You do not choose your life – rather it chooses you. From then on, you have to make a series of decisions. In making these, are you trying to please yourself? Or do you prefer to conform to the desires others? How do you avoid that? How do you face issues like crime, injustice suffering and getting older with courage and confidence? People use the phrase ‘get a life’ and this book, in simple straightforward language, explains and clarifies what a ‘life’ actually is, beginning with the light romantic comedy Groundhog Day and working through the minds of the greatest philosophers who ever lived and, at the end, suggesting a way forward. It teaches one both to look at the worst and celebrate the best.

Instead of beginning this short book with a highflown statement of intention, I will slip in an outline of the film ‘Groundhog Day’ (1993) in which Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a selfish, sarcastic television weatherman who makes the annual trip to a rural ‘Groundhog Festival’ at Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Although folks come from far and wide to see if the Groundhog will predict an early spring or six more weeks of winter, it is a job Connors finds tedious and irksome. He wants it all to end as quickly as possible. Along with his flighty yet attractive producer, Rita, and wisecracking cameraman, Phil drifts through the tedious rota and awakes the next morning to find Groundhog Day beginning all over again, the same actions, the same conversations with an old classmate, the same locales and the same snowstorm returning and blocking him in.

Repeatedly certain scenes are played out exactly as they were done the first time. The cumulative impact is excruciating. How can he escape this appalling trap? But then Connors has an idea. There is a situation here that he could gainfully exploit. While the other characters, although unaware of it, are stuck in the groove of their daily routine, he is equipped with a valuable foresight – he has actually been there before. Connors tries to take advantage, both sexually and gastronomically, for he can experiment with chat-lines on the opposite sex, eat and drink as much as he likes, even to the point of having a heart attack, but he will still awake to find himself in the dawn of Groundhog Day. Inevitably this leads to deep rage and despair. Finally he tries to commit suicide by driving over a ledge into a quarry, taking a plugged-in toaster into the bath, throwing himself off a building – still he wakes up each morning intact with Groundhog Day greeting him afresh.

Granted these appalling limitations, what can Connors do to enrich his life? How can he make the ordinary, the grindingly repetitive, alive and meaningful? Illumination comes when Connors discards the negative response and approaches each identical day as a world that he can explore from many angles and at tremendous depth. If the day cannot grow, at least he can. Connors starts to live ‘authentically’ by engaging in activities which - if not objectively useful - do have a cumulative value. He begins taking music lessons, the results of which he can retain the following day, even if his instructor cannot. For she is bound to see him as a new pupil – although starting out at an ever-advancing level of proficiency. His moral awareness spreads to the plight of others. He acts with kindness and sympathy towards an old man who he knows will die that day, attempting even to forestall his death. When he finds that is not possible, he turns his attention to the living, catching a child who he knows will fall from a tree at a particular time. No vanity attends these actions. Each good deed he performs is extinguished twenty four hours later. Despite or perhaps because of this, he grows into a ‘good’ person, accepting that, although there’s no glory in the enterprise, such actions are the only ones possessed of real significance.

His emerging goodness works its magic on others, notably Rita, who has rejected his previous attempts at seduction. Once he abandons all strategies of selfishness and personal gratification, she falls in love with him and spends the night in his room. The first time nothing happens, but on the second occasion he finds that she is still there – for they have moved into the next day. Connors is overwhelmed. For not only has times started to move again, he has also found his ideal partner. But where is the best place for them to spend their lives together? In a final irony, Rita and Connors decide to settle down in Punxsutawney.

Is the plot of this light comedy relevant in any way to us? None of our lives are as confined as Connors’s. At least they do not appear to be. But if we look a little more deeply, maybe we find ourselves equally governed by rhythm, rote and routine. Maybe we go through life shallowly, mechanically, like a sleepwalker rather than an explorer. Even if our lives are as narrow as Connors’s stuck in Groundhog Day, that does not prevent them having depths and riches. Virtues are defined by limitations. But in the great rush of duty and moneymaking, we do not always make the decisions best for us. Only a shock – like being stuck in Groundhog Day – can reawaken us to the things that have intrinsic substance and value. One philosophy which tries to address the question – how should I live my life – is existentialism. And, of course, Groundhog Day is, in a sense, an existential tract presented as a piece of entertainment.

Existentialism - at least in its post-war manifestation - acquired the status of a practical philosophy. It concerned itself with the individual at large in the world, with such questions as how to measure up as an authentic citizen. It addressed issues like choice, freedom and commitment. Jean Paul Sartre, generally regarded as its founder, went so far as to state that there are definite means by which one can choose correctly between various painful obligations or duties.

First each person has to overcome the problem of being born to occupy no definite role. A floating - rather than fixed - consciousness leaves one peculiarly alienated. Existence precedes essence, in Sartre’s view, or one is given a life but no integral core or quintessential self. In fact, human life is akin to a hole in reality, a vacuum. If a human being were an instinctual machine like a shark – an efficient predator – there would be less of a problem. Each man and woman would be finely attuned to the purpose of survival and the course of their destinies pre-determined. But human beings vary so much. Often they have no idea how to order their lives or to formulate questions or circumnavigate obstacles. One man may appear decisive, but another is more like Hamlet, a head-scratching doubter who finds it difficult to define his role - hence there may be a willingness to shelter under the banners and slogans of dictators and politicians. If the latter turn out wrong-headed or evil, they at least lessen the burden of choosing and leave the individual free.

Free - to do what? To abnegate important decisions? To be oppressed and thwarted by those in power? This is Sartre’s point. If you do not think hard, understand that you have no pre-cast inner nature and try to grasp what the world means to you as an individual - the nature of the dilemmas it imposes - your life will never be your own. Freedom means the power to make decisions. If, however, you opt out of choosing, you do so consciously. You have chosen not too choose, and that is as much your responsibility as voting for a tyrant.

Thus there are no accidents in life; a community event which suddenly burst forth and involves me in it does not come from outside. If I am mobilized in war, the war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it. I deserve it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by desertion... For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it.

Accepting such an argument - taking on such a responsibility - leaves you better equipped to shape out a future within the focus of your talents and limitations.

One can, of course, exaggerate this necessity of finding a role, a destiny. Some men and women are content to automatically follow in the footsteps of their parents, inherit a business or craft, or pursue a pattern of development that has been handed down. Introspection - the constant weighing-up of inclinations and alternatives - does not feature in their agendas; they prefer, if you like, to live an ‘unexamined’ life.

Sartre might say that such types are turning their back on choice, refusing to acknowledge their existential freedom. Why? Simply because it is easier. The world poses a challenge of a complex nature. To look hard at life, to make moral choices, to consider and reflect upon one’s actions - all this requires assiduity. Hence many of us duck such choices and live inauthentically.

The world being many-faceted and complex, problems arise concerning career and personal relationships. This may result in a type of behaviour that Sartre called bad faith. It can make itself known in two distinct ways. One is when an individual denies his freedom and does not accept responsibility for his actions, blaming it upon innate character, parental influence, or various invisible or ‘subconscious’ forces that directed him to behave insincerely or dishonestly. Here the man places himself at the level of a thing, an object picked up or pushed around by exterior forces. He is not a self-determining individual, open to praise or blame, but an agent or vehicle.

Perhaps it was this tendency that made Sartre reject Freud’s notion of the subconscious. He saw the construct as a convenient excuse, an escape from the obligation placed upon an individual who inherits an enormous and bewildering personal freedom. "I beat up my wife because my father used to beat my mother as a child" - this is the kind of excuse the subconscious is liable to provoke, the shifting of blame to a psychic scar or inherited tendency. The subconscious becomes a scapegoat. Sartre resisted this; he maintained that men and women do not act badly because trace elements are polluting their minds, but because it is often the easy way out. In other words, they choose to act badly.

The second type of bad faith is advertised by a retreat into role playing. Sartre’s famous example is that of the waiter who acts as though he is stamped through with the gestures of his profession like a stick of rock. His demeanour - all elaborate bows and fussy attentions - is fervently ritualistic. He cannot see beyond his servile qualities. He is hiding from the world by burying himself in a role. He is denying all the other areas of himself that could be developed, saying all I am is a waiter.

Writing of tradesmen, Sartre said, "The public demands of them that they realise their condition as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavour to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer and a waiter. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the customer because he is not wholly a grocer.... There are indeed many precautions for imprisoning a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away, and suddenly elude his condition."

Man is not a puppet. Neither does he exist alone. There is the problem of ‘the other’ or the people with whom we share the world. Some philosophers, like Hume, are not convinced of their existence - of anything or anyone beyond the self. Bishop Berkeley went further. While admitting the eternal, ubiquitous presence of God, he denied the very existence of matter. The ‘out there’ is merely perceived. We cannot furnish solid proof of it. What we translate with our senses may be pure illusion – in Descartes’ words, a kind of mirage constructed by a demon or deceiver. Although no one can actually disprove this solipsistic hypothesis, for practical purposes it tends to be exhausting - not to say depressing – to argue at length.

Sartre had a less constricted view. He acknowledged the reality of others, yet depicted their presence as a source of vexation and puzzlement. He went so far as to say that other people in the world constituted "a scandal". Read coldly, all Sartre’s talk of other people looming so large and alarming may appear nonsense, but Sartre is exploring the issue at a primal level, trying to recover the immediacy and shock of a child confronted by a bewildering reality. Other people introduce challenge and conflict; they trespass across our psychological boundaries, demand our response. Sartre is conducting a depth study of interaction from a territorial standpoint when the ‘other’ appears to be infringing or limiting our freedom.

