The Outsider

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Even my father, who was not particularly interested in my work – being a non-reader – had a sudden intuition that my book would be a success. This fascinated me. It obviously did the dog no good whatsoever to know that its master was on his way home. It just sat there. But it clearly possessed some natural faculty of “tuning in”. Then in 1969, my US literary agent Scott Meredith wrote to ask me if I would be interested in writing a book about “the occult” for Random House. It was not a subject that interested me particularly, but I accepted it because I needed the money. Dalgleish, Tim The Guerilla Philosopher: Colin Wilson and Existentialism (1993), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-47-0 Now, this might not sound precisely like enjoyable holiday reading, but once you open this book and begin to grasp its central idea, I defy you not to be hooked! Wilson takes your mind to new limits, demolishing mental walls as if they did not exist, in such a way that you can never look at mundane existence in quite the same way again.

The success of The Outsider notwithstanding, Wilson's second book, Religion and the Rebel (1957), was universally panned by critics although Wilson himself claimed it was a more comprehensive book than the first one. While The Outsider was focused on documenting the subject of mental strain and near-insanity, Religion and the Rebel was focused on how to expand our consciousness and transform us into visionaries. Time magazine published a review, headlined "Scrambled Egghead", that pilloried the book. [16] Undaunted, Wilson continued to expound his positive "new" existentialism in the six philosophical books known as "The Outsider Cycle", all written within the first ten years of his literary career. These books were summarised by Introduction to the New Existentialism (1966). When the book was re-printed in 1980 as The New Existentialism, Wilson wrote: "If I have contributed anything to existentialism – or, for that matter, to twentieth century thought in general, here it is. I am willing to stand or fall by it." a b Williamson, Marcus (8 December 2013). "Colin Wilson: Author (Obituary)". The Independent . Retrieved 17 January 2014. Dossor, Howard F. The Philosophy of Colin Wilson: three perspectives (1996), Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 0-946650-58-6 Life’s no picnic, but by refusing to rail at the rain that SPOILS it... we MUST learn to smile away the pain. The people who were always there for us in the past are a very good reason to smile.

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That autumn, I spent some time as a writer in residence at the extramural department of an American college in Majorca. I was living in Deya, the same village as the poet Robert Graves. When I asked Graves’s advice on writing a book on the occult, it came in one word: “Don’t.” A new six-part film documentary about the life and works of Colin Wilson was premiered during the third International Colin Wilson Conference in Nottingham, UK, on September 3, 2023. Stanley, Colin. Colin Wilson's 'Occult Trilogy': a guide for students (2013). Alresford: Axis Mundi Books. ISBN 9781846947063

Stanley, Colin (ed). The Sage of Tetherdown: Recollections of Colin Wilson by his friends (2020) Nottingham: Paupers' Press. ISBN 9780995597884 Laura Del Rivo 'The Furnished Room' "Laura Del-Rivo: The Furnished Room". Archived from the original on 29 March 2016 . Retrieved 2 June 2014. Ve kitabı özetle yazar şunları bize aktarır; Yabancının sorunu, dünyayı ‘kötümser’ görmeye tekabül eder. Bu kötümserliğin doğru ve haklı olduğunu göstermeye çalıştım. Bu yüzdendir ki kötümserlik ‘ölmüş benliklerinin sıçrama tahtasına basarak yükseklere doğru’ ilerleyen insana dair hümanist idealleri alaşağı eder ve kendini bilmediği takdirde filozofun dünyayı bilmesinin bir anlamı olmadığını söyleyerek felsefeyi eleştirir. İdeal ‘nesnel felsefenin salt düşünürlerce değil, düşünür, şair ve eylem adamının birleştiren insanlar tarafından yaratılacağını söyler. Felsefenin ilk sorusu ‘Evren durup dururken nereden çıktı?’ değil ‘Hayatımızı nasıl yaşamalıyız?’ olmalıdır, amacı entelektüel olarak tutarlı bir sistem değil, bireyin kurtuluşu olmalıdır.Stanley, Colin. The Ultimate Colin Wilson Bibliography 1956–2015 (2015) Nottingham: Paupers' Press ISBN 9780956866356 John said: 'I'm very proud both to have written material for the series and acted as one of the producers. I've been an admirer of Colin's work since I was a teenager and I'm very happy that the series is ready to be shown to the public for the first time. It's our hope that it will bring an appreciation of Colin's work to a whole new generation.' It is impossible for me to be objective about this book as it had such an influence on my life! I read it when I was 21 and identified with the outsider theme. It had me reading most of the books this precocious autodidact quoted in his rambling thesis. I was particularly fascinated by his outline of Gurdjieff and this led me to join a Gurdjieff Group, convinced I had found the solution to my problems. I hadn't but that's another story! On 1 July 2016, the First International Colin Wilson Conference took place at the University of Nottingham. A second conference took place at the same venue on 6 July 2018. The Third Conference was held in Nottingham on September 1-3, 2023 which included the premiere of the Figgis-West eight-part documentary film series Colin Wilson: his life and work. Directed and edited by Jason Figgis, the documentary is a detailed study of Wilson's life and work which includes interviews with Uri Geller, Gary Lachman, Tahir Shah, Damon Wilson, Jason Figgis, John West, Martha Rafferty and Philip Pullman. [33]

Or consider the view that man is a stranger or alien in the world. On the conventional religious view one can understand roughly what is meant by this. Man’s soul, which is separable from his body, is either a fragmented part of the world-soul and must return to the One from which it descended, or, cast into the natural world, its supernatural end is reunion with God, its creator. But if an individual surrenders this view, and, like most of Mr. Wilson’s characters, repudiates the dogmas of immortality and resurrection, what home can he possibly conceive man to have other than the natural world of which he is a part, to be sure a distinctive part, but as dependent upon other existing things as the animals and stones in the field? Significantly, Wilson's most prominent enthusiasts were all "Mandarins" - bellettrists who were younger members or descendants of the Bloomsbury group, upper-middle-class and upper-middle-aged, high priests of high art who worshipped at the altar of modernism and all things sophisticated and French. Wilson dropped all the right names - foreign, highbrow, impressively daunting on both counts - and, with his vague proclamations about the spiritual crisis in modern society and the alienation of his genius Outsiders, pressed all the right buttons. Wilson is rather like the headmaster of some apalling school who contrives in his innocence and benevolence, to find a good word on even the most outragous of his pupuls. [The Occult] displays, more fully than any other Wilson bok that I have read since The Outsider, the full array of his amiable virtues.”

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In 2016 the first full-length biography of Wilson, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson, by Gary Lachman, appeared. It received a positive endorsement from Philip Pullman, who wrote that "Wilson was always far better and more interesting than fashionable opinion claimed, and in Lachman he has found a biographer who can respond to the whole range of his work with sympathy and understanding, in a style which, like Wilson's own, is always immensely readable." Michael Dirda in The Washington Post called Wilson a "controversial writer who explored the nature of human consciousness in dozens of books" and said that Lachman, a "leading student of the western esoteric tradition, writes with "exceptional grace, forcefulness, and clarity." [31] Brett Taylor "enjoyed" the biography, but said that "a more critical author might have written a book that argued for the subject's worth in a broader and more convincing context. Lachman displays credulity on occult matters and an admiration for Wilson's sometimes dodgy philosophy." [32]