my cherry picked Colin Wilson

Browsing around Glasgow's Mitchell library the other day, my eye was caught by a thick book entitled 'The Ultimate Colin Wilson.  Writings on Mysticism, Consciousness and Existentialism'

Flicking through the pages, it didn't take me long to take the book out on loan and become thoroughly engrossed in its reading.  I sort of literally could not put it down.  I closed its pages only shortly before closing my eyes at night, and opened them again shortly after I had opened them again in the morning.  The bullet points below are citations or phrases or fragments of ideas that struck me.  I paraphrased some of them to suit my understanding and so I can't say that these selected snippets are fully faithful transcriptions of Wilson's words, but most of them are more or less so, to my understanding.  Wilson himself is fond of rephrasing.  Of the hundreds of books which I have subsequently learned that he has written, he admits to having centred on essentially the same main ideas, which he approaches from different angles or decorates with diverse references to philosophy, literature and tales from everyday experience. 

One recurring theme running throughout Wilson's writing is the 'peak experience' - when one is overcome by a feeling of immense well-being: joy, ecstasy, elation, wonder and awe, as if one had received (in the words of G.K. Chesterton) "absurd good news."  Maslow first coined the phrase 'peak experience' in describing religious/spiritual experiences where ego consciousness disappears and is replaced by a blissful awareness of the underlying oneness of All.  Discussing this later with Wilson, Maslow reported that, although such experiences could occur among all types of people, certain very healthy individuals were most prone to them and that, in the process of describing and dwelling upon their experiences, they were found to recur with an ever greater frequency. 

• 'We started on one of those clear dawns that wake up the senses with the sun, while the intellect, tired of the thinking of the night, was yet abed.  For an hour or two, on such a morning, the sounds, scents and colours of the world struck man individually and directly, not filtered through or made typical by thought; they seemed to exist sufficiently by themselves, and the lack of design, or carefreeness in creation no longer irritated.'        T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom
• 'Why did I suddenly feel so happy, hanging there like a fly, looking down at the lights thousands of feet below in the valley?  So many are lying there comfortably in their beds, not particularly happy because they take their beds for granted.  All suffering from what you could call false fatigue - a mistaken feeling that life is not really worth living.  Suddenly the absurdity struck me: we have climbed this mountain to remind ourselves of something we ought to know anyway - that life is only worth living when the will is concentrated.
• What we call waking consciousness is not usually much better than sleep.  We are still wrapped in a passive, sluggish day-dream.  This is not due to some natural limit to consciousness, but only because we remain unaware that it can be stretched.  We are like dogs who think they are on a chain, when in fact they are free.
• 'peak experiences' remind us that everyday consciousness is a kind of tunnel and that we only have to remove the telescope fixed on the one cloud on the horizon to realise how unlimited the big blue sky is.
• the 'ordinary consciousness', which we have taken for granted as the only kind of consciousness, is a poor substitute for the real thing.  Mystics have always experienced this insight, and found it hard to put into words simply because all our language is based upon the premise that ordinary consciousness is the real thing.
• The Outsider is the heroic figure of our time.  He feels alone in the crowd of the second rate.  He could be a saint or visionary, caring for nothing but one moment where he understands the world or sees into the heart of nature and God.  He is a symptom of our time, a rebel against the lack of spiritual tension in a materially prosperous age.
• 'If I had to stand on a narrow ledge for ever and ever, in eternal darkness and tempest, I'd still rather do that than die at once'    Rashkolnikov, in Crime and Punishment
• 'Art, that makes life seem like a game, and withdraws us from the common fate'  Wagner