Sartre views man as essentially cut-off and selfish. He tends to negate the fact that the ‘other’ can extend the world of meaning and delight. He shows the individual as threatened rather than enriched by the many planes and attitudes of being. He might have endorsed the sentiments expressed by Robinson Crusoe:

"What are the sorrows of other men to us, and what their joy? Something we may be touched indeed with by the power of sympathy, and a secret turn of the affections; but all the solid reflection is directed to ourselves. Our meditations are all solitude in perfection; our passions are all exercised in retirement; we love, we hate, we covet, we enjoy, all in privacy and solitude."

It seems bleak, placing self-interest at the core of the individual, and may apply in certain instances. But even self-interest cannot be pursued in isolation. The most selfish person can only realise his aims through cooperation and intercourse with society. There can be little enjoyment in the restricted world of the castaway that Defoe paints so vividly, for man is also a social creature, a creator of communities and townships. Even David Hume, who was not prepared to vouchsafe for the existence of others, wrote in his Treatise on Human Nature:

"We can form no wish which has not a reference to society... Let all the powers and elements of nature conspire to serve and obey one man; let the sun rise and set at his command; the sea and the rivers roll as he pleases, and the earth still furnish spontaneously whatever may be useful or agreeable to him; he will still be miserable, till you give him one person at least with whom he may share his happiness, and whose esteem and friendship he may enjoy."

German philosopher Martin Heidegger drew attention to a fact that we are ‘thrown’ into world that has already been set up and organised by others. We have to learn all the necessary skills and patterns of seeing in order to understand what is going on. There is no choice in this matter. Each child inherits a society, a network of laws and social structures, a cultural dynamic. These shared life-worlds distract our contemplation from the fact of existence itself. All enquiry, he believed, begins with a radical astonishment at being part of a world: "Man alone of all existing things experiences the wonder of wonders: that there are things in being." Heidegger characterised the human personality as ‘Dasein’ or literally ‘being there’ and maintained that modern man had become detached or lost his sense of union with nature. He must regain this, also his sense of authentic self, quite distinct from those of others. His next task is to establish his sense of time and destiny - he only exists for a finite duration in which he may realise his unique potential.

The obstacle is that, once an individual raises the level of his being to true awareness, he is overcome by fear and anxiety, caused by the implications of such a responsibility: the loneliness of a single person adrift on an ocean scored by enormous eddies and currents wherein meaning is to be found in the skill and rightness of the navigator. However, there is a concomitant advantage. For he is able to plot his course towards his own unique death, take choices and alter his future - in a sense, he is free. Of course, others are adrift on this ocean and, though his way is not theirs, he must observe them, make room for their passage - but never blindly follow in their wake. For he has his work cut out. His duty is to master the threshold guardians, Time and Nothing: Time, the temporality demanding urgency of purpose and surety of direction; Nothing, the swallowing negation of all that there is through which, paradoxically, Dasein gains its force of definition.

Some feel deep kinship with ‘other souls’ or the social world, inhabited by millions of ‘others’ and escape any feeling of ‘Nothing’ by integrating themselves. Others feel apart from society and unable to lock into a social niche. Like chesspieces frozen on a board, they have no inclination to engage or manoeuvre.

Deciding the route of one’s destiny, to put it rather grandly, is seldom easy. What metaphysical chemistry declares that one should be a dentist, a farmer, a fireman? And if you keep chanting these occupations to yourself, as if they were mantras, their sense dissolves - they end up meaning nothing. Values disintegrate, start to seem arbitrary, pointless. This state of mind affects many sensitive young men and women, poised at the crossways of adulthood, who find themselves in jobs they do not like and mixing with people for whom they feel no empathy.

"Beckett looked at the clock again. It seemed stationary. He realised that it was no good hoping for five-thirty. Five-thirty was a thing in the future and did not exist. Only the present existed. He was fixed in the present like a man in a photograph. And tomorrow he would have to endure it all again. Not only tomorrow, but for all his life until he retired at sixty-five. He was resentful. He had only one life; why should he waste it in this manner? It would be different if he believed in immortality."

The above typically disillusioned passage is taken from a novel called The Furnished Room by Laura del Rivo, a misanthropic classic set amongst the beats and angries of London’s bedsits of the 1950s. The hero Joe Beckett is a typical ‘outsider’, intelligent and bored with his job, needing intellectual stimulus. Yet he is not sufficiently gifted to established himself as a free-standing creative figure, an artist or scientist. Out of this deep sense of boredom and frustration, he eventually get inveigled into committing a pointless murder.

Colin Wilson helped to identify and give the name ‘Outsider’ to this type, taking the title from a novel by Albert Camus, dealing with the life and death of Mersault, a man curiously remote from other humans beings, so cut-off in fact that he is presumed quite devoid of human feelings; for that reason, he ends up being condemned to death for a crime that he did not commit. Yet Mersault is indifferent to his sentence; he accepts his fate stoically, impassively, almost too bored to plead his innocence.

Despite such loveless portraits, Wilson believes that Outsiders are central to the development of a healthy society. Their ability to not feel at home, sometimes stemming from a greater sensitivity, makes them more prone think original thoughts, to alter and challenge things. Hence Outsiders act as checks against monotony and complacency clogging the atmosphere of the world. Wilson concluded that the Outsider might begin as a dropout but could end up as a saint.

Why does the Outsider feel alienated? What is oppressing him? It may not be just other people or unease with work but also what is known as the human situation: being born to die, or the fleeting, transient nature of existence, the fact that things rise, crumble and are perpetually replaced. This is the source of much despair and unease.

"I can connect noting with nothing," wrote T.S Eliot in one of the more despairing passages in The Waste Land. The message is one of hopeless protest. Like a fist trying to grip water, meaning trickles away, negating any effort at comprehension.

At a personal level, some people find change alarming (the adoption of decimal currency in Britain produced suicides among the elderly) but others are inspired by change - the social rejuvenation that often accompanies reform and re-organisation. An institution like the nineteenth century Tory Party was set on maintaining and ‘conserving’ traditional ways, resisting flux and flow, opting instead for tradition and inheritance, while the Whigs were all for reform, emphasising how socials upheavals were taking place elsewhere and the constitution had to change in accordance with new pressures and challenges.

Although political institutions may appear static, change is ingrained in us at a molecular level. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said that you can never enter the same river twice. There is a constant field of movement and transaction. Everything shifts and alters its aspect. This change - translated to a human level - seems to be telling us, ‘All pleasures and joys are transient. On the stream of time, the line of barges drift endlessly, stopping to unload wine and apples, cholera, tar, deformity and blooming health.’

Because of this constant change and displacement, doubt has been cast on the concept of continuous personality. Unceasing movement and flow leave one with no stable centre from which to measure things - a matter that is as much a problem to a modern physicist as it was to past philosophers. Each moment drops like a single grain of sand into time’s hourglass and who can prove – save a DNA sample - that the new-born babe and the dying octogenarian are still the same individual? What essence is retained through all this flux? If we were to meet our ten years old selves walking down the street, would we recognise or feel empathy with them? The most basic things become fraught with complexity if one examines them at depth.

Heraclitus’s message may seem a dispiriting. Isn’t is equally true that, living in the real world, we assume solidity and coherence, cling to our single selves, plan ahead and shore up substantial - if temporary - advantages. Also, our finite nature has inspired the most moving poetry and drama. Time passing, the decaying of leaves, the transitions of fashions and families - this has always been the stuff of literature:

Our value systems, then, are based on limited duration. If each of us were immortal, unchanging, nothing could have any real point or urgency. In a sense, beauty is movement - sometimes frozen movement, as in a painting or relief - and staying is nowhere. So while we, naturally enough, protest at death, decay and a short lifespan, they endow meaning and urgency to the smallest tasks.

In the same way that particles and rivers are on the move, changing shape and anchorage, so is the language employed to define our role and culture. The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, sees meaning as endlessly deferred and the author as a kind of illusion of ‘presence’ or ghost in the machine. We do not speak language; language speaks us. We inherit a world already shaped by words. During the learning process, we force our expression through artificial conduits and frameworks. The forms, structures, images and cultural connotations mechanically employed overwhelm and drown whatever emotion or meaning we intended to convey.

Derrida has developed an elaborate methodology of ‘deconstructing’ texts - zooming in with microscopic zeal and uncovering a contradiction or aporia - so that the document is revealed as an integrally unsound. Far from achieving its intentions, it can often be seen as subverting its central theme or argument. Derrida, often wittily, conducts us through the linguistic ruin, pointing out various shattered deductions and rickety premises.

There is a contradiction in his standpoint. If the whole structure of linguistic meaning is a misnomer, why does Derrida show such trust in an imperfect medium by expressing his philosophy - as he does - in Laocoon-like, inordinately complex sentences, dense with philosophical reference, puns, synonyms, Greek and Latin tags? If he allows himself such extravagances, he must anticipate communicating with a degree of precision - indeed, he has turned out a succession of books that are now standard reading in many universities? Derrida admits that he is not immune from ‘deconstruction’ and would probably respond to these comments by saying that a ‘slippage’ has occurred and his argument has been misunderstood.

