Ideas
Colin Wilson: A Quintessential Outsider!
Aravindan Neelakandan
Dec 09, 2021, 06:24 PM | Updated 06:23 PM IST
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On 5 December 2013, a prolific writer died. He was a profound philosopher to his admirers and a mixture of crank oddities to his critics. But none can deny that this writer who was 82 years old when he died, made the entire intellectual world look at him when he was 25. That is when he was 25, and when he was not having any college degree or any proper job but was having an estranged marriage, tensed relations with the family and was living in a water proof bed and living a very lonely life trying hard to write a novel.
He was Colin Wilson.
It was Christmas season 1954. And hear from his own words what made him write Outsider, which since its publication in 1956 is to date a bestseller:
Christmas Day, 1954, was an icy, grey day, and I spent it in my room in Brockley, south London. ... It struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favourite characters in fiction: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun’s Hunger: alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society. It was not a position I relished; I’d always been strongly attached to my home and family (I’m a typical Cancer), and missed being with them at Christmas. Yet an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation. I began writing about it in my journal, trying to pin it down. And then, quite suddenly, I saw that I had the makings of a book.
That was how Outsider was born — a powerful book which churned its way through the different powerful literary characters in Western literary tradition and through the womb processes that should have given birth to these characters. It also studied the philosophers and artists.
Outsider could be seen in Van Gogh and Nietzsche, in the works of Hermann Hesse and Leo Tolstoy. An 'outsider' can become a painter who ultimately commits suicide or worse a serial killer. The problem though is how to integrate the 'outsider' in herself.
Colin Wilson goes into various mystics in the Western tradition. He also presents Sri Ramakrishna as an 'outsider' — but with a difference: "Here we can see what happens when the Outsider can slip into a tradition where he ceases to be a lonely misfit." The way Wilson presents Sri Ramakrishna in Outsider is filled with possibilities of studying Sri Ramakrishna-phenomenon for the psychological and social well-being of individual and the society both East and the West. Unfortunately that never happened. The field has been usurped by the likes and clones of Wendy and Kripal.
Wilson sees the Outsider as the phenomena of the mystery of consciousness and evolution. He wrote in a later edition of ‘Outsider’ that it gradually became clear to him that "what we are dealing with is a problem of evolution". It is quite interesting how Wilson concluded ‘Outsider’:
The problem for the ‘civilization’ is the adoption of a religious attitude that can be assimilated as objectively as the headlines of last Sunday’s newspapers. But the problem for the individual always will be the opposite of this, the conscious striving not to limit the amount of experience seen and touched; the intolerable struggle to expose the sensitive areas of being to what may possibly hurt them; the attempt to see as a whole, although the instinct of self-preservation fights against the pain of the internal widening, and all the impulses of spiritual laziness build into waves of sleep with every new effort. The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint.
Here, by civilisation, he means Western civilisation, though we Hindus must remember that we too are inevitably getting modernised Western way. But Hindu Dharma essentially is also an ecosystem that constantly generates and provides acceptance for the ‘outsider’ in the most holistic way.
In Colin Wilson we have a potential framework to study Hindu society and culture from this perspective.
Intimately associated with 'outsider' problem is the ‘peak experience’ phenomenon — discovered by psychologist Abraham Maslow. Peak experience is a sudden burst of overwhelming sensation of pure serenity and the entire world showing itself to be delightful. It can come from any field — from religious experience to experience from daily life. One can say that in a way when Krishna talks about fulfilment from doing one’s own duty, it may be that doing one’s duty with all focus of being will lead to peak experience. Wilson cites the following instance given by Maslow — "... a young mother who was watching her husband and children eating breakfast when it suddenly dawned on her how lucky she was, and she went into a peak experience." According to Colin Wilson Russian philosopher mystic G I Gurdjieff (1866-1949) also addressed the 'outsider' problem in the Western cultural context.
His book ‘The Occult’ (1979) is an extraordinary book which unfortunately did not receive the attention it deserved. With more than 750 pages, the book studies the occult and mystical traditions of the West both in their historical and psycho-spiritual aspects. For every Hindu student of Western civilisation this book is a must read. Consider the following depiction and evaluation by Colin Wilson of the criticism of Theosophy by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of Arya Samaj:
Swami Dayananda was undoubtedly correct when he criticised the theosophists for being interested chiefly in 'phenomena.' The Hindu ascetics insist that any advanced yogi can produce phenomena, and that they are a waste of time, a red herring across the path of spiritual advancement. ...It is not that Hinduism lacks its preposterous tales of miracles. Paramhansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi, a recent work by a man who died in 1952, contains stories as extraordinary as anything in the lives of the mediaeval saints. ... Even so, Yogananda's book breathes the true spirit of Hinduism, and can create the peculiar spiritual intoxication that can also be found in the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna and the Bhagavad Gita. By comparison, The Secret Doctrine is on the level of children's fairy tales, a muddy torrent carrying all kinds of strange objects on its surface.
Three books of Colin Wilson, The Occult, The Mysteries (1979) and Beyond the Occult (1988) form a trilogy which is a must read for the students who want to understand Western esoteric traditions.
Some of his insights can actually become guiding principles in understanding 'guru' phenomenon in modern times without getting into the binary of charlatan and genuine while safeguarding the seeker against abuse.
Consider this statement in his book Rogue Messiahs (2000) where he makes a brief but brilliant comparison of Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925), J Krishnamurti (1895-1986) and G I Gurdjieff:
Steiner and Krishnamurti are an interesting contrast. Although he was a modest man, Steiner accepted the messianic role thrust upon him, and died of overwork. Krishnamurti foresaw the dangers of becoming a "world teacher," and made a determined effort to escape. Yet, like Steiner, he died in harness. It is not so easy for the guru to escape the demands of his disciples. A university professor can relax outside the classroom and live his own life, but a guru has renounced the right to live his own life. This problem becomes even clearer in the case of one of Steiner's most extraordinary contemporaries: George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, one of the most remarkable gurus of the twentieth century. Unlike Steiner, Gurdjieff was unwilling to accept the public role of messiah; in fact, one condition of joining his groups was to observe the strictest secrecy. In spite of which, as we shall see, he was unable to escape the penalties that seem an inescapable part of the messiah's life.
Unfortunately, the views of Colin Wilson could never get serious scholarly attention. One of the reasons is that when science is not ready, minds like that of Colin Wilson easily start searching for facts validating their worldviews in suspicious realms and in this domain charlatans galore. This was the problem not peculiar to Wilson. Earlier, brilliant biologist Lyall Watson (1939-2008) also faced the same problem.
Another influence on the worldview of Colin Wilson, apart from Sri Ramakrishna, Maslow and Gurdjieff was American psychologist Julian Jaynes (1920-1997) whose "Bicameral Mind" thesis, then rejected by mainstream psychologists is today receiving significant attention. Colin Wilson used this thesis in many of his works to explain the inner evolution dynamics of human species.
Not that Colin Wilson was 100 per cent right in his books even otherwise. There are deficiencies. Nevertheless for students interested in the deeper history and psychology of mystic traditions, his works should not be ignored.
Colin Wilson in his writing career kind of devolved too. He wrote on sensational murder mysteries, on serial killers and scandals. He also was over-enthusiastic about the claims of paranormal and sometimes promoted a few really crank worldviews. Yet even in all these one can always discern his love for what he considered as the basic mystery. On the whole, Colin Wilson remained true to his very first bestseller — he remained the quintessential 'outsider'. He might have made mistakes but he still remains an important pathfinder for deep psychology and modern Western philosophy.
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