Insight Editions · No. 97
The Ultimate Colin Wilson
The Essential Anthology Completed, 1956 to 2006
Colin Wilson · Edited by Colin Stanley
Colin Wilson's essays and excerpts examine outsider consciousness, peak experiences, existential philosophy, the hidden capacities of the mind, and methods for sustaining optimism and purposeful awareness.
A study guide to The Ultimate Colin Wilson by Colin Wilson, edited by Colin Stanley. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
What Ultimate adds on top of the 1985 argument.
How the argument builds
- Preface. Stanley: complete, do not replace; four experts + editor pick six additions after Wilson's further ~100 titles.
- Problem (Intro, Ch 1-3). Outsider unreality; insight evaporates; autobiographical drive toward a method.
- Diagnosis (Ch 4-6). Maslow peaks; 2009 strange story of philosophy (Descartes to Husserl/Whitehead); everyday consciousness is a liar.
- Hidden powers (Ch 7-11). Faculty X, ladder of selves, other mode, Stan/Ollie, active imagination.
- Shadow (Ch 12-16). Evolution, violent man, mind vampires, Eiger, Uncle Sam.
- Method (Ch 17-18). Peak Experience lecture; Human Condition postscript.
- Late restatements (Ch 19-24). White Tower (Faculty X as machine); Below the Iceberg; Seventh Degree; Fifth Window; Psychology of Optimism; Future of Mankind.
Same method, new metaphors after 1985.
Through-line from 1956 to the additions.
| Block | Contents | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| Front | Stanley's preface; Wilson intro | Why Ultimate; one question |
| Ch 1-3 | Outsider 20 years on; Country of the Blind; Autobiography | Problem lived |
| Ch 4-6 | Maslow; Strange Story 2009; Everyday liar | Diagnosis |
| Ch 7-11 | Magic; Ladder; Other mode; Laurel & Hardy; Active imagination | Powers + mechanism |
| Ch 12-16 | Evolution; Violent man; Vampires; Eiger; Uncle Sam | Shadow + fiction labs |
| Ch 17-18 | Peak Experience; Human Condition | Method + close of Essential |
| Ch 19-24 | White Tower; Iceberg; 7th degree; 5th window; Optimism; Future | Late restatements |
Ultimate structure: Essential spine completed by six additions.
Editor's Preface: Completing the Essential
How the Essential became Ultimate.
What Stanley says
Wilson, at 54, had already published his 74th book when he selected the Essential. Writers often fail at self-anthology; Stanley says Wilson was "the exception" and produced "an important collection for anyone approaching his work for the first time." In the 28 years before Wilson's death in 2013 he produced about another 100 titles, "plenty of material for an update."
Stanley asked Nicolas Tredell, Geoff Ward, Gary Lachman and Vaughan Rapatahana each to recommend one post-1985 extract, and added a choice of his own. Because the new edition completes the original, the title becomes The Ultimate Colin Wilson. Closing hope: "that Colin Wilson would not have been displeased."
Edition architecture.
The Single Thread
Career as one investigation into holding absurd good news.
Absurd good news and absurd bad news
Wilson starts with Yeats, sitting alone in a London shop at fifty when "my body of a sudden blazed" for twenty minutes of happiness. Such moments, he suggests, come when we relax below a threshold of tension that normally traps us in a shallow, hurried consciousness. In them our energies feel "more-than-adequate"; in ordinary life they never quite seem enough.
The opposite mood is "absurd bad news": the sense that our values are mere bodily states. Two literary scenes carry it. In Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, the wounded hero swears he will want Catherine after his operation; afterwards he is sick and admits "it did not make any difference who was on night-duty". In Flecker's Hassan, two lovers tortured to death meet as ghosts, and at the end Rafi answers his beloved's cry with "who was Rafi?" Flecker's note, Wilson says, is worse than tragedy: the suggestion that the lovers died for a delusion, and that all men die for delusions.
The child at Christmas
The problem first appeared to him as a boy at Christmas: the glow made it obvious that life is not dull, then the return to school felt like "waking up from a pleasant dream in an icy bedroom". Yet when the mood returned on a seaside trip or blackberrying, it was again self-evident that the world is bigger than we allow. In his teens he found the Romantics had suffered the same swing, and he links their high rates of suicide and early death to it. Their underlying fear was that the truth about the world is triviality, and that inside every adult sits a child interested in food and comfort, who takes over when we are tired.
The career as one investigation
1957 Religion and the Rebel: the second half of the same book, on saints and mystics.
1959 Letter from Abraham Maslow about "peak experiences".
1959-66 The rest of the Outsider cycle: The Age of Defeat, The Strength to Dream, Origins of the Sexual Impulse, Beyond the Outsider.
1966 The New Existentialism: "Romanticism Mark Three".
1971 The Occult: psychic powers and Faculty X.
1978 Mysteries; then the split-brain books Frankenstein's Castle and Access to Inner Worlds.
1984 A Criminal History of Mankind.
- The Outsider treated Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Nijinsky and Dostoevsky as men caught between Carlyle's "Everlasting Yes" and "Everlasting No". Van Gogh painted Starry Night and still killed himself, leaving the note "Misery will never end". The book's last pages pointed to Blake and Ramakrishna as nearer a solution.
- In his teens Wilson thought of a monastery or India; every job he tried, from farm labourer to dishwasher, "seemed to lead away from my objective", like walking toward a visible mountain on roads that never reach it. Writing for a living ended that frustration.
- Maslow believed peak experiences could not be induced at will. Wilson disagreed, citing Graham Greene, who induced intense relief by playing Russian roulette.
- The New Existentialism argued that existentialism is "Romanticism Mark Two": the Romantics expected defeat; Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre and Camus added that man is at least free. Hemingway's "A man can be destroyed but not defeated" sums it up. Wilson wanted neither, hence "Romanticism Mark Three", an optimistic existentialism.
- The Occult changed his mind about the paranormal. Over ten thousand years, he argues, man narrowed consciousness for efficiency and suppressed powers such as second sight. Peter Hurkos, who reportedly gained psychic ability after falling from a ladder, struck him as significant. Drugs like mescalin and LSD "put back the clock"; the better route is deliberate intensification of consciousness, the power he names Faculty X, glimpsed in Proust's cake dipped in tea.
- Split-brain research, met through Julian Jaynes, gave him the "unifying principle": a second self lives in the right hemisphere. Frankenstein's Castle and the study of Brad Absetz came, he feels, "close to a definitive solution".
Wilson's self-portrait: each phase is a new angle on the same problem, ending in the split-brain "solution".
Fiction and crime
Wilson writes novels because some things "can be expressed in a novel that cannot be expressed in non-fiction", following Shaw's call for "artist-philosophers". The germs of The Mind Parasites and The Black Room lie in The New Existentialism. He chose mostly non-fiction for this Ultimate anthology because it states the ideas "with greater economy".
Crime he sees as a low form of romantic revolt, a crude bid for self-fulfilment; he quotes the murderer Christie feeling "that quiet, peaceful thrill". The criminal matters "because he shows us what is wrong with all of us": spoilt, childish, self-pitying. Wilson then lists the failings of geniuses, from Dante's self-pity to Dostoevsky's gambling, and borrows Yochelson and Samenow's portrait of the criminal as "weak, lazy, vain, self-pitying". His formula: criminality is mankind's "original sin" and creativity its "redemption".
The Outsider, Twenty Years On
From Christmas conception to reputation restored.
The book is born
Christmas 1954 found Wilson alone in a room in Brockley, eating tinned tomatoes and bacon, estranged from a father who thought he had thrown away a safe office job. He had spent the year writing Ritual in the Dark, a novel about a Jack the Ripper figure, sleeping out on Hampstead Heath to save money and writing in the British Museum Reading Room, where Angus Wilson offered to show the novel to his publisher. Sitting with an eiderdown over his feet, he saw he was in the position of his favourite characters, Raskolnikov, Rilke's Malte, Hamsun's starving writer, and in the back of his journal he outlined "The Outsider in Literature".
Two days later he read Barbusse's L'Enfer in a single morning and opened his book with its line about a girl on a tram whose dress lifts, until "a block in the traffic separates us".
The un-achievable essence
Wilson now admits that sex drove the book more than its text shows. The obsession of his teens was that a glimpse up a skirt makes a woman seem worth pursuing to the ends of the earth, yet the act never satisfies the desire. In Ritual in the Dark, Gerard Sorme spends an afternoon with Caroline, feels free of the "sexual delusion", then glimpses a passing girl's skirt and is aroused again.
Wilson calls Barbusse dishonest: the narrator claims spiritual beauty in watching a girl undress when, Wilson says bluntly, he would probably masturbate.
Three lopsided outsiders
On the Thames Embankment, explaining the novel to his friend Bill Hopkins, Wilson found the seed of the book: three kinds of outsider, each with discipline in one faculty and none in the others.
| Type | Disciplined in | Novel character | Real example | Karamazov brother |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intellectual | Intellect | Sorme | (Wilson himself) | Ivan |
| Emotional | Emotions | Oliver Glasp, painter | Van Gogh | Alyosha |
| Physical | Body | Austin Nunne | Nijinsky | Dmitri |
All three are "lopsided" and all three can go insane. This scheme became the chapter "The Attempt to Gain Control". The brother pairings are the standard reading; Wilson only says Dostoevsky "used the same categories".
Material was cut: a chapter on Faust, one on criminal outsiders (later used in An Encyclopedia of Murder), and one on "the weak outsider": Oblomov, Hamlet, Gatsby, the poets of the 1890s. Gatsby fascinated him because the essence he craved was success, which Wilson suspected was also a fraud. The hardest writing was the links between sections; the Wells-to-Sartre bridge took two weeks and came while hitch-hiking near Oxford.
Fame, overnight
Edith Sitwell predicted "a truly great writer". On the Sunday of publication weekend both "posh" papers led with the book (Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee, he later names them), and the previous evening's paper had run "He's a major writer, and he's only twenty-four". The same week John Osborne's Look Back in Anger made him the first "Angry Young Man", a label J. B. Priestley attached to both. Wilson says the two had only one thing in common: working-class backgrounds and the fear of lifelong obscurity.
He sees the press as manufacturing an "epoch" out of Presley, Monroe, Bardot, Amis, Murdoch, Sagan and child prodigies, with Wilson cast as "boy genius". Fame itself brought little: he did not care about food, wine or travel, and he stayed with Joy, which he admits was his "keenest regret".
The horsewhip and the fall
In early 1957 Joy's father arrived with a horsewhip while the couple were giving supper to Gerald Hamilton, the model for Isherwood's Mr Norris, who promptly rang every gossip columnist he knew. The chase lasted two weeks across Devon, Wales and Ireland. Gollancz warned that his serious reputation was ruined and told him to leave London; the couple moved to a cottage near Mevagissey in Cornwall and stayed. Reviews of Religion and the Rebel, The Age of Defeat and The Strength to Dream began "More pretentious rubbish from this... overrated young man".
The passport
Re-reading The Outsider, he still feels the same excitement and impatience. He once mistook it for anticipation of success; now he sees it was the sense of having started "the serious business of living", like leaving harbour. The critics could retract their praise, "They couldn't take back the passport they'd given me."
The Country of the Blind
Country of the Blind as Wilson's master metaphor.
The hole-in-corner man
"At first sight, the Outsider is a social problem." Barbusse's hero comes from the provinces to a Paris bank job and a family hotel. He has "no genius, no mission", yet "I desire some sort of recompense". Religion bores him; philosophy is meaningless because "nothing can be tested". Then he finds a spy-hole into the next room and for a month watches the lives that pass through it, "standing apart and, symbolically, above".
Two scenes carry Wilson's argument. The morning after watching a woman undress, the hero cannot re-create the experience: "These words are all dead." And at a dinner where a barrister describes the rape and murder of a child, he watches the respectable guests panting and staring, unable to leave. His case against society follows: everyone has these savage impulses and covers them with respectability, philosophy and religion. He is an Outsider because he stands for Truth.
The Outsider is not the artist
Barbusse's hero is mediocre; "he can't write for toffee". Wilson stresses this to block the easy equation of outsider with artist. Shakespeare, Dante and Keats were socially well-adjusted, and Keats, who intended "to do his own living for himself", had no sympathy with Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's "As for living, our servants can do that for us." The Outsider may be an artist, but the artist is not necessarily an Outsider.
What marks the type is a sense of unreality, which can strike even Keats ("I feel as if I had died already and am now living a posthumous existence"). Good health only means looking elsewhere. For the bourgeois the world is orderly with a disturbing fringe; for the Outsider it is chaos, and truth must be told even without hope. Wilson notes the Kabbalist view that chaos (tohu bohu) is latent order, "the egg is the 'chaos' of the bird".
Wells at the end of his tether
Wells, the lifelong optimist of A Modern Utopia and Mr Polly ("If you don't like your life you can change it"), announced in his last pamphlet that "a frightful queerness has come into life": events have lost their logical cord and drive "anyhow to anywhere". Wilson's analysis:
- Self-refuting logic. If life is ending, the pamphlet is pointless; Wells half-sees this and pleads "scientific training".
- No argument. The remaining nineteen pages repeat the assertion ("our doomed formicary") with vague gestures at Einstein and the radium clock.
- Retreat. Wells narrows his claim from all life to Homo sapiens, then ends asking whether civilization can be saved.
- Rank. Even so, it is "the most pessimistic single utterance in modern literature", alongside Eliot's Hollow Men. One contemporary called it "an outburst of peevishness at a world that refused to accept him as its Messiah".
The shocking thing is that Wells was an Insider, the encyclopedist of the scientific spirit. Can his sickness explain it? Wilson refuses the shortcut: Wells claimed objectivity, so his illness is as irrelevant as "his dressing-gown and slippers". The task is to judge whether the world can be seen his way.
| Witness | Key phrase | Step in the argument |
|---|---|---|
| Barbusse's hero | "Truth, what do they mean by it?" | Change makes no difference: half-way |
| Wells | "No way out or round or through" | Total negation: the whole distance |
| Kierkegaard | "Put me in a system and you negate me" | Existence refutes systems |
| Roquentin | "Man is a useless passion" | Things themselves become absurd |
The chapter's ladder of negation, from social complaint to metaphysical despair.
