Chapter 3: Influences
Max had always read widely on the many subjects that
interested him such as meditation, yoga, zen, and research into human physiology
and psychology. A classic Chinese
Zen text with which he was familiar is The Ox and the Herdsman, ostensibly
a story about how the herdsman searches for and finds his ox. He begins the
search, finds traces of the ox and then catches it. Then
begins the problem of taming it until at last he can return to his home on
it. The ox is a symbol of his
own mind - the story is how the herdsman discovers his true nature. (ref
3-1) .
Western knowledge of the workings of the brain
began in the 18th century. Galvani concluded in 1791 that nerves contained “some
intrinsic form of electricity”. Nearly 100 years later, in 1875, an
English physician, Richard Caton, was able to measure electrical currents
travelling in different directions on the exposed surface of the brain. Some
of these currents were caused, he found, by stimulation of the retina of
the eye. His apparatus was effectively the first electroencephalograph (EEG
machine). A Russian, Danilevsky,
noted in the same decade that the brain had its own spontaneous activity
that was apparently independent of stimulation.
The first recording of EEG activity on the outside
of the head was achieved by the German psychiatrist Hans Berger in 1925,
followed three years later by his discovery of alpha rhythm activity using
electrodes attached to the scalp. Berger proposed that certain EEG frequencies
could allow telepathic phenomena. Though this belief is not mentioned in
EEG texts, Max may have been aware of it as he was a member of the Society
for Psychical Research.
In the 1950s Max was reading some of the classic
findings such as W Grey Walter’s The Living Brain (ref 3-2), which described
his investigations into personality and how humans process learning and memory. Grey
Walter’s work in the Department of Physiology at Burden Neurological
Institute, in Bristol - which was based on Berger’s findings - was the
foremost brain research in the world at the time it was published in 1953,
and foreshadowed much modern research. The
Burden, supported for many years by grants from American foundations, carried
out extensive investigations into brain disorders such as psychiatric illness
and epilepsy for a group of Bristol hospitals that also referred patients
for treatment that included brain operations.
Grey Walter joined the institute when it opened
in 1939 under its first director, the neurologist Professor Frederick Golla,
and was head of its physiological research unit for 35 years. From the start
Grey Walter began improving the rather crude EEG machines then available
to record the brain rhythms. Even so, his first machines recorded on to a
smoked metal drum, like an early phonograph.
What interested Max particularly was Grey Walter’s
work in locating alpha rhythms in the brain, and his endeavours to discover
any possible meaning empirically. Grey Walter, who was Anglo-American and
a Cambridge graduate in natural sciences, had become fascinated by the phenomenon
of these rhythms even before joining the institute. In
1938 while working in the central pathological laboratory of the London County
Council mental hospitals, he had found that alpha activity in the occipital
regions of each brain hemisphere was symmetrical, and “what is most
peculiar, and fascinating, the rhythms . . . were exactly in phase and vary
in amplitude together.” His attempts to explain the possible meaning
of such discoveries took him beyond science into poetry. The captions to
many of his diagrams of brain rhythms showed his wide-ranging search: “But
the lake must be perfectly calm; homeostasis frees the brain from menial
tasks”, “Always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one”, “Strange
patterns, and new significance emerged”, “Are we then at the mercy
of these theta rhythms?” “These rhythms are the warden of brain
functions”.
Max and Grey Walter, who met once during the
1960s, had much in common. Both
had a charismatic air and directness of manner that could be disarming; both
were inclined to take an unorthodox approach when solving problems; and each
published a large output of papers.
Another influential book was Flanders Dunbar’s
Emotions and Bodily Changes (ref 3-3), a detailed psychosomatic study of
the bodily systems first published in 1935, a period when the researches
of Freud, Jung and Groddeck were becoming absorbed into thinking about the
mind-body relationship. Max
quoted Groddeck: “A man whose resistance - or wish-fulfilment -takes
the form of a fractured bone is not to be analysed, but a patient whose fracture
will not heal is to be analysed”.
Richard Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness (ref
3-4) mapped qualities in the lives of famous people who were extraordinary
by normal standards was often quoted by Max. Bucke,
writing at the turn of the 20th century, took as examples figures
such as Swedenborg, Dante, Francis Bacon, William Blake and Walt Whitman.
Max also was very interested in Abraham Maslow’s
ideas of self-actualisation described in Towards a Psychology of Being, which
posited that we make the most of our potential through having a meaningful
vocation in life where the division between work and play is transcended.
Similarly, he found Carl Rogers’ ideas on the fully-functioning individual,
expressed in On Becoming a Person, ran parallel with his own. William
James’s book The Varieties of Religious Experience had appeared, based
on James’s lectures at the turn of the century. These
people demonstrated a way of being in the world which Max later
called The Awakened Mind.
Those who influenced Max most were people who
related their knowledge to an overview of life as found in Eastern texts
on yoga, which are presented in a very scientific way: try this and you can
expect this result; knowledge which had been tried and found true over very
many generations.
This period in the 1960s and 1970s when Max was
developing his theories was a very exciting because others, while they did
not influence Max, were thinking along similar lines. There was a flowering
of ideas, research and theories on the workings of the human mind and the
mind-body relationship. For example, Hans Selye in The Stress of Life had
claimed stress could cause mental and physical illness, though his work was
flawed because it was based on an artificial situation. The
animals were confined in cages so that they could be studied by scientists
to examine the effect of stress but this denied them the chance they might
have had, in their natural surroundings, to discover a creative solution
to this stress.
