How not to advance understanding of OBEs

This is an article which appeared in the Financial Times magazine. It reminds me of how deplorable it is that we continue to be prevented from making any progress in research on out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs), as well as being unable to publicise our criticisms of tendentious work in several other well-established areas, such as philosophy and education. The point about OBEs is that they may very well shed important light on the processes of normal perception, given that they represent a sort of ‘subversion’ of the ordinary organisation of perceptual data. The would-be paranormal association is a red herring, as far as I am concerned.

People (including academics) say, as a knee-jerk reaction, ‘OBEs are very difficult to work on, aren’t they’ (as a way of writing off the possibility of doing so). This is simply not true (at least it is not true of work that might be done by us), but we have never been able to do any work on them. If we could, I am sure developments would be rapid.

We hoped that Charles’s very constricted supervised work on them for his DPhil might have led to less restrictive opportunities, but of course it never did. Nor, of course, did it lead to any academic career progression for Charles in the direction of a Fellowship or a Professorship. (I wanted Charles and Fabian to get Professorships as soon as possible so that they could support my applications, if for no other reason.)

As regards the experience described in the article, it is typical of a certain type of case in which the person turns around and sees himself lying on the ground, unconscious. This particular case could be described as near-death, since the subject was clinically dead for a short time, but exactly similar experiences have been reported with less serious causes, and not ‘near death’.

Several of Charles’s subjects, when he was working at the Department of Experimental Psychology, had OBEs fairly often, and I am sure it would be possible to find out a lot more about them if we were in a position to do so.

Thinking for oneself

This is a letter I wrote in 1986 about 'individualism'. Since then, the particular version of individualism discussed here has become considerably more prevalent.

In a recent piece of writing I used the expressing ‘thinking for oneself’, and in the letter to you about Nietzsche there was some reference to 'individualism'. Now this is an area where terminology can be very misleading. The tribal ethic is in many ways very authoritarian and anti-individualistic. Above all it is anti-hierarchical (that is to say it will not tolerate any subsidiary hierarchies coming into being which are not actually determined by the tribe). Nevertheless, it will be asserted by upholders of tribal morality that they believe very much in people ‘thinking for themselves’, being allowed to ‘live their own lives’ and ‘doing their own thing’. This area requires very careful consideration because it is perfectly possible for someone to agree with you on the assumption that what you mean by the verbal forms you use is diametrically opposed to what you do mean.

For example, a fairly standard object of social approval at the time of writing is a person who has been in a convent and left [this was a reference to ex-nun Karen Armstrong]. Characteristically, such a person will say that she was expected to be uncritical of authority in the convent, but then she went (let us say) on a university course and was taught to ‘be critical’ and ‘think for herself’. This made returning to the convent unthinkable, and now she has a happy life ‘making her own decisions’. Actually this probably means being critical of certain ideas being promoted in the convent by reference (probably implicit) to widely accepted but unanalysed assumptions.

‘Thinking for oneself’ has a strong tendency to mean ‘identifying with the implicit assumptions which are fashionable at present and rejecting the ideas of any individual or minority which do not reinforce them’.

I saw this illustrated in the contrast between my convent school and the state grammar school I went to — which was far worse than the convent, so far as I was concerned. But on the ideological level (which was not directly related to how they treated me) the difference was between a very explicit set of beliefs, and one vaguely defined but actually equally emotionally loaded ideology. The nuns would give various reasons why you should believe in God and, having done so, why you should believe he was in favour of certain things and so on. I did not find the reasons convincing, but then the nuns admitted that ultimately it was a question of having faith, and they said (which was after all quite true) that you accepted all sorts of other things on faith in normal life. It seems to me that if you found their arguments convincing enough to accept their system, despite the extent to which it was authoritarian, this would be ‘thinking for oneself’ as much as is usually practiced, if not more.

The state school did not explicitly claim to be authoritarian, but one found oneself under enormous implicit pressure to behave in certain ways which would imply certain beliefs about the moral rightness of certain things. However, it was maximally easy for people to conform to these pressures without ever formulating what assumptions they implied. In fact, the indefiniteness of the situation was such that it would require very considerable intellectual powers to make a start on setting out the underlying assumptions with any clarity. The inconsistencies and weaknesses of the nuns’ positions were relatively open to inspection; those of the state school lay protected by the fact that they were not defined at all.

Incidentally, you keep referring to my speculation about the psychodynamics of human nature — viz. that what makes people able to tolerate their own finiteness is positive appreciation of the finiteness of others. Well, it is a speculation. All that is really open to introspection is that interacting with people, or thinking about them, is what makes it hardest to be aware of the shockingness of the existential situation. People derive security and meaningfulness from other people. But the speculation arises, not from introspection, but because one observes that while people ostensibly set great store by other people, they don’t really seem to mind about them much, at least about what happens to them.

Some more notes about pain

Copy of a letter, following on from this.

I think that the pain thing is complicated for most people by the fact that their ‘individualistic’ drives are repressed by their need to derive significance from social approval so that they think they are ‘really’ bad, inadequate, evil and deserving to suffer. I suppose this is one of the things that Christianity plays on. However, it really makes it more necessary to reject the belief in society and its evaluations, while no doubt making it even more difficult to do so (or even to start wanting to do so).

However, I can tell you what I was thinking about before I got the solution to pain, although I had really eliminated the inhibitory belief in society 18 months earlier (and at the time that had been experienced as an appalling and irrevocable loss).

Here you are, existing and threatened from all sides, especially threatened by mortality and the extinction of consciousness, and not knowing anything about anything. This gives you a tremendous drive to react against this claustrophobic situation, and a sense of immediacy and urgency because you could die at any time. This went into my urgency about exam-taking; however young I was, I might die the next day and I had to get on with it. Apart from any considerations about needing to do things at the right age for oneself in terms of one’s mental, rather than chronological, age.

So you have very strong drives to assert yourself against the threatening unknown that surrounds you, but you are afraid of failing and reminding yourself of how puny you are. So you try to find out what you can succeed in doing and to put your drives into things that won’t immediately bring you up against your finiteness.