The one-eyed man
The Outsider's reply to the charge of neurosis comes from Wells's own story: "In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." He is the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that does not know it is sick.
Barbusse was unknowingly paraphrasing Kierkegaard, who rejected Hegel's system because existence negates it: "Put me in a system and you negate me; I am not just a mathematical symbol; I am." His question, "Can one live a philosophy without negating either the life or the philosophy?", got the answer no, though one can live a religion. Wilson enjoys the symmetry that Kierkegaard attacked the Church for cutting religion to fit life, while Nietzsche attacked it for cutting life to fit religion. German professors of the 1920s turned Kierkegaard into Existenzphilosophie; Sartre and Camus restored the Outsider to the centre, with Sartre's "commitment" and Camus's "Remain an Outsider".
Roquentin and the chestnut root
Sartre "skilfully synthesizes" everything so far. The historian Roquentin, alone in a Le Havre hotel researching the diplomat Rollebon, is hit by attacks of nausea: a flat stone on the beach, a sudden waking "from a six-year slumber" in Indo-China, the café patron's braces. He insists, like Wells, that the nausea is "out there, in the wall". The salauds, the self-assured worthies in the town gallery, disgust him, and so does his own past acceptance of meanings.
A record of "Some of These Days" dissolves the nausea; art gives "order and logic to chaos". But as exhaustion narrows him to the here and now, memory fails and words come loose from things: "It's a seat, but the word stays on my lips." At the chestnut root existence unveils itself as "the very paste of things". Causality collapses, so there are no adventures, and a biography of Rollebon would be bad faith. The book ends with Roquentin planning to write something rhythmic and purposive, as the song was.
Wilson's verdict: Roquentin is the one-eyed king, but his kingship "is kingship over nothing", bringing only loss of faith and of the power to act. And this leads back to Barbusse's swaying dresses: what the hero wanted was not sex but an indefinable freedom. To what does the Outsider have an inalienable right? That question opens the rest of The Outsider.
An Autobiographical Introduction
Autobiographical arc into the method.
The piano keyboard
Wilson admits critics are right that "Outsider" is a loose word covering Boehme and Nijinsky, Fox and Sartre. It is deliberately vague because the real question behind it is: how can man extend his range of consciousness?
He also frames the Outsider historically: a rebel against "the lack of spiritual tension in a materially prosperous civilization", like Augustine in a dying Rome. "Outsiders appear like pimples on a dying civilization." Fame after 1956 proved the point on his own skin: interviews, dinners and letters made him lose touch with the higher states. He was becoming an Insider. Modern life "makes a noise like a dynamo" and turns men into "highly efficient pigs".
Leisure, will and the slum
Eliot's pamphlet on cathedrals, which turns into a plea for leisure, and T. E. Lawrence's "Mankind has been no gainer by its drudges" both excited him. A civil-servant colleague named Desmond, licking envelopes, said "Soul-destroying, isn't it?"; Wilson thought it life-destroying, the stagnant life-force smelling "like standing water". He divided people into those who disliked themselves and those who did not; the first he called Outsiders.
But leisure is only the cleared site. Writers who live by what they enjoy often knock down one slum and build another to their taste. His conclusion is stark: "Nature is dead; every act of will is unnatural." The more we fight against, the more alive we are, yet civilization works to make the will unnecessary, offering crosswords and football as artificial obstacles, and abstract philosophy as the thought that matches this abdication.
The boy scientist and the "Essay on Superiority"
12 Home laboratory funded by a paper round; reads Jeans and Eddington.
1944 Writes a 20-page letter to Eddington, who had died; writes the "Essay on Superiority" in one night; begins a six-notebook summary of all science.
c. 1946 Hears Man and Superman on the BBC Third Programme.
16 Warehouse job, then laboratory assistant at his old school; sacked.
1947 The hydrocyanic acid evening.
1948 Easter blackout and "eternity of pain".
Then Tax office, RAF discharge, wandering, farms, France (1950), engineering works, marriage, London factories, the Heath, The Outsider.
Nicknamed "Professor", he tangled the physics master on light in moving frames and imagined himself joining the line Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Planck, Einstein. Jeans's echo of Pascal ("the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me") drove him to write to Eddington.
Freud and Jung bored him; Adler's "power instinct" was a revelation. Right and wrong looked relative: "Nobody is right; nobody is wrong; but everyone wants to be thought right." Everyone wants to see himself in a good light; the lunatic who thinks he is Napoleon walls off his self-esteem, and "the sane person prefers to get other people to cooperate in maintaining his delusions". Writing all this up at a single sitting, in a notebook headed with Einstein's and Adler's names, he felt he had gone "deeper into unbelief than any other human being", and went to bed beside his brother expecting God to strike him dead. In the morning: "God either didn't care, or didn't exist."
Futility
The next three years he names by one word, futility, and he is honest that "there was a social maladjustment for which the ideas provided the excuse": no friends, no girls, three years in a bedroom. Sexual frustration (Shaw: young men need sex years before it is convenient) mattered as much as metaphysics. In "Subjective Essays" he argued men are emotion-driven machines and truth as useless to them "as bookcases are to cows"; the ideal philosopher was the eyeless Colossi of Memnon, so "only the dead may be called sane".
Shaw broke in. The third act of Man and Superman on the radio was a "mental earthquake": another man had thought about his problems, and answered that life's purpose is a will to self-understanding. Don Juan's retort to the Devil's "vanitas vanitatum" stayed with him: shall a man "give up eating because he destroys his appetite in the act of gratifying it?" That night he found his brother cold "as tin" and for a moment thought knowledge had killed him. Twelve years on, Shaw remained for him "the greatest figure in European literature since Dante". Eliot's Ash Wednesday ("Teach us to sit still") became his substitute for prayer.
Two moments at the edge
The two experiences that framed Wilson's later thought: the vision of meaningless pain, and the sudden certainty of wanting more life.
At the stove, after a day of Lavrin on Russian literature, he blacked out while standing and saw "on the other side of consciousness" what looked like an eternity of pain; he was "the bed of a river, and the current was all pain". He understood Kurtz in Heart of Darkness. He took the word nihilism as active belief in Nothing, read the Tao Te Ching as Nothingness, and decided from Berkeley that a bar of chocolate existed only in his friends' minds.
Then the check. Exhausted one evening, he resolved to kill himself, and the decision "cheered me immensely". At his chemistry evening class he took down the bottle of hydrocyanic acid, and in an instant lived the burning in his throat. "I was suddenly supremely aware that what I wanted was not less life, but more." He put it back and reached for the methyl red. "In one second, I had seen something that I have striven to see all my life since." The insight faded because he clung to it; Hesse, he says, would have been the bible of his teens.
Offices, the RAF, the road
- The tax office. "The chief qualification for a tax collector is an ability to simulate work." Passing the establishment exam filled him with despair. He dropped Dickens for stream of consciousness.
- The RAF. After being rude to a sympathetic adjutant he was, through a story he calls "unprintable", discharged within months, learning that "salvation can lie in proceeding to extremes of indiscretion". Mr Polly's advice had worked.
- The road. He resigned from the Civil Service, hitch-hiked, was arrested by RAF police leaving a haystack near Stonehenge, sold fairground tickets, had his first affair, wheeled a thousand barrows of concrete a day, worked farms. He read Synge, Blake, Rabelais, the Bhagavad-Gita (bound in leather), and took Catholic instruction toward a monastery, but could not accept the need for a Saviour: pinning salvation to one point in space and time seemed like giving Lao-tse's Unchanging "a beard and white hair".
- Constant motion. Brooke's "The Roman road to Wendover" suggested never staying anywhere long enough to be bored. It failed: wandering means endless "thought for the morrow".
- France, 1950. In Paris he joined the "Akademia" of Raymond Duncan, Isadora's brother, a toga-wearing preacher of "actionalism", who expelled him as "an adventurer and an imposter" because the meals mattered more to him than the lectures. A pen friend in Strasbourg had become a Communist; they quarrelled and Wilson borrowed his fare home from the consulate.
The automatic pilot
Back in Leicester, the engineering works gave moments of grace: walking over snowy girders toward the welding glow, repeating Blake's lines on the Hammer of Los, "the world would suddenly seem altogether good". But familiarity switched on the automatic pilot. Early runs, sleeping on the floor, sitting cross-legged half the night: nothing stopped him becoming "merely another human being in the human anthill".
He asked the Corporation to let him dig trenches three days a week to gain free time; they refused. He married the works nurse in June, worked factories and a Fulham hospital as porter, separated "temporarily", and in London saw that food was the only necessity: a waterproof sleeping bag replaced rent. He slept on the Heath after midnight, breakfasted on bread and dripping at 2½d, and wrote in the Reading Room, where Angus Wilson offered to read his Ripper novel.
Writing The Outsider
After a stolen journal and a hated Deptford laundry, a Haymarket coffee bar job freed his days. Handing Angus Wilson the first part of the novel left him at a loss; Stuart Holroyd's Emergence from Chaos prompted a quick critical "credo". In half an hour he planned The Outsider in Literature: Van Gogh, T. E. Lawrence, Fox, Boehme, Nijinsky, the "weak Outsiders" (Oblomov, Hamlet, Steppenwolf, Gatsby), the Faust figures, the existentialists. He began that afternoon with Barbusse, then Wells. An introduction (later dropped) cast the book as the defence of religion that T. E. Hulme never lived to write. Working title: The Pain Threshold. A desk job paying 3s an hour to answer a rarely ringing phone let him finish in three months.
Success "winded" him. He had wanted the book twice as long; it became a parlour game, "Outsider or Insider?", and Van Gogh stopped moving him. He ends defiantly: writing is only a discipline for "subduing my stupidity and laziness"; all men who have lived "have been failures"; the one thing worth achieving is vision: Nietzsche on the hilltop, Pascal's Memorial, Boehme's pewter dish. Yeats called life "a vast preparation for something that never happens"; one minute of vision would turn preparation into achievement.
Personal Notes on Maslow
Maslow partnership and the induction dispute.
The letter and the peak experience
In 1959 Maslow wrote to Wilson after reading The Stature of Man. Wilson's "fallacy of insignificance" matched Maslow's "Jonah complex": asked who expected greatness, his students stared blankly until Maslow said "If not you, who then?" Months later Wilson read the papers properly and found Maslow's founding idea. Psychology had been built on sick people; Maslow studied the healthiest he could find, and found they reported moments of awe and bliss in which they felt "like a member of a family, not like an orphan".
The robot
Wilson had already named the enemy: automatism. In a paper for an existential-psychology symposium he called it "the robot", the servant who learns to type, drive and speak bad French for him, then spoils a new symphony by anticipating every note. "I have even caught him making love to my wife." His dog has no such trouble on the cliffs: "Descartes was all wrong about animals. It isn't the animals who are robots; it's us." The robot is necessary, but it filters out newness, and health needs a flow of it. The task is to modify the robot, not abolish it.
Why peaks can be induced
Maslow held that peaks cannot be summoned: we are "Surprised by Joy" and they come as by-products of good work. Wilson calls this only partly true, and argues from Husserl:
- Perception is intentional. A child squirms before your hand arrives; you cannot tickle yourself because you know it is you. Tickling is "99% psychological". You glance at your watch and see it without noticing the time: seeing needs a mental act of grasping.
- Real-izing and un-real-izing. A book on the shelf is a "nodding acquaintance"; returned after a loan, it delights because you focus your beam of interest on it "like a sapper de-fusing an unexploded bomb". We real-ize and un-real-ize constantly without noticing.
- The peak has a structure. The breakfast mother switches her beam from the eggs to her family, "like an athlete gathering himself for a long jump". If it is a sequence of mental acts, it can be duplicated.
Peakers keep more in the current account.
The first precondition is energy, not physical but "preparedness". A child promised the pantomime tidies his room with gusto: he places his "interior army and navy on call". Vigilance, alertness, preparedness are the basis of the peak.
The girl in the chewing-gum factory
This was Wilson's own subject. The Outsider asked "Why does life fail?" (Auden: "when life fails / What's the good of going to Wales?"). Maslow's answer: human beings have a higher nature "just as instinctoid" as the lower, needing meaningful work, responsibility, creativeness and justice.
The near and the far, and the third world
The Romantics despaired because the near and the far never meet: Axel's "Live? Our servants can do that for us"; L. H. Myers's Prince Jali seeing one desert that glorifies the eye and another that wearies the feet; Senancour's Obermann, depressed by rain and finding sunshine "useless". That is life-failure.
Wilson's reply uses Karl Popper's "third world", the world of objective thought-contents (Teilhard's noösphere): destroy the machines and libraries survive to rebuild; destroy the libraries and civilization cannot return. Man is young and catches only glimpses of this world, as when a fragment of Brahms makes "Colin Wilson" cease to matter. It is man's evolutionary destiny to become a citizen of the third world. Meaning makes the heart "leap": energy rising to meet it. Boredom cripples the will; meaning stimulates it.
The St Neot margin
Sartre never felt so free as in the Resistance. Capetanakis feared the war was "not frightening enough" to wake the mind. Camus's noble "Night of Truth" editorial gave way, in Beauvoir's The Mandarins, to drinking and pointless adulteries in St Germain. Without danger, inner laziness descends, and with it a real amnesia: false memory keeps the facts but loses their meaning.
So must we need war? No: focusing is a muscle. Greene's Russian roulette worked by intense concentration; Wilson found a mild peak could be induced by concentrating on a pencil, relaxing, and repeating until fatigue, then pushing on. The "pumping" of attention summons energy from the depths.
| Down staircase | Up staircase |
|---|---|
| Discouragement: "not worth the effort" | A glimpse of meaning |
| The will goes passive | The will strengthens |
| Meaning narrows | Wider meaning, sharper appetite |
| Molehills become mountains; breakdown | No theoretical limit; long-range purpose needed |
Wilson's chain reaction. Holidays work by "reminding" us the universe is "a vast spider's web of meaning".
