Climbing the Ladder of Selves
Innovative Innervations
On the 11th August 2016 the British scientific journal, Nature[i], published the results of an experiment which used a virtual reality environment to enable paraplegics to regain sensation in their paralyzed limbs. This resulting sensation, due to a somewhat miraculous innervation, led to some of these once paralysed individuals able to walk once again, thus dramatically improving their daily lives. In the study special note was taken of the “potential occurrence of functional cortical plasticity,” which was “evaluated through longitudinal analyses of EEG recordings.” The report continues by stating that all “patients were instructed to imagine movements of their own legs while EEG signals from 11 scalp electrodes were recorded over the leg primary somatosensory and motor cortical areas.” (my italics).
Indeed, there have been several similar experiments undertaken before, but one particular example will suffice; it involves a group of physically healthy Israeli soldiers. This experiment was conducted by Shlomo Breznitz at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Breznitz conducted the soldiers to march twenty-five miles but provided each group of marchers with differing and sometimes incorrect information about how much they had actually marched (or were going to march). He would either exaggerate, or dramatically underestimate, the marcher’s mileage. The author Michael Talbot summarised Brezniz’s results, in which the findings showed that the “stress hormone level in the soldiers’ blood always reflected their estimates and not the actual distance they had marched.” (my italics). Talbot concludes, “In other words, their bodies responded not to reality, but to what they were imagining as reality.” (1991: 88).
Now this is all highly significant when considering the notion of an evolutionary self: for the embryo of the future self must also exist in the present (indeed, the post-Jungian psychologist, James Hillman, called this the ‘acorn theory’). However, this ‘latent self’ has merely not been ‘actualised’, as the psychologist Abraham Maslow may have put it. Now, this demands the question: what if we were able to imagine a higher reality for ourselves; a more integrated and powerful form of Being? Indeed, to become self-actualised is an enormous challenge, and as I have mentioned before, alpinism seems to be an often-used metaphor for this arduous task of self-development.
The philosopher Colin Wilson, in his book New Pathways of Psychology (1972), used the term ‘self-image’; the fact that we are only so much as capable of being what we imagine ourselves to be. “The great man is the play-actor of his own ideals,” said Nietzsche. Now, Wilson, significantly using mountaineering as a metaphor, comments:
“A man could not climb a vertical cliff without cutting hand-holds in the rock. Similarly, I cannot achieve a state of ‘intenser consciousness’ merely by wanting to . . . We tend to climb towards higher states of self-awareness by means of a series of self-images. We create a certain imaginary image of the sort of person we would like to be, and then try to live up to the image.” (1972: 34)
This series of self-images, as it were, is precisely the means by which we can grapple with the tough and turbulent terrain of reality. However, it must correspond with a possible and latent — or implicit — reality within the psyche of the individual.
The Nature experiment provided the imaginary stimulus (the virtual reality headgear and exoskeleton) which provided a new, body-enhancing self-image for the patients involved. Again, it awakened the mind to correspond with an implicit reality and thus innervated the previously derelict limbs. That is, they were re-imbued by a sort of psychological leap which then became a physiological reality. And yet, the possibility for this development was already there in embryonic form — it simply needed the required recognition that it is indeed a possibility.
In many ways, what happened corresponds very closely to what the famous Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, called synchronicity — those moments when the inner-world of thought seems to somehow transfer into everyday events, producing jarring and sometimes profound sequences to occur.
The Mind as Programmer
Wilson emphasised this fact of an implicit possibility in his 2006 essay, ‘The Psychology of Optimism’, in which he discusses the implications of the neuropsychologist Roger Sperry’s type of mind-body monism. Sperry came to reject the idea that the mind and body were two basically diametrically opposed realities, in which the mind absolutely cannot influence the body, and that the body, essentially, was the generator of mind. Instead, Sperry believed that “[e]mergent mental powers . . . must logically exert downward causal control over electrophysiological events in brain activity.” The mind for Sperry was not merely epiphenomenal; it was something outside of the brain, in which the brain merely acted as a receiver. However, there is an altogether more immediate correlation; the body is minded, if you like.
Consciousness for Sperry existed as well as the body, and not because of the body, and therefore it takes the role of an active force. Indeed, as an enormously important creative will which can generate profound physiological changes (like the innervations of a paraplegic’s legs). Wilson concludes the essay by saying that we must “persuade scientists . . . to begin experiments to try and show that brain cells can be created by a focused effort of will.” (2006: 85).
