Posted by What makes a book a “good read”? An obvious answer is that it must be “readable”, and the writings of the existentialist author Colin Wilson are always that. His style is so smooth that even seemingly complex topics become ‘page turners’.
Anyone interested in the great questions of life, such as “what is the meaning of life?”, or, “what are we doing here?”, will have their thought processes advanced or changed by Wilson’s writing.
More and more people are awakening to new realities about the world we live in. One new reality that is regularly discussed now is that we are “more than our physical bodies”. Scientists won’t help us with this concept. Anything that can’t be seen, tested, prodded, jolted with electricity or whatever is ‘unreal’ to them.
Wilson was a pathfinder, opening eyes to new realities at a time when few were questioning the reality of life here. His 1955 book The Outsider was instrumental in this blogger’s awakening at university in London in the early 70s. In Wilson’s world, the “outsider” could be described as an “intelligent misfit”.
Wilson went on to write The Occult (1971), and Mysteries (1978), which were combined to make up the enormous 1991 book Supernatural. All these decades on, these books still remain essential reading.
Most people need a map to see their way through life, a clear picture, and once they have a map in place, a belief system, they tend to resist any change to that. This belief system is likely to have been programmed and conditioned into them in their growing years. To change that belief system is hard, but spiritual development requires that we keep learning, keep our minds open to new paradigms.
The problem, and this is a main theme of Wilson’s work, is that we are so tied up in the trivialities of living that we have no time to expand our consciousness.
This is by design: the authorities want our thought-processes contained in a hive mind, as this is easier to control. Becoming an “intelligent misfit” is not what they want. But we must wake up. Life is a gift and we shouldn’t sleep through it, simply “existing”, or worse, complaining while existing.
Wilson was well read, and had a vast 30,000 book library of his own, and he references many important obscure books. One was PD Ouspensky’s 1912 Tertium Organum, in which Ouspensky stated that human consciousness is a form of sleep, from which we must awaken. But how do we wake up?
Jung suggested that perhaps the appearance of new phenomena such as crop circles, UFOs and other psychic phenomena are to wake our consciousness up and that we should regard them as “signs of great changes to come which are compatible with the end of an era”.
Wilson said that to take advantage of the new era of consciousness evolution would be assisted by simply “paying attention”.
Whenever human beings experience that deep sense of happiness and meaning, it is because they are ‘paying attention’. We can’t enjoy a meal if we don’t pay attention to it. It’s the same with living. Don’t let it pass us by. Perhaps we should make the effort to limit our focus on life’s endless trivialities and spend more time reading about consciousness.
Wilson puts it well: “The great heroes of this new phase of human evolution are not the conquerors, or even the scientists, but the men who have taught us to reflect, to ‘go within’.
When we learn about our inner powers we can go further. We will be opening our minds to new belief systems, new thoughts, instead of resisting change through a closed mind.
2 December 2023
[Review: The author Colin Wilson]
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