07-30-2005, 12:00 AM
Reading Colin Wilsons The Mind Parasites, I realized Castaneda discovered something alike with his 'flyers' or that he made use of it. Not impossible, for TMP was first printed in 1967.
Because the book seems to be out of print, I want to share some of its contents, the juicy bits, with you.
From The Mind Parasites, by Colin Wilson, 1967.
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'The Mind Parasites' , a fantasy/SF novel, takes place in the beginning of the 21th century and starts with the discovery of the remnants of a very ancient and perhaps alien civilization buried deep down in the ground somewhere in Turkey. The other plot is the discovery of mind parasites that hinder the evolution of human awareness, live of our energy and keep us like 'sheep'. Two lead figures in the novel develop a strategy, based on Husserl's phenemonology, to beat the mind parasites.
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from page 58 and on:
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Now Karel Weissman was a psychologist, not a historian. And the field in which he made a living was in industrial psychology. In the Historical Reflections ,he writes:
" It was in 1990 that I entered the field of industrial psychology as the assistant of Professor Ames at Trans-world Cosmetics. I immediately discovered a curious and nightmarish situation. I knew, of course, that 'industrial neurosis' had become a serious matter - so much so that special industrial courts had been set up to deal with offenders who sabotaged machinery or killed or injured workmates. But only a few people were aware of the sheer size of the problem. The murder rate in large factories and similar concerns had increased to twice
that of the rest of the population. In one cigarette factory in America, eight foremen and two high executives were killed in the course of a single year; in seven of these cases, the murderer committed suicide immediately after the attack.
The industrial Plastics Corporation of Iceland had decided to try the experiment of an 'open air' factory, spread over many acres, so that the workers had no sense of overcrowding or confinement; energy fields were used instead of walls. At first the experiment was highly succesful; but within two years, the factory's rate of industrial crime and neurosis had risen to equal the national avarage.
These figures never reached the national press. Psychologists reasoned - correctly - that to publicize them would make things worse. They reasoned that it would be best to treat each case as one would an outbreak of fire that must be isolated.
The more I considered this problem, the more I felt that we had no real idea of its cause. My collegues were frankly defeated by it, as Dr. Ames admitted to me during my first week at Trans-world Cosmetics. He said that it was difficult to get to the root of the problem, because it seemed to have so many roots - the population explosion, overcrowding in cities, the individual's feeling of insignificance and increasing sense of living in a vacuum, the lack of adventure in modern life, collapse of religion ... and so on. He said he wasn't sure that industry wasn't treating the problem in entirely the wrong way. It was spending more money on psychiatrists, on improving working conditions - in short, in making the workers feel like patients. But since our living depended on this mistake, it was hardly up to us to suggest a change.
And so I turned to history to find my answers. And the answers, when I found them, made me feel like suicide. For, according to history, all this was completely inevitable. Civilization was getting top heavy; it was bound to fall over. Yet the one thing this conclusion failed to take into account was the human power of self-renewal. By the same reasoning, Mozart was bound to commit suicide because his life was so miserable. But he didn't.
What was destroying the human power of self-renewal?
I cannot explain quite how I came to believe that there might be a single cause. It was something that dawned on me slowly, over many years. It was simply that I came to feel increasingly strongly that the figures for industrial crime were out of all proportion to the so-called 'historical causes'. It was as if I were the head of a firm who feels instinctively that his account is cooking the books, although he has no idea how it is being done.
And then, one day, I began to suspect the existence of the mind vampires. And from then on, everything confirmed my guess.
It happened first when I was considering the use of mescalin and lysergic acid for curing industrial neurosis. Fundamentally, of course, the effect of these drugs is no different from that of alcohol or tobacco: they have the effect of unwinding us. A man who is overworked has got himself into a habit of tension, and he cannot break the habit by merely willing. A glass of whisky or a cigarette will reach down into his motor levels and release the tension..
But man has far deeper habits than overwork. Through millions of years of evolution, he has developed all kinds of habits for survival. If any of these habits get out of control, the result is mental illness. For example, man has a habit of being prepared for enemies; but if he allows it to dominate his life, he becomes a paranoiac.
One of man's deepest habits is keeping alert for dangers and difficulties, refusing to allow himself to explore his own mind because he daren't take his eyes off the world around him. Another one, with the same cause, is his refusal to notice beauty, because he prefers to concentrate on practical problems. These habits are so deeply ingrained that alcohol and tobacco cannot reach them. But mescalin can. It can reach down to man's most atavistic levels, and release the automatic tensions that make him a slave to his own boredom and to the world around him.
Now I must confess that I was inclined to blame these atavistic habits for the problem of the world suicide rate and the industrial crime rate. Man has to learn to relax, or becomes overwrought and dangerous. He must learn to contact his own deepest levels in order to re-energize his consciousness. So it seemed to me that drugs of the mescalin group might provide the answer.
So far, the use of these drugs had been avoided in industrial psychology, for an obvious reason: mescalin relaxes a man to a point where work becomes impossible. He wants to do nothing but contemplate the beauty of the world and the mysteries of his own mind.
I felt there was no reason to reach this limit. A tiny quantity of mescalin, administered in the right way, might release a man's creative forces without plunging him into a stupor. After all, man's ancestors of two thousand years ago were almost colour-blind because they were in a subconscious habit of ignoring colour. Life was so difficult and dangerous that they couldn't afford to notice it. Yet modern man has succeeded in losing this old habit of colour-blindness without losing any of his drive and vitality. It is all a matter of balance.
And so I inaugurated a series of experiments with drugs of the mescalin group. And my first results were so alarming that my engagement with Trans-world Cosmetics was terminated abruptly. Five out of my ten subjects committed suicide within days. Another two had a total mental collapse that drove them into a madhouse.
I was baffled. I had experimented with mescalin on myself in my university days, but I found the results uninteresting. A mescalin holiday is all very pleasant, but it all depends whether you like holidays. I do not; I find work too interesting.
But my results made me decide to try it again. I took half of a gram. The result was so horrifying that I still perspire when I think about it.
At first, there were the usual pleasant effects - areas of light swelling gently and revolving. Then an immense sense of peace and calm, a glimpse of the Buddhist nirvana, a beautiful and gentle contemplation of the universe that was at once deteached and infinitely involved. After about an hour of this, I roused myself from it; I was obviously not discovering what had caused the suicides. Now I attempted to turn my attention inward, to observe the exact state of my perceptions and emotions. The result was baffling. It was as if I was trying to look through a telescope, and someone was deliberately placing his hand over the other end of it. Every attempt at self-observation failed. And then, with a kind of violent effort, I tried to batter through this wall of darkness. And suddenly, I had a distinct feeling of something living and alien hurrying out of my sight. I'm not, of course, speaking of physical sight. This was entirely a 'feeling'. But it had such an imprint of reality that for a moment I became almost insane with terror. One can run away from an obvious physical menace, but there was no running away from this, because it was inside me.
