"Strange Powers" - Colin Wilson lecture notes

[Alada]

Hi All,

A few weeks back I went to a lecture entitled "Strange Powers" given by Colin Wilson, the closing lecture in a series on Alchemy (I missed the others). Having sent a review copy of Secret History to him, the idea was to go and listen then maybe speak afterward about the book, ideas, or whatever happened - he had offered the opportunity to speak after the lecture in a brief email exchange.

So here are my notes from that with some thoughts, questions and 'the conversation that never was' as it were. They are expanded [in the quotes] from available web articles quoting Wilson, as much of what he said during the lecture seems fairly well repeated elsewhere.

"Strange Powers"

Wilson began his talk with discussion of the "German Romantics" around 1775, Goethe et al, and the exploration of 'altered states', of ones feelings, mind, the universe, of what was real or not - the altered state or the regular state?

"I had always been fascinated by romanticism, and recognised that this was the root of the problem. As soon as man begins to feel 'the eternal longing', he also begins to find it hard to cope with the demands of everyday life.
...
As soon as [Negley] began to talk, he went 'into gear', and experienced a sense of being alive. But on an average day, when there was no one to talk to, and nothing to do but struggle on with another autobiographical book [which] went forward with painful slowness, he felt stranded, becalmed. And this was the problem of the romantics, from Goethe onwards.
...
"I was fascinated by these romantics [who] would experience these exquisite moods of universal perception, in which everything was self-evidently good, and in which everything in the universe seems to be connected together, and then suddenly waking up the next morning thinking, "My God, what did I mean by it?" -- the feeling that it was an illusion, that maybe you'd had a drink too many, or whatever. So the question I asked myself from the beginning is, how could you determine which was true -- the moods of intensity, or the suicide note that Van Gogh left saying, "Misery will never end"? The philosophers at the time, when I produced The Outsider -- people like A.J. Ayre and Gilbert Ryle and so on -- would have said, "That's a totally meaningless question. After all, you feel one thing in one mood, you feel another thing in another mood. They're just relative." Now, I could not believe this, because every time I've experienced these moods of intensity it's like going to a hilltop and seeing precisely the same vision, exactly the same landscape below you. It must be solid, or it wouldn't be the same every time. It would be different every time. On the other hand, of course, in what you might call the worm's-eye-view moods, things appear bad in a different way every time. You suddenly feel that the truth is these views of the worm's- eye view are subjective and emotional, and it's only the bird's eye views that are true. I've always believed this deeply -- it's the big that's true, not the small. In other words, close-upness deprives us of meaning. I have always felt this is the basic truth of life. Somehow you've got to get that trick of pulling back and seeing things through a kind of wide-angle lens. As soon as you do this, you instantly go into a state of intense optimism.

This was the problem Wilson explored in his first book "The Outsider", the problem being "how are states so different?" How is it that at moments one can experience a heightened state of aliveness/awareness, yet the rest of the time find the 'normal' state to be mundane or lacking by comparison?

It still seems to be that the whole "Outsider" problem is epitomised in the contrast between Van Gogh＿s painting 'The Starry Night' and the words of his suicide note: "Misery will never end"

It was this question that led Wilson onto the study of religion and mysticism in exploring the idea of "states". He puts the question: "Is there a reliable way to experience the 'night of the starry night'?"

Now Wilson moves on to his contact with the psychologist Abraham Maslow

I think that the main problem is that we have no way of galvanizing ourselves when we are in the low moods. That's the real problem. Now, at this point -- this was two years after I'd written The Outsider -- I came upon this interesting clue in the form of a letter from an American professor of psychology called Abraham Maslow, who wrote to say he'd read a book of mine called The Stature of Man, in which I'd said that I was fed up with the fact that modern literature appears to feel that telling the truth means to express defeat and misery, and that any form of conquest is generally regarded as a fantastic lie. Maslow said that he got sick of studying sick people because then he talked about the sickness, and he instead decided to study the healthiest people he could find. So he asked among his friends, "Who's the healthiest person you know?" And he studied these healthy people, and he made this discovery which no one else had ever made, because nobody else had studied healthy people, which was that healthy people have with a fairly greater frequency what Maslow called the peak experience -- just bubbling experiences of overwhelming happiness, not mystical, just ordinary happiness. The interesting thing was, his students, as soon as they began talking about peak experiences, would say, "Ah yes, I remember now," and begin to describe some precise peak experience they'd had in the past. Not only that -- and this was the really significant point -- as soon as they began talking about their peak experiences to another and discussing them all the time, they began having peak experiences all the time. So in some way, you see, the question of how to create the peak experience depends upon realizing that this is a norm of ordinary human consciousness. It's a perception. It's not an emotion, it's a perception. You turn your face in that direction, towards the peak experience, and it's like looking at something that gives you pleasure, like a mother looking at her baby. You just suddenly bubble over.

I think that we recognize that in our own depths we possess enormous reserves of strength of which we are normally totally unaware. This is what fascinates me. This is obviously what happened to the romantics. They just had these bubbling experiences of power coming up from their own depths, and were startled by this. And what's more interesting, I've noticed again and again when you experience a sense of power coming from your own depths, you are likely to feel that in some way it's coming from the external universe, because it so transforms the universe -- like Van Gogh's vision of the starry night, with all the stars turning into great whirlpools of force and the trees looking as if they're flames rising toward the sky -- it so transforms it that it appears to be an external vision. Of course all that's happening, so to speak, is that you are glowing with light that transforms the external universe. So in all the mystics you get this strange thing. They say the inner becomes the outer, and the outer becomes the inner -- it's characteristic of all the mystical experiences, that. And then, as soon as I began to see this, that it is a matter of sort of inner strength, I became extremely interested in this problem. The question I asked myself was, how then could you create the peak experience at will? Because obviously, if you want to compare that with what you might call the depth experience, the depression, somehow you've got to create them and put them side by side so you can see them side by side, and you see which is higher than the other. Well, I talked to Maslow about this, and Maslow said, "It's impossible. You can't do it. The peak experience comes when it wants to, and it goes when it wants to, and there's nothing you can do about it." Now, the nineteenth-century romantics had said this. You know, Pushkin compares the poet's heart to a coal which is blown into a red glow by the flame of inspiration and then goes black again, and there's nothing he can do about it. And yet, I said to Maslow, "In a sense, you're contradicting your own basic theory, that there are higher ceilings of human nature, that we're free." That's what fascinated me so much, this notion that we are actually free -- that we get these curious moments in which freedom floods over us with a kind of explosion that suddenly shakes us awake. It's what the Buddhists call enlightenment. Whenever it hits you, you get this strange feeling of, "My God, of course." Then of course you wake up the next morning saying, "Of course what?" So the problem was to define it precisely, and the only way you could do this was by learning, if possible, to create peak experiences at will, and that was the problem to which I gave myself after about 1958 -- how could it be done?

And that was the question he repeated again at the lecture, "How do you get back [to the peak experience]?" As above he talks about mood, natural cheerfulness, and that it is "easy" (in my side notes I wrote: "Is it? > General Law > Wishful thinking?"

Wilson now moves onto the problem of mechanicalness, what he calls 'the robot', but rather than a deeper understanding and a method of training/transforming he again seems more interested in quicker routes. He discusses Graham Greene's experiences playing 'Rissian Roulette'

[Green] said that when he heard there was just a click, he had this wonderful feeling of sheer happiness and relief and said it was as if a light had been turned on and he felt as if everything in the world was marvellous.

Wilson equates the above to waking up, that "crisis snaps one out of mechanical habit". So the next question was "how to stop mechanics?"

He describes his own suicide attempt (when he was 16), and how on going into a lab where he was working having decided to drink potassium cyanide, at the point where he lifted the bottle to his lips...

"I suddenly had an extremely clear vision of myself in a few seconds' time with an agonizing pain in the pit of my stomach, and at the same time I suddenly turned into two people. I don't mean that literally, but I mean that there was I, and there beside me was this silly, bloody little idiot called Colin Wilson who was in a state of self-pity and about to kill himself, and I didn't give a damn whether the fool killed himself or not. The trouble was, if he killed himself he'd kill me too. And quite suddenly a terrific sense of overwhelming happiness came over me. I corked up the bottle, put it on the shelf, and for the next few days was in total control of my emotions and everything else. I realized suddenly that you can achieve these states of control, provided that you put yourself in a crisis situation. And that's why throughout The Outsider I keep saying the outsider's salvation lies in extremes.

He describes similar instances in others and his interested in the question of "how to 'fix' the state?" or at least to keep a sense of the perception, of what it means and how to remember thoughts and observations gathered during such states. Wur dit'go?

The subject moves on to "mysteries", alchemy, mesmerism/hypnotism and one Thomson J. Hudson.

In the 1890s, an American newspaper editor called Thomson J. Hudson became fascinated by hypnosis, and went on to write a classic book called The Law of Psychic Phenomena. His interest seems to have begun when he witnessed a hypnotic session in which a rather commonplace young man was placed in a trance by a professor of physiology. The young man was a Greek scholar and the professor pointed to an empty chair and said, 'Allow me to introduce you to Socrates.' The young man bowed reverently to the empty chair. The professor told him that he could ask Socrates any questions he liked - adding that, as Socrates was a spirit, the rest of them could not hear him. He asked the young man to repeat aloud what Socrates said. The young man proceeded to ask Socrates various questions, and then repeated his answers, which were so brilliant and apposite that some people present thought that perhaps the spirit of Socrates really was sitting in the chair. After Socrates, they introduced him to various other modern philosophers, and in each case the answers formed a brilliant and self-consistent system of philosophy. What was happening, of course, is what happens when we dream that we are composing a piece of music, and actually hear magnificent music in our sleep. The right brain seems to have this capacity for sheer creativity.

Hudson observed many such cases, and concluded that we have two people living inside our heads - this was in 1893 - which he called the objective mind and the subjective mind. The objective mind looks out towards the external world and copes with everyday reality - in other words, the left brain. The subjective mind looks inward towards our inner being, and is in charge of our intuitions and our vital energy - in other words, the right brain. The subjective mind, said Hudson, is far more powerful than the objective mind. Under hypnosis, the objective mind is put to sleep, which explains why people become capable of far more under hypnosis than when they are awake. An old trick of stage hypnotists was to tell someone that he would become as stiff as a board, and that when he was placed between two chairs, with his head on one and his feet on the other, two men would jump up and down on his stomach without making him bend in the middle. And of course, he was able to do it. Yet it would have been totally impossible if he was awake. In other words, his 'subjective mind' - or right brain - could make him do extraordinary things under the orders of the hypnotist, and yet would not do them under the orders of his own left brain. Why not? Because the right brain believes the hypnotist, but it doesn't believe your left brain. If your left brain told it that it was going to lie between two chairs and support the weight of two men, it would sense the left brain's lack of confidence, and feel totally undermined.

The astonishing conclusion is that what is wrong with us is lack of 'left-brain confidence'. To our generation, this sounds an appalling heresy. D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller have told us again and again that 'head consciousness' is dangerous and stupid and that we ought to trust the 'solar plexus' - by which they mean our instincts. That sounds very plausible, until we think about hypnosis. Then we can see that the problem is not that 'head consciousness' is overconfident and conceited, but that it is far too weak and diffident.

The above is snipped from comments Wilson made in 1981, but if he still holds this line of thought with regard to solar plexus, then perhaps he is missing a piece of the puzzle in terms of understanding finer energies and how to retain/transform them?

This idea of the "two minds" is then expanded in his talk, that the right brain hemisphere is connected with inspiration, with art and so on and the left with logic and science. With the above possible missing puzzle piece in mind, Wilson puts it that it is the right brain that is "in charge of energy supply".

He goes on to characterise the right/left brain relationship in terms of Laurel and Hardy and has written a book on the subject "The Laurel and Hardy Theory of Consciousness".

I'd known about this split-brain psychology for years -- I mean, I'd known that the right brain is concerned with pattern recognition and all the rest of it, the left brain is concerned with logic and language and mathematics. And it hadn't struck me as terribly interesting. I thought, OK, so what? Then I read this book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, in which he explains that if you split somebody's brain down the middle, which they do to prevent epileptic attacks, they literally turn into two people. This is what interested me so much -- that they become two people, and that the person who actually says "I" lives in the left brain. You know, what Jaynes says is if you show a split-brain patient an apple with the left eye and an orange with the right eye, and you say, "What have you just seen?" he will reply, "An orange." If you say, "OK, write with your left hand" -- which is connected to the right brain -- "what you have just seen," and you don't let him see it, he will write "Apple." You say, "What have you just written?" and he replies, "Orange." If you show him a dirty picture with his right brain, he will blush. If you say, "Why are you blushing?" he says, "I don't know." So obviously I, I don't know, means that I lives in the left brain, and that total stranger lives over in the right. Now, you may say, "But I'm not a split-brain patient." On the other hand, Mozart said that tunes were always walking into his head fully fledged, so he just had to write them down. Now, where did they come from? Obviously, that other self in the right brain, and they walked into the place where Mozart lived. Now, if Mozart was a split-brain patient, so are we all.

And what's more, they're totally disconnected -- disconnected to such an extent that we're not even aware that we have this other person living in the other hemisphere.

I realized that in fact these two were exactly the same as Laurel and Hardy in your movies, and that the person living in the other hemisphere is in fact Stan Laurel. He's the one who sends up all the energy; Ollie is the living you. And somehow they're like lumberjacks at either end of a double-handed saw, whose business is to collaborate. If you once actually get the collaboration of Stan in the other hemisphere, everything is fine.

One is totally creative, but unfortunately is so silent that you don't even know he's there except in your high moods, your intense -- Van Gogh could see his Stan when he was painting A Starry Night, and soon as you know Stan is really there, what I'm saying is that he will always support you, always send up these surges of creative energy when you need them.

Ollie is the left brain, Stan the right, and Ollie drains Stan in a negative feedback loop. "The peak experience is Stan" ... "Contact with Stan is the secret of alchemy"

In this context Wilson mentions the book "A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery", saying it was destroyed because it was "too close to the secret".

Mary Anne Atwood (1817-1910) and Thomas South, her father, published A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery in 1850 - a near legendry and very rare alchemical work, because they quickly withdrew all published copies and apparently burned them in their back yard.

- Mary Anne Atwood wrote "Early Magnetism" in 1846.
- Their startling discoveries-that the ancient mysteries made use of some form of hypnotic trance state. - Mary Anne also wrote "A Suggestive Inquiry Into The Hermetic Mystery With A Dissertation On The More Celebrated Of The Alchemical Philosophers".
- He made only 100 copies at his own expense in 1850.
- He later burned all but a few copies.
- It was reprinted in Belfast in 1918.
- Mary Anne presented one of the few remaining copies of her book to the mystic Anna Kingsford.

"The basic secret is that the mind puts something into the mix"


Here Wilson side-tracks and mentions the "Right Man" theory of A.E. Van Vogt, saying that perhaps the reason the the 'secret' is kept secret, is that "right men might be rather good at it", that they have a capacity, "a peculiar kind of self confidence".

Some excerpts on the theory in this blog entry:
http://phinnweb.blogspot.com/2004_10_01_phinnweb_archive.html
An interesting read in terms of the psychopath and other deformed psychological types we have been looking at lately.

So back to "the mind puts something into the mix". Wilson talks more about psychology of George Pransky and Sydney Banks.

The American psychologist George Pransky had recognised that from the moment we woke up in the morning we were influencing our own states of mind by our thoughts and expectations, and Wilson had outlined a similar idea in his own 'Laurel and Hardy' theory of consciousness.

As soon as you can see this is fundamentally true, as soon as you do things and they work out right, what happens is that you change your self-image. Suddenly, you're promoted - you really are a lance-corporal! It's not really complicated to enact once you've got yourself into the state of mind. Pransky is completely right. It is thought that is the basis of all this. He's the first to see this with absolute total clarity so, in my view, he's the greatest living psychologist."

Pransky had gained his insight from an ordinary non-academic, non-professional working man called Sydney Banks. Banks had been telling a friend how unhappy he was when the friend remarked: "You're not unhappy, Syd, you just think you are". As it sank in, Banks looked at him in amazement. "Do you realise what you've just said?" he asked his friend. What had suddenly struck him was that nearly all our psychological problems arose from our thoughts. What the friend was saying was: people make themselves unhappy with their thoughts. Pessimists do not have peak experiences because they are pessimists. Optimists do have peak experiences because they are optimists. Banks was so overwhelmed by this insight that he began presenting it to audiences. Pransky was one of those who heard him and he was converted from the old pessimistic Freudianism. Pransky noted one interesting thing: all the people at the seminar struck him as exceptionally healthy and cheerful. They were "copers", people who felt in charge of their lives.

"This, I can now see, is the fundamental solution to the problem stated by the existentialists," said Wilson. "They all place undue emphasis on man's weakness and misery, and then insist that this is the human condition. It isn't."

The kind of re-invention of the self which occurred in the promotional experience, and which embraced a vision of fundamental human freedom, also returned one to the existentialist question, he agreed. We could all sustain that vision if we stayed on a slightly higher level of drive, and overcome the problem of the "robot", which is Wilson's term for that mechanism which does so much of our living for us, which allows us to drive our cars, or operate our word processors, hardly without thinking - our "automatic pilot" - but which often takes over completely and eclipses the "real me".

"Those who cope well with life, "copers", can "do things" ... "90% of problems are things that we think we are" ... you have to "put your finger on the right button" (the mind puts something into the mix).

The 'Outsider' can be swept up by a wave of gloom, but as the world gets gloomier, we recognise the opposite possibility. We are "50% robot / 50% real". The robot consumes things, when we are getting tired it is because we are getting more robotic, we become say 54% robot. The "opposite possibilty" (of becoming more "real") is found through reaching and perceiving the hopeless depths of mechanicalness.

If we can tip the other way, become more than 50% real then things change, we can do things. In such a state "I seem to be a verb".

Wilson sets out his idea of seven levels of consciousness, a guide perhaps to where we are on the 50/50 scale:

1. Sleep

2. Dreaming/Waking up

3. 'Nausea' - "the world is too much" a level of low energy

4. Ordinary consciousness - as we are

4.5 "I can win" - things begin to go right when we feel they are - synchronicity

Between 4.5 and 5 a "gap" = peak experience

5 "Spring morning/Holiday consciousness"

6 Magic Consiousness -

What excited me most about Maslow was a concept I found in one of the papers he sent me: the peak experience, or PE. This is that sudden rush of pure happiness that we all experience in moments of 'delight' (or what J.B.Priestley called 'magic'). For me, the real revelation was that Maslow had discovered that all healthy people have 'peak experiences' with a fair degree of frequency. Shelley was wrong when he wrote: 'Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight'. 'Peakers' experience it every day.

