becomes a real force. To feel something is not presented in your work as in some sense reductive; it actually has meaning. Feeling is a genuine response.
Lessing: It is interesting, you use the word feeling to cover both emotion and intuition. Because intuition has been banished from our culture, emotions are spread to include it, whereas in actual fact I think there is thinking and there are emotions and there is intuition which is something quite different. It is fascinating. You see it on television, for example, in God knows how many series. For example, Star Trek. Mr. Spock has no emotions and therefore he is handicapped, but the good Earth people have emotions and therefore they are on a higher level. The word emotion has been spread to include intuition and this is how we get round it. Intuition is not the property of women or of sensitives; everybody has intuition but somewhere in the past, probably in the Renaissance, there was an unspoken agreement to banish intuition. But none of us could operate for five minutes without it. I think we all use it all the time.
Bigsby: When you talked about evolution did you mean the intensification of those abilities which have decayed. Are you actually anticipating the restoration of these abilities or the intensification of them?
Lessing: I think any human being can, if he watches and listens, use them now. It takes practice.
Bigsby: Is that the appropriate moment to ask you about Sufi?
Lessing: Yes, it probably is. I became interested in this because I had to recognize that what I had experienced and what I was thinking and feeling had got nothing whatsoever to do with my philosophy. This happened when I was writing The Golden Notebook. Writing that book in the form I did forced me to examine myself in all kinds of ways. I was writing about experiences that I had never had. I have had some of them since, let me tell you, but I had to recognize that the way I thought then, my philosophy, was absolutely inadequate. I either had to pretend that I didn’t have the experiences I had, or thoughts I had, or admit them openly. I think enormous numbers of people do this. There comes a point where they have to make a choice and a lot of people decide to forget it. When I got to that point and I examined how I was thinking, the whole progressive package (which is shorthand for all the ideas the young people have now as if they are programmed, which they are – they are all materialists, and socialists and semi-Marxists or something of the kind and there is a whole set of ideas that go together). I decided I could no longer live with it so I started looking around. Now the interesting thing about that – I have described that in The Four-Gated City – is that I simply read extensively in areas which were regarded then as quite kooky, though they are not so much now because, in fact, they have got quite trendy.
I did an immense amount of reading and I came up with certain basic facts. One basic fact was that our education was extremely lacking informationwise. You could be brought up in this culture and not know anything at all about the ideas of other cultures. We are brought up with this appalling Western arrogance, all of us. This is the reason I am glad I haven’t been educated because it seems to me almost impossible not to have this arrogance if you are brought up inside the Western education system. The other idea I came up with was that if I was going to do this seriously, explore this area, it was a dangerous thing to do it without a teacher; people go crazy and they go wandering off. God knows what they don’t do. They go off to Katmandu, etc. So I took a great deal of trouble. I am nothing if not obsessive, perfectionist, and boring when I am faced with this kind of situation, and I put a great deal of time and trouble into looking for a teacher. I went through some experiences which were quite interesting, making mistakes, and then I found Sufism as taught by Idries Shah, which claims to be the reintroduction of an ancient teaching suitable for this time and this place. It is not some regurgitated stuff from the East or watered down Islam or anything like that. And I read a book called The Sufis, which I knew was on its way. I waited for it and read it and thought simply, This is where I might find what I am looking for because my ideas were there and no other place; there was no other place for them. I did not want to become a Christian mystic. I couldn’t possibly be a Christian. I can’t be religious; I haven’t got the religious temperament in the way it is demanded of you. In parentheses, again, Christianity is a very emotional religion. In Hinduism you do not have to be emotional. But Christianity demands an emotional response, and I couldn’t do that. There are other things that demand of you a totally intellectual response, and I couldn’t do that. What I have found is the beginnings of a way of looking at things which unfolds as you go on, and if that is an annoying phrase I can’t help it. You discover all the time. It is not an easy thing.
Bigsby: You said that you couldn’t be religious, but is your outlook pantheistic or does it posit some sort of ultimate being?
Lessing: Is it any help if I say; yes, it believes in God? So what. Do you see the point I am making? Supposing I said it didn’t believe in God? What then? Supposing I said it believed in the Devil? These are words, they don’t mean anything.
Bigsby: But it does talk about oneness, doesn’t it? Is the sense of the oneness, not actually a being external to the self but in a sense the aggregate of the selves, is that what it means by unity?
Lessing: Perhaps I don’t know either. I am still at the beginning of it. You start off shedding prejudices and preconceptions. If I say “mysticism” or “Sufism” I don’t know what your particular set of associations is, but they are likely to be something like the Maharishi, Mantras, Yoga, chanting, dancing up and down, and Islam, something like that, because that is the culture we live in. You begin by shedding the ideas that you have, many of them unconscious. Let’s take the word “teacher.” A teacher is someone who stands at the end of the room on a dais and he lectures to you. But you see this is not a teacher as I have experienced it; it is something quite different, but it takes a long time even when you have accepted that intellectually, to translate it into how you experience what is happening, because all the time, unconsciously, you are thinking, Ah, one day the guru will announce, “My child, this is the truth.” Now I am caricaturing a very deeply rooted psychological need, and I was quite shocked to find how deep it is. One of the things that Shah says is that we are taught all the time in this culture that we are not conditioned, that we are free, that we have made up our own minds all through our lives about what we believe, and that we are here as a product of various acts of will made throughout our life. He will simply say, “I am sorry but this is not so, and in actual fact you have been programmed to want authority; you want to be told what to do, you want a guru, you want something to belong to, you want rules.” Now when he first says this to you, you say, “Oh, come,” but then you are put in a situation where you find out that it is true and very humiliating it is, because it is true. I did want all those things. Well, now, please God, I don’t. But the thing is you learn to shed all the time, not through an intellectual process at all; all the time you are put into situations where you see the truth about yourself and it isn’t at all pretty, actually. It is humiliating.
Bigsby: It seems to me that The Marriages of Zones Three, Four and Five is actually suffused with this kind of thought. Isn’t it about the breakdown of these kinds of assumptions, the recognition of a determinism?
Lessing: You keep talking about determinism. It is the opposite that I have experienced.
Bigsby: Well, Al.Ith, the princess, receives a summons. It is a summons which really doesn’t immediately operate on the conscious mind, but on the subconscious mind. It is a summons which must be obeyed. There is no scope for denial. That is what I mean by determinism; her actions are determined quite apart from her own sensibility. Now isn’t that what you were just talking about, the recognition of that determinism? And indeed the recognition becomes a kind of moral act; it is what you pay, it is what you owe, the recognition of an element of determinism.
Lessing: I don’t think that Marriages
