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Sensory Solutions for Herbal Evolution
- Colin Stanley
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Welcome to “Healing from Within” with host Sheryl Glick author of Life Is No Coincidence and The Living Spirit books that share the process of awakening transforming and transcending the physical challenges of life to refine our inner intuitive soul essence so we many create lives that are purposeful joyful and healthy and Sheryl is delighted to welcome Colin Stanley author of The Ultimate Colin Wilson which discusses the thoughts and writings of Colin Wilson a prolific author mystic philosopher and seeker of the occult and an awareness of higher consciousness of the twentieth century.
As listeners of “Healing From Within” are well are Sheryl and her guests share intimate stories and insights into the metaphysical aspects of our dual nature as spiritual beings having a physical life and explore how to use this knowledge of higher consciousness and awareness along with the many mystical as well as scientific insights into understanding Universal Energy or Creation for living life both physically and energetically and creating a balanced and purposeful life experience.
In today’s episode of Healing From Within Colin Stanley will discuss how synchronicity and life plan lead him to become aware of Colin Wilson a prolific author best known perhaps for his book The Outsider the best selling classic of British existentialism and the Occult, his survey of the supernatural which discuss ideas of a man perhaps ahead of his times and show us how to be more aware of our potential as complex human and spiritual beings.
When Colin is asked about his and Colin Wilson’s childhood we discover they were both born in the same area in England only twenty years apart and both yeanred to move beyond the conventional life of a small town to learn about the world and the ideas of great minds and thinkers.
From an excerpt in the book Colin Wilson wrote, “What I wish to give is as full an account as possible of how the problems of the Outsider came to preoccupy me. Philosophy is nothing if it is not an attempt to take one’s own experience apart under a microscope. When I was eleven years old my grandfather gave me a tattered and coverless science fiction magazine. This was in the second year of the war and I had never seen such a thing before. it was here that I discovered a name of which I had never heard: Albert Einstein. It was difficult to determine from references in the story precisely what Professor Einstein had done. ….The stories excited me and they were mostly about Experiments that got Out of Hand…..I found Einstein’s own little volume Relativity, the Special and General Theory…for I imagined him as occupying a place in the hierarchy—Galileo Newton Planck Einstein—which would one day include myself. I believed Einstein had taught me the impossibility of making a final judgment on anything. I tried to explain to school friends that space was infinite and yet bounded: and it seemed to me that the possibilities of human life were also infinite and yet bonded: that within its framework of endless repetition anything could be done.
Sheryl says…Quite like watching as a child a favorite show and discovering the concept of The Transformer a futuristic machine in the Star Trek series that could rearrange peoples molecules allowing them to move from one place to another…At that time I remember thinking that whatever the mind creates or thinks can be achieved…Beyond time and space there is only the reality of endless eternal energy and each of us is a divine spark of that Universal Source of life embued with much wisdom and awareness of the infinite potential to create through our thoughts our own reality in this physical dimension.
Colin goes on to tell us that Colin Wilson 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 he wrote his first book The Outsider which was published in 1956 and which received outstanding acclaim. He wrote many books on philosophy the occult crime and sexual deviance. Colin Wilson died in December 2013,
Colin Wilson (1931-2013) was one of the most prolific and popular authors of the past fifty years with more than a hundred books to his name.
Wilson narrates about his days spent in the Reading Room of the British Library, working on fiction and non-fiction alike. His belief in himself, his work and his ideas provide us a timely reminder of how Wilson was ahead of his time.
Colin Stanley is Colin Wilson’s bibliographer, Managing Editor of Pauper’s Press and has worked part time for the Universities of Oxford and Nottingham Trent spending the rest at the cinema and theatre listening to music writing editing reading and watching cricket.
In the introduction to the book recognizing the fifty books Colin Wilson wrote which ranged from mysticism to criminology he can see a single thread running through it all the question of how man can achieve those curious moments of inner freedom, the sensation of sheer delight of knowingness of Self that G.K. Chesterton called “absurd good news,” and Yeats described in a short poem:
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat a solitary man, In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed:
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
Such sensations seem to occur when we relax below some threshold of tension that normally traps us in a more superficial consciousness. There is a sensation of freedom of peace and serenity. In such moments we also feel that our energies are more-than-adequate to meet any challenge.