The importance of this insight cannot be overestimated. It meant that much of the unhappiness of the Werthers and Obermanns was due to a kind of laziness. These 'outsiders' implied that their unhappiness arose from their intelligence - or, as the hero of Barbusse's L'Enfer put it: 'I see too deep and too much'. Maslow was calling their bluff. It was true that many of Maslow's 'peakers' were ordinary people, like the hostess who looked around the room after a party, and in spite of the wine stains on the carpet, exclaimed 'That was a terrific party!', and went into the peak experience. But there was no good reason why romantic poets and professors of philosophy should not also have the same kind of peak experience.

In short, the peak experience is based on a mental attitude.

7. "Faculty X" [an increased sense of meaning and possibly to effects akin to telepathy or awareness of other energies]


He goes on to talk about states 4/5/6 (says nothing more of "Faculty X"), mentions synchronicity and the digital clock number thing that we observe a lot here, Jaque Vallee, conscious intent, "put yourself into the state and things happen", again this idea "I seem to be a verb"... which brings thoughts of Gurdjieffs notion to "Do" or what Mouravieff calls "savoir faire".

At this point it is starting to sound like YCYOR though, all very upbeat and to the unwary very misleading I think. He didn;t really give much impression that one had to do very much at all, or that there was any great difficulty in trying to develop oneself from the normal state we find ourselves in, to something other. Just spend an hour doing the "pen trick" - which sounded similar to the 'spot starring' meditation described by Mouravieff - and bingo, works every time.

Which is all well and good, but does that "fix" the state? Is THAT alchemy? Well I wonder, there's something going on but it does not sound like transmutation of the coarse to the fine, more like a temporary bridge of some kind. Wilson claims that he can produce the effect much more quickly now, "I know how to do it", that with 20 minutes of concentration, "pushing to a state of intensity" he can now reach a 'peak experience'. ... "I solved the problem".

"Peter Marshall" says the same thing in his book (I didn't catch the title) ... "Ouspensky mentions similar in A New Model of the Universe, describing his experiences." ... Of the seven levels of consciousness "get past 4.5 and you can only go up"

He says that he believes "we are on the verge of a leap" that humanity will do it by "realising", by individuals waking up and all those who can have this influence will affect the whole of reality.

In response to questions at the end, he goes off on a tack that he had not mentioned before. Talks about Graham Hancock and his experiences with the drug eboga, in this context talks about "knowledge being outside of us" of the possibility of a realm of knowledge outside us inhabited by beings that view our world seems small, our squabbles petty by comparison. The woman sat in front of me is nodding at this in a "yes, yes, that's it" kind of way and I'm sat there thinking, "well who said they were the good guys?"

I was left wondering quite what state or "where" the state Wilson was producing in himself was taking him, if indeed he was even in contact or aware of other beings and what influence these may be having - I was reminded of Robert Burton the Fellowship of Friends guy and his description of what he called "influence C", which were beings that appeared to him and other group members and set them "tests/tasks", that never quite sat well with me just on the level of it "felt" out of place.

The last comment in my note book is Wilson describing the process/exercise in terms of "you develop a new muscle" and he tapped his forehead in the 'third eye' position.

So all very interesting, intriguing, yet left one with doubts and questions. Seems he has found some method, but I wonder then in light of his above comment on "I see too deep and too much", if Wilson's whole view skewed to the subjective? That this line stays well clear of any focus on the greater objective reality.

It would seem a very good way to please oneself, but does nothing to help one grasp the problems of the machine, the reality of the 3d world and its nature, the possibility of a hyperdimensional reality and so on. Maybe it is 'advanced' wishful thinking? Perhaps a "corrupted conceptualization based on the false belief that the activation of the physical endocrine system is the same as the creation and fusion of the magnetic center" as the Cs put it?

Afterward, the chance to talk with him at length did not occur, there was only time for a brief discussion. He said he found SH very interesting, "more interesting than the other one" (ponerology), "she certainly has an interesting mind"... he said he found the ideas to go "all over the place". He seemed 'stand-off-ish' like he had not offered to talk in his email, he certainly did not seem to be asking to take the conversation further anyway and I did not press it further.

He made comment regarding getting in touch with Laura directly (I had forwarded Laura's email address), that it was not a good idea that "I fear she may take over my life", a comment he 'closed' the conversation with in a "see ya, wouldn't want to be ya" kind of a way or so it seemed and that was that, 'strange powers' indeed.

 

[Saman]

Hi All,

[...]

"I had always been fascinated by romanticism, and recognised that this was the root of the problem. As soon as man begins to feel 'the eternal longing', he also begins to find it hard to cope with the demands of everyday life.

[...]

But there was no good reason why romantic poets and professors of philosophy should not also have the same kind of peak experience.

In short, the peak experience is based on a mental attitude.

[...]

Maybe the following will shed some light on why SOME romantic poetes and SOME philosophers don't have the same kind of "peak experiences":

"By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher." (Socrates)

Some romantic poets - the one's that feel 'the eternal longing' for being with someone who truly enhances their potential and vice versa - and some philosophers - REAL philosophers in the sense of being seekers of the objective truth working to fulfill this 'eternal longing' by learning why and how it is still lacking in their lives- find it hard to cope with the demands of everday life, that is of the mechanical life, because it is full of lies and lacking of any REAL Love and Truth in the sense of aiding one in the progression of getting closer to being united with their polar opposite due to the daunting demand of learning to discern through the maze of lies told to the self through this mechanical life, and the lies "out there" in this mechanical life - thus, there is this ongoing feeling of being incomplete 'below'.

Then some think that they can fulfill this incompleteness through celibacy, but then there is the following:

"As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent." (Socrates)

If man just wills marriage, he will repent. If man just wills celibacy, he will repent. He will repent in either case because will alone does not lead to the fullfilling 'the eternal longing'. Only marriage of will to knowledge does so, and on the Way of this divine marriage, there is always the feeling of 'the eternal longing'. This longing is the soul fuel which one can tap through the 'right creative self' when the "going gets tough" and continuing to live life here seems to the 'left self' pointless, hopeless, and even absurb.

So what should then one do when the pain from this 'eternal longing' is too much for the organic heart of the 'left self' to bear? "Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for." (Socrates)

In other words, strive to Network and "gain easily what others have labored hard for."

It all comes down to "let him that would move the world first move himself" (Socrates), and
"the greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be." (Socrates)

So I am pretending to BE, in case this pretending might actualize to the "growth" of the REAL potential 'thing'.

 

[Laura]

Some interesting things about Wilson on the Net:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jbmorgan/wilsonat70.htm

(...)

Last year (2000), I felt no little sense of disappointment when another of those potted guides to matters philosophical was published in the UK, this time 101 Key Ideas in Existentialism, without any reference at all to Wilson, whose "new existentialism" has laid the foundations for fresh paths of philosophical and psychological inquiry in the 21st century, and prepared a paradigm for a renewed humanity.

But then, since the publication of The Outsider in 1956, Wilson, who is 70 on June 26, 2001, has presented critics with one of their most significant challenges of the past 45 years. Sadly, few have risen to this challenge, a jealous academia choosing instead to frown upon his "autodidactism", evidently still a pejorative term in those rarefied regions. Thus Wilson's works have always prompted an intense, and frequently negative, critical response, certainly in the UK.

Not surprising then, that during a series of attempts to place an article in the British national media to mark Wilson's 70th birthday, which I, as a journalist, regarded as a significant literary occasion, I came up against a disconcerting lack of interest - although one literary editor who rejected the idea of a birthday tribute article nevertheless told me that he saw Wilson as "one of our great forgotten writers". A back-handed complement indeed!

Meanwhile, Wilson writes on, as ever undeterred by such short-sighted attitudes. New projects under way at the moment are the fourth part of his Spider World series of novels, an introduction to child killer Ian Brady's autobiography, and a revision of The Outsider for publication in China, involving an explanatory postscript to each chapter. Next year, he plans to write a sequel to The Atlantis Blueprint.

In 1969, in his autobiographical Voyage to a Beginning, Wilson asked: "Why has nature blinkered the human will? Why do so many of us die, bored and discouraged, at the age of 70, complaining that we have exhausted the world?"

Clearly, Wilson, as he himself arrives at the milestone of three-score-years-and ten, has not "exhausted the world" - although he may have exhausted the critics.

ACCLAIM for The Outsider, published when Wilson was only 24, reached a pitch previously unheard of in 20th century literature, but rapidly turned to rejection and personal abuse as follow-up works were received with hostility. It was the infamous horsewhip episode that seemed to symbolise the backlash of the English establishment - and explains how he and Joy came to live in a remote Cornish fishing village 250 miles from London.

Shortly after publication of The Outsider, Wilson and Joy, whom he had met in Lewis' department store in Leicester, were sharing a meal in his London flat when Joy's father burst in brandishing a horsewhip, uttering the immortal words: "Aha, Wilson! The game is up!"

The incident had been provoked by Joy's younger sister who had found some of Wilson's notes for his first novel Ritual in the Dark, thought he must be a sexual pervert, and had shown her parents. Next day, the papers were full of the story, which went global. The scandal resulted in Wilson leaving London; he took Joy first to Devon, then Ireland, and then to Cornwall where they were offered accommodation, and where they remain to this day.

Rather ruefully, Wilson will say that the ignoring of the ideas in his books has become a critical tradition in itself. He sees himself as the victim of a resistance to intellectual and emotional challenges, of a kind of intellectual elitism, and to the idea that an individual can take responsibility for his or her own personal development.

However, the success of The Outsider had given Wilson an international audience, even if his books never sold enough copies to make him rich, "or even reasonably affluent". He continued to write and was glad to build up a large body of readers who sought genuine insight into themselves and their world, who felt that his Outsider cycle of books (between 1956 and 1965) contained key ideas for an understanding of our times, and that later works such as Beyond the Occult (1988) offered the beginnings of an explanation for the mind's "hidden powers". Indeed, Wilson describes Beyond the Occult as "probably my best book" because it is here that the two great streams of his work, existentialism and occultism, come together, the two strands being of equal importance. It remains the work that contains the essence of his ideas, and serves as the best summary of, and introduction to, the Wilson canon.

"But as time went by," Wilson wrote in his foreword to Howard Dossor's biography (1990), "I got used to the idea that I would remain a literary 'outsider', and that if there was ever a general understanding of my work it would probably be after my death . . . I regard my own work as a kind of existential jigsaw puzzle in which apparently disparate parts lock together to make a whole."

[...]

These days, Wilson has cut back on speaking engagements because he dislikes too much travelling, and prefers to tie in such occasions with holiday breaks for himself and Joy, such as the trip he plans to Florida this autumn (2001) when he will be attending.the Prophets Conference. "I'm a Cancer, you see," he will say, referring to his astrological sun sign, one of the typical qualities of which is being a "home bird" who likes home comforts. In any event, he says he is rarely paid for these lectures, frequently accepting expenses for himself and Joy instead. Yet on his 70th birthday, and on the day before, he was to be addressing occult and psychic forums in the UK, at Brighton and London.

During our meetings, Wilson talked with great conviction and candour, free of affectation but with tremendous assertion of self, about his life and works - and not without a sprinkling of expletives as he occcasionally becomes moved by an angry emotion!

IN HIS seminal essay, "Existential Criticism" (1958), Wilson wrote: "It is my hope that, within the next two decades, the techniques of existential thinking will become commonplace in England and America. They would undoubtedly provide a solution to many problems which we now regard as peculiar to the mid-twentieth century."

Unfortunately for him, this was not to be; it was not Wilson's broadly humanistic stance which came to be the fashion in the next two decades and beyond, but the virulently anti-humanist approach of the new wave of French thinkers such as Derrida (born 1930, a contemporary of Wilson's), Barthes and Foucault with their emphasis on deconstruction, the elusiveness of meaning, and the "death of the author".

It was ironic that these thinkers all took their cue from aspects of the work of Nietzsche, the German Romantic philosopher, who Wilson saw as having indicated "the road to a new phase in human evolution" through a form of mental concentration able to bring about a deeper perception of meaning, and make people stronger and healthier as a result.

Wilson, therefore, in view of the monumental effort he has put into formulating his new existentialism, which moves in the opposite direction to the pessimistic and nihilistic strands of the "old" existentialism, may be forgiven should he feel somewhat bitter about the success of these later and tremendously influential "post-structuralist" theorists - to whom he is also diametrically opposed, referring to their works, as he does, bluntly and with not a little bile, as "shit". Thus, a significant element of Wilson's output since the 1980s has been an attempt to debunk them and demonstrate their "theoretical fallacy".

However, Wilson realised at an early stage that he was never going to be an influence on his English contemporaries in the way that Sartre was on his in France. "To begin with, when I published The Outsider, the main streams were logical positivism and linguistic analysis. They gradually lost their grip and disappeared completely, but they haven't really been replaced by anything. All they've been replaced with is a kind of vague scepticism of the type you find in Rorty, or someone like that. All these people seem incapable of getting beyond this feeling that there's no next step.

"But this didn't really bother me, although I used to think, let's say, back in the '80s, here am I saying the most important things being said in the world at the moment and none of these people pay the least attention. You'd think I was shouting in a vacuum. A friend of mine had a quote about a writer whose works pre-deceased him - I used to think, God forbid that should be me. But I never really believed it would be. I was always fairly certain that what I was saying was too important to pre-decease me!

"And little by little, to my great delight, I've found that over the past ten years or so that things are beginning to move very slowly in my direction. I shall have to be about 90 before I see any real results! Nevertheless, I see things like the new websites about me, or the enormous number of people who write to me. I think the world's full of people now who know my work and who have been deeply influenced by it. So all these years of working away in the dark, it wasn't really in the dark at all. There was a certain feedback."

He cites the example of British author Philip Pullman whose His Dark Materials trilogy is greatly influenced by the works of David Lindsay about whom Wilson wrote a book The Haunted Man: The Strange Genius of David Lindsay (1970) in conjunction with J. B. Pick and E. H. Visiak. Pullman's trilogy was "brilliant", said Wilson, his imagination "tremendous and overwhelming". In correspondence, Pullman told Wilson he had used Wilson's works as a "guide to literature". Everything Wilson had recommended Pulllman had read.

"On the other hand," Wilson went on, "It would have been terribly bad for me if that success of The Outsider had continued because I would have wanted to do all kinds of things, for example, making the same kind of success on the stage. I would have concentrated much too much on play writing. As it was, with the feeling that no one cared anyway, I just settled down and wrote book after book in which I merely set out to please myself and express my own ideas. An example is that Books in My Life volume (1998) which still seems to me one of my best of recent years, and which was written at the behest of a Japanese publisher who asked if I could add a few more literary essays to those I'd already published in magazine form. Then I discovered that people were reading Books in My Life as a kind of literary guide.

"That gives me a feeling of satisfaction, that things are moving slowly, although it's been very difficult and I've never really made very much money, always having an overdraft at the bank until the past few years, since From Atlantis to the Sphinx (1997) came out, and managed to sell out edition after edition. For the first time in my life I found that we weren't in overdraft. We now continue to squeak along just on the side of being in the black instead of in the red."

For Wilson, the old existentialism emphasised man's contingency. It said that as there was no God, there were no transcendental values either. Man was alone in an empty universe, and a man's actions had no importance to anyone but himself. Under the new existentialism, Wilson calls for a phenomenological examination of consciousness with emphasis upon the problem of what constitutes human values.

"Everyday consciousness is a liar," he says, in a famous phrase, and most people have insights to this effect. The question was how to give such insights philosophical status, and how to investigate them. Wilson remains sure that there is a standard of values external to human consciousness, and that human evolution depends upon this realisation, and upon a renewal of the sense of overall purpose.

Does he know of any other contemporary authors who take a "new existential" approach? "Only me," he says with a smile.

ALTHOUGH existentialist issues per se comprise only one part of Wilson's prodigious oeuvre of more than a hundred books, they are the common thread linking his themes. As well as a series of novels - including the Spider World trilogy, The Tower, The Delta, and The Magician, which is being re-published in the USA in 2001-2002, to be followed by a fourth part, Shadowland, which he is now writing - he has brought his extraordinary powers of analysis and perspicuity to bear on a bewildering variety of topics. These have included criminology (notably serial killers - "I think I have a pretty good understanding of the criminal mind"), literary theory and criticism, psychology, sexology, occultism and the paranormal, wine and classical music, ancient civilisations and extra-terrestrials.

He has also produced a number of biographies, their subjects including such diverse figures as Rasputin, Jung, Strindberg, Hesse, Wilhelm Reich, Jorges Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, Rudolph Steiner and Ken Russell. Wilson's latest work, The Devil's Party, a study of "charlatan messiahs", published in March 2001, is yet further testament to his diversity.

He confesses that the breadth of his interests may have created a problem for critics who like to pigeon-hole authors. And readers can find enough in any one sector of his works to keep them going indefinitely, such is the extent of the insights, illuminations and food for thought that he provides on any subject to which he turns.

But underlying all his works is a faith in the power and potential of the human mind to rise above the mediocre or the malevolent to new and higher levels of awareness, and to press against and challenge the boundaries of everyday consciousness.

Central to his work is the question of how people can achieve those strange moments of inner freedom, of sheer delight, of "peak experience", or "ecstasy", when we feel our energies are more than adequate to cope with any challenge, those moments of "pure joy in which we experience an almost god-like sensation of power or freedom" - in stark contrast to normal consciousness in which we seem to sense our energies are never quite up to the mark, or feel ourselves to be in the grip of impersonal forces much stronger than ourselves.