Time and the Transcendent ‘Self’
To return Nature’s virtual reality experiment, this indeed proves it to be an important avenue of research, and although it can improve the lives of many who have lost use of their limbs, it could also potentially act as a new method by which to stimulate unused areas of our own minds.
Of course, drugs, particularly hallucinogenic, have also had a similar effect on individuals, and are in fact an influence on virtual worlds themselves[1]. Imagination in itself is an important means by which to “stimulate the earth-bound imagination of man to grasp the immensity around him” (1989: 19–20). The mind, Wilson reminds us, is also a muscle that needs to be re-innervated so as to be able to grasp — to contract its powers so as to assimilate its experience of reality more powerfully — with a vivid intensity which enables existence to be more powerfully experienced[2].
Interestingly, this notion of imagination, virtual worlds and dreaming as being a means to stimulate the ‘earthbound imagination’ out of its tendency to become robotic and passive, has been picked up by many novelists. An example is in the work of J.B. Priestley whose time plays — or the novel The Magicians — enables his characters to vividly re-live the past in what he called ‘Time Alive’. Although the novel stems directly out of Gurdjieff’s and Ouspensky’s development of system known generally as The Fourth Way, it nevertheless provides and important psychological point. This also appears most profoundly in an even earlier play, his 1937 Time and the Conways, in which the character Alan Conway states the multiplicity of our ‘selves’, or ‘I’s’:
“[N]ow, at this moment, or any moment, we’re only cross-sections of our real selves. What we really are is a whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we come to the end of this life, all those selves, all our time, will be us — the real you, the real me. And then perhaps we’ll find ourselves in another time, which is only another kind of dream” (2014, ix).
These theories of time and our multiple personalities emerged directly out of J.B. Priestley’s obsession with the time theories of J.W. Dunne, whose work An Experiment with Time (1927) postulated — as an outcome of Dunne’s theory of serial-time — that there must also be corresponding ‘I’s’ which observe us as if it were free from our usual linear sense of time. Instead, this other ‘I’ would see as if through an infinite hall of mirrors which reflect different versions of ‘you’ — as you are, as you were, and as you could be.
Importantly, the late psychoanalyst Anthony Storr noted something which corroborates with this theory in a fascinating way, for he provides a cybernetic interpretation of consciousness. In other worlds, that consciousness is essentially self-regulating and attempting to reach equilibrium[3]. Significantly this is noted in his aptly titled book The Integrity of the Personality (1960) when discussing the theories of Carl Jung (who also thought the psyche a self-regulating mechanism that knows what is best for it). And yet this ‘self-regulating’ self is ever thwarted in its path to self-actualisation by external and internal fluctuations.
The body says Storr ‘knows’ what is “best of itself; but it is a knowledge without consciousness, and the goal of homeostasis is sought automatically without the deliberate direction of a conscious ego.” (176) Yet he presents the possibility that the psyche is also seeking a semblance of equilibrium, and that Jung provided this essential insight into the cybernetic quality of the personality or Being. And this therefore infers a ‘right’ state of consciousness: a self that simply ‘knows’ — or is in some sense already actualised — in the future, or somehow vertically above and/or outside of time.
Jung looked for signs of this other self in the mythologizing nature of the unconscious mind, which seemed to him to be active in its will to equilibrium and the integration of the personality, in other words, as an unconscious process which aims at developing an evolutionary self-image.
Energetic Leaks
We have a tendency to ‘leak’ energies, as Wilson put it, and these leaks are due to a poorly integrated sense of self; a tumultuous ego which is either too easily shaken, or emotions which erupt — or ‘drop’ — our spirits like pockets of air pressure effecting an airplane’s descent.
The psychologist Roberto Assagioli who termed his own movement of psychology, psychosynthesis, also said the same thing: that we should integrate our multiple ‘I’s in a skilful and efficient way. He also noted the self-regulatory aspect of the will, stating that the true will has a “directive and regulatory function; it balances and constructively utilizes all the other activities and energies of the human being without repressing any of them.” (1973, 10) Abraham Maslow called these self-integrators ‘self-actualisers’, who aimed towards “the creation of a superordinate unity.”