For nearly a week afterwards, I was in a state of the most abject terror, and closer to insanity than I have ever been in my life."
(....) "For although I was now back in the ordinary physical world, I had no feeling of safety. I felt that, in returning to everyday consciousness, I was like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. It only meant that I was unaware of the menace.
Luckily, I was not working at the time; it would have been impossible. And about a week later, I found myself thinking: Well, what are you afraid of? You've come to no harm. I immediately began to feel more cheerful. It was only a few days after this that Standard Motors and Engineering offered me the post of their chief medical officer. I accepted it, and plunged into the work of an enormous and complex organization. For a long time it left me no time for brooding and devising new experiments. And whenever my thoughts turned back to my mescalin experiments, I felt such a powerful revulsion that I always found some excuse for putting it off.
Six months ago, I finally returned to the problem, this time from a slightly different angle. My friend Rupert Haddon of Princeton told me of his highly successful experiments in rehabilitating sexual criminals with the use of L.S.D. In explaining his theories, he used a great deal of the terminology of the philosopher Husserl. It immediately became obvious to me that phenomenology is only another name for the kind of self-observation I had tried to carry out under mescalin, and that when Husserl talks about 'uncovering the structure of consciousness', he only means descending into these realms of mental habit of which I have spoken. Husserl had realized that while we have ordnance survey maps that cover every inch of our earth, we have no atlas of our mental world.
Reading Husserl renewed my courage. The idea of trying mescalin again terrified me; but phenomenology starts from ordinary consciousness. So I again began making notes about the problems of man's inner world, and the geography of consciousness.
Almost at once, I became aware that certain inner-forces were resisting my researches. As soon as I began to brood on these problems, I began to experience sick headaches and feelings of nausea. Every morning, I woke up with a feeling of profound depression. I have always been a student of mathematics in an amateurish way, as well as a good chess player. I soon discovered that I felt better the moment I turned my attention to mathematics or chess. But the moment I began to think about the mind, the same depression would settle on me.
My own weakness began to infuriate me. I determined that I would overcome it at all costs. So I begged two month's leave of absence from my employers. I warned my wife that I was going to be very ill. And I deliberately turned my mind to these problems of phenomenology. The result was exactly as I predicted. For a few days I felt tired and depressed. Then I began to experience headaches and nerve pains. Then I vomited up everything I ate. I took to my bed, and tried to use my mind to probe my own sickness, using the methods of analysis laid down by Husserl. My wife had no idea what was wrong with me, and her anxiety mad it twice as bad. It is lucky that we have no children; otherwise I would certainly have been forced to surrender.
After a fortnight, I was so exhausted that I could barely swallow a teaspoonful of milk. I made an immense effort to rally my forces, reaching down to my deepest instinctive levels. In that moment I became aware of my enemies. It was like swimming down to the bottom of the sea and suddenly noticing that you are surrounded by sharks. I could not, of course, 'see' them in the ordinary sense, but I could feel their presence as clearly as one can feel a toothache. They were down there, at a level of my being where my consciousness never penetrates.
And as I tried to prevent myself from screaming with terror, the fear of a man facing inevitable destruction, I suddenly realized that I had beaten them. My own deepest life forces were rallying against them. An immense strength, that I had never known I possessed, reared up like a giant. It was far stronger than they were, and they had to retreat from it. I suddenly became aware of more of them, thousands of them; and yet I knew that they could do nothing against me.
And then the realization came to me with such searing force that I felt as if I had been struck by lightning. Everything was clear; I knew everything. I knew why it was so important to them that no one should suspect their existence. Man possesses more than enough power to destroy them all. But so long as he is unaware of them, they can feed on him, like vampires, sucking away his energy.
My wife came into the bedroom and was astounded to find me laughing like a madman. For a moment, she thought my mind had collapsed. Then she realized that it was the laughter of sanity.
I told her to go and bring me soup. And within forty-eight hours, I was back on my feet again, as healthy as ever - in fact, healthier than I had ever been in my life. At first, I felt such an immense euphoria at my discovery that I forgot about those vampires of the mind. Then I realized that this in itself was stupid. They had an immense advantage over me; they knew my own mind far better than I did. Unless I was very careful, they could still destroy me.
But for the moment, I was safe. When, later in the day, I felt the persistent, nagging attacks of depression, I turned again to that deep sorce of inner power, and to my optimism about the human future. Immediately the attacks ceased, and I began to roar with laughter again. It was many weeks before I could control this laughter mechanism whenever I had a skirmish with the parasites.
What I had discovered was, of course, so fantastic that it could not be grasped by the unprepared mind. In fact, it was extraordinary good luck that I had not made the discovery six months earlier, when I was working for Trans-world. In the meantime, my mind had made slow and unconscious preparation for it. In the past few months, I have become steadily more convinced that it was not entirely a matter of luck. I have a feeling that there are powerful forces working on the side of humanity, although I have no idea of their nature.
-(I made a special note of this sentence. It was something I had always felt instinctively.)
What it amounts to is this. For more than two centuries now, the human mind has been constantly a prey to these energy vampires. In a few cases, the vampires have been able to completely take over a human mind and use it for their own purposes. For example, I am almost certain that De Sade was one of these 'zombis' whose brain was entirely in the control of the vampires. The blasphemy and stupidity of his work are not, as in many cases, evidence of demonic vitality, and the proof of it is that De Sade never matured in any way, although he lived to be 74. The sole purpose of his life work is to add to the mental confusion of the human race, deliberately to distort and pervert the truth about sex.
As soon as I understood about the mind vampires, the history of the past two hundred years became absurdly clear. Until about 1780 (which is roughly the date when the first full-scale invasion of mind vampires landed on earth), most art tended to be life-enhancing, like the music of Haydn and Mozart. After the invasion of the mind vampires, this sunny optimism became almost impossible to the artist.. The mind vampires always chose the most intelligent men as their instruments, because it is ultimately the intelligent men who have the greatest influence on the human race. Very few artists have been powerful enough to hurl them off, and such men have gained a new strenght in doing so - Beethoven is clearly an example; Goethe another.
And this explains precisely why it is so important for the mind vampires to keep their presence unknown, to drain man's lifeblood without his being aware of it. A man who defeats the mind vampires becomes doubly dangerous to them, for his forces of self-renewal have conquered. In such cases, the vampires probably attempt to destroy him in another way - by trying to influence other people against him. We should remember that Beethoven's death came out because he left his sister's house after a rather curious quarrel, and drove several miles in an open cart in the rain. At all events, we notice that it is in the nineteenth century that the great artists first begin to complain that 'the world is against them'; Haydn and Mozart were well understood and appreciated by their own time. As soon as the artist dies, this neglect disappears - the mind vampires loosen their grip on people's minds. They have more important things to attend to.