Derrida’s famous term differánce needs to be considered. It combines ‘defer’ and ‘difference’, the first meaning that no fixed meaning can be extracted from a text which can be diversely and successively interpreted; the second attacking the notion of words possessing a discrete, self-contained value, for a dictionary can only define them in terms of ‘difference’, drawing in a network of other words in order to establish a context of usage.

Several of Derrida’s essays undermine the idea of speech being more authentic – or truer to its source - than writing. To demonstrate this, he deconstructed various Platonic dialogues. Plato was a natural target for Derrida; for he was the most important of the philosophers who introduced an element of stability into the eternal flux of Heraclitus and others. Plato believed that, although things drift, change and dissemble in this gross material world, there is another world - an immutable stable kingdom - where the soul resides and things exist in a state of perfect being.

Plato developed a theory of Forms or Ideas, stating that behind every object is a perfect form of its being, akin to the spiritual ideal, the comparison by which all earthly appearances must be found wanting. In this non-visible realm, the argument runs, there does exist the essence of the perfect house, the perfect dog, the perfect state, the perfect embodiment of truth, love, honour, chastity, etc.

Now there are many objections to this, the most notable being the sheer multiplicity of species and objects. How can there be a perfect plant or perfect tree or perfect insect when so many thousand species exist, all distinct in form and outline? How can one develop an essential notion of ‘treeness’ when considering forms as diverse as miniature willow and a giant redwood? Furthermore, how is a perfect or ‘ideal’ blade of grass to be distinguished from an ordinary one?

But one knows why Plato developed this theory. Everything made, imagined, conceived, starts with a kind of shimmering semi-presence, ostensibly located in the mind, that one strives to translate in solid terms. Plato was trying to account for man, the most unnatural of animals, always seeking to change or ‘improve’ his environment, always claiming an affinity with something ‘out there’ that drives him onward and upward; yet who at the same time can display a degeneracy and rottenness quite beyond the animal kingdom.

This need to embody higher values, Plato argues, must be the soul-mirror reflecting light from a spiritual realm, while the degeneracy and rottenness must be the result of a wilful denial of this light - in other words, as Shakespeare said, roses that fester smell worse than weeds.

Despite rational refutation, the splendour of the theory has proved enduring. Plato solidified the human longing that certain values be revered throughout time, be fixed in place like guiding stars, rather than seen as manifestations of a prevailing social order. Most of us in a shadowy, ill-defined way respect invisible values, preferring a world where God, Truth, Justice and Love are honoured and invoked, rather than a world devoid of higher meanings. Plato inspired men to pursue a vision of Utopia or establishing a heaven on earth.

He maintained that people do not learn things. Rather they remember them or rediscover the knowledge absorbed during the process of ‘anamnesis’ or previous life cycles. In its ‘disembodied’ state, the soul gains knowledge of the realm of Forms which it loses upon being reborn. So, in Plato’s view, existence is a period of separation from the primal truth that underlies appearance.

He illustrated his thinking by the parable of the cave, in which he compared human beings to prisoners, squatting in a cave, their backs turned to the entrance, seeing only reflected shadows in the flamelight and thinking it reality. One man escapes from the cave and blunders into the light. He steps out into the purer realm beyond that of gross materialistic substances. Eventually he stumbles back to the cave. He is dazzled but seemingly more stupid than before. This is because he had received an insight - a glimpse of the eternal realm of Forms - that has changed him utterly and he is unable to translate such an intense spiritual vision to those huddled in the darkness. He has become an outsider in his own world, perhaps less happy than he was before. The fine and the coarse-grained have become separated.

This parable has given birth to many offspring. One thinks of the oracles of certain African tribes whose utterances are believed to contain otherworldly truths. There are apparently irresponsible jesters - like Shakespeare’s ‘Fool’ in King Lear - who are actually dispensing profound insights in an oblique way. A man like Blake appeared to his contemporaries as a kind of mystical madman. Wisdom does not always take the form one might expect, and one must be vigilant before dismissing anyone as spouting nonsense.

After hearing talk of souls and spirits, there is a point at which irritation sets in. Ideas concerning the hidden realm can seem muzzy and irrelevant, especially in a world where there is so much injustice and suffering. What use is it, one asks, to formulate such metastic concepts when people are being cruelly oppressed, starved or thrown into prison?

In the Greek view, suffering was very much part of hard fabric of existence. Cruel fates, embodied in creatures like Furies, stalked about and sought revenge on mortals who overstepped the mark or infringed some law or another. The hard lot of mankind was not a subject for Job-like lamentation; it was a fact, just as much as the seasons, the cycles of birth and death.

In the Christian view, the Myth of the Fall may account for the rapacities of the food chain and other apparently ‘tainted’ aspects of existence - in other words, we inherit a flawed paradise. Nobility is yoked to suffering as in the example of Christ on the Cross. Pain is a kind of refining fire. Christ voluntarily took on this ordeal. But what of those who neither want nor deserve pain, but still have to endure it, like the chronically sick, the brutally oppressed?

"We have rather a problem with earthquakes," a Christian once admitted. Aside from man’s cruelty to man, there are huge careless acts of destruction visited by natural forces upon evil and good alike - could these also be the work of a benevolent deity? Earthquakes were a theological point in the 18th century, especially after the great earthquake at Lisbon (1755), after which the atheist Voltaire proclaimed that, if God existed, he was unfeeling and indifferent. Rousseau, the mystic, naively retorted that God was in no way responsible, and that, if men had chosen to live naturally in the forest, instead of crowding together in high-storied buildings, they would have been spared the effects of the catastrophe.

Writers like C.S. Lewis have attempted to tackle the problem of human pain from a theological standpoint, saying that these are the harsh knocks of God’s chisel as he beats out the shape of man, but this is hardly more than metaphoric window dressing. No clear, convincing explanation emerges, only a voice strangulated by the paradoxical coils it attempted to untangle.

Humanists argue that one way to reduce human suffering is by taking a political stance, by each individual participating and shaping the way society conducts itself. Statesmen of all nations should co-operate to form a world government that is democratic and egalitarian, excluding tyrants and warmongers, promoting the health and welfare of all beings. Naturally such a measure would not eliminate the privations caused by illness or accident, or the painful fact of death and personal tragedy, but it would at least address the issue of man’s inhumanity to man.

All politics start from the individual. Each individual may have to develop in order to locate and remedy the area of unrest. One could go so far as to say that many of the outrages and injustices in the world are caused by evil men in positions of power attempting to punish or reform what they see as evil in others. "I believe one of the greatest sources of disaster in our lives today," said Sir Laurens Van Der Post, "is the assumption that all great social problems must have political solutions. All the solutions of our problems must also, sometime, have a political expression but in the first instance they are apolitical, and no instant ideas, ideology or law can bring them about. They arise first as intimations in an area of spirit where our master values have their origin. They must be nursed, grown, lived and fertilised in the imagination of men everywhere before they can become decently political."

The worst conundrums are posed by those who take the lives of others. The motives of cold-blooded murderers may be calculated - to gain an inheritance or remove an obstacle - but there are also those who appear to take life for the sake of it. One has only to glance at the daily papers, or the stacks of books on deliberated atrocities, to know that once men’s pleasure centres are aroused, they can be capable of the worst type of act. Certain men are able kill brutally and successively for the gratification the act confers, and in so doing negate whatever human feeling they may have possessed.

But there are also paradoxes and contradictions, as to what constitutes murder. If, during wartime, a pilot drops bombs on women and children, he is not considered a murderer, yet in his way he has killed in cold blood. If the same man had taken a rifle to these civilians - killed them personally - he might even have been judged a war criminal. So does the fact that he conducts the bombing at a distance - is less personally involved - exonerate him? Naturally his mission has been ratified by a government who has accepted (if that is possible) the mantle of his responsibility: thus he can say, "I was only obeying orders."

Furthermore, the pilot was bombing for expediency, not wreaking death for pleasure like the serial killer. But is this making any valid point, save suggesting that the emotionally detached execution of civilians in order to lower enemy morale is superior to murder for its own sake? Obviously the cases are dramatically different - the only thing they have in common, some would say, are dead bodies - but they do raise the issue of how we evaluate the taking of human life.

We are not here attempting to equate men who fought for their country with cynical murderers, only questioning anomalies in human ethics and psychology. Why do civilised men, when ordered to do so by politicians, stoically accept the necessity of killing other civilised men who, in different circumstances. they might have embraced and befriended? Why do not such men, in times of peace, direct this fervour towards abolishing the arms industry - removing the mechanics of war altogether? Sartre might have answered, "Because they can’t be bothered to think that hard and find it easier to act in bad faith by allowing fundamentally immoral governments to make decisions on their behalves."

Clearly, once war has been declared, a kind of tacit agreement has arisen. The usual ethical standards are dissolved. Actions normally considered reprehensible are seen as patriotic and brave. In carrying out deadly orders, such as bombing civilians, the pilot is exonerated because he is operating within the context of a life-threatening situation.

Nevertheless, this tendency of humanity, in its passage through historic time, to co-operate in a kind of wholesale madness has led Freud to locate an subconscious deathwish in the psyche: the seemingly nonsensical proposition that, secretly, men want to kill and be killed.

Some link this lemming-like tendency to a Puritan sense of physical disgust. D.H. Lawrence suggested that western mechanised man was a split soul who loathed his body - its sexual and excretory functions - and sought to destroy it by means of the enginery of war. Others have argued that war is a ritual outlet for men’s surplus energies - their welling desire to run amok and wreak harm. It is not a political thing, so much as a deep-rooted psychological need.