Sheryl says as a medium in meditation connecting to the energies of intelligent higher soul life and layers of dimensions of life beyond this physical realm I am in a state similar to what is described in Yeats poem and when truly free of the ego or physical world consciousness of fear and limitation for that time shares a moment of such connection to our inner soul essence and actually felt such a connection one day while stuck in traffic on the parkway with the warm sun beating down on her and the ripples of light coming through the glass and suddenly felt and saw her inner light soul being. Sheryl felt so blessed and connected to all of life and to the truth of our eternal soul nature. It might only be a moment that such a connection lasts but it is given by spirit and received by a soul willing to allow the truth that our physical reality is but a stage we create with our thoughts in order to remember and refine this true measure of connection to the force of creation God the Divine Universal Intelligent energy or whatever you wish to call it.
It seems as Sheryl and Colin talk that it is indeed not a coincidence that both writers have the same first name Colin nor that they were destined to meet and work together to explore the mysteries of eternal Universal life.
The Outsider was specifically about this problem that Romantics suspected was the truth about the world that in its ordinariness and triviality where human beings are often basically selfish short sighted, narrow minded little animals and by all attempts convince themselves that we can reach for the stars is only a game of make-believe, like children playing at kings and queens. As human beings grow up they learn to look more dignified and purposeful but inside every one of us there is still a child whose basic interests are food amusement and creature comforts. And when we feel tired and discouraged the child seems to take over again.
The Outsider was about this problem; men who experienced moments of intense ecstasy and affirmation then found themselves dragged down by the triviality of everydayness and the misery of unfulfillment. To such men as Van Gogh Nietzsche Dostoevsky the problem presented itself in terms of “Everlasting Yes” versus “Everlasting No”..Paintings like Van Gogh’s Starry Night express ultimate faith in the power of life over death; all the same, he committed suicide leaving a note saying, “Misery will never end.” Yet in the last pages of the book mystics like William Blake and Sri Ramakrishna had come together to arriving at a satisfactory solution to the problem which is found in Wilson’s second book Religion and the Rebel which is really the second part of The Outsider dealing mainly with saints and mystics and religious visionaries. The book which was a thousand pages long was his investigation into the mysteries of consciousness which lead into the heart of the paranormal.
The Ultimate Colin Wilson takes a look at parts of Colin Wilson’s books to try to understand the human condition and social problems facing modern day society. It also attempts to understand the dynamics of male –female tensions or interactions serial killings and the underlying psychosis of unresolved passions.
In The Country of the Blind from The Outsider Colin writes “ In the air on top of a tram a girl is sitting. Her dress, lifted a little, blows out. But a block in the traffic separates us. The tramcar glides away, fading like a nightmare.
Moving in both directions, the street is full of dresses which sway: offering themselves airily, the skirts lifting: dresses that lift and yet do not lift.
In the tall and narrow shop mirror I see myself approaching, rather pale and heavy eyed. It is not a woman I want—it is all women, and I seek for them in those around me, one by one……
This passage from Henri Barbusse’s novel L”Enfer pinpoints certain aspects of the Outsider. His hero walks down a Paris street and the desires that stir in him separate him sharply from other people. And the need he feels for a woman is not entirely animal either for it is not that I could not see things as they were. I see too deep and too much.
Sheryl says….That is the heart of soul or spirit that is connected to all of life and to knowing within that we seek to end the loneliness which fills us, as the dissociation from our true home or Universal Life or creative force. The physical world only seems to emphasize this separation from the energy and interconnection we seek which cannot be found in the physical realm and that is perhaps why there is much suffering and dysfunction.
The Outsiders case against society we find upon reflection is very clear. All men and women have these dangerous untameable impulses, yet they keep up a pretence to themselves, to others, their respectability, their philosophy, their religion are all attempts to gloss over to make look civilized and rational something that is savage, unorganized irrational . He is an Outsider because he stands for the Truth of both our search for light or goodness and the shadow side of each individual.