In 1971, Claudio Naranjo and Robert Ornstein
had published On The Psychology of Meditation. Max
often used passages from The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader, which appeared
in 1970, and also from Psychosynthesis, the writings of Roberto Assagioli,
published in 1965, for the sessions in his London classes on biofeedback
and altered states.
A key book of the time was Marilyn Ferguson’s
The Brain Revolution, published in 1973, which W Grey Walter praised. Subtitled
The Frontiers of Mind Research, it provided a new vista on many important
discoveries of this century. In
1976 Ferguson began the fortnightly Brain Mind bulletin from California,
which brought together in one regular publication, reports and book reviews
from such people as Naranjo, Isthak Bentov, Dr Barbara Brown, Ilya Prigone
and Kenneth Pelletier, research which otherwise would have been widely scattered
in the learned journals or not published at all. Some
of Max’s research appeared in the bulletin in 1977. He
was encouraged that others were pursuing much the same quest from their own
perspectives.
An important influence on Max’s ideas came
about by accident. He had joined the Society for Psychical Research in 1963,
became a member of its council in 1969, and honorary secretary from 1973
to 1975. As the title suggests, it was not a paid post but because it coincided
with his leaving Smiths Industries and the beginning of earning a living
from his own teaching, he was pleased to accept. Among
the advantages, it gave him many useful contacts and easy access to old documents
in the society's library.
One day the librarian was having a clear out. Max
spotted one book in the rubbish bin with the interesting title The Development
of the Psychedelic Individual by John Curtis Gowan (ref 3-5). The librarian
had probably reacted to the word “psychedelic”; remember this was
the Sixties - the traditionalists in the society maybe thought that it was
about drug orgies. They could
not have known that Gowan was a very erudite, almost Victorian, professor
at California State University who used the word correctly to mean “mind-revealing” or “mind-manifesting”. The
book’s subtitle, A Psychological Analysis of the Psychedelic State and
its Attendant Psychic Powers, tells us more. This
book had a great influence on Max for here was a Western collection and discussion
of the same marvellous and sometimes incredible stories that are found in
the East and considered to be a basic facet of existence; stories that in
the West are usually regarded, if they cannot be explained by the intellect,
as fantasy or illusion.
When Max began teaching biofeedback and altered
states of consciousness in 1973, he had to be very careful how he presented
his material because the average person was not yet ready for the leap into
self-awareness and the attendant questioning of dogma; even yoga was a word
which you did not use in polite company. Of course there were many others
around who were on a similar quest but you did not declare yourself unless
you were fairly sure that your listener was of similar persuasion.
So Gowan was a shining bright Western light on
those stories of mind-manifestation that are usually dismissed as illusion.
He collected many thousands of reports that together make a fascinating body
of evidence for phenomena which are beyond explanation at the material level.
Of course, many such reports are likely to be
pure fabrication; stories of little green men appearing from a space ship
are rejected by Gowan not because they are little and green but because it
is extremely unlikely that beings from another planet could have our physiology.
Gowan brought a scholarly awakened mind to these reports, and the ones he
collected constitute impressive evidence for psychic phenomena appearing
in the world around us. A few quotations from the book illustrate his breadth
of interest:
Everyday concepts of firmness, hardness, weight and form, which give the material universe a certain comforting quality, are seen in the light of modern physics to be illusions of perception.
The 300-year experiment, by which Western man attempted to achieve absolute
certainty by barring from the real world the non-objective facts of subjective
experience, has not worked.
If scientific theories have proved insufficient to explain the universe,
anthropomorphic religious doctrines have proved equally unsatisfactory.
The inner world of man does not need to be buttressed by sectarianism but
is a self-validating experience which exists in its own right.
Psychedelia (mind expansion) is a developmental stage and implies experience
in the psychic world. It is necessary to investigate that world in as scientific
a manner as possible.
Psychedelia is a stage on the road to self-actualisation and partakes
of some of the “powers” and “glories” of that quest.
In the preface Gowan writes that his book is for the 21st century. His mission is to bring psychology back to its true meaning - the science of the soul. He continued his calling with further studies: Operations of Increasing Order, which was rather Buddhist in nature; Trance, Art and Creativity and, finally, a book of stories written in the manner of traditional teaching stories, called Enveloped in Glory.
I was fortunate to meet Gowan when he made a
visit to England. He and Max seemed to have come from the same mould. So
a book which was found in the rubbish bin became almost a bible to Max and
had a profound effect on his thinking; its manifestation at the appropriate
moment could be taken as an example of psychedelia and synchronicity.
References
3-2. The
Living Brain. W Grey Walter. Duckworth
and Co 1953.
3-3.
Emotions and Bodily Changes: A Survey of Literature on Psychosomatic Interrelationships.
Flanders Dunbar. Columbia University
Press, New York 1935.
3-4. Cosmic
Consciousness. Richard Bucke MD. University Books 1961.
3-5. The
Development of the Psychedelic Individual. John Curtis Gowan. Privately published. Available from his son John Gowan, 472 Central Chapel Road,
Brooktondale N.Y 14817 USA.