We Can Recreate Our Minds

Looking down onto Exeter from the Tree


In Defense of Sensuality
John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930

Page 199

What we have to do is to realise that we can re-create our minds, our whole intellectual and aesthetic powers, at our free will. To do this we must have faith. It is absurd to leave such a miraculous power as faith to all manner of mountebanks, charlatans, and quacks. We must have faith in the experiments of our own inmost will. Not a biological change, not an evolutionary change has ever occurred that has not been the creation of a particular organic will. And we must will not only the hardening and tightening of our “ego” but also its loosening, its relaxing, its liquefaction, its becoming nothing… we must become nothing in order to become everything! We must be as weak and ubiquitous and yielding as air and water, in order to be as formidable as space and time…

…what the individual person must do who has discovered the magical secrets of loneliness is to value nothing, hold nothing of importance, except the actual experiences of his own soul. In place of regarding his day-dreams as a weakness, he will regard them as the only reality.

Let Us Confess the Truth

The Horseshoe at Mere

Let us confess the truth. This divine-devilish First Cause is reached by our inmost soul and touched by our inmost soul at innumerable points. We have, each of us, the power of tapping Its magnetic contradictory energies. When we are obsessed by evil, we tap Its cruel destructive energy; when we are obsessed by good, we tap its beneficent creative energy. Between It and us there is an umbilical cord: we are Its offspring – Its latest-begotten. We are It…

Page 198
In Defense of Sensuality
John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930

The Whole Secret of Life

Kimber Hill, North Cadbury

The whole secret of life depends upon the kind of sensuality that your inmost nature allows to itself. There is a witless, restless, brutal, unintelligent “pleasure-seeking” that is the extreme opposite of the diffused sensuality I am advocating here. And it is this garish, frivolous, brainless, restless pleasure-seeking that, more than anything else, is the enemy and destroyer of that delicious, dream-creating, contemplative sensuality which is the purpose of all intelligent life. This crude, brutal “having a good time” is as alien from real ecstatic happiness as is one’s absorption in business. It is far more deadly and far more evil than any practical work. Some kind of work it behoves us all to undergo, thus paying back what we owe to the human race for food and shelter. But we do not owe it to the human race that we should waste our precious time and spoil the sweet privacy of our secret delights by taking the remotest interest in those absurd “sports” as they are called… dictated by the silly fashions of the hour to such an extent that even their vulgarity is not fresh or spontaneous…

In Defense of Sensuality
John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930
Page 190

The Purpose of Life

Looking to Georgeham, from the hills above Croyde

… The purpose of life is entirely individual and personal, a certain secret adjustment between ourselves, as lonely organic unites of consciousness, and the imponderable multiverse that surrounds us. We each, if we have any sense of honour or any virtue in us, feel we must share the practical labour of housing, feeding, and clothing the naked bodies of men; but all this is merely the means of life, Life itself, the purpose and entelechy of life, does not even begin until both the tiresomeness of “work” and the tiresomeness of “play” are laid aside and we obtain leisure to enjoy those dreamy, sensual, imaginative feelings out of which our inmost identity or interior “ego” weaves its unique material material-spiritual cocoon.
Everyone has a natural right to advocate the kind of economic or political arrangements – however shocking to the majority-opinion – that one feels lends itself best to the housing, clothing, and feeding of human beings. But all these matters are irrelevant to the main issue. Whatever economic or political system we ironically endure or passionately seek to bring about, out real life goes on its way, through good luck and bad luck, through comfort, through poverty, seeking its true happiness in the imaginative sensuality of its contemplative day-dreams.

In Defense of Sensuality
John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930
Page 191

A Doctorine Hanging in the Void

Braunton Burrows


… Once more let me repeat. Every Oriental philosophy that would make us indifferent to happiness is a blasphemy against life. And they are refuted once for all by every plant that drinks the rain, by every animal that eats the grass, by every infant that is suckled by its mother , by every lover who embraces his mistress, by every girl who picks flowers in a field. “Let us bear the pain as well as we can, for the sake of enjoying the pleasure.” This is the cry of life itself , life’s one and only cry; life’s cry when it is born, life’s cry when it comes to die.
How, in a world like this – a world calling upon us to respond to so much pain, to so much pleasure – can any being imagine in its mystical folly, that it has made the best of life, when at its death it can only exclaim, “ I have learnt to be indifferent to both happiness and suffering”! Such a last word is the utmost confession of abysmal defeat. And to this defeat, to this blasphemy against life, to this monstrous death-cult, all those Oriental metaphysicists tend who deny the breathing, quivering, vibrating, bleeding difference between happiness and unhappiness, between pleasure and pain.

