This World

Because I attended Shirley MacLaine’s Higher Self Seminar, I contacted what might be called my Higher Self. Because I honestly and openly reported what had happened to me there, I set out upon the path that has brought me to a vastly expanded universe.

When I got home from the Higher Self Seminar weekend, I wrote up a 2,000-word piece for my newspaper, to appear the following Sunday. I didn’t try to describe meeting my “higher self,” because for a general audience a third-hand description would be worse than none at all. (Third-hand, in that they would have had to interpret my interpretation of my experience.) It is one thing to describe a thing to someone who may use that description as a guide or as a trail-marker. It is quite another, futile, thing to describe it to those who will then judge its validity offhand, without having had the experience and without making any attempt to have the experience. Yet I didn’t hide behind the journalist’s facade of pretended impartiality. I was more willing to be called a fool than to pretend that nothing had happened to me.

But I admit, I had qualms when, on the Friday before publication, I saw the lead article in the “Commentary” section page proofs! They had made my suggested headline (“Shirley MacLaine’s not the only one out on a limb”) into a subhead, and had used “In the spirit” used as the head. “Oh God,” I thought, “what have I done?” Nothing in the piece was phony or shallow. But it was so open and unprotected! I suddenly wasn’t so sure I wanted it so widely distributed. Continue reading Of God and Shirley MacLaine

I was living in the Hampton Roads, Virginia, area, age 40, in my first year as Associate Editor for the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, writing editorials, columns and book reviews, all very happily. I belonged to no church, but I lived, or tried to live, according to my silent prayer, “Dear God, show me the way.” There are many worse ways to live. Indeed, at my best I live that way now, though I define things differently. (As usual, religious experience unites; religious opinions divide.) Yet whenever I sat down to work on the novel whose first-draft I had written eight years before, or on my study of “Thoreau and Mr. Emerson,” begun even earlier, I dried up. And I had other problems, including my marriage and, notably, my health.

I was experiencing chronic intense back pain. Any little thing, like building a cold frame for some lettuce seedlings, reduced me to near-immobility. I couldn’t sit, stand or lie down comfortably. My chiropractor sent me to get x-rays, and one Tuesday she showed me the x-ray films. They showed a thinning of pads in the hips, which was pretty serious, and heavy deposits of calcium on the bones: On the x-rays it looked like frosting! And nothing could be done to remove it. It looked like I was beginning to become an old man, and I was only 40. So along with the pain came depression, of course — I not realizing that this was the low point. Continue reading A wake-up call

The fact is, we have a hard time living in the earth because physical matter is not fully our home. Our bodies are of the earth, our animating spirit is not. And the closer you get into touch Upstairs, the clearer this is. We are an uneasy combination of matter and spirit, which makes living in physical matter possible, but doesn’t make it easy. Psychic powers? Of course you have psychic powers. No spirit incarnating could exist without them. One might as well suppose that people could live without breath, or heartbeat. The problem is that our society has marginalized those who are most aware of these abilities.

That kind of awareness may manifest in various ways. Depending upon your background, constitution, and awareness, you may feel special affinity toward mysticism on the one hand, or toward magic, on another hand, or toward strict religious discipline, on the third hand so to speak.

A spiritually alive and responsive society based on real knowledge of who we are and what we are here to do — rather than knowledge of dead things, economics, and the ability to manipulate material things for material ends — would provide outlets for each of these inclinations, supporting them in a web of social relationships. Instead, it places the subjects in the realm of unimportant things, and defines the mainstream by what one might call a spiritual lowest common denominator.

Continue reading No place for psychics

I know I’m talking a lot, here, about my personal story. But I’m trying to use it to talk about something else, something not always so easy to get hold of. It is as Henry Thoreau said in Walden: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me.”

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Colin Wilson’s body of work revolves around one premise that could be summarized as follows. “There is something wrong with life. The unsatisfactory way we live isn’t the way it should be or has to be. We possess vast unsuspected powers and abilities of which we are slowly becoming half-aware. It is our task to exert the intelligently-directed will to learn to develop and use these powers.”

That message filled me with excitement partly because it was pretty much without precedent. I had read Jess Stearn’s Edgar Cayce — the Sleeping Prophet, and Ruth Montgomery’s A Gift of Prophecy, but not much else that could be called parapsychology or occult (or, now, New Age). My mental world was filled with history, biography, politics, current affairs.

The only thing in my life touching on what people call the paranormal was the fact that in college I had hypnotized a couple of my fraternity brothers, eliciting stories that purported to be past lives of theirs. (More about this another time.) As to drugs, I went to George Washington University, a very conservative school, slow to catch up with the times. Also, I was a very conservative person, and a timid one — who had his future political career to consider. I graduated without having tried any drug stronger than alcohol and tobacco. Continue reading Cutting the Anchor

A science-fiction book by someone named Colin Wilson

It was February, 1970, and I was 23 years old. I was in a drugstore checkout line when a strong impulse led me to pick up a paperback book off the rack, a science-fiction novel called The Mind Parasites, by an author I’d never heard of named Colin Wilson. I bought it, and that moment turned my life.

The plot was simple enough. Two scientists at the end of the twentieth century discover that humans are unsuspecting hosts to — well, to mind parasites, creatures that sap our vitality and our sense of purpose. After sundry adventures, they learn to defeat the parasites, and for the first time begin to take possession of humanity’s unsuspected abilities, including a host of powers then usually called occult.

When I read that book, something within me went “click!” I was seized with the conviction that the author was telling the truth. We do have such powers, and they are inexplicably beyond our grasp. What is more, it was clear to me that the author believed it too. The strength of his conviction ran like a strong current beneath the surface of the story, and was spelled out clearly in his preface. And when I began looking for his other books, beginning with The Outsider, I found that in whatever form he uses — and he has written novels, volumes of criticism, biography, history, essays, plays — the same underlying message comes through.

Continue reading A science-fiction book by someone named Colin Wilson

You can learn how to obtain first-hand knowledge of life beyond what our society considers normal. You can learn how to extend your abilities in ways that our society considers to be impossible. Most important, you can experience the world in ways that shed new light on the reality that has been set forth (and then repeatedly misunderstood) in all the world’s scriptures.

My own experience convinces me that this life is not our only life. We are immortal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies. And we are not separate “individuals” but are all connected one to another because we are part of a larger being. This larger being cares about us and can be trusted, and is a source of foresight and wisdom except when we lose communication with it by failing to remember that we are more than we appear to be.

Continue reading Making sense of ALL of life, not just some of it