In the history of art and literature since 1780, we see the results of the battle with the mind vampires. The artists who refused to preach a gospel of pessimism and life devaluation were destroyed. The life-slanderers often lived to a ripe old age. It is interesting, for example, to contrast the fate of the life-slanderer Schopenhauer with that of the life-affirmer Nietzsche, or that of the sexual degenerate De Sade with that of the sexual mystic Lawrence.
Apart from these obvious facts, I have not succeeded in learning a great deal about the mind vampires. I am inclined to suspect that, in small numbers, they have always been present on earth. Possibly the Christian idea of the devil arises from some obscure intuition of the part they played in human history: how their role is to take over a man's mind, and to cause him to become an enemy of life and of the human race. But it would be a mistake to blame the vampires for all the misfortunes of the human race. Man is an animal who is trying to evolve into a god. Many of his problems are an inevitable result of this struggle."
(...) "I have a theory, which I will state here for the sake of completeness. I suspect that the universe is full of races like our own, struggling to evolve. In the early stages of its evolution, any race is mainly concerned to conquer its environment, to overcome enemies, to assure itself of food. But sooner or later, a point comes where the race has progressed beyond this stage, and can now turn its attention inward, to the pleasures of the mind. 'My mind to me a kingdom is', said Sir Edward Dyer. And when man realizes that his mind is a kingdom in the most literal sense, a great unexplored country, he has crossed the borderline that divides the animal from the god.
Now I suspect that these mind vampires specialize in finding races who have almost reached this point of evolution, who are on the brink of achieving a new power, and then feeding on them until they have destroyed them. It is not their actual intention to destroy - because once they have done this, they are forced to seek another host. Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle. Their purpose, therefor, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards. I think there can be no possible doubt that the wars of the twentieth century are a deliberate contrivance of these vampires. Hitler, like De Sade, was almost certainly another of their 'zombis'. A complete destructive war would not serve their purposes, but continual minor skirmishes are admirable.
What would man be like if he could destroy these vampires, or drive them away? The first result would certainly be a tremendous sense of mental relief, a vanishing oppression, a surge of energy and optimism. In this first rush of energy, artistic masterpieces would be created by the dozen. Mankind would react like children who have been let out of school on the last day of term. Then man's energies would turn inward. He would take up the lagacy of Husserl. (It is obviously significant that it was Hitler who was responsible for Husserl's death just as his work was on the brink of new achievements.) He would suddenly realize that he possesses inner-powers that make the hydrogen bomb seem a mere candle. Aided, perhaps, by such drugs as mescalin, he would become, for the first time, an inhabitant of the world of mind, just as he is at present an inhabitant of earth. He would explore the countries of the mind as Livingstone and Stanley explored Africa. He would discover that he has many 'selves', and that his higher 'selves' are what his ancestors would have called gods.
I have another theory, which is so absurd that I hardly dare to mention it. This is that the mind vampires are, without intending it, the instruments of some higher force. They may, of course, succeed in destroying any race that becomes their host. But if, by any chance, the race should become aware of the danger, the result is bound to be the exact opposite of what is intended. One of the chief obstacles to human evolution is man's boredom and ignorance, his tendency to drift and allow tomorrow to take care of itself. In a certain sense, this is perhaps a greater danger to evolution - or at least, a hindrance - than the vampires themselves. Once a race becomes aware of these vampires, the battle is already half won. Once man has a purpose and a belief, he is almost invincible. The vampires might serve, therefor, to inoculate man against his own indifference and laziness. However, this is no more than a casual speculation...
The next problem is more important than all this speculation: How is it possible to get rid of them? It is no answer simply to publish 'the facts'. The historical facts mean nothing at all; they would be ignored. In some way, the human race has to be made aware of its danger. If I did what would be so easy - arranged to be interviewed on television, or wrote a series of newspaper articles on the subject - I might be listened to, but I think it more probable that people would simply dismiss me as insane. Yes, indeed, this is a tremendous problem. For short of persuading everyone to try a dose of mescalin, I can think of no way of convincing people. And then, there is no guarantee that mescalin would bring out the desired result - otherwise, I might risk dumping a large quantity of it in some city's water supply. No, such an idea is unthinkable. With the mind vampires massed for attack, sanity is too fragile a thing to risk. I now understand why my experiment at Trans-world ended so disastrously. The mind vampires deliberately destroyed those people, as a kind of warning to me. The avarage person lacks the mental discipline to resist them. This is why the suicide rate is so high...
I must learn more about these creatures. While my ignorance is so complete, they could destroy me. When I know something about them, perhaps I shall know how to make the human race aware of them."(page 6
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" I had been assuming that man is limited because his brain is limited, that only so much can be packed into the portmanteau. But the spaces of the mind are a new dimension. The body is a mere wall between two infinities. Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards."
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"(...) If individuality is an illusion, and mind is actually a kind of ocean, why should it not contain alien creatures?"
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"The most remarkable faculty of mankind, says Weissman, is its power of self-renewal, or of creation. The simplest example is the kind of renewal that occurs when a man sleeps. A tired man is a man already in the grip of death and insanity. One of Weissman's most striking theories is his identification of insanity with sleep. A sane man is a man who is fully awake. As he grows tired, he loses his ability to rise above dreams and delusions, and life bcomes steadily more chaotic."
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"(...) Months of expecting them had sensitized me. In the old days, I would have ignored this sudden feeling of depression, of some obscured danger, dismissed it as indigestion. Since then I had learned a great deal. I had learned, for example, that when human beings have that unheralded ';shivery' feeling, which they describe as 'someone walking on my grave', it is usually an alarm signal; some parasite has blundered too close to the surface of consciousness, and the shiver is due to the awareness of the presence of the alien.
In my room, I knew immediately that the mind parasites were watching me. It may sound paradoxal to say that they were ';there' in my room, when I have already said that they were inside me. This is due to the inadequacy of everyday language. In acertain sense, universal mind and universal space-time are coincidental, as Whitehead understood. Mind is not really 'inside' us in the same sense that our intestines are. Our individuality is a kind of eddy in the sea of mind, a reflection of the total identity of the universal humanity."
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"That was it! Habit! How obvious, how self-evident, when you thought about it! Psychologists had been telling us for years that the human being is largely a machine. Lord Leicester compared human beings to grandfather clocks driven by watch springs. A single traumatic experience in childhood could be the foundation for a lifelong neurosis. On or two happy experiences in early childhood can make a man an optimist for life. The body will destroy the germs of a physical illness within a week; but the mind will preserve germs of morbidity or fear for a lifetime. Why? Because the mind tends to be stagnant, as far as the life-forces go. It works on habit, and these habits are tremendously difficult to break, particularly the negative ones.