Imagination as the model faculty
Lecturing at Brandeis in 1967, Wilson argued imagination normally gives only "a dim carbon copy", except in sex, where a fantasy can produce a full physical response. Maslow objected that monkeys masturbate; Wilson asked whether in total isolation, and Maslow conceded he had not seen it. Wilson's provocative conclusion: masturbation "is one of the highest faculties mankind has yet achieved" because it presages imagination able to reconstruct any reality. Interest spreads like the glow in a crucible of iron and sulphur, continuing once the flame is removed.
The self-image
Two stories carry Wilson's central concept:
- Romain Gary's The Roots of Heaven: demoralized French prisoners invent an invisible girl and apologize to her when they swear; morale rises. The Commandant demands she be handed over for the officers' brothel; they refuse, and he knows he is beaten. Robert survives solitary by imagining herds of elephants on endless plains.
- Machado de Assis's "The Looking Glass" (1882): a village youth made lieutenant, petted by his aunt as "Senhor Lieutenant", is left alone when even the slaves desert. His reflection blurs until he puts on the uniform; then it becomes solid, and he stays sane.
"The petting... produced a transformation in me." Wilson's word for this is "promotion", a raising of the personality to a higher level; all poetic experience is promotion. We climb toward intenser consciousness by a series of self-images, like handholds cut in a cliff: "The great man is the play-actor of his ideals" (Nietzsche). An orchestra in a dead BBC studio played well only once Donald Aldous fed their sound back to them.
Meaning from outside
Viktor Frankl's block warden dreamed liberation would come on 30 March 1945; when it plainly would not, he fell ill on the 29th and died on the 31st, ostensibly of typhus. Frankl also reports a spike of deaths after Christmas 1944, and prisoners laughing in freezing rain at Dachau because it had no incinerator chimney. Religion supplies objective standards but convinces the sophisticated least; art re-animates the will but we assume it is "subjective". Freud and Marx call fantasy escape; for Maslow it is how a determined man masters reality. Against Eliot's "each in his prison", Blake knew man can pass out through one of his five windows at will. Mental illness is a kind of amnesia in which the patient forgets his powers.
The end of reductionism, and of Maslow
Wilson sees the 1960s as the break-up of reductionism (Koestler's "rat" psychology): a psychologist once shouted at Maslow "You are an evil man. You want to destroy psychology", yet Maslow later became president of the American Psychological Association. Popper on intuition in science, Polanyi's Personal Knowledge (1958), and Alister Hardy's 1965 Gifford Lectures hinting at telepathy and a "group mind" all point the same way. Wilson began the book in Majorca in autumn 1969, from a hundred papers and a pile of tapes; it grew to include Frankl, Straus, Boss, Glasser and Laing. Maslow died of a heart attack on 8 June 1970, just before his last tapes arrived. Wilson closes with Frankl's "existential vacuum", which he calls the "nothingness neurosis".
Popper and Polanyi: Popper was not "one of the original founders" of Logical Positivism; he was an early critic of the Vienna Circle. Polanyi was not Popper's "follower"; the two developed independent and in places opposed views.
Biology: the human line goes back well over two million years by current evidence, and sharks have existed for roughly 400 million years, not "15,000,000".
Hoffer: the alcoholism trials by Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond mainly used LSD. The "more than 50 per cent cured" figure comes from uncontrolled early studies that later controlled trials did not confirm at that level. Hoffer was not a colleague of Maslow in any formal sense.
Gary: in The Roots of Heaven the man who survives by imagining elephants (Morel) becomes their defender against hunters. Wilson's "becomes a hunter of elephants" reverses the plot.
Tone: the marine's "soft curves and gentle natures" and the masturbation passage are of their period; they are reported, not endorsed.
The Strange Story of Modern Philosophy
2009 strange story spine.
From Socrates to Hume: doubt runs downhill
Socrates' world rejection (only spirit is real; death a consummation) suited Christianity for 2,000 years; Wilson "totally" rejects it. Galileo's experiment launched science; Descartes tried to bring the same certainty to philosophy by doubting everything, inspired by water-driven automata to think animals machines. "I think, therefore I am" leaves room for doubt: a self-aware washing machine might say the same.
| Thinker | Move | Wilson's verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Descartes | Doubt everything; animals are machines | The original "howler": never asked "who am I?" |
| Locke | Mind a blank sheet; all from experience | "Even more dubious"; mind as Lego |
| Berkeley | No matter; objects exist when perceived (by God) | Invites the next sceptic |
| Hume | No self, no necessary causation | Philosophy flattened "after the dropping of an H-bomb" |
| Reid | Common sense; the "active power" of the will | Right, but not influential enough |
The British chain of doubt and its first critic.
The pattern, says Wilson, is typical: successors justify a howler and push it to absurdity instead of going back to square one. Hume's error was to think ideas are "faded impressions"; Thomas Reid, after his teacher George Turnbull, held that common sense cannot be reasoned away and that philosophy should rest on our active power. Huxley on mescalin found everything "ten times as real"; Hume on mescalin would have dropped his theory.
Kant, Fichte and the two selves
Kant made the mind creator of order, imposing categories, clocks and words like a pair of spectacles we cannot remove, with an unknowable noumenon behind. Kleist was so upset he killed himself. Fichte called a halt: forget the noumenon; but if "I" create the world, why don't I know it? There must be two "me"s, the everyday self and a hidden creator, so that Descartes' two certainties become three worlds. Fichte also saw philosophy's fault as passivity: it should be "a prelude to action". Buckminster Fuller: "I seem to be a verb."
The French machine and Maine de Biran
La Mettrie's Man the Machine, Condillac's sensations and Cabanis's brain secreting thought "as the liver secretes bile" made man a penny-in-the-slot machine. Maine de Biran objected: in real effort I know it is I, not a machine, acting. Nobody listened; the French were too busy giving the Church "a two-finger salute". Comte declared metaphysics superstition despite breakdown and suicide attempt; Hegel revived idealism with history driving "upward and on"; Kierkegaard, put off by Hegel's abstraction, coined "existential" and "Truth is subjectivity", dying at 42.
Whitehead's refutation of Hume
Husserl and creative seeing
Husserl, "the greatest of modern thinkers", attacked psychologism (Mill's reduction of logic to feeling) in Logical Investigations, and saw that perception is intentional: we fire attention like an arrow, so there must be an archer, the transcendental ego. Bertrand Russell, by Rosemary Dinnage's account in Alone, Alone, stayed a "logic machine", a "spectator and not an actor", and "could behave rottenly", Dora Russell said; Wilson blames his passive philosophy for a lifelong failure to join thinker and person.
The wrong turns since Husserl
How, in Wilson's account, Husserl's successors undid his work.
Heidegger put "Man" (Dasein) at the centre instead of the ego; Sartre denied the ego, making freedom in a meaningless world "as impossible ... as it is to jump while you are falling". Foucault, inspired by Waiting for Godot, saw history as fashion; Wittgenstein, morbid and suicidal, made language a picture of atomic facts in the Tractatus, then a set of language games, ruling out Kierkegaard's question "What am I doing in this world?". Wilson pairs him with Beckett, both trapped in Heidegger's "triviality of everydayness". Derrida: no presence, no self; "back to Hume". Philosophy has only two pockets, materialism and idealism.
Everyday Consciousness Is a Liar
Everyday consciousness as liar.
The common content of insight
The witnesses agree. Koestler, facing execution in Spain, felt even death was trivial: "Have you nothing more serious to worry about?" Greene's whisky priest felt "it would have been quite easy to be a saint". Proust's Marcel ceased "to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal". Nijinsky, near madness, wrote "I am God". Wilson provocatively asks: if these insights have objective content, was Nijinsky God? The empiricist's "Clearly not. Next question" is an evasion; the real answer is that such questions can be examined through the phenomenological examination of consciousness, which needs a new language.
| Old existentialism (Sartre, Heidegger) | New existentialism (Wilson) | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Man's contingency in an empty universe | Everyday sense of contingency is false |
| Values | No transcendental values | A standard of values external to everyday consciousness |
| Authenticity | A flash under threat of death, not sustainable | A glimpse of purpose that should be easily accessible |
| Method | Description of the human condition | Phenomenology of values plus analysis of language |
Wilson's contrast. He notes the metaphysics, though not the dogma, matches the Upanishads and the Gita.
Granville Barker called these insights "the secret life", from which even trivial men draw strength. Western culture has concentrated on the particular for centuries: superb for technology, a cul-de-sac for culture, which Yeats called "fish gasping on the strand".
What a value is
Wilson defines a value as a rate of exchange: "not worth the effort" means I will not exchange life energy for the result. A value is the response of rising energy, like the pleasure of food when hungry. Life is a process of discarding false values, as the child learns about cream cakes. We adopt temporary value systems for each task: a loving parent who punishes "brackets" his love, in Husserl's sense, and so does anyone who finishes a chore instead of something pleasanter.
The great problem: a value is an immediate warm response, but our ultimate values are precisely the ones we do not feel. Ramakrishna can touch them; most of us "work on in the dark".
Asking what constitutes human values is, Wilson claims, a step as decisive as putting the sun at the centre: "The shifting sands cease to shift." Because insight is rarer than depression, the most useful field is the phenomenology of life-devaluation.
The analysis of language
The other half of the task is language, where Wittgenstein led. He showed language is not one scale on which Shakespeare, Hegel, Beatrix Potter and Freud all sit, but many "games" with different rules, like the levers in a locomotive cab that are pulled, pushed or turned. His aim looked negative, but it complements Husserl's: one a phenomenology of perception, the other of language. The new existentialism claims to unite the two great traditions of twentieth-century philosophy, linguistic empiricism and phenomenological existentialism.
Magic, the Science of the Future
Occult as recovery of suppressed powers.
Ouspensky's drawer
The chapter opens with P. D. Ouspensky in a Moscow newspaper office around 1906, unable to face an article on the Hague Conference ("phrases... utterly automatic") and opening a drawer full of occult books instead. Wilson read this at twenty, on the dole in Earls Court with a wife, a baby son and a "half-insane landlady", feeling with Céline that civilization was "rotten with lies". Occult books confirmed "another order of reality". Yet he did not believe magic worked; he agreed with Crowley's biographer John Symonds: "The only trouble with magic is that it doesn't work."
Ouspensky as a schoolboy, reading a physics book, felt "threads... begin to reach out and bind things together". Even Bertrand Russell longed to express "the very breath of life, fierce and coming from far away... the fearful passionless force of non-human things".
Senses we have lost
| Creature | Feat (as Wilson reports it) | Proposed mechanism |
|---|---|---|
| Eel | All Atlantic eels breed in the Sargasso Sea; elvers return alone to rivers they have never seen, Europeans (115 vertebrae) east, Americans (107) west | Smell, perhaps; unexplained |
| Green turtle | 1,400 miles from Brazil to Ascension Island | Unknown |
| Deer mouse | Finds its 50-yard home from a mile away | Unknown |
| Pigeon | Untrained young home as well as trained adults | Sun "astronomical reading" |
| Blackcap; salmon; bees | Long-range navigation | Stars (planetarium tests); smell; sun |
| Cats (Wilhelmshaven) | Chose the exit of a 24-exit maze facing home | Unknown |
| Robin | Confused inside a steel strong-room | Electromagnetic sensitivity |
Wilson's animal evidence, drawn from Ardrey and Dröscher. His point: whether or not "natural", these are senses far beyond ours, "new senses. Or rather, old senses."
Our ancestors must have had such powers, especially a sense of danger. They survive when needed. Jim Corbett found red dust on his feet and realized he had unconsciously crossed the road before a culvert; next day he found the pug marks of a tiger lying on the other side. "Jungle sensitiveness came to my assistance." Whether it was a sixth sense or subconscious Holmes-style deduction "makes no real difference": the subconscious works with a speed and accuracy beyond conscious grasp. A water diviner traced the spring under Wilson's field, distinguished it from a metal pipe, and said anyone could learn in an hour.
Civilized survival depends on forgetting these powers. Peter Hurkos fell from a ladder in 1943, woke with second sight, foresaw a British agent's murder by the Gestapo, nearly got shot by the Dutch underground, and could no longer paint houses: "like a radio set picking up too many stations".
Why man became narrow
Wilson's evolutionary story: an upright ape (he names Ramapithecus) freed its hands and enlarged its horizon. Forward-facing eyes give narrow, concentrated vision; narrowness breeds boredom and curiosity; seeing far teaches calculating far. Defenceless, man had to stay vigilant and focus on minute particulars. Thinking "paid off" so well that in a few thousand years he out-evolved the reptiles' millions, and entered self-consciousness, the phase children enter at six or seven, gaining power and control and losing naturalness. He became "the most dangerous animal on the earth".
Coincidence and premonition
- The taxi. The musician Mark Bredin, exhausted, knew a taxi would shoot out of Queensway and hit them; it did.
- Wilson's journal, 1968. Finishing Hawkins on Callanish as a "Stone Age computer", he opened Bell's mathematics book at a footnote on Stone Age mathematics. A Criminologist article mentioned Nannie Doss; the old True Detective he had pulled out for another case led with her.
- Guirdham. Arthur Guirdham's search for a pub name at Little Gaddesden was answered by a library book on the Pyrenees, at the start of the reincarnation case in The Cathars and Reincarnation.
Wilson does not posit "hidden forces" sending messages; a healthy, absorbed mind seems to have a kind of radar, jammed by distraction. A murdered child's father recalls that only when his wife asked "Where's Fiona?" did they feel acute fear, "like a telephone that cannot be heard until the television is turned down".
Wilson's own cases
1965: driving from St Andrews to Skye he grew depressed; his wife had toothache. In Kyle of Lochalsh his oppression lifted and he said "Mummy's just had her tooth out"; she had.
Babies: if he lay awake thinking of his daughter she woke; if he looked at his sleeping son for long, the boy stirred. The link weakened after the first year.