People play on this and want to make you feel that if you are less good than some other person at doing a certain kind of thing, that is a permanent limitation that you must accept and live within, not think that circumstances might all be different on some other occasion.

So you get a fear of doing something in which you might fail. People who are academically successful usually have techniques for pretending, both to others and themselves, that they are not trying. E.g. Bill Gates playing bridge all day and only working for his degree at night, Kierkegaard putting in an appearance at theatres in the intervals, and then going home to swot up on the classics (or whatever it was he liked to show off about).

But, I had thought, this leaves you with very little of your emotional drive. If you want to try with 51%, and 49% is wanting to preserve itself from failure by not trying, you have 2% of your motivation left. But every failure, of whatever kind, is a horrifying reminder of finiteness and mortality and hence (if you are centralised enough) drives you back onto the point of ricochet and rebounds as the drive to infinity. Because in reality it is not any finite goal that you are aiming at; you want to be omniscient and omnipotent, and it is terrible that you are not. So everything can be made unconflicted if it is turned back into, or recognised as an expression of, the drive to infinity.

And in fact by applying this I had achieved freedom from conflict and certainly had the impression of deploying extremely strong emotional drives, even for someone who had always been uninhibited and regarded as ‘intense’.

But pain presented a serious problem. Any psychological thing, however bad, can be relatively easily ignored. Well, relatively, at least in comparison with pain. As you said, even if they tell you that you have cancer and will die soon, you are still alive. They may be wrong, it may not happen. Anyway, perhaps you can still enjoy yourself.

When Bill’s brother John actually was dying of cancer and Bill took this seriously, John said (as Bill told me), ‘Well, I feel bad about it sometimes, especially when I wake up in the night, but if I do something like going to dinner with your sister, I feel all right again.’ [names changed]

However, pain is difficult to ignore. It is there and you do not want it to be there. It is a proof that your will can be violated (something that you try to overlook as far as possible) and ultimately violated by death. So it is actually a proof of mortality and the ultimate horror of the situation.

It is difficult now to remember how desperate my situation was then. I had to get a solution to pain, if only because I abhorred anaesthetics. And so I set my emotional drive at the problem and determined that my subconscious should forthcome this solution, which I had to have.

This led to the most intolerable existential claustrophobia and nostalgia; I would be driven back onto the point of ricochet and get a violent recoil driving forward again at the problem which had to be solved.

In fact I suppose you can say one was being driven further and further away from any possibility of being related to ‘normal’ life on ‘normal’ terms, past the point of no return. And, of course, it is the great problem with higher level psychology that you lose everything, and lose it irrevocably, before you get everything. It is not a case of giving up on what you have got (or might have) because you see that something else will be better. You give up on it because it is not good enough, although you are still shut in and cannot see how to get anything else.

I have written elsewhere about the despair of finiteness; and it may sound like resignation. But actually it was very complex. I was extremely angry, claustrophobically appalled, and disgusted, that a consciousness should be in such a position, without knowing anything or having any way of finding anything out. It certainly was not resignation in any sense that made the situation tolerable; it made it seem more intolerable than ever, as I reassured myself, wondering whether to go along with it. I had a principle against resignation, which was unrealistic. But a despair so profound as this was dangerous. However, I said to myself, if it arises from a perception of reality that my psychology really reacts in this way to the situation, that is realistic, be the consequences what they may, and so I entertained the despair of finiteness.

Nietzsche, who did not get a higher level, said, ‘If there were God, how could I bear to be no God? Consequently there is no God.’ More precisely, ‘Whether there is God or not, I cannot bear to be no God. Consequently my life in finiteness is worthless and I have no interests worth defending.’

Some notes about pain

Copy of a letter

Since I was talking to you about your latest experience at the dentist I thought I should write it down so there is a record of it. I have said it a lot before but not written about it much.

You have to aim through the experience as a reaction against finiteness, so that in effect you are putting your drive into making it happen rather than trying to minimise your awareness of it. Any recoil, trying to get away from it, is actually your worst enemy as the conflict caused by that is what makes a sensation painful, in the sense of hurting.

Doing it is actually, I think, centralising and I think this is why a technique so potentially useful remains unknown. Centralisation provides a point of psychological ricochet; if you perceive that finiteness is intolerable, you get the drive of the animal that turns at bay and fights for its life against hopeless odds. This is an exceedingly strong drive; by the time I did the thing with the teeth, I called it the drive to infinity because clearly no conceivable goal could satisfy it. I did not yet have any idea that there might be an inconceivable goal at which it might arrive.

Anyway, what preceded my getting the thing about pain right was that I had been having a long series of dental appointments doing fillings, the result of my having had so bad a time at Somerville that quarrelling and arguing with my parents, and them shouting me down and asserting the social line, had prevented my mother paying any attention to making appointments for me, and she tended to give me very bad sweets which she liked herself (she had had false teeth for a long time herself).

I had a fairly highly evolved sort of centralisation and I experimented with ways of viewing the pain as abstract sensation, which worked moderately well but clearly had a breakdown point so that I knew I would not be able to apply them to the impending extractions.

I had a solution to most things by then and I found it quite intolerable that my consciousness could be invaded by things to which I could not be reconciled. So I set about trying to make my subconscious forthcome, which led to the despair of finiteness, as I call it, which was really breaking through the final resistance to getting a higher level. But I was not on a higher level yet, and I thought I had failed in getting a solution to pain.

There was a final session of fillings before the extractions and I was using my fairly adequate methods when the dentist suddenly stuck his drill on a nerve. Quite likely he had left the worst filling to last. This presented itself as absolutely intolerable, my system broke down completely, this was just impossible. But quite unpremeditatedly I reacted with a spurt of absolute anger at this intolerable sensation, a sort of, ‘Go on, damn you’, and the sensation became quite neutral.

I realised at once that I had got the solution to pain after all, and that the impending extractions would be a great opportunity to try it out.

