Drawn Upward

     An experience like Bennett's leaves no doubt that the blinkers are not protecting us from a vision of meaninglessness, but from too much meaning. Gurdjieff went to the heart of the problem when he said: 'Life is real only when "I am".' Our total being is far larger than we can grasp with our daylight-consciousness. The problem is to expand into the darkened areas.
     The real importance of these insights is that they establish evolution — mental evolution —  as a basic law of the universe. Scientists continue to insist that evolution is a purely mechanical process, driven 'from below' by the need to survive. Experiences like Bennett's suggest that our mental evolution is drawn upward, from above. It is as if a higher level of consciousness was trying to persuade us to bring it into actuality. All of which suggests that mind is not an accidental product of the material world, a mere spectator of a process it did nothing to inaugurate. In a deeper sense, the material world is its plaything, its instrument. Nature's meanings remain incomplete without the activity of mind, as the nausea experience demonstrates. And this again points to the conclusion that the ecstasies of the romantics and mystics were a glimpse of the possibility of the true relation between mind and nature.
— Colin Wilson, Mysteries, p. 505.

....Man possesses a strange ally capable of tightening the sinews while he sits in a chair. It's called imagination. And it is basically a form of inner purpose. Philosophers and artists and saints have discovered that their methods — involving imagination and disciplines of the mind — are more effective than those of the conquerors. They can produce a strange sense of widening horizons, of inner breathing-space.
     In some men, this need for inner breathing-space has become so urgent that it takes precedence over their other needs; it leads them to perform apparently masochistic acts of self-discipline. These men, whom I have labelled 'Outsiders', are driven by an obscure craving for wider horizons, for deeper knowledge, for greater control of their freedom. They feel an instictive loathing of the people who are absorbed in the trivial values of everyday life, and are impatient of the stupid, whose inner freedom is almost non-existent.
     For the past two or three millennia, the history of civilization could be written almost entirely in terms of these men whose major concern has been inner freedom: Socrates, Pythagoras, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Aquinas, Dante, Leonardo, Spinoza, Goethe, Nietzsche [Swedenborg] ... Scientists should also be included, for, as Einstein pointed out, 'one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is to escape from the everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires ... This may be compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains.'
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., pp. 531-532.

....Life is infinitely strange, yet we spend a great deal of it yawning; and many people live in big cities as if they were in a tiny village; they hardly know the next door neighbors and have never bothered to wonder what lies on the other side of that railroad embankment.
     Our minds are essentially provincial when ideally, they ought to be cosmopolitan. We are not merely earth-bound; we have our heads buried in the earth. The UFO phenomena, Vallée suggests, are forcing us to look up, to get used to the idea that we are citizens of the universe, not just of this earth.
     But Vallée admits that he has no idea of who or what is controlling the learning curve....
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., pp. 563-564.

     This obviously describes what happened to both Fechner and Gurdjieff; tension pushed them into the state of inner crisis. Fortunately, both of them retained the power to fight back (although Gurdjieff seriously contemplated suicide in one of his later crises).  The result was a strengthening of their vital powers, an increased control over the robot. In fact, as one reads Walter Lowie's account of Fechner's life or Gurdjieff's own description of his various crises in his last book, one begins to feel more than a glimmer of a suspicion that their crises were not entirely accidental: that they were somehow subconsciously engineered to produce precisely this effect. This suspicion deepens when we read that Fechner's 'religious' tendency had been there since his early days, but was in conflict with his scientific temperament; some kind of radical rearrangement of his inner forces was necessary if his two aspects were to cease cancelling one another out. Gurdjieff's reactions to his own crises reveals that he regarded them as something more than accidents; he always took them as a signal for radical self-examination and re-alignment of direction.
     In his autobiography, Yeats expresses the view that men of genius are deliberately brought to crisis by some inner destiny, 'spirits that we had best call Gates and Gate-keepers ... They have but one purpose, to bring their chosen man to the greatest obstacle he can confront without despair. They contrived Dante's banishment, and snatched away his Beatrice, and thrust Villon into the arms of harlots, and sent him to gather cronies at the foot of the gallows, that Dante and Villon might through passion become conjoint to their buried selves...' Interestingly enough, Yeats recognises that the 'gate-keepers' are a part of man's own psyche. 'I know now that revelation is from the self, but from that age-long memorised self, that shapes the elaborate shell of the mollusc, and the child in the womb ... and the genius is a crisis that joins that 'buried self' as the puppet master who pulls the strings of the puppet called the everyday self.
     Yeats believed, like Gurdjieff, that this 'conjoining of the buried self and the trivial daily self' can only be brought about by crisis. This is also the view we find in the saints and mystics: salvation comes through the death of the old self and the birth of the new.
— Colin Wilson, Ibid., pp. 598-599.