Colin Wilson & the Fire in the Mind!

Colin Wilson & the Fire in the Mind

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2005

When a man is fighting mad
Something drops from eyes long blind
He completes his partial mind . . .

William Blake (1757 – 1827)



Between the idea
And the reality . . .
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the shadow

T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965)




I was reading my current issue of The New York Review and perusing the independent press listings, books either self-published or by electronically publishing on demand (POD) presses, and I came across an old book by Colin Wilson that is being republished.

Now Colin Wilson published a seminal work that became an international best seller in 1956 titled "The Outsider." It was about the alienation of modern man, and I must say, I read it when I was in South Africa, when I felt very much like that.

I've read other of his books. In fact I was reading one of his books while eating in a restaurant in Stockholm in 1987, when the waitress came up to me and asked, "You haven't taken your face out of that book. It must be very good." I nodded. Then she asked me what I was reading. It was Wilson's esoteric Access to Inner Worlds. Here I was an American executive in Europe, who looked like an executive, dressed like an executive, and read weird stuff, leastwise, that is how she made me feel. In any case, she stayed clear of me after that.

The book was, indeed, compelling as it was about achieving enlightenment with such topics as "beyond left brain thinking," and "contacting the other self" and "from negative to positive freedom," something that I learned much more about with Isaiah Berlin.

The book, perhaps even more than The Outsider, had influence on my conceptual thought, and this is perhaps obvious in my writing because it was written as a story.

To give you a since of the influence, I went to the book now, and noted at the end of it this note -- I write in most of my books by the way:

"Completed October 26, 1987 at The Prince Philip Hotel Restaurant in Stockholm, Sweden, surrounded by noisy, happy, joyous diners, with the soft cords of the piano in the background and the melodious voice of a Swedish lady singing Americana."

I might write an essay on my sense of what I got out of that book, but my reason for making reference to it now is that Colin Wilson, the world-famous author, is advertising "The Mind Parasites" in this independent listing. This book was originally published in 1966 but it is now more apropos than ever. I sense that major publishers don't agree, or don't want to take the risk. The book deals with what he calls "parasites" thriving in the deepest layers of human consciousness with the only weapon, our minds.

As I mentioned elsewhere in my conversation with Erskine Caldwell, he advised me that publishing never gets easier, or that readers of a generation will necessarily appreciate your message.

Caldwell, now deceased, was author of "God's Little Acres," among many other best selling novels, and at the time of its publication in the 1930s, the longest running Broadway hit play based on a book.

Were it not for Colin Wilson, I wonder if I would have ventured into this no-man's-land of publishing. Something to ponder.

What is evident in "The Outsider" is that Wilson was a reader and was fed up with the world he was forced to enter as a young man. His book struck a cord with the wider Western society of Europe and the US.

In "Access to Inner Worlds," he had sorted his angst out pretty well, as the little book was much less pontificating and polemical than his world famous seminal work. Now, when he is in his mid-70s and should be coasting, his mind is still on fire, and he apparently wants to resurface his ideas. Bully for him! What a tribute to a man and his continuing influence.

A postscript: Colin Wilson is mainly self-taught, having left school at age 16, spent a brief time in the Royal Air Force, and then started to write and has been publishing ever since. You don't have to be a Ph.D. to write what Ph.D.'s are supposed to know.

* * * * * * *

Excerpts and comments from "Access to Inner Worlds":

ESSENCE & PERSONALITY:

Gurdjieff made an important distinction between “essence” and “personality.” Personality is the outer self, the part that has learned to cope with other people and with the world. Essence is the inner being, and in most of us, its development lags far behind that of the personality. Personality reacts mechanically to events and circumstances. Under stress, it tends to bend or break. Essence is the part of us that enables us to stand alone, to make out own decisions, if necessary to ignore the opinions of other people and swim against the tide. Shy people are prone to leave their essence undeveloped, because their biggest problem is to learn to blend with the crowd, to feel themselves a part of society. They often spend so much effort on developing protective coloration that they have no energy left for deciding what they really want out of life. (Amen!)

The trouble with personality is that its motivation needs to come from outside. It reacts to people, to situations, to external stimuli. Like a donkey, it needs carrots to make it break into a gallop. (Man has two souls, one outside and looking in, and one inside and looking out)

ON FREEDOM:

My own work differed from that of the other ‘angries’ in being totally unconcerned with social issues; "The Outsider" was a study in the paradox of freedom: that, as Fichte says, to be free is nothing; to become free is heavenly. (How well I know!)

The rebel knows clearly what he doesn’t want; but he is less sure about what he wants. (True!) Some feel that since this is a “spiritual” problem, the answer should be sought in religion. (Religion can be a retreat into a cave. Take Thomas Merton, who became a Trappist monk. He seemed more frustrated in his cell than as a layman. No, the answer is not in religion!)

Whitehead remarked that western philosophy is little more than a series of footnotes to Plato. (Never thought of it that way, but agree. Plato thought reason could do miracles. Well, it can’t. Insight doesn’t come from reason)

Dostoyevsky experienced the sense of reality (insight) when he was reprieved in front of a firing squad; what had that to do with reason? (Nothing, and that’s the point! Pain, failure, and yes, facing death can wake up the mind!)

