by Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson is one of the most prolific, versatile and popular writers at work today. He was born in Leicester in 1931, and left school at sixteen. After he had spent years working in a wool warehouse, a laboratory, a plastics factory and a coffee bar, his first book The Outsider was published in 1956. It received outstanding critical acclaim and was an immediate bestseller.
Since then he has written many books on philosophy, the occult, crime and sexual deviance, plus a host of successful novels which have won him an international reputation. His work has been translated into Spanish, French, Swedish, Dutch, Japanese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and Hebrew.
By the same author
Non-Fiction
The Outsider Cycle:
The Outsider
Religion and the Rebel
The Age of Defeat
The Strength to Dream
Origins of the Sexual Impulse
Beyond the Outsider
Introduction to the New Existentialism
Books on the occult and paranormal
The Occult
Mysteries
Poltergeist
Psychic Detectives
Strange Powers
The Geller Phenomenon
A Dictionary of Possibilities (with John Grant)
Other Non-Fiction
An Encyclopedia of Murder (with Pat Pitman)
An Encyclopedia of Modern Murder (with Donald Seaman)
A Casebook of Murder
Order of Assassins
Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs
Bernard Shaw—A Reassessment
New Pathways in Psychology
The Quest for Wilhelm Reich
The War Against Sleep—The Philosophy of Gurdjieff
The Lord of the Underworld—A Study of Jung
The Craft of the Novel
The Strange Genius of David Lindsay
Frankenstein's Castle
Access to Inner Worlds
Eagle and Earwig (Essays on books and writers)
Poetry and Mysticism
A Book of Booze
Starseekers
Brandy of the Damned (Essays on Music)
Anti-Sartre
Autobiography
Voyage to a Beginning
Fiction
The 'Sorme Trilogy':
Ritual in the Dark
The Man Without a Shadow (retitled The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme)
The God of the Labyrinth
Other Fiction
Adrift in Soho
The World of Violence
Necessary Doubt
The Glass Cage
The Mind Parasites
The Killer
The Philosopher's Stone
The Black Room
The Space Vampires
The Schoolgirl Murder Case
Rasputin: A Novel
The Essential COLIN WILSON
COLIN WILSON
GRAFTON BOOKS
A Division of the Collins Publishing Group
LONDON GLASGOW
TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND
Grafton Books
A Division of the Collins Publishing Group
8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA
Published by Grafton Books 1987
First published in Great Britain by
Harrap Ltd 1985
Copyright © Colin Wilson 1985
ISBN 0-586-06865-1
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Collins, Glasgow
Set in Times
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
CONTENTS
Introduction: The Outsider, Twenty Years On 1976
The Country of the Blind (The Outsider) 1956
An Autobiographical Introduction (Religion and the Rebel) 1957
Personal Notes on Maslow (New Pathways in Psychology) 1972
The Strange Story of Modern Philosophy (Beyond the Outsider) 1965
Everyday Consciousness is a Liar (The New Existentialism) 1966
Magic—the Science of the Future (The Occult) 1971
The Ladder of Selves (Mysteries) 1978
The 'Other Mode' (Frankenstein's Castle) 1980
The Laurel and Hardy Theory of Consciousness 1979
Active Imagination (The Lord of the Underworld) 1984
Human Evolution (A Criminal History of Mankind) 1983
A Report on the Violent Man (A Criminal History of Mankind) 1983
Discovery of the Vampires (The Mind Parasites) 1967
Vision on the Eiger (The Black Room) 1971
Uncle Sam (The World of Violence) 1963
Peak Experience—The Schumacher Lecture 1982
Postscript: The Human Condition 1984
INTRODUCTION
As I look back over fifty-odd books, whose subjects range from mysticism to criminology, I can see that a single thread runs through all my work: the question of how man can achieve these curious moments of inner freedom, the sensation of sheer delight that G. K. Chesterton called 'absurd good news'. Yeats described the sensation in a short poem:
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
Such sensations seem to occur when we relax below some threshold of tension that normally traps us in a more superficial consciousness. There is a sensation of freedom, of peace and serenity. In such moments we also feel that our energies are more-than-adequate to meet any challenge—in sharp contrast to normal consciousness, which always seems to be 'in a hurry', and in which we have a vaguely uncomfortable sense that our energies are never quite adequate.
The feeling of absurd good news is often contradicted by its opposite—what might be called 'absurd bad news'—a feeling that we are helpless victims of forces far stronger than we are. In these moods, it seems that all our 'values' are illusions created by the body. There is a scene in A Farewell to Arms where the hero is being prepared for an operation by a nurse with whom he is in love. He asks her if she will be on duty that night after the operation. She says:
'I probably will. But you won't want me.'
'Yes, I will.'
'No, you won't. You've never been operated on. You don't know how you'll be.'
