Living Forward Into Mystery
“Few of us would deny that the universe is a stranger place than the generally accepted natural laws can account for.
Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of feeling more or less alive on different days. Everyone knows on any given day that there are energies slumbering in him which the incitements of that day do not call forth, but which he might display if these were greater. Most of us feel as if a sort of cloud weighs upon us, keeping us below our highest notch of clearness in discernment or sureness in reasoning. Compared with what we ought to be we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources.
The human individual lives unusually far within his limits. He possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energizes below his maximum. He behaves below his optimum.
In other words, for everyday purposes human beings have a certain predetermined limit. It is like the thermostat on a central heating system. When the temperature rises above a certain point it automatically switches off the heating. When our tiredness reaches a certain limit, we also switch off automatically, and allow ourselves to sink into a passive state. But if some crisis arises, we refuse to allow ourselves to switch off. Our thermostat readjusts itself. The implication seems to be that each of us contains a vast reservoir of energy. We live subject to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only from habit to obey.
There is nothing mystical or occult about this. We all have within us a robot, akin to the automatic pilot in an airplane, whose task is to simplify our lives by handling a series of routines. Learning to do something new requires considerable effort and concentration, but once we have mastered it, our robot takes over and does it far more quickly and efficiently than we could do it consciously. The trouble is, the robot can become so efficient that it takes over most of our life. We begin to live like a robot. We do things automatically. It takes some sudden crisis to jar us out of this automatic living.
Like our bodies, our feelings are also controlled by the robot, running on automatic pilot. We seldom experience new feelings. For the most part, we play the same old feelings over and over again. Our minds contain a vast unused library of thoughts and ideas. The world around us is full of an infinite number of interesting things that the robot is trained to ignore. We accept the universe around us as stable and normal, when there is immense mystery and complexity and reality hidden from us by ignorance and habit.”
from Colin Wilson & Dr. Christopher Evans, The Book of Great Mysteries, Dorset Press, 1986.