One of the most important images in his work, Wilson points out, is that of people's "worm's eye" and "bird's eye" views, the former being the blinkered experience, languishing under limitations of consciousness, and the latter the capacity to grasp, or "conjure up" reality, linked to Faculty X, his term for the mind's latent ability to intensify and expand consciousness, to achieve a mastery over time - indeed, to reinstate the "visionary gleam" - and which he sees as the route to fulfillment of mankind's evolutionary potential, or, strangely, as a regaining of it. For it is Wilson's theory that for the people of an ancient civilisation 100,000 years ago - the Atlanteans - Faculty X was the norm in their intuitive right-brain-dominated way of thinking. After the destruction of their civilisation, survivors passed on knowledge to successive societies, notably the ancient Egyptians. Gradually, over the centures, the intuitive right-brain lost out to the rational left-brain, so that in modern man such attributes as precognition, telepathy, astral projection, telekinesis and so on - indeed, all the manifestations of the paranormal - are the remnants of the once-dominant Faculty X of our ancestors.

"Think of Faculty X as simply being a kind of faculty which is natural to poets," he said. "When Keats talked about 'negative capability' he meant that funny sort of way in which in one single stride you can open up to the whole universe and become completely receptive to it. He was talking about a particular kind of receptivity. Now that receptivity is very close to what I've been talking about, the right-brain as opposed to the left-brain faculty. Keats was talking about the right-brain, certainly not about the left-brain.

"In the same way that some people are such good calculators that they can do quite large sums in their heads, whereas others have to have paper and pencil, some people can, when they consider a problem, see the answer quite obviously while others find it far more difficult, and really have to plod. It's like the difference between a person who can climb up a mountainside, leaping from rock to rock, and somebody who has to climb up with iron crampons.

"You can see that there is a sense in which an uneducated person is in a way better qualified to do that than a highly-educated person who tends to be so completely squashed by academicism that he finds it very difficult to do any genuinely intuitive thinking. And what we are talking about is intuition. Faculty X is intuition raised to a higher level."


DURING his career, Wilson, of course, has been no stranger to controversy, and one of his latest projects - writing the introduction to Janus, the autobiography of "Moors Murderer" Ian Brady, the notorious British child serial killer - could put him in the firing line again.

The book, written at Wilson's suggestion, is to appear only in the USA because it is felt that it would be insensitive to publish it in Britain where those appalling crimes of the mid-1960s are still very much in the public consciousness. Janus was the Roman god of gateways and of beginnings and endings. He had two faces, one looking back to the past and the other looking forward to the future, just as every doorway has two aspects. Ovid describes Janus as the custodian of the universe, the opener and fastener of all things, looking inward and outward from the gate.

It was Brady who sought out Wilson, through an intermediary, having read a number of his works in prison. Wilson, who then sent Brady's book to an American publisher who specialises in works by and about criminals and serial killers, intends to give the $5,000 that Brady will make from the book to Brady's mother. Yet Wilson was surprised that the book was taken up because he said he did not find Brady's arguments for crime terribly convincing.

What had happened was that, one night in 1991, after Wilson had gone to bed, a young, blonde woman had called at his home and left a letter with Joy. The woman claimed she was a friend of Brady and left a letter from him. In the letter, Brady mentioned horizontal and vertical consciousness, terms invented by Wilson.

"The woman wanted to talk to me about the idea of writing an autobiography - she'd had a very hard childhood and had been in an orphanage and so on. She had decided to contact Brady purely for morbid reasons - to begin with, she thought that he might be her father. She didn't know who her father was. Brady committed the Moors murders at the time she was born and since there was some vague rumour around that Brady had fathered a child, she wondered if it was her. She wanted to quote Ian Brady's letters but I told her she couldn't do that, they were his copyright, and if they were quoted even though he was in prison he could sue her.

"Then a few weeks later I got a letter from Brady asking if it was true that Christine - that was the woman's name - was about to write a book about him. I wrote back and said 'no' and told him what the circumstances really were, and then we drifted into correspondence. I was corresponding with him because he knew a lot of things about the Moors murders which I didn't understand and which I wanted to get straight from the horse's mouth, as it were, and that I did, little by little over a long period of time, from that contact with him.

"I could see he was in a no-win situation in jail. If you're in a situation where there seems to be no possible way in which you can ameliorate it, or win, the one thing you can do is turn inward and write a book, or do something like that. That's what I suggested to him, and this book is the long-term result of that suggestion. It's rather interesting, being about serial killers - to be written by a serial killer it has an unusual insight into their minds."

When discussing mass murderers, the question naturally arises: can an evil person have an evil peak experience? "That's interesting," said Wilson. "I'm writing at the moment the introduction to Ian Brady's book. I think that most people would say that Brady was, by definition, a wicked person - anyone who would murder children for sex must be a pretty nasty person. But he interests me because he's so highly intelligent and because his beginnings were very like mine in many ways, that is to say his foundations and the kinds of experiences he grew from. But he, at a certain point, dug in his heels far more, and set his jaw like a clamp, and said 'I've turned my back on the possibility of nice things happening to me.'

"In my teens I was in such a state of grimness, of feeling how awful the universe was, and I came very close to suicide on one occasion. I got into such a low state of grim despair, but it never reached the same point as it did with Brady because when I was a child I'd been so loved and adored that I naturally generated a feeling of calm confidence and optimism which later stood me in good stead when I went through that long period of grimness in my teens.

"Now Brady didn't have that. Born the illegitimate son of a waitress, his mother didn't really have the time to pick him up and kiss and cuddle him and make him feel that he was the greatest person in the world. So he didn't have much to fall back on when he went into his time of total grim loneliness, and the result is that he's still stuck in the grim pessimism stage. I think that to some extent answers your question. It depends basically upon that sort of feeling of happiness that you get in the peak experience, that sudden feeling of what Chesterton called 'absurd good news'.

"When you ask, would it be possible to have a wicked peak experience, that's like saying would it be possible to have a wicked 'absurd good news', and you can see that in a certain sense you've got two words there that cancel one another out. But in another sense, Baudelaire saying 'Everything in the world exudes crime', and also saying that unless we actually treat sex as evil then we don't really begin to understand it, gives you a very interesting insight.

"Sex itself is deeply interesting because people find that when they are carried away by sexual excitement they get a kind of vision of sexual possibility - for example, let's say King Farouk, who wanted every attractive girl he saw in a restaurant and would send his grand vizier over to offer her �1,000 to go to bed with him. He totally wasted his time! That is the problem with sex. It is an illusion - if you're not very careful, it will not only totally waste your time but, as in the case of Brady, totally screw up your life. The fact remains that I do believe that you can have that kind of 'black' peak experience with sex. Brady actually calls it the 'black light', and I'm sure that's what he's talking about.

"It's strange what an enormous number of people there are, apparently respectable people, who have found in fact that sex has given them experiences that strike them as their highest experiences. The sad result is, for example, MPs going to visit prostitutes to be whipped, and to be dressed up as babies, and so on! This is all the lure of the 'black light', the sexual impulse."

While the "black" peak experience may be "positive" for the serial killer, it obviously had a negative result on the victims and on the world at large. Roy Hazelwood, of the FBI, who had commented that sex crime was not about sex but about power, was absolutely right. When a man was experiencing his ultimate orgasm, because he was so thoroughly enjoying sex, what he was really enjoying was a feeling of power over a woman. This made him feel that he was better and cleverer than he thought he was.

"Probably exactly the same feeling that Sibelius felt when he'd written his first symphony, thinking that's a bloody good symphony! I think that is the real aim of human beings - we would all like to be creative enough to get that feeling. It's what I call the promotional experience. In the RAF I'd noticed that when someone was promoted to the rank of lance corporal, at first they were very embarrassed, having to give orders to their old pals in the billet, but very quickly they realised that the corporal who had made them lance corporals knew exactly what he was doing, and they were lance corporals, it was there inside them ready to come out. And it came out and then they were genuinely promoted.

"Now what's happening with a lot of sex is that what people are hoping for is the promotional experience. Once they've experienced that feeling of the sexual orgasm then they suddenly get that feeling that maybe if they had this often enough, like the lance corporal, they would begin to feel like a lance corporal. They would no longer have the feeling of being an ordinary aircraftsman jumped up from his position but doesn't really deserve it.

"So that's what lies behind sex crimes, in particular repetitive sex crimes, like those, say, of Ted Bundy. What he gets from it is actually a feeling of being god-like."

WILSON recalled the struggles he had had during the years of critical rejection which followed The Outsider phenomenon.

"When The Outsider came out I was pretty well alone in being one of the few authors actually interested in the psychology of 'outsiderism'. The really fashionable people at the time, in fact nearly everybody else in Declaration, were left-wingers: John Osborne, Ken Tynan, Kingsley Amis, the lot - the Lefties! I was the only one who said I wasn't terribly interested in politics but I am interested in the human mind and the possibility of human beings evolving to a higher stage. Well, the result was that all of the Lefties - Bernard Levin, for example - howled 'fascist' and 'Nazi' at me when obviously I had nothing to do with fascism and Nazism. That went on for quite a long time and the result was that I was very unfashionable.

"But then The Outsider seemed to have started something - a trend in the direction of people I was interested in. For example, I was the frist person to write about Hermann Hesse. After The Outsider, quite suddenly, Steppenwolf came out again and all kinds of other books by Hesse and, in the '60s, Hesse became a best seller, towards the end of his life. Then Americans began writing theses about Hesse and various books about him came out - but not one of them mentioned me! By that time I was totally unmentionable, you see."

 

[Laura]

Colin Wilson at 70 Part II

...



Wilson recalled Time magazine's description of him as a "scrambled egghead". He continued: "I don't want to sound self-pitying, because I'm not self-pitying, but the fact remains that my name was shit. I felt that suddenly having achieved overnight this terrific notoriety, or fame, whatever you want to call it, quite suddenly I was back down on the ground from this height I'd been lifted to, with the feeling that everybody had now decided I was a total fake, and that the Colin Wilson boom had been a flash in the pan, and a mistake anyway. It was very, very hard to continue writing with this feeling that I was regarded in general as low-life.

"Fortunately, all those years that I'd spent working at my ideas had resulted in the feeling that Outsiders had got to stand alone, and this came to be to my advantage. All I had to do was to do again what I'd been doing for years and years, even before The Outsider came out - turn my back on the possibility of success, because years before The Outsider, when everything I sent to magazines or publishers was returned, I began to get the feeling that there was nothing I could do about it. But at a certain point I said to myself, what I'm going to do is continue writing books and even if when I've finished a book it's shoved on the shelf I'm going to end nevertheless with a row of books and I won't feel my life has been wasted.

"So I settled down and wrote The Outsider and, of course, it got published immediately, so I didn't have this complaint of everything gone wrong. Nevertheless, after the terrific back-swing, I was forced to go back to the feeling I'd had before, that you've got to learn to stand totally alone. And that's what I did. I got through the '60s and the '70s in this way, but there was a real feeling, not exactly of despair, but for example, because of these violent attacks on me it meant that it was a pretty thin living writing books. Whereas The Outsider had sold about 40,000 copies in England and a lot more in America, none of the subsequent books sold really well.

"I was getting advances of maybe �500 or �1,000 and then seeing nothing more from the book because it didn't meet its advance, so I didn't make any money. What I was doing was anything that would keep me and my family alive. I went on writing books. But once when I was feeling particularly low because the last book hadn't done too well - the novel Necessary Doubt, I think - I suddenly got the idea of doing a book about Rasputin, and I went on doing books like that. And nothing happened. No breakthrough whatsoever. But with The Mind Parasites, I did get a few decent reviews, which was a total change because my books were usually slammed or ignored. And so it went on indefinitely, that kind of thing, and to some extent it still goes on. I can usually reckon that books of mine will not be reviewed. There is still this terrific anti-Wilson thing around."

Indeed, The Atlantis Blueprint (2000), which Wilson co-authored with Canadian Rand Flem-Ath, failed to be reviewed in any of the quality British newspapers or magazines. Yet after the book was serialised in the Daily Mail, a middle-market tabloid sympathetic to Wilson's ideas, it entered the British best-seller list. Wilson now plans to write a sequel to be published in 2002, expanding on the theories he introduced in The Atlantis Blueprint and From Atlantis to the Sphinx.

Looking back, Wilson sees the highest point of his career, not surprisingly, as the enormous success of The Outsider, and the lowest points the savage attacks made on him following publication of his follow-up work, Religion and the Rebel (1957), and the panic attacks he suffered in the early 1970s while engagaged on a punishing work schedule imposed by publishing deadlines.

He said: "In a way, nothing will ever surpass what happened waking up on that Sunday morning when The Outsider came out, May 26, 1956, and there were all these rave reviews, and suddenly I was famous overnight, appearing on television, and giving interviews to journalists., when I'd just got used to the idea of never becoming known. The same thing happened to Jack Kerouac. He had published a novel, and written three or four others which hadn't seen print, when On the Road came out, and he was sure that it might get him known, but he didn't expect to be hit by that fame, which of course destroyed him. Fortunately, I'd spent so many years plodding and swimming against the current that I wasn't destroyed by it. I simply, as it were, turned away, came down here (Cornwall), and settled down to Religion and the Rebel. A very low point was definitely the attacks on Religion and the Rebel, the way that overnight my reputation just evaporated.

"Then, of course, another pretty low point was when I started having panic attacks just from overwork in the early 1970s. I described that at the beginning of Mysteries (1978). The panic attacks took me lower than ever before - there was a feeling of tremendous potential danger, the notion that my mind might crash completely. This was the worst time. But I took great encouragement from T E Lawrence's phrase about having seen people in the desert push themselves to a tremendous extreme but there was never a break unless it came from inside, from the mind itself. I was determined that whatever I did there wouldn't be break from inside.

"It's one of our basic problems - we get in these states by thinking about them. This was recognised a long time ago by the Roman philospher Epictetus. I realised after that experience, when I felt so close to total misery and despair and wondered really if my mind was about to snap, that it was my thought that was doing it. But I'd still find it very difficult. I'd go for walks, this deep depression would come on me and I would have to fight it off, inch by inch."

Wilson realised that the depression was due to the fact that he had got into the habit of thinking that he was going to suffer panic attacks. The American psychologist George Pransky had recognised that from the moment we woke up in the morning we were influencing our own states of mind by our thoughts and expectations, and Wilson had outlined a similar idea in his own 'Laurel and Hardy' theory of consciousness.

�As soon as you can see this is fundamentally true, as soon as you do things and they work out right, what happens is that you change your self-image. Suddenly, you're promoted - you really are a lance-corporal! It's not really complicated to enact once you've got yourself into the state of mind. Pransky is completely right. It is thought that is the basis of all this. He's the first to see this with absolute total clarity so, in my view, he's the greatest living psychologist."

Pransky had gained his insight from an ordinary non-academic, non-professional working man called Sydney Banks. Banks had been telling a friend how unhappy he was when the friend remarked: "You're not unhappy, Syd, you just think you are". As it sank in, Banks looked at him in amazement. "Do you realise what you've just said?" he asked his friend. What had suddenly struck him was that nearly all our psychological problems arose from our thoughts. What the friend was saying was: people make themselves unhappy with their thoughts. Pessimists do not have peak experiences because they are pessimists. Optimists do have peak experiences because they are optimists. Banks was so overwhelmed by this insight that he began presenting it to audiences. Pransky was one of those who heard him and he was converted from the old pessimistic Freudianism. Pransky noted one interesting thing: all the people at the seminar struck him as exceptionally healthy and cheerful. They were "copers", people who felt in charge of their lives.

"This, I can now see, is the fundamental solution to the problem stated by the existentialists," said Wilson. "They all place undue emphasis on man's weakness and misery, and then insist that this is the human condition. It isn't."

The kind of re-invention of the self which occurred in the promotional experience, and which embraced a vision of fundamental human freedom, also returned one to the existentialist question, he agreed. We could all sustain that vision if we stayed on a slightly higher level of drive, and overcome the problem of the "robot", which is Wilson's term for that mechanism which does so much of our living for us, which allows us to drive our cars, or operate our word processors, hardly without thinking - our "automatic pilot" - but which often takes over completely and eclipses the "real me".

"That's the problem - promotion has got to stick, freedom has got to stick, become, so to speak, our normal way of thinking. As soon as you begin to realise you can roll back the boundaries of the robot then you've hit a really big revelation and, what's more, you discover , even more interestingly, that by collaborating closely with the robot you don't treat it as an enemy but more as an employer treats trade unions, drawing it into negotiation."

After spending his whole life working at the problem, Wilson said he was now able to keep himself in a higher state of bubbling optimism than the average person could by having "learned the tricks" of how to do so. The panic attacks had taught Wilson a great deal about resisting the terrific weight of pessimism. "Once you get used to this idea that we are capable of being great, and of having peak experiences, you suddenly just turn your back overnight on that naturally pessimistic influence."

DISCOVERING the works of existentialist writers Sartre and Camus in the early 1950s, Wilson became deeply interested in the subject "for purely personal reasons".

He told me: "As a working class boy, I found that one of my chief problems was that I wanted to escape from being working class like mad! I was fed up with living in semi-poverty and having to work at lousy jobs in factories. The problem was that I noticed in myself that if ever I got into situations where I had plenty of time to spare, like long holidays from school - and I was a lab assistant for a while and got six or eight-week holidays - I tended to get bored. Obviously, I couldn't handle my own freedom, and this struck me as very interesting, this whole problem of freedom."

Sartre had remarked that he never felt so free as during the Second World War when he was in the Resistance and was likely to be arrested and shot at any moment. Sartre before the war, however, with his Nausea, for example, had a negative outlook, and saw life as meaningless. Sartre invented the term "the absurd" which Camus took up.

"I'd also, in my teens, had these moments in which I felt that life was absolutely, totally meaningless, and I'd come very close to suicide on one occasion," Wilson confessed. "This made me very clearly aware that this was a real problem. When I was about 10 I got terribly interested in science and it seemed to me that that was the answer to all the riddles of the universe. Then gradually I realised it wasn't and there was this sudden, awful feeling of being let down by science, by knowledge, and the result of all this was that I could see that existentialism was really putting the absolutely basic and essential question, the question of whether it's worth making effort - what Carlyle called the 'Eternal Yes versus the Eternal No'.

"Of course, in The Outsider, it was symbolised by Van Gogh painting the starry night, with all these wonderful trees surging towards the sky, on fire, and with the sky made of great whorls of vitality, and then committing suicide a few months later by shooting himself in the stomach, leaving a note that said 'Misery will never end'.

"There you've got the perfect balance between Eternal Yes versus Eternal No, and that's what really interested me. It's obviously a purely personal thing because there was I, struggling in a working class environment with no chance of getting to university - right after the war you just didn't get offered the chance. I'm glad now that I didn't - Iris Murdoch always had this obsession about sending me to university. That would have been absolutely disastrous, because I think it's essential that you go your own way. That basically was the theory of The Outsider."