The ‘superordinate unity’ is what Assagioli called the ‘transpersonal self’ — or what Wilson meant by the title of his book Super Consciousness (2009). Maslow’s peak experiences are effectively the unification of the selves, which result in an invigorated focus of all the intellectual, emotional and physical energies — that is, they are all efficiently synthesised (or what Assagioli would have called psychosynehsis.)
So, what is the essential driving force behind our urge to unify our multiple selves?
Wilson contends that it is meaning itself, for there is a certain healthy-minded tropism within the human psyche towards meaning. He states it in his ‘ladder-of-selves’ theory: “In moments of intensity, of excitement, of creativity, I move up the ‘ladder’, and instantly become aware that the meaninglessness was an illusion. For I can ‘tell myself my own story’ and grasp it as a reality; I can look in a mirror and experience myself as an entire object.” (1985: 147) As one climbs the ladder it contracts our being more tightly until all the disparate elements of our psyche are satisfactorily integrated. We cease to be victims of vacillating moods, and become our own programmers, the directors of our own existence.
Now, the positive self-image provides the individual with a certain traction — a grip — with which they can most effectively climb the ladder-of-selves. Again, in Wilson’s quote above we can see both the ‘virtual sense of self’ and the experience of grasping oneself as a whole unit rather than as a vacillating collection of disharmonious impulses. I can tell myself my own story and grasp it as a reality.
It must be emphasised that this story, or vision, must correspond with a potential reality that harmonises with one’s best aspects (and should not be divorced from reality totally, for it would be a dangerous delusion that would be the contrary to integration — it would become dis-integration, a loss of a sense of self). For example, Assagioli points out an amusing misunderstanding of education, quoting Gustave Le Bon who said that “education is the art of making the conscious pass into the unconscious,” when in fact it should be quite the opposite — passing from the unconscious into consciousness. Assagioli notes that the etymology of ‘education’ means to “draw out,” to actualise our “latent possibilities from the unconscious, to activate the energies dormant in it, particularly in its higher sphere, the superconscious.” (1973: 57–58) The self-image must, therefore, abide by similar pedagogical practices, for they must ‘draw out’ those latent possibilities in the most efficient way possible.
The Self-Image as a Symbolically Authentic Metaphor
To return to the symbolism of the mountain: the controversial esoteric philosopher Julius Evola, like René Daumal in his poetic novel Mount Analogue (1952), also adopted it as a powerful metaphor for human existence. And, much like the peak experience and its vistas of meaning and distant fact, Evola too points to the seriousness of the alpinists as a contraction of disciplined and focused energy. Says Evola:
“The […] feature of serious mountain climbers […] is inner discipline: a total control of reflexes; the style of a deliberate, lucid, and purposeful action; a boldness that is not reckless or hasty, but which is connected to the knowledge of one’s own limitatations and strengths and of the exact terms of the problem to be solved. In relation to this characteristic, we also find yet another one: the control of one’s imagination and the capability to immediately neutralize any useless and harmful inner turmoil.” (33) (my italics)
Evola’s discussion of the will comes dangerously close to what Assagioli described as the Victorian caricature of will as been cold and brutal (Evola’s continuing comments are on the Nordic and Mediterranean ‘types’ seems to be a typical example of this), but nevertheless in the context of existence the metaphor is significant, for the virtual and metaphorical nature of the mountain is a sort of simulation, or as Daumal called it, “symbolically authentic,” (which is perhaps the most accurate description of the self-image theory). It must be symbolically authentic, — and to quote Nietzsche again: ‘The great man is the play-actor of his own ideals’ — these ideals must be authentic in origin, relating to man’s greatest and most implicit possibilities.
The paraplegics being able to walk again seems to support this idea of a bridging between the symbolical and the real — the symbolical world of the virtual reality headsets convinced the mind, and thus the body — to provide nerves and feeling to limbs that were felt — and known — to be paralysed; but in some loop of the unreal and the real, they manifested in actuality.
This posits the question: What is not impossible? What can become an actuality?
