A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

degree murder. The artist may also suffer an identity crisis, a sense of ‘Who am I?’ Yet the fact that
he is an artist means that he can never be wholly unaware of the ‘invisible helper’.
We are beginning to see our way towards a solution of the problem - not just of crime, but of the
‘bottleneck’ in human evolution.
The problem - it should now be clear - is that the left-brain ego is unaware of its powers. But then,
awareness is something that can be cultivated.
Consider what happens when a hypnotist orders a man to do something that he would normally find
very difficult - to stop smoking, or to lie rigid across two chairs while someone jumps up and down
on his stomach. What the hypnotist has done is to immobilise the left brain - to stop it from
‘interfering’. But if we are capable of these unusual feats, why can we not order ourselves to do
them? Because, as we have seen, the left-brain ego does not believe it has the power. It is unaware
of its own capacities.
But this seems absurd. Every time we become deeply interested in something, every time we
experience ‘holiday consciousness’, every time we perform some difficult action easily and
unselfconsciously, the ego realises that it has a powerful ‘backer’. There are even times, when we
are feeling very relaxed and optimistic, when this backer seems to be able to foretell the future, to
prevent our making stupid mistakes, even to arrange interesting coincidences. It is presumably this
right-brain ‘backer’ who quite gratuitously tells us to expect a letter from someone we haven’t
heard from in years. In any case, most normal and healthy people have plenty of experience of the
‘invisible backer’. So it seems preposterous to say that our chief problem is that the left brain is
unaware of its powers.
But then, experience is one thing, awareness another. I may be able to drive a car without knowing
the first thing about internal combustion engines. I may be able to use a mathematical formula to
solve a problem without knowing why it works. I may be able to solve the Rubik cube without
knowing why a certain sequence of twists rearranges the sides. But in each of these cases, a certain
mental effort can enable me to understand what I am doing, to see precisely why it works. Paying
attention to the moments of close collaboration between the right and left brain can endow us with
conscious awareness of some of the powers of the left brain.
Abraham Maslow discovered that, when he talked to his students about peak experiences, they
began to recall peak experiences which they had had in the past, but had not noticed at the time,
flashes of that deep sense of well-being. He also discovered that, when his students began to talk
and think about peak experiences regularly, they began to have more peak experiences. The left
brain was beginning to recognise the ‘invisible helper’ and its power to induce those sudden
moments of supreme well-being.
And now, at last, we can see the outline of the solution to this problem of human criminality and
human evolution.
Once we are aware of some fact, we can begin to absorb it into consciousness until we know it
instinctively. And in the past century, we have slowly become aware of the basic facts about
consciousness. Freud’s insight into the unconscious, Husserl’s into intentionality, Adler’s into the
will-to-power, Maslow’s into the peak experience, Frankl’s into the law of reverse effort, Sperry’s
into the double brain: all these have revolutionised our knowledge of human psychology. What has
emerged is the recognition that consciousness is not a passive mirror that reflects experience. It is a