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(Sept-Oct 2020) from NewDawnMagazine Website
Like many other people, I have spent the past few months under a voluntary "house arrest," following the rules the government has set out in order to combat COVID-19,
I am not the most gregarious of people and so being asked to practice social distancing, to self-isolate and stay at home, was not, as it was for many others, that much of a hardship.
I missed being able to see friends or to sit at a café or loiter in bookshops, but to be honest I spend most of my time reading or writing at home anyway, and my neighborhood in North London has many quiet, leafy backstreets, so my daily ration of exercise, taking a walk or riding my bicycle, was pleasant. I also have a small garden where I can stretch my legs and putter around outdoors.
Lockdown, then, was more
of an inconvenience for me than a burden.
In fact, the odd
experience mentioned above is directly related to this, the
inveterate human habit of "taking things for granted."
I "knew" all this, but this knowledge somehow didn't answer my question, nor did it explain why I should suddenly see something as ubiquitous as the sun as strange.
I was genuinely surprised
by it, and if any of my neighbors were in earshot that morning, they
may have wondered what it was that I was giggling about.
Although I was not as badly affected as many others, I still had to change my routine. After a few trips to my usual market resulted in a tour of empty shelves, I decided to go to smaller ones that hadn't yet been pillaged by hysterical hoarders.
Even there I had to make do with what they had.
The smaller shops were further away, so I used the daily food run as an extra bit of exercise, pulling on my backpack and heading out on my bike.
I took all the advised precautions,
I was in "crisis mode,"
but the odd thing was that I found myself feeling more that I was on
holiday.
What was odd was that, as I mentioned, I was not actually doing anything very different from my ordinary routine. Yes, I had made a few changes but nothing too upsetting.
But there was something odder still.
Recognizing that something unusual was happening to me, I decided to try to analyze exactly what that was, to apply a bit of phenomenology to my consciousness.
The result was that I realized that the essence of the strange exhilaration I felt was paradoxically a sense of freedom. 1
And if this wasn't paradoxical enough, my reflections led to an even odder insight.
It was that the "freedom" I was feeling was not one that I had recently been granted - as some people, celebrating the easing of lockdown in some places may be feeling now.
No. It was a feeling for the freedom I already possessed but had become used to.
It was a freedom the "crisis" had reminded me of, just as I had been reminded of the strange reality of the sun, although I thought I knew all about that. I had taken the freedom I already possess for granted, just as I had taken the sun for granted.
The sun had surprised me
and so had my freedom...
Why? Because I realized that I was experiencing exactly the kind of shift in consciousness that Colin Wilson describes in many of his books, a shift from what he calls "the robot" to "real me," or, in your case, to "real you."
This odd transition is at the heart of Wilson's work, and it was apparently something I already knew, as I had written a book about Wilson's life and work entitled Beyond the Robot.
I may have known it, but I had taken it for granted, just as I had taken the sun for granted.
Now I saw that I had had
an experience of this phenomena, and I knew, with the kind of
knowledge that comes from experience, that Wilson was right.
Think of some skill that you now possess but which cost an immense amount of effort when you were first learning it.
It can be anything, from tying your shoes or learning how to type, to riding a bicycle or playing a musical instrument.
At first,
But if we keep at it, one day something miraculous happens.
What has happened is that
our robot has taken over the grunt work, freeing "us" up to
consider other things. He is a kind of automatic pilot that keeps us
flying while we can enjoy the view and think about what we'll do
when we reach our destination.
If it wasn't for the robot we would never learn anything and would have to start from scratch each time we wanted to type, ride a bicycle, or use any other learned skill.
Animals have robots, but theirs are not as versatile or capable as ours. You can teach a young dog new tricks, but even their capacity to acquire new skills is severely limited.
A dog may fetch your
morning paper - although these days I suspect that is a lost art -
but it can't learn French or how to sew (and of course this is also
true of many people…)
But there's one hitch.
To extend my metaphor,
And, accommodating fellow that he is, he is happy to oblige.
on Hampstead Heath, London, 1956. His seminal work was published the same year.
As Wilson writes, the robot has,
What is that?
(Wilson does not mention
it, but one wonders if his wife ever caught her own robot in the act
as well.)
But at some point, the moments of delight that we used to feel at a sunset, a starry night, or simply relaxing with music and a glass of wine, begin to dwindle.
That is why we have a nostalgia for our childhood, although, as Wilson points out, we develop our robot precisely in order to help us deal with the emotional and psychological turbulence of youth.
In "The Rock," T.S. Eliot asks,
Wilson answers:
Sometimes the feeling of being cut off from life is so acute that it can lead to suicide or, conversely, to sudden outbursts of violence, just in order to "feel alive" again.
This is the thesis behind Wilson's "existential" study of murder and sex crime, in books such as his Encyclopedia of Murder and Order of Assassins.