Elaborate neurological and physiological theories have been forwarded. Psychologists and scientists have speculated whether the unprecedented growth of the cerebral cortex in the last hundred thousand or so years has created a disharmony with the older limbic system: in other words, a kind of argument has broken out between driver and passenger, and this has resulted in the ‘headstrong’, erratic route of humanity, repeatedly crashing into ditches and setting fire to its vehicle of progress.

E.F.F. Hill, parson and philosopher, provided yet another spiritual angle. He believed war resulted from man detesting his masculine role. Resenting the pain of separation from the feminine - his mother - he seeks to regain that blissful uterine unity by killing the separated self:

"The masculine revolts against the masculine: all revolution is this; it rebels against the fact of separation, of birth: all rebellion is this... But war is the struggle between mothers in which the sons are sacrificed, but not lost, for the tombs are not empty - the separated masculine principle returns, and in the darkness of death (feminine) is held, and in the folds of mother earth is at rest..."

Whatever the rationalisation, such behaviour reminds us that civilisation is a thin crust over a lava lake; beneath are terrible pressures, gases that might shatter and swallow it permanently. This problem has been elucidated by several writers and intellectuals.

William Golding stated that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey" and several of his novels demonstrate this contention. In Lord of the Flies, a group of well brought-up English schoolboys become shipwrecked on a desert island. Instead of pluckily taking forward the civilised values of their parents and teachers, they regress to homicide and cannibalism, killing the most vulnerable - and most intelligent - member of their party. Similarly Joseph Conrad wrote a novel The Heart of Darkness showing how a cultivated and ostensibly high-minded European, placed in the heart of the jungle, ended up by immersing himself deeper and deeper in barbarism. The ‘heart of darkness’ is man’s innate tendency towards evil, this covert but malign predisposition that finds expression in wars, orgies and holocausts. The famous phrase, "Mr Kurz - he dead," refers to the extinction of the protagonist’s soul.

Conrad hints that Kurz experienced a dark pleasure when he indulged his lowest instincts. He does not go into details, but we know that the novelist is hinting at the weird flushes and arousals a man might feel when he abandons restraint. The rational, temperate self is suppressed; the darker, Dionysian energies take control.

Arthur Schopenhauer earlier identified this overpowering force in The World as Will and Idea. Temperamentally speaking, a Romantic pessimist, Schopenhauer saw people not as instigators of action but as objects or mediums controlled by the timeless will or ‘energy’ that expresses itself in the turbulent phenomenal world. Men and women are little more than puppets driven by this thing-in-itself that works through them, finding expression in sex, greed, violence, confusion.

One of the most melodramatic presentations of Schopenhauer’s view of life is Ted Hughes’s poem Ghost Crabs. It opens by describing a beach where the tide is going out. The sea uncovers enormous crabs "like a packed trench of helmets" who creep inland and invade the bodies of men and women, making them act in a compulsive, aggressive way:

Dylan Thomas also evoked this irresistible will in the famous lines:

This is taken from a striking passage in The World as Will and Idea that finds this will in "the force that shoots and vegetates in the plant, indeed the force by which the crystal is formed, the force that turns the magnet to the North Pole...and finally even gravitation, which acts so powerfully in all matter, pulling the stone to the earth and the earth to the sun; all these he [the reader] will recognise as different only in the phenomenon, but the same according to their inner nature."

The only way, apparently, to thwart this all-mastering force is by renouncing the world and its sensual diversions. Instead of giving way to the pressure of desire, one adopts an attitude of ascetic abstinence like a Buddhist monk. Schopenhauer did not, however, practise the world-rejection that he preached. He lived comfortably, enjoyed eating out and had many light affairs.

But there was another aspect of Schopenhauer’s thinking, and that touched upon the area of relationships, on why so many men and women are hurt or aggrieved when their marriages or love affairs do not turn out as they hoped or planned. Schopenhauer had an instant reply. Why we get love wrong, he maintained, is that we think we are our in control of it when actually it is control of us. In the middle of the hormonal storm of romantic attraction, the blind will of the species rushes forward to fulfil its destiny. It surges through men and women and it is quite irrepressible and unpredictable. Love is a kind of ecstatic madness, aided by an immense rush of brain chemicals, and it is foolish to attach to much weight to it, anymore that you would to a statement made by some ecstatically drunk. Be prepared for love to hurt you or cast you aside, once it has finished its business. "Love…casts itself on persons," he wrote, "who apart from the sexual relation, would be hateful, contemptible and even abhorrent to the lover. But the will of the species is so much more powerful than that of the individual, that the lover shuts his eyes to all the qualities repugnant to him, overlooks everything, misjudges everything, and binds himself forever to the object of his passion."

On the surface, this leaves little to take heart from. But what it does suggest is that, when things go wrong in this area, do not automatically blame yourself or go through hours of self-analysis. Happily accept that will of the species has rushed passed you and on to another destination, but that does not mean that it will not stop on your way again. It is like a river that will never stop flowing. Paddle in it when you can, enjoy its vigour and coolness, but when it dries up for a while, just wait until the current revives and starts up again.

Other thinkers take a less oppressive view than Schopenhauer, seeing the will as being more pliable, a tool to shape and use rather than an overlord to obey.

Carl Gustav Jung perceived this controlling, instinctual aspect of the will not as an infernal force or first cause, but rather as the natural psychic inheritance of each man and woman. He called it ‘the shadow’ and pointed out that, if understood and responsibly harnessed, the shadow need not be bad, for it contains a deep well of utilizable energy and inspiration. There is a vague analogy between the Jung’s shadow, Nietzsche’s Dionysus and the Freudian Id or the basement of the psyche where incestuous desires and outlawed urges are supposed to hide. Similarly the Vajrayana Path of Buddhism embraces ‘crazy wisdom’ whereby impure or ‘shadow-generated’ emotions - passion, hatred, rapacious greed - are transmuted into the spiritual.

If men, however, go to the other extreme, ferociously quell such urges, as in the more extreme forms of religion, they put themselves in danger, theoretically speaking. For they are making of their body a battleground rather than a parliament or meeting-place of desires, sensations, dreams. A civil war breaks out between opposing impulses; the result is erratic, veering behaviour, like the man who alternates between celibate and rabid seducer.

To overcome such dangers, one needs to make an effort at understanding the psyche, its dream-pictographs and stratagems, and begin to employ it for the better. In achieving this, creativity - art, writing, painting - can be useful, in that it proposes a method of channelling - sublimating - forces that have the potential of getting out of hand. In Jungian terms, man should seek to integrate the separated halves, or know himself and be himself.

But what does this mean? Know yourself? Novelist-philosopher, John Cowper Powys, believed that each individual discovers and creates his own universe from the ‘objective mystery’ of the vast unknown that surrounds him. Owing to defects and biases in the personality, people tend to evolve intellectual systems that distort - in the name of idealism, morals or science - the nature of the universe. "If I am convinced of anything in this world," he wrote, "I am convinced of the presence in every philosophical system, of the original wish, or will, or temperamental bias, of the individual philosophising."

In other words, Powys believed that we were narrow-visioned, seeing the world according to whatever leaning or tendency we inherited. To remedy this, we should attempt to get a rounder picture, encompass the complex, many-angled nature of things and, through a fuller act of understanding, acquire deeper knowledge of our individual natures.

To come to know yourself and be yourself may seem an overly self-conscious, narcissistic task. It sounds as if one is being urged to spend hours in self-analysis - studying one’s essence or whatever. But no, that would not seem an answer. You cannot hide in a cave with a crystal and emerge a month later with a stunning solution to everything. Isolation only brings knowledge of oneself in isolation. For knowledge proper, one should involve oneself in the manifold layers of human activity and, at the same time, cultivate the objective view.

Goethe wrote: "All ages have said and repeated that one should strive to know oneself. This is a strange demand which no one up till now has measured up to and, strictly considered, no one should. With all his study and effort, man is directed to what is outside, to the world about him, and he is kept busy coming to know this and to master it to the extent that his purposes require...How can you come to know yourself? Never by thinking; always by doing. Try to do your duty, and you’ll know right away what you amounts to. And what is your duty? Whatever the day calls for."

It is notable that Buddha himself discouraged inwardness among his followers. To know the world, they had to become part of it, forget themselves and become compassionately aware rather than hide away in meditation. "Go forth monks," he entreated, and wander for the gain of many, out of compassion for the world, for the good, the welfare of gods and men."

In doing your duty and meeting the world, you are inevitably brought into conflict. You may have to correct or suppress certain tendencies in yourself in order to negotiate a delicate situation. You may be forced up against those who would thwart your intentions. Almost certainly you will learn that the surfaces of the world are not rounded and smooth. Growing up means coming to terms with knocks, severances and dislocations, in terms of friends and families, routines and locations.

In the novel Demian by Herman Hesse, the central figure Emil Sinclair finds himself compelled to produce a painting of a bird perched on a basket or tree-top. It was a bird of prey with a narrow, cruel hawk head and it was forcing itself out of a giant egg that stood out against the background of the blue sky. Emil pondered the meaning of this symbol for days, until he received the illumination, "The bird is struggling out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The name of the God is called Abraxas."

