry, and then I suddenly relax my attention, whatever I see when I relax appears to me to be beautiful.
”

This is obviously another version of what happened to me in the truck—the threat of inconvenience causing a certain concentration of the attention, and then the removal of the threat, which allows the senses to expand with relief, causing a sensation of delight, of life-affirmation.

Try a very simple experiment. Take a pencil and hold it in
front of your eyes, a few feet away. Narrow your attention to the pencil itself, so you cease to be aware of the room. Then let your attention expand, so you become aware of the room as its background. Then narrow your attention again. Do this a dozen times. At the end of this time, you will begin to experience a curious mental glow, not unlike what happens if you exercise your muscles. Because, in fact, you
are
exercising a muscle of whose existence you are normally unaware. You take your perception foir granted, as something that merely
‘‘
happens
”
when you open your eyes. But, as Husserl knew,
perception is intentional
You would not see anything unless you made a subconscious effort of will to perceive.

Freedom and imagination are also muscles that we never exercise; we rely upon external stimuli to make us aware of their possibilities. We tend to be trapped in a world of everyday premises that we take for granted. (Husserl calls this
“
the natural standpoint.
”
) The problem is to use the mind in such a way that we become detached from this world of the natural standpoint, able to criticize it
and analyze it.
This latter is the key to the phenomenology.

I have taken more than ten years to create my
“
new existentialism,
”
and it seems to me that I am working upon the most interesting problem in the world, the
only
interesting problem. In America, there are others who are working along similar lines—Hadley Cantril and Abraham Maslow, for example (both experimental psychologists). England is totally unaware of these problems; intellectually, we have always been the most backward country in the world. Europe has little to offer, besides the dead philosophy of Sartre and Heidegger. And yet in spite of this, I feel that immensely exciting things are about to happen, that we are on the brink of some discovery that will make our century a turning point in human history.