Inner Control

....in some international centre, nor lodged in any single mind, but permeating the community: an all-powerful, prescient, implacable group-mind, whose decisions can only be accepted unquestioningly by the individual. Necessarily so, since by the time individuals will have relegated to it, centuries before, the functions of thought and will. Such a super-intelligence will be permanently unchallengable, for it will rule from the inside as well as outside each individual. It will be everywhere — and nowhere. There is after all nothing new in this. The collective intelligence which controls the hive or the terminary has this mysterious invisibility and unquestionable power.
     Theses things have not happened yet. There is still time to decide — is this what we want? But they may not be far off. One contemporary writer has seen humanity caught already in the grip of an unseen yet pervasive power with thich it is impossible to contend; and it drove him to despair and death. Kafka's tremendous, suffocating books communicate perfectly the panic horror of the moment when man begins to guess that the very essence of himself, the power to will, to decide, to feel, even to realise the loss of these faculties, is slipping out of his grasp and sliding smoothly into invisible waiting hands whose purposes, perhaps hostile, at best indifferent, must be for ever unknown to him.

                                    *     *     *

     Three possibilities, then, are open to modern man. We can continue as we have started — bombing, poisoning and infecting each other till death do us part, leaving Life a free hand either to begin again with the remnants of the human race, or to experiment with some altogether different species. Many already believe this to be the destiny of our world — and try not to think about it. Or we can recognise the fatal imbalance between size and structure in our present communities, and choose consciously to disintegrate into smaller and more manageable groups. But this is manifestly a pipe-dream. As the world knows, the world's population can now be supported only by the interlocked resources of huge industrial groups — business monsters that are the unwieldy progeny of the city-monsters. Even if we would, we cannot go back.
     There remains apparently only the third possibility: a sacrifice of individual values, and a passive human cooperation in Life's current tentative moves towards a super-intelligent group-mind, of which the individual is merely the acquiescent instrument. This is the goal towards which the contemporary planner unconsciously strives; perhaps in the long run the most hideous solution of all.
     Three very disagreeable answers to the problem....
....
    Undreamed of by them, there is another way of looking at these things. When a solution appears to lead to nihilism it is a safe assumption that the lines of approach are inadequate. Some factor of primary importance has not been taken into account. It is as if a two-dimensional mind were facing a three-dimentional crisis. This is the predicament of contemporary man.
— Alan McGlashan, Gravity and Levity, "Nature's Monstrous Failures," pp. 84-85.

     One should note the presupposition of this first paragraph, which is present in all Powys's work: that there is a kind of 'psychic ether' that carries mental vibrations as the 'luminiferous ether' is supposed to carry light.
     This I would define as the fundamental proposition of magic or occultism, and perhaps the only essential one. It will be taken for granted throughout this book.
— Colin Wilson, The Occult, "A Survey of the Subject: Magic-The Science of the future," pp. 52-53.

     All this is to say that 'magical systems' — the Hebrew Kabbalah, the Chinese Book of Changes, the Tarot pack, the Key of Solomon, the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead — should not be regarded as primitive and unsuccessful attempts at 'science,' but as attempts to express these depths of 'lunar' knowledge in their own terms. The Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead — their own language Pert Em Hru (Emerging by Day) and Bardo Thodol — are designed to be read aloud to the dying person in an attempt to give the 'subconscious self' a certain control over its strange experiences. To Western ears, this sounds absurd, until we recognise as rational the notion of controlling the 'sleeping self' and its impulses. Then we understand that what the ancient Egyptians and Tibetans were trying to do is not childish and illogical, but a step ahead of any knowledge we possess in the West....
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., "A Survey of the Subject: The Dark Side of the Moon," pp. 77-78.