Implicit Possibilities
“It seems preposterous that nothing except a little absent-mindedness stands between us and a life that is ten times as satisfying as the present one. Anybody who realises this experiences [a] tremendous sense of frustration, and is willing to make the most exhausting efforts to ‘break through’.” (1986, 60)
Opportunities, Wilson said elsewhere, have a tendency to increase as they are seized. The spur of meaning as one ascends the ladder-of-selves should in theory make it easier and more invigorating as you are more properly integrated; but lower down the ladder there is more danger, for we can too easily become a victim of ourselves. On the lower rungs we can much more easily become robotic and slip back into what Gurdjieff called ‘sleep’. There must be a tremendous amount of phenomenological vigilance and self-discipline involved to prevent this degeneration of the ‘self’ to a more trivial level of existence. Indeed, existence itself provides us with humbling threats and reasons to be joyful, but it can — with its trivialities and bores — pull us back into a semi-comatose automaton, drifting and hypnotised by our untamed, unconscious forces.
The question of human existence itself is what Gurdjieff called “holy the firm,” the fact that “the only firm ground in human life is the seemingly uneasy ground of question, especially questions that can neither be answered nor left unanswered.” (2016, 108) The sheer unanswerable nature of the question can either undermine our sense of self and cosmos, or in fact invigorate us to make a more concerted effort to create our own values. The climbing of the ladder of selves is a means of creation; and the creative act is precisely another type of bridging together disparate facts and realities into a single actualised form.
The philosopher Henri Bergson points out the essentially creative nature of evolution, whereby nature, he says:
“. . is more and better than a plan in course of realization. A plan is a term assigned to a labor: it closes the future whose form it indicates. Before the evolution of life, on the contrary, the portals of the future remain wide open. It is creation that goes on for ever in virtue of an initial movement. This movement constitutes the unity of the organized world — a prolific unity, of an infinite richness, superior to any that the intellect could dream of, for the intellect is only one of its aspects or products” (2014: 106–107)
So, in a sense self-realization too is a form of creativity, a virtue of an initial movement. It suggests therefore not an explicitness of something to become, but an implicitness that can become. All sorts of paradoxes and contradictions can arise when considering this notion of an implicit nature, for what made the initial movement in the first place? It was life — in whatever its form — taking a hold of matter, presenting it with a possibility of becoming more complex. Buckminster Fuller similarly shares this notion of man, and more generally, life, as being a function against the automatism of the universe:
“My continuing philosophy is predicated, first, on the assumption that in counterbalance to the expanding universe of entropically increasing random disorderliness there must be a universal pattern of omnicontracting, convergent, progressive orderliness, and that man is that anti-entropic reordering function . . .” (1963: v).
If this is true, and we are able to use the Hermetic dictum of ‘As Above, So Below’, we can begin to map a correlate between cosmic evolution and psychological individuation, for as Bergson points out: the intellect is merely one of creation’s aspects. Therefore, it would be a leap further to understand the evolutionary drive in man, who appears to be the most complex creature on Earth with apparently surplus potentialities yet to be actualised or ‘drawn forth’. Colin Wilson, in The New Existentialism (1966), calls the two polar states of consciousness ‘inauthentic’ and ‘authentic’, that is — in Fuller’s terms — he compares the mind of an entropic universe with that of an anti-entropic one (and the latter of course is the world of human consciousness).
Wilson describes the differences the fundamental differences thus:
“Inauthenticity is to feel futile, contingent, without purpose. Authenticity is to be driven by a sense of purpose. Such a sense of purpose cannot exist unless we first make the assumption that our sense of contingency is a liar, and that there is a standard of values external to every day human consciousness.” (1980: 153)
At this point it is clear that an element of faith is necessary, and it quickly turns into the problem of religion. However, it would be fundamentally correct to say that pessimism, like any other state, is an act of intentionality, and that the ‘act of faith’, as Wilson points out, is just another way of “concentrating these powers of intentionality” (1980: 117). We can, he argues, will more intensely from a background of purposeful values. In other words, we must understand, phenomenologically, what Bergson meant by the initial movement; the creative momentum that imbues matter with consciousness. This is an enormous task, but clues may be found in what J.G. Bennett called hyparxis which has been described by the author Anthony Peake as traceable:
“… throughout all levels of existence from atoms through the simplest living forms up to a man and it is this factor that entitles us to look beyond man to the attainment of superhuman levels. Without this factor everything would be compelled to remain wholly determined by its own eternal pattern.” (2014: 97)
Why would anybody climb a mountain at all is the same question as why consciousness would need to invade matter, for surely it would be easier simply not to: to simply exist in a state beyond matter, perhaps in a timeless Platonic realm. Gary Lachman in his vast study of esotericism, The Secret Teachers of the Western World (2015), suggests a possible answer to this question when he says that the force behind evolution “does not want us to remain static. It pushed us out of the cosmic nest, into the cold and difficult regions of left-brain consciousness, because it is in those unwieldy climes that we can best actualize our capabilities.” (2015: 56)
At our point in evolution we have long yearned to know why we exist, and unfortunately science offers no satisfactory answer other than the mechanisms and the ‘How’ of nature, without providing a ‘Why?’ In fact there is no Why? in science, and if there is, it is merely a cosmological fluke — a quantum flux in a vacuum that accidentally spewed out all matter as we know it, with consciousness being a mere ‘epiphenomena’ of matter.