Probably the despair of finiteness had provided me with a more absolute sort of centralisation which made the ricochet from intolerable sensation to a head-on drive against it possible.

Even if you are not centralised enough for that to happen, anger is a much better attitude to cultivate than fear or emotional recoil from the situation. Anger and drive are on your side, timidity and apprehension are not, although apprehension may precede anger.

As you know, the extractions worked perfectly and there was no sense of a breakdown point in the system. It seemed as if the pain automatically set up an adequately strong feedback reaction to neutralise it.

One should not lose sight of the fact that although this all seems, and was, very dramatic, the sort of centralisation that made it possible did not arise until I had, in the operative sense, rejected society or other people as a source of significance (which I had done when I was 19, about eighteen months earlier). This, as should always be emphasised, has nothing to do with giving up on having a drive to get out of society all that it should provide in the way of status and opportunity (Professorship, hotel environment, research departments to run, recognition and saleability for one’s books). However difficult society makes it to get any of these things out of it.

More on the belief in society

copy of a letter

Further to yesterday’s comments about giving up on the belief in society, I should, as usual, insist on the importance of the hypothetical. People have a resistance to accepting the possibility that everyone may be against them, or that their lives may be irrevocably ruined, but it is not a matter of believing that those things are the case, it is only necessary to accept that these thing are possibilities and to stop distorting one’s mind in a decentralised way to avoid noticing the indications that they may, realistically, be the case.

In practice, however, I have certainly found that accepting these things (without giving up) has aroused hostility and opposition.

I had not realised that trying to recover from a bad position, once one has been thrown out by society, makes one a criminal. If you go on trying to do what society has decreed you are to be outcast from, this not only arouses no sympathy (except from the few very exceptional people who are here now) but actually arouses opposition, either covert or overt as vitriolic abuse.

As you know, I was quite identified from an early age with being a respectable and successful middleclass person and I saw no difficulty at all in living within the law and with a fair amount of respect for other people’s territories, physical and psychological. But I found this was not enough to prevent myself from being perceived as a criminal.

And, by the way, perhaps I should repeat that although when I regained my centralisation at the age of 19 I cried for three days for the loss of my destiny, I was not actually giving up and did not actually lose it (as everyone around me would have liked to believe at the time). But, of course, I was not any longer in the market for explaining myself to other people.

Giving up on the belief in society

copy of a letter

Although giving up on the belief in society is very traumatic, it is difficult to see what one is giving up on. One is breaking a taboo which puts one beyond the pale; one can never again feel any sense of supportive solidarity with the human race. They can all be against one; one cannot prevent this if they want to be; they are not under one’s control. One must be identified only with what is under one’s control, and that is very little.

One loses the possibility of glamour; glamour comes from social glorification, and you are stripping society of its power to glorify you. This seems, at the time, like a terrible loss. If you (say) get a Nobel Prize, it will not reinforce your sense of significance. But, you decide, you must give up on the glamour that you wanted to get from it, so that you will not be incapacitated from doing the work that may get you one, if ever you can get into a position to do such work.

And you accept that you have lost your destiny; you will spend your life asserting the significance of what should have been in loss and mourning; but you will never give up. You know that everyone would disapprove of this; ‘move on’, they would say, ‘give up’.

You must accept the discontinuity in your life in order to go on pursuing the same things as before, and mourning for their loss. More usually, people wish to retain an idea that they are still in the same life (I wished it myself); that it is continuous with their previous life, just modified.

Maybe they will get less of what they wanted out of society and in a different form, but they don’t want to think they have given up on it. This means that they will need to keep their minds distorted and decentralised.

It is (paradoxically) only by giving up that you are enabled not to give up, and pretending not to have given up means that you have really lost the essential thing.

You said how was it that, at the SPR, I could feel like a convicted criminal wearing broad arrows and be clearly aware of the implications of all their jibes and taunts, and yet really feel as much a Professor as ever, although not socially recognised as such, and regard those who taunted me, and those whose machinations had placed me in this position, as the real criminals, and as having acted badly by the standards which academics ought to have.

I think the positive part comes out of the centralisation; you don’t decide in advance that this is the position you are going to adopt. Any significantly centralising manoeuvre is, I think, experienced as negative, as loss and dangerous. You don’t know what may come of it, you may never be able to be motivated to try to get anything again. But in practice, if the effect is really centralising, positive and unforeseeable results ensue, and you find that you are confident and sure of yourself in a way that you never were before, even when your life seemed to be most successful and socially rewarded.

As for the risk of losing motivation, I found that I still had very strong motivation to get social recognition as a Professor as soon as possible, and a Nobel Prize. I also had very strong motivation to work on an adequate scale in any area where I had started to see what could be done and confidence that there would be significant progress which I would be able to make in the light of the perceptions which I already had in those areas.

This did not, of course, give me any motivation to fiddle around in those areas inconclusively or ‘theorise’ about them vaguely, as other people did. But there was a very strong drive to get into a position where I could work on them on an adequate scale. Such drives, if they could not be implemented, did not go away. But they would be less tormenting if I could be intellectually active and functional on an adequate scale in any area of work which had some realistic content, and which could be done in a way that was contributing either to my career advancement towards a Professorship or to my build-up of capital.

Despairing of society as a source of significance

Once I despaired of society or other people as a source of significance. And once I despaired of all that could be possibly be got out of finite existence. Both times it took very great emotional violence to break the resistance, but the first was the more fundamental, in that it gave me the sort of centralisation that can lead to a higher level, although of course I did not know it at the time.

It is very difficult to write about, because it was essentially a manoeuvre to make it possible not to give up. I knew that it would make me an outsider and I had not expected to have to be that. I was a perfectly respectable middleclass person and until my life was made to go wrong I had been treated as a member of the club by respectable middleclass teachers etc. But now my wish to get back into the same position was being used against me as a decentralising factor.

