“We begin to see the nature of the problem. Human consciousness is narrow, a wedge of light moving through time, creating a perpetual present. The past slips into the darkness, becoming unreal. So it is natural that our notion of 'real' should be tied up with the present. Dr Johnson kicked a stone to refute Berkeley's proposition that matter is unreal; G. E. Moore produced his watch when someone said that time is unreal. The solid present is our criterion of reality. And so it should be. But its narrowness adds a strong element of unreliability to the ‘present' as a standard of reality, for it tells us that the past is unreal. It is a common feature of all mystical experiences that they seem to be more real than the ‘everyday world.' This is because they reach further.
And this is the confusion that has been built into the foundations of Sartre's philosophy; he keeps appealing to the present as his standard of reality. This can be seen far more clearly in his trilogy of novels than in the philosophical books (where it tends to get concealed by the technical jargon). The world of Les Chemins de la Liberté is a world surrounded by fog; there is never the slightest glimpse of the 'increasing ranges of distant facts.' What Sartre presents as the 'reality' of the human situation is only a claustrophobic present reality, with no vision of horizons or of real causes.
This glimpse of distant ranges is the fundamental poetic experience. It is what Wordsworth meant by 'other modes of being.' For some reason, human beings are squeezed into a narrow, tight cell of the present; and, as Eliot points out, 'we each think of the key, each in his prison.'
The question that has troubled every poet - and everyone who has experienced this extension of ordinary consciousness - can now be clearly expressed. Why are we forced to live in this depressing slum of consciousness when our perceptions are perfectly capable of grasping the wider horizons?
The obvious answer was suggested by Aldous Huxley in Doors of Perception: that if we lived all the time in this broader state of consciousness, we would become too lazy to confront the problems of everyday life. This is a depressing notion. It seems that human beings are bound to live like blinkered horses to avoid becoming extinct; the blinkering acts as a protection. Our boredom and dissatisfaction spur us to the effort of building civilisation.
This sounds plausible enough; but when closely examined, certain flaws become apparent. Vision is a far more powerful stimulus than boredom. In fact, everything that human beings have achieved has been achieved through sudden glimpses of the 'ranges of distant facts.’ What was Newton's science but a vision of distant facts? The reason that most visionaries do nothing about their visions is the one given by William James - that the intellectual processes cannot grasp the enlarged reality, and so can make little use of it. It is like a man who is lost in some strange country, and who climbs a high mountain to find out where he is. Unless he has a pencil and some paper with him, so that he can make a map, his vision will be useless, for he will forget most of what he has seen by the time he descends to the valley again.
But there is undoubtedly a problem that is analogous to the one Huxley mentioned. James said that his 'vision' simply took in a wider horizon of 'facts' than usual, and that the effect was a sense of exhilaration. But if we were perpetually aware of such a wide horizon of facts, the effect, for most people, would be disastrous. The whole idea of intentionality means that it is not the 'facts' that matter so much as our interpretation of them. Philosophers are men who are concerned with a wider horizon of fact than the average man, and the history of philosophy has ten pessimists to every optimist. That is to say that, given a wide horizon of facts, human beings are inclined to choose the gloomy interpretation. The more facts there are, the gloomier they are inclined to be. Under the circumstances, it may be as well that most of us are 'blinkered.'
The reason for this is obvious enough to anyone who has grasped the concept of intentionality. Human beings possess a great maelstrom of subconscious energy. Luckily, most of this energy is not available to the 'Jekyll' self. It would be disastrous if it were, like giving a child an atomic bomb to play with. For the delusions of passive consciousness make man particularly susceptible to pessimism: that is to say, to 'intentionalising' his perceptions so that they take on a negative flavour. (This concept would have been extremely difficult to grasp fifty years ago; since then, psychoanalysis has taught us that negative subconscious energies can produce the most devastating effects.)
The same point has been made repeatedly by those who have taken mescalin or other mind-changing drugs. Under mescalin, Huxley was asked if he could see where madness lies, and he replied with an emphatic affirmative. 'If you started the wrong way, everything that happened would be proof of the conspiracy against you. . . . If one began with fear and hate as the major premise, one would have to go on to the conclusion.' Mescalin widens the horizons; or, to put it another way, endows the imagination with a tremendous magnifying power. If one's choice of the' facts' were negative, the imagination would magnify them until they became mind-destroying. All of these experiences of wider consciousness can lead to heaven or hell. Given the human tendency to negative-intentionalising, it would mainly lead to hell.
The reason for introducing the word 'imagination' may not be at once apparent. This is because the word 'imagination' suffers from the same ambiguity as ‘reality.' If we are speaking of the narrow 'present reality,' then imagination means no more than the ability to escape into a realm of unreality. But as soon as we think in terms of James's other 'reality' - the 'ranges of distant fact' - this definition becomes inadequate, for these wider ranges of reality are precisely the realms into which imagination was trying to escape. To perceive a distant reality as real is the function of imagination. The words 'perception' and 'imagination' become interchangeable on this level.
The whole point of phenomenology is that there is no sharp dividing line between perception and imagination. The dividing line only applies when we think of perception as passive and imagination as active. As soon as we realise that perception is active, the old dichotomy vanishes.
All this should make it clear, then, why, at this stage in our evolution, it would not be desirable for human beings to have access to 'wider states of consciousness.' This is the objection to Aldous Huxley's suggestion that mescalin should be made as easily available as alcohol or tobacco. It is necessary first of all for human beings to achieve a phenomenological discipline that enables them to recognise how far pessimism is intentional. To give mescalin to the average westerner - with his tendency to neurosis and anxiety - would be like handing a revolver to a man with suicidal tendencies. The only 'safe' way to an enlargement of consciousness is through phenomenological discipline.” - Colin Wilson, ‘The New Existentislism’ (1980) [p. 104 - 108]