In other words, once a human being has been 'conditioned' by the mind parasites, he is like a clock that has ben wound up; he only requires attention once every year or so. Besides, Weissman discovered, human beings 'conditioning' one another, and save the parasites work. The parents' attitude to life is passed on to the children. One gloomy and pessimistic writer with a powerful style affects a whole generation of writers, who in turn affect almost every educated person in the country."
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"(...) Once you have got the knack of using the mind properly, everything follows easily. It is a matter of breaking a habit that human beings have acquired over millions of years: of giving all their attention to the outside world, and thinking of 'imagination' as a kind of escapism, instead of recognizing that it is a brief excursion into the great unknown countries of the mind. You had to get used to thinking how your mind worked. Not just your 'mind' in the ordinary sense, but your feelings and perceptions as well. I found that by far the most difficult thing, to begin with, was to realize that 'feeling' is just another form of perception. We tend to keep them in separate compartments. I look at a man, and I 'see' him; that is objective. A child looks at him and says: 'Ooh, what a horrid man'. The child feels about him, and we say that is 'subjective'. We are unaware of how stupid these classifications are, and how much they confuse our thinking. In a sense, the child's feeling is also a 'perception'. But in a far more important sense our 'seeing' is also a feeling.
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Think for a moment of what happens if you are trying to adjust a pair of binoculars. You turn the little wheel, and everything is a blur. Suddenly, a single extra turn makes everything become clear and sharp. Now think what happens if someone says to you: 'Old So-and-so died last night'. Usually, your mind is so full of other things that you don't feel anything at all - or rather, your feeling is indistinct , blurred, just as if the binoculars are out of focus. Perhaps weeks later, you are sitting quietly in your room reading, when something reminds you of old So-and-so who died, and quite suddenly you feel acute grief for a moment. The feeling has come into focus. What more is necessary to convince us that feeling and perception are basically the same thing?
(...) as we realized when we thought about this matter, the chief weapon of the parasites was a kind of 'mind-jamming device' that could be loosely compared to a radar-jamming device. The conscious human mind 'scans' the universe all the time. 'The wakeful life of the ego is a perceiving'. It is like an astronomer scanning the skies for new planets. Now an astronomer discovers new planets by comparing old star photographs with new ones. If a star has moved, then it isn't a star, but a planet. And our minds and feelings are also constantly engaged in this proces of scanning the universe for 'meanings'. A 'meaning' happens when we compare two lots of experience, and suddenly understand something about them both. To take an extremely simple example, a baby's first experience of fire may give it the impression that fire is wholly delightful: warm, bright, interesting. If he then tries putting his finger into the fire, he learns something new about it - that it burns. But he does not therefore decide that fire is wholly unpleasant - not unless he is exceptionally timid and neurotic. He superimposes the two experiences, one upon the other, like two star maps, and marks down that one property of fire must be clearly separated from its others. This proces is called learning.
Now supposing the mind parasites deliberately 'blur' the feelings when we try to compare our two experiences. It would be as if they had exchanged an astonomer's spectacles for a pair with lenses made of smoked glass. He peers hard at his two star maps, but cannot make much out. We do not learn clearly from experience when this happens. And if we happen to be weak or neurotic, we learn entirely the wrong thing - that fire is 'bad'; because it burns, for example.
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The aim of the parasites was to prevent human beings from arriving at their maximum powers, and they did this by 'jamming' the emotions, by blurring our feelings so that we failed to learn from them, and went around in a kind of mental fog.
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Well, it was at this point in history, just as the human mind had taken this tremendous evolutionary leap forward - evolution always proceeds by leaps, like an electron jumping from one orbit to another - that the mind parasites struck in force. Their campaign was cunning and far sighted. They proceeded to manipulate the key minds of our planet. Tolstoy glimpsed this truth in "War and Peace", when he declared that individuals play little part in history, that it moves mechanically. For all of the protagonists of that Napoleontic war were moving mechanically - mere chess man in the hands of the mind parasites. How? By giving them a deep feeling of psychological insecurity that made them grasp eagerly at the idea of science as 'pure objective' knowledge - just as the parasites had tried to divert Weissman's mind into mathametical problems and chess.
The artists and writers were also cunningly undermined.(...) Men of genius were ruthlessly destroyed like flies."
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(...) The first thing I realized when I started practising Husserlian disciplines was that human beings have been overlooking an extremely simple secret about existence, although it is obvious enough for everyone to see. The secet is this: that the poor quality of human life - and consciousness - is due to the beam of attention that we direct at the world. Imagine that you have a powerful searchlight, but it has no reflector inside it. When you turn it on, you get a light of sorts, but it rushes off in all directions, and a lot of it is absorbed by the inside of the searchlight. Now if you install a concave reflector, the beam is polarized, and stabs forward like a bullet or a spear. The beam immediately becomes ten times more powerful. But even this is only a half measure, for although every ray of light now follows the same path, the actual waves of light are 'out of step', like an undisciplined army walking along a street. If you now pass the light through a ruby laser, the result is that the waves now 'march in step', and their power is increased a thousand-fold - just as the rhythmic tramping of an army was able to bring down the walls of Jericho.
The human brain is a kind of searchlight that projects a beam of 'attention' on the world. But it has always been like a searchlight without a reflector. Our attention shifts around from second to second; we do not really have the trick of focusing and concentrating the beam. And yet it does happen fairly often. For example, as Fleischman observed, the sexual orgasm is actually a focusing and concentrating the 'beam' of consciousness (or attention). The beam of attention suddenly carries more power, and the result is the feeling of intense pleasure. The 'inspiration' of poets is exactly the same thing. By some fluke, some accidental adjustment of the mind, the beam of attention is polarized for a moment, and whatever it happens to be focused on appears to be transformed, touched with 'the glory and feshness of a dream'. There is no need to add that so-called 'mystical' visions are exactly the same thing, but with an accidental touch of the laser thrown in. When Jacob Boehme saw the sunlight reflected on a pewter bowl, and declared that he had seen all heaven, he was speaking the sober truth.
Human beings never realize that life is so dull because of the vagueness, the diffuseness, of their beam of attention - although, as I say, the secret has been lying at the end of their noses for centuries. And since 1800, the parasites have been doing their best to distract them from this disovery - a discovery that should have been *quite inevitable* after the age of Beethoven and Goethe and Wordswoth. They achieved this mainly by encouraging the human habit of vagueness and the tendency to waste time on trivialities. A man has a sudden glimpse of a great idea; for a moment, his mind *focuses*. At this point, habit steps in. His stomach complains of being empty, or his throat complains of dryness, and a false little voice whispers: 'Go and satisfy your physical needs, and they you'll be able to concentrate twice as well'. He obeys - and immediately forgets the great idea.
The moment man stumbles on the fact that his attention is a 'beam', (or, as Husserl put it, that consciousness is *intentional*) he has learned the fundamental secret. Now all he has to learn is how to polarize that beam. It is the 'polarized' beam that exerts PK effects."