I could only escape the trap by becoming independent of anyone else’s opinion. I would not stop behaving like a respectable bourgeois and successful academic person, nor would I stop feeling as if I were one, but I would not be a member of the club. Nor did I think that the club, as it was in practice, should be able to exclude me. I retained an image of the way society should be, to which the way it was in practice was irrelevant.

However, I would not ‘belong’ any more. I would be a criminal and outlaw because I was breaking the taboo which decrees that respectable persons do not think of themselves as better than society tells them they are. Of course it was a long time since I had been treated as if I ‘belonged’ anyway. They had set up impossible arrangements, ignoring my protests and complaints, and said that their judgement about me was fixed until further notice. If, and only if, I could succeed on the terms they prescribed after traversing the obstacle course, would they consider accepting me as a person who was good at doing the sort of things that, in the right circumstances, I was superlatively good at doing.

The hypothetical

It is obviously very difficult to define the sort of rejection of society as a source of significance that goes into becoming centralised. You don’t give up on wanting or needing things that society can provide, or on trying to get them, but you do give up on thinking that you ought to be able to prevent anyone from opposing you, or that it is some sort of reflection on you if you can’t.

The hypothetical is very important; you don’t give up on your drive to get things, but you do have to ask yourself whether you would give up on it, or nor act on it, if there should happen to be some consideration of a higher order of significance (that appeared to you to be of a higher order of significance). This is quite independent of a belief in such a thing or even expectation that there might be.

However, the hypothetical precedes anything presenting itself as highly significant, and has more psychodynamic force than might appear; I mean it has an effect on what actually happens.

As I approached the final degree exam at Somerville I found it very difficult to be motivated. Of course this was comprehensible in view of the unappetising vistas of doing pointless things without a hotel environment, but it was very alarming because the idea of being an outcast in the non-academic wasteland outside of a career as a Professor in a university, without a hotel environment, was simply appalling and unthinkable.

So also was the idea of ending my period of supervised education without even one first class degree. I knew that getting a second class degree would entirely destroy my social identity and my relationship to society. I would no longer be able to identify in any way with myself as a member of society. I would never again meet anyone as myself.

But however much I wanted to retain at least the tiny toehold of respectability that a First would provide, the horror of the cancellation of my life that would result from failure made it no easier to be motivated. I could work only mechanically, with deliberate conscious effort, to do something in which I had no subconscious cooperation.

Of course I was on a higher level so there was no doubt that there was an urgency of overriding significance and that I wanted to proceed in whatever would be the best way in terms of it.

That should not be taken to imply that I found myself wanting to do anything different in life from what I had always wanted, which was the best sort of academic career, expansive research projects and so forth. It appeared even more urgent than pre-higher level to get on with this, and even more certain that I would be able to make significant progress in any field in which I was able to work.

On the face of it, the best way of proceeding was by having the most successful sort of academic career, but by now I had fallen foul of the system; years of tedious work in bad circumstances at other people’s behest still lay ahead, with no guarantee that they would lead to the sort of life I needed to have.

But if I did not get a research scholarship, what then? Exile into the non-academic wasteland outside of Oxford University, into a place with which I had nothing to do, which might perhaps contain an opportunity somewhere, but of which I knew nothing good.

The university was at least supposed to be about things that were meaningful to me, even if they were not doing them very well and there was no sympathy or motivation of any kind to which I could appeal.

All ways appeared barred against me, and my sense of urgency produced extreme desperation. I was on a higher level, and that implies that all information was, at least potentially, accessible. I tried, therefore, to find out something useful. Surely there must somewhere be someone who was willing and able to help me. If I could, I thought, get a name and address in Australia I would walk out of the college and catch a plane like a shot.

But nothing came. It seemed I could not get any specific information on this point. I would have to go on with what I was doing; it did not seem right to stop trying to work as hard as I could for the degree, equally it was impossible to have any positive motivation. It remained an uphill struggle to do something rather disgusting, in a rather disgusting situation.

Might it not be better to do badly and get a Second? It might be better to be thrown out and find something in the uncharted wasteland. Of course it seemed preferable to get a First and simply abandon the research scholarship, even if I got it,, but somehow I felt it could not work like that. Obviously one would be very strongly inclined to stick with what seemed like a more secure and obvious way ahead.

So I thought that I had better consider as hard as possible that it might actually be better to get a Second and to go out into the wilderness, if there were anything out there. This seemed wildly improbable, but one always had to be openminded to the improbable. If something improbable was the case, it was a fact.

So I considered this possibility very hard because I did not want my preferences to get in the way of what might, in reality, be the best thing.

After a short time of doing this, and quite suddenly, I stopped being stressed. It was all right, it was all worked out. I hadn’t been able to get information consciously, but my subconscious had all the information that was necessary. Whether I got a First or a Second, all I had to do was to follow my nose, or do whatever seemed obvious.

There would be a way ahead.

And one must admit, in retrospect, that my subconscious did quite well.

Within a couple of months I was being interviewed for a job at the SPR, by two of those who had been most concerned with the Cross-Correspondence scripts. A fortnight later I was meeting Sir George Joy at the SPR office, and before the next academic year started in October I had found out about the Perrott Studentship of Trinity College, Cambridge, and decided not to return to Oxford, as I had intended, but to stay at the SPR to try to get the grant.

The evolution of dishonesty

In dealing with external physical reality, it would seem that all the evolutionary forces must be on the side of honesty and realism. It will do a farmer little good to pretend he has not noticed the signs of an approaching storm. But when living beings are dealing with others, even with those of their own species, there are many ways in which it can be useful to mislead other life forms about the true state of affairs, including your disposition and intentions. Transparent plankton could be said to be pretending not to be there, although they are, and by the time one arrives at something so complex as a normal plant, one finds the most elaborate reproductions and imitations being offered in order to induce insects to behave in the way that will best disseminate the plant's pollen.

