i_rabbit

My first exposure to Colin Wilson was reading The Outsider (not to be confused with The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton) as an assigned book in high school. It resonated with me as I was pretty much the ‘lone wolf’ then, and now. Then twenty years later I stumbled upon him again reading the The Space Vampires, which was also filmed in 1985 as the movie Lifeforce, under which name it has also been reprinted. I somehow didn’t make the connection then that it was the same Colin Wilson as I am terrible at remembering names of authors. Recently I have been reading a lot of work around the psychology, cognitive science, and existentialism, mostly because I don’t agree with much of existentialist philosophy, and I see it embraced time and time again as a rationalized excuse to under perform as beings. This kind of ‘back burner’ research led me to Wilson again via his Essay on the ‘New’ Existentialism. Wilson, by his own admission, makes the same point over and over again in all his books.

The human mind tricks itself into under performance.  Humans too easily fall prey to unnecessary defeatism.  Certain kinds of experience trigger our full capabilities, e.g., on receiving surprise good news we get a sudden surge of enthusiasm, optimism and meaning.  When we are threatened, we suddenly spark into action.

Now, once again, Wilson’s words have resonated with my own experience as I was able to relate this idea to my own life course over the past few years and how it took a ‘threatening event’ to spark me into the action of turning my life around.

I feel that this has been a very natural, almost intuitive, attraction to his work and ideas that are echoed in an essay/interview between Wilson and Jeffrey Mishlove Ph.D. That I came across on google yesterday. Particularly the following dialog regarding the possibility of ’something greater’ working in our lives.

MISHLOVE: It’s as if, if we are willing to acknowledge the possibility of something greater, we open ourselves up to it, and we can experience that.

WILSON: I think it’s more than simply acknowledging the possibility of something greater. I think that we recognize that in our own depths we possess enormous reserves of strength of which we are normally totally unaware. This is what fascinates me. This is obviously what happened to the romantics. They just had these bubbling experiences of power coming up from their own depths, and were startled by this. And what’s more interesting, I’ve noticed again and again when you experience a sense of power coming from your own depths, you are likely to feel that in some way it’s coming from the external universe, because it so transforms the universe — like Van Gogh’s vision of the starry night, with all the stars turning into great whirlpools of force and the trees looking as if they’re flames rising toward the sky — it so transforms it that it appears to be an external vision.

This is how my life feels these days. it is tapping into that energy that exists within each and every one of us, unlimited human potential, that often manifests as though it were an outside force or coincidence. Jung calls it synchronicity. In Sanskrit it is Atman; the ’soul’ or underlying metaphysical self. In Buddhism, the concept of Atman is the prime consequence of ignorance, – itself the cause of all misery - the foundation of Samsara itself.

Now, twenty-two years after reading The Outsider, I am finding new meaning and inspiration from the work of Colin Wilson and seeing that there it is possible for existentialism and Dharma to coincide. I am also finding Wilson’s “Spider World” trilogy great fuel for the D&D campaign I run for my children!