So, in order to make yourself, you break a world. This is a violent way of putting it, but there is always a certain amount of (metaphorical) breakage during one’s development. Violence can accompany change, and this violence or upheaval is not invariably negative - at least, in the sense that slums have to be effaced, outdated institutions dismantled, tyrants overthrown, unnecessary barriers removed. Taking responsibility for yourself - breaking and making a world - may call for courage and persistence, a willingness to fly in the face of popular opinion, but like most consistent and honest enterprises, it pays off in the long run by minimising the potential of accrued anger and resentment which comes when one distorts one’s personality in order to please or ingratiate others.

"All except the shallowest living," wrote John J. Sullivan, "involves tearing up one rough draft after another."

By implication, emphasis on ‘self’ - the unique possibilities of the individual - marginalizes the presence of anything greater. It has been noted that an obsessive preoccupation with self-development has accompanied the decline of organised religion. The concept of the ‘self’ has waxed as the idea of God has waned.

Many are now convinced that ‘God is dead’ or no longer relevant to an expanding universe of subatomic particles. God is a relic of a time when primitive tribes needed to dignify their rites of passage. Indeed, there is a poignancy about the decline of a myth that contains much simple truth and goodness - promising that, at the end of long life, one will gratefully rest in the arms of a loving Father.

Yet attempts to kill God have rarely been coherent in the sense that those who claim to have erased or overturned Him also claim that He does not exist. Attacking the non-existent is not, practically speaking, possible, so the effort to destroy, paradoxically, re-instates the presence. Perhaps it is time we looked at the problem less abstractly by placing it in a historical context.

Nietzsche, echoing Schopenhauer and Heine, first claimed that ‘God is dead’. He saw the Christian God as a Judaeo-Christian monolith, associated with injustice, prejudice and the hypocrisy of the old order. Such a Creator had been displaced by Nietzsche’s new morality, the will to power, partly enforced by Darwin, wherein a spiritual elite evolve and develop their own morality, not grounded in weakness or poverty, but upon active strength responding to whatever challenge the future holds. However, ‘evolve’ might be a misleading word, as Nietzsche denied the idea of progress, believing that what was given - life, earth, a physical body - was adequate for eternal celebration.

Nietzsche’s core emphasis was on discovering what is divine in oneself or in summoning the God in man and woman. In other words, we can no longer blame the Devil for our sins, nor praise God for our virtues - neither can lay claim to an authentic existence. Accountability lies solely with us humans, who are the spearhead of evolution. One should not hanker after immortal souls or invisible, abstract essences - the body is the soul of man. If, in Nietzsche’s philosophy, God has been disarmed, the individual has been empowered and handed back his freedom.

Where does this leave man or woman? How do they find out what is godlike and special in themselves? Presuming they do not wish to leave things as they are - often the sensible option! - how do they take things further? In what areas of human activity, do we locate the sacred, the ineffable, the eternal?

"Thou demandest what is love?" wrote Shelley. "It is that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves."

The poet is abstracting the emotion, transforming it into a universal - a boundless reaching out - but there are many who would endorse Shelley, while adding that the basis of the what he describes is found in an intense personal relationship. You rediscover the sacredness and splendour of the world through the intensity with which you identify with another.

There have been many men - both frauds and fine-minded teachers - who have believed one touches the heart of the divine during sexual congress. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence wrote, "Knowledge is so often an illusion and even when it seems sure, its power to sustain us goes dead. The knowledge of the movement of the stars is wonderful, but the beauty of the stars in their motion is still more wonderful and it is the penis which connects us sensually to the planets."

While questioning the phallocentric imagery, contrasting it with Goethe’s, "The eternal womanly draws us ever upward", the basic message holds. What Lawrence is suggesting is that the act of love opens up the channels of the universe. Bernard Shaw made a similar observation when he suggested that it produced "a celestial flood of emotion & exaltation" that may one day find its intellectual equivalent."

For this very reason, sex has often been condemned or seen as potentially dangerous, a double-edged blade, in that men and women are capable of acting ruthlessly in order to utterly forget themselves, to attain the pleasure that the act confers. Indeed, it can effect delusions of grandeur, and there are many examples of criminal messiahs whose paranoiac self-image has been inflated by adorers offering their bodies.

Early religions used temple prostitutes in order to attain divine communion. Using drugs and implements of arousal, men and women would invoke the forces of frenzy and ecstasy in order to attain maximum satisfaction. "The orgy," wrote George Bataille, "is not associated with the dignity of religion...its potency is seen in its ill-omened aspects, bringing frenzy in its wake and a vertiginous loss of consciousness. The total personality is involved, reeling blindly towards annihilation, and this is the decisive moment of religious feeling."

So this godlike feeling can be seen as a door - a dangerous door perhaps if used improperly - but an escape nevertheless from an excess of earthbound routines. But such experiences may be difficult to live by. The intensity can rarely be sustained, and those who try to sustain it may find themselves confronted with various practical difficulties.

Some believe that the answer is to achieve a similar pitch of elation without recourse to orgy or bloodletting. Yogis try to invoke the kundalini, the ‘coiled splendour within’, or what can be termed, rather crudely, wherein the life-force is transmuted and directed up to the stem of the brain. The resultant effect is overwhelmingly powerful: hence the kundalini can dangerous, literally ‘mind-blowing’, and there are gentler methods of attaining similar ends by meditation and harmonising one’s will with the universal pulse or rhythm.

John Cowper Powys maintained that the door to exultation lay not through any physical act, but rather by the physical act becoming mental: consciousness empowering itself through the channelling and sublimation of desire. "I became aware, more vividly aware than I had ever been, that the secret of life consists in sharing the madness of God, I mean the power of rousing a peculiar exaltation in yourself as you confront the inanimate...a cosmic eroticism."

If the latter sounds tame and contained, it is probably the only way that the such forces may be simultaneously experienced and kept in check. The sublime and dangerous urge, embracing chaos, fruitfulness and ecstasy, was first glorified by Frederick Nietzsche. He identified two major forces at work in man, Dionysus and Apollo, the first savage, exultant and untamed, the second controlled, temperate and dignified - orgy and order, one might say, and these two conflicting impulses are reconciled in the finest works of art and music, the energy of the first being enhanced by the superior form and outline of the second.

Dionysus was god of the vine. He lauded over the mystery and potency of intoxication. However, it should also be grasped that - at least in Nietzsche’s view - he is as much a tragic figure as an ecstatic one, for at the highest pitch of exaltation may be felt the stirrings of mortality: "Yet the peculiar blending of emotions in the heart of the Dionysian reveller - his ambiguity if you will - seems still to hark back (as the medicinal drugs harks back to the deadly poison) to the days when the infliction of pain was experienced as joy while a sense of extreme triumph elicited cries of anguish from the heart. For now in every exuberant joy there is heard an undertone of terror, or else a wistful lament over an irrecoverable loss. It is as though nature...a sentimental trait of nature were bemoaning the fact of her fragmentation, her decomposition into separate individuals."

So the joy of union dissolves and disperses. The individual slips back into himself, mourning the loss of such cohesion and intensity. This fragmentation leads back to self-consciousness and Heraclitus’s world of perpetual change and Sartre’s realm of hovering ‘anguish’.

Extinction of self was not, however, the end, so far as the Nietzsche myth was concerned. He promoted the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence. "I shall return," Zarathustra predicts, "with this sun, with this earth, with this snake - not to a new life, a better life, or a similar life... I shall return always to this self-same life.."

This arresting doctrine Nietzsche expressed in several forms: that history moves in regular cycles; that birth, growth and death impose a similar rhythm down the generations and, more fantastically, that one re-enacts one’s own life in the minutest detail again and again. The latter was not seen as an appalling, monotonous restriction, but as the ultimate test of the superman: to love and affirm existence so much that one would gratefully re-endure all the joys, pains and tediums ad infinitum.

A parallel may be found in Crime and Punishment. There is the scene in which Raskolnikov says that, if he had to choose between instant execution or standing on a narrow ledge, facing nothing but eternal night and the raging storm forever, he would choose the ledge. In other words, true vitality embraces its persistence, however grim or limiting the circumstances. The corollary goes: if pardoned these awful choices, how deep would be our sense of gratitude and release! Therefore, why do we not live our lives in a state of uninhibited joy, knowing in a sense that we all are ‘reprieved’, the inheritors of stupendous good fortune?

These anecdotes stand as interesting parables, but Eternal Recurrence touches a more scientific stratum in the theory of the constancy of quantitative matter. We exist in a universe where nothing can be destroyed or added to. Things may perish and fragment but never disappear. The molecules that make up all the artefacts and objects in the universe continue to exist after the forms of their being have dispersed; the universe is a closed circle from which nothing escapes, so in time all combinations may repeat themselves. The corresponding notion - of an open universe, in which matter may spontaneously appear and pass back and forth - presents a further spectrum of speculation.

P.D. Ouspensky wrote a curious novel about recurrence. It was called The Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. A rather conceited young Russian visits a magician and requests that he may live his life over again, in order to avoid his original mistakes. Given the chance, Osokin throws it away, repeating each mishap and indiscretion to the letter. Eventually he finds himself back in the room with the magician. The old man solemnly lectures him, telling him that, if he wishes to obtain proper knowledge, he must pay the price:

"A man can only be given what he can use; and he can only use that for which he has sacrificed something. This is the law of human nature. So if a man wants to get help to acquire important knowledge or new powers, he must sacrifice other important things to him at the moment... If you could change something in yourself, you would be able to use this knowledge for your own advantage."

The magician knew that the power to live one’s life again would be meaningless if one did not honestly get to grips with the laws and limitations of the universe. Given the opportunity, all Osokin did was drift into his former pattern, ploughing an identical furrow of indulgence and futility.