Wilson had been fascinated by the story about Graham Greene playing Russian roulette while feeling miserable and bored and having an "overwhelming feeling of sheer joy" when the gun failed to fire.

"He said it was 'as if a light had been turned on and I saw that life is infinitely fascinating'. Well, it suddenly seemed to me quite obvious that if you could find a method of making yourself see that life is infinitely fascinating then you've solved this great problem, the problem that Kierkegaard was talking about, the basic existential problem, that when intellect gets to grips with the real world it tends to be continually halted by the sheer solidness of matter and the problems then encountered. You get the feeling, in other words, that intellect just is hopeless in dealing with reality. Sartre and all the rest of them said, what's more, reality tramples you flat, and leaves you dead!

"So there was that feeling that intellect was of no use at all. Now I couldn't believe that because I'd always been optimistic. And one of the writers I admired most of all was H G Wells. I felt that there must be an answer to this. Kierkegaard had said that an existential system was impossible, meaning by that that you couldn't have a philosophical system, essentially an intellectual construct, if it was existential, because 'existential' really means stomach aches and diarrhoea and all kinds of down-to-earth things, and these things appear to be in basic conflict.

"Well, my feeling was that somehow an existential system has bloody well got to be possible! It must be possible to get above reality. In a funny sense, Van Gogh got above reality when he painted Starry Night, and Norman Mailer once made to me an interesting comment that what he really wanted to do was to be able to pin down the meaning content of the sexual orgasm. Again, I saw this as very important - the sexual orgasm gives you that odd feeling of pushing up from reality as if you are doing a push-up. You no longer feel, as Kierkegaard did, that an existential system is impossible because there's no conflict between intellect and what you see.

"Now Sartre and the rest of them, Camus, Heidegger and so on, had always taken the view that, in fact, reality negates intellect and that there's nothing much we can do about this. Camus is amazingly like Thomas Hardy, there's exactly the same feeling of the world in a novel like L'Etranger and a novel like Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Edmund Gosse said he couldn't understand why 'Mr Hardy wanted to shake his fist at his creator all the time', which is basically what Camus was also doing. There's his play about a sailor who comes home without announcing his identity and his parents murder him in the night for his money, and Camus is implying this is what the world is like - these terrible misunderstandings. You know, I knew Camus and I didn't like this aspect of his thinking at all."

Wilson has an anecdote of an encounter he once had with Camus in France. Wilson pointed out to Camus that there were a number of places in his works where characters were actually "overwhelmed with meaning". Wilson asked Camus why he didn't pursue that personally, and Camus pointed to a Parisian teddy boy slouching past the window, saying: "What is good for him must be good for me also." Wilson said: "I got very excited, and irritable in a way, and said 'That's nonsense. Are you telling me Einstein shouldn't have produced the theory of relativity because a Parisian teddy boy wouldn't understand it?' We didn't get much further than that because we were talking in French, and my French wasn't very good anyway, and Camus had absolutely no English."

That, for Wilson, seemed to be the problem. Kierkegaard had got stuck in a cul de sac because he felt that existentialism had to be a philosophy which returned back to existence from abstractions, but having got back to existence he found he was confronted with the question: where do you go from here? He was unable to move forward, except into religion, and Sartre and Camus, of course, rejected that route.

"It seemed to me fairly clear from the very beginning where you go," said Wilson. "What you do is to take your glimpses of meaning and build upon those. It may be true that when you are sitting in some cafe staring out at the rain pouring down the windows, looking at the pool of tomato sauce on the table, you cannot actually see any meaning in the world around you. Ionesco once said to me 'Look, it's raining outside - what's the meaning of that?' when we were arguing about precisely this thing at a party. I conceded that, sitting in a cafe on a rainy day, you could not see how you could penetrate beyond the curtain of boredom.

"But, on the other hand, take your sudden feelings of intensity, in fact, your peak experiences, and suddenly you get to see that Abraham Maslow (the American psychologist who studied the peak experience) was perfectly right. Peak experiences are a way through. Once you, instead of accepting Sartre's nausea, accept that we do have these curious moments of intensity - although Maslow thought you can't get these moments at will - what you can do is recognise the meaning of those moments and build upon that. Maslow didn't see that he had hit upon the solution. He discovered that when he talked to his students about peak experiences they began having them all the time, they were doing something about it. They were getting beyond nausea and actually learning the way to get these experiences."


YET how does one get from The Outsider and the new existentialism to the lost civilisation of Atlantis, the subject that so preoccupies Wilson at the present time? He regards From Atlantis to the Sphinx as an extremely important work because it signalled a new direction for him which was continued in The Atlantis Blueprint.

"I got into the occult almost by accident. But I soon discovered it's very closely linked to the whole business of my new existentialism and so on because what the occult was really concerned about was the question of man's hidden powers, and therefore the evolution of man to the next stage. I explained that very thoroughly in an essay in Below the Iceberg (1998).

"In the same sort of way, when I got into this whole Atlantis business, what immediately became fascinating was this notion that civilisation is a great deal older than we think, and that that our ancestors were a great deal brighter than we think. Then everything began to fall neatly into place. The Atlantis Blueprint is about Hapgood's declaration that civilisation is 100,000 years old, and we start off the book with that, and I came to a very interesting conclusion, that in fact what Hapgood was talking about was Neanderthal man who had a rather higher level of civilisation than we think. I don't mean civilisation in the sense of skyscrapers, or even wheeled carts, or something like that. I think that there is very strong evidence that Neanderthal man not only studied the skies but discovered the precession of the equinoxes, and all kinds of other things, and that he was a highly intelligent being."

Wilson suggests that mental prodigies have a quite different form of intelligence to the norm. Enormously difficult mathematical computations made in an instant by calculating prodgies cannot be performed by the ordinary intellect, nor, for example, can ordinary intellect tackle the problem of prime numbers. A prime number is a number that cannot be divided by any other number, except itself and one. It was not known which numbers were primes, and if you had a number "that long" - here Wilson stretched out his arms either side of him - there was no way of finding out whether it was a prime number or not. There was no simple way, and even a computer probably could not do it in less than 24 hours. Yet calculating prodigies were able to identify primes instantly. They somehow looked down on the whole field of numbers and were able to spot right away if a number was a prime.

"That's using something completely different from our usual left-brain intellect. It's using the right-brain in a totally different way. And that's what interests me so much. Now, I think that our ancestor was quite different from us in the sense that he was using his right-brain in the way that we use our left-brain. We've used our left-brain through this highly-technical civilisation of ours, whereas he used his right-brain to build a completely different kind of civilisation. I've come back to this idea several times, first of all in From Atlantis to the Sphinx, then in Alien Dawn (1998), and again for The Atlantis Blueprint.

"In the new book I shall propound the theory that ancient man had a completely different mind from ours, and that it could reach genius level, but not at all in our left-brain sense of the word. When I've completed the sequel to The Atlantis Blueprint I think I shall really be well on the way towards saying what seems to be so important, and making quite clear what is only hinted at in From Atlantis to the Sphinx, because that primarily is about the question of how old civilisation is. Far more interestingly in that book, is what a completely different state of mind the Egyptians had. They were basically right-brain thinkers who saw things in a completely different way. Their genius was of the right-brain.

"I've just reviewed a book about idiot prodigies, and that fascinates me because people who are total idiots can do these immense mathematical calculations. I spoke to calculating twins in New York who are actually very sub-normal but who can sit swapping vast prime numbers running into 20 figures. But what interests me so much is that we have this notion 'It's impossible - it can't be done'. And we have that about lots of things, because our minds are stuck in a certain viewpoint, in the way that Sartre and Camus were stuck in the old kind of existentialist pessimism.

"What I'm trying to do is to rip the mind completely out of that to a higher level in which you can suddenly see that it can be done. In other words, it's all a part of this original scheme of mine of the new existentialism."


IT STRUCK Wilson at the time of The Outsider that the answer to the basic problem encountered in Sartre and Camus, of boredom, nausea and the absurd, lay in the direction of the mystics and in their flashes of peak intensity and meaning.

"For me, this was the only valid way out of that cul de sac of existentialism," he said. "What I'm getting at is terribly simple. If Maslow's students, when they began discussing peak experiences among themselves, began having peak experiences all the time, then the one certain way to a peak experience is to turn your attention on peak experiences and mystical experiences. Then you gradually get into the right state of optimism and happiness, of drive and purpose, in which suddenly these things become possible. While you are in the state of mind of the leading characters in Sartre and Camus and Samuel Beckett there's not a hope in hell of you achieving this kind of state of mind!"

In the 1960s, it had seemed to Wilson that structuralism might be a means of countering Sartre's view that the universe was "black and meaningless", and that reality always negated intellect, by suggesting the answer lay in underlying structures, and that life was not what you see on the surface, that the "surface" described by Camus in L'Etranger was not life.

And indeed, at the conclusion of L'Etranger when the central character is sentenced to death, he feels a sense of overwhelming joy in the universe, an affirmation of meaning, and says he knows he has been happy and he's happy still. "If he'd been happy why didn't he know it?" Wilson asked. "That's what always struck me as most puzzling. How can you be happy and not know you're happy? And then you suddenly realise, we do that most of the time. We're always looking back on some past time and saying 'that was a happy time' but you didn't realise it at the time it was happening!"

It seemed that what Levi Strauss was saying might be fairly sound, that the answer to some extent lay in the unconscious. Maslow, with whom Wilson had discussed this subject in detail - instead of dealing with sick people, had investigated the "peak experiences", or feelings of sudden overwhelming happiness, of healthy people. Wilson realised this was also what G K Chesterton was talking about when he referred to "absurd good news". And Pransky had taken Maslow's insight a stage further.

Wilson continued: "This bubbling sheer overwhelming happiness seemed to me to be a basic answer. Maslow quickly discovered that an enormous percentage of healthy people had these peak experiences. Instead of seeing the world as Camus and Sartre saw it, people suddenly saw it in a wonderfully positive way.

"It was obviously some terrific eruption coming up from the unconscious mind, like Nietzsche's experiences which I described in The Outsider - on the Strasbourg road when he had to stand back against the wall to let a troop of soldiers go past and suddenly recognised his old regiment. He was miserable and tired, because he'd spent all day in a nursing hospital station helping to saw off limbs and all that in the Franco-Prussian war, when suddenly he had this feeling of sheer happiness flooding over him. It seemed to me that this feeling of happiness was the answer. It comes bubbling up from the unconscious, and this is what philosophers can never take into account, because you can't cause it at will. Aldous Huxley thought you could with mescalin, but that doesn't really work, it doesn't cause the peak experience.

"It seemed to me that Levi Strauss was on the right track but, you know, I couldn't really feel very much trust in it. Well, then I heard about Derrida - so I proceeded to try and read him, and as you know, it's totally unreadable! I spent 18 months struggling with Derrida and gradually what I saw was that Derrida had taken his stand from Heidegger, his denial of metaphysics, which was just like Kierkegaard's denial of a system. He was saying that the reality of the world is in fact so real that any metaphysical system you try to impose on it just bursts at the seams - it just can't stay on this absolute reality.

"Derrida went on to say that we are living in a world which we try to make decent by covering it with language as if it were naked, but that this reality is continually bursting through from underneath. Now that would have struck me as absolutely fine. I would have cheered him, except that he wasn't saying it from a positive point of view, like G K Chesterton, he was saying it from, apparently, a completely negative and sceptical point of view. What he meant, what Roland Barthes meant, was that there was no underlying meaning, that meaning would be completely useless to us.

"This notion that there is no underlying meaning horrified me. Once I grasped what Derrida was saying I began to hate him. I thought what he was talking about was absolute nonsense. He, in effect, handed himself over to pure materialism, a kind of Marxism. And this is the trouble with the French, they just have that kind of intellect. They love taking what they feel to be a healthy sceptical point of view.

"Incidentally, one of the reasons for Derrida's immense popularity was that in reducing a work of art to one level where it wasn't a kind of spirit-animating body made of words or paint or music or whatever, he was also telling the professor that what he was doing in criticising it was using exactly the same creative faculty that the writer, painter or composer used. Of course, the critics were absolutely delighted with this."

Wilson saw that Derrida derived from directly from Sartre and committed all the same philosophical errors that Sartre had made. Wilson tackled the issue head-on in a series of essays eventually collected in Below the Iceberg: Anti-Sartre and Other Essays (1998). For him, the post-structuralists had gone off in "completely the wrong direction" with their "peculiar theories". They had failed to get beyond phenomenology - they were back in that cafe with the rain running down the windows. Instead of taking a step forward they had taken a step backwards.

Wilson's existential approach to literary criticism, of course, is the antithesis of the post-structuralist outlook. Existential criticism runs counter to the "fallacy of insignificance" and is an attempt to develop the standard of meaning. It involves being totally aware of the writer and his or her virtues - as well as his or her faults - whereas Barthes, for example, pronounces the writer's non-existence.

Wilson believes that existentialism is the one certain road to creative development of literature in the future. While his theory of existential criticism embraces humanistic formalism, it goes a radical stage further - to evaluate literature by assessing it in terms of its capacity to satisfy the depths of human need, to clarify the image of "what we are yet to become" on the evolutionary spiral. Wilson wants to know what, fundamentally, an artist is saying, what concepts of human purpose lie in the basic assumptions of the work, and how far the work succeeds in revealing existence as potentiality.

Certainly, for Wilson, the purpose of literature is nothing less than to liberate the imagination in order to point the way forward for human evolution, to act as a "magic mirror" in which the reader can see reflected his or her own soul.

"Existential criticism is not knowing a text in the same way that an academic knows a text," said Wilson, "By studying it with an awestruck attitude - 'Oh God, this is Milton, he's far greater than I am, I can only look up at him towering above me!' What I'm saying is that, in a way, in order to really appreciate a writer you must know that writer as intimately as a husband knows a wife, or a wife knows a husband. If a wife began to criticise her husband in a private conversation with her best friend - that would be existential criticism because it's based upon a total knowledge of her husband, or at least a much fuller knowledge than somebody who lives around the corner has. Now it seems to me that's quite important in an age like ours where we're often moving forward into absurdity.

"George Melly and I once had to appear at St Ives (Cornwall) in some debate, and the subject of the bricks in the Tate Gallery came up. George tended to take a rather generous attitude towards them - 'Oh well, it's good fun, why not?' But the point is that the public felt that there was something irritating and silly about a pile of bricks, no matter what their intellectual justification was. Now there's an example, it seems to me, of totally losing contact with reality by letting the intellect take over. Existential criticism insists that you don't do that. You've somehow got to stay in touch with reality, with intuition."

Indeed, for Wilson, existentialism is a philosophy of intuition and, in a view first put forward in The Occult (1971), philosophy in general should be "the pursuit of reality through intuition aided by intellect" - a definition which stands the conventional way of thinking on its head but which is crucial to an understanding of Wilson's approach.



WESTERN philosophy has been like playing billiards with just two pockets on the table, maintains Wilson, in an analogy of which he is fond. "You can end up only in one pocket or the other: one is total negativism, the tradition that's run through philosophy since David Hume, which Kant did his best to fight against without any success, and the other pocket is a kind of optimism, of the G K Chesterton type, and really the only philosopher of this kind in the Western tradition is Henri Bergson.

"Heidegger's existentialism was supposed to be derived from Edmund Husserl, who seems to me to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, and probably the greatest philosopher since Plato, who tried to create a purely scientific philosophy, that is to say, a philosophy in which you try to examine things completely objectively by a sort of act of withdrawal, which he called the 'epoche'. It's a bit like watching, say, a highly emotive television programme in a state of cool detachment - the opposite of that at football matches."

In a sense, Heidegger had taken over from Husserl, but he had a different kind of existentialism, and what he was doing, in a way, was saying "back to reality - back to the reality of actual existence". He said that one of the main troubles with human beings was what he called "forgetfulness" of existence. This was what Sartre had meant in Nausea when Roquentin looks at a seagull and says it exists, but he doesn't really believe it. It was also what Chesterton meant when he said we say "thank-you" for passing the salt at table but we don't mean it; we say the earth is round but we don't mean it.

Heidegger said that in our greatest moments we actually said something and meant it. It was like D H Lawrence's view, that in moments of magnificent intensity we really seemed to see the meaning of life, whereas philosophy or intellect tended to take that away.

Wilson referred to the famous passage in Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality in which Whitehead said that what philosophers really needed to take into account was every kind of experience - experience drunken, experience sober, experience mystical, experience sceptical, and so on. "He was perfectly right, but can you imagine though an Oxford philosopher saying 'Oh dear, I'd better go and get drunk because I haven't taken the experience 'drunk' into account'?"

While on the subject of Oxford philosophers, Wilson recalled how he was once asked to interview the Oxford professor of metaphysical philosophy Gilbert Ryle who, in The Concept of Mind argued that there was no such thing as "mind", and that Ryle agreed to the interview only on condition that his philosophy was not discussed.

"He obviously felt that his philosophy was very unsound," Wilson remarked. Ryle thought that to talk about spirit was simply to talk about the "ghost in the machine" - that one couldn't view a human being as something like a torch with a battery in it and which wouldn't work if the battery was removed. Wittgenstein took the same view.

Yet Ryle's favourite novelist was Dostoevsky, so he did have an opposite side which recognised his philosophy was extremely narrow. "You don't read Dostoevsky if you don't believe that the spirit really does mean something," said Wilson. "Dostoevsky said there is only one basic question: the question of whether there is life after death, and that's the most important question in the world. Of course, in a certain sense he was correct, because if we are merely products of material nature, merely machines, then there is a sense in which human life is profoundly meaningless."



ONE of the most central anecdotes in all Wilson's works is that of the Russian writers Gorky and Tolstoy walking together when they see two hussars approaching , resplendent in their uniforms. Tolstoy first says: "Look at them - bloody military idiots, strutting along," and then, as the hussars go past, he exclaims: 'My God, aren't they magnificent!'

Wilson said: "That's what I call dual value response, and it's being swept out of the world of intellect and suddenly seeing that there's far, far more meaning. Now that is the basis of my optimism. Pessimism is always based upon an intellectual, rational assessment of things. Whenever we catch a glimpse of 'the reality' we suddenly get this overwhelming sense of tremendous meaning.

