Let me attempt a summary.
     Life on earth has been around for about two billion years.  But life invented reproduction--and death--only about half a billion years ago.  This is when life learned to control its instinctive processes by means of the 'robot'.[*]
     Man is not much more than two billion years old.  And the 'brain explosion' that turned him into earth's most dominant inhabitant occurred only half a million years ago.  So the instinct-robot alliance is about a hundred times as old as ego-consciousness.  Even then, as we have seen, consciousness continued to play the passive role, leaving all the real decisions to instinct.  Somehow, it had to be forced to stand on its own feet.  And in recent history, not many thousands of years ago, the modern 'bicameral mind'[**| emerged.  Then man's real troubles began:  loss of direction, alienation, the 'divided self', neurosis, self-mistrust.  In fact, it could be argued that this partitioning of consciousness was a disaster.  Human life became a misery.  This is why so many of the ancient philosophers, from Ecclesiastes to Aristotle, complain that life is 'vanity of vanity'.
     But all this, we have seen, came about because ego refused to play its full part in the 'triple alliance'.  But then, perhaps 'refused' is too harsh a word.  It has failed to play its part because, like an actor who has failed to learn his lines, it is not sure what part it is supposed to be playing.  It is inclined to attribute its misery and alienation to the unkindness of fate.
     In fact, it is in the position of Ramakrishna's grass-eating tiger.  Ramakrishna told a story of a tiger that gave birth to a cub as it sprang on a flock of sheep.  The cub grew up among the sheep, and learned to bleat and eat grass.  One day another tiger attacked the flock and was astonished to discover a tiger that bleated like a sheep.  It grabbed it by the scruff of the neck, dragged it to a nearby pool, and made it look at its reflection, saying 'Look, you are a tiger, not a sheep.'  Then it smeared blood on the mouth of the grass-eating tiger, which--slowly, and with some hesitation--came to accept its new identity.
     This problem of alienation and self-division came to preoccupy philosophers only in recent centuries:  Kierkegaard was one of the first to state it clearly when he wrote (in Repetition):  'Who am I?  What am I doing here?...  Why was I not consulted?'  In the twentieth century, Sartre labelled this sense of alienation 'nausea', while Camus called it 'absurdity'.  When I first became preoccupied with the problem--in the second part of the 1940's--Kierkegaard, Kafka, Sartre and Camus were the major influences on the post-war generation of intellectuals.  It was natural that I should take them as my starting point when I embarked on my own analysis of the problem in The Outsider.  Yet in the last chapter of that book, I quote Ramakrishna's parable of the grass-eating tiger.  It was already clear to me that the sense of alienation and absurdity was some kind of misunderstanding.
     What I had grasped intuitively, and what slowly formed itself into an intellectual conviction, was that misery and alienation are not laid upon us by fate.  They are due to the failure of the ego to accept its role as the controller of consciousness.  All our experiences of happiness and intensity force the same conviction upon us, for they involve a sense of mastery.
     It struck me that if this is correct, then certain consequences should follow:  that a deliberate policy of control ought to bring an immediate change in the quality of consciousness.  To use my earlier simile:  if we take the trouble to tighten the link between the tap and the hosepipe, so that the 'leakage' becomes minimal, then our available inner-pressure ought to rise dramatically.
     A few days of constant effort convinced me that this is precisely what happens.  It also brought an insight that I have been trying to assimilate ever since.  I can only express it--inadequately--by saying that we have misunderstood the purpose of left-brain consciousness.  It is not intended to be an 'observer', but a gatherer of power.  William James says:  'Most of us may...learn to live in perfect comfort on much higher levels of power.'  In fact, we must learn to live on a far, far higher level of power.  And that is what the left-brain was intended for.  Its far-sightedness gives it the ability to summon power.  Yet it hardly makes use of this ability.  It could be compared to a man who possesses a magic machine that will create gold coins; so that he could, if he wanted, pay off the national debt and abolish poverty.  But he is so lazy and stupid that he never bothers to make more than a couple of coins every day--just enough to see him through until evening...Or perhaps he is not lazy:  only afraid of emptying the machine.  If so, the fear is unnecessary.  It is magical, and cannot be emptied.

* 'robot' here refers to the mechanical self of learned behavior that needs little attention from consciousness.

** 'bicameral mind' refers to a two-sided brain functioning of which one is not self-aware,  i.e. no self-consciousness
 
 

return