Colin Wilson - Beyond The Occult: Twenty Years Research into the Paranormal

COLIN WILSON

Colin Wilson is one of the most prolific, versatile and popular writers at work today. He was born in Leicester in 1931, and left school at sixteen. After he had spent years working in a wool warehouse, a laboratory, a plastics factory and a coffee bar his first book The Outsider was published in 1956. It received outstanding critical acclaim and was an immediate bestseller.

Since then he has written many books on philosophy, the occult, crime and sexual deviance, plus a host of successful novels which have won him an international reputation. His work has been translated into Spanish, French, Swedish, Dutch, Japanese, German, Italian, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and Hebrew.

By the same author

NON-FICTION

The Outsider cycle

The Outsider

Religion and the Rebel

The Age of Defeat

The Strength to Dream

Origins of the Sexual Impulse

Beyond the Outsider

Introduction to the New Existentialism

Books on the Occult and Paranormal

The Occult

Mysteries

Poltergeist

Psychic Detectives

Strange Powers

The Geller Phenomenon

A Dictionary of Possibilities (with John Grant)

Other Non-Fiction

An Encyclopedia of Murder (with Pat Pitman)

An Encyclopedia of Modern Murder (with Donald Seaman)

A Casebook of Murder

Order of Assassins

Rasputin and the Fall of the Romanovs

Bernard Shaw A Reassessment

New Pathways in Psychology

The Quest for Wilhelm Reich

The War Against Sleep The Philosophy of Gurdjieff

The Lord of the Underworld A Study of Jung

The Craft of the Novel

The Strange Genius of David Lindsay

Frankensteins Castle

Access to Inner Worlds

Eagle and Earwig (Essays on books and writers)

Poetry and Mysticism

A Book of Booze

Starseekers

The Brandy of the Damned (Essays on Music)

Anti-Sartre

The Misfits

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Voyage to a Beginning

FICTION

The Sorme Trilogy:

Ritual in the Dark

The Man without a Shadow (retitled The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme)

The God of the Labyrinth

Other Fiction:

Adrift in Soho

The World of Violence

Necessary Doubt

The Glass Cage

The Mind Parasites

The Killer

The Philosophers Stone

The Black Room

The Space Vampires

The Schoolgirl Murder Case

Rasputin: A Novel

Spider World: The Tower

Spider World: The Delta

CONTENTS

Analytical Table of Contents

Part One: Hidden Powers

Introduction

I am asked to write a book about the occult. The moments of mystical freedom. Muz Murrays experience in Cyprus. My own experience in Alsace. Derek Gibson sees inside the trees. Jacob Boehmes vision of the signature of all things. Yuliya Vorobyeva develops X-ray vision. Jim Corbett and his jungle sensitiveness. Why man has lost his occult faculties. Calculating prodigies. How to gain control of our hidden powers. My original scepticism about the occult. Impressive consistency of reports. Reading through the skin of the stomach. Community of sensation under hypnosis. Buchanan and the discovery of psychometry. Peter Hurkos and precognition. My attempts to create a Newtonian theory of the occult. My increasing doubts.

1 Mediums and Mystics

Lawrence LeShan studies Eileen Garrett. She psychometrizes his daughters hair. The case of the missing doctor. The case of Marmontels memoirs. Eileen Garrett on mediumship: A kind of turning inward. Warner Allens timeless moment at the Queens Hall. Is time an illusion? Poets as natural psychics. A. L. Rowse is almost decapitated. The superconscious attic of the mind. The mystical experience. Wendy Rose-Neill lies on her lawn. Claire Myers Owen and the golden light. Buckes flash of cosmic consciousness. A brilliant shaft of light from out of the sky. Vision of God in a cow-barn. Moyra Caldecott and the Timeless Reality. Ouspenskys vision of connectedness. Steppenwolfs mystical insight. Henri Bergson is converted from materialism to mysticism. The inability of thought to grasp experience. Two ways of grasping reality. The left and right brain. Peak experiences. Anne Bancrofts mystical experience. The branch of rhododendron. Douglas Harding loses his head. Is it desirable to have no head? William Jamess Suggestion about Mysticism. Robert Graves and The Abominable Mr Gunn. Another mathematical prodigy.

2 The Other Self

My dream of the amusement park. Thomson Jay Hudson watches a hypnotic demonstration. Return of the dead philosophers. Charcot and hypnosis. Mans two minds the subjective and the objective. The power of the subjective mind: Henry Clay speaks for two hours. The artist who saw a picture before he painted it. Puysgur and magnetism. Councillor Wesermann makes telepathic contact with a friend. The Verity Case. Hudson practises distant healing. His success. Doctor Albert Mason performs a miracle. Why Shakespeare was not Bacon. Learning to use the right brain. The Laurel and Hardy theory of consciousness. The robot. Negative feedback. The power of the Spectre. Graham Greene and the revolver in the corner cupboard. The gloominess of the great philosophers. Schopenhauer complains about life. Dylan Thomass foul mousehole. Thomas Manns Disillusionment. Schizophrenic patients stop seeing things. Artsybashevs Breaking Point. The Master Ikkyu writes, Attention. Hesses Journey to the East. My experience of being caught in a snowstorm. Raising consciousness by an act of will. The journey to Northampton. Rilkes solution: To praise in spite of.

3 Down the Rabbit Hole

Arnold Toynbees vision of the battle of Pharsalus. Frank Smythes vision of the massacre near Glen Glomach. Toynbees time-slip in Crete. His experience in the ruins of the temple at Ephesus. His vision at Monemvasa. The destruction of Mistr. The nature of Faculty X. Doctor Johnson and the Happy Valley. Toynbees vision of all history. Proust and the madeleine dipped in tea. Other experiences of Faculty X described in Proust. The past was made to encroach upon the present. G. K. Chesterton and Absurd good news. Helen Keller learns to spell water. Why Faculty X is so difficult to achieve. Sartre and nausea. Camus and the Absurd. Ordinary consciousness is a form of nausea. Roquentin is sickened by a tree. Maupassant and sexual failure. The erase key. The demon Screwtape heads off a conversion. Physical, emotional and intellectual values. Upside-downness. Sartre in the French Resistance. The parable of the emperor and the grand vizier. The mechanism of upside-downness. Arthur Koestler joins the Communist Party. Koestlers mystical experience in a Spanish jail. Einstein on science and mysticism. Holiday consciousness.

4 The Information Universe

Mr Chase sees a cottage that no longer exists. Time-slips. The English ladies at Versailles. Jane ONeill and Fotheringhay Church. Falling down the rabbit hole. J. B. Priestley on Faculty X. Ivan Sandersons time-slip in Haiti. Can time-slips be explained scientifically. Lethbridge and the tape-recording theory. The Long Gallery at Hampton Court. Buchanan and psychic bloodhounds. Denton experiments with geological fragments. Hudson attacks Dentons results. The memory of the subjective mind seems to be practically limitless. Sullas villa. Pascal Forthuny psychometrizes a letter by a murderer. Pagenstechers experiments with Maria de Zierold. Walter Franklin Prince and the sea bean. Maria shares Pagenstechers consciousness. Rilkes experience at Castle Duino. How to make time stand still. Bentovs