Meetings With Remarkable People. Episode 3: Colin Wilson, Part 3

Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider and The Occult

This is the third podcast in my new series “Meetings With Remarkable People.” It is also the third part of my meeting with the remarkable Colin Wilson, the angry young man of British literature, who I met for the first time in 2005 at his home in Cornwall, England.

We launch this episode with a talk inspired by the part of Wilson’s autobiography in which he speaks of trying mescaline, and of course the obvious inspiration for that, the work of Aldous Huxley in his book The Doors of Perception. I talk about my own decision that drugs are not a way to reach the “peak experience” that Wilson made one of his life goals to achieve. This leads to his discussion of his “seven levels of consciousness,” and his ability in the previous year of his life to stay in this higher state than ever before. In short, the segment is all about trying to control our levels of optimism and general contentedness, and to induce the peak experience.

This is the original interview that served as the basis of the article I wrote about Wilson that appeared in August 2005 in the International Herald Tribune and then The New York Times. I later expanded it, and worked with Colin Wilson himself, to develop the interview into a book that was published to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of “The Outsider,” which appeared in 1956. My book, Colin Wilson: Philosopher of Optimism, is now in its second edition, and still available in many online bookstores and directly from the publisher, Michael Butterworth books in Manchester.