The doctrine that life could not exist without this dualism of pleasure and pain is a doctrine that no man can prove. It is a doctrine hanging in the void. Surely it is not inconceivable that the First Cause, which is responsible for this dualism, might, by using Its freewill, have managed to reduce the pain of the world to a kind of minimum – just enough of it to break up the paradisic monotony! Instead of allowing the balance on the good side to be no greater than it is? Why could not the First Cause almost overcome, if not quite overcome, the evil in Its own nature? Well, there it is! It is not much help to ask such a question. The First Cause remains, just as we and the universe of all souls remain, with something - a considerable shade, a moiety a fringe, a margin – left over, wherein the good does have an advantage over the evil…

In Defense of Sensuality
John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930

Page 188

I Have Deliberately Named My Philosophy

Equinox Fire at Danes Road

I have deliberately named my philosophy by the name “ichthyosaurus” in order to challenge that bastard sense of humour which is always being exploited by the inquisitors of the Status Quo to kill the new shoots of thought…

In Defense of Sensuality
John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930

Page 201

All Sensuous Moments

Along from Dunkery Beacon

….All sensuous moments, all divine moments occur in solitude and silence – except in the single case of exchanging ideas with anyone you have singled out to love. And in that one exception it is in the silences that follow the words, where the countenance is illuminated and the eyes wet with tears, rather than in the words themselves, that the ecstasy is consummated, between the “good” in the twi-natured First Cause and the “good” in each of the excited interlocutors of cosmic rapport is reached.

Life is far too precious a thing, far too short a thing, to waste it on acquaintances. But there is no need to be unkind. Propitiate all living creatures. Be reverential and considerate to all living things, human and non-human. Visit the grave of someone who is dead, everyday. Remember that human beings have the power of creating a sort of half-consciousness in dolls and in stuffed birds and in other so-called “inanimate” things. Be religious in the only real, deal sense. That is to say, indulge fetish-worship to the extremist limit. Thus in your imaginative life the beast-gods of the remote Past will beckon to the beyond-human gods of the remote future…

…Between such a one (as John Cowper Powys calls an ichthyosaurus half-god – one who is in the “I am I” state of being, in solitude of thought, without the baggage of the tribe) and the dying leaf dropped in the gutter, or any deserted and broken object that has been endowed with an obscure half-life by the unconscious creative “aura” of the human touch, there is a magnetic link. Thus it may well be said, as Apuleius maintained, that the world is full of dethroned and bewitched and abject little gods. The world is pluralistic and full of magic; and it is a grievous mistake, and one of the chief and most obstinate causes of man’s present misery, that people have given up polytheism. Not to worship the sun and moon and earth and sea, and each one of the planets and stars, is to make a pompous ass of yourself. They are all gods and they can all answer prayers… Every living soul, if it cares to demand it, can be made true even if there is no conscious life after death. There are a great many mores forces at work than the merely conscious ones. Our attitude toward the First Cause (JCPs description of an ultimate creator, a dual natured force behind the cosmos) need not be religious. It ought not to be so unless we are consciously forgetting the evil side of this Ultimate Being and thinking only of its good side. It is best to worship the “little gods” and defy the First Cause. Thus, what we should really aim at is to become idolaters. The essence of poetry is idolatry. Our modern machine-made misery come from the fact that we shrink from natural idolatry. It has become a moral compulsion with us to shrink from this – to be what is considered “reasonable” is the new-fangled fashion. Such arid and lifeless “rationality” is far more removed from the real secret of life than the craziest superstition.

In Defense of Sensuality
John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930

Page 88

A Migratory Spirit

Across to the Bristol Channel Through the Trees

To suggest as even possible that one can take a view of life that extends outside the normal human consciousness – that reverts, in fact, to the remote vegetable-world in the one direction, and anticipates some super-human godlike sense-life in the other direction – seems to these ugly watch-dogs of human prisons and privies the last word of the ludicrous.

There is evolution in other respects. Everybody believes that the trunk of the elephant evolved and that the neck of the giraffe evolved and that the prickles of the ea-urchin evolved and tat the uprightness of Homo Sapiens evolved. Why should not this “ichthyosaurus-philosophy” prove to be something that emanates from the beginning of a new evolutionary phase? Whey should not the particular kind of ecstasy, the wretched and crude rudiments of which it has been given me to describe, turn out to be a new evolutionary phenomenon like the elephant’s trunk, the urchin’s prickles, the sea-horse’s scales, the neck of the giraffe, the spots of the leopard?