"As I've often said, human beings are rather like blinkered horses - we're deliberately blinkered because we couldn't bear reality, it would be simply too strong, too chaotic, for us, as Huxley points out in The Doors of Perception, so we have to have filters, blinkers, like a horse in traffic. So the very nature of human perception means that we are all in the position of philosophers, wandering around blinkered, unable to see the reality.

"You see, which would you say is most true? Tolstoy's feeling: 'Look at those bloody military idiots strutting along there' or 'My God, aren't they magnificent!' Obviously, the second, because he was entering more deeply into sympathy with the hussars when he said that. Bergson, of course, thought it ought to be possible to intuit your way inside things, and there is that passage at the beginning of Beyond the Occult, which I think is probably my best book, in which a man on a motorbike describes suddenly feeling time has stopped and he can see inside the trees. That's an example, I think, of what Bergson meant.

"Heidegger was saying the same kind of thing when he talked about forgetfulness of existence. Bergson said we filter the world through intellect, and somehow you've got to get back to that real world, in Bergson's case, he thought, with something called intuition. It's significant that he's one French philosopher who was very famous in his own time but who has totally lost influence and now nobody even gives Bergson's name the time of day.

"What Heidegger meant by hating metaphysics was anything like Plato's notion of Ideas, that the reality of things lies in the Idea behind them. You can see what this means. You couldn't, if you were a carpenter, make a table unless you had a clear Idea of the table. Therefore, in a sense, the Idea of a table is more real than any individual table.

"Heidegger wouldn't have this, and he gave an interesting example of why he wouldn't have it, which, I think, was a hammer. He said you can't really have the idea of a hammer on its own because a hammer is connected with all kinds of things, with hammering, with carpentering, which are all connected, inextricably bound together, so you can't have the idea of a hammer on its own and separated out from them. Now that just seems flatly untrue. Of course you can have the idea of a hammer - the hammer is any kind of an object that's used to apply great force at a single point to another object. You've obviously got a very clear idea of what you mean by a hammer.

"Therefore, Heidegger's dislike of metaphysics, by which he meant Platonism, is rubbish. Derrida took over this complete - that's where he started from. One of the bitterest quarrels between Derrida and Foucault was when Derrida accused Foucault of metaphysics - it would be a bit like accusing Arnold Schwarzenegger of being an old pooftah! But you can see what that means though, if you say that the Idea does not exist, that only the reality of things exists, you are getting back to the old medieval dispute between nominalism and realism, and also going back to the basic philosophical dispute between materialism and idealism, or materialism and spiritualism, if you like, using spiritualism, of course, in the sense of believing that the spirit is reality."



AFTERWORD: I first met Colin Wilson during a holiday in Cornwall in the summer of 1999. As I had chosen to study his existential criticism as part of an English and philosophy degree course I was pursuing as a mature student - having been an avid reader of his books since the mid-1960s - I was keen to meet him and so, having pieced together his address from clues in Howard Dossor's biography, I had written him a letter, explaining my interest. I was amazed to receive a phone call from Colin on the very morning he received my letter, inviting me to visit him at his home at Gorran Haven - a meeting where I received the gifts of two of his latest books, and after which he took the trouble to record on tape many further thoughts about our conversation, and mail it to me (addressed quaintly to "Mr G Ward, Esquire").

How many world-famous authors would go to such lengths for a stranger? Yet, as Dossor has remarked, Wilson is well-known for the generosity with which he gives his time to visitors. Once asked by Punch magazine what he would like for Christmas, Wilson was moved to request a summer at home free from visitors - but he opted for a batch of record albums instead! I can only say that I am extremely grateful to Colin for welcoming me to his home these past summers and giving me some of his valuable time for the interviews on which this article is based.



FOOTNOTE (8/18/01): It was announced in August 2001, that Ian Brady�s book, under the title The Gates of Janus, would appear in Britain after all.� Following publication by Feral House of California, the book will go on sale in Britain in November 2001, distributed by Turnaround Publisher Services, of London.



COPYRIGHT GEOFF WARD 2001

 

[Laura]

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jbmorgan/cwbio.html

A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF COLIN WILSON

Wilson was born in Leicester, England, on June 26, 1931 into a working class family, which he says he considers not to be "of any particular importance" except to motivate him to escape from the extreme drabness of such an environment. His father was a "worker in the boot and shoe trade," and Wilson has described him as being rather frustrated with his life, and apparently he and his sons kept their distance from each other out of a mutual irritation. Wilson has said little about his mother, who remained a housewife, although she too seems to have been extremely ordinary in her time and place. Wilson has one sibling, his brother Barry, born one year after him.

Wilson did not learn to read until he was 7 or 8, but once he did he set himself the task of reading everything in sight. Among his earliest influences Wilson has mentioned comics, romance and detective magazines, and P.G. Wodehouse. At his aunt's home he also discovered a number of pulp magazines, including Weird Tales, which he immediately delved into, to the chagrin of his uncle, who never invited him to return after finding them. Wilson says that he spent most of his childhood in a "dream world," extremely bored and dissatisfied with the world around him.

When Wilson was 10, his grandfather gave him his first science fiction magazine. It excited him greatly, and soon afterwards an uncle gave him some copies of a science magazine entitled Armchair Science. Wilson says that this discovery reminded him of when he was 7 and he had been taught about dinosaurs in school - "it seemed incredible that no one had ever before offered me such an important piece of information." Reading now became for Wilson not merely an entertainment, but a means of accumulating knowledge. Soon Wilson knew that he wanted to understand everything. He read voraciously about science, and labored for long hours over his chemistry set. Other things began to interest him, and he frequented the local movie theaters and roamed on his bicycle, exploring the caves at Matlock Bath. His life suddenly began to seem exciting, charged as it now was with the energies of fantasy.

By age 13 Wilson was also beginning to have the first intimations of sexual awareness. He had his first girlfriend at this time, but she soon dropped him in favor of his best friend. Depressed by this, Wilson wrote his first "book" to overcome his misery. At first he tried to summarize everything he knew about science, but as he worked he began to want to include more and more subject areas. He continued to read, and soon he began to move beyond the physical sciences into psychology and philosophy. Soon his little project had succeeded in filling six notebooks. Wilson says that this project was valuable to his development because it taught him "how to work for my own pleasure" and "how to think."

Philosophy puzzled Wilson at first, seeming to have no connection to the world at all, but Joad's rendering of Berkeley's ideas struck a chord with him, particularly Berkeley's idea that color is an invention of the senses. He realized that this implied that the entire universe could simply be an invention of our minds. Such an idea was frightening to the young Wilson.

Also at this time Wilson became interested in Einstein's Theory of Relativity. However, Einstein's ideas also served to shatter Wilson's youthful faith in the objective world. He didn't know how to deal with them. Freud and Adler contributed to his confusion. Wilson became filled with dread at the prospect of "living in a universe without certainties."

Wilson found himself embroiled in the modern predicament even before he had had any experience of life. Reason had failed him. He recalled how, in childhood, he had believed that moments of delight, such as Christmas morning, were somehow more real than the rest of life. Now he could no longer believe that there was any meaning in anything. Every human being seemed to be motivated by nothing but delusion. The acquisition of knowledge was of no value in and of itself. His newly-developed sexual feelings only served to worsen his torment and the sense that he was "out of touch with reality." Life seemed entirely futile.

Wilson decided to leave school at 16 in order to pursue a career as a scientist,but a low grade in math on his matriculation exam made this impossible. He could not return to school as his father insisted that he begin earning money. Wilson ended up taking a job in a wool factory. Wilson hated the job, consoling himself in his free time by reading the works of the great English poets, the only time when he felt truly free.

After only a month at the factory Wilson's old school offered him a position as a laboratory assistant. He retook the math exam and this time received the credit that he needed. However, Wilson's interest was rapidly moving away from science and he had already begun work on a play - a work heavily influenced by George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman." He accepted the job and began taking night classes in science, but writing was now Wilson's primary interest. Stuck in a job in which he no longer had any interest, he found himself back in the same predicament of meaninglessness.

Wilson became so frustrated that one day he decided to kill himself. Enrolled in a class in analytical chemistry, he walked into class one evening with every intention of swallowing cyanide. But at the moment he was about to ingest it, he saw himself as two people - one being the depressed Wilson, the other being his real, and as yet unknown, self. Deciding that he couldn't sacrifice the unknown Wilson due to his own depression, he replaced the bottle and felt invigorated with life - for a few days.

After a year Wilson took the exams, and his grades reflected his lack of interest in the subject. The school offered to keep him on, but recognizing the futility of staying, he resigned. He then took a job as a civil servant in a tax office, which needless to say didn't succeed in exciting his interests either. He continued to write, and even sent stories to magazines, but they were invariably rejected.

Wilson was transferred to another tax office in Rugby, finding it no better than Leicester. He continued to read and write. When he turned 18, he was required to register for the National Service, and he decided that he would join the Royal Air Force in order to learn how to fly. Wilson hated the restrictive military lifestyle but he was not bored, and actually enjoyed the structure and activity involved in his training. Once his training was completed, however, he was assigned to Nottingham as a junior clerk for an anti-aircraft unit, and soon he was back where he had started.

His discontentment reached a peak one day when a Flight Lieutenant asked him if he wasn't ashamed of his bad typing. Wilson, fed up, said no. To Wilson's surp rise, instead of disciplining him the officer sympathized with his unhappiness a nd said that if the Medical Officer would certify him as emotionally unstable he could get a transfer to a medical unit. As Wilson had decided that becoming a medical orderly would offer him more freedom, he accepted. He went to the Medic al Officer and explained that he was having difficulties with military life due to his homosexuality. The plan worked better than Wilson had expected. He was questioned by the RAF police, who demanded that he identify all homosexuals in t he camp. Wilson knew of some genuine homosexuals but refused to betray them. The y told him that they would not release him until he cooperated. The officer, up on hearing of Wilson's predicament, sent him home on leave. A few weeks later, he was called in to see a Wing Commander (who Wilson later learned was homosexual) who officially discharged him from the RAF.

His freedom restored, Wilson vowed to never take a boring job again. It was now 1950. He took brief jobs as a farmhand and as a ditch-digger. If not interesting jobs, Wilson had found that physical labor at least prevented boredom. At this time, a reference in a T.S. Eliot poem led Wilson to the Bhagavad-Gita, and he began to practice meditation. Wilson found that meditation helped him to overcome the depression that had plagued him since his teenage years. His life grew infinitely more satisfying.

It was during the summer of 1950 that Wilson had his first sexual experience. This, too, helped to release Wilson from his boredom. However, the girl's determination to marry him alarmed him, and with scarcely any money he left for France. In Paris he befriended a millionaire philosopher, Raymond Duncan, who was espousing the philosophy of "Actionalism." Finding that they had much in common, Duncan offered Wilson a place to stay and to train him as a printer in the "Akademia Duncan." Wilson remained for a few weeks but found the place uninteresting, travelled eastward on his bicycle, but his lack of funds forced him to return to Leicester in December.

Wilson found work in various mundane jobs, and soon found himself stuck in the same, persistent hopelessness. He began to write a novel called Ritual of the Dead, based on Jack the Ripper, and essays on literary themes. He became involved in a relationship with Betty, who was ten years older than he. She became pregnant, and Wilson's parents forced him to marry her. Wilson did and they moved to London. However, as they had very little money, they found it almost impossible to afford a place that was big enough for all three of them. After 18 months of nomadic life, Betty returned to Leicester. It was the end of their marriage.

Wilson worked at various jobs, and returned to France briefly. During a job as a carpet salesman in Leicester, Wilson met Joy Stewart and fell in love with her. After persuading her to break off an engagement to another man, she joined him in London in February 1953. After a few months more of tedious jobs, Wilson at last decided to give up paying rent and ended up sleeping in a waterproof sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath. With just barely enough food to eat, Wilson spent his days in the Reading Room in the British Museum (where Karl Marx and Shaw had composed masterpieces) and worked on his novel, which he now called Ritual in the Dark. He also conducted research.

One day, asking a librarian to help him locate T.S. Eliot's essay "Ulysses, Order and Myth," the problem ended up in the hands of the novelist Angus Wilson, who was the superintendent of the Reading Room at the time. In conversation Colin told Angus what he was working on, and he offered to read the manuscript. Wilson rapidly completed the first part and gave it to him to read over the Christmas holiday.

By now, the weather had grown severe and Wilson was forced to return to work, finding a place to live in New Cross. Over Christmas Wilson began to conceive of another book, which he called The Outsider in Literature, which contained ideas he wanted to put into Ritual in the Dark but which he knew would overload it with theory. Inspired by Henri Barbusse's novel L'Enfer, Wilson was soon at work on the second book.

Wilson ended up working nights as a dishwasher so that he could spend his days in the Reading Room. Angus Wilson read the first part of Ritual and encouraged him to finish it. However, Colin decided to finish The Outsider in Literature first. Having read and been impressed by an anthology of religious mysticism entitled A Year of Grace, edited by the publisher Victor Gollancz, Wilson sent him the first chapter of The Outsider with an outline for the rest. Wilson's mother became ill when he was only halfway done with the manuscript; Wilson submitted the completed half and returned home. When he came back to London, he found an acceptance letter from Gollancz and an advance. Wilson finished the book, and The Outsider finally appeared in May 1956.

By this time, Joy and Wilson were at last able to live together, and they took an apartment in Notting Hill Gate, in a house in which Dylan Thomas had once lived. The appearance of The Outsider caused an uproar. It was almost unanimously hailed by reviewers as a masterpiece, and reviews appeared under such headlines as "He's a major writer, and he's only 24!" Wilson was soon being interviewed by everybody, including Time and Life. The book was a bestseller in both England and America, and within a year it was translated into a dozen languages. The situation overwhelmed Wilson. After the initial rush, however, Wilson began to feel irritated by all the attention, and felt that he was betraying the very principles he had been writing about. "My 'success' itself was an absurd paradox;" he later wrote, "I was being rewarded for telling society how much I detested it." He came to understand that the people interviewing him had no understanding of his work but saw him as some kind of freak.

Coincidentally, a week before the appearance of Wilson's book, the young John Osborne's play "Look Back in Anger" had been performed for the first time, and had a similar reception as Wilson's book. Thus the "Angry Young Man" movement in literature was christened by the press. Wilson found himself the frequent subject of gossip columns and was pestered by reporters on the most banal issues. It got to be so bad that the Daily Express once reported that Wilson had been seen on line at a movie theater.

After a few weeks of wild reception, however, the attitudes towards Wilson's book took a turn for the worse, as serious critics had grown irritated with the banality that had surrounded it and its author. The Sunday Times offered Wilson a job as a regular critic the day after the book's publication, but only printed two of his reviews. Their gossip columnist called The Outsider a coffee table book, more often bought than read. Angus Wilson warned Colin that if such publicity continued, he would never be taken seriously as a writer. This turned out to be the case, as no other writers acknowledged the book at all, except for Arthur Koestler, who called it "bubble of the year."

Early in 1957, the final blow was dealt. One evening Joy and Wilson were having dinner in their apartment with Gerald Hamilton (on whom Mr. Norris in Christopher Isherwood's Last of Mr. Norris is based), a homosexual, when Joy's parents suddenly burst in. Joy's father was armed with a horsewhip, shouting, "The game is up, Wilson!" Joy's parents had always disliked him, but her sister claimed to have read Wilson's diaries and that they proved that he was a homosexual and had several mistresses. What Joy's sister had actually seen were Wilson's notes for Ritual in the Dark. As Joy was over 21, her parents could not force her to do anything, and Wilson called the police. Unfortunately, Gerald Hamilton had decided to alert the newspapers. Within minutes, the Daily Mirror reports were on the scene. Wilson gave them an interview but soon his apartment was besieged with reporters. Joy and Wilson succeeded in sneaking away and left London, but this only added fuel to the fires of gossip. When Wilson returned to London he was contacted by Victor Gollancz, who told him, "For God's sake get out of London or you'll never write another book." Wilson agreed, and he and Joy decided to rent a cottage in Cornwall, where they remain to this day.

Unfortunately, the damage was done, and no one took Wilson seriously anymore. Undaunted, Wilson commenced work on a sequel to The Outsider dealing with religious outsiders which he called The Rebel. He argued that the Outsider does not need to be an exile from society but can also be an important force for change within it. Gollancz persuaded Wilson to change the title to Religion and the Rebel and it was published in the autumn of 1957. It was as unanimously rejected as The Outsider had been praised. The world was sick of both Wilson and the Anrgy Young Men in general. Wilson was called an intellectual fraud.

Wilson was upset by these reviews, but he was also relieved that no one was interested in him anymore. A few weeks after the appearance of his second book, he went to give a lecture in Oslo, Norway. He expected the worst, but instead he discovered that the Norwegians cared nothing about his personal life but wanted to know only about his ideas. The trip renewed his confidence. Wilson decided that his failure had been an important lesson, and that now he must attempt to prove the ideas that he had set forth in his books, showing that the Outsider could indeed work alone. His success had been a false success that had led him astray; now he could pursue his true goal.

If nothing else, success had given Wilson one important thing: money. Despite the bad publicity, Wilson's books were continuing to sell well. He was now secure from the endless drudgery which had dogged his youth. They weren't living a life of luxury, but he and Joy were living comfortably and happily. They even had enough money to purchase a larger house in Cornwall, one large enough to house Wilson's massive collection of books and records.

Wilson continued to work on Ritual in the Dark, and it was finally published in 1960. Wilson went on to write the other four books in the Outsider Cycle (see the bibliography for the others), but the critics continued to ignore him. Still, the books sold well enough that Wilson and Joy were able to eke out a precarious existence. Wilson was contacted by the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who was intrigued with Wilson's work, and he related the discoveries he had made which strongly paralleled Wilson's own conclusions. The basis of his work is the idea of "key experiences" - moments of sudden and extreme happiness. Maslow, as Wilson, believed that truly happy people have these experiences on an ordinary basis, and that if people were more aware of them, they could have them all the time. This concept is a cornerstone in both writers' work.

Wilson grew more and more intrigued with this concept, and began to believe that peak experiences were brought about when reality is grasped by the mind rather than by the automatic responses which get us through everyday life. This ability which enables people to grasp reality consciously was labelled "Faculty X" by Wilson. As Wilson was developing these theories, Wilson was approached by a publisher who wished him to write a book on the occult. Wilson accepted, as he realized that his researches were leading him in the direction of the paranormal.

