Celia Green was a british child prodigy. She published several works on the nature of consciousness and the experience of lucid dreaming. I was first exposed to her work as an audio track read by a british actress in an ambient electronic music track. The following passage reveals her thoughs on existential psychology (taken from her work The Human Evasion ):
On the face of it, there is something rather strange about human psychology. Human beings live in a state of mind called "sanity" on a small planet in space. They are not quite sure whether the space around them is infinite or not (either way it is unthinkable). If they think about time, they find it is inconceivable that it had a beginning. It is also inconceivable that it did not have a beginning. Thoughts of this kind are not disturbing to "sanity", which is obviously a remarkable phenomenon and deserves more recognition.
A sane person believes firmly in the uselessness of thinking about what he does not understand, and is pathologically interested in other people.
I should make it plain at once that I use "reality" to mean "everything that exists". This is, of course, a highly idiosyncratic use of the word. I am aware that it is commonly used by sane people to mean "everything that human beings understand about", or even "human beings". This illustrates the interesting habit, on the part of the sane, of investing any potentially dangerous word with a strong anthropocentric meaning.
Particular attention should be drawn to the phrase 'running away from reality' in which "reality" is almost always synonymous with "human beings and their affairs". For example: "It isn't right to spend so much time with those stuffy old astronomy books. It's running away from reality. You ought to be getting out and meeting people." (An interest in any aspect of reality requiring concentrated attention in solitude is considered a particularly dangerous symptom.) This usage leads to the interesting result that if anyone does take any interest in reality he is almost certain to be told that he is running away from it.
Although so far we have given only one illustration, some impression may already begin to emerge of the way in which the sane mind has allocated to all crucial words meanings which make it virtually impossible to state, let alone to defend, any position other than that of sanity.
I am reminded of a book called Flatland in which an imaginary two-dimensional world is described. Towards the end of the book a non-dimensional being is encountered -- a point in space. The observers listen to what it is saying (but of course, since they are of higher dimensionality than its own, the point being cannot observe them in any way). What it is saying to itself, in a scarcely audible tinkling voice, is something like this: "I am alpha and omega, the beginning and the end. I am that which is and I am all in all to myself. There is nothing other than me, I am everything and all of everything is all of me and all of me is all of everything..."
The human race has taken to producing similar noises. Perhaps we would not be surprised at the sociologists murmuring to themselves from time to time, "in society we live and move and have our being", as they scurry from communal centre to therapeutic group, but these days everyone is at it. Progress towards sanity is achieved by abandoning first the desire for omnipotence and then that for exceptional achievement.
It is inconceivable that anything should be existing. It is not inconceivable that a lot of people should also be existing who are not interested in the fact that they exist. But it is certainly very odd.
Young people wonder how the adult world can be so boring. The secret is that it is not boring to adults because they have learnt to enjoy simple things like covert malice at one another's expense. This is why they talk so much about the value of human understanding and sympathy. It has a certain rarity value in their world.