Happiness, ecstasy, are not entirely material like these; but they undoubtedly have a material basis. Why should not this ichthyosaurus-book be a straw upon the wind, indicating that certain individual human beings are going to develop new powers on psychic-sensual happiness? Man has develop brain power and love-power and torture-power; why should he not develop happiness-power? In fact, it were not offence to the noble and true Rousseau-doctrine of “the equality of all souls” if we maintained that in the world around us now are certain human beings, in every class of society – solitary, fantastic, grotesque, human beings, the laughing stock of the vulgar herd – who have developed a power of secret, overbrimming, exquisite happiness – like the happiness of certain mystics and saints in the past – which is just as different from the rival pleasures and silly boredoms of the others, as the neck of the giraffe is different from the neck of the mongoose.

The great thing is to make perpetual mental war upon the whole tone, temper, and morale of modern existence in a commercial community. The great thing is to convert as many individuals as possible to the idea of living a static life in place of a dynamic life, a contemplative on e in place of an active one. Let all honest men and women earn their living in an honest way, let them recognise that they owe nothing more to humanity. Each must do his job to keep the thing going. But the wiser you are, the more you will reduce the burden of your job to the narrowest limits; and then - send Society to the devil!…

…The thing to do is to think of yourself not as a human being at all, but as a migratory spirit, at present inhabiting a human body. One ought constantly to make a definitive introspective effort to detach one’s “ego” from its human envelope and contemplate that envelope with humorous detachment. There is much more in this particular gesture than has yet been realised. But one of the most natural ways of using it is to separate your inmost soul from its human associations. Thus you can think of your “ego” as your real self, and regard it as a humorous accident… that you were ever lodged in a human covering… It is only then that you find yourself instinctively feeling your natural link with a beetle “rolling a ball of dung,” or a yellow gnat drinking pig’s urine, or a little, soft, green maggot inside a splash of cuckoo-spit.

In Defense of Sensuality
John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930

Page 201

The Beatific Vision

Looking to Hoy

listen to http://www.myspace.com/tapesthlm - Marui Hito: Tenniscoats

... this ecstasy swings for ever backwards and forwards, like the motion of an everlasting pendulum or the advance and retreat of the sea-tide. The male hath his Beatific Vision in his unremitted possession of the female; she in her unremitted passivity in being thus possessed. Their mutual ecstasy is something that isolates them from all the rest of the universe. They come to resemble that strange double-natured being to whom Plato in his Symposium makes such fanciful and playful reference. Before they met each other, they went about through the world maimed, abortive, disillusioned, quasi-moribund. But now that they have met, they have become two in one. They have come to resemble those two horned flames in whose inseparable conjunction Dante beheld the eternal fate of Ulysses and Diomed! It is, indeed, as if, enclosed in the same hollow opalescent shell of ecstatic isolation, the male held the female in a perpetual trance, while the female, responding to this act of possession in an eternal dream of abandoned self-immolation, would as soon perish as awaken!

Love of this kind... could endure in exactly the same psychic-physical state without a flicker of change - the male possessing, the female possessed - for thousands of years. It is clear proof that the patient and subtle Marcel Proust was emotionally very limited, that he should be continually insisting that change and novelty and jealousy and disturbance should be so necessary to love...

...What makes such an encounter so great a thing is that it is the blending of two eternal dialogues in a fivefold eternal dialogue. It is therefore an absolute living quincunx - the number which, according to Sir Thomas Browne, is the most lucky of all. Each of the two lovers is a self confronting a not-self. Each of the two keeps up its indignant dialogue with their First Clause, which is , of course, the hypothetical substratum of every inflowing impression composing both their not-selves. And in addition to this, each converses consciously or unconsciously with the other. Every pair of real lovers in this deep physical-metaphysical embrace make up a third entity, the united multiple of alternate gratitude and indignation - is the cumulative voice of the Number Five. The vast mass of animals, fishes, reptiles, plants, share in this universal planetary love-making and in its fivefold ecstasy. No human speech is theirs; but a vibration radiates from every such perfect embrace, which creates a new pattern in the fluctuating taper sty of the wind-blown cosmos.