• 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'     Ecclesiastes
• 'There is nothing new under the sun.'   this gloomy feeling haunts so many outsiders - those looking for those magical wow moments.
• 'The Ecclesiastes Effect' is expressed with gloomy power in the philosophy of Schopenhauer.
• Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Van Gogh were perceivers of other realities which brought about a dissatisfaction with ordinary consciousness and its emphasis on the immediate and trivial.
• Mental illness is basically caused by the collapse of the will.  When you make an effort, your will recharges your vital powers as a car recharges a battery when you drive it.  If you cease to will, the battery goes flat, and life appears to be futile and absurd.  To emerge from this state, all that is necessary is to maintain any kind of purposeful activity - even without much conviction - and the batteries will slowly become recharged.
• 'I felt the need to test the power that had entered me, and I began to dig in the fierce afternoon heat for more than an hour at a rate that I ordinarily could not sustain for two minutes.  I felt no fatigue, and no sense of effort.  Moreover, I felt a clarity of thought that I had only known involuntarily and at rare moments, but which was now at my command.  The phrase 'in my mind's eye' took on new meaning as I 'saw' the eternal pattern of each thing I looked at: the trees, the plants, the water flowing in the canal.  I remember saying aloud: 'now I see why God hid himself from us' but even now I cannot recall the intuition behind this exclamation.'    [here Wilson is quoting an author whose name I did not note]
• If some benevolent deity gave every person the equivalent of a million pounds, not much more happiness would be produced; most people would soon find reasons to feel dissatisfied.
• This is the paradox of human existence: man knows what he doesn't want far more clearly than he knows what he does want.
• As Fichte says: to be free is nothing; to become free is heaven.
• 'Dante's inferno is a picture of human society in a state of sin and corruption, like our own, racked by futility, lack of living faith, drift into loose morality, greedy consumption, financial irresponsibility, self-opinionated and obstinate individualism, violence.'     Schumacher
• Authenticity is driven by a deep sense of purpose.  Such a sense of purpose cannot exist unless we first assume that our sense of contingency is a liar, and that there is a standard of value external to everyday human consciousness  [mystical consciousness.]
• The metaphysics of religion [and not its dogmas] affirm the existence of an external value system [which Wilson would like to call 'new' existentialism]
• [which Wilson contrasts to the 'old' existentialism, which espouses materialism, where there is a 'total contingency' (non-necessity of being so)]
• Man's evolution depends on a renewal of his sense of overall purpose.  For biological reasons we are blinkered, like horses in the traffic.  We are capable of altering our immediate responses and values in favour of a more embracing value system.  Every moment of our conscious lives depends on the value systems we adopt.

• The narrator in Powys' novels wants to see events from some universal point of view in which the algae in a stagnant pond and the grubs in a rotten tree are as important as the human characters.
• Powys: 'I became aware, more vividly aware than I had ever been, that the secret of life consists in sharing the madness of God; the power of rousing a peculiar exultation in yourself as you confront the inanimate, an exultation which is really a cosmic eroticism.
• Healthy optimistic minds repel ordinary misfortune, whereas accident-proneness and general bad luck are the result of a psyche made vulnerable by defeat or stagnation.
• We say something and mean it only when Faculty X [Wilson's term for a higher state of awareness] is awake.
• Faculty X is the key to all mystic and poetic experience; it is the sheer affirmation experienced by Wordsworth and Shelly and Blake.
• When Faculty X is awoken life suddenly takes on a new, poignant quality.
• Faust is about to commit suicide when the Easter bell rings, bringing him back to childhood; suddenly faculty X is awake and he knows suicide to be the ultimate laughable absurdity.
• In Proust's novel, the narrator dips a madeleine into his tea and is suddenly thrust back to childhood: 'an exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses.  At once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory - I had now ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.'
• Faculty X is a sense of reality, the reality of other places and other times, above and beyond my ordinary senses that tell me that here and now is all that is real.
• What is consciousness for? When you are deeply asleep, you have no consciousness.  When you are very tired, consciousness is like a dim light that hardly illuminates anything.  When you are wide awake and excited, consciousness seems to increase in sheer candle power.  Its purpose is to illuminate reality, to reach out into its recesses and thus to enable us to act upon it and transform it.  When it is low, reality becomes 'unreal'; as it becomes stronger, reality becomes 'realer': faculty X.

• The birds are creatures of the air, fish are creatures of the water; man is a creature of the mind.     H.G. Wells
• An animal cannot disobey its instincts; humans disobey theirs a hundred times a day.
• 'Our inner robot' is the unconscious servant who performs all automatic tasks of everyday life.  When I am energetic and cheerful, the robot stays in the background and I walk around with my senses wide awake.  As I get tired, the robot takes over more and more of my functions and the reality around me becomes less and less real.
• With the senses closed, one suffers from 'meaning starvation.'  Human beings accept the lack of meaning with stolid fatalism, as an animal accepts illness and pain.
• If I want more meaning, then I must force my senses wide-open by an increased effort of will. Meaning is proportional to the intensity of will.
• Gurdjieff's tremendous vitality impressed everyone who met him.  His method depends on forcing people to make unusual efforts to release their vital reserve.
• concentration - intensity - intention -  volition - purpose - appetite for life