1964: a Blackpool palmist predicted a minor accident; a month later he wrecked a speedboat on rocks, despite a premonition.
More darkly, he wondered whether hatred can kill. In 1952 a querulous asthmatic landlord in Wimbledon, whom he wished dead, died of a heart attack; a violently suspicious later landlady was diagnosed with cancer and died. John Cowper Powys claimed his anger so reliably brought misfortune that he prayed for each new enemy.
Powys, Strindberg and the psychic ether
Powys's late novels, from Wolf Solent and A Glastonbury Romance, show a creative outpouring with "the majesty of Niagara Falls". The Glastonbury opening, a ripple between a traveller off the 12.19 from London and "the divine-diabolic soul of the First Cause", presupposes a psychic ether carrying mental vibrations as the old luminiferous ether carried light. Wilson calls this "the fundamental proposition of magic", and takes it for granted throughout the book. Powys practised "multi-mindedness", feeling himself into a pier-post or a monolith, and felt "thaumaturgic" power at Verona and Stonehenge.
Wilson's explanation: Powys could not explain because the act was subconscious, like urinating in a crowded lavatory, Stendhal's fiasco, or recalling a forgotten name. Such "tricks" could be learned but not described. Emotional crisis can also wake the faculties: Strindberg in his Inferno period, longing for his family, "was really there behind the piano" where his mother-in-law saw him; and in a wine shop, describing the Augustiner tavern to a young officer, he found himself in it until a curtain of shelves and bottles descended. "In the great crises of life... the soul attains transcendent powers." Dion Fortune (Violet Firth) believed a domineering principal attacked her psychically, studied Freud, joined the Golden Dawn, and concluded that a healthy, optimistic psyche repels hostile forces and even bad luck.
Faculty X
Consciousness exists "to illuminate reality". The brighter it burns, the "realer" reality becomes; Faculty X is its top setting.
Johnson's Rasselas, glutted in the Happy Valley, suspects "some latent sense for which this place affords no gratification". Wilson knew it as a child craning at every river from the bus. He names the latent sense Faculty X: the power to grasp the reality of other times and places. Proust's madeleine let him say "I was a child in Combray" and mean it. Chesterton: we say the earth is round but do not mean it. The Easter bells stop Faust's suicide. Our senses insist here and now is more real than Singapore or the past; in moments of intensity we know this is a lie.
Faculty X is not occult; it unites conscious and subconscious. A tune or smell is only the stimulus, "like touching the leg of a dead frog with an electric wire"; our own inner strength does the clenching. A wired cat watching mice switched off the nerve signal of a loud noise: all creatures can focus and exclude, and city dwellers cut out perhaps 99 per cent of stimuli.
Toynbee gives the clearest evidence. On 23 May 1912 at Mistrá, sacked in 1821, Time "stood still" for him. Reading of a leader's suicide in 80 BC, he was transported to "a back yard on a dark night". And once, by the wall of Victoria Station, he felt "the passage of History gently flowing through him in a mighty current". Wilson concludes that ordinary waking is little better than sleep. "We are like dogs who think they are on a chain when in fact they are free." Faculty X is the key to occult experience and "to the whole future evolution of the human race".
Navigation: robins' disturbance in steel rooms is explained by the geomagnetic field (the magnetic compass shown by the Wiltschkos from the late 1960s), not radiation from the Milky Way.
The cat experiment (Hernández-Peón, 1956) was later attributed largely to recording artefacts.
Psychics: the claim that Hurkos and Croiset were "tested in the laboratory and found to be genuine" is not supported; controlled studies and investigators found their records unconvincing. Guirdham's reincarnation case is not regarded as authenticated outside psychical-research circles. Wilson's own "telepathy" anecdotes are uncontrolled and recalled years later.
Facts: Moina Mathers was the wife of one of the Golden Dawn's three founders, not "its founder". Wolf Solent (1929) appeared in Powys's late fifties, not his sixties. Calling A Glastonbury Romance the "only" God's-eye novel is an overstatement.
Ethics: Wilson's speculation that his own hatred may have killed an old man and a landlady with cancer is reported as he wrote it; no causal link is shown.
Misprints: "Corbert", "cud up", "Lady Chatterly".
The Ladder of Selves
Ladder of selves model.
The panic
Appointed coordinator of a crime encyclopedia that suddenly had to be finished in months, Wilson was writing seven 3,000-word articles a week, eight or nine hours a day, unwinding with wine and records. Two long sessions with chattering young journalists bored him into "moral torpor", leaking inner pressure "like a punctured tyre". At 4 a.m. anxiety began to churn "like a car being accelerated when the engine is in neutral". Trying to crush it by will made his heart race in terror; soothing himself "as I might try to calm a frightened horse" worked briefly, but the panic returned in waves.
The irony stung: in New Pathways he had called mental illness a collapse of the will, cured by purposeful activity that recharges the battery. Now his novel The Mind Parasites, with creatures draining energy from below, felt closer to the truth.
Learning to steer
He refused to quit, even when asked for ten articles a week instead of seven, and treated himself "like a man with snake-bite, forcing myself to keep walking". It was like steering a glider: a flash of fear sent him into a nose dive, an effort pulled him up, a dozen times an hour, until vigilance became a kind of exhilaration. On a night sleeper months later the worst attack struck. In an ebb he relaxed himself past normality into deeper calm, telling himself he was sick of being bullied; "suddenly, it was as if a boat had been lifted off a sandbank by the tide", into Rilke's "stillness like the heart of a rose".
The mechanism of panic
1. Fatigue turns into a general mistrust of life.
2. Self-consciousness amplifies it: think about itching and you itch; a stutterer trying not to stutter stutters more. This "amplification effect" is "the basis of all neurosis".
3. The childish self strikes. Pushed too far, a sullen inner child "declining to do its proper work of re-charging my batteries": a ladder with the last rungs missing.
Remedy: redirect attention outward ("Ah yes, how interesting"), and wake up a more purposive self. A friend told him the condition cures itself in about eighteen months.
The schoolmistress effect
Calling on the purposive "me" was like a schoolmistress clapping her hands in a room of squabbling children: sudden sheepish silence. Gurdjieff said we contain dozens of "I"s passed around like a rugby ball. Wilson adds that they are arranged vertically, like a ladder, and that all purposive activity evokes a higher "I". William James's musician plays for years, then one day "the music is playing him".
Wilson's ladder is triangular: climbing brings concentration and control; descending diffuses the self "like a cloud".
Gurdjieff's energies
Gurdjieff told Bennett that rare people are connected to a "Great Reservoir or Accumulator" of higher emotional energy and can lend it. Fritz Peters, near breakdown in Paris in 1945, felt "a violent electric blue light" pass from an exhausted Gurdjieff into himself; Gurdjieff went grey, left for fifteen minutes and returned "like a young man again". Wilson infers Gurdjieff was not in permanent control of his powers; helping Peters reminded him how to reach his own reserves. Rasputin, summoned to Anna Vyrubova crushed in a 1915 rail accident, stared into her eyes, said "She will live, but she will always be a cripple", and fainted as he left.
Three ways to know Mozart existed
Bennett's experience is Faculty X. "Ten people died in an air crash." "Yes, I know." We don't know; the rescuers knew. To really grasp that Mozart lived, Wilson can:
- Induce deep calm in a room where he played, slowing the senses' forward rush.
- Leap by intuition, fingers on the keys he touched: "the mental equivalent of leaping a six-foot fence".
- Immerse himself in art, closing the "leaks" until inner pressure rises: the "magic carpet" effect. Art's weakness is that it makes everyday life seem futile; true Faculty X strengthens us for it.
Overwinding and release
Concentration is a great power with a cost: it locks us in a room. Overwork or worry overwinds the "inner watchspring" until we forget to open the windows, like the Zen monk still carrying the girl ten miles after his companion set her down. All obsession cuts us off from meaning, which "walks in through the senses on a spring morning". The robot does the throttling: as fatigue grows it takes over until life becomes unreal and, under more pressure, the jammed accelerator becomes panic.
Crisis can burst the windows open: Nietzsche in a hailstorm on a hill ("Pure will, without the confusions of intellect"), Ramakrishna seizing the temple sword to kill himself and seeing "a limitless, infinite shining ocean of consciousness". Both were starved of meaning first. The lesson never fully fades: men are stronger than they suspect and "set the limits themselves". An academic friend, ordered to lose weight, found it easy, looked back on his old self "with pitying condescension", and felt the new level "realer and truer".
The paranormal on the ladder
Wilson now reads psychic phenomena as the work of higher or split-off selves:
- Death. The body is "more like a city than an individual"; after decapitation the cells live on, so what dies is "some higher principle of organization". If higher selves survive depression or crime dormant, why assume they die with the body?
- Dowsing. Wilson found he could dowse, with strong reactions at standing stones; pendulums answer questions, perhaps because a higher self has the information.
- Multiple personality. Morton Prince's Miss Beauchamp and her mischievous alter "Sally", and "Sybil" with sixteen personalities, suggest our everyday self may be "a mere fragment" of an ultimate personality. Stevenson's Jasbir Lal Jat seemed to take on the personality of a man dying at the same moment.
- Poltergeists. The Rosenheim case centred on an unaware clerk, Annemarie Schaberl; a disembodied "Sally" might act just so.
- Precognition. A BBC producer foresaw a cellist's string breaking and a race winner; Alan Vaughan's ouija board said columnist Dorothy Kilgallen died of poison, and his own surge of energy brought brief telepathy and foresight.
So there seem to be two routes to the higher centres: climbing the ladder (Gurdjieff's way) or a short circuit that bypasses the everyday self (Rasputin's). Faculty X combines them: Proust, William James's widening "ranges of distant fact", Toynbee at Mistrá, Gibbon on the Capitol.
"All is well"
Childhood rests on a sense of security; adulthood keeps the belief that security can be achieved. But the universe is queer: we cannot conceive its beginning or end, our own birth or extinction, and the mind "skids, like a car on ice" on any abstract problem. Pessimists (Schopenhauer, Beckett, Sartre) use gloom "as an excuse for not thinking" and seem arrested in development. Meaning is revealed by an inner searchlight; stare with conviction of defeat and you see as little as you expect. Camus's man gesturing silently in a phone booth, Sartre's nausea and Beauvoir's "I feel that I am not" are what low inner pressure predicts, not truths about the universe. Mystics say "All is well"; we cannot conceive it, but neither can we conceive infinity, yet Cantor made a mathematics of it.
Wilson closes by introducing Tom Lethbridge (died 1971), the Devon dowser and archaeologist whose nine books he judges "the only... comprehensive and convincing theory of the paranormal" of the century, the subject of the first part of Mysteries.
Cases: the "Sybil" case has since been seriously challenged, including evidence that some personalities were suggested in therapy. The Fox sisters confessed in 1888 to faking the raps (one later recanted), so "probably some kind of poltergeist activity" is doubtful. Uri Geller's spoon-bending was widely shown to be conjuring, so "of its existence there can be no doubt" is unwarranted. Kilgallen's death was ruled acute alcohol and barbiturate intoxication, so "poison" is a loose match. Ernesto Bozzano was not a professor.
Internal: Nietzsche's hill is "Leutsch" here and "Leutch" in Chapter 5.
Misprints: "Mysteries,,", "tike", "be had expected", "alproblems", "hone" for horse, "I took at myself in vain in a minor" for "look... in a mirror", "Goerg Cantor".
The "Other Mode"
Two modes of mind.
Three examples
- Praetorius and whisky. A tired musician friend relaxed with a drink and a record of dances and suddenly "took off" into wild exhilaration.
- Becoming Schubert. A BBC producer alone in a control room felt he was composing the Schubert Octet, understanding why each bar was written as it was. Wilson calls this not occult but empathy "ten times as deeply as usual, like going down in a lift". Sartre said to enjoy a book is to rewrite it.
- Shaw's harbour. Writing about Shaw's marriage and breakthrough, with a returned book and sun on his desk, Wilson felt his heart "turned into a balloon". It was not empathy only but "a sense of the multiplicity of life itself": Edwardian London, but equally Goethe's Weimar or Mozart's Salzburg.
The romantic trap
The Romantic Outsiders (Rousseau, Shelley, Hoffmann, Hölderlin, Berlioz, Wagner, Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, Nietzsche) kept glimpsing the other mode and came to despise ordinary consciousness; many died of suicide or tuberculosis, and even Thomas Mann framed life as stupidity-and-health versus intensity-and-death. Wilson thinks much of the misery was self-inflicted: Eliot snapped that "Shelley was a fool", a fool in love with every pretty face and given to "lying down like a weary child" to weep.
Maslow's mirror
Maslow confirmed it. His healthy subjects had peak experiences, and when his students discussed them they recalled forgotten peaks and began having them regularly. The breakfast mother was happy unreflectively until a sunbeam made her think "I am happy", which intensified it. "It is as though we possessed a kind of mirror inside us... which has the power to turn 'things that happen' into experience." So, contrary to Shelley's plea to the "spirit of beauty", the unseen power lies within ourselves.
Gottfried Benn called it "primal perception", the "new-minted" look of the world; T. E. Lawrence felt it on desert dawns when sounds and colours "struck man individually and directly, not filtered through... by thought". The filter is the robot, which "may be essential to human life; but he makes it hardly worth living". Psychedelics suggest the robot sits in the brain: Huxley on mescalin quoted Blake on cleansing "the doors of perception". Wilson's 1960s novel The Philosopher's Stone placed primal perception in the pre-frontal cortex. Ten years later came "a [key] piece of research", the split brain, which the next chapter takes up.
The Laurel and Hardy Theory of Consciousness
Laurel and Hardy as split-brain comedy.
From Flash Gordon to the two brains
Rewriting a Flash Gordon script, Wilson needed a reason for Zarkov's brainwashing to fail and chose the brain's two near-identical halves, each with its own memory store, which a single-brained race might overlook. That raised the real question: why do we have two brains? He admits he is speculating, and cites Julian Jaynes, whose theory of the bicameral mind he thinks wrong but wonderfully stimulating.