Each pair of lovers, isolated in its planetary shell, is for ever gathering more and more magnetic power wherewith to enjoy the good and to defy the evil of that ultimate First Cause which is responsible - through the medium of Chance - for their having come together at all. Never for one second do they forgive this First Cause for the horrible suffering which they know exists around them. From their united ecstasy there is for ever projected a protest against this suffering, and an out-jetting godlike command - quivering with the good-will of thier own chance-favoured happiness - that this suffering should be lessened and that all living sentiences should attain pardon and peace.

page 140
John Cowper Powys
In Defence of Sensuality
1930

Ancestral Memory

Looking to Long Knoll, Maiden Bradley


... when one thinks how many indurated common impressions of the monotonous incidents of daily earth-life and daily seashore-life must linger in the convoluted fibres of ones's ancestral memory, is it any wonder that a touch of sharp-blowing air or a glimpse of fast-driving mist can melt our bones with a sudden ecstasy "too deep for tears"? Oh, it is time, it is time, for an entirely new philosophy to arise - a philosophy setting free the suppressed longings of our nature for cool, large lonely imaginings, for sensuous feelings, vague, delicious, and dim, that are far deeper and more precious than any conceivable overt action!...

John Cowper Powys
In Defence of Sensuality 1930
page 134

Man is a Link

The Omphalos in the hills above Kingston Deverill

Man is a link in a long spiral ascent, not finality. And in all of us there are non-human moods and feelings, some of which release long-buried atavisms from the past, while others contain hints and premonitions of what will be or what might be in the remote future.

The disturbing and magical power of human freewill renders any kind of determinism impossible. All manner of incredible experiences, anticipating the future are to be expected. So also are all manner of incredible reversions. We have no right to assume that in the process of biological variation the whole advantage is with the present condition of human life. In the great process of cosmic change, many states of existence contained elements of consciousness superior rather than inferior to what we possess as human beings to-day. Because there has been change we have no right to take for granted that there has invariably been progress.

The power of the human will in relation to biological evolution is much more important than is usually realised. Certain distortions of human "reason" in the direction of mechanical logic - an altogether misleading and quite paltry by-alley of modern thought - have done untold harm in abrogating from the power and dignity of this creative sorcery within us. The moment any human soul begins to have faith in itself, in its unfathomable potentialities, in its untried powers of will, a great flood of liberation sweeps through it.

Every individual personality is like a vast cavern with endless avenues and stairways, leading up and down, leading north, south, east, and west. All have that in them which belongs to the vegetable world. All have that in them which belongs to a still earlier world inorganic stellar nebulae. And we also have moods of strange prophetic premonition in which we anticipate in our feelings the feelings of those mysterious superhuman beings who in the process of time will take the place of humanity... (!)

In Defence of Sensuality

In Defence of Sensuality
John Cowper Powys
Victor Gollancz Ltd 1930

Page 88

….All sensuous moments, all divine moments occur in solitude and silence – except in the single case of exchanging ideas with anyone you have singled out to love. And in that one exception it is in the silences that follow the words, where the countenance is illuminated and the eyes wet with tears, rather than in the words themselves, that the ecstasy is consummated, between the “good” in the twi-natured First Cause and the “good” in each of the excited interlocutors of cosmic rapport is reached.

Life is far too precious a thing, far too short a thing, to waste it on acquaintances. But there is no need to be unkind. Propitiate all living creatures. Be reverential and considerate to all living things, human and non-human. Visit the grave of someone who is dead, everyday. Remember that human beings have the power of creating a sort of half-consciousness in dolls and in stuffed birds and in other so-called “inanimate” things. Be religious in the only real, deep sense. That is to say, indulge fetish-worship to the extremist limit. Thus in your imaginative life the beast-gods of the remote Past will beckon to the beyond-human gods of the remote Future…

…Between such a one... and the dying leaf dropped in the gutter, or any deserted and broken object that has been endowed with an obscure half-life by the unconscious creative “aura” of the human touch, there is a magnetic link. Thus it may well be said, as Apuleius maintained, that the world is full of dethroned and bewitched and abject little gods. The world is pluralistic and full of magic; and it is a grievous mistake, and one of the chief and most obstinate causes of man’s present misery, that people have given up polytheism. Not to worship the sun and moon and earth and sea, and each one of the planets and stars, is to make a pompous ass of yourself. They are all gods and they can all answer prayers… Every living soul, if it cares to demand it, can be made true even if there is no conscious life after death. There are a great many more forces at work than the merely conscious ones. Our attitude toward the First Cause (JCPs description of an ultimate creator, a dual natured force behind the cosmos) need not be religious. It ought not to be so unless we are consciously forgetting the evil side of this Ultimate Being and thinking only of its good side. It is best to worship the “little gods” and defy the First Cause. Thus, what we should really aim at is to become idolaters. The essence of poetry is idolatry. Our modern machine-made misery come from the fact that we shrink from natural idolatry. It has become a moral compulsion with us to shrink from this – to be what is considered “reasonable” is the new-fangled fashion. Such arid and lifeless “rationality” is far more removed from the real secret of life than the craziest superstition...