Because the book seems to be out of print, I want to share some of its contents, the juicy bits, with you.
From The Mind Parasites, by Colin Wilson, 1967.
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'The Mind Parasites' , a fantasy/SF novel, takes place in the beginning of the 21th century and starts with the discovery of the remnants of a very ancient and perhaps alien civilization buried deep down in the ground somewhere in Turkey. The other plot is the discovery of mind parasites that hinder the evolution of human awareness, live of our energy and keep us like 'sheep'. Two lead figures in the novel develop a strategy, based on Husserl's phenemonology, to beat the mind parasites.
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from page 58 and on:
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Now Karel Weissman was a psychologist, not a historian. And the field in which he made a living was in industrial psychology. In the Historical Reflections ,he writes:
" It was in 1990 that I entered the field of industrial psychology as the assistant of Professor Ames at Trans-world Cosmetics. I immediately discovered a curious and nightmarish situation. I knew, of course, that 'industrial neurosis' had become a serious matter - so much so that special industrial courts had been set up to deal with offenders who sabotaged machinery or killed or injured workmates. But only a few people were aware of the sheer size of the problem. The murder rate in large factories and similar concerns had increased to twice
that of the rest of the population. In one cigarette factory in America, eight foremen and two high executives were killed in the course of a single year; in seven of these cases, the murderer committed suicide immediately after the attack.
The industrial Plastics Corporation of Iceland had decided to try the experiment of an 'open air' factory, spread over many acres, so that the workers had no sense of overcrowding or confinement; energy fields were used instead of walls. At first the experiment was highly succesful; but within two years, the factory's rate of industrial crime and neurosis had risen to equal the national avarage.
These figures never reached the national press. Psychologists reasoned - correctly - that to publicize them would make things worse. They reasoned that it would be best to treat each case as one would an outbreak of fire that must be isolated.
The more I considered this problem, the more I felt that we had no real idea of its cause. My collegues were frankly defeated by it, as Dr. Ames admitted to me during my first week at Trans-world Cosmetics. He said that it was difficult to get to the root of the problem, because it seemed to have so many roots - the population explosion, overcrowding in cities, the individual's feeling of insignificance and increasing sense of living in a vacuum, the lack of adventure in modern life, collapse of religion ... and so on. He said he wasn't sure that industry wasn't treating the problem in entirely the wrong way. It was spending more money on psychiatrists, on improving working conditions - in short, in making the workers feel like patients. But since our living depended on this mistake, it was hardly up to us to suggest a change.
And so I turned to history to find my answers. And the answers, when I found them, made me feel like suicide. For, according to history, all this was completely inevitable. Civilization was getting top heavy; it was bound to fall over. Yet the one thing this conclusion failed to take into account was the human power of self-renewal. By the same reasoning, Mozart was bound to commit suicide because his life was so miserable. But he didn't.
What was destroying the human power of self-renewal?
I cannot explain quite how I came to believe that there might be a single cause. It was something that dawned on me slowly, over many years. It was simply that I came to feel increasingly strongly that the figures for industrial crime were out of all proportion to the so-called 'historical causes'. It was as if I were the head of a firm who feels instinctively that his account is cooking the books, although he has no idea how it is being done.
And then, one day, I began to suspect the existence of the mind vampires. And from then on, everything confirmed my guess.
It happened first when I was considering the use of mescalin and lysergic acid for curing industrial neurosis. Fundamentally, of course, the effect of these drugs is no different from that of alcohol or tobacco: they have the effect of unwinding us. A man who is overworked has got himself into a habit of tension, and he cannot break the habit by merely willing. A glass of whisky or a cigarette will reach down into his motor levels and release the tension..
But man has far deeper habits than overwork. Through millions of years of evolution, he has developed all kinds of habits for survival. If any of these habits get out of control, the result is mental illness. For example, man has a habit of being prepared for enemies; but if he allows it to dominate his life, he becomes a paranoiac.
One of man's deepest habits is keeping alert for dangers and difficulties, refusing to allow himself to explore his own mind because he daren't take his eyes off the world around him. Another one, with the same cause, is his refusal to notice beauty, because he prefers to concentrate on practical problems. These habits are so deeply ingrained that alcohol and tobacco cannot reach them. But mescalin can. It can reach down to man's most atavistic levels, and release the automatic tensions that make him a slave to his own boredom and to the world around him.
Now I must confess that I was inclined to blame these atavistic habits for the problem of the world suicide rate and the industrial crime rate. Man has to learn to relax, or becomes overwrought and dangerous. He must learn to contact his own deepest levels in order to re-energize his consciousness. So it seemed to me that drugs of the mescalin group might provide the answer.
So far, the use of these drugs had been avoided in industrial psychology, for an obvious reason: mescalin relaxes a man to a point where work becomes impossible. He wants to do nothing but contemplate the beauty of the world and the mysteries of his own mind.
I felt there was no reason to reach this limit. A tiny quantity of mescalin, administered in the right way, might release a man's creative forces without plunging him into a stupor. After all, man's ancestors of two thousand years ago were almost colour-blind because they were in a subconscious habit of ignoring colour. Life was so difficult and dangerous that they couldn't afford to notice it. Yet modern man has succeeded in losing this old habit of colour-blindness without losing any of his drive and vitality. It is all a matter of balance.
And so I inaugurated a series of experiments with drugs of the mescalin group. And my first results were so alarming that my engagement with Trans-world Cosmetics was terminated abruptly. Five out of my ten subjects committed suicide within days. Another two had a total mental collapse that drove them into a madhouse.
I was baffled. I had experimented with mescalin on myself in my university days, but I found the results uninteresting. A mescalin holiday is all very pleasant, but it all depends whether you like holidays. I do not; I find work too interesting.
But my results made me decide to try it again. I took half of a gram. The result was so horrifying that I still perspire when I think about it.
At first, there were the usual pleasant effects - areas of light swelling gently and revolving. Then an immense sense of peace and calm, a glimpse of the Buddhist nirvana, a beautiful and gentle contemplation of the universe that was at once deteached and infinitely involved. After about an hour of this, I roused myself from it; I was obviously not discovering what had caused the suicides. Now I attempted to turn my attention inward, to observe the exact state of my perceptions and emotions. The result was baffling. It was as if I was trying to look through a telescope, and someone was deliberately placing his hand over the other end of it. Every attempt at self-observation failed. And then, with a kind of violent effort, I tried to batter through this wall of darkness. And suddenly, I had a distinct feeling of something living and alien hurrying out of my sight. I'm not, of course, speaking of physical sight. This was entirely a 'feeling'. But it had such an imprint of reality that for a moment I became almost insane with terror. One can run away from an obvious physical menace, but there was no running away from this, because it was inside me.
For nearly a week afterwards, I was in a state of the most abject terror, and closer to insanity than I have ever been in my life."
