Beyond the Occult by Colin Wilson Page B

he used yogic and magical methods combined with the use of some sort of drug, almost certainly nitrous oxide — ‘laughing gas’. * Ouspensky states that the change took place more quickly and easily than he had expected. The account that then follows is one of the most important and detailed in the whole literature of mysticism.
    ‘The unknown,’ Ouspensky notes, ‘is unlike anything that we can suppose about it. The complete unexpectedness of everything that is met with in these experiences, from great to small, makes the description of them difficult.’ And he goes on to make an observation of central importance:
    First of all, everything is unified, everything is linked together, everything is explained by something else and in turn explains another thing. There is nothing separate, that is, nothing that can be named or described
separately
. In order to describe the first impressions, the first sensations, it is necessary to describe
all
at once. The new world with which one comes into contact has no sides, so that it is impossible to describe first one side and then the other. All of it is visible at every point … .
    Here we have one of the most basic assertions that all descriptions of mystical experience have in common.
Everything is seen to be connected
. And the word ‘seen’ deserves to be underlined. This world of infinite relationships, in which everything is connected with everything else, is seen all at once — from a bird’s-eye view, as it were. And language instantly becomes useless, because it can only pin down one thing at a time. ‘A man becomes lost amidst the infinite number of totally new impressions, for the expression of which he has neither words nor forms.’
    What seems equally strange is that the normal sense of the distinction between objective and subjective disappeared:
    Here I saw that the objective and the subjective could change places. The one could become the other. It is very difficult to express this. The habitual mistrust of the subjective disappeared; every thought, every feeling, every image, was immediately objectified in real substantial forms which differed in no way from the forms of objective phenomena; and at the same time objective phenomena somehow disappeared, lost all reality, appeared entirely subjective, fictitious, invented, having no real existence… .
    And he goes on to say that this strange world resembled more than anything else ‘a world of
very complicated mathematical relations’
.
    This vision of infinite meaning made it very difficult to carry on a conversation, for between each word of the sentence so many ideas occurred that it was difficult to remember what he intended to say next. He began a sentence with the words, ‘I said yesterday …’ but could simply get no further. The word ‘I’ raised hundreds of insights about the meaning of ‘I’, the word ‘said’ raised just as many ideas about speech and self-expression, each of which produced ‘an explosion of thoughts, conjectures, comparisons and associations’, and the word ‘yesterday’ led to endless thoughts and ideas about the nature of time, so that he was left with a feeling of breathlessness that made it impossible to continue.
    Something strange also happened to his sense of time, so that when his companion spoke, there seemed to be an immense gap between each of his words. ‘When he had finished a short sentence, the meaning of which did not reach me at all, I felt I had lived through so much during that time that we should never be able to understand one another again, that I had gone too far from him.’
    All this, says Ouspensky, was accompanied by immensely powerful emotional states. ‘I took in everything through feeling, and experienced emotions which never exist in life.’ His inner world became a kaleidoscope of ‘joy, wonder, rapture, horror, continually changing one into the other’. The state seemed to allow access to infinite knowledge, but when he