'I'll be all right.'
After the operation, he admits:
'I was sick, and Catherine was right. It did not make any difference who was on night-duty.'
When he looks at her before the operation, he can see that she is beautiful and desirable; ergo, he will want to make love to her after the operation. He acknowledges that he may feel sick, but he is certain that he will simply overrule his sickness. In the event, it overrules him. The underlying suggestion is that our values, like our desires, are merely physical sensations.
The same thing is suggested even more chillingly in Flecker's Hassan. After the two lovers ha
ve been tortured to death—because the girl has refused to give herself to the Caliph—their ghosts meet by the fountain in the Caliph's garden. The fountain ghost tells her: 'As long as you remember what you have suffered, you will stay near the house where your blood was shed.' She replies: 'We will remember that ten thousand years.' The ghost tells her: 'You have forgotten you are a spirit. The memories of the dead are thinner than their dreams.' And when the wind from eternity blows, she calls to her lover: 'Speak to me, speak to me, Rafi', and his ghost answers: 'Rafi—Rafi—who was Rafi?' Here Flecker sounds a note of pessimism that goes beyond the tragedy of their deaths: the suggestion that they have died for a delusion, and that all men die for delusions . . .
For me, the problem first presented itself at Christmas-time as a child. That marvellous feeling of richness and excitement made it obvious that life is not difficult and boring and repetitive. Then came the new year and return to school, and it was like waking up from a pleasant dream in an icy bedroom. The glow of Christmas seemed an illusion. Yet the moment the moods of happiness and freedom came back—on a day-trip to the seaside or picking blackberries on an autumn afternoon—it was quite plain they were not some kind of delusion or wishful thinking. It was again self-evident that the world was a far bigger and more exciting place than we normally give it credit for.
Now this raised an interesting question. When you have learned to solve some puzzling problem—like how to remove a bicycle tyre or extract a square root—the solution stays in your head permanently; you do not forget it the next day. Yet in the case of this question—whether the 'absurd good news' is a delusion or reality—the 'solution' seemed to evaporate into thin air the next day, so it was impossible even to remember what I had felt so happy about.
I was in my early teens when I discovered that I was not the first person to brood on this problem. It had been encountered by whole generations of writers and artists of the nineteenth century—a movement we call Romanticism. The Romantics were always experiencing these strange moods of delight and relaxation in which they seemed to see the answer to all the problems of existence. And the next day the insight had vanished, leaving them miserable and fretful. This seemed to explain the high rate of suicide and early deaths from tuberculosis among the Romantics.
Here, I could see, the problem had taken a slightly different form. The Romantics suspected that the truth about the world is ordinariness and triviality: that human beings are basically selfish, short-sighted, narrow-minded little animals, and that all these attempts to convince ourselves that we can reach for the stars are a game of make-believe, like children playing at kings and queens. As human beings grow up, they learn to look more dignified and purposeful, but inside every one of us there is still a child whose basic interests are food, amusement and creature-comforts. When we feel tired and discouraged, the child seems to take over again.
My first book, The Outsider, was about this problem: men who experienced moments of intense ecstasy and affirmation, then found themselves dragged down by the 'triviality of everydayness' (Heidegger's phrase) and the misery of unfulfilment. To such men as Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Nijinsky, Dostoevsky, the problem presented itself in terms of Carlyle's 'Everlasting Yes' versus 'Everlasting No'. Paintings like Van Gogh's Starry Night express ultimate faith in the power of life over death; all the same, he committed suicide, leaving a note saying 'Misery will never end'. Yet in the last pages of that book, it became clear that mystics like William Blake and Sri Ramakrishna had come altogether closer to arriving at a satisfactory solution to the problem. This is why my second book Religion and the Rebel—which is really merely the second part of The Outsider—dealt mainly with saints and mystics and religious visionaries.
There was, in fact, a period in my teens when I felt that my own answer might lie in this direction: entering a monastery or travelling to India to study 'the perennial philosophy' at its source. The problem, I felt, amounted to finding something to do, a way of living that would be a direct expression of this urge to explore visionary states of awareness. Every way of living that I explored—from working as a farm labourer to washing dishes in a restaurant—seemed to lead away from my objective, or at best, run parallel to it. It was a frustrating feeling, like trying to approach a mountain which is perfectly visible and finding that no road seems to get you any closer.
After writing Religion and the Rebel this frustration seemed to disappear—I presume because, now I was able to devote my life to writing, I had found a way of living that led straight towards my objective. This certainty increased when, in 1959, I received a letter from the American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who told me about his own discovery that all healthy people seemed to have 'peak experiences'—my 'moments of affirmation'. Maslow believed that it was impossible to induce peak experiences at will, but I felt he was mistaken: for example, Graham Greene had done precisely that by playing Russian roulette with a loaded revolver. In due course I was to write a biography of Maslow, the first chapter of which is included in this book.