(....) "For although I was now back in the ordinary physical world, I had no feeling of safety. I felt that, in returning to everyday consciousness, I was like an ostrich burying its head in the sand. It only meant that I was unaware of the menace.
Luckily, I was not working at the time; it would have been impossible. And about a week later, I found myself thinking: Well, what are you afraid of? You've come to no harm. I immediately began to feel more cheerful. It was only a few days after this that Standard Motors and Engineering offered me the post of their chief medical officer. I accepted it, and plunged into the work of an enormous and complex organization. For a long time it left me no time for brooding and devising new experiments. And whenever my thoughts turned back to my mescalin experiments, I felt such a powerful revulsion that I always found some excuse for putting it off.
Six months ago, I finally returned to the problem, this time from a slightly different angle. My friend Rupert Haddon of Princeton told me of his highly successful experiments in rehabilitating sexual criminals with the use of L.S.D. In explaining his theories, he used a great deal of the terminology of the philosopher Husserl. It immediately became obvious to me that phenomenology is only another name for the kind of self-observation I had tried to carry out under mescalin, and that when Husserl talks about 'uncovering the structure of consciousness', he only means descending into these realms of mental habit of which I have spoken. Husserl had realized that while we have ordnance survey maps that cover every inch of our earth, we have no atlas of our mental world.
Reading Husserl renewed my courage. The idea of trying mescalin again terrified me; but phenomenology starts from ordinary consciousness. So I again began making notes about the problems of man's inner world, and the geography of consciousness.
Almost at once, I became aware that certain inner-forces were resisting my researches. As soon as I began to brood on these problems, I began to experience sick headaches and feelings of nausea. Every morning, I woke up with a feeling of profound depression. I have always been a student of mathematics in an amateurish way, as well as a good chess player. I soon discovered that I felt better the moment I turned my attention to mathematics or chess. But the moment I began to think about the mind, the same depression would settle on me.
My own weakness began to infuriate me. I determined that I would overcome it at all costs. So I begged two month's leave of absence from my employers. I warned my wife that I was going to be very ill. And I deliberately turned my mind to these problems of phenomenology. The result was exactly as I predicted. For a few days I felt tired and depressed. Then I began to experience headaches and nerve pains. Then I vomited up everything I ate. I took to my bed, and tried to use my mind to probe my own sickness, using the methods of analysis laid down by Husserl. My wife had no idea what was wrong with me, and her anxiety mad it twice as bad. It is lucky that we have no children; otherwise I would certainly have been forced to surrender.
After a fortnight, I was so exhausted that I could barely swallow a teaspoonful of milk. I made an immense effort to rally my forces, reaching down to my deepest instinctive levels. In that moment I became aware of my enemies. It was like swimming down to the bottom of the sea and suddenly noticing that you are surrounded by sharks. I could not, of course, 'see' them in the ordinary sense, but I could feel their presence as clearly as one can feel a toothache. They were down there, at a level of my being where my consciousness never penetrates.
And as I tried to prevent myself from screaming with terror, the fear of a man facing inevitable destruction, I suddenly realized that I had beaten them. My own deepest life forces were rallying against them. An immense strength, that I had never known I possessed, reared up like a giant. It was far stronger than they were, and they had to retreat from it. I suddenly became aware of more of them, thousands of them; and yet I knew that they could do nothing against me.
And then the realization came to me with such searing force that I felt as if I had been struck by lightning. Everything was clear; I knew everything. I knew why it was so important to them that no one should suspect their existence. Man possesses more than enough power to destroy them all. But so long as he is unaware of them, they can feed on him, like vampires, sucking away his energy.
My wife came into the bedroom and was astounded to find me laughing like a madman. For a moment, she thought my mind had collapsed. Then she realized that it was the laughter of sanity.
I told her to go and bring me soup. And within forty-eight hours, I was back on my feet again, as healthy as ever - in fact, healthier than I had ever been in my life. At first, I felt such an immense euphoria at my discovery that I forgot about those vampires of the mind. Then I realized that this in itself was stupid. They had an immense advantage over me; they knew my own mind far better than I did. Unless I was very careful, they could still destroy me.
But for the moment, I was safe. When, later in the day, I felt the persistent, nagging attacks of depression, I turned again to that deep sorce of inner power, and to my optimism about the human future. Immediately the attacks ceased, and I began to roar with laughter again. It was many weeks before I could control this laughter mechanism whenever I had a skirmish with the parasites.
What I had discovered was, of course, so fantastic that it could not be grasped by the unprepared mind. In fact, it was extraordinary good luck that I had not made the discovery six months earlier, when I was working for Trans-world. In the meantime, my mind had made slow and unconscious preparation for it. In the past few months, I have become steadily more convinced that it was not entirely a matter of luck. I have a feeling that there are powerful forces working on the side of humanity, although I have no idea of their nature.
-(I made a special note of this sentence. It was something I had always felt instinctively.)
What it amounts to is this. For more than two centuries now, the human mind has been constantly a prey to these energy vampires. In a few cases, the vampires have been able to completely take over a human mind and use it for their own purposes. For example, I am almost certain that De Sade was one of these 'zombis' whose brain was entirely in the control of the vampires. The blasphemy and stupidity of his work are not, as in many cases, evidence of demonic vitality, and the proof of it is that De Sade never matured in any way, although he lived to be 74. The sole purpose of his life work is to add to the mental confusion of the human race, deliberately to distort and pervert the truth about sex.
As soon as I understood about the mind vampires, the history of the past two hundred years became absurdly clear. Until about 1780 (which is roughly the date when the first full-scale invasion of mind vampires landed on earth), most art tended to be life-enhancing, like the music of Haydn and Mozart. After the invasion of the mind vampires, this sunny optimism became almost impossible to the artist.. The mind vampires always chose the most intelligent men as their instruments, because it is ultimately the intelligent men who have the greatest influence on the human race. Very few artists have been powerful enough to hurl them off, and such men have gained a new strenght in doing so - Beethoven is clearly an example; Goethe another.
And this explains precisely why it is so important for the mind vampires to keep their presence unknown, to drain man's lifeblood without his being aware of it. A man who defeats the mind vampires becomes doubly dangerous to them, for his forces of self-renewal have conquered. In such cases, the vampires probably attempt to destroy him in another way - by trying to influence other people against him. We should remember that Beethoven's death came out because he left his sister's house after a rather curious quarrel, and drove several miles in an open cart in the rain. At all events, we notice that it is in the nineteenth century that the great artists first begin to complain that 'the world is against them'; Haydn and Mozart were well understood and appreciated by their own time. As soon as the artist dies, this neglect disappears - the mind vampires loosen their grip on people's minds. They have more important things to attend to.