Simple forms of dishonesty in animal life are well-known; for example, the bird that feigns an injured wing in order to lure a predator away from its nest. But clearly by far the greatest opportunities for dishonesty must be found in the social interactions of human beings, whose social forms are so much more complex and varied than those of other animals. We must suppose that a high degree of social dishonesty can greatly enhance the organism's chance of survival and successful reproduction, to the extent that the evolutionary pressures upon it depend on competition and successful interaction with its own kind rather than on attempts to overcome the difficulties presented by the physical world around it. Such a favourable strategy will probably become, as there is every reason to think it has become, a dominant mode of human behaviour and, like other successful strategies, it is likely to occur in association with a liking for this form of behaviour and a tendency in the direction of using it.

But since other people are aware of this strategy, a high degree of sophistication must be aimed at, and it may be that that will be best achieved if a person contrives to deceive himself concerning his own motives and intentions.

From the forthcoming book The Corpse and the Kingdom

"The over-60s are not worth treating"

Recently the Daily Mail reported that 1 in every 2 GPs said that patients (victims) over the age of 60 were not worth diagnosing or treating. Well, of course, what they say has no necessary relationship to what they actually do. Telling the truth is not, even nominally, part of their remit. But in fact we can be pretty sure that what goes on, and has been going on for a long time, is worse than they admit openly.

Some years ago there was a similar article revealing that, in the case of women, 55 was the age at which doctors thought them past bothering with. Taking a short break at Boscombe in a seaside hotel, I was discussing this with someone at the breakfast table, sitting opposite a lady in her fifties. She twice protested at so painful a topic being discussed, so I stopped talking about it. But that clearly illustrates, both how demoralising the immoral power of the medical Mafia is, and why there is no sympathy with those who complain of it.

When this lady went to her doctor she liked, no doubt, to maintain an uneasy fiction that she could trust him, rely on him to exercise his powers in her best interests (as understood by herself) , and believe what he said. She would wish to do this in order to relieve her anxieties about any symptoms she might have, but it would take quite a lot of emotional energy to do so, in view of the available evidence. Taking up emotional energy in this way is essentially decentralising. Recognising that one is alone in a hostile world is, or may be, eventually liberating (although, no doubt, there are plenty of ways of doing it wrong).

This lady, like everyone else, believed in society. On higher level terms, and in view of the basic moral principle, one considers it highly immoral to force people into decentralised positions, and tries to avoid offering people the usual provocations to reactiveness. The psychological social contract is what happens when the individual gives up his own drives to self-fulfilment and becomes the willing slave of social oppression, in return for the possibility of oppressing others, or enjoying the spectacle of their being oppressed by the social forces with which he has thrown in his lot.

Once a society has instigated an oppressive regime, such as the modern Welfare (Oppressive) State, there is no real possibility of reversing it, as an increasing number of people wish to believe in the ‘benefits’ they are deriving from it, including in many cases the opportunity to oppress other people, rather than face up to the terrifying nature of the threats to which they are exposed.

It may also be pointed out that discrimination against persons over a certain age is discrimination against aristocratic genes and high IQs (as certainly as is a chronological-age related exam system) since high IQ is positively correlated with longevity. My parents, with aristocratic genes and high IQs, remained functional with little recourse to medication or hospital treatment until they had reached an age at which they were, in the eyes of the medical Mafia, past their sell-by date. People with worse genes and lower IQs cost the taxpayers (via the NHS) much more over their lifetime than my parents did, even if in a shorter lifetime.

Suppressed drive turns into aggression

As I said recently, children are brought up in such a way that compliance with social demands, and identification with the rewards to be derived from membership of social groups, are seen as good, and any individual drive is bad, since it is likely to lead to social disapproval and punishment.

So the individual represses his individualistic drives and cravings, but this leads to anger and resentment, which is also regarded as bad, and he has to try to pretend he does not have such feelings. But he can sublimate or redirect them into a socially approvable form, by joining with society in its disapproval of those who express their drives in ways considered morally wrong.

E.g. people with high IQs who emerge from their state-funded education as demoralised criminals, and with no way of using their drives to succeed in life, are not angry at the oppressive education which has got them into this position, although they quarrelled with their teachers and committed acts of vandalism on school buildings. Instead they are angry at bank managers and property owners and their minds run on ways of asserting themselves by doing something really painful and damaging to such people, such as putting lighted papers through the letterboxes of those who annoy them in any way, in the hope of burning down their house.

Or they may become agents of the collective, such as teachers, doctors or social workers, and interfere in the lives of other people against their will.

Boys are more likely to suffer from repressed anger and resentment than are girls, who usually cotton on sooner to the possibility of using social position as an aid to oppressing other people, and reconcile themselves from an early age to seeing the restriction of the liberty of other people as the only form of self-assertion to be aimed at.

Schopenhauer and friendship

This is what Schopenhauer says about friendship:

In many cases, there is a grain of true and genuine friendship in the relation of man to man, though generally, of course, some secret personal interest is at the bottom of them - some one among the many forms that selfishness can take. But in a world where all is imperfect, this grain of true feeling is such an ennobling influence that it gives some warrant for calling those relations by the name of friendship, for they stand far above the ordinary friendships that prevail amongst mankind. The latter are so constituted that, were you to hear how your dear friends speak of you behind your back, you would never say another word to them.

Apart from the case where it would be a real help to you if your friend were to make some great sacrifice to serve you, there is no better means of testing the genuineness of his feelings than the way in which he receives the news of a misfortune that has just happened to you. At that moment the expression of his features will either show that his one thought is that of true and sincere sympathy for you; or else the absolute composure of his countenance, or the passing trace of something other than sympathy, will confirm the well-known maxim of La Rochefoucauld: “Dans l'adversité de nos meilleurs amis, nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui ne nous deplaît pas.” Indeed, at such a moment, the ordinary so-called friend will find it hard to suppress the signs of a slight smile of pleasure. There are few ways by which you can make more certain of putting people into a good humour than by telling them of some trouble that has recently befallen you, or by unreservedly disclosing some personal weakness of yours. How characteristic this is of humanity!

It is not only that people look pleased at one's misfortunes, they may sometimes be observed to look dismayed at one's good fortune.

