Welcome to a New Term!

 Welcome to a new term!  Here we are again mostly in real life!  An element of freedom returned..

I have been reading Colin Wilson as I found a fairly new book on his works by Colin Stanley.  Colin Wilson died in 2013 at the age of 82, his first book The Outsider, Ezard writes in his obituary 'The Outsider (1956), led him to be seen as a potential saviour of the human spirit, a thinker who might find a way through the spiritual nullity of the postwar years' (Ezard, 2013) Wilson wrote while camping out on Hampstead Heath and writing in the British Library in London each day.  Wilson went on to write books about mysticism, the occult, consciousness, existentialism.  I was lucky enough to see Colin Wilson in the flesh at the Occultique festival in Brighton in the early 2000s.  I was surrounded by all the witches in Sussex and Wilson was one of the most charismatic people I have ever had the privilege to watch.  

Colin Wilson in 1957

At present, I am reading about Peak Experiences which began when Wilson was looking at Maslow, who wanted to treat healthy people as in healthy people Maslow stated; 'I picked out the healthiest people, the best specimens of mankind I could find, and studied them to see what they were like. They were very different, in some ways startlingly different from the average..'(Ed.Stanley, 2019:54) he realised that they had more joy and had what he called 'peak experiences'  These experiences were' something like a mystical experience, moments of great awe, moments of the most intense happiness, or even rapture, ecstasy or bliss...' (Ed. Stanley, 2019:55)

Maslow discovered once they had these experiences they would have more and afforded the person experiencing this, a moment of clarity where they could see everything clearly.  This is one of the things Wilson writes about in great depth and I chose this to talk about as I spend much of my time with people now who are not healthy and I have found this has the effect of experiencing more negative emotions.  This book reminds me of better times past, present and future are possible that a healthy mind really can bring that sense of awe and wonder back into life....

References 

Ezard, J., 2013. Colin Wilson obituary. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/09/colin-wilson [Accessed 5 October 2021].

Ed. Stanley C. (2019) The Ultimate Colin Wilson: Writings on Mysticism,, Consciousness and Existentialism. Watkins Media ltd, London.