Mystic Certainty

     But in order to understand the underlying spirit of the magic that flourished so unexpectedly in the sixteenth century (and the years 1500 to 1600 undoubtedly were the century of magic), it is necessary to understand something of the mysticism that inspired it. For it cannot be stated too often that the essence of magic and the essence  of mysticism are one and the same; the crucial difference is that magic lies at the lower end of the spectrum, mysticism at the higher. Both magic and mysticism are an attempt to get into tune with an 'inner force.' Plotinus (A.D. 205-270) was not a Christian, but his influence on Christian mystics was enormous; he compared human beings to the choir standing around a choir master but with their attention distracted by things going on about them, so they fail to sing the tune in time. He held that creation was a series of steps leading away from the One (or God); he called those steps emanations. (The Kabbalists later borrowed his ideas, as William Blake was to borrow from the Kabbalah.) This is  definitely a non-Christian view, for Plotinus's evil is a negative thing, depending upon how many steps you have taken away from the One; it is like someone walking away from a lighted house at night, moving further into the darkness of the garden. But why should people walk away, unless tempted by the Devil? Because, says Plotinus, we are empty-headed, and easily distracted. The philosopher is the man who determinedly ignores distractions and multiplicity, and tries to see back towards the One. 'Such' he concludes, 'is the life of gods and of godlike men; a liberation from earthly bonds, a life that takes no pleasure in earthly things, a flight of the alone to the alone.'
     This is the intoxicating idea at the heart of mysticism; and in spite of the apparent difference of aim, it is not far from the divine intoxication of the Dionysians. It is the feeling that the banal world in which we appear to be stuck can be escaped. We are all in the position of some dazed person wandering around after an accident, not knowing where he is going to — only half-conscious. A mystic is a man who has partly 'come to.' He has caught a glimpse of what life and death are really about.
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "A History of Magic: The World of the Kabbalah," pp. 230-231.

     The real importance of Swedenborg lies in the doctrines he taught, which are the reverse of the gloom and hell-fire of other breakaway sects. He rejects the notion that Jesus died on the cross to atone for the sin of Adam, declaring that God is neither vindictive nor petty-minded, and that since he is God, he doesn't need atonement. It is remarkable that this common-sense view had never struck earlier theologians. God is Divine Goodness, and Jesus is Divine Wisdom, and Goodness has to be approached through Wisdom. Whatever one thinks about the extraordinary claims of its founder, it must be acknowledged that there is something very beautiful and healthy about the Swedenborgian religion. This feeling of breezy health is the basic reason for its enduring popularity. Its founder may not have been a great occultist, but he was a great man.
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., "Adepts and Impostors," p. 281.

     Lindsay has created an image of the basic problem of the artist and the mystic. In the moments of 'higher consciousness' there is always a feeling of 'But of course!' Life is infinitely meaningful; its possibilities are suddenly endless, and 'normal consciousness' is seen as being no better than sleep. For, like sheep, it separates man from reality.
     When man gets this feeling of 'reality,' he knows that nothing in the world could be so important as keeping it. He tries every possible method of reminding himself not to forget, not to stop fighting to achieve it. What is more, in this state of intensity, it becomes clear that it can be achieved. He sees now as something that is self-evident that he possesses a true will, the ability to focus clearly on an objective and then to achieve it in the most economical way. But then he descends back to his lower storey, and can only remember dimly that he had a vision. The sleep comes back.
     The main trouble is a kind of listlessness, a tendency to waste time and consciousness, like a person staring out of the window at the rain and yawning, wondering what to do next....
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., "Two Russian Mages," pp. 391-392.

     Dostoevsky once said that God had denied man certainty because it would remove his freedom; there would be no virtue making the right choice if you knew for certain that it was the right one. Anyone who reads a history of spiritualism may well feel that the spirits have adopted the same principle: that too much evidence of 'another world' would condition mankind to a lazy mode of thought and behaviour. The philosopher C.D. Broad remarked to me in an interview on this subject: If these facts of psychical research are true, then clearly they are of immense inportance — they literally alter everything. And the alteration would not necessarily be for the better. In fact, it would certainly be for the worse, if we take into account the basic pecularity of human nature: the need for uncertainty and crisis to keep us on our toes. One day it may be that we shall learn to keep the will alert as automatically as we now breathe, and if that happens, we shall be supermen living on a continual level of 'peak experience.' But until we achieve this new degree of self-determination, life had better remain as bewildering and paradoxical as possible.
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "Man's Latent Powers: The Realm of Spirits," p. 462.