I was once in receipt of some financial support for a period of seven years. During this period I moved into a larger house. Speculation among my friends and well-wishers may well have arisen that I would not be able to maintain myself, along with my various colleagues, in this more desirable house once the financial support came to an end. One of these colleagues paid a social call on a Professor and his wife. "And what will you do when your grant comes to an end?" the wife enquired, operating under cover of the social convention which enables people to enquire into your affairs on the assumption that their intentions are benevolent. "Oh, we will go on living in the same house," my colleague replied, and told me afterwards how the face of the Professor's wife dropped with surprise and regret. One may add, of course, that the Professor's wife was living in a more than comparable lifestyle to any we had ever enjoyed, and with far greater social status and security, so that her reaction was not due to our continuing to have some advantage which she did not have herself.

Psychology is real and inconvenient

People are always wanting to think that I am advocating some particular psychological attitudes in a way that is applicable to the population in general, and hence to themselves if they go away from here or never come in the first place. The few websites that have links to mine mostly contain expositions of my psychological ideas which make them sound as if they are supportive of hippyish dropout psychology.

Matters are not helped, either, by the fact that both religions, and modern collectivist ideology (the new world religion), instil in people the idea that psychological events are either good or bad, and that their psychology is something for which they are responsible and should be able to alter to taste, so that they are bad if they fail to make it conform to what is socially regarded as good.

So people are very likely to have a lurking fear that they are intrinsically evil or worthless, associated with a fear of self-assertion and autonomy, since anything of that kind led to their being slapped down in infancy, and even throughout their ‘educational’ years. But so long as they don’t try to break away from the social guidelines — which in practice are tolerant of dropping out in the approved manner, as well as of having a salaried and highly-taxed ‘career’ in the approved manner — they can kid themselves that they are not minding about anything and need never confront their real problems.

Well, as a matter of fact, it is exceedingly difficult to change one’s psychological position; when I had psychological problems everyone was keen on telling me that they did not exist. I had to keep telling myself that psychology was real. It did not work in what might appear to be the rational way, or the way that would have been convenient for oneself.

But eventually, after a lot of failed attempts to make something work, and especially after proving to myself very thoroughly that the methods proposed by counsellors etc. did not work (not that I went near such people, but the recommended attitudes are ubiquitous in the modern world), I gradually acquired some degrees of freedom and found that it was possible to make some choices and re-direct certain things.

There was no way, at this stage, that I could have foreseen the extraordinary higher level outcome.

Your back to the wall

(copy of a letter)

I was saying to you the other day that there is a back to the wall quality in centralisation. Of course people have a great resistance to recognising that they are (or may be) alone against the world, because they cannot prevent other people being hostile if they choose to be.

All you can be in control of is a very small bit of your own psychological territory, so it is no use trying to operate within what other people think you ought to do, or thinking that you should be able to get other people’s permission or approval before you identify with wanting what you want and being what you want to be. People are, of course, tremendously conditioned to think you ought to be able to ‘prove yourself’ or something.

The fact is that the buck stops here, i.e. in your own mind. A successful child prodigy, allowed enough social territory within which to be fully functional and purposeful, can avoid realising this and think that one should be able to go with the social flow. As soon as I found that I wasn’t being able to be functional and purposeful within it, I became a criminal in everyone’s eyes.

I think that my father showed his own decentralisation in wishing to feel that he was supported by good advice and he had a tendency to seek it from some father figure or expert before making any important decisions.

When I complained to my mother that it had been crazy to get opinions from other people about whether I should take the School Certificate, she used to say, ‘He always did that. He went and asked the vicar if it would be right to marry me.’ In that case the advice did not seem to put him off doing the right thing, but he once bought a disadvantageous house on the advice of an estate agent who said he would treat him just like his own son.

So most people probably are going with the flow, and very much disinclined to do anything without social support.

Although the first form of back-to-the-wall centralisation makes you an outlaw and an outcast, you can see that it is actually quite closely related to the royalty development, in which also the buck stops here. A king has to make his own best guess because he is the best there is, and although he may consider other people’s points of view he has ultimately got to be prepared to oppose them if necessary.

And, of course, in relation to the existential situation, you have got to make your own best guess about what it is best to take a risk on.

It is of course perfectly valid to decide that someone else has more information in a certain area than you have yourself, and defer the decision-making to them. Also, of course, it would be quite acceptable for someone to ask another person, whether medically qualified or not, to decide on the details of what medication he should take.

What is not acceptable is to impose the judgements of agents of the collective on all and sundry so that they are not free to make their own decisions about things that vitally concern them. There is an ‘educational’ Mafia which is very nearly as criminal as the ‘medical’ Mafia, except that its powers of interference and oppression are less explicitly spelt out.

Exceptionality

There was once a woman who said of me, with that sublime lack of analyticalness which characterises those who know they have social support: ‘If she is really exceptional it won't make any difference to her whether she takes exams very young or not.’

Let us consider some of the things that she might have meant by this.

The first possible meaning is tautologous. It is: ‘Provided she subsequently succeeds in gaining social recognition she will not be able to say that she was prevented from gaining social recognition by not taking exams very young.’

A family of other possible meanings depend implicitly on assertions of the type: ‘All true ability achieves social recognition.’ In the case of the past, it is clearly not the case that all those who are currently regarded as having possessed true ability achieved social recognition during their lifetime. So our implicit assumption must be somewhat of this form: ‘All those who, subsequent to the present century, will be socially recognised as having true ability, will achieve social recognition during their lifetime.’

Or again, she may have meant: ‘The human race as a whole is so indifferent to superficial tokens of success, so much in the habit of using its independent judgement to assess ability, and so generously inclined to the ability it notices, that no obstacles will be placed in the path of a person of very great ability, even if that person has spent the first 20 years of his life not using the great ability.’

If this was what she meant, she was a poor observer of human nature. Even if the argument were true, of course, it would still provide no positive reason for gratuitously writing off a considerable expanse of years as unusable.