Shown an apple to the right brain and an orange to the left, a patient says "orange" but writes "apple" with his left hand.
Shown a nude among neutral images, he giggles and says "I don't know" why.
The right brain draws a house in perspective; the left draws it flat.
Guessing red or green lights shown to the right brain, patients scored above 50/50: after a wrong guess they would jump "as if someone had kicked him under the table" and change it.
Doing dull sums, the right brain shows alpha rhythm, idling (Ornstein).
"The 'I' who responds to questions clearly lives in the left half of the brain." The right is not an idiot but silent; right-brain damage leaves speech intact but destroys pattern-copying and real problem-solving.
Wild guesses
Wilson extrapolates freely, as his cautious friends deplore. Perhaps the poltergeist lives in the right hemisphere of disturbed adolescents who function like split-brain patients; Hans Bender's rule is never to tell the child, because nothing is more frightening than a Hyde-like part of oneself acting alone. Perhaps the energy comes from the earth, the same force that twists a dowser's rod. He notes Stan Gooch places the unconscious in the cerebellum and keeps an open mind; the one sure thing is that consciousness is "hardly thicker than the icing on a large Christmas cake".
Freud's monster versus Stan and Ollie
Working on his biography of Wilhelm Reich, Wilson located Freud's error. From Charcot, Freud learned that a power able to paralyse a hysteric must be stronger than consciousness, then wrongly concluded we are puppets of a monster. That is like saying that because a ship is bigger than its captain, the captain is not in control.
Wilson's two selves and the feedback between them. Gurdjieff's "essence and personality", Wilson says, map onto the right and left hemispheres.
Inspiration and the real me
As a teenager Wilson found words "killing the intuitions"; persistence taught him to translate them. When writing well, "I" straddle the two: the right brain sees itself expressed and shouts "Yes, that's it!", sending more; the left, praised, catches them. That rally is inspiration. Fatigue and over-effort break it.
The right needs to be left alone; nagging, phones and hurry make it give up. After work, with a hot bath, white wine and records, Wilson's "verbal me" dozes and another self voyages in music, with a strong sense that Mozart really existed, which by day he can say but "in an odd sense, I don't believe". He concludes the ego is "only the front-man"; the realer self is "a voiceless observer", and learning that the "I" is an illusion is good news, since real existence lies deeper.
Lawrence was wrong
The left-brain ego starts to look like the villain, Lawrence's "head consciousness", Bertrand Russell in one side of the head and Whitman in the other. But Wilson reverses this:
- Stage fright shows the left over-reacting; yet actors say some nerves are essential to a great performance, because they push both selves into new cooperation.
- Hypnosis, on his own theory, puts the left to sleep: then the right can perform feats like lying rigid between two chairs with a man standing on the stomach, because the hypnotist speaks with authority. The left ego lacks that authority. If it could generate it, the powers released "might well be described as superhuman".
Stimulus instead of effort
Our most dangerous habit is substituting stimulus for effort: the holiday after ten months of dull work, the bored child's television, the cigarette, the drink, Don Juan's next girl, and war. Rupert Brooke's sonnet thanking God for 1914, "Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary", is "one of the saddest confessions of civilized man". Using a hypnotist to stop smoking "is like calling in the man from next door to chastise your children".
Wilson admits brain science is at about the level of ancient Egyptian anatomy; Ornstein, asked about the right hemisphere and the limbic system, said he might as well ask about the big toe. But the physiology hardly matters: self-observation shows the two selves, as Gurdjieff knew by 1920. The optimistic upshot is that we are "an excellent army with incompetent and inexperienced officers", a curable state, and that the theory makes Freud, Jung and Adler largely redundant. A few days of deliberate effort to "tighten the link" raised his own inner pressure "dramatically".
History: Sperry and Gazzaniga's human split-brain studies were at Caltech in the early 1960s. Sperry's 1950s Chicago work was on animals, so "split-brain patients in Chicago in the early fifties" is wrong.
Popular simplification: the clean "left scientist, right artist" split has been heavily qualified by later research. Wilson's left-asleep theory of hypnosis is his own speculation, as he admits.
Gurdjieff placing essence and personality in different parts of the brain in a 1920 London talk is asserted without a source.
Misprints: "Norman Vincent Peak" for Peale, "EEC" for EEG, "Dr Hyde" for Mr Hyde, "functioning if the".
Active Imagination
Active imagination as will training.
A method hidden in the Collected Works
Jung's fullest account, the essay "The Transcendent Function", was written in 1916, never names the method, and sat in his files until a student magazine asked for it in 1957, with a warning that it is "not without its dangers" and needs "expert supervision". Wilson argues that if it works the danger is secondary, because it would solve the Romantic problem. Rimbaud (1871) wanted to become a visionary by "a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses", and claimed to see "a mosque in place of a factory... a drawing room at the bottom of a lake". From Novalis to the surrealists, the craving for marvels looked like Yeats's ladder out of "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart".
Jung lets go
Brad Absetz, an American in Finland, lay relaxed but vigilant beside his wife, sunk in depression after their child's death from cancer. One day he felt he was floating off the bed. Then his "other self" began to act: his arm twitched at a buffet and chose food he would not have chosen, and he lost weight and felt healthier; asked by his daughter for a drawing, the hand produced an endless series of "psychedelic" patterns; then poetry, metal sculpture, and ritual calm in bee-keeping. "The Member for the Unconscious had been given his proper say." Wilson calls the posture, total relaxation with wide-awake vigilance, perhaps "the simplest and most effective of all mental therapies".
Reconstructing the method
Jung said little because there is little to say. His instructions: make the emotional state itself the starting point, sink into it, and note the fantasies that arise, but do not let them drift into Freud's "free association", which traps the patient "in the sterile circle of his own complexes". The trick is relaxation plus vigilance.
Active imagination in five steps (Wilson's synthesis)
1. Trust the catcher. Letting go is like falling backwards trusting someone will catch you; first recognise the "hidden ally" is there. Max Freedom Long's Huna group called it "George" and talked with it.
2. Relax and stay alert, lying still like Absetz.
3. Take one image (Jung to "Mrs O-", 1947): contemplate it and watch it change by itself; do not make it into anything.
4. Step into the picture and speak to any figure; listen to the reply.
5. Reach the turning point: the moment you realise it is not personal fantasy but an objective inner reality.
Jung's young artist patient could not do it until, waiting at a station, he fantasised into a poster of Mürren: up the meadow, round a ravine, into a chapel, where something with pointed ears vanished behind the altar. He dismissed it as nonsense, then repeated the scene on the train and the creature jumped behind the altar again. That repetition convinced him: "access to inner worlds".
Voices, the Great Mother and the knight
Wilson finds Julian Jaynes useful: ancient people heard decisions as the voices of gods, really the other hemisphere. Wilson objects that modern man is still "bicameral" and ancient man was more likely relaxed and "unicameral", but agrees on the core: a second self in the brain, heard by thousands as hallucination.
- Anna Marjula (in Barbara Hannah's Encounters with the Soul): before her piano examination at twenty-one, a voice told her to renounce ambition and become the mother of a genius by conceiving without pleasure. She never found the man and was in crisis in her forties. Analysed at fifty-one, she was advised that the vision was an animus deception and used active imagination to converse with the Great Mother, ending in "a happy and serene old age".
- J. Marvin Spiegelman, at twenty-four, met a mother, daughter and wise old man in a fantasy cave; a knight carried them off and announced that others wished to dictate their stories. Spiegelman took down tales from the knight, a nun, a nymphomaniac and an old Chinaman, in four volumes.
The rainmaker
Spiegelman noted that active imagination "regularly leads to the occurrence of synchronistic events". Richard Wilhelm's story: a drought-stricken Chinese village sent for a rainmaker, who shut himself in a cottage for three days; then rain and unseasonal snow fell.
| View | Active imagination is... | Who leads |
|---|---|---|
| Rimbaud | A reasoned derangement of the senses | The ego, forcing |
| Free association (Freud) | Drift through complexes | No one |
| Jung, Absetz | Surrender to the hidden ally | The unconscious as equal partner |
| Wilson, after Howard Miller | Cooperation of conductor and orchestra | The ego, as conductor |
Wilson's final position. For him, synchronicity is "a natural product" of inner harmony: when we are healthy, "synchronicities should occur all the time".
Keep the baton
The physician Howard Miller pointed out that we already have a form of active imagination: we can switch at will from a hot beach to a snowy mountain, with the ego at the control panel. The right brain is the orchestra, the left the conductor, who must tap the stand and announce the Jupiter Symphony. "The greatest danger of active imagination is that the subject should assume it means handing over his baton to the orchestra." Western man is a conductor barely aware he has an orchestra; active imagination makes him aware (individuation), and the next task is training it. As Jung said late in life: "Consciousness is the supreme arbiter."
Human Evolution
Evolution as widening of consciousness.
The river
Wilson's metaphor: each stage narrows the channel and speeds the current.
Man survived without the predators' advantages by intelligence, but for millions of years development meandered because he had not learned to use "that most valuable of all tools, his mind". With Homo erectus the river became a stream; with Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, a torrent; with agriculture and cities, dangerous rapids. Between the first cities and Crete and Mycenae it flowed faster still. The danger created a new alertness and determination: "A man who steers his raft with his jaw set... has no time for compassion."
A Report on the Violent Man
Violence as frustrated intentionality.
Nanking and Chou-kou-tien
On 13 December 1937 the Japanese army entered Nanking and began two months of murder, rape and torture: some twenty thousand disarmed soldiers machine-gunned and burned, more than twenty thousand women raped, schoolboys used for bayonet practice. The photographs, taken by the Japanese themselves as records of "revenge", caused outrage when published in Look. Wilson gives over fifty thousand dead in the city and nearly two hundred thousand around it, noting the official Chinese figure of 340,000.
Thirty miles from Peking, meanwhile, scientists were excavating Peking Man, a true human of over half a million years ago who used fire and roasted venison, and whose skulls were broken open at the base, apparently to scoop out the brains. Franz Weidenreich concluded they were killed and eaten by their own kind. While editorials asked how civilised men could massacre a city, the caves suggested man had always killed his own species.
The killer-ape debate
| Position | Proponents | Claim | Wilson's verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Killer ape | Raymond Dart, Robert Ardrey, Konrad Lorenz | Weapons and aggression made us human; Dart's antelope-bone club fitted holes in baboon skulls | Too pessimistic, though Lorenz and Ardrey hedge with hope |
| Faulty brain | Arthur Koestler, after P. D. MacLean | Reptile, mammal and neo-cortex stacked badly: "a few screws loose"; on the couch with "a horse and a crocodile" | Suggestive, not sufficient |
| Peaceful primitive | Erich Fromm, Richard Leakey, H. G. Wells | Early man was peaceful; cities created cruelty | Partly right about cities, but misses the mechanism |
The three positions Wilson weighs. The 1953 exposure of the Piltdown hoax, which had seemed to show a big brain arriving first, helped Dart's case.
Even Fromm calls man "the only primate that kills and tortures members of his own species without any reason". Wells observed that our response to cruelty is itself vindictive ("Do you know what I should like to do to that brute?"), revealing the lack of fellow-feeling that makes cruelty possible. Sartre argued in the Critique of Dialectical Reason that others are naturally rivals, as in any bus queue.
Disoriented people and crowded animals
Colin Turnbull's Ik, driven from their hunting grounds into farming a rainless land, abandoned children at three and laughed when a baby burned its hand. Wilson refuses Ardrey's conclusion that altruism is superficial: the Ik show what demoralisation can do, not what humans can achieve. He notes infanticide among the Caribou Indians and Australian Aborigines as survival measures, and xenophobia as an animal instinct: Darwin's Uruguayan cattle sorted themselves into groups of fifty to a hundred, and Desmond Morris gave the same figure for a person's human "tribe".
Indifference, not ideology, explains much atrocity. Rainer Baum found the Holocaust bureaucrats had "no feeling" for their victims; the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 1982 shows the same category-shift. Then comes overcrowding:
- James Island deer (John Christian, 1958): about 300 Sika deer on half a square mile; 220 died with enlarged adrenals, until numbers fell to around eighty.
- Calhoun's rats: a pen able to hold five thousand stayed at two hundred. In four linked cages, dominant rats took the defensible end pens; in the crowded centre, the frustrated dominant minority formed gangs that raped, cannibalised and ate young: a "behavioural sink".
- Morris: wild animals do not mutilate themselves, become fetishists or murder; zoo animals and city humans do. "The city is a human zoo."
Yet Hong Kong is crowded with low crime. Augustus Kinzel found violent prisoners needed about forty square feet of "personal space" against ten for others. Wilson thinks the key is tension and the attitude that governs it.
Force T and Force C
Wilson's counterweight model. Crime "is essentially the search for 'the easy way'"; games, mountaineering and art are pleasure in building Force C.
His experiments: crawl growling at a child and watch delight turn to flight; have an adult crawl at you and notice the automatic adrenalin, which you can then choose to feel without reacting, suppress, or even prevent. In a vertigo cinema he learned to stand firm for twenty minutes, then a sudden crash threw him into the arms of the woman behind. Concluding that all control is "relative" and therefore futile "is the essence of the criminal mentality".
Control is not merely negative: mastering an instrument turns frustration into power, as a broken-in horse becomes a servant. Against Wittgenstein, Wilson argues all games share one purpose: to create stress and enjoy controlling it. Bell Telephone found workmen had three times the coronaries of executives; the distinguished in Who's Who live longer; rats given Valium under stress fared worse than undrugged rats that toughened up. "Man is the only creature who has learned to thrive on stress."
Obedience and impersonal cruelty
Man is innately social, which makes atrocity more puzzling: the Germans at Oradour were probably good fathers. Milgram's obedience experiments supply the answer: most "ordinary people" administered what they believed were agonising shocks on command. A soldier at My Lai, asked how a father could shoot babies, said "it's just one of those things". Minds can overrule instincts; city life is already a violation of instinct, and obedience completes it. At Nanking, emperor-worship and humiliation at the stubborn Chinese resistance turned "insensitivity into cruelty".