How does one avoid the trap of Osokin? How does one take anything forward? Ouspensky thought it possible to step out of present time - or being locked in states (sorrow, joy, suspicion, etc.) of mind - into eternal time, in which one realises, imaginatively, all the potentials of any one given moment. "Our mind," he wrote, "follows the development of possibilities in one direction only. But in fact every moment contains a very large number of possibilities. And all of them are actualised, only we do not see it and do not know it. We always see only one of the actualisations, and in this lie the poverty and limitation of the human mind. But it we try to imagine the actualisation of all the possibilities of the present moment, then of the next, and so on...[we] shall understand the infinite richness of time..."

All our possible lives are being lived out somewhere! What evidence has Ouspensky to support this? We might categorise him as an early advocate of the parallel universe - or parallel universes - theory, but Ouspensky, together with his one-time teacher, Gurdjieff, was basically an evolutionist, with a vision of how man might take things forward by expanding consciousness. From watering the inner time-seeds and perceiving the myriad levels of the universe, Ouspenksy had the idea of growing a Superman or ‘super-conscious individual’.

From what experience did Ouspenksy derive these special insights? In some ways, he was ahead of his time, anticipating the many-stranded, perspectivial universe that quantum physics presents us with today. Perhaps such things are grasped through a kind of ‘systematic derangement of the senses’, to borrow Rimbaud’s phrase. Like other writers and thinkers of his time, Ouspensky had experimented with nitrous oxide or ‘laughing gas’, using it as a trigger to explore ‘oceanic’ modes of being, and quite a number of spiritual insights and perceptual travelogues were induced by gulping down this anaesthetic together with deep draughts of air.

Earlier, Nietzsche had also forged a vision of his own time-emancipated ‘overman’ or Superman who, having freed himself from shackles and constraints, accepted life and its pains. Open towards the world, prepared to trust in chance and frankly pursue his ends, Nietzsche’s Superman represents the opposite of the Christian idea. He is not meek, does not passively accept his lot or glory in poverty or humility. In him the vices of lust and egotism are raised and concentrated to the level of sacrament. "Based on the premise of a God-less world," wrote J.P. Stern, "the Superman embodies the enhancement of man’s untrammelled will to power under the quasi-religious dispensation of ‘eternal recurrence’ of the same."

Certain sustained rhapsodic passages in Nietzsche’s writing, revering and idealising this figure, struck a chord in the heart of Nazi propagandists. Adolf Hitler was seen to have placed himself beyond conventional morality and considered he had a special dispensation to act with summary ruthlessness: hence the ‘Superman’ notion is the part of Nietzsche’s philosophy that has been more thoroughly attacked, discredited and misunderstood than any other.

Nietzsche maintained that Supermen had surfaced throughout history, stretching back into the infinity of the past, stretching forward into the infinity of the future. The real test of the Superman, he maintained, was his ability to exult in the process of eternal recurrence - of being able to love this life, this earth, this body, and see it as sufficient end in itself. One might call this doctrine ‘spiritual materialism’.

Gautama Buddha, meditating at the foot of the holy bo tree, perceived a scheme of existence that included no Superman, God or indestructible soul. What he perceived was mutability, from which only death offered escape. The projections of his mind were empty, like a raindrop steaming back into a cloud. Virtue resided in recognising this or obliterating the ‘self’. There is a contradiction here. How does one destroy a ‘self’ that does not exist? By recognising, presumably, that a confluence of appetites and superficial needs are not an identity. True liberation is entry into the serene emptiness that precedes being.

Buddha, then, saw individual minds as vessels into which were poured sundry desires? After meditating, stripping away the layers of appearance, he had glimpsed the void, from which viewpoint human life seemed fundamentally self-seeking - a sounding board for worldly greeds.

(This it at odds with the schema of contemporary scientists who equate mind with the physical workings of the human brain, seeing it as a unifying agent [linked closely with our capacity for language] and an integrator and essential processor of modalities of sensation and perception.)

And what happens to this mind - or consciousness - when the body fails? Buddha believed that we were reborn. The latter is a different from reincarnation. Rebirth signifies coming back as a different personality altogether, retaining no previous memory or impression, although there is supposed to be a causal connection between one life and another; the spent candle, if you like, is being used to light a new one.

"Does the cosmic space we dissolve into taste of us then?" Rilke asked. The Austrian poet might have agreed with Buddha. He saw an impersonal kind of rebirth in the timeless intensity of human passion. Because such feelings as love, joy and grief, recur throughout all ages, in expressing them we are in a sense resurrecting or re-channelling the experiences of past humanity? It is our job to take in the physical, perishable world with our material senses, so that it arises ‘invisibly’ in us. We do not inherit one strata of feeling but immense layers of it, deep as aeons and epochs. In moments of intensity, we invoke and re-possess the passion and fury of the universe:

Instead of depicting feelings as single-minded, personality-centred, Rilke shows them uniting humanity throughout time and, in a sense, extending the duration of being.

Rilke’s poetry, though ultimately affirmative, is shot with pain, unrest and longing. It emphasises the need to accept life as commission, to surrender completely to each separate instant, rather than mentally hurry forward to devour the next. The shadow of death enweaves the sinuous slide of metaphor, a longing for greater horizons, a vaster, more generous consciousness that recalls Thomas Carlyle’s maxim: "Man’s unhappiness comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite."

But still that leaves the basic question of consciousness unsolved. Is it just a name for the thinking mechanism that directs and motivates the body? Or is it a true mirror of the outside world - the mediating ground between the internal and external? Is it brain-centred or a separate force, akin to gravity, that finds expression through us, divides and scatters among millions of individual? Or do we, at the moment of birth, grow it from within like a seed?

William James suggested a function of the brain which was not productive but ‘transmissive’ or activated by an external force: "(1) The brain brings into being the very stuff of consciousness of which our mind consists; or else (2) Consciousness pre-exists as an entity, and the various brains give to it its various special forms." Such a theory might account for the curious feeling of ‘immortality’ or ‘indestructibility’ that bears many people through the most gruelling scenarios. Our resistant attitude to death, irrational in itself, may owe itself to the brain playing ‘host’ to consciousness rather than generating it.

Such questions and speculations arise from a conviction that mind is a quite different mechanism - almost an entirely separate one - from that of body. Many neurologists would disagree. The mind, they would argue, is a product of the neuro-circuitry of the brain, a network of pulses and chemical messages giving rise to the illusion of a unique single self. But that is rather like saying that a tree is no more than a gathering of leaves or a mountain a heap of calcium or silica. Few would contest such statements on points of accuracy, but it is little more than the naming of parts and hardly encompasses the ‘being here’ in the fuller sense. A phrase has been devised - ‘spatio-temporal tract’ - to describe the unique path that an individual traces from cradle to grave, the spoor left by individual personalities in space-time. Materialists say this unique furrow terminates in the coffin; the metaphysicalists say that mind or ‘essence’ survives in the form of the soul.

Such statements are framed because the mind stubbornly insists on seeing itself as special. This tendency has been attributed to the conceited ego, unable to countenance its own extinction and over-compensating by loudly proclaiming its immortality. But there are ways in which the mind seems qualitatively different from the body. For instance, its working is unimpaired by physical deficiencies, like a lost arm or leg. The mind does not appear to be pegged down by the body and has a powerful problem-solving imagination. At times it seems to be able to escape its physical anchorage, imagine amazing situations, turn around upon its own thoughts, dream and wander through other places, other times, interpret abstract signals, recall past events and respond to a whole range of activities that seem allied to processes beyond the physical.

Do not such faculties denote an integral self-sufficiency, a self-sufficiency that might survive decease?

Death is impossible to speak of authoritatively, though countless books and papers have been written on the subject. Strictly speaking, being is in no position to pass judgement on non-being. "Death is not an event in life," wrote Wittgenstein, "we do not live to experience death."

And this is the core of the problem: that we are dealing with something to which the answer - if there is one - lies outside space and time. If all of us were birds, we might not make credible or objective ornithologists - a criticism often levelled at psychologists and sociologists who, in a sense, are people studying their own species. In the same way, we cannot observe and measure the interiority of death, which is of itself an omission or withdrawal of presence.

This argument arises out of formal logic rather than a religious stance. Buddhist holy books, such as the famous Book of the Dead, describe the death-process as precisely as one might a stroll through a favourite park with its fountains and flowerbeds. They set down itineraries of the afterlife, delineating the various bardos or in-between states, when the soul is preparing for rebirth. In a sense, a Buddhist’s whole existence is a preparation and reconciliation with the forces of dissolution. You live in order to die and be reborn over and over again.

If you wish to step off this treadmill - to attain bliss or nirvana - you must thoroughly grasp the nature of ‘mind’. Nirvana cannot be conveyed by words, but there are images which strive to translate it like a calm ocean, a rippleless pool, a sky with neither clouds nor horizons - equivalents to utter peace and boundless equilibrium.

Perhaps one needs to be a Tibetan master to know – to experience - such matters. Buddhists do not inherit the sense of doubt endemic to ‘unenlightened’ Western minds. To them the afterlife is a fact. Here, in the West, there is less faith and more branching speculation. Yet Christian mystics also agree that closeness to God is the natural state of being in which immortality is implicit. "Certainty of immortality," wrote an anonymous commentator on the Tarot, "issues from the participation experienced in that which is intrinsically indestructible and imperishable, and therefore immortal. He who has had experience of the kernel of his being...permeated by divine breath, bathed in divine light and ardent with divine warmth, he knows what immortality is and that he is immortal."