Then again, she may have meant: ‘The human race is so aware of the characteristics which denote purposiveness that, no matter what social recognition anyone may have achieved by their ability to recapitulate the present knowledge of the human race, as soon as they set out to add to that knowledge they are certain to encounter every resistance and opprobrium.’ There is certainly something to be said for this view, though, again, it is difficult to see that it possesses great persuasive force if it be paraphrased in the form: ‘It will not make any difference whether you are well-fed when the siege begins, because once the siege has begun you certainly will not get any food.’

Or she may have meant: ‘No matter how many years you spend in an inspirational state, and no matter what your achievements in those years may be, they will still in retrospect be finite; and the difference between a number of years spent in an inspirational state and the same number of years spent in considerable misery will always, in retrospect, be finite.’ There is something in this position, although one should always view with caution attempts to quantify anything so incalculable as consciousness.

Or she may have meant: ‘The intellectual level of the human race is so low that even if someone is obliged to go through life without a knowledge of those things which they would have learnt if they had been educated, their intellectual life will not thereby be impoverished. E.g. Greek literature contains no ideas which any thinking person could not originate for themselves, so no one will be losing anything if they cannot read Greek.’ This is true, though it does nothing to demonstrate that the mental operations involved in learning Greek may not be desirable in themselves. Further, it does not allow for the refreshing effect of variations in syntax and alphabet upon the jaded mind.

Or she may have meant: ‘If this person is as exceptional as all that, I can try as hard as I like to smash him up, since I shall not be able to prevent him from achieving social recognition, and so I shall not have done him any harm. If, on the other hand, my attempts to smash him up result in his failing to achieve social recognition, this will prove that he was not exceptional and therefore I shall have done no harm in smashing him up.’ If stated in terms of physical rather than intellectual well-being, few people would find this argument acceptable. ‘If I hit this man on the head with a hammer and he dies, it will prove he was so feeble he is no great loss. If I hit him on the head with a hammer and he does not die, I shall not have done him any harm because he will still be alive.’

Or she may have meant: ‘True despair comes only to those who have no longer any hope of being accepted by society; and the sooner this happens to someone the better.’

Counselling is the opposite of centralisation

(copy of a letter)

In a way it is interesting that the basic psychological manoeuvre of ‘counselling’ etc is so precisely the inverse of what goes into becoming centralised in a bad situation, in the way that produces remarkable developments and may lead to a higher level.

The recommended technique is not to think about what you have lost or been deprived of, and to have lots of interaction with other people. Your sense of identity is supposed to be derived from your acceptability to other people, and will inevitably reinforce your belief in society as a source of significance. And you are supposed to ‘move on’, not to remain in the same state of bereavement.

Well, I swore that I would never move on, I would always be trying to get back the same things in life I had always been aiming at. And I had to cut out of my life absolutely any vulnerability to what other people thought of me.

I had seemed for a long time to be accepted as a respectable bourgeois person; old-fashioned middle-class schoolteachers had been ‘friendly’ to me as if I was one of their club of that sort of person, and was going to continue to be in my future academic career.

But I was breaking a fundamental taboo, which persons of that kind never broke, in not waiting for society to tell me that I was the sort of person who should be entitled to the sort of life which I needed to have.

Despairing of society

(copy of a letter)

I think I ought to write down what I was saying to you when I last saw you, because it is so widely misunderstood. It is a lot easier to write about the despair of finiteness immediately preceding a higher level, but that is not really in ‘normal’ psychology at all, and what made it possible was the far more difficult and traumatic, but absolutely crucial, despair of society, in which I did effectively destroy the power of society, or any other person, to reward me by contributing to my sense of significance, which seemed a terrible loss at the time. I felt that I was destroying this irrevocably, and my life would be forever diminished by the loss, but at the same time I had no other way of extracting myself from the trap in which I had been caught.

However, this was in no way as people would like to imagine it, that you give up on wanting social success, prestige, status, opportunities, financial reward, etc. It is only that in order to retain your freedom from paralysing conflict in working towards these things in your now very disadvantaged position you have no option but to sacrifice what has become too great a burden.

As I was telling you, I had already had quite a long and precocious life as an apparently respectable and acceptable person, and I had expected that I should be able to pursue my objectives in life within the parameters of socially approved respectability. However, I realised that I was breaking too fundamental a taboo in abandoning any respect, however provisional or hypothetical, for social judgements and evaluations of one. One is very much given to understand that a respectable person waits for society’s imprimatur before considering oneself as suited to, or needing, a certain type of career, circumstances of life, scope for activities.

I found that it was no longer possible to do this, and I knew that I was going to go on aiming at exactly the same sort of life and reinstatement in the right sort of social position, however impossible it might come to appear.

So in a sense it is not even that one gives up hope; one is still aiming at the same thing, however improbable may appear the ways in which one has to work towards it. But one does abandon the unrealistic belief that the opinions of social authorities are in any way objective or realistic, or that one ought to be able to gain their approval before allowing oneself to identify with what one wants and needs to have.

Plenty of people do ‘give up’ on social approval in the commoner ways, which get you nowhere, and do become drop-outs pursuing some ‘alternative’ idealism.

This, however, is not potent, but the identification with not giving up on everything that you originally wanted, and still want, out of life and society, although you recognise that you cannot prevent other people from being hostile and opposing you in everything that you most want and need to have, is actually very centralising and has extraordinary psychological consequences.

An advantage in a life of adversity

(copy of a letter)

As I was saying, and perhaps should write about, the higher level was certainly a great advantage in the life of adversity that confronted me on leaving university. If I had not had a higher level I would have needed essentially the same things and needed to work towards them in the same ways, but it would have been a lot harder if I had still had the deficits and cravings with which I had arrived at Somerville. It was so long then since I had been able to get anything out of life that I needed to get something quickly, in many ways, and could not easily reconcile myself to further unrewarding chores.

I knew that the idea had been that as I was prevented from getting anything I wanted out of life, I would adopt the prevailing worldview as a compensation, but in fact it still presented itself to me as totally unattractive.