• To put it crudely, you could say it is as if you had Bertrand Russell in one side of your head and D.H. Lawrence (or Walt Whitman) in the other; the result is non-stop hostility.
• The left-brain hemisphere adopts a worm's eye view of reality and is concerned with analytically apprehending surface facts; the right-brain hemisphere adopts a bird's eye view of reality, seeing the 'big picture', perceiving deeper meanings and underlying connections.
• Under hypnosis one is able perform extraordinary feats - when the conscious left-brain is shut down and replaced by the authoritative voice of the hypnotist.  One cannot perform such feats in a conscious state, when the left-brain is in control, simply because one does not believe that one can.
• D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller tell us that 'head consciousness' is dangerous and stupid and that we ought to trust the 'solar plexus' [instincts.]  However, the main problem is not that 'head consciousness' is overconfident and conceited, but that it is far too weak and diffident.
• The left-brain/right-brain view of the human entity gives altogether firmer grounds for optimism about man's future.  Our real trouble is not that we are at the mercy of sinister dark forces, but that we are enfeebled by an unjustified lack of self-confidence.  My problem lies in my attitude to myself, my tendency to premature defeat, my failure to grasp that I am, in fact, in control. 
• I could be compared to an excellent army with incompetent and inexperienced officers.  This is a far better situation than an army with good officers and hopeless soldiers.  The thought of inexperienced officers [the left-brain function] makes us aware that human beings are young and inexperienced in an evolutionary sense and therefore these problems are little more than teething pains.
• A deliberate and conscious effort of control, based upon a change of attitude, ought to bring about an immediate change in the quality of one's consciousness.
• Jung's method of active imagination through letting go - lying totally relaxed, but in a state of wide-awake vigilance - could be regarded as the simplest, and most effective, of mental therapies.
• Once the real existence of our 'other self' [our 'hidden ally'] has been recognised, the next question is to tease it into expressing itself.  Many people experience it in the form of auditory and visual hallucinations - Jung's projections.
• Jungian Barbara Hannah postulates that ancient man's encounters with God are instances of active imagination.
• Ancient man was perhaps unicameral [one-brained]; in a relaxed, instinctive state of oneness with nature, like a cow.  Being in Tao and in himself.
• Jung's individuation: being dominated by the left-brain which, unaware of the 'hidden ally', is inclined to over-react to problems.
• Active imagination is not Rimbaud's 'reasoned derangement of the senses', directed by the ego.  It is an inner harmony based on the recognition of the hidden ally, leading to a process of cooperation between the two selves.
• The right and left brains can eventually achieve the same relationship as a great conductor with his orchestra, which has come to respond to his most delicate gesture.  Such a state of harmony depends on the initial recognition that I am the conductor.
• 'Consciousness is the supreme arbiter.'    Jung
• Once man has made the discovery - that when a wild horse ceases to be wild it becomes an invaluable servant - he looks around for new fields to conquer.  All games are designed to create stress and then give us the pleasure of controlling it.  Hence: the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

• Kant's attitude to knowledge was passive, whereas to really grasp reality it should be active.
• 'I seem to be a verb'      Buckminster
• Fichte's insight: a part of our minds creates the world 'behind our backs.'
• To know something with the mind is hardly to know it at all.  Our whole being is involved in true knowing.
• Husserl: perception is intentional.  When we see something, we fire our attention on it like an arrow.  But if there is an intentional arrow, there must also be an archer to shoot it.  It is active, not passive ... like a hand reaching out and grabbing things, not just a searchlight.
• Bertrand Russell is a sad example of staying in the 'Cartesian' mode for too long; always (passively) asking 'what can I know for certain?', without ever finding an answer.
• Paul Ricoeur: the very seeing itself is a doing, a producing, a creating.  
• Husserl's intentionality culminates in seeing recognised to be a creative vision.
• Sartre recognised that we are free, but because he failed to see the creative role that we play in constructing our reality, he ultimately saw no way out of the morass of being in a meaningless world.
• It is as impossible to exercise freedom in a meaningless world as it is to jump while you are falling.
• There are only two pockets in the billiard table of philosophy: materialism and idealism; no matter how 'original' a philosopher, he is bound to end up in one or the other.
• Wittgenstein's demonstrably inadequate philosophy sets out to impose limits on the world and its meaning.  It reduces meaning to the narrow and commonplace, saying 'if we want more than that then we are suffering from delusions.'  He is trapped in Heidegger's 'triviality of everydayness.'
• For Derrida words have no innate meanings; words vary freely in different contexts.  For Derrida philosophy is a kind of spume on the surface of the sea of language.

• We tend to climb towards higher states of self-awareness by means of a series of self-images; we create a certain image of the sort of person we would like to be, then try to live up to the image.
• 'The great man is the play-actor of his ideals'    Nietzsche
• 'Even war cannot frighten us enough'     Auden
• In a Universe infinite yet bounded within its framework of endless repetition, anything can be done.
• In Zarathustra, the Eternal Recurrence is recognised as the foundation of an essentially optimistic philosophy.
• Left to ourselves, the prospects for humanity seem dark.  I do not believe we are left entirely to ourselves, but neither can we forget the problem and leave it to some anthropic principle to steer us through to a solution.  God helps those who help themselves.