Some argue that, after death, we re-incarnate in other bodies, suggesting that natural justice is better served by such a progress. If we imagine the number of luckless lives - from Roman galley slaves to children bombed or crushed in an earthquake - there is little fairness. But if one imagines that each of us lives an infinity of existences in which we endure being poor and rich, male and female, loved and unloved, deformed and beautiful, long-lived and short-lived, then all inequalities would eventually be redressed.

If one has never experienced boundless belonging or inextinguishable wholeness, the rhetoric will seem less persuasive. The religious argument proceeds from the premise that God is. It does not argue but proclaims this is truly how things are.

Others may consider the material side. At point of death, the brain loses ascendancy, but the particles that make up the individual continue to form new chains and allegiances - perhaps ultimately new minds and thoughts. "If the universe’s smallest components are indestructible," wrote Rolf Edberg, "then the protons and electrons that compose your identity have, in the aeons, been radiation in space and matter, in heavenly bodies moving through other firmaments; and they have taken shape in life forms of which you can know nothing, and they shall continue to enter into galaxies and sunbeams and waters and mountains, and into new kinds of life in new worlds, long after this planet has crumbled into a cosmic autumn."

This conviction - of man being a microcosm or little world - was voiced by the magician Paracelsus who stated that each individual "is an extract from all the stars and planets of the whole firmament, from the earth and the elements; and so he is their quintessence." If such an assertion be true, since man is directed by mind, then a tendency towards mind may exist in the basic matter of the universe, as some scientists - like the late Professor Haldane - believed.

Recently attention has been given to the anthropic principle. Crudely condensed, its argument runs that, given the chances of life appearing anywhere in the universe being so tiny, it is likely that "things are as they are because we are" or that the universe attains meaning and character through human consciousness. To many, this might appear inspiring; to others, merely conceited or deluded. Elevating men and women as the crown jewels of creation, the raison d’être of existence, the anthropic principle has naturally attracted a following, but it has certain intrinsic flaws, in that it hardly accounts for the presence of multiple galaxies - did they really need to be there in order that humans should perceive them?

If the anthropic principle is rejected in favour of a spiritual agent operating through humanity, is it aware of the direction it is taking? Does it develop purposively? Some minds - like Albert Einstein - say yes, God does not play dice - but other scientists like Richard Dawkins see the intricate mechanism as the work of a ‘blind watchmaker’, a craftsman who is perpetually improvising, developing an intricate, adaptable mechanism - but with no obvious goal save its own fanatic perpetuation. The watchmaker proceeds by guesses and experiments - hence the many cul de sacs and blind alleys of earth history. Consciousness is a kind of fortuitous accident, rather like throwing down a heap of random cut-out words and finding that they make a perfectly lucid paragraph. Furthermore, the watchmaker is no sentimentalist, being compassionless, glacially detached. He does not care how much animals or human beings suffer because, "at bottom, there is no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference."

The watchmaker is a pseudonym for the DNA or the biological material of life. The basis of Dawkins’s argument is the assumption that, to be purposeful, the thrust of life should be glaring, apparent, a single luminous lance rather than a heap of broken swords.

"Nature does nothing," wrote Aristotle, "without pure purpose" and, despite its elegant presentation, the ‘watchmaker’ theory is rather narrow in the way it refuses to envision an ongoing dialectic or creative conflict between human consciousness, with its strange mix of the compassionate and destructive, and the matter of which it is composed: the idea that something is being ‘worked out’ that transcends biological components.

In a sense, the opposing viewpoints cancel each other out. We can imagine Richard Dawkins’ saying, "Yes, there is intricacy and beauty of design in the universe, but that pales beside the pointless savagery of nature, man’s cruelty to man, the inquisitions and death camps - such things belie the existence of a higher being!" while the mystic replies, "You are imposing a narrow moral judgement on selective aspects of a cosmic process that is so much deeper than your temporal concerns."

Here the first speaker might riposte. "True, I could go along with that, but you must admit that your so called ‘great mind’ does not give a toss about who suffers or is sacrificed on the way to the fulfilment of his design."

If not floored by this, the second speaker might reply. "Yes, there may well be a cosmic law stating that compassion, love and caring are only relevant as a response to suffering. We have to go through painful processes in order to understand and elevate our natures."

These ‘painful processes’ can seem protracted. Hegel, the German philosopher interpreted history as a vast dialectic movement in which each impulse (thesis) meets its counterforce (antithesis), and from the conflict emerges an inevitable outcome (synthesis) blending the two. This process, working at both the individual and collective social level, is forever in motion, a ceaseless regime of conflict and temporary resolution. For Hegel, only the whole was true, and he stated that "the eternal life of God is to find himself, become aware of himself, coincide with himself.’ But such a philosophy can be used to dignify tyranny, suffering and holocaust, attributing it all to the eddying wave-motion of the divine spirit.

Beyond the DNA, the biological building blocks, is there an implicate statement concerning our highest ideas that reconciles physics with metaphysics, the atom with the ‘soul’ of man? If God has been deposed, or forfeited his patrician qualities, is there anything one can put in His place? Can we discern a core principal - like mind or benevolence - behind the subatomic apparatus of the universe? If so, how is the individual able to ‘feel’ or ‘contact’ this presence?

It has been pointed out that there are three types of mysticism: God-mysticism, soul-mysticism and nature mysticism. The first postulates there is a God who inhabits his own sacred territory, from whom man has become separated but perhaps will return to after death; life then is a kind of long separation or hunger-pang between re-unions. The second locates God in man; the life of each man is a kind of personal Grail-quest in which he seeks what is immortal and integral in himself; while the third, nature-mysticism, seeks God in the shapes and organisms of the natural world.

Such distinctions are interesting. Yet in practise people tend to move in and out of all three, and this century, it seems, nature or eco-mysticism is foremost, and many believe they have touched the essence of something like a Universal Spirit while communing with the manifold forms that make up the natural world. The philosopher and educationalist Jean Jaques Rousseau was the first to concisely express this view. He elevated natural man far above civilised man. The further you get away from nature, he maintained, the more you descend into hypocrisy, conceit and shallowness.

In the wake of Rousseau came an Age of Romanticism wherein poets and artists hungered for vast, uncontaminated horizons, for freedom from patriarchy and classical restraint. "There is in man," wrote Friedrich Schlegel, "a terrible unsatisfied desire to soar into infinity; a feverish longing to break through the narrow bounds of individuality."

Such an attitude ensnared thousands of writers and thinkers, many of whom sought "to soar into infinity" while meditating in solitude or engaged upon on solitary walks. Pacing mountains and vales alone, or with like-minded companions, these men and women sensed they had entered a passageway of pure elation in which something deeper than reason - a transcendent presence - was immanent.

"The father I ascend from animated Nature, from men," wrote Coleridge, "and cattle, and the common birds of the woods, and fields, the greater becomes in me the Intensity of the feeling of Life; Life seems to me then a universal spirit, that neither has, nor can have, an opposite. God is everywhere, I have exclaimed, and works everywhere; and where is there room for Death? In these moments it has been my creed, that Death exists only because Ideas exist, that Life is limitless Sensation; that Death is a child of the organic senses, chiefly of the Sight; that Feelings die by flowing into the mould of the intellect, and becoming Ideas; and that Ideas passing forth into action re-instate themselves in the world of Life. And I do believe, that Truth lies enveloped in these loose generalisations - I do not think it possible, that any bodily pains could wipe out the love and joy, that is so substantially part of me, towards hill, and rocks, and steep waters!"

By studying the textures of nature, Coleridge believed one could divine something of the mystery of life. Furthermore, by imaginatively transforming these observations, one might elevate oneself and enter the mould of being or the Platonic realm of Ideas. "An IDEA in the highest sense," he wrote, "cannot be conceived but by a symbol." Hence Coleridge spent hours staring at rapids and waterfalls, symbolically translating them. He perceived in booming particles of spray, frothing vortices and bubbling eddies, a kind of tumultuous cartography - a mirror of the startling transitions that underlie the larger process.

The poet talks about getting away from "animated Nature", drawing a distinction between living and inorganic forms. It is the rocks and mountains that stir great and complex thoughts, rather as if their eternal statis, their frozen enduring quality, is creating an internal tension that stimulates in him mental motion.

His close friend and fellow-poet, William Wordsworth, also sensed a vaster, more complex principle behind daily forms and appearances. In The Prelude, he describes taking a boat out and rowing it at night:

In this passage there is a trace of vexation. The alienness of the "huge and mighty" forms engenders unease. The ‘forms’ are like vast, impersonal liners of the night, immense doors that open and shut behind the visible scenery, but at other times this same force takes on a warmer, more benevolent quality:

One notes an element of what may be termed ‘surrender’ in the passage. The poet is not ‘steeling’ or forcing his intellect to penetrate a complexity; rather he is opening himself out, aerating the hidden chambers of his being.

"When thought is locked in caves," Blake wrote, "love will show its roots in deepest Hell" - meaning that one must suspend the irritable hankering after reason in order to cherish the world of creation. Love wells up and flows through channels unpolluted by facts, strategies and cautions. You see nothing if you are constantly analysing.

