Now Concentrate

     Man's trouble is not his inability to achieve the kind of concentration necessary for maximum use of his powers, but his unawareness of what can be achieved by such concentration. And this recognition leads to a formulation of central importance: 'occultism' is not an attempt to draw aside the veil of the unknown, but simply the veil of banality that we call the present.... All art does its work in this way — by rescuing us from our self-chosen triviality, to which we are so prone. It is like a deep organ note that makes my hair stir and a shiver run through me. I 'pull back' from life, like a camera taking a long-shot with a wide-angle lens. I quite simply become aware of more reality than before.
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "A History of Magic: The Evolution of Man," pp. 134-135.

     This explains the attraction of drugs — particularly psychedilics — for intelligent people. They have an intuition that if a 'peak experience' could be summoned up at will, or maintained for half an hour, it would quickly become possible to learn to re-create it without drugs. There is a fallacy here. Most drugs work by reducing the efficiency of the nervous system, inducing unusual states of consciousness at the expense of the mind's power to concentrate and learn. You only have to try to memorize a short list of foreign words when you are slightly drunk to realise this. The mind is usually absorbent, like blotting paper; when you are under the influence of alcohol, it turns into a sheet of glossy paper with no power to absorb. Drugs work by temporarily paralysing certain levels of the mind, like a local anesthetic, thereby reducing its energy consumption. Worse still, they inhibit 'feedback effects.' When Lady Chatterley feels the park surging beneath her feet like the sea, this is a feedback effect of her intense concentration on her sexual activities: an ecstatic 100 per cent concentration that pumps up enormous energies from her depths. It is these energies that continue to surge and spread as she returns home. The Kabbalah describes the creation of the world as being a total concentration of energy into a single luminous point. (Captain Shotover's 'seventh degree of concentration' in Shaw's Heartbreak House is related to it.) All drugs, without exception, produce the reverse of concentration, a relaxation of the mind. In the case of the psychedelics, the nervous system is 'short-circuited,' so that the nervous impulses cease to follow their own track, and spread sideways, creating a series of 'feelings'; it is like opening the lid of a grand piano and running your fingers over its strings, producing an effect like a harp. But these 'feelings' have nothing to do with clear focussing upon reality....
     Drugs, then, are the worst possible way of attempting to achieve 'contemplative objectivity.' They increase the mind's tendency to accept its own passivity instead of fighting against it.
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "A History of Magic: The Evolution of Man," pp. 134-135.

     I must begin by repeating my basic general proposition. It is man's biological destiny to evolve Faculty X. All living creatures on the surface of this planet have been trying to do this throughout their history. Man is more than halfway there. A true adept would be a man in whom Faculty X is more developed than in the average.
     By this definition, there have not been many true adepts. This does not mean that the great names in magic were chalatans or self-deceivers (although some were). Most of them possessed a high degree of 'intuitive' powers, akin to Corbett's 'jungle sensitivity.' These powers lie at the lower end of man's concsiousness — the red end of the spectrum. Faculty X lies at the violet end....
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "A History of Magic: Adepts and Initiates," p. 177.

     The curtain is 'everydayness.' It is a state of mind rather than an objective reality. The human mind must be thought of as being akin to the radar of bats; we somehow reach out and 'feel' the reality around us. But in my ordinary, everyday existence, I do not need to 'reach out' very far. And I get in the habit of not doing so.
     Whenever I am deeply moved bt poetry or music or scenery, I realise I am living in a meaning universe that deserves better of me than the small-minded sloth in which I habitually live. And I suddenly realise the real deadlines of this lukewarm contentment that looks as harmless as ivy on a tree. It is systematically robbing me of life, embezzling my purpose and vitality. I must clearly focus on this immense meaning that surrounds me, and refuse to forget it; contemptuously reject all smaller meanings that try to persuade me to focus on them instead.
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., p. 178.