The book, The Occult, was printed in 1971. Suddenly, many of the reviewers who had been attacking Wilson since 1956 began to give him a warmer reception. The book was a financial success. Wilson also began to realize that, despite the critical failure of his books, he had acquired a large and regular audience of readers, and he discovered that there was even a Colin Wilson Society in London.

Of Wilson's life since that time, he has said little. But considering the enormous output of his work, which persists up to the present day, an account of that period would no doubt be more of an intellectual than a biographical story, which is what this piece aims to be. I have derived the above account from Wilson's own 1988 book Autobiographical Reflections. A more thorough and lengthy autobiography, although significantly older, is Voyage to a Beginning. There are also a number of biographies of Wilson available, the most recent being Howard F. Dossor's Colin Wilson: The Man and His Mind.

 

[Laura]

An exchange with Graham on Colin Wilson:

______________

Now that I have gathered some data on Wilson, I think I can say something intelligent about Graham's experience.

Graham wrote:
> He seems interested in heightened 'states' and how to get there, to
> which end he seems to have developed a method of
> concentration/focussing attention that can produce the effect he had
> been chasing for a long time. "I know how to do it... I solved the
> problem". So he goes on to talk a little about something that is added
> by the brain in this process, described it as developing a muscle and
> tapped the front of his head in the 'third eye' position.

Laura:
After reading his biography, and the fact that he spent most of his life
depressed and looking for stimulus to keep from being depressed, even
getting to the point of wanting to kill himself because life was so boring
(what a reason?!), this is not a surprise. It's also not a surprise that he
has developed a "mechanical" way of self-calming.

Graham wrote:
> About such raised states he then goes on to discuss events seemingly
> connected with these states. This was toward the en of his talk and I
> was kind of with him thus far, but now started to wonder as it began to
> almost drift into YCYOR terms, well not quite that, but I might 'be so bold',
> to a sleeper, listening to him the idea could be taken and swallowed whole
> without thinking too deeply further on it, and missing the point that if the
> idea is right their starting point of consciousness (sleep) is not a place
> from where they can 'do it', but maybe he is no worried about such people?

Laura:
Which means that he is basically leading people astray. This saddens me. He
was SUCH a hero to me!

Graham wrote:
> So he talks about the level of consciousness above the ordinary waking
> state and how "things begin to go right" when in them, talks about
> syncronicity, conscious intent, "put yourself into the state and things
> happen"... "I seem to be a verb".
>
> The ideas at the time brought up Ms description of "savior faire" or Gs
> ability to "do". Is it the same thing perhaps, going in the same direction as
> Wilsons thought, "I seem to be a verb"?

Laura:
Yes, but it seems to be a mechanical counterfeit, almost as though it is an
imitation of what is really possible.

Reading his biography, with all we have learned, makes me wonder... well,
about a lot of things.

Graham wrote:
> But, the flavour of his discussion of this idea seemed very upbeat to
> me, he seemed to be missing something of the other problems posed by
> hyperdimensional reality, or even the problem for most people to even
> get anywhere near to these states from the position they are in. Yet,
> he seemed to think that "we are coming to a 'tipping point' "... "are
> on the verge of a leap", where all those who can have this influence
> will affect the whole of reality.

Laura:
If you haven't read his book, The Mind Parasites, you might want to. That
was the one that made me think he was on a similar path. I now see that I
projected something onto him that wasn't really there. I was basically
"filling in" the missing elements with my own world view.

Graham wrote:
> Then right at the last during the Q and As, he briefly touched on the
> idea of "other beings", of knowledge coming from outside of us from the realm
> of these beings, a realm where our world seems small, our squabbles petty.
> There seemed no question as to whether beings in this realm where benevolent
> or not (but the subject was only briefly touched on).

Laura:
In other words, if it's higher, it's "good"??

Graham wrote:
> Afterward, the chance to talk with him at length did not occur, there
> was only time for a brief discussion.
>
> He said he found SH very interesting, "more interesting than the other
> one" (ponerology), "she certainly has an interesting mind"... he said
> he found the ideas to go "all over the place". He seemed
> 'stand-off-ish' like he had not offered to talk in his email, he
> certainly did not seem to be asking to take the conversation further
> anyway and I did not press it further.

Laura:
Now, after reading the biography, I understand why. I was shooting a lot of
his sacred cows in SH and didn't even know it. I read in the biography that
he had been contacted by Maslow who was "interested" in his ideas. For a
guy who had been so bored and then badly treated, this was probably the most
validation he ever had, so Maslow and his ideas probably became "cemented"
in his mind.

And in SH, I wrote the following:

Aldous Huxley also made an early connection between the effects experienced
by those partaking of psychedelic drugs and the experiences of Eastern
Mysticism and this set the consciousness-raising bomb off with a BANG! Along
came Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert AKA Baba Ram Dass with their LSD and
other modes of mind marvels, leading the parade of those who were "turned
on, tuned in." Abraham Maslow became a father figure to the new "wave" of
those desiring to fill the gaping hole of their reality with "peak
experiences." Maslow cited psychedelic drugs as one of the means in which
even ordinary people could have a little of what the Eastern Mystics worked
many years to develop. Now, it could be had for a weekend seminar at Big
Sur, or a study by mail course at only $29.95 per lesson! What a deal!

Peak Experiences-experience, experience, and experience-became the pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow of the 1960's. No one needed to live in
Existential Despair any longer! Everyone could become a "spiritual voyager"
and achieve extended periods in realms of consciousness they had only heard
about in veiled, mysterious allusions down through the ages.

Encounter groups, radical therapies, old and new combinations of theories
and practice came rolling off the conveyor belt of techno-spirituality. The
intangibles of spirit had been harnessed! Anyone could evoke some desirable
experience by manipulating awareness at the basic physical and psychological
levels. Never mind that all of this bypassed the vital processes of reason
and conscious decision making. By its very nature, the whole techno-
spiritual machine operated completely without critical thinking; it tapped
the bottomless pit of feeling-emotion-primal being. Never mind that much of
this emotion was negative, confusing, anxious and fearful! Let's just get it
all out here in the open and have a party with it!

Each of the many techniques developed during this time was fully capable of
producing an emotional high of one sort or another. There were endless "peak
experiences," and dramatic "personal breakthroughs." The mixtures of Zen,
yoga, meditation, and drugs along with strict mechanical technology, were a
veritable adventure in awareness! The only problem was: in the midst of all
this peaking, mind-blowing, turning on and tuning in, ecstasy and
encountering, many people encountered things that, perhaps, ought not have
been awakened. Boundaries were breached into unseeable and terrifying realms
of consciousness. William Chittick, translator of the works of the great
Sufi Shaykh, Ibn al-'Arabi, wrote:

Nowadays most people interested in the spirituality of the East desire
the "experience," though they may call what they are after intimate
communion with God. Those familiar with the standards and norms of spiritual
experience set down by disciplined paths like Sufism are usually appalled at
the way Westerners seize upon any apparition from the domain outside of
normal consciousness as a manifestation of the "spiritual." In fact, there
are innumerable realms in the unseen world, some of them far more dangerous
than the worst jungles of the visible world.

So preserve yourselves, my brothers, from the calamities of this place, for
distinguishing it is extremely difficult! Souls find it sweet, and then
within it they are duped, since they become completely enamored of it.

By the end of the decade of the 60's, the "human potential" movement had
become a veritable potpourri of religion, science, mysticism, magick and
"the occult." The drug use got out of hand, the "techniques" began to show
serious flaws with a number of tragedies resulting in crime or madness, and
the whole idea of human beings becoming "psychic supermen" hit the skids.
The promise of the 60's decayed into an aimless lethargy-old hippies living
in communes, braiding their gray locks and lusting after the sweet young
teeny boppers while they fired up another bong and reminisced about the
"good old days" at Esalen.

So, I guess I now know that he is kind of "frozen" in his fantasy. Seems
that living in a fantasy is a big part of his existence.

And I had one too: that Colin Wilson was a true seeker of truth, and not
just a hack looking for experiences to alleviate his boredom and high
stimulus threshhold.

Graham wrote:
> I may have read it wrong but that seemed the right thing at the time.
> He made comment regarding getting in touch with you directly (I had
> forwarded you email address), that it was not a good idea that "I fear
> she may take over my life", a comment he kind of 'closed' the
> conversation with in a "see ya, wouldn't want to be ya" way, or so it
> seemed.
>
> What is interesting about that, Wilson's reaction to you and the
> material, and his affect later on me, is that it is VERY similar to the
> feedback/influence of Robin Amis. Amis had commented that the work was "too
> long" when taking about Ancient Science, and had described you at one time as
> "a dominator".
>
> I wonder if it is their age/character that is producing these
> interpretations? Perhaps 75 year old English men do not like the idea
> of young American women with ideas from waaaay outside of the box of
> the known?

Laura:
I admit that this kinda got to me because any such critique always sends me
into a state of trying to figure out if it is objective or not. I asked the
guys to PLEASE tell me the truth! (After all, that's how Vinnie described
me also: a "dominator.")

I mean, Ark doesn't think I'm a dominator.. he thinks of me more as a kid
who hasn't been ruined by parental programming and still feels perfectly
confident and free to explore and learn.

Henry said that men who aren't sure of their manhood are always threatened
by women that are confident being a woman.

Well, I don't feel so confident... and I don't know why I am perceived as
confident. The only thing that I feel inside is that there are things to be
done and somebody's got to do them, and I'm here, I'm capable, and I don't
see anybody else stepping up to the plate, so I'm willing to work. That's
it. That's what I feel inside when I do things. So why does that "project
confidence"?? I wonder.

Another thing: I'm not afraid of looking foolish, so I'm not shy. If I try
to do something, and make a mess, that's okay. I'll try again. I'm not
perfect, nobody is, but that doesn't mean people ought not to do stuff.
Maybe that is it?

I didn't realize that Amis had such a view. I'm glad you told me.

Graham wrote:
> Their affect upon me seemed similar too, Both Wilson and Amis allude to
> having found something, and seem to 'drop hints' that the current direction
> of work is being "dominated/taken over" by the Cass work (but that may be
> just problems in my own readings a-la 'everything is about 'me', everything
> is a criticism of what I do, so I am never quite sure).

Laura:
Hmmm... the "secret knowledge" ploy. Reminds me of what Lobaczewski wrote:

You can just imagine our worry, disappointment, and surprise when some
colleagues we knew well suddenly began to change their world view; their
thought-patterns furthermore reminded us of the "professor's" chatter. Their
feelings, which had just recently been friendly, became noticeably cooler,
although not yet hostile. Benevolent or critical student arguments bounced
right of them. They gave the impression of possessing some secret knowledge;
we were only their former colleagues, still believing what those "professors
of old" had taught us. We had to be careful of what we said to them. These
former colleagues soon joined the Party. [...]

This knowledge about the existence of susceptible individuals and how to
work on them will continue being a tool for world conquest as long as it
remains the secret of such "professors". When it becomes skillfully
popularized science, it will help nations to develop immunity. But none of
us knew this at the time. [...]

One of the first discoveries made by a society of normal people is that it
is superior to the new pathocratic rulers in intelligence and practical
skills, no matter what geniuses they seek to appear to be. The knots
stultifying reason are gradually loosened, and fascination with the new
rulership's non-existent secret knowledge and plan of action begins to
diminish, followed by familiarization with the accurate knowledge about this
new deviant reality.

Putting all the puzzle pieces together, (especially after reading the biography),
it strikes me that Wilson may be a
variation on this type described by Lobaczewski:

Schizoidia: Schizoidia, or schizoidal psychopathy, was isolated by the very
first of the famous creators of modern psychiatry. From the beginning, it
was treated as a lighter form of the same hereditary taint which is the
cause of susceptibility to schizophrenia. However, this latter connection
could neither be confirmed nor denied with the help of statistical analysis,
and no biological test was then found which would have been able to solve
this dilemma. For practical reasons, we shall discuss schizoidia with no
further reference to this traditional relationship.

Literature provides us with descriptions of several varieties of this
anomaly, whose existence can be attributed either to changes in the genetic
factor or to differences in other individual characteristics of a non-
pathological nature. Let us thus sketch these sub-species' common features.

Carriers of this anomaly are hypersensitive and distrustful, while, at the
same time, pay little attention to the feelings of others. They tend to
assume extreme positions, and are eager to retaliate for minor offenses.
Sometimes they are eccentric and odd. Their poor sense of psychological
situation and reality leads them to superimpose erroneous, pejorative
interpretations upon other people's intentions. They easily become involved
in activities which are ostensibly moral, but which actually inflict damage
upon themselves and others. Their impoverished psychological worldview makes
them typically pessimistic regarding human nature. We frequently find
expressions of their characteristic attitudes in their statements and
writings: "Human nature is so bad that order in human society can only be
maintained by a strong power created by highly qualified individuals in the
name of some higher idea." Let us call this typical expression the "schizoid
declaration".

Human nature does in fact tend to be naughty, especially when the schizoids
embitter other people's lives. When they become wrapped up in situations of
serious stress, however, the schizoid's failings cause them to collapse
easily. The capacity for thought is thereupon characteristically stifled,
and frequently the schizoids fall into reactive psychotic states so similar
in appearance to schizophrenia that they lead to misdiagnoses.

The common factor in the varieties of this anomaly is a dull pallor of
emotion and lack of feeling for the psychological realities, an essential
factor in basic intelligence. This can be attributed to some incomplete
quality of the instinctive substratum, which works as though founded on
shifting sand. Low emotional pressure enables them to develop proper
speculative reasoning, which is useful in non-humanistic spheres of
activity, but because of their one-sidedness, they tend to consider
themselves intellectually superior to "ordinary" people.

The quantitative frequency of this anomaly varies among races and nations:
low among Blacks, the highest among Jews. Estimates of this frequency range
from negligible up to 3 %. In Poland it may be estimated as 0.7 % of
population. My observations suggest this anomaly is autosomally hereditary.

A schizoid's ponerological activity should be evaluated in two aspects. On
the small scale, such people cause their families trouble, easily turn into
tools of intrigue in the hands of clever and unscrupulous individuals, and
generally do a poor job of raising children. Their tendency to see human
reality in the doctrinaire and simplistic manner they consider "proper" -
i.e. "black or white" - transforms their frequently good intentions into bad
results. However, their ponerogenic role can have macrosocial implications
if their attitude toward human reality and their tendency to invent great
doctrines are put to paper and duplicated in large editions.

In spite of their typical deficits, or even an openly schizoidal
declaration, their readers do not realize what the authors' characters are
really like. Ignorant of the true condition of the author, such uninformed
readers thed to interpret such works in a manner corresponding to their own
nature. The minds of normal people tend toward corrective interpretation due
to the participation of their own richer, psychological world view.

At the same time, many other readers critically reject such works with moral
disgust but without being aware of the specific cause.

An analysis of the role played by Karl Marx's works easily reveals all the
above-mentioned types of apperception and the social reactions which
engendered animosity between large groups of people.

When reading any of those disturbingly divisive works, we should examine
them carefully for any of these characteristic deficits, or even an openly
formulated schizoid declaration. Such a process will enable us to gain a
proper critical distance from the contents and make it easier to dig the
potentially valuable elements out of the doctrinaire material. If this is
done by two or more people who represent greatly divergent interpretations,
their methods of perception will come closer together, and the causes of
dissent will dissipate. Such a project might be attempted as a psychological
experiment and for purposes of proper mental hygiene.

Graham wrote:
> All in all, not quite what I was expecting!

Me either.

Graham wrote:
> I will be interested to read a little of Wilson's recent work to see
> what further he has said about these ideas, part of me wonders if he
> "gets" the full scale of the hyperdimensional reality, it seemed to be
> missing. Similarly the only other book of his I have read on G 'The War
> against Sleep' I think it was, I was left there thinking that he didn't get
> it, that he was viewing from afar rather than from within the process of Work
> itself which seemed to leave something lacking from his view.

Laura:
I also really wonder about his reaction to Ponerology. Strikes me that
anyone who doesn't grok its importance is NOT paying attention or simply
can't grok reality.

But maybe that's the thing here: he spends so much time trying to shut
reality out that this is all he is able to do.

Very, very sad for me.

 

[Guest]

And I had one too: that Colin Wilson was a true seeker of truth, and not just a hack looking for experiences to alleviate his boredom and high stimulus threshhold.

Ditto.

It's been a real lesson to stop projecting my expectations onto some people, who after all think outside the box of average humanity, but not by much. I also think that some of these people suffer from the same stresses as rock stars who get too much attention. They not only live in a fantasy, but are burdened with having to live up to the standards of that fantasy. It's no wonder that any objectivity they may have had initially, goes out the window along the way.

I guess people like Wilson are steps along the way for any seeker. They go beyond completely mundane convention, but end up getting stuck in their own version of convention, which they then promote as some great truth.

I also really wonder about his reaction to Ponerology. Strikes me that anyone who doesn't grok its importance is NOT paying attention or simply can't grok reality.

In principle, I was also surprized when I read this. After all, Wilson does take on a psychological view of human nature. I've also noticed a lot of people seem to have a gut reaction against Ponerology, that seems hard to explain at first. I thought about it, and believe that this is because they see themselves in the work. They read about symptoms they know apply to them and their illusions are threatened.

Wilson struck me at least as being open-minded, and as the last person who would ignore the significance of Ponerology. I guess that's another projection out the window.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

> Similarly the only other book of his I have read on G 'The War
> against Sleep' I think it was, I was left there thinking that he didn't get
> it, that he was viewing from afar rather than from within the process of Work
> itself which seemed to leave something lacking from his view.

It's interesting that this came up. I was thinking about posting this same observation before Laura's post, but didn't think it would bring much to the topic. I read this book while I was still only part way through Miraculous and Beelzebub (in other words, I hadn't read a complete fourth way book, only the excerpts in Laura's material). Reading Wilson's biography of Gurdjieff, I couldn't help thinking, "this guy just doesn't GET it." It certainly seemed like he understood a lot, but something was missing. He seemed to interpret the Work in an overly simplified "psychological" framework (e.g. Ouspensky should have quit smoking to realize that he was a machine :D). In other words, his interpretation was akin to saying "We already have Will". His cup seemed full and he wasn't willing, even then, to try to go beyond the juvenile dictionary meanings of what G was trying to communicate. While I haven't read "The Occult" yet, I find it odd that he groups Gurdjieff with Rasputin, Crowley and Blavatsky. Hopefully he doesn't take the Tsarion way out and admire all of these folks as 'accomplised High Magickians.'