Some individuals, who have allowed their lives to become almost completely automatic, periodically erupt into a murderous rage, the violence throwing off the robot temporarily.
More often, we resort to expedients like alcohol or drugs, which achieve their effect by putting the robot to sleep for a while.
That is why after a glass of wine or two, things that struck us as uninteresting take on a strange glow of meaning. It's no coincidence that poetry and wine have long been linked. The problem here is that by putting the robot to sleep, our own efficiency is hampered; that is why we are advised not to drive while drunk.
Wine may inspire poetry,
but the actual writing is best done while sober.
As an example, Wilson offers the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre who said he never felt as free as when he was a member of the resistance during the German occupation of Paris and was in danger of being arrested by the Gestapo.
Another more extreme example is the novelist Graham Greene.
As a teenager, Greene suffered from acute boredom, and when he discovered his brother's revolver, he decided to play Russian Roulette. He put a bullet in a chamber, spun the cylinder, took the gun out to the common, and put the barrel to his head.
Then he pulled the trigger.
When Greene heard the hammer click on an empty chamber, he experienced an,
Greene had been so bored that the thought of blowing his brains out seemed appealing.
Nothing had changed
except something in him. The "infinite possibilities" were always
there; Greene had simply been blind to them. He didn't see them
because his robot was on the watch, and he isn't programmed to see
possibilities but to perform functions with a minimal expenditure of
effort.
When he heard the hammer hit an empty chamber, he relaxed. The sudden contraction of his attention, in effect, told his robot that "this is important," and so it handed over control to Greene.
That is why when he relaxed,
Something similar, Wilson tells us, happened to Dostoyevsky when he faced execution and received a sudden reprieve:
Greene's experience is summed up in a quotation from the English man of letters Doctor Johnson that Wilson is fond of quoting:
Greene's mind was thus concentrated.
This is why the philosopher Heidegger and the esoteric teacher Gurdjieff both suggested that the one sure way for humans to overcome their "forgetfulness of being" was to maintain an awareness of their inevitable death.
I was not going to be hanged in a fortnight, nor was I in danger from the Gestapo.
Many of them said that they never felt more alive or more free.
They could be blown up at any moment, and this added a certain savour to everything.
What had happened, in
Wilson's terminology, is that I had lowered my "indifference
threshold." 4
Wilson discovered, though, that where something pleasant fails, an inconvenience can succeed.
It can shake us out of our indifference and break through the "I can't be bothered barrier" many of us spend much time behind.
Somehow, the inconvenience prompts us to respond, and when it is overcome we find ourselves in a better mood than we were in before the inconvenience.
Paradoxically, it has
"cheered us up."
Gurdjieff captured this in the title of his last, unfinished book, Life is Real Only Then, When "I Am."
Gurdjieff knew about the robot; his way of speaking about it was to say that we are all mechanical, machines, not real human beings. Or that we are all asleep, believing we are awake.
This is the most dangerous part of "living on the robot":
The robot edits out everything that he considers inessential, so the world he presents to "us" is stripped down to practical concerns; all the "extras" are omitted.
This is why when he is
given a holiday, everything seems more "interesting," rather like
the effect of color being added to a black and white sketch, or a
sumptuous soundtrack to a silent film.
These moments, what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called "peak experiences," are really moments when our consciousness is working as it should, and not at the "energy-saving" levels the robot usually has it set at.
We all have much more energy and power than we know, but because we have come to accept the minimum levels that the robot limits us out of habit, we never draw on these supplies.
Gurdjieff again knew this,
Yet, like genuine crisis, the artificial kind can become habitual too.
Greene eventually stopped playing Russian Roulette because the kick of not blowing his brains out lost its thrill; it's a wonder he survived to write his gloomy novels.
Gurdjieff had to develop more and more difficult exercises and create more inconvenience in order to keep his students on their toes.
In his last days in Paris, Gurdjieff's students "lived dangerously" by piling into his car and driving at breakneck speed to parts unknown until the petrol ran out; Gurdjieff was an appalling driver, and they would have to find petrol in order to get back.
As some reports suggest, at times the crisis Gurdjieff induced proved too great and a student collapsed.
And as Wilson points out,
we have created civilization in order to minimize crisis, so there
is something absurd about having to put a gun to your head in order
to feel alive.
The essence of both
exercises is to evoke a sense of reality, and the shock of a
positive reality can be just as effective as that of a negative one,
as well as being a lot less gloomy.
Now, when that freedom was constrained, this inconvenience reminded me of it; hence the paradox that I felt more free.
The crisis mode I had adopted made "me" more "present" and I remembered how much I possessed and had to feel grateful for. It was a collateral benefit of a difficult time.
With any luck I will not
need another crisis to be reminded again...
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