Message #36487

[Bianca]

To Wilson the present world with all it's difficulties offers special challenges which have the potential to strengthen our hidden capacities. Human suffering he sees as, in large measure, due to the fact that we've forgotten who we are and that we are trying to recover what we have lost. That recovery, though, shouldn't be so difficult.

If we could get the right point of view, so to speak, suddenly these latent powers would become accessible to us all the time. Certain that he's on to something big, he expands, It really does seem to me that one of the basic problems with human beings is that they experience wonderful moments of insight, for example, children at Christmas, when they feel the whole universe is absolutely glorious, and they feel that surely no one would ever want to die, but the trouble is, you know perfectly well at Christmas that within a couple months in the middle of February you'll be grimly bored and begin to long for the coming of the holidays around August. The need is to sustain the drive and purpose of the high moments during the low ones.

The highs, it seems to him, amount to a kind of three-dimensional consciousness, contrasting with the ordinary two-dimensional humdrum consciousness. And he sees modern nihilistic existential pessimists like Samuel Beckett and Jean Paul Sartre as trapped in the 2D experience. In contrast, the thoroughly optimistic Wilson believes that we are on the threshold of a time when we will be able to find the kind of balance between modern rational thought and ancient intuitive knowledge that will enable us to become masters of the peak experience. Simply learning the true antiquity of ancient civilization may do much to help us on our way, as he reminded us, when we tried to probe an intellectual riddle which puzzled us.