Blake is also drawing a distinction between two types of knowledge - cerebral insights as opposed to those that ‘droppeth like the gentle rain from heaven’; in Christian theology, the former has been symbolised by the cunning Serpent and the latter by the descending Dove or spirit of truth.

Similarly Wordsworth (whose later writings are often marred by preacherly intrusions) has suspended his analytical side and made himself a conduit for what lies beyond and outside of him. The tautological "huge and mighty forms" of the first extract have fused into a gentler, more reassuring presence, a universal spirit evoked with quiet exaltation. The hugeness that initially threatened has become a means of encompassment and unity.

The laureate who succeeded Wordsworth had glimpses into a world of ‘boundless being’ where his temporal senses were blotted out. "A kind of waking trance I have frequently had," recorded Alfred Lord Tennyson, "quite up from boyhood, when I had been all alone. This has generally come upon me through repeating my name two or three times to myself silently, till at once, as it were, out of the intensity of consciousness of individuality, the individuality seemed to fade away into boundless being, and this is not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was almost a laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life... I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is beyond words?"

This is, to all intents, a Buddhist perception filtered through the mind of a Victorian gentleman-poet. Of course, such occurrences should not be qualified by a denomination. Intrinsically, they are no more Buddhist than Christian, being part of the legacy of all mankind, but it is a type of experience that is more readily accepted in an Eastern religious context, through perhaps the regular practice of meditation.

In a sense, what we are confronted with is different moods or ways of seeing. In the first extract, Wordsworth is alone, a young man rowing on the lake, and the "huge and mighty forms" appear fearful, ominous. In the second extract, he is at Tintern with his sister Dorothy, and the pastoral setting stands as a meeting-point of their emotions, a symbol of their long friendship and love. The landscape - admittedly a less dramatic one - has taken on the coloration of his emotion. Tennyson’s experience is different, in that it is deliberately self-induced, almost a ‘willed’ entry into a different order of reality.

Manifold gateways lead to such affirmations, and some have found that dreams have facilitated access to these oceanic states - for there are more than one. While asleep, some claim to have reached crossing-points of time, wherein they have had a glimpse of the future, or received insights of such a remarkable nature that they have become permanently enlightened or reconciled with the process that will one day absorb and recycle them.

Novelist and dramatist, J.B. Priestley wrote in his autobiography Rain Upon Godshill an account of a remarkable dream - almost a vision - that inspired and strengthened him at a time when he was feeling despondent. "I dreamt," he wrote, "I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon myriads of birds flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this aerial vast river of birds. But now in some mysterious fashion, the gear was changed and time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek and then, in a flash, bled and shrivelled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless biological effort? As I stared down, seeming to see every creature’s ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us all, had been born, if the struggle ceased forever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy. But now the gear was changed again and time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; and as soon as I saw it, I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me in a rocket-burst of ecstasy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real, but this quivering and hurrying lambency of being. Birds, men, or creatures not yet shaped or coloured, all were of no account except so far as this flame of life travelled through them. It left nothing to mourn over behind; what I had thought was tragedy were mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never felt such deep happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds, and if I have not kept that happiness with me, as an inner atmosphere and a sanctuary for the heart, that is because I am a weak and foolish man who allows the mad world to come trampling in, destroying every green shoot of wisdom."

In a sense, Priestley had glimpsed - or thought he had glimpsed - a vision of the élan vital behind appearances - a force that contained each individual life, yet collectively amounted to so much more than the sum of its parts. While ‘containing’ compassion, it is essentially vast and impersonal.

Priestley was an unusual personality; half of him was a bluff, Yorkshireman who wrote drawing-room comedies about class conflict and workaday drudgery; the other half a Jungian mystic, immersed in dream, time theory and the ideas of Dunne and Ouspensky.

It appears that Priestley was undergoing a kind of ‘tunnel’ experience before he saw the vision of the birds. During the early part of the dream, he was depressed by the swarming profusion of dying birds, the infinite duplication and secession of living forms, but this later gave way to something pure and elemental, a refining essence or tongue of pure light that made him open out in gratitude. The ‘white flame of life’ he saw was the force embracing all living things - akin to Pan, the unifying presence behind all matter, the Spanish duende or earth pulse, the pure spirit of creation. It is significant perhaps that, in the West, mystics often see God in the form of a descending ray of white light while those in the East speak of the spiritual being taking the form of fire.

As Priestley was all too aware, how we perceive the world is largely mind-dependent or mood-dependent. We view things in accordance with our intentions and inner directives. But there is an objective element as well - we do not ‘make’ what we see. It is rather like the two modes of time, Absolute Time, which is consistent, Newtonian, unveering, and Relational Time, identified by Leibnitz, or the waltz of human existence, which appears to proceed at different rates. Whether there is a world that may be equated with Absolute Time - a steady-state reality akin to that conceived by Plato - is a rift of philosophical debate.

Shades of light and dark, nuances of emotion, the dilation and contraction of perception, are fascinating points of enquiry. They highlight the problem of ‘objectivity’ or grasping phenomena that is many-angled, always in motion. For instance, from the earth we gaze up at the stars, see them as comforting points of light - soothing, distant, beautiful - yet, astronomically speaking, they are gigantic balls of flaming gas, fierier and deadlier than volcanoes. Distance has ‘tranquillised’ our angle of perception and given them a symbolic power and significance.

One might say: this is the contrast between comforting illusion and hard reality, but both views are equally real, twin aspects of the same phenomenon. Placed at the proper distance, a fire becomes a source of warmth and solace to human beings; move any closer and it will burn the skin. It may be the same fire, but from the standpoint of the percipient its nature has altered.

The extent to which we participate and project ourselves into situations may determine what returns we get. Accepting the myriad character of events and things endows one with greater objectivity and stretches one’s grasp of the world. The philosophers - Brentano, Husserl and Merleau Ponty - have all concerned themselves with the aboutness of conscious states - how the shape and pointing of our intentions modifies what is being apprehended. This is putting it too simply, for reality is not infinitely plastic, cannot be adapted to the contours of our private selves, but the greater our effort at perception - at seeing things clearly and understanding the nature of our desires - the richer and better our lives will be.

Evidence from the perennially foggy sphere of the paranormal suggests that perception has a more far-reaching antennae than any present theory can accommodate. When, under hypnosis, a man regresses and identifies himself as someone who lived several hundred years ago, in another time, another place, and the supportive, documentary evidence emerges as convincing (as in the best-attested cases), this has philosophical implications, for it undermines the notion of the stable, solid personality.

Instead of a finite life-span fixed at a point in space-time, we have to envisage a personality that is fluid, can move back and forth and accommodate many selves. Thus the solipsistically sealed mind may have to be substituted with a radically different model - a mind that is a window on possible worlds, or a universal mind that, translated into living matter, acquires specific personality traits that are released at death. This is of course trespassing in a domain wherein few philosophers tread, but as evidence mounts up, concerning such anomalies as multiple personalities and remote-viewing, there may well come about some dramatic adjustments in the present view of the mind and its boundaries.

The Russian mystic Gurdjiefff likened man to someone half-asleep who has never awakened and explored his potential. He wrote an improbable parable (which he seems to have literally believed!) about the human race being created in order to manufacture a constant supply of food for the moon. However, the safety of moon’s source of nourishment was undermined when man began to develop objective reason and became restless with his servile role. So the moon sent a band of Archangels to the earth to implant in the human mind an organ called the Kundabuffer, making men see delusion as reality, so that they continued making food for the moon, all the time believing they had attained freedom and independence of thought.

Gurdjieff tried to formulate a method to counteract this Kundabuffer tendency in human consciousness, using callisthenics, meditation and startling behaviour. By dramatically confronting the sleepwalker with the nature of his short time on earth, in this incarnation; by making him understand his transient, corruptible nature, and then teaching him how to summon his reserves of inner strength, he might help him break out of his dream and attain greater evolutionary heights.

"We have no right to believe," wrote Maurice Nicoll, "that our ordinary level of consciousness is the highest form of consciousness, or the sole mode of experience possible to man. We cannot say that the range of the internal experience of oneself is necessarily limited either to dream-states or ordinary consciousness. We have to consider the possibility, not only that there is a level above our ordinary level of consciousness, to which we are only occasionally awakened, but that our ordinary consciousness becomes integrated in a larger system when this happens... From this point of view our ordinary consciousness would have to be regarded as a release phenomena. We would have to study ourselves from the angle of being disintegrated and not integrated individuals."

Colin Wilson, too, has endorsed this view: that men and women have far greater reserves of power and intellect than they draw upon during their lifetimes and possess hidden "layers of internationality" that can be summoned by an effort of will. He has written a remarkable, persuasive series of books, developing a ‘New Existentialism’, to which this present work is indebted, utilising the work of the philosopher Edmund Husserl and the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who identified peak experiences (or moments of joy and affirmation) as the commission of healthy people. Wilson maintains that such moments can be ‘willed’ into being, and that the more one looks for meaning, the more it becomes manifest.

By self-discipline one can attain visionary states - of connectedness with the universe - and use such states to overcome the problems of life-failure and depression. For it is not in moments of defeat that one grasps the nature of the world, as some tragedians claim, but in moments of greatest insight and exaltation. This is a manifest truism: the furniture of the civilised world - the buildings, inventions and institutions - are the upshot of optimistic vision and, if such achievements are to be taken forward, a commitment to human progress is essential.

And if one says to this, "Yes, but all you are doing is trying to sell an ideal", remember, as Carl Schurz remarked, "Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them you will reach your destiny."