Wells's focus on sadists such as Gilles de Rais misses this impersonal cruelty. Fromm's "malignant aggression" and necrophilia fail too: his textbook necrophiles were sexual opportunists, Sergeant Bertrand had mistresses, the Spanish general's "Long live death!" meant patriotic sacrifice, and Hitler was a romantic who thought his Reich expressed health. Neither explanation is "universal enough".
The Right Man
Peter Sellers (from his son Michael's 1981 memoir): spoiled, morbidly jealous while having affairs, threatened suicide when his wife sought divorce, secretly phoned his secretary for briefings on Greek myth at dinner with Princess Margaret, drove a carving knife into the nanny's door.
Stepan Aksakov (from A Family Chronicle): "noble, magnanimous", yet dragged his wife by the hair when a daughter lied, then woke cheerful asking for tea.
Turgenev's mother, who had serfs flogged to death, and Elizabeth Duncan, who hired killers for her son's wife: proof that Right Women exist, contrary to van Vogt.
Van Vogt's sharpest insight: the Right Man can be destroyed when "the worm turns". The admiring partner guarantees his "primacy"; if she leaves, he falls back to "the helpless child in a hostile universe", and may beg, drink or kill himself. "Most violent men are failures." Success does not cure him, because the problem is inner. Each explosion feeds his sense of justification and his rage, a spiral he cannot leave until spent. The same "magic" (Sartre's term for emotional self-deception) turns a crying baby into a demon in the eyes of a battering mother, and let Patrick Byrne blame women for his "sexual tension" and Charles Manson blame "society".
The dominant five per cent
Shaw asked H. M. Stanley how many men could replace him as leader: "One in twenty." Wilson claims a constant five per cent of any group are dominant. In a rigid class society, a dominant labourer leads the church choir; in a society of television leaders and working-class pop idols, millions of dominant people feel cheated of primacy, and some take short cuts as bullies, cheats or criminals. Gifted dominant outsiders may become Schuberts, Darwins or Balzacs. The difference is self-discipline: Beethoven threw soup at a waiter but channelled his impatience "like a fireman's hose" into music. The Right Man's explosions waste energy and erode the canal banks, "the emotional counterpart of physical incontinence", which is why violent men from Alexander to Stalin end as psychotics. The answer to Fromm is the craving for primacy, and the next problem is "the psychology of self-destruction".
Paleoanthropology: the Peking Man skull was found by Pei Wenzhong. There were about fourteen skull caps and fragments from some forty individuals, not "forty skulls", and they were lost in 1941. Weidenreich's cannibalism reading is now widely attributed to damage by hyenas and other taphonomic causes. Dart's bone-club theory was refuted by C. K. Brain's work showing predators, chiefly leopards, caused the damage. The baboon skulls came from Makapansgat and Taung rather than "near Sterkfontein".
Myths and dubious claims: lemmings do not commit mass suicide; the famous footage was staged for a 1958 Disney film. Dogs will eat dog meat. The "exactly five per cent" dominance figure, the Stanley anecdote and the claim that segregating 5 per cent of US prisoners in Korea stopped all escapes are not established findings. "Ten thousand murders of wives in one district" in China in 1954 is unsourced.
Smaller slips: five per cent of 1980s England was about 2.3 million, not "more than three million". Civilisation and Its Discontents appeared in 1930, not 1931. Nanking death tolls remain disputed, and Wilson's figures are lower than most current estimates.
Sensitive content: the chapter describes atrocities, infanticide and sexual violence in detail. The editor reports Wilson's argument without endorsing his generalisations about any people. The Sabra and Shatila passage reflects 1982 reporting; the Kahan Commission found Israeli officials indirectly responsible.
Discovery of the Vampires
Fiction extract: Discovery of the Vampires.
The setting
Wilson's headnote: the narrator's friend Weissman kills himself in the novel's first chapter, and months later his journal reveals the existence of mind parasites. The novel's problem is how to fight a parasite "which already knows what they are thinking the moment they think it".
In 1990, Weissman joins industrial psychology at Trans-world Cosmetics and finds a hidden epidemic. Factory murder rates are twice the national rate; one American cigarette factory lost eight foremen and two executives in a year, most killers committing suicide at once; an Icelandic "open air" factory with energy fields for walls matched the national crime average within two years. The figures are suppressed to avoid contagion. His boss Ames lists the usual causes (overcrowding, insignificance, lost religion) and suspects industry wrongly treats workers as patients.
Mescalin and the hand over the telescope
Weissman reasons that man's deepest survival habits, constant alertness and ignoring beauty, are beyond the reach of whisky or tobacco but not of mescalin. A small dose might release creativity without stupor. The result: of ten subjects, five killed themselves within days and two went mad; he was sacked.
Taking half a gram himself, he passed through light and nirvana-like calm, then turned inward to observe his own perception. "It was as if I was trying to look through a telescope, and someone was deliberately placing his hand over the other end." Battering through, he felt "something living and alien hurrying out of my sight", and spent a week close to insanity, feeling that ordinary consciousness was only an ostrich's head in the sand.
Husserl and the sharks
The journal's sequence of discovery.
A Princeton friend's use of LSD and Husserl's vocabulary showed Weissman that phenomenology was the self-observation he had tried under mescalin, achievable from ordinary consciousness: "we have ordnance survey maps that cover every inch of our earth" but "no atlas of our mental world". Whenever he thought about the mind he got headaches and depression; chess and mathematics relieved them. Taking two months' leave, he deliberately pursued the problem through vomiting and exhaustion until, too weak to swallow milk, he rallied his deepest forces and felt his enemies "like swimming down to the bottom of the sea and suddenly noticing that you are surrounded by sharks". Then an immense strength "reared up like a giant", and he knew: "Man possesses more than enough power to destroy them all", but while unaware he is fed on. His wife found him "laughing like a madman", the laughter of sanity.
The history of the invasion
| Before c. 1780 | After c. 1780 |
|---|---|
| Life-enhancing art: Haydn, Mozart | Pessimism; artists feel "the world is against them" |
| Artists appreciated in their time | Neglect until death, when the vampires loosen their grip |
| Rare parasites (perhaps the source of the idea of the devil) | "Zombis": de Sade, later Hitler |
| Victors over the vampires: Beethoven, Goethe; life-slanderers (Schopenhauer) live long, life-affirmers (Nietzsche, Lawrence) are destroyed |
Weissman's reading of cultural history, a fictional version of the "fallacy of insignificance" and "Romantic decline" arguments elsewhere in this book.
He speculates that the vampires seek races on the brink of turning inward, crossing "the borderline that divides the animal from the god", and feed on their evolutionary energy, steering attention outward; continual minor wars suit them better than total destruction. Freed, man would create masterpieces "by the dozen", take up Husserl's legacy, discover powers "that make the hydrogen bomb seem a mere candle", and find "that his higher 'selves' are what his ancestors would have called gods". A second, "absurd" theory: the vampires may unintentionally serve evolution by inoculating man against indifference, since "once man has a purpose and a belief, he is almost invincible". The practical problem remains: publishing the facts would get him called mad, and dumping mescalin in a water supply is "unthinkable".
Vision on the Eiger
Vision on the Eiger.
Gradwohl and the Munich School
Gradwohl is tall, bony, bald, jerky as a puppet, with a German accent that turns d's into t's. He has overheard Butler's remarks on false fatigue and agrees that endurance in the black room needs discipline. His own secret: "a naturally healthy subconscious mind", earned on rock faces. In the thirties, Nazi climbers of the Munich School made a cult of impossible routes with pitons and karabiners; Gradwohl and his brother Otto, anti-Nazi though not Jewish, climbed to prove "you didn't have to be a Nazi to climb a vertical rock face".
First lesson: the decision to die
When the Munich School took the north face of the Matterhorn, the brothers aimed at the unclimbed Eigerwand, a six-thousand-foot wall. The Munich climber Wulffian Gartner raced them with three companions and was trapped by sleet after the third ice field. The brothers joined the rescue from the Eigerwand Station. Only Gartner survived the night; he cut free a dead companion, unravelled the rope into strands, and lowered within ten feet of rescuers before the knot jammed in his karabiner. Then: "Thanks for trying, anyway. I'm finished." "I watched him decide to die."
Second lesson: the ledge above Grindelwald
In 1936, just before the Olympic Games, they climbed by night to avoid melt-loosened stones. Tired, they pushed across the third ice field and up the ramp as wind rose and darkness neared; Otto spotted a ledge twenty feet the wrong way, slipped, and was hauled back. On a three-foot sloping shelf glazed with six inches of ice, pinned to pitons, they sat sleepless until the clouds cleared over the lights of Grindelwald. Otto laughed: "Are we both mad?"
| The sleepers below | The climbers on the ledge |
|---|---|
| Comfortable, take their beds for granted | Hanging "like a fly", intensely happy |
| False fatigue: life "not really worth living" | Certainty that life is worth living |
| Will diffuse | Will concentrated on every foot of the White Spider |
Gradwohl's contrast, the extract's version of the "St Neot margin".
The absurdity strikes him: they climbed to remember what they should know anyway, "that life is only worth living when the will is concentrated". Why need an obstacle? For two million years man has climbed "a mountain of evolution", yet his will is so weak he dies before a century. "Our business is evolution": a composer and a philosopher can see how far civilizations have climbed and "shouldn't be drifting like the rest of the fools".
Uncle Sam
Uncle Sam as romantic dead end.
The narrator's distaste
Hugh has never liked human beings: not Swiftian hatred but "an obscure discomfort", like a dentist's drill; even buying a pencil required overcoming revulsion. Thinking mathematically from six, he is offended by the waste of thought-energy in small talk, like a hiker walking a three-foot circle five thousand times to make five miles. He watches two people discuss the weather "expecting to see their faces crumble suddenly into horrible grief".
The attic
A rich lumber merchant, Sam retreated when Hugh was four, had the window bricked up and a double-thick door fitted with a food hatch, and admitted only his cheerful second wife Bertha ("He doesn't like noise"). Nobody sought to certify him: everyone expected to benefit from his will. At nine, at the start of the war, Hugh carried a candle up during a power-cut and was invited in: a prophet-bearded old man in a grey nightshirt, a stench of years of meals, eating in the dark because "darkness is man's natural element". After Sam's death he left Hugh money and a forty-page "Letter to my Nephew Hugh".
The letter
Uncle Sam's life as reconstructed from the letter.
The first attack. Riding the tube to a board meeting, confident of a coup on the bankrupt Cardew, Sam was struck "as abruptly as a heart attack" by hatred for all human beings: faces like "beings of clay and corruption", a city of "gigantic and hairy spiders". He felt he had glimpsed a truth he had no right to turn from; if he were God, he would destroy all life. Speechless at the meeting, he scrawled the Cardew advice by habit and fled. His wife Mildred became repulsive; he took a gin-sodden train to an Ayrshire cottage, where even the delivery man seemed "a walking fungus". Mildred went back to her previous husband. He concluded the vision had "some physico-cerebral origin" but was "totally useless to me as a living man", ascribing it to being "unusually sensitive to the idea of violence".
Respite. Business became a game; he married his cook Bertha in 1932, settling half his fortune on her against another "retreat". By 1936 moral exhaustion warned of a new collapse; boxes of grass and privet held it off.
He felt like Newton, Darwin and especially Marx, and understood the tube: people were loathsome because they were contented slaves. But the analogy failed: Marx could point workers at employers, while God is hidden. Two facts remained: he objected to being exploited; most people do not. So: a one-man strike. In darkness to keep his mind concentrated, he hoped "the Great Employer" might negotiate, then settled for being, "like Christ", an intercessor "on behalf of my fellow human insects". He did not advise Hugh to copy him, but made provision in his will.
| Sam's analogy | Marx | Sam |
|---|---|---|
| Oppressor | Employers, visible | God or Fate, hidden |
| Fuel | Physical discomfort | Spiritual indignity, which few feel |
| Action | Mass revolution | Solitary strike in the dark |
Why the revolution could not be collective.
"I saw it"
A twenty-page "Summary of my religion and philosophy" followed in decaying handwriting; one half-legible phrase stands out: "What is the logical response to being alive?" Two days before death Sam fell into a trance with an expression Bertha took for joy, and scrawled "I saw it". Not "Him", Hugh notes. Like Aquinas's final vision, it "robbed him of the desire to go on living".
Peak Experience
Peak Experience lecture spine.
Schumacher, Maslow and the small pond
Wilson had planned a book on Schumacher, whose ideas he saw as "a natural extension, in a social direction" of his own. The Outsider's problem is the person alone in a society "too big and too impersonal"; lecturing in America he saw classes so large students watched on TV monitors. Civilization's fundamental aim, he says, is to promote creativity in the individual.
Maslow wrote in the late 1950s about The Age of Defeat, sharing Wilson's obsession with civilization's "premise of defeat". His thesis: psychologists study the sick because the sick talk about sickness; study the healthy instead. Asking "Who is the healthiest person you know?", he found such people frequently had peak experiences: non-mystical surges of happiness, like the mother watching her family at breakfast in a beam of sunlight, or the hostess surveying a trampled carpet after a good party.
Small is Beautiful extends this: the healthy person is not overwhelmed by the environment, so society must keep things small. Writers flourish as small fish in small ponds: Joyce's and Shaw's Dublin, Wells's Lewisham, Bennett's Burslem, Proust's Combray, Wilson's own Leicester; at nineteen in London he felt that if a bus knocked him down, nobody would care.
| Maslow's level | Example in the lecture | State in our society |
|---|---|---|
| Physiological | The starving man dreams of one good meal | Mostly satisfied |
| Security | The tramp's cottage with roses | Mostly satisfied |
| Love, belonging | Intimacy with others | Mostly satisfied |
| Self-esteem | Coffee mornings, Rotary Clubs | The unsatisfied need: de-individuation |
| Self-actualization | Fostering children; ships in bottles | Reached only "with luck" |
The hierarchy of needs as Wilson presents it.
