Beyond the Occult by Colin Wilson Page A

our complex modern civilization, it
has
to work hard just to survive. It can easily become exhausted and overworked, in which case we begin to experience the ‘Ecclesiastes effect’, the feeling that all is vanity. T. S. Eliot was complaining about his left brain when he wrote:
    And I pray that I may forget
    These matters that with myself I too much discuss
    Too much explain,
    and Yeats was speaking of the same thing when he wrote about:
    … the old mill of the mind
    Consuming its rag and bone …
    But this feeling of aridity and futility is simply due to having
forgotten
that we have another faculty for grasping reality. In effect the husband has become so overworked and exhausted that he has forgotten that he has a wife — and, moreover, a wife who can offer him extremely powerful support. So when he feels abandoned and miserable, it often comes as an extremely pleasant surprise to realize that
he is not alone after all
. He collapses from sheer exhaustion and is amazed to be suddenly overwhelmed by an exquisite sensation of relaxation and pure serenity: the recognition that the world
is
a delightful place after all. The psychologist Abraham Maslow called such moments ‘peak experiences’ — those moments of bubbling, overwhelming happiness when we realize we had forgotten how marvellous life can be. Maslow offered as a typical example the case of a young mother who was watching her husband and children eating breakfast when it suddenly dawned on her how lucky she was, and she went into a peak experience. She had been taking them for granted, then stopped taking them for granted.
    An even better example concerns a marine who had been stationed in the Pacific for a long period without seeing a woman. When he went back to base and saw a nurse, he had a peak experience — because, he said, it suddenly struck him
that women are different from men
— that they’re soft and curved and gentle and as different from men as horses are from cows. Anyone who is enjoying a holiday has a similar sensation — the delighted feeling that the world is a far larger and more interesting place than we had given it credit for. It is then that we realize that our ordinary workaday awareness tell us lies. It tells us that reality is rather dull and repetitive, and that if we were somewhere else it wouldn’t really be all that different from where we are now. And now we see that this is outrageously untrue: the world is full of infinite variety and strangeness. And connectedness.
    The problem is that an efficient left brain is a ‘workaholic’. This word — which has entered the current vocabulary since the sixties — means a person who has become so accustomed to making an effort that he can no longer enjoy relaxation. He is too tense to relax for long. In the past few thousand years of human evolution the left brain has developed into a workaholic — and this applies to
all
human beings, even the laziest. This is why we have forgotten the sheer variety and strangeness of the universe, and why it took a philosopher like Bergson to even notice that something had gone wrong.
    The peak experience makes us aware of the same thing: this is why it is so important. It descends upon us as a flash of
recognition
— the same kind of recognition that made Archimedes leap out of his bath shouting, ‘Eureka!’ What we recognize is what Bergson put into words: that we have two modes of perception, and that they are
equally valid
. Maslow also made another important observation: that most healthy people have peak experiences every day. The reason is obvious. We have peak experiences when we are full of energy and optimism. But the peak experience is not a mere overflow of energy and optimism: it is a
perception
that comes to us when the brain is highly energized. This explains another important observation made by Maslow. He discovered that when his students began talking and thinking about having peak experiences, they began having