Beyond the Occult by Colin Wilson Page A

the light — or power — comes from
within
. Muz Murray’s account of his ‘illumination’ in Cyprus contains the phrase, ‘… an indescribable sensation as if the whole universe was being poured into me, or rather, more as if the whole universe was welling out of me from some deep centre.’ One of Nona Coxhead’s correspondents, Jim Harrison, told her how he had been wondering how God could permit his wife to remain ill when it struck him, ‘Maybe it wasn’t God’s fault after all.’
    So then I thought all right, I take it all back, and filling my heart with the tender love often reserved for my little daughter, I projected it towards him, thinking, if you exist then I give you my love.
    I could feel this love being passed on and on, and then suddenly it returned, a brilliant shaft of light from out of the sky, brighter by far than the mid-morning sun, permeating me with such an intensity of happiness and Love as to halt me in my tracks with a jump for joy — and lingering for five or ten seconds before fading away. I knew intuitively that this light, plainly visible, somehow, mysteriously, stemmed from within.
    Jim Harrison, like so many others who have experienced a flash of ‘cosmic consciousness’, concluded:
    So then I knew for certain that God does indeed exist, that he is love, that he is joy, that he is light, that he stems from within as much as from without, and that we alone are responsible for our own sufferings and problems in consequence of the mis-use of our free will.
    C. G. Price, a farmer whose farm was on the point of bankruptcy, had a similar experience of light:
    With thoughts of self-pity such as these in my mind, one Sunday morning in February 1968 … I set about the task of bedding my cows down with straw … I don’t even remember the feeling creeping up on me, but suddenly… .
    I seemed to be enveloped in a cocoon of golden light that actually felt warm, and which radiated a feeling of Love so intense that it was almost tangible. One felt that one could grasp handfuls of it, and fill one’s pockets.
    In this warm cocoon of golden light I sensed a presence which I could not actually see but knew was there. My mind became crystal clear, and in an instant of time I suddenly knew, without any doubts, that I was part of a ‘Whole’. Not an isolated part, but an integral part. I felt a sense of ‘One-ment’. I knew that I belonged and that nothing could change that. The loss of my farm and livelihood didn’t matter any more.
    In fact he
was
forced to sell the farm, but his mystical experience made this seem unimportant.
    Moyra Caldecott, a South African schoolgirl, had a similar experience when kneeling at the altar rail to take Communion. As the bishop placed his hand on her head:
    I suddenly seemed to cease to be me (that is, in the sense of ‘me’ I had thought I was — living in a particular house, in a particular street, going to a particular school). I felt the most incredible flow of energy and power coursing through me and had what I believe to be an experience of Timeless Reality … of consciousness that took in everything without limit … but reacted to nothing except in the sense of ‘knowing’… and … ‘loving’.
    In fact it is very tempting to say that what mystical experiences all have in common is a sudden sense of one’s
real
identity, and that this ‘real self’ is in some sense god-like — could even be described as God.
    But perhaps the most remarkable of all accounts of mystical experience is to be found in P. D. Ouspensky’s book
A New Model of the Universe
, in a chapter called ‘Experimental Mysticism’. Ouspensky was the most important follower of the Russian philosopher and mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, but he was also a considerable thinker in his own right, as his books reveal. Ouspensky does not tell us the details of how he achieved his states of mystical consciousness, but his biographer James Webb is probably correct in assuming that