Chesterton and Belloc's Distributism ("two acres and a cow") anticipated Schumacher, who updated it. Wilson corresponded with and visited Schumacher; then Schumacher died. A Guide for the Perplexed showed he too had turned to the lone individual: improving society starts with improving the individual. Its epilogue quotes Dorothy L. Sayers on the Inferno as our society's portrait, "Futility, lack of a living faith ... and violence", and argues we are trying to live without religion, meaning inner certainty as an anchor against alienation.
Why comfort breeds crime
An ideal material society would not guarantee happiness. As a student of crime (then writing A Criminal History of Mankind), Wilson notes that comfort brings soaring, increasingly sadistic crime; some mass murders "would simply never have happened before the 1960s". Shaw ("Modern man cannot live without a religion"), Toynbee and Schumacher all saw the need. Whitehead: "Religion is what a man does with his solitude."
Steppenwolf and the golden bubble
Hesse's Steppenwolf (Wilson claims to be the first to write on Hesse extensively in England) has comfort, books, records, a girlfriend, and is bored and suicidal; then a glass of Moselle bursts "the golden bubble" and he is "reminded of Mozart and the stars". A button for that experience would end crime, war and frustration. Huxley proposed mescalin, but it makes you "ecstatically lazy": unwashed dishes look too beautiful to wash.
Alcoholics and the will
Wine, mescalin and pot work only half the time. Maslow, working with the psychologist Hoffer, judged alcoholics often more intelligent than average and so more bored. Their treatment: a psychedelic "lift" plus each patient's old peak triggers (colours on a screen, music, poetry). Claimed result: about 85 per cent permanent cure. The alcoholic had been passive, "waiting ... for the alcohol to carry him like a magic carpet"; the intense experience showed that peaks depend on health, and health on will-drive. "He changed drugs, and used will instead of alcohol."
Greene's revolver: contraction then release
Graham Greene, depressed after six months of adolescent analysis, played Russian roulette with his brother's revolver on Berkhamsted Common; at the click, "It was as if a light had been turned on and I suddenly saw that life is infinitely beautiful." Wilson's reading: boredom leaves us "spread out"; the peak is a tensing of the will followed by total relaxation, like an old car handbrake that must be pulled tighter before release.
The two selves in the head
The explanation came from Sperry and Gazzaniga's split-brain work. Cutting the corpus callosum stopped epileptic storms crossing hemispheres and seemed harmless (someone joked it only stopped the brain sagging), until Sperry found the patient becomes two people. Left: speech, reason, coping; right: pattern, intuition. Examples: an object shown to one side named, another written by the left hand; a woman blushing at a picture without knowing why; one hand embracing a wife while the other pushed her away; one hand doing up flies, the other undoing them.
Wilson's two-hemisphere model of the peak experience.
"The person you call 'you' lives in the left side of your head"; the right is a stranger, and in a sense we are all split-brain patients. Mozart's melodies "walking into his head" came from the right. Absorption is collaboration; someone looking over your shoulder makes the left self-conscious, and the flow stops. A pianist attends from his fingers to the music. Wilson's writing became "a game of tennis": the right supplies insight, the left words it, the right says "Yes, that's exactly what I meant!", and inspiration is perfect cooperation.
The left is quick and the right slow, so they drift out of earshot; we fall in step by slowing the left (meditation) or speeding the right (excitement, drumming, pop music), like two trains side by side whose passengers can talk. Anxiety lets the left take over and cut itself off from its power source: "The more anxious we become, the weaker we become."
Laurel and Hardy. Ollie (left) wakes on a rainy Monday and groans; suggestible Stan (right), who controls the energy supply, sinks lower and cuts the flow; Ollie nicks himself shaving, drops his umbrella, and the gloom feeds back. On Christmas morning the loop runs the other way. "If we could cling on to this state of mind, human beings would become gods within the next century."
Animals, dowsing and the hidden quartermaster
Drink and drugs give animal consciousness: a cow or dog feels as if after "three or four large whiskies", permanently drunk, which may explain animal second sight. Hugh MacDiarmid's wife said their dog waited at the lane end days before he returned. Wilson, "ESP-thick" except when very relaxed or excited, found he could dowse at the Merry Maidens stone circle once shown how to hold the rod; he suspects the right brain convulsing his muscles. A Sperry experiment seemed to confirm it: a patient allowed a second guess at a colour flashed to the non-speaking side would twitch at a wrong first guess. So, "as Plato declared", there is a being inside who knows more and is willing to send energy, if the telephone line is not cut by tension.
The cost of relaxation: the drunk cannot fit his key in the lock. We have a telescope on one eye and a microscope on the other and go about with one eye closed, a "worm's-eye view". L. H. Myers's The Near and the Far: Prince Jali on Akbar's battlements sees a desert glorious to the eye and wearying to the foot. Wilson's answer: the two halves exist to hold near and far at once.
Faculty X
Underfloor lighting and the crisis paradox
Normal consciousness is like a nightmare of heavy legs; its underpinning is negative. A child in a cinema, happy without knowing why until he remembers the holidays began today, shows happiness retreating into the subconscious, an "underfloor lighting" (Granville Barker's "secret life"). Healthy people leave it on; Greene switched his on by crisis. A friend's depressed dog emerged from five minutes locked in a cupboard bouncing with joy.
| Example | Crisis | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Greene | Russian roulette | "life is infinitely beautiful" |
| Meursault (L'Etranger) | Facing execution; shakes the priest | "I had been happy and I was happy still" |
| Hans Keller | Nazi Germany | Vow never to be unhappy again |
| Raskolnikov | Expected execution | Would rather stand on a ledge forever |
| Ramakrishna | Sword at his heart | Samadhi; thereafter at a word |
Crisis tears off the blinkers.
"Man knows what he doesn't want far more clearly than he knows what he does want." Fichte: "To be free is nothing; to become free is heaven." It is like a car doing 90 m.p.h. in reverse and 10 forward: "some kind of basic error in the human design". Meursault's happiness he did not know he had is Sperry's answer: one hemisphere can feel what the other does not know; real happiness is both feeling the same. Dr Johnson's hanging "concentrates his mind wonderfully"; Raskolnikov on his ledge "has the world inside his brain", a British Museum library in his head. This, says Wilson, is what the Buddha meant by enlightenment, now nearly translated into Western terms. Schumacher's dim gallery: the visitor insists he sees the pictures until someone raises the blinds. The task: reprogramme the underfloor lighting by repeating the insight until it is known.
Hudson, hypnosis and left-brain confidence
Thomson J. Hudson's The Law of Psychic Phenomena (1893) began with a hypnotised young man who "interviewed" Socrates and other philosophers, giving brilliant, consistent answers, as we compose music in dreams. Hudson's objective mind (left) and subjective mind (right): under hypnosis the subjective mind obeys, so a subject lies rigid between two chairs while men jump on him. Why not on our own orders? The right brain believes the hypnotist but senses the left brain's lack of confidence.
Richard Wilhelm's rain-maker did not "make" rain: he withdrew for three days until he was "once more in Tao", and it rained. Wilson reads Taoism and Jung's synchronicity as the mind influencing reality.
Howard Miller and the projectionist
The American doctor Howard Miller, writing in the late 1970s, saw a dentist tell a hypnotised patient she would not bleed, and she did not; his own hypnosis of terminal cancer patients brought remissions. His step beyond Hudson: if the hypnotist replaces the "you" in giving orders, the "you" could give them itself with enough authority. (Wilson adds the Wirral hypnotist Joe Keeton, said to be curing cancer and to have regrown a girl's heel.) Miller calls the self "the unit of pure thought", holding the brain an amplifier of thought from beyond it. Wilson replied that this was only Husserl's transcendental ego, and Miller was disappointed.
Three months later, tired on a cliff walk, Wilson tensed and released as usual and asked: what part of me gave that order? The left brain, supposedly the villain, and the right relaxed because the order had authority. He wrote to Miller that evening that he was right. Miller's case: Penfield's electrode floods patients with memories, so the brain is a library; stuck tunes make us feel powerless; but call up a beach, then dissolve it into a mountain, and you see that you are in control of the computer. Like a cinemagoer who climbs to the empty projection room, we must remember we are the projectionists.
Wilson closes against Western pessimism: man is at "the most interesting point in his evolution", and Schumacher shared that optimism.
The Human Condition
Human Condition as closing frame.
The switchback of feeling
Our senses try to give an accurate picture, but feelings offer a different "truth" every ten minutes: food is good when hungry and disgusting when sick; the beloved becomes repulsive when she sues for divorce. Life seems exciting at ten and dreary at four; decisions made in the morning look futile by afternoon, like Alice's croquet with flamingoes. Hence the philosophers' "vanity of vanities" and the advice to expect the worst. Reason helps us smile at people we dislike, but we still treat prejudices about sport, pop music or parties as logic: William James's "a certain blindness in human beings".
The harm is not inconvenience but waste: the blindness traps us in narrow, trivial consciousness. A crisis gives a bird's-eye view, and we know life without the threat would be "a continual delight": the feeling of "absurd good news". Most people in the civilized world "ought to regard their lives as a perpetual holiday".
The lesson of the panic attacks
During the panic attacks described in Mysteries, Wilson saw no objective reason for gloom and every reason for happiness. With tremendous effort he could impose objective perceptions on subjective feelings; the foreboding returned half an hour later, but he knew it could be made to go. Hence one of the most important experiences of his life: we need not wait for clouds to drift from the sun; we can blow them away. "The final arbiter is the mind itself."
Wilson's Brooklyn Bridge image of the two lines of consciousness.
Everyday consciousness, accepted as natural, is a form of depression. R. H. Ward, under dental gas, passed into a state "far more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary waking consciousness". Wilson's image: a frosted windscreen with a scraped peephole, driving at five miles an hour. Glimpses of completer consciousness are not "higher" but a step toward true normality.
The storage cupboard
We hold a thousand personal reasons for delight, and the species a million more: imagine our Pleistocene ancestors half-starved in caves while snow piled up outside, and see the triumphs a modern city represents. We cannot be mindful of them all, but that does not explain the narrowness: these reasons reactivate themselves, especially on solving a problem, when a particular relief widens until "all life seems good", and we realise the delight is always accessible.
Underfloor lighting and the third dimension
Relief switches on a whole range of lights, "like the Blackpool illuminations". In the Laurel and Hardy terms of Chapter 10, Ollie tells himself "everything's all right after all" and Stan overhears. Then consciousness gains a third dimension: Husserl's "natural wakeful Me" is a flat perceiving, but joy makes reality "more real". If reality is three-dimensional, that itself is a permanent reason for delight, and flat consciousness is dispensable: it is "almost entirely a matter of bad habits", a negative feedback loop of discouragement and boredom.
The emotional body
The book is the emotional body: physically mature at twenty, it stays arrested at about ten in most civilized people, perhaps fifteen in harder-living ancestors. "Prod most civilized men, and you find a child just below the surface." Hence our craving for adventure and danger, an instinctive way to force it to mature. But 3-D insight is itself a direct method: grasped, it brings the flash called enlightenment, and "knowledge itself can break this vicious circle". The chief danger is treating 3-D states as holidays, "too good to last".
The inner world
Waking, we feel we leave an inner world for the real one; objective flashes show an equally vast world "in here". Huxley in Heaven and Hell: the mind "still has its darkest Africas and Amazonian basins". More practically, Penfield's probe on a patient's temporal cortex released vividly re-lived childhood memories; Proust's madeleine did the same. Children sink into this world, thumb in mouth, gazing at the fire. Thomas Jefferson Hogg describes Shelley reading over meals, in bed and in the street, and curling up like a cat to sleep anywhere: a "right brainer".
Inside the White Tower
Niall's ascent as Faculty X machine.
The ascent
Under the blue canopy Niall feels peace and "tremendous joy", then sees as if rising vertically: the spider city, the harbour, the desert where his father lies, the curve of the Earth, the Moon as a sphere rather than "a flat golden plate", and finally the planets from beyond Pluto, where the Earth is "an almost invisible pinhead". Returning, he has forgotten who he is; his daydreams seem "a spark compared to a bonfire". Despair that "knowledge was infinite and his own life so short" is dissolved into "a consuming appetite for knowledge".
Steeg's history of life
| Stage | Steeg's account | Wilson's theme |
|---|---|---|
| Solar system | Explosion, implosion, condensation into planets | Order from chaos |
| First life | DNA, bacteria eating organic compounds | "Life began as an energy-vampire" |
| Photosynthesis | Blue-green algae make oxygen | Life rescues itself from its own success |
| Death and sex | Reproduction replaces immortal cells | Mortality forces memory and learning |
| Land | Fleshy-finned fish flee the sharks | "The less successful species are the most successful" |
| Dinosaurs | 150 million years, ended by a meteor | Victims of their own success |
| Man | Drought, upright walking, hunting, fire | Challenge breeds brain |
| Cro-Magnon | Language, cave magic, farming, cities | "A new stage of his evolution" |
The evolutionary lesson as a series of crises that force life upward.
The core idea is that "life invented death": an immortal creature "has no need of memory", but a new-born one must fight and learn fast, so "the ancient, immortal organisms were mere vegetables; the new life forms were fighters and learners". The shark, perfectly adapted 400 million years ago, never changed; the struggling lungfish became amphibians and reptiles. Fire forced larger, organised groups, laws and manners, and perhaps the "brain explosion" of half a million years ago. The Cro-Magnons, "supermen" beside Neanderthals, developed shamanic magic, calendars on bone, trade, domestication and cities.
Below the Iceberg
Iceberg self model.
Boredom and purpose
As a child Wilson noticed that coveted Christmas toys bored him within hours. At thirteen he bought volumes of Practical Knowledge for All at a church bazaar and spent the August holiday writing A Manual of General Science, never bored, with "an almost drunken sensation of the sheer immensity of the world of ideas". Lesson: the secret of avoiding boredom is a strong sense of purpose. Reading without writing left him dissatisfied again.