 

[Alada]

In one of his emails, Wilson suggested that much of the subject matter/ideas of Secret History had already been covered in his book "Atlantis to the Sphinx" Virgin Publishing 1996. Where on page 19 we find the following, interesting in terms of trying to figure where his ideas may have come from/may lead to.

Schwaller was in his early twenties when he met, in the Closerie des Lilas, in Montparnasse, an alchemist who called himself Fulcanelli (and whose real name seems to have been Champagne) and they discussed the 'Oeuvre', the Great Work of transmutation. Fulcanelli was surrounded by a circle of disciples, who called themselves The Brothers of Heliopolis; all were dedicated students of the works of Nicolas Flamel and Basil Valentinus. They combed the second-hand bookshops of Paris looking for old alchemical texts. In an ancient volume he was cataloguing for a Paris bookshop, Fulcanelli had come across a six-page manuscript written in faded ink, and stole it. It indicated that colour played an important part in the secret of the alchemists. But Fulcanelli, whose approach to alchemy was materialistic, failed to understand it. Schwaller was able to help him in his interpretations. He also showed Fulcanelli his own manuscript on medieval cathedrals, at which Fulcanelli became excited, and offered to help find a publisher. In fact, Fulcanelli borrowed the manuscript for a long time, and eventually stole most of its central insights for his own Mystery of Cathedrals, published in 1925, which has achieved the status of a modern classic.

Schwaller had meanwhile become friendly with a French poet - who was also a Lithuanian prince - called Luzace de Lubicz Milosz. During the First World War, Schwaller worked as a chemist in the army, and after the war Milosz bestowed on him a knighthood for services to the Lithuanian people, and the right to add 'de Lubicz' to his name. (It is not clear what right Milosz had to go around bestowing knighthoods.) At this point Schwaller also received the 'mystic name' AOR. He and Milosz founded a political organisation called Les Veilleurs ('watchmen' or 'vigilant ones') based upon Schwaller's notions of elitism, of which Rudolf Hess was at one time a member (as well as of a German magical order called the Thule Society). But Schwaller seems to have grown tired of involvement in politics - recognising, like most mystics, that it is a form of entrapment- and moved to Suhalia, in Switzerland, to pursue his esoteric studies with a group of like-minded friends, particularly studies relating to stained glass. This lasted until 1934, when financial problems led to the dissolution of the Suhalia community.

By this time, Fulcanelli was dead. According to Schwaller, he had invited Fulcanelli to his home in Grasse, in the south of France, to attempt the magnum opus, and they were wholly successful. Convinced that he now knew how to bring about the alchemical transformation, Fulcanelli returned to Paris and repeated the experiment several times - failing each time. The reason, said Schwaller later, was that he had chosen the right moment and the right conditions for the experiment, and Fulcanelli was ignorant about such matters. Fulcanelli now decided to break the vow of silence he had taken, and to communicate what he had learned to his disciples. He ignored Schwaller's pleas and turned down his offer of renewed financial support in exchange for silence. But he became ill, and died of gangrene the day before he was going to divulge the 'secret' to his disciples. Schwaller declared that this was an inevitable consequence of breaking the alchemical vow of secrecy.

Schwaller spent the next two years on his yacht, apparently at something of a loose end. His wife Isha - who had come to him as a disciple in the early days (drawn to him, she claims, by some telepathic link) had always been fascinated by ancient Egypt, but Schwaller had failed to share her interest. Now, in 1936, he allowed himself to be persuaded to go ashore in Alexandria to look at the tomb of Rameses IX. There he was struck by a revelation as he looked at a picture of the pharaoh represented in the form of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle whose proportions were 3:4:5, while the upraised arm represented an additional unit. Clearly, the Egyptians knew about Pythagoras's theorem centuries before Pythagoras was born. Suddenly, Schwaller realised that the wisdom of the medieval craftsmen stretched back to ancient Egypt. For the next fifteen years, until 1951, he remained in Egypt, studying its temples - particularly the temple at Luxor. The result was his massive geometrical opus The Temple of Man, in three volumes, and his last book The King of Pharaonic Theocracy, translated into English as Sacred Science.

The above leads me to wonder if whether having had chance to scan Secret History a little longer by the time I came to meet with him, he may have noted the clear difference of view in Laura's writing on Fulcanelli and Schwaller, and possibly decided that we didn't 'get it'? (see introduction to Laura's Schwaller article below).

Was there really a "circle of disciples, who called themselves The Brothers of Heliopolis" or was this a 'blind' and Wilson has taken the bait, missing the alternative 'cosmic' interpretation Laura has written of?

The excerpt was written ten years ago and he may well have changed his views since then, but my sense of him at the time was that there was a kind of self satisfaction in whatever it was he felt he 'had'. A similar sense to that given off by Robin Amis, who 'coincidentally' has also made reference to Schwaller in the past as a source, which he later retracted when questioned claiming to not really having read it, curious.

Below is a link to Laura's article on Schwaller and a snip from the introduction:

Schwaller de Lubicz and the Fourth Reich
Many readers have written to me asking about the work of Rene Schwaller de Lubicz, and why I have suggested that work based on his ideas is misleading. I have before me the lovely boxed set of his magnum opus, The Temple of Man, in which Schwaller makes all kinds of claims about the "pharaonic intelligence" and thought, which we must take as true simply because he says so. Oh, indeed, he does attempt to dazzle the ignorant and easy believer with his mathematical and "symbolique" feats of cerebral derring-do, but when his sentences are examined carefully for content, one makes the most distressing discovery that the word density of Schwaller is quite low. And he helpfully informs us at the beginning, in case we don't get it, that if we don't get it, it's going to be our fault because we aren't bright enough to get it.

Schwaller de Lubicz settled in Egypt in 1938 and for the next 15 years studied the symbolism of the temples, particularly Luxor, finding what he considered to be proof that the ancient Egyptians were the ultimate examples of Synarchy, because the were ruled by a group of elite initiates. He failed to point out that the Egyptian civilization was static and limited. What's more, it caved in on itself, and never managed to produce any significant work of benefit for humanity, as mathematician Otto Neugebauer showed. In fact, Neugebauer made it clear that the Egyptian civilization was a hindrance to the development of mankind. The Pharaonic lifestyle was that of a small group of the "elite," served and worshipped by everyone else - and that all others were, essentially, expendable.

 

[anart]

Was there really a "circle of disciples, who called themselves The Brothers of Heliopolis" or was this a 'blind' and Wilson has taken the bait, missing the alternative 'cosmic' interpretation Laura has written of?

This is an interesting question, because when I read his statement that there was a circle who called themselves "The Brothers of Heliopolis", I assumed that this circle of disciples were simply using the title as a signal that they knew and understood of the Brothers Heliopolis, as they are described by Laura in S.H. My point is that it may not be mutually exclusive; there could have been disciples and they could have named themselves to reflect their knowledge of our binary star system.

What you've pointed out is very interesting to me. Where I thought, "oh, they named themselves that to signify their understanding of the truth to which Fulcanelli was referring", your point seems to be that Wilson interpreted it in a way that Fulcanelli simply dedicated his book to his disciples who, for some other reason, called themselves 'The Brothers of Heliopolis' - which is an interpretation, on Wilson's part, that seems to lack a depth of perception, and misses the point entirely. Thanks for posting it, it is yet another example of how a person can encounter information, yet not really understand the information.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

In one of his emails, Wilson suggested that much of the subject matter/ideas of Secret History had already been covered in his book "Atlantis to the Sphinx" Virgin Publishing 1996. Where on page 19 we find the following, interesting in terms of trying to figure where his ideas may have come from/may lead to.

[...] Fulcanelli was surrounded by a circle of disciples, who called themselves The Brothers of Heliopolis; all were dedicated students of the works of Nicolas Flamel and Basil Valentinus. [etc]

What are his sources? Schwaller?

 

[Ryan]

It seems Colin Wilson is a little infatuated with Schwaller's ideas. This little snip from Laura's article is highly relevant:

We recognize it immediately in the words quoted above from Schwaller de Lubicz. It is quite easy to see his objective. It is to trash the work of someone who actually did it, and to promote the agenda of Fascist Synarchy under the guise of Alternative Egyptology. In fact, the similarities of tone, style and semantic content are so identical to other COINTELPRO operations, that it makes one wonder if they don't have a computer program that composes this disinformation?

...Hi, my name is Rene Schwaller de Lubicz. I've always been fascinated with alchemy, though for some reason (unknown even to myself), I've always indulged in this passion under strict secrecy, though now that I am a master, I don't have to keep secrets anymore, and since the other principle party is dead, I'll tell you all his secrets and my secrets.... Some years back, I wrote a little book entitled "The Mystery of the Cathedrals " but Fulcanelli stole it from me. As a scientist, I came up with a small idea, which I called the "theory of relativity". Well, It wasn't much of a theory, but Albert Einstein stole it from me and took credit for it...

It should be noted that Andre Vandenbroeck and his wife Goldian, are, according to them, both "elite members of an emerging category of authority appropriately understood as planetary tribal elders. Both studied directly with R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, unarguably one of the greatest Hermetic adepts of our age."

Remember him? R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz, the guy who designed uniforms for Nazis and taught that women couldn't grasp hermetica? The guy who hung out with Synarchists and occultists who promote the rule of the masses by secret societies in cahoots with "higher beings" who are very likely the Evil Magician described by Gurdjieff. And now we have an "emerging category of authority" called a "planetary tribal elder?" Excuse me? Where was I when the tribe cast the ballot for that one?

The Vandenbroeck's are busily promoting the idea that Fulcanelli's highly acclaimed work, The Mystery of the Cathedrals, was stolen outright from Schwaller. They support this claim by saying that "Such an allegation appears highly credible considering Schwaller's later work on the architectural symbolism of the Egyptian temple at Luxor." They then go on to promote Schwaller's magnum opus, The Temple of Man, as "the result of 15 years of on-site study at the Luxor Temple that exposes Egypt's deepest esoteric wisdom. The release of Schwaller's masterpiece has been hailed as the publishing event of the decade. It is a dense and demanding study of number, harmony and geometry that serve the supporting metaphysical foundations of ancient temple design."

And it is pure unadulterated disinformation intended to lead the reader away from the work of a real master alchemist, Fulcanelli. Anybody with two neurons in contact with one another can read Fulcanelli and then read Schwaller and see the difference. But Schwaller's work is further designed to support the Stargate Conspiracy as identified by Picknett and Prince. His ideas are the current "scientific peg" upon which all of that nonsense about "Egyptian mysteries" are suspended.

 

[Laura]

"Strange Powers" - Colin Wilson lecture notes

Yes indeed. It IS sad to see Wilson taken in by Andre VandenBroeck's nonsense. (see: AL-KEMI Hermetic, Occult, Political, and Private Aspects of R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz. By Andre VandenBroeck . Illustrated. 286 pp. Great Barrington, Mass.: Inner Traditions/ Lindisfarne Press. $22.95. Better yet, don't waste your money.)

According to Robert Irwin (not that I am saying he is an authority, but his review is interesting):

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE5DE113EF93BA15751C0A96E948260

This curious book mingles reminiscence with expositions of occult teaching. The artist Andre VandenBroeck spent most of 1959 and 1960 studying with the hermetic philosopher R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz at his villa in Grasse, in southern France. The human picture that emerges fragmentarily in ''Al-Kemi'' is both bleak and absurd.

The villa was organized like an initiatory temple. Its high priest, the gloomy recluse Rene A. de Lubicz, brooded on the evils of modern society, the Jews and the machinations of the Jesuits, as he labored on the great alchemical opus about the transmutation of metals and the soul. His wife, Isha, a veteran of eurythmics and the successful author of novels about ancient Egyptian mysticism, was high priestess. Lucie, their daughter, acted as her father's dutiful scribe, but both wife and daughter were firmly excluded from the higher mysteries. The de Lubiczes' son-in-law, Dr. Lamy, was rarely to be seen. He spent his time in an annex of the villa, mixing homeopathic medicines.

Mr. VandenBroeck, a painter and a seeker of burning intensity, managed to talk his way into the temple's precincts. He began as a reluctant disciple of Isha, about whom ''there floated an air of gypsy fortune-teller.'' He eventually managed to free himself from this rather tiresome woman and began an apprenticeship of sorts with R. A. de Lubicz, an initiation into a rarefied form of alchemy. Relations between master and disciple were always difficult. Mr. VandenBroeck already had some background in the occultist philosophy of Ouspenkyism and in the hardly less bizarre Chicago-based general semantics movement, which opposed traditional Aristotelian logic. De Lubicz for his part was suspicious and cryptic. Knowledge had to be worked for.

R. A. Schwaller was born in 1887. In his youth he worked as a chemist and studied art and theosophy. The aristocratic Lithuanian poet and occultist Oscar Milosz conferred the title of de Lubicz on Schwaller. At around the same time, Schwaller de Lubicz claims to have met the enigmatic alchemist Fulcanelli. Fulcanelli later became famous for his book ''Le Mystere des Cathedrales'' (1925), an alchemical reading of the symbolism of Gothic cathedrals.

Soon afterward, Fulcanelli (certainly a pseudonym) vanished mysteriously. De Lubicz claimed that Fulcanelli had not only pirated his (de Lubicz's) ideas on the symbolism of cathedrals, but had also attempted to make gold without fully understanding the procedure. This last had fatal consequences, and Mr. VandenBroeck tells us that, when de Lubicz visited Fulcanelli on his deathbed, the alchemist had turned black.

After World War I, de Lubicz was largely responsible for the formation of the Veilleurs (the Watchmen), a group dedicated to preserving higher values in a demoralized postwar world. The higher values were those of hierarchy and discipline. The elite of the Veilleurs sought to evolve to a higher state of being. The group's ambitions were esoteric and protofascist. Subsequently R. A. de Lubicz went to Egypt, where he spent years studying the temple at Luxor. ''Le Temple de l'Homme,'' published in 1958, was his exposition of the inner meaning of Pharaonic architecture, which boring mainstream Egyptologists with their profane readings had failed to penetrate. Finally, de Lubicz moved to Grasse, where Mr. VandenBroeck found him a couple of years before his death.

This is all quite interesting, but the reader has to work hard to extract the interest. The book is clogged with abstruse lectures on secret harmonies, mystical chemistry and whatnot. The style is rigorous, but the content is ultimately meaningless.

Eventually, Mr. VandenBroeck left the temple of mysteries at Grasse. It is to his credit that an important motive for his doing so was that he found de Lubicz's political ideas objectionable. It would have been even more to his credit if he had gone further and had recognized that most of de Lubicz's theories were junk. His ''archeology'' at Luxor failed to take account of the ascertainable circumstances of the temple's building. His ''history'' was a farrago of nonsense about racial destiny and the secret histories of Templars, tarot cards and so on. His ''geography'' had space for a manmade Nile and a Sphinx up to its neck in seawater. His ''science'' was an ill-tempered polemic against Darwin and Einstein. It is odd, then, to find Saul Bellow's foreword giving endorsement to de Lubicz as ''a source of revolutionary insights.''

This Andre VandenBroeck seems to have just "created" a story out of whole cloth, the participants being dead, and none of it stands up to proper scrutiny. So, it is, indeed sad, that Wilson has bought into it hook, line and sinker.

Seems that Graham Hancock has done the same.

Reading Riviere's book on Fulcanelli, one comes to the inescapable conclusion that Champagne was something of a "Judas" because of certain weaknesses of character. Here is the relevant excerpt from Patrick Riviere's book on Fulcanelli:

During the same year, (1921) Jean-Julien Champagne left Paris for Berry. Upon an invitation from the de Lessepses, he took up residence at their château de Leré, an estate which, although it was in Berry, was some ways from Bourges. There he was assigned the tasks of creating blueprints for a refrigerator and teaching drawing to young Paul. However, in that ancient dwelling that had once belonged to Agnès Sorel , the new landlord, Pierre de Lesseps, had installed a laboratory. And it seems that Champagne took the opportunity during his sojourn at the castle to devote himself to his passion - Alchemy - in his spare time.

Back in Paris the following year, he met Jules Boucher through one of his cousins who was working with the latter at Rhône-Poulenc's. Jules Boucher was well-versed in esotericism, and in occultism in particular, and the two men immediately established very good relations. Then, in the fall of the same year, Fulcanelli invited Champagne to attend the famous alchemical transmutation carried out by Eugène Canseliet under Fulcanelli's direction. The chemist, Gaston Sauvage, was also present and served as a witness to the event.
During the course of the following year, it is known that the Master chose to progressively disappear.

Jean-Julien Champagne returned to the castle in Leré, while Eugène Canseliet went on with his work in the small laboratory in Sarcelles until the day that Fulcanelli gave him the three famous wax-sealed envelopes that contained the documentary notes for Le Mystère des Cathédrales, Les Demeures philosophales, and Finis Gloriae Mundi.

Jean-Julien Champagne took the opportunity of his stay in the vicintity of Bourges to visit Jacques Coeur's palace and the Lallemant mansion, which aided him in the preparation of the illustration plates for Le Mystère des Cathédrales.

In the spring of 1925, he moved in with his friend, Eugène Canseliet, at 59 bis rue de Rochechouart in Paris. They resided on the same landing, each one in his own garret room. One day, they were both on their way to Montaigne Avenue to visit the de Lessepses when they again met the writer Raymond Roussel, ...

At that time, Champagne was frequently seeing Jules Boucher , who thought that the Master's illustrator was Fulcanelli himself. The painter had doubtlessly boasted that Fulcanelli and himself were one and the same person during an evening when absinth (for which he had a particular fondness) had flowed rather abundantly. One is already aware of how fond he was of jokes and pranks, and how whimsical he could be.

Indeed, he had forged the handwriting and signature of Paul Le Cour, the renowned founder of the Atlantis association , in order to send a letter to the Director of the Mercure de France magazine. In that letter, "Paul Le Cour" submitted to the Director, Mr Valette , a request to collect funds from readers with a view to erecting a memorial monument for the Martyrs of Atlantis "in the middle of the Sargasso Sea", which would naturally be "insubmersible and floating"! As one might imagine, that rather tasteless joke resulted in Paul Le Cour being severely reprimanded, and in the face of so much derision and cynicism, he had difficulties getting over it.