If you play a game with an insect (and who hasn’t), blocking its path with a twig, it never seems to become discouraged; it will continue indefatigably trying to find an unblocked path until it collapses with exhaustion (I always tired first). A man becomes discouraged long before because he “contemplates” his situation; he may even get discouraged before he starts (I know that well!). the purpose of this faculty – of taking stock – is to enable us not to waste vital energy. But in practice, it causes us to waste a great deal. We exaggerate; we become over-excited; we succumb to anxiety and self-pity. In short, the rational ego loses touch with its intuitive partner (Amen! I say sorrowfully, how well I know this!)

(What Wilson does) I deliberately slow down the left-brain ego; I “pay attention,” I try to apprehend it simultaneously with reason and intuition, with the mind and emotions. And if I can persuade them to cooperate, I suddenly find that I am grasping reality in a new way.

The real problem is that the process tends to be self-perpetuating. Modern man is permanently in a hurry (to the point this has become a cliché) Because I am in a hurry, I fail to bring enough energy and concentration to bear on some specific task, and the task begins to strike me as futile and boring. (Yes!)

ACCESS TO INNER WORLDS:

When we are thoroughly relaxed the right (brain) is treated as an equal partner (to the left brain), and we are suddenly surprised to notice that reality can be so pleasant and rich. (That is why I say God is in the shower with me all the time. That is where my best thoughts come!)

Science came later than religion or art, and in the past century, has gained itself a bad reputation among the religious and the artistically inclined. But this is because scientists have taken it upon themselves to dogmatize about reality, unaware that the reality they perceive through their microscope is two-dimensional reality of the left-brain. Science is nothing more than a reference system, like the index at the end of a book, which is meaningless without the reality that occupies the rest of the book. (Indeed!)

Our “normal” way of perceiving the world could be compared to a man who is so short-sighted, whenever he looks at a picture gallery, he has to peer at the paintings through a magnifying glass. Naturally, he can never see more than a few square inches. If he is very intelligent and very diligent, he can put together a general idea of the whole picture. But if he tries to stand back and see it as a whole, it turns into a blur. If someone presented him with a pair of powerful spectacles that would enable him to look at pictures from the proper distance, the result would be a revelation – very much like Plato’s image of the man who is allowed outside the cave (True, he was exposed to the sunlight for the first time, and had to wait for his eyes to adjust to the shock of light.)

IMAGINATION:

We normally think of imagination as the ability to conjure up mental images: I can imagine what it would be like to win the football pools, or to go hang-gliding. In fact, imagination is far more than this. It is the ability to re-create experience, in all its complexity and richness. And the right brain is able to do precisely that. The problem is that it seldom gets a chance. I read a book about ancient Rome, and imagine that I now have an excellent grasp of the world of the Romans. My right brain shakes its head in despair; if only I had allowed it to cooperate, it could have re-created ancient Rome for me. How? By drawing upon its immense store of memories and impressions. . . We forget that when we relax, the right brain will supply reality with a third dimension. (Alan W. Watts was fond of saying that we think we are thinking when we wrinkle up our forehead and scowl, when all we are doing is wrinkling up our forehead and scowling, which has nothing to do with thinking.)

ON KNOWLEDGE:

Human beings have such a passion for knowledge because it somehow frees them from the personal, allows them to enter a wider world where there is a sense of freedom, like standing on a mountaintop. This in turn makes us aware of the extraordinary and paradoxical fact that human beings were not primarily intended to live in “this world.” That sounds absurd: for when we look at a dog or a bird, we can see plainly that its “purpose” is to keep itself alive – to survive – and to propagate its kind. That is its primary purpose and, as far as we can see, its only obvious purpose. Man is an animal: ergo, the same thing should apply to him. Yet human beings who are restricted to such an existence feel there is something wrong. They begin to crave some “other” form of existence; this is the origin of religion. And when we read of a Newton discovering the law of gravity, a Harvey discovering the circulation of the blood, a Kant discovering that the mind influences our perceptions, a Freud discovering that man’s unconscious mind is far more powerful than his conscious mind, we see in a flash that man was intended for more than mere survival. He was not intended for “personal” existence; he was intended for “impersonal” existence. This sounds bleak and uncomfortable, but that is only because we are confusing the impersonal with the left-brain, two-dimensional consciousness. When the right brain adds its third dimension, the realm of the impersonal becomes far more rich and exciting than the personal. (This is even more provocatively developed in "One Dimensional Man" by Herbert Marcuse)

Aside: See my “Sodium is Sodium.”

THE MOST PREPOSTEROUS PART OF THE STORY:

What would we think of a man who lived out on the lawn in a tent, while he built himself a magnificent home, and then absent-mindedly went on living in the tent and left the house empty? For that is precisely what man has done. We have only to glance at the enormous volumes of history, philosophy, theology, anthropology, sociology, on library shelves, to see that very few of the writers actually “lived” their knowledge. Arnold Toynbee admits as much in the last volume of “A Study of History,” where he describes certain brief moments in which he experienced history as a living reality.

Like a man who has been driving all day, and who keeps waking up at night, imagining he is still behind the wheel, mankind has slipped into an insidious habit – of anxiety, of tension, of over-alertness.

Final aside: This book was purchased and read while on a business trip to the Scandinavian countries. This was October 1987, and the Wall Street Stock Market had crashed with my own personal portfolio being reduced by more than one-half. The book put everything in perspective for me. I wrote then, “We want to take the soft options, we want to protect our interests/markets. We have lost our nerve if not our verve.” I would ignore my portfolio the next two years while completing my European assignment. By that time, it had miraculously rebounded. Wilson was a natural palliative. His influence would show in my writing for the next quarter century. I share it with you here now, whatever your situation, hoping it proves equally useful to you as well.