At sixteen he read Dostoevsky's letter about the mock execution on Semyonovsky Square: surely a man reprieved would never be bored again. The ordeal made Dostoevsky great, showing that "life failure" is "a form of childish spoiltness". Poetry after factory shifts lifted Wilson into a bird's-eye view, which made the next morning worse, like Hanno Buddenbrook trudging to school after Lohengrin.
From existentialism to the occult
Asked to write The Occult, Wilson polled friends and found many paranormal experiences:
| Witness | Experience | Power suggested |
|---|---|---|
| Mark Bredin, pianist | Knew a taxi would jump the light at Queensway and hit his cab; it did | Precognition |
| A. L. Rowse | "Let the damn thing fall!": the window fell just after; foresaw two men embracing in the library | Precognition |
| Kay Lunnis | Rose above her body when ill | Out-of-body |
| Lyall Watson | Saw from above a boy trapped in an overturned bus, then rescued him | Out-of-body |
| G. Wilson Knight | Evidence his mother survived death | Survival |
| Robert Graves | At fifteen "knew everything" for a day; classmate Smilley's instant answers | "Supra-logic" |
| Zerah Colburn; Sacks's twins | Instant factor 641; swapping huge primes | Seeing the whole number-field |
The evidence Wilson assembles for the "iceberg" view.
If true, man is more than Heraclitus, Sartre or Derrida allow; Dostoevsky said proof of survival would be the most important thing humans could know. Hume found no self; Sartre said the self is "the gaze of others"; de Beauvoir "felt that I am not". The paranormal suggests instead an iceberg whose hidden part, and the sea below it, hold "virtually magical powers".
The iceberg model of the self.
Faculty X and lunar knowledge
Proust's madeleine reminded him of the depths but could not be summoned deliberately; Toynbee seemed to see ancient battles. Wilson named the faculty in Washington in 1966: Faculty X is not paranormal but "simply the opposite" of Sartre's contingency. Animals keep such powers (MacDiarmid's dog), as did Jim Corbett's "jungle sensitiveness" and, Clarence Weiant reported, the telepathy of the Montagnais. Since Euclid and Archimedes, Graves's "solar knowledge" has eclipsed intuitive "lunar knowledge".
Knowing versus really knowing
Writing Beyond the Occult reluctantly, Wilson found he had only superficially known his own ideas: "to really know something we must meditate upon it until we have absorbed it into our being". A girl in a cornfield saw everything turn to diamond light and knew "it is still there". Romantics had such glimpses because they relaxed, but missed that they bring strength; Maslow's peakers were strong copers.
The Seventh Degree of Concentration
Concentration ladder.
High fliers and the lukewarm
High fliers (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shaw, Wells, David Lindsay) ask what we should do with our lives; low fliers (Austen, Dickens, Thackeray) never ask the big question. The basic problem is Steppenwolf's: comfort and lukewarm consciousness, broken by wine's "golden bubble". For the average person the choice is not Carlyle's Everlasting Yes versus No, but the bird's-eye view versus Heidegger's "triviality of everydayness", a new problem born of the comfort intellect has created.
The clenched mind
Greene's revolver blew away boredom, but "it was the sudden convulsion of his own mind that transformed his consciousness, not the revolver". The mind is like a hand: it can clench or hang slack; Beckett's had atrophied from lying in bed. Unscrambling a corrupted file of his Huysmans chapter, Wilson was never bored because relieved; next morning, concentrating "as if my life depended on it", he felt "a marvellous sense of control and meaning" and saw it would work even for blowing his nose. Boredom is the assumption that something is not worth doing. Once attention closes the leaks, little effort maintains it.
We can steer thought (Renouvier's proof of free will) but feelings steer like dodgem cars, except in rare relaxed moments of "power steering": wallowing in a warm bed, rain on a cardboard-box "house", enjoying the drift towards sleep. Wilson expects this steering to become as natural as walking.
Seven circles inward
Wilson's degrees of concentration; he describes the first four only.
Shaw's Captain Shotover wants "the seventh degree of concentration". Sexual excitement shows the mechanism: each excitement focuses attention, which raises excitement, a series of compressions; the same holds for music, art, holidays, sport and insight. Picture a pond's rings moving inward. Everyday reality is untrue: a short-sighted man would not call his blur truer than his glasses. Alcohol, sex, sport and holidays work by focusing attention, but we wrongly credit the means. Hence the purpose of all literature: to absorb us in an imaginary world until we see that "in the battle between the world and the mind, it is the mind that is destined to win".
The Fifth Window
Fifth window thesis.
The conundrum
Wells: all living things have been "up against it", and struggle drives evolution. Life is active, yet creatures feel it only briefly (the lion stalking, the warrior charging) and mostly feel "as helpless as leaves carried on the wind". Moments of exaltation reveal the problem: we are blinded by "close-upness". But man's aim is a crisis-free life, and crisis is what liberates him from boredom, so "the greatest obstacle to his long-term happiness is this civilization that has cost him so much effort".
The theoretical way out is memory, the "sense of reality": a man who knows he must stay vigilant does so without difficulty, by programming his unconscious through imagination, the "reality function". The practical obstacle is fifteen million years of habit: we adapt so skilfully that we do not notice our own activity.
| Mode | Experience | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic, uphill | Crisis seems to galvanize us | Bird's-eye view, credited to the crisis |
| Automatic, on the flat | Top gear, bored indifference | Hunting for crises |
| Manual override | Deliberate change of gear | Control without crisis |
Wilson's three driving states.
The "imaginative revolution" of the past three thousand years, he concludes, has been man's dim attempt to build a manual gearbox so as not to become "the victim of his own success".
The Psychology of Optimism
Psychology of optimism spine.
Sanine and Syd Banks
In his teens Wilson found Artsybashev's Sanine, often abandoned nearly new in second-hand shops: its hero is an attempt at an anti-Dostoevskian Russian, "sane, balanced, intelligent, clear-sighted". In one scene he takes a girl's virginity "in spite of her resistance"; next day, after her horror, she decides to "look on the bright side". Wilson calls it "a delightful book".
Pransky's diagnosis matches Wilson's: we live in close-upness, noses two inches from the canvas, with "an underpinning of boredom". A man told he is dying jumps to the bird's-eye view; told it was a mistake, he can see that the bird's-eye view "was true all along" and resolve to believe it. Hans Keller's vow to "never be unhappy again" if he escaped Germany is the same insight. The Outsider, fifty years earlier, began from nineteenth-century suicides who needed only to grasp intellectually that the worm's-eye view was false.
The philosophers to blame
| Figure | Claim | Effect in Wilson's story |
|---|---|---|
| Kant | Reality unattainable | Kleist's suicide |
| Faust | "We can nothing know" | Saved by Easter bells |
| Descartes, La Mettrie | Animals, then men, are machines | Free will an illusion |
| Condillac, Cabanis | Brain secretes thought like bile | Mental life is sensation |
| Maine de Biran | In effort I know "I" act | Ignored, then rediscovered by Sperry |
Wilson's genealogy of the machine view and its rebuttal.
It matters: if a depressed person believes he has no free will, the thought can push him over the edge, as Wilson claims it pushed Kleist.
ECT and the muscles of the will
Cerletti introduced ECT in the late 1930s. Johan Hellsten of Lund gave rats ECT and found more cells lining the blood vessels in the hippocampus, with vessels about 16 per cent longer; long-term depressives have smaller hippocampi. Wilson's reading: depression is ceasing to use the will; the shock acts like a crisis that stimulates effort; and willed effort makes something grow. Pransky's patients, he presumes, induce their own "ECT" by effort and optimism.
The Future of Mankind
Future of mankind conditional.
Why we are not ready for our civilization
Wilson remembers Hitler, Stalin and the Belsen photographs, and notes both tyrants were soon dead. A million pounds each would not make humanity much happier: we lack the imagination to recognize when we are well off. Fichte: "To be happy is nothing. To become happy is heavenly." Like scarves knitted on school hosiery machines, which ruin if the weight touches the floor, humans need "a weight on the needles"; the rich of Fellini's La Dolce Vita lack one. Schopenhauer saw this but treated the human condition as fixed; it is not. Wells: the world evolved more in two centuries than in the previous thousand years.
Life inserting itself into matter
Wilson rejects pure natural selection, citing Fred Hoyle's odds and Brandon Carter's 1974 Anthropic Principle. With Bergson and Shaw, he holds that life was "already there" outside matter and has spent fifteen billion years inserting itself, Shaw's "whirlpool of pure force" becoming "a whirlpool of pure intelligence". Unlike Shaw, he believes in forces outside space and time, visible in synchronicity, as if "some cosmic joker" were digging us in the ribs.
| Evidence offered | Story |
|---|---|
| Synchronicity | Jacques Vallee, researching the Order of Melchizedek, got a taxi receipt signed "M. Melchizedek", the only one in the LA directory. Wilson, writing it up in 1990, found an unread book on his camp bed that opened at "ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEK". |
| Fate in crime | Nasty criminals seem "fated" to make the mistake that catches them. |
| Precognition | Jung's student friend dreamed a Spanish cathedral and a carriage with cream-coloured horses, then saw both. |
| Random generators | Jahn's subjects influenced electronic coin-flippers; Nelson's global network spiked at Diana's funeral, at New Year midnights, and on 11 September 2001 from about 6 a.m., hours before the attacks. |
Wilson's grounds for thinking "we possess powers ... we do not even begin to understand".
The need to wake up
Some force "has gone to an awful lot of trouble to get us to where we are" and will not let us vanish like the dinosaurs. Yet we cannot carry on as we are; Wilson has believed for forty years that man is on the point of an evolutionary change to a higher level, requiring the effort of a serious New Year's resolution. Gurdjieff told Ouspensky in 1915, as a lorry of crutches for not-yet-wounded soldiers passed, that men are mechanical; could one wake up? "It is possible, but it requires a tremendous effort." Auden: "Even war cannot frighten us enough"; George W. Bush's withdrawal from climate commitments suggests even September 11 did not. We are not left wholly to ourselves, Wilson ends, but we cannot leave it to an anthropic principle either.
What the Ultimate Edition Adds Up To
What changes after the Human Condition postscript.
Twenty-four master takeaways
- Ultimate completes Essential: Stanley's preface frames six scholar-chosen additions after ~100 further titles.
- Absurd good news remains the touchstone; the insight still evaporates by morning without a method.
- Everyday consciousness is a liar: low-energy close-up falsifies the world.
- Maslow's peaks are healthy-person data; Wilson insists they can be induced.
- The 2009 Strange Story shortens the 1965 chapter and elevates Reid, Maine de Biran, Whitehead and Husserl against later passivity.
- Descartes' doubt is the original "howler"; successors often amplify howlers instead of returning to square one.
- Faculty X: reality of other times and places as a trainable sense.
- Ladder of selves: crisis or will can install a higher commanding "I".
- Stan and Ollie: left must lead right with earned confidence.
- Active imagination trains dialogue with images instead of drift.
- Violence is frustrated will seeking a cheap peak.
- Mind-parasite fiction dramatises attention drains and group resistance.
- Eiger ordeal accidentally concentrates; training should copy concentration, not cliffs.
- Uncle Sam's world-refusal is sterile romanticism.
- Method: contract, release, reprogramme until 3-D consciousness defaults.
- White Tower: Faculty X as machine; widened view energises hunger to know.
- Life "invented death" so organisms must remember and learn (Steeg's shape, not his outdated facts).
- Below the Iceberg: most of the self is submerged; shafts of attention reach powers Sartre's nausea denies.
- Seventh degree of concentration: reading and work as graded attention gyms.
- Fifth window: misfit / sexual intensities can open meaning if transmuted, not only compulsion.
- Psychology of optimism: optimism is trained perception, not cheerleading.
- Future of mankind: crime versus creativity as evolutionary fork; adulthood is conditional.
- Criminality as "original sin"; creativity as "redemption" inside one pattern.
- Best use: run one mechanism per week across Essential spine, then test late metaphors (iceberg shaft, seventh degree) on the same problem.
Frameworks and mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Absurd good news | Two global moods; only one reports richness | Post-joy crash |
| Everyday liar | Close-up low energy falsifies | Chronic boredom |
| Faculty X | Elsewhen/elsewhere made real | Dead study, flat history |
| Stan and Ollie | Verbal left leads emotional right | Anxiety loops |
| Contract then release | Peak after tension + letting-go | Practice design |
| Iceberg self | Powers live below the tip | Feeling "only the surface" |
| Seventh degree | Attention has grades up to mastery | Skimming life/books |
| Fifth window | Extra aperture beyond social four | Misfit drive without frame |
| Optimism discipline | Selective attention can be retrained | Pessimist realism pose |
| Future fork | Crime comfort vs creative purpose | Civilisational gloom |
Frameworks spanning Essential spine and Ultimate additions.
Combined Ultimate daily loop.
Who's who
| Name | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Colin Wilson | Author / original selector | One question across fifty years |
| Colin Stanley | Editor | Completes Essential as Ultimate |
| Nicolas Tredell et al. | Choosers | Six late extracts |
| Maslow | Ally/foil | Peaks; induction dispute |
| Reid / Maine de Biran / Whitehead / Husserl | 2009 heroes | Will and organism against passivity |
| Niall (fiction) | White Tower protagonist | Faculty X enacted |
| Sartre (foil) | Iceberg antagonist | Nausea refused |
Cast for the completed anthology.
About this book
The Ultimate Colin Wilson: The Essential Anthology Completed, 1956 to 2006 by Colin Wilson, 2019. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions
- Ultimate completes Essential: Stanley's preface frames six scholar-chosen additions after ~100 further titles.
- Absurd good news remains the touchstone; the insight still evaporates by morning without a method.
- Everyday consciousness is a liar: low-energy close-up falsifies the world.
- Maslow's peaks are healthy-person data; Wilson insists they can be induced.
- The 2009 Strange Story shortens the 1965 chapter and elevates Reid, Maine de Biran, Whitehead and Husserl against later passivity.
- Descartes' doubt is the original "howler"; successors often amplify howlers instead of returning to square one.