The Occult
By Colin Wilson
…“When I am confronted by danger or crisis, I see it as a threat to freedom, and my freedom suddenly becomes positive and self-evident –as enormous and obvious as a sunset. Similarly, a man who is violently in love feels that if he could possess the girl, his freedom would be infinite; the delight of union would make him undefeatable. When he gets her, the whole thing seems an illusion; she is just a girl…
I have always accepted the fundamental reality of freedom. The vision is not an illusion or a mirage. In that case, what goes wrong?
The trouble is the narrowness of consciousness. It is as if you tried to see a panoramic scene through cracks in a high fence, but were never allowed to look over the fence and see it as a whole. And the narrowness lulls us into a state of permanent drowsiness, like being half anaesthetised, so that we never attempt to stretch our powers to their limits. With the consequence that we never discover their limits. William James stated, after he had breathed nitrous oxide, ‘our normal waking consciousness… is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different’.
…‘One day I believe man will have a sixth sense – a sense of the purpose of life, quite direct and uninferred.’ And in 1968 I wrote in a novel entirely devoted to the problem of Faculty X, The Philosopher’s Stone;
‘The will feeds on enormous vistas; deprived of them, it collapses.’ And there again is the absurd problem of freedom. Man’s consciousness is as powerful as a microscope; it can grasp and analyse experience in a way no animal can achieve. But a microscopic vision is narrow vision. We need to develop another kind of consciousness that is the equivalent of the telescope.
This is Faculty X. And the paradox is that we already possess it to a large degree, but are unconscious of possessing it. It lies at the heart of all so-called occult experience. It is with such experience that this book is concerned…
Primitive man believed the world was full of unseen forces… The Age of Reason said that these forces had only ever existed in man’s imagination; only reason could show man the truth about the universe. The trouble was that man became a thinking pygmy, and the world of the rationalists was a daylight place in which boredom, triviality and ‘ordinariness’ were ultimate truths.
But the main trouble with human beings is their tendency to become trapped in the ‘triviality of everydayness’… in the suffocating world of their personal preoccupations. And every time they do this, they forget the immense world of broader significance that stretches around them. And since man needs a sense of meaning to release his hidden energies, this forgetfulness pushes him deeper into depression and boredom, the sense that nothing is worth the effort… the drama of the rationalist suffocating in the dusty room of his personal consciousness, caught in the vicious circle of boredom and futility. Faust’s longing for the ‘occult’ is the instinctive desire to believe in the unseen forces, the wider significances, that can break the circuit. –
The Occult, by Colin Wilson
– Copyright Colin Wilson 1971
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This book was on almost every hippie’s bookshelf in the 1970s and has all but disappeared from the radar of modern so-called ‘consciousness’. These excerpts are from the preface and introduction. If you haven’t read the rest you can probably still find a copy.
Always buy second-hand if you can! Pluck the priceless pearls from the crapheap and recycle to save the planet from destruction – and salvage your consciousness from the tawdry, straight, square, materialist claims of orthodoxy’s knowledge of ‘reality’. Turn on, tune in – and OPT OUT of this destructive pseudo-civilization – while you have the chance! Freedom is real. Illusions of control and security are maintained to keep the fearful and unenlightened slave workers running on pointless treadmills toward the grave.
‘You can be free when you retire!’ What a bad joke! You’re free now! Seize your birthright now, before it’s stolen by time, insecurity, age, fear, forgetfulness – and the crass lies of ‘ leaders’, ‘teachers’ and ‘priests’. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Drop out of the materialist illusion and become an immortal hero today. Laugh aloud at the new clothes of your ‘rulers’. Point out the blind nakedness of your ‘religious instructors’. Stop giving them your time and money. Save yourself and the planet. Do it now.
Thou art God! You are immortal consciousness peering through the cracked shell of NOW!
Remember what you’re here for?
– R.A.
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