I continued to explore the problem in the remaining four books of the 'Outsider cycle', investigating the role of the imagination in The Strength to Dream, and of sexual ecstasy in Origins of the Sexual Impulse. Beyond the Outsider, the sixth volume of the series, was my most comprehensive attempt to date to summarize the problem. From the beginning, I had been aware that the problem can only be fully understood in terms of history—the evolution of man in the past ten thousand years or so. It was essential that I should spread my net as wide as possible. Yet as far as reaching an audience was concerned, this attempt was often self-defeating; I could see why hostile critics thought my books were merely summaries of cultural history. Yet I felt there were times when, by this method, I succeeded in going straight to the heart of the matter; the chapter called 'The Strange Story of Modern Philosophy' is a good example.
I had been on two lecture tours of America in the early 1960s, and the need to repeat my ideas over and over again had the effect of enabling me to see new perspectives. I made yet one more attempt to summarize all I had done so far in a small volume called The New Existentialism. I argued that the philosophy we call existentialism is actually 'Romanticism Mark Two'. The Romantics felt that the human spirit is engaged in a hopeless battle with a hostile world, and that the end is bound to be defeat and despair. The existentialists—Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus—started from the sane position, but arrived at a slightly less gloomy conclusion: man is free, he has a certain power of choice, even if life is totally meaningless. Hemingway summarized it in the phrase 'A man can be destroyed but not defeated'. My own feeling was that I had no wish to be either defeated or destroyed: there had to be another answer. Hence my attempt to create a more optimistic form of existentialism—a kind of 'Romanticism Mark Three'. This, I would say, is still a fairly good summary of my basic aim. The present book includes the central chapter of The New Existentialism.
At this point I found myself exploring the problem in a new direction. I was asked by an American publisher to write a book about 'the occult'. Ever since childhood I had been interested in the paranormal, and had explored it in books like Rasputin and The Man Without a Shadow. But I had never felt that it had any bearing on this question of 'absurd good news'. Now I began a systematic study of 'psychic powers' and I saw I had been mistaken. In the past ten thousand years or so, man has deliberately narrowed his consciousness in an effort to achieve the efficiency necessary to survive. One of the powers he has suppressed is the faculty we call 'second sight', and the example of Peter Hurkos—who regained the power when he fell off a ladder and smashed his skull—struck me as specially significant. In narrowing his faculties, man has also suppressed those states of 'cosmic consciousness', heightened awareness, experienced by mystics like Boehme and Blake. These faculties can, to some extent, be regained by means of drugs such as mescalin and LSD: but they merely put back the clock of human evolution to an earlier stage. It was clear to me that we can regain these powe
rs by another method: by the deliberate intensification of consciousness by intellectual and spiritual disciplines. Many people have achieved accidental glimpses of such states—Proust, for example, experienced such a state when he tasted a cake dipped in herb tea. This heightened power of perception I called 'Faculty X', and the concept is explored in the first chapter of The Occult, included herein.
Many readers of the earlier books must have felt that this preoccupation with 'the occult' was a change of direction. I knew differently: that it was a breakthrough into a new field of exploration. There is a direct connection between psychic powers, mystical awareness, and the control over heightened states of awareness achieved by Gurdjieff. I made this connection clear in the introductory chapter of Mysteries, before launching into a more general study of 'cosmic forces' and man's ability to 'tune in' to them.
I was writing the last section of Mysteries when I came upon The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, and for the first time grasped the full significance of split-brain research. I had always been aware that one of the basic problems of consciousness is that man has two selves inside his head and that, as I put it in 'The Strange Story of Modern Philosophy', 'the left side of the mind doesn't know what the right side is doing'. But I had not realized that my intuition was so literally true—that we literally have another 'self' living in the right hemisphere of the brain, and that the person I call 'me' lives in the left hemisphere. There was no space in Mysteries to explore this insight to the full; yet I could see that it provided the unifying principle I had always been looking for. The existence of the two halves of the brain explained poetic inspiration and 'psychic powers'. I explored the implications of split-brain physiology for the first time in a little book called Frankenstein's Castle, written for a friend, Robin Campbell, who was just launching his own publishing firm. Not long after this I encountered in Finland a man who seemed to have achieved a remarkable breakthrough in learning to make active use of his right brain; the result was Access to Inner Worlds, The Story of Brad Absetz. In both these books I feel that I have come close to a definitive solution of the problem I first propounded in The Outsider. Lack of space decided me against printing all but a brief extract from Frankenstein's Castle in the present volume, but their basic ideas are summarized in the piece on 'The Laurel and Hardy Theory of Consciousness', as well as in the Schumacher Lecture 'Peak Experience'.