I have been going through more than 40 years of journals, finding and indexing quotations from various writers and others who have influenced me over the years. In the first rank among these, certainly among the first in point of time and among the longest lasting in terms of continued influence, is Colin Wilson. Perhaps this quote from one of his earliest books, which I copied in April,1970, will give you a sense of how and why he was so significant. As slightly later with Carl Jung, when I first came across Wilson’s work, I recognized immediately a mind that worked as mine did, that valued what I valued.
“This is the problem of our time: to destroy the idea of men as a `static observer,’ both in philosophy and art. All imaginative creation is involved with the three absolutes: freedom, evolution, religion.”
Colin Wilson, The Strength To Dream
Also this:
“Every time a civilization reaches its moment of crisis, it is capable of creating some higher type of man. Its successful response to the crisis depends upon the creation of a higher type of man. Not necessarily the Nietzschean Superman, but some type of man with broader consciousness and a deeper sense of purpose than ever before. Civilization cannot continue in its present muddling, shortsighted way, producing better and better refrigerators, wider and wider cinema screens, and steadily draining men of all sense of a life of the spirit. The Outsider is nature’s attempts to counterbalance the death of purpose. The challenge is immediate, and demands a response from every one of us who is capable of understanding it.”
Colin Wilson, Religion And The Rebel
You get the idea, perhaps.