Yet it is possibly the best time to ask precisely that question, for now we are free from the restricting dogmas of religion (at least on a large enough scale) and at a juncture in science where its determinism and reductionism is beginning to erode. There is a sense, especially in quantum physics, where mind is recognised as fundamentally interactive with matter itself, causing quantum variations which may in turn shed light on the ‘initial movement’ of the cosmos. And, indeed, offering us a foundational insight into the evolution of consciousness alongside — or together with –the first emanations of matter into the ‘void’. A void, as it turns out, that is teeming with potentiality.
In Bargaining with the Devil: The Work of Colin Wilson in a Cultural Context (2016) — a generally critical view of Colin Wilson’s work — Nigel Bray nevertheless concludes with a call for optimism. For in a brief analysis of contemporary trends in science, particularly quantum physics, he sees Wilson’s work as a contribution to what could be called ‘quantum psychology’. Nevertheless, quantum or not, the entire foundation of Wilson’s work was based on an ‘evolutionary phenomenology’ which naturally integrates anything that can be verified phenomenologically or existentially. And yet, as science becomes more bizarre and less deterministic, it nevertheless becomes more existential, for again it is returning to that basis of all phenomenology: consciousness. And consciousness, as it did for the paraplegics in Nature’s experiment, has enabled humanity to take a giant step towards evolving new limbs for new lives and new possibilities.
Bibliography:
Assagioli, R. (1973) The Act of Will. Baltimore, Penguin Books Inc.
Bergson, H. (2014) Creative Evolution. New York, Dover Publications, Inc.
Bray, N. (2016) Bargaining with the Devil: The Work of Colin Wilson in a Cultural Context. Nigel Bray.
Fuller, B.M. (1963) No More Second Hand God & Other Writings. Illinois, Carbondale.
Lachman, G. (2015) The Secret Teachers of the Western World. New York, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
Peake, A. (2012) The Labyrinth of Time. London, Arcturus Publishing Limited.
Priestley, J B. (2014) The Magicians. Virginia, Valancourt Books.
Spurgeon, B. (2006) Colin Wilson: Philosopher of Optimism. Michael Butterworth.
Storr, A. (1963) The Integrity of the Personality. Middlesex, Penguin Books Ltd.
Strieber, W & Kripal, J.J. (2016) The Super Natural. New York, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.
Talbot, M. (1991) The Holographic Universe. London, HarperCollins Publishers.
Wilson, C. (1979) New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution. London, Victor Gollancz Ltd.
Wilson, C. (1980) The New Existentialism. London, Wildwood House Ltd.
Wilson, C. (1985) The Essential Colin Wilson. London, Harrap Limited.
Wilson, C. (1986) G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep. Wellingborough, The Aquarian Press.
Wilson, C. (1989) Existentially Speaking: Essays on the Philosophy of Literature. California, The Borgo Press.
[1] For example, in 1998 there was even a Japanese computer game called LSD which was entirely based on Hiroko Nishikawa’s dream journal, released under the title Lovely Sweet Dream.
[2] Note: Wilson also used the virtual worlds of computer science in his 1985 novel, The Personality Surgeon for the same reason.
[3] Although Storr often uses the word homeostasis, which may present the reader with a fairly static sense of being rather than a dynamic one. Yet the integrated personality is entirely dynamic, resistant and able to absorb and distribute its energies to the highest degree of efficiency.