Many great artists have none of the characteristics of the Outsider. Shakespeare, Dante Keats were all apparently normal and socially well adjusted, lacking anything that could be pitched on as disease or nervous disability. Keats who always makes a very clear and romantic distinction between the poet and the ordinary man seems to have had no shades of inferiority complexes or sexual neuroses lurking in the background of his mind.
What can be said to characterize the Outsider is a sense of strangeness of unreality…Keats wrote the man in good health is thinking about other things and doesn’t look in the direction where the uncertainty lies. Barbusse has shown us the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois accepting what he sees and touches as reality. He sees too deep and too much and what he sees is essentially chaos.
It might be said The Outsider was an incomplete book. It was intended to document and order a subject which for personal reasons, I find particularly absorbing: the subject of mental strain and near insanity. Over the many years the obsession about the figure called the Outsider became for me the heroic figure of our time. My vision of our civilization was a vision of cheapness and futility, the degrading of all intellectual standards.
In contrast to this the Outsider seemed to be the man who, for any reason at all felt himself lonely in the crowd of the second rate. The more I considered the outside who wished to appear harmless and normal to other people like a saint or visionary caring for nothing but one moment to understanding the world and to see into the heart of nature and of God the more I felt him to be a symptom of our time and age. Essentially he seemed to be a rebel in rebellion against what was the lack of spiritual tension in a materially prosperous civilization.
When added to the exhaustion of reading and thinking too much Shaw comments in one of his journals that most young men need sex several years before it is socially convenient for them to have it. This I think is especially true nowadays, and the consequence is a residue of sexual hunger that may take years of libertinism to assuage. At any event, I think that sex played as important a part of my eschatological doubts in making me wretched in my early teens. In articles I wrote at that time the central theme was always the same: that men are machines driven by emotions that the “desire for truth” is always some less credible urge disguised by the emotions that truth would be as useless to human beings as bookcases are to cows. The actual theme is to understand free will in man.
It has become common place that no man asked himself what life was about or if he did answered with arrant nonsense or wishful thinking. I once asked my grandfather during an argument about the existence of God..if he understood the purpose of life and he told me he did and would tell me when I was fourteen. Unfortunately he died when I was eleven. Now I heard Shaw talking quite plainly about the purpose of life and answering that it was a will to self-understanding.
Sheryl says in reference to this search past loneliness of the soul and in answer to the question Is there really a God or source of creation I wrote in my new book New Life Awaits The Eyes of Spirit Share Evolution Revolution and Global Awakening the following, “ Each of us I have discovered, have a specific unique destiny, experiences, and challenges that are included in a life plan or itinerary that comes into this world with us at conception. At conception the soul part of life merges with physical body for the ultimate purpose of exploring our divine potential. I was reminded only recently that true happiness can only be found by understanding our true worth as divine beings having a physical life. When we are able to discern our part in the process of creating happiness for ourselves and others, we will also recognize that the instinctual need to grow and put forth our presence in the world is really our reason for being.
In summarizing today’s episode of Healing From Within we have explored age old questions that reflect answers from some of the most progressive thinkers in our time and before who have never been motivated by the materialistic factors of the physical world but by an inner energetic soul presence that calls to them through time and space to remember who they are and to bring this message into the world by their life work and the way they regard the infinite possibilities for improving the human condition.
Colin reflects this in the passage he wrote that goes as follows, “This vision of the eternal pattern behind trees and plants brings to mind Boehme’s mystical experience when he walked in the field and saw the signature of “all things,” as if he could see the sap rising in the trees and plants. He went for a walk in the forest and met Gurdjieff: Gurdjieff told him:
The real complete transformation of Being, that is indispensible for a man who wishes to fulfill the purpose of his existence, requires a very much greater concentration of Higher Emotional Energy than that which comes to him by nature. There are some people in the world, but they are rare, who are connected to a Great Reservoir or Accumulator of this energy. This Reservoir has no limits. Those who can draw upon it can be a means of helping others.”
Colin and I would hope those listening will explore their own inner heart urges that call to you in dreams mediation and in nature to find the light or Spirit within and answer questions about your own desires to live and love life, yourself and others, for then you will be drawing on the energy from above and within in, and will find peace.
