The Complex Vision

by John Cowper Powys

The possibility that "the invisible companions," or in more traditional language that the "immortal gods," should be driven by the passion of their creative love, to suffer vicarious pain and pleasure through the living bodies of all organic existences, is a possibility that derives a certain support from two considerations, both of which are drawn directly from human experiences. It is certainly a matter of common human experience to be conscious, for good and for evil, of a kind of obsession of one's body by some sort of spiritual power. We may regard these moments of obsession, with their consequent exhilaration or profound gloom, as due purely to the activity of our own soul; and doubtless very often this is the explanation of them. But it is conceivable also that such obsessions are actually due to the presence near us and around us of the "high immortal ones."

That when we experience this "spiritual vampirizing" of our mortal bodies by immortal companions, such an obsession is not necessarily "for good," is a thing inevitably implied in our primary conception of personality. For although a purely demonic personality is an impossibility, owing to the fact that personality is, in itself, an achieved triumph over evil, it must still remain true that the eternal duality of creation and "what resists creation" must find an arena in the soul of an "immortal" even as it finds an arena in the soul of a "mortal."

Therefore we are driven to regard it as no fantastic speculation but as only too reasonable a possibility, that when a physical depression takes possession of us it is due to this "spiritual vampirizing," in an evil sense, by the power of some immortal whose "malice" at that particular moment has overcome "love." But just as the power of physical pain may be dominated and overcome by the energy of love arising from the depths of our own soul, so this vampirizing by the malice of an "invisible companion," may be dominated and overcome by the energy of love from the depths of our own soul.

It may indeed be regarded as certain that it is when the malice in our own soul is in the ascendant, rather than the love, that we fall victims to this kind of obsession. For evil eternally attracts evil; and it is no wild nor erratic fancy to maintain that the malice in the human soul naturally draws to itself by an inevitable and tragic reciprocity the malice in the souls of the "immortal companions."

The second consideration derived from human experience which supports this view of the vicarious pain and pleasure experienced by the gods through the bodies of all organic entities is the psychological fact of our own attitude towards plants and animals. Any sensitive person among us will not hesitate to admit that in watching animals suffer, he has suffered with such animals; or again, that in watching a branch torn from its trunk, leaving an open wound out of which the sap oozes, he has suffered with the suffering of the tree. And just as the phenomenon of bodily obsession by some immortal god may be either "for good" or "for evil" as our own soul dictates, so the sympathy which we feel for plants and animals may be either "for good" or "for evil."

And this also applies to the relation between these bodiless "immortals" and the bodies of all organic planetary life. According to the revelation of the complex vision, with its emphasis upon the ultimate duality as the supreme secret of life, both pain and pleasure are instruments, in the hands of love, for rousing the soul out of that sleep of death or semi-death which is the abysmal enemy.

The philosophies which oppose pain to pleasure, and insist upon the "good" of pain and the "evil" of pleasure, are no less misleading than the philosophies which oppose flesh to spirit, or matter to mind, calling the one "good" and the other "evil." Such philosophies have permitted that basic attribute of the complex vision which we call conscience to usurp the place occupied, in the total rhythm, by imagination; with the result of a complete falsifying of the essential values.

In a question of such deadly import as this, we have, more than ever, to make our appeal to those rare moments of illumination which we have attained when the rhythmic intensity of the arrow-point of thought was most concentrated and piercing. And the testimony of these moments is given with no uncertain sound. In the great hours of our life, and I think all human experiences justify this statement, both pain and pleasure are transcended and flung into a subordinate and irrelevant place. Something which it is very difficult to describe, a kind of emotion which resembles happiness, flows through us; so that pain and pleasure seem to come and go almost unremarked, like dark and light shadows flung upon some tremendous water-fall.

What we are compelled to recognize, therefore, is that pain and pleasure are both instruments of the creative power of life. They only become evil or are used for purposes of evil, when, by reason of some fatal weakening in the other attributes of the soul, the purely sensational element in them dominates the emotional and they become something most horribly like living entities—entities with bodies composed of the vibrations of torment and souls composed of the substance of torment—and succeed in annihilating the very features of humanity.

Pain and pleasure are not identical with the unfathomable duality which descends into the abyss; for pain and pleasure are definitely and quite unmistakenly fathomable; though, as the gods know well, few enough of the sons of mortals reach the limit of them. They are fathomable; for carried to a certain pitch of intensity they end in ecstasy or they end in death. They are fathomable; for even in the souls of "the immortals" they are only instruments of life warring against death. They are fathomable; because they have one identical root; and this root is the ecstasy of the rhythm of the complex vision which transcends and surpasses them both.