Strange Company

Jules Boucher, erroneously considering himself the disciple of Fulcanelli, then encouraged Champagne to associate with some rather sinister acquaintances, as we shall soon see. He introduced him to Alexandre Rouhier, a former market manager for a 'left-bank' publishing house. This was the Editions Véga, which was attached to a bookshop of the same name. Rouhier was the author of a book entitled De l'Architecture naturelle and had just finished writing an essay on the plant that 'makes astonished eyes': peyote.

Additionally, our Doctor of Pharmacology was practising Satanism in the Très Haut Lunaire , or Grand Lunaire cult, in which he was an official. This cult met on nights of the full moon near the dolmen in the Meudon woods. Later, Eugène Canseliet stated:

The most active ones were undoubtedly Alexandre Rouhier, Gaston Sauvage and Jules Boucher. The three of them more or less coaxed poor Julien Champagne into a less than commendable collaboration that alienated him forever from Fulcanelli's strong protection .

The above statement is of no little significance. In his book entitled Sectes et Rites , Pierre Geyraud wrote about the "Most High Moon-Dweller":

In the third and last degree, initiates assemble in the main occultum, on rue Chapon, precisely in the Saint-Merri parish. The room is hung with red. The Baphomet grimaces behind red curtains. In a cage, toads, satanic beasts. There the supreme teachings are delivered, based on Fulcanelli's (Le Mystère des Cathédrales), Schwaller de Lubicz's (Adam, l'Homme rouge ), Lotus de Pïni's (La Magie et le Mystère de la Femme ) and Crowley's books.

And as if this were not enough, Pierre Geyraud gives some specifics a few lines before:

The Black Pope of the sect is, like the other officials, an alchemist. His assistants are a Left-Bank publisher, a renowned journalist, a banker, an illustrator-painter, two young women, and many others, but those are mere executives.

The protagonists in the "case" are easy to identify: the publisher, Alexandre Rouhier; the journalist, Jules Boucher; the illustrator-painter, Jean-Julien Champagne. As to the "Black Pope", how could we not guess that under his tunic was hiding Gaston Sauvage (a character appearing in P. N. de la Houssaye's novel) - the chemist who was one of the witnesses at the famous transmutation carried out in 1922 at the Sarcelles gasworks?

Quite enlightening! At any rate, Jules Boucher, who was later forced to have himself exorcised, admitted that he was at the same time fascinated and terrified by the Rhône-Poulenc chemist, Gaston Sauvage who did, in fact, bear quite a fitting name!

We have seen that Pierre Geyraud evokes not only the well-known luciferian and Satanist, Alistair Crowley, but also Fulcanelli, as being among those the sect considered as the inspiration for their ideas . Here we must really wonder why, even if Julien Champagne had been partially responsible for this - in addition to esotericist, Schwaller de Lubicz, for his book Adam l'Homme rouge, about which we shall say more later on.

For the time being, let us keep in mind that Jean-Julien Champagne knew Schwaller de Lubicz personally as he had met him several times during his later years. This is according to a statement reported in Geneviève Dubois' book by André Vandenbroeck, to whom Schwaller de Lubicz purportedly made confessions in 1959 at his house in Grasse.

Eugène Canseliet was aware of the relationship between Schwaller de Lubicz and Jean-Julien Champagne, but was not aware of everything. Indeed, a secret agreement had purportedly been made between the two men (this also according to André Vandenbroeck) that dealt with an extremely delicate task entrusted to Jean-Julien Champagne by the esotericist and Egyptologist, which that esotericist was subsidizing. This task was no less than penetrating the mystery of the blue and red dyes in the exceptional stained-glass windows of Chartres Cathedral! That the two men were successful in that task would be saying enough. However, Geneviève Dubois claims that the successful result of that experiment was reported by Eugène Canseliet himself in his second preface to Le Mystère des Cathédrales. This is entirely incorrect and the error is easily demonstrated. That letter was discovered by Eugène Canseliet after the disappearance of Fulcanelli and was addressed to the latter's 'initiator', rather than 'attributed to Fulcanelli's master', as Geneviève Dubois erroneously asserts.

Eugène Canseliet was very clear on this subject:

Thus, the author of Le Mystère des Cathédrales, for many years, kept as a talisman the written proof of the triumph of his true initiator.

And, the following is the ambiguous sentence that Geneviève Dubois interpreted as being the confession of the solution to the problem of red and blue dyes in the stained-glass windows at Chartres:

[... ] what comforts me in certainty is that the fire only dies out when the work is achieved and the whole tinctorial mass impregnates the glass which, from decantation to decantation, remains absolutely saturated and becomes luminous like the sun.

The above, in fact, most certainly does not refer to an archemical process of dyeing glass, even if it is extraordinary in and of itself. It does, however, refer to the pure and sheer application of the penetration power (ingrès) of the philosophers' stone such as was described accurately by Fulcanelli himself in his Demeures philosophales. Apparently, this was entirely missed by Geneviève Dubois.

Further, she should have carried out her alchemical research more in depth prior to meditating on the following, unequivocal, lines:

Above all, it is all important is to remember that the philosopher's stone appears to us in the shape of a crystalline, body, diaphanous, red in the mass, yellow after pulverisation, dense and quite fusible although fixed at any temperature, and which its inner qualities render incisive, fiery, penetrating, irreducible and uncalcinable. In addition it is soluble in molten glass...

This is the undeniable evidence that the alchemist has obtained the stone and that transmutation can be achieved successfully!

It is quite obvious that the letter involved is not from the pen of Schwaller de Lubicz, as Geneviève Dubois would like us to believe, since it was not addressed to Champagne but, let us repeat it, to Fulcanelli's initiator!

In order to remove any doubt, the reader is referred to the text of this letter, which is given in the Appendix.

Julien Champagne Poses as Fulcanelli

Let us come back to the "Fulcanellian" pretensions of Jean-Julien Champagne (the "stand-in") who, indeed, persisted in keeping up that pretence for the benefit of his pseudo-disciple, Jules Boucher. He even went so far as to dedicate a copy of Le Mystère des Cathédrales to him in the following eloquent terms:

To my friend Jules Boucher, fervent adept of High Sciences, I offer this token of cordial affection. (signed) A.H.S. Fulcanelli .

The handwriting undoubtedly being Jean-Julien Champagne's, there is no doubt about the stratagem.

Furthermore, it seems that Champagne attributed to himself older 'disciples' such as Max Roset and a certain Steiner, both of whom he claimed to have initiated into alchemy in the small laboratory owned by the de Lesseps on rue Vernier. The same held true for Schwaller de Lubicz, contrary to what Dubois thinks.

In any event, Eugène Canseliet seemed to be quite unaware at that time of the fact that Jules Boucher discretely claimed to be "Fulcanelli's" (i.e., Jean-Julien Champagne's) disciple. The author of Deux logis alchimiques , published in 1945, even went so far as to dedicate his book to Boucher in the following terms:

To Jules Boucher, to the common friend of Champagne and myself, to the hermeticist who, better than anyone else, is able to properly appreciate Fulcanelli's occult personality. Quite cordially. (signed) E. Canseliet.

After which, Jules Boucher used this friendly dedication without hesitation to loudly proclaim that it was an implicit confession that Jean-Julien Champagne and Fulcanelli were one and the same person!

In 1962, Robert Ambelain published an article in the magazine La Tour Saint-Jacques in which he supported the same argument. This inevitably led to a response from Eugène Canseliet. In his réponse à un réquisitoire of the same issue of the magazine, he wrote:

Better than anybody else indeed, he [Jules Boucher] was able to accurately assess Fulcanelli's secret personality, for the excellent reason that he often heard people talking about the Master, even though he never obtained the privilege to be introduced to him. [...]

But let us come back to Jules Boucher, who soon reappeared in his true light with his various attempts to involve me in some of his usual hoaxes. One of those coarse jokes - intended for a certain individual by the name of Laviolette who brought to light all the machinations with supporting documents as evidence - resolutely took me away from that maniac, and from a left-bank bookseller-occultist, his guarded counsel and damned commensal.

But it was, in fact, in a letter dated May 7, 1963 and addressed to one Charles Art... published in L.M. Otero's book (see bibliography) that Robert Ambelain revealed his true thoughts. The letter is quite enlightening and removes any ambiguity about Jules Boucher, as can be understood from the following passages:

My Dear Charles,

[...] No, I never received a Fulcanelli file from Boucher! Mine was started before the war, as I have written. I have information (not all of it published...) that Boucher never mentioned! I own photographs he never saw. The reason? He would have been cross with me for that investigation and for what I had learned from it, about the others and "about him"....

[... ] Fulcanelli existed "under another name". He incorporated himself in Champagne for the time necessary to write his two books; the latter was the - likely unconscious - medium. That is why he was working at night...

[...] This is why the drafts of these nocturnal works, in a handwriting other than his own, were never found after his death. Without a doubt destroyed as the work progressed...

That said, after Pierre Dujols' death in April 1926, Champagne no longer hesitated in posing as Fulcanelli, even with Schwaller de Lubicz, with whom his ties had become closer and closer until the successful experiment in 1930 that resulted in the famous discovery of the blue and red dyes that constituted the mystery of the stained-glass windows in Chartres Cathedral.

After his return from the Plan de Grasse property belonging to Schwaller de Lubicz, Jean-Julien Champagne did not appear to be quite the same to his faithful friend, Eugène Canseliet. He immersed himself in long, philosophical meditations and undertook to renew some spagyric experiments on the small, round stove in his sparse and squalid attic on rue de Rochechouart.

With Eugène Canseliet's assistance, he busied himself developing an ointment and a plaster that they both wished to submit for clinical trials in hospitals. Was poor Jean-Julien Champagne already suspecting that an illness awaited him that would soon bring him down?

At the end of 1931, his left leg became horribly sore. He dragged it painfully until he was eventually forced to keep to his bed a few months later. In his bedroom, which was lit by a petroleum lamp whose beam he had adjusted with an attached lens, he sniffed galbanum from a metal box he always kept at hand, and slowly sipped absinth to soothe the pain.

Eugène Canseliet tried to give him as much relief as he could by changing his bandages, but to no avail. The inflamed arterial blockage developed into gangrene, growing worse daily. At the break of dawn on August 26, 1932, Jean-Julien Champagne passed away in great poverty. He was 55 years old.

His sister, Renée Devaux, took the few papers he had left. Eugène Canseliet remained on excellent terms with her, as well as with her husband, who had acted as a go-between for his brother-in-law for a long time.

Jean-Julien Champagne was buried three days later in the cemetery at Arnouville-lès-Gonesse. A few months later, a marble slab was placed on his grave. It had been ordered by his sister, but had been paid for by Schwaller de Lubicz, who was also behind the composition of the epitaph:

Here lies
Jean-Julien
Champagne
Apostolus Hermeticae Scientiae
1877-1932

A year and a half later, Eugène Canseliet happened upon Schwaller de Lubicz's book entitled, Adam, l'Homme rouge. After having read it carefully, he decided to write the author a letter, dated December 4, 1933, from which the following are excerpts:

Sir,

It may be that my name, written on the back cover, is not completely unknown to you since, having been very close to Mr Champagne in the last years of his life, you may have heard him talk about me sometimes. Since his death, I have been pursuing on my own the aim of our collaboration that started seventeen years ago, and which led us to rent two neighbouring attic rooms at 59 bis rue de Rochechouart in January of 1925.

It so happens that I was lucky enough to have been lent a very interesting book a few days ago - Adam, l'Homme rouge - which taught me something that our mutual friend had neglected to tell me - i.e., that you are the author of that curious and scholarly book. In it you demonstrate very deep knowledge and highly philosophical ideas about the primeval androgynous state - the same ones that were embraced by Mr Champagne after his return from Plan de Grasse, and which seemed to have overturned the notions he held before. As we both followed this new orientation, we went back to the study of the caput mortuum of the first work, which we had previously always rejected as useless and valueless scoria. [...]

Isn't it possible that Mr Champagne also showed an incomprehensible and surprising lack of memory towards this material part of your work, unless this was due to untimely discretion and excessive reserve?

Whatever the reason, I feel unable to rid myself of the painful impressions left in me by some unexpected events, some unsuspected facts, that took place at the end of his life and after his death, which gave rise to atrocious scenes of which I cannot say whether they were more loathsome or disturbing. It should be said that for a long time he was progressively under the deplorable influence of a woman. Alas! Narrow-minded persons too often exert such influence on superior minds.

But all of that is of no significance and has no other interest apart from the negligible one of the artificial things of this world. Quite different is the value I will give to the reply you will deem adequate to address me in order to provide me with clarification, in the proportion you deem useful, about the primary point of the great work. [... ]

Eugène Canseliet

It seems that Eugène Canseliet had already foreseen what was going to happen more than half a century later with the publication of André Vandenbroeck's book, Al-Kemi: A Memoir: Hermetic, Occult, Political and Private Aspects of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz . Once again, Geneviève Dubois erroneously wrote that the author claimed in this book that Julien Champagne was Fulcanelli.

Jean Laplace exclaimed that it was Joscelyn Godwin who, one year later, in his English critique of the book published in the review, Aries (no.8), decided on his own accord to "put to death" the Fulcanelli myth by the following extrapolation:

Vandenbroeck, not finding this point important, did not dwell on that miserable man's identity. Aor's (Schwaller de Lubicz' nickname) anecdotes, however, leave no room for doubt about his identity:

Jean-Julien Champagne, which, for many, will not be a surprise...

How could Geneviève Dubois endorse this, in contempt of any objectivity, when André Vandenbroeck had only written:

[...] The information about what Fulcanelli was doing was obtained from the Frères d'Héliopolis, in particular from Canseliet, Champagne ...

[...] I felt and I assured him of this, that to get a clear idea of the situation, History was in no need of an identification. [...] I swore to keep his name secret. I shall keep my promise.

Eugène Canseliet had, in a veiled manner, attempted throughout his life to put the reader on the trail of Fulcanelli's identity. He did this by leaving behind many clues that would permit one to discern the true personality that dwells in the shadows of the Master's pseudonym. This naturally left the door open to several hypotheses, not all of which, alas, were without a certain degree of subjectivity or partial after-thought, to say the least. These shall be refuted further on. For the time being, let us simply make mention of them.

Erroneous Hypotheses

To whom in Eugène Canseliet's entourage has Fulcanelli's true identity not been attributed? When Canseliet maintained, as he did from the start, that he was himself the disciple (and was thought to be so as well by Paul Le Cour, the founder of the Atlantis association), authors Jules Boucher, Robert Ambelain, Robert Amadou, and more recently, Geneviève Dubois, loudly proclaimed without hesitation that Fulcanelli could be none other than the painter, Julien Champagne, unless the latter had conned René Schwaller de Lubicz or Pierre Dujols.

Patrick goes on to examine all of the claims, presents evidence that debunks the nonsense that immediately was created around Fulcanelli by the "cosmic cointelpro" machine, and supports his conclusion that Fulcanelli was the great French scientist, Jules Violle.

It's a compelling read. Too bad Wilson didn't read it.

 

[Ryan]

"Strange Powers" - Colin Wilson lecture notes

Thanks Laura; this is very interesting. I wonder who was misleading who here? Was VandenBroeck making up a bunch of hearsay, or is he just dutifully repeating the things that Schwaller told him after being taken in by Champagne masquerading as Fulcanelli?

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE5DE113EF93BA15751C0A96E948260

Soon afterward, Fulcanelli (certainly a pseudonym) vanished mysteriously. De Lubicz claimed that Fulcanelli had not only pirated his (de Lubicz's) ideas on the symbolism of cathedrals, but had also attempted to make gold without fully understanding the procedure. This last had fatal consequences, and Mr. VandenBroeck tells us that, when de Lubicz visited Fulcanelli on his deathbed, the alchemist had turned black.

Reading Riviere's book on Fulcanelli, one comes to the inescapable conclusion that Champagne was something of a "Judas" because of certain weaknesses of character. Here is the relevant excerpt from Patrick Riviere's book on Fulcanelli:

At the end of 1931, his left leg became horribly sore. He dragged it painfully until he was eventually forced to keep to his bed a few months later. In his bedroom, which was lit by a petroleum lamp whose beam he had adjusted with an attached lens, he sniffed galbanum from a metal box he always kept at hand, and slowly sipped absinth to soothe the pain.

Eugène Canseliet tried to give him as much relief as he could by changing his bandages, but to no avail. The inflamed arterial blockage developed into gangrene, growing worse daily. At the break of dawn on August 26, 1932, Jean-Julien Champagne passed away in great poverty. He was 55 years old. [...]

Jean-Julien Champagne was buried three days later in the cemetery at Arnouville-lès-Gonesse. A few months later, a marble slab was placed on his grave. It had been ordered by his sister, but had been paid for by Schwaller de Lubicz, who was also behind the composition of the epitaph:

When Canseliet maintained, as he did from the start, that he was himself the disciple (and was thought to be so as well by Paul Le Cour, the founder of the Atlantis association), authors Jules Boucher, Robert Ambelain, Robert Amadou, and more recently, Geneviève Dubois, loudly proclaimed without hesitation that Fulcanelli could be none other than the painter, Julien Champagne, unless the latter had conned René Schwaller de Lubicz or Pierre Dujols.

Patrick goes on to examine all of the claims, presents evidence that debunks the nonsense that immediately was created around Fulcanelli by the "cosmic cointelpro" machine, and supports his conclusion that Fulcanelli was the great French scientist, Jules Violle.

 

[lewis_86]

Re: "Strange Powers" - Colin Wilson lecture notes

Read the majority of this post, apart from the last couple (Andre VandenBroeck etc) as I don't really know these people. Enjoyed the insights and info about Colin Wilson. I find him an interesting character; however it has been around 4 years since I read "The Outsider". I thought the book was well written and had merit, but maybe I would think differently these days.

In regards to Ponerology, this is a new topic to me, and I intend to read the significant book I've seen mentioned on here in the near future. However, I can't really see how C.W not mentioning Ponerology makes for strong criticism. Granted, the sheer weight of the topic makes it an important one to at least show willing to comprehend, but by not covering it I don't necessarily see it as a flaw. And yeah, I understand the idea of truth that is omitted is often more important that the facts discussed, but I feel that in this instance it doesn't necessarily detract from his other work. Not that I have read a great deal of his other work, that being said...

Of course, I'm prepared to be shot down...