In the history of art and literature since 1780, we see the results of the battle with the mind vampires. The artists who refused to preach a gospel of pessimism and life devaluation were destroyed. The life-slanderers often lived to a ripe old age. It is interesting, for example, to contrast the fate of the life-slanderer Schopenhauer with that of the life-affirmer Nietzsche, or that of the sexual degenerate De Sade with that of the sexual mystic Lawrence.
Apart from these obvious facts, I have not succeeded in learning a great deal about the mind vampires. I am inclined to suspect that, in small numbers, they have always been present on earth. Possibly the Christian idea of the devil arises from some obscure intuition of the part they played in human history: how their role is to take over a man's mind, and to cause him to become an enemy of life and of the human race. But it would be a mistake to blame the vampires for all the misfortunes of the human race. Man is an animal who is trying to evolve into a god. Many of his problems are an inevitable result of this struggle."
(...) "I have a theory, which I will state here for the sake of completeness. I suspect that the universe is full of races like our own, struggling to evolve. In the early stages of its evolution, any race is mainly concerned to conquer its environment, to overcome enemies, to assure itself of food. But sooner or later, a point comes where the race has progressed beyond this stage, and can now turn its attention inward, to the pleasures of the mind. 'My mind to me a kingdom is', said Sir Edward Dyer. And when man realizes that his mind is a kingdom in the most literal sense, a great unexplored country, he has crossed the borderline that divides the animal from the god.
Now I suspect that these mind vampires specialize in finding races who have almost reached this point of evolution, who are on the brink of achieving a new power, and then feeding on them until they have destroyed them. It is not their actual intention to destroy - because once they have done this, they are forced to seek another host. Their intention is to feed for as long as possible on the tremendous energies generated by the evolutionary struggle. Their purpose, therefor, is to prevent man from discovering the worlds inside himself, to keep his attention directed outwards. I think there can be no possible doubt that the wars of the twentieth century are a deliberate contrivance of these vampires. Hitler, like De Sade, was almost certainly another of their 'zombis'. A complete destructive war would not serve their purposes, but continual minor skirmishes are admirable.
What would man be like if he could destroy these vampires, or drive them away? The first result would certainly be a tremendous sense of mental relief, a vanishing oppression, a surge of energy and optimism. In this first rush of energy, artistic masterpieces would be created by the dozen. Mankind would react like children who have been let out of school on the last day of term. Then man's energies would turn inward. He would take up the lagacy of Husserl. (It is obviously significant that it was Hitler who was responsible for Husserl's death just as his work was on the brink of new achievements.) He would suddenly realize that he possesses inner-powers that make the hydrogen bomb seem a mere candle. Aided, perhaps, by such drugs as mescalin, he would become, for the first time, an inhabitant of the world of mind, just as he is at present an inhabitant of earth. He would explore the countries of the mind as Livingstone and Stanley explored Africa. He would discover that he has many 'selves', and that his higher 'selves' are what his ancestors would have called gods.
I have another theory, which is so absurd that I hardly dare to mention it. This is that the mind vampires are, without intending it, the instruments of some higher force. They may, of course, succeed in destroying any race that becomes their host. But if, by any chance, the race should become aware of the danger, the result is bound to be the exact opposite of what is intended. One of the chief obstacles to human evolution is man's boredom and ignorance, his tendency to drift and allow tomorrow to take care of itself. In a certain sense, this is perhaps a greater danger to evolution - or at least, a hindrance - than the vampires themselves. Once a race becomes aware of these vampires, the battle is already half won. Once man has a purpose and a belief, he is almost invincible. The vampires might serve, therefor, to inoculate man against his own indifference and laziness. However, this is no more than a casual speculation...
The next problem is more important than all this speculation: How is it possible to get rid of them? It is no answer simply to publish 'the facts'. The historical facts mean nothing at all; they would be ignored. In some way, the human race has to be made aware of its danger. If I did what would be so easy - arranged to be interviewed on television, or wrote a series of newspaper articles on the subject - I might be listened to, but I think it more probable that people would simply dismiss me as insane. Yes, indeed, this is a tremendous problem. For short of persuading everyone to try a dose of mescalin, I can think of no way of convincing people. And then, there is no guarantee that mescalin would bring out the desired result - otherwise, I might risk dumping a large quantity of it in some city's water supply. No, such an idea is unthinkable. With the mind vampires massed for attack, sanity is too fragile a thing to risk. I now understand why my experiment at Trans-world ended so disastrously. The mind vampires deliberately destroyed those people, as a kind of warning to me. The avarage person lacks the mental discipline to resist them. This is why the suicide rate is so high...
I must learn more about these creatures. While my ignorance is so complete, they could destroy me. When I know something about them, perhaps I shall know how to make the human race aware of them."(page 6
Page 32:
" I had been assuming that man is limited because his brain is limited, that only so much can be packed into the portmanteau. But the spaces of the mind are a new dimension. The body is a mere wall between two infinities. Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards."
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"(...) If individuality is an illusion, and mind is actually a kind of ocean, why should it not contain alien creatures?"
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"The most remarkable faculty of mankind, says Weissman, is its power of self-renewal, or of creation. The simplest example is the kind of renewal that occurs when a man sleeps. A tired man is a man already in the grip of death and insanity. One of Weissman's most striking theories is his identification of insanity with sleep. A sane man is a man who is fully awake. As he grows tired, he loses his ability to rise above dreams and delusions, and life bcomes steadily more chaotic."
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"(...) Months of expecting them had sensitized me. In the old days, I would have ignored this sudden feeling of depression, of some obscured danger, dismissed it as indigestion. Since then I had learned a great deal. I had learned, for example, that when human beings have that unheralded ';shivery' feeling, which they describe as 'someone walking on my grave', it is usually an alarm signal; some parasite has blundered too close to the surface of consciousness, and the shiver is due to the awareness of the presence of the alien.
In my room, I knew immediately that the mind parasites were watching me. It may sound paradoxal to say that they were ';there' in my room, when I have already said that they were inside me. This is due to the inadequacy of everyday language. In acertain sense, universal mind and universal space-time are coincidental, as Whitehead understood. Mind is not really 'inside' us in the same sense that our intestines are. Our individuality is a kind of eddy in the sea of mind, a reflection of the total identity of the universal humanity."
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"That was it! Habit! How obvious, how self-evident, when you thought about it! Psychologists had been telling us for years that the human being is largely a machine. Lord Leicester compared human beings to grandfather clocks driven by watch springs. A single traumatic experience in childhood could be the foundation for a lifelong neurosis. On or two happy experiences in early childhood can make a man an optimist for life. The body will destroy the germs of a physical illness within a week; but the mind will preserve germs of morbidity or fear for a lifetime. Why? Because the mind tends to be stagnant, as far as the life-forces go. It works on habit, and these habits are tremendously difficult to break, particularly the negative ones.