When hunger becomes too dominant it detracts from functionality. I suppose, however, that it was an advantage that my deprivations, although severe and painful, were not based on emotional deprivations in early life, as I think most people’s are.

Anyway, I cut other people or society out of my life as a source of significance, because I saw that any wish to derive support from that quarter was being used against me.

By the time I was thrown out without a usable qualification, and with no way of making a career, I was extremely well stoked up emotionally and all the deficits had been filled in. Which was just as well in the circumstances. If it had been otherwise, it is difficult to imagine how I could have been so pragmatic and extraverted in the terrible circumstances in which I found myself.

I was destitute and friendless in the world, my position was shocking. Every social contact was horrifying, and it was easy to imagine a protective reclusiveness. But I had derived from the higher level an assurance that there would be a way ahead and it would lead somewhere. This was where I found myself and I had to see how it might contribute to my return to an academic career. Disgraced and outcast as I was, I met everybody, explored every avenue, became aware of everyone’s attitudes and opinions. And saved money. I had a daily allowance for expenditure and at the end of each day the surplus was carried forward or transferred to permanent savings. My savings represented my freedom of action; one day there might be an opportunity and whether I was free to take it would depend on exactly how much money I had. Every penny counted.

Meanwhile I lived without an identity. I had been cheated out of the social position which I should have had, and now I was dead in the eyes of the world. At the SPR I was surrounded by professors and appalled to find myself - not only without the professorial status that I should have acquired myself, in less hostile society, at about 15 - but without any status or hope at all, being not even on a career track that could lead to a Professorship.

I was shocked and horrified, but I was well stoked up emotionally by the higher level, and I could proceed as purposefully as possible without deriving any feedback or reinforcement from anything I did or from any social reinforcement. That was the difference from when I arrived at Somerville. Having been thrown out, it did not do to think about how I appeared in anyone’s eyes, and I could proceed purposefully without doing so.

I realised for the first time how the despair which I continually rejected was being converted into anger when a member of the SPR Council commented on my dogged weariness and suggested I take a holiday. At least he might refrain from pretending that he cared about what was good for me. If he cared, he would be helping me to get back into the academic career that I should be having, with residential hotel facilities. I sold myself into slavery in the SPR office; I sold my life by the day, having nothing else to sell. Holidays were for Professors, not for slaves.

Developing an observer

(copy of a letter)

Well, if you want to develop a 'soul', or whatever, you could try the following.

Gurdjieff sets great store by developing an ‘observer’; that is, you regard yourself as something that is watching what is going on in your mind. This is probably a prerequisite for centralisation or existential perception. This means you don’t identify with your psychology, it is something you observe. You don’t feel responsible for what you observe in your psychology, because you can’t prevent it from being there. This is often very difficult, because people do feel that their psychology is what they really are, and any part of it which they regret or think other people might disapprove of may give them serious feelings of worthlessness and despair.

There is a lot of social influence in the direction of making people feel that they ought to be able to control what is in their own psychology or to apply some fictitious sticking plaster to cover it up, but this is not helpful. People might eventually get a bit more freedom of choice about what they want to reinforce or manipulate, but that isn’t likely to happen while they are still feeling responsible for what they are observing. More often than not there are things which they are trying to change instead of observing them, and trying to feel differently about. This is both decentralising and deprives you of a lot of emotional energy, although it can be very difficult to get into the right position.

People often feel that their life has been ruined in some way or another and if they see how bad it is and how irrevocable they are afraid it is, they will give up, so it is better not to see it too clearly. Then, of course, one has to cultivate realism, but this is often not obvious because a lot of things are peddled as realistic attitudes which are not. People generally have a lot of value judgements and don’t think that there may be exceptions. E.g. going to school is always a ‘good thing’, doctors are always trustworthy, universities are infallible.

Any value judgements that have a certain amount of social support are likely to be occlusive but one can avoid becoming identified with them by remembering that in any given case there may be a large number of factors which you can’t begin to evaluate, possibly including some inconceivable ones. Of course, in the examples I have given it is not difficult to imagine counter examples; you only have to envisage the possibility of one irresponsible and incompetent doctor. Any value judgements that imply ‘shoulds’ are particularly dubious.

The difference between stress and pressure

"There is a big difference between stress and pressure. Pressure is when you have made a speech in public, for example, and feel good about it. Stress is the feeling you never want to do that again."

(quoted by Andrew Smith from interview with Mark Johnson, Director of CEBO Corporate, In Business magazine, a supplement to the Oxford Times, October/November 2006)

Interesting use of the words ‘pressure’ and ‘stress’, analogous to that of ‘pushing’ and ‘stretching’. You could say that people wanted to save me from the ‘pressure’ of being allowed to take as many exams as possible, as young as possible, and as fast as possible, in order to expose me to the ‘stress’ of having to try to avoid being thrown out at the end of my ‘education’ without any usable qualification at all, and sent to Devil’s Island for life.

The definition of ‘stress’ quoted above is questionable. Isn’t it more the fear of being unable to avoid an intolerable situation from which you have no means of escape, and which you have no practicable way of averting?

As even this article puts it: "Mr Johnson has experience of working for big companies undergoing takeovers which can be highly stressful for people worried about their jobs."

We know that the modern ideology does not accept that any suffering or hardship arising from an unsuitable social position can be objective.

Mr Johnson is quoted as saying, of those facing the loss of their jobs, "At the end of the day, it is about responsibility and talking about the things you find difficult."

Odd use of the word ‘responsibility’. You must take ‘responsibility’ for pretending that you are not suffering from an objective deprivation, which can only be relieved by a change of circumstances. In other words you must take ‘responsibility’ for being unrealistic in the socially required way. If you are realistic, in the sense of recognising how seriously bad your position is, you are not being ‘responsible’ on social terms, and society, no doubt, will offer you ‘help’ in the form of counselling and mind-bending drugs. At the top of this article, Mr Johnson is said to have been "helping people cope with stress for 20 years." That should really be ‘helping’, in scare quotes.