In other words, once a human being has been 'conditioned' by the mind parasites, he is like a clock that has ben wound up; he only requires attention once every year or so. Besides, Weissman discovered, human beings 'conditioning' one another, and save the parasites work. The parents' attitude to life is passed on to the children. One gloomy and pessimistic writer with a powerful style affects a whole generation of writers, who in turn affect almost every educated person in the country."
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"(...) Once you have got the knack of using the mind properly, everything follows easily. It is a matter of breaking a habit that human beings have acquired over millions of years: of giving all their attention to the outside world, and thinking of 'imagination' as a kind of escapism, instead of recognizing that it is a brief excursion into the great unknown countries of the mind. You had to get used to thinking how your mind worked. Not just your 'mind' in the ordinary sense, but your feelings and perceptions as well. I found that by far the most difficult thing, to begin with, was to realize that 'feeling' is just another form of perception. We tend to keep them in separate compartments. I look at a man, and I 'see' him; that is objective. A child looks at him and says: 'Ooh, what a horrid man'. The child feels about him, and we say that is 'subjective'. We are unaware of how stupid these classifications are, and how much they confuse our thinking. In a sense, the child's feeling is also a 'perception'. But in a far more important sense our 'seeing' is also a feeling.
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Think for a moment of what happens if you are trying to adjust a pair of binoculars. You turn the little wheel, and everything is a blur. Suddenly, a single extra turn makes everything become clear and sharp. Now think what happens if someone says to you: 'Old So-and-so died last night'. Usually, your mind is so full of other things that you don't feel anything at all - or rather, your feeling is indistinct , blurred, just as if the binoculars are out of focus. Perhaps weeks later, you are sitting quietly in your room reading, when something reminds you of old So-and-so who died, and quite suddenly you feel acute grief for a moment. The feeling has come into focus. What more is necessary to convince us that feeling and perception are basically the same thing?
(...) as we realized when we thought about this matter, the chief weapon of the parasites was a kind of 'mind-jamming device' that could be loosely compared to a radar-jamming device. The conscious human mind 'scans' the universe all the time. 'The wakeful life of the ego is a perceiving'. It is like an astronomer scanning the skies for new planets. Now an astronomer discovers new planets by comparing old star photographs with new ones. If a star has moved, then it isn't a star, but a planet. And our minds and feelings are also constantly engaged in this proces of scanning the universe for 'meanings'. A 'meaning' happens when we compare two lots of experience, and suddenly understand something about them both. To take an extremely simple example, a baby's first experience of fire may give it the impression that fire is wholly delightful: warm, bright, interesting. If he then tries putting his finger into the fire, he learns something new about it - that it burns. But he does not therefore decide that fire is wholly unpleasant - not unless he is exceptionally timid and neurotic. He superimposes the two experiences, one upon the other, like two star maps, and marks down that one property of fire must be clearly separated from its others. This proces is called learning.
Now supposing the mind parasites deliberately 'blur' the feelings when we try to compare our two experiences. It would be as if they had exchanged an astonomer's spectacles for a pair with lenses made of smoked glass. He peers hard at his two star maps, but cannot make much out. We do not learn clearly from experience when this happens. And if we happen to be weak or neurotic, we learn entirely the wrong thing - that fire is 'bad'; because it burns, for example.
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The aim of the parasites was to prevent human beings from arriving at their maximum powers, and they did this by 'jamming' the emotions, by blurring our feelings so that we failed to learn from them, and went around in a kind of mental fog.
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Well, it was at this point in history, just as the human mind had taken this tremendous evolutionary leap forward - evolution always proceeds by leaps, like an electron jumping from one orbit to another - that the mind parasites struck in force. Their campaign was cunning and far sighted. They proceeded to manipulate the key minds of our planet. Tolstoy glimpsed this truth in "War and Peace", when he declared that individuals play little part in history, that it moves mechanically. For all of the protagonists of that Napoleontic war were moving mechanically - mere chess man in the hands of the mind parasites. How? By giving them a deep feeling of psychological insecurity that made them grasp eagerly at the idea of science as 'pure objective' knowledge - just as the parasites had tried to divert Weissman's mind into mathametical problems and chess.
The artists and writers were also cunningly undermined.(...) Men of genius were ruthlessly destroyed like flies."
Page 103:
(...) The first thing I realized when I started practising Husserlian disciplines was that human beings have been overlooking an extremely simple secret about existence, although it is obvious enough for everyone to see. The secet is this: that the poor quality of human life - and consciousness - is due to the beam of attention that we direct at the world. Imagine that you have a powerful searchlight, but it has no reflector inside it. When you turn it on, you get a light of sorts, but it rushes off in all directions, and a lot of it is absorbed by the inside of the searchlight. Now if you install a concave reflector, the beam is polarized, and stabs forward like a bullet or a spear. The beam immediately becomes ten times more powerful. But even this is only a half measure, for although every ray of light now follows the same path, the actual waves of light are 'out of step', like an undisciplined army walking along a street. If you now pass the light through a ruby laser, the result is that the waves now 'march in step', and their power is increased a thousand-fold - just as the rhythmic tramping of an army was able to bring down the walls of Jericho.
The human brain is a kind of searchlight that projects a beam of 'attention' on the world. But it has always been like a searchlight without a reflector. Our attention shifts around from second to second; we do not really have the trick of focusing and concentrating the beam. And yet it does happen fairly often. For example, as Fleischman observed, the sexual orgasm is actually a focusing and concentrating the 'beam' of consciousness (or attention). The beam of attention suddenly carries more power, and the result is the feeling of intense pleasure. The 'inspiration' of poets is exactly the same thing. By some fluke, some accidental adjustment of the mind, the beam of attention is polarized for a moment, and whatever it happens to be focused on appears to be transformed, touched with 'the glory and feshness of a dream'. There is no need to add that so-called 'mystical' visions are exactly the same thing, but with an accidental touch of the laser thrown in. When Jacob Boehme saw the sunlight reflected on a pewter bowl, and declared that he had seen all heaven, he was speaking the sober truth.
Human beings never realize that life is so dull because of the vagueness, the diffuseness, of their beam of attention - although, as I say, the secret has been lying at the end of their noses for centuries. And since 1800, the parasites have been doing their best to distract them from this disovery - a discovery that should have been *quite inevitable* after the age of Beethoven and Goethe and Wordswoth. They achieved this mainly by encouraging the human habit of vagueness and the tendency to waste time on trivialities. A man has a sudden glimpse of a great idea; for a moment, his mind *focuses*. At this point, habit steps in. His stomach complains of being empty, or his throat complains of dryness, and a false little voice whispers: 'Go and satisfy your physical needs, and they you'll be able to concentrate twice as well'. He obeys - and immediately forgets the great idea.
The moment man stumbles on the fact that his attention is a 'beam', (or, as Husserl put it, that consciousness is *intentional*) he has learned the fundamental secret. Now all he has to learn is how to polarize that beam. It is the 'polarized' beam that exerts PK effects."