Access to Inner Worlds

by Colin Wilson

Book Overview

Studies the case of an American living in Finland who experienced altered states of consciousness, including automatic painting and poetry writing, and suggest a practical route to enlightenment.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0890875014
• ISBN13: 9780890875018
• Release Date: November 1995
• Publisher: Celestial Arts
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A modest venture into unsplit brain research

Colin Wilson is never boring, and never has quite the same take as anyone else writing about psychic spaces. So when I ran across a used paperback copy of this book a couple of weeks ago, I didn't think twice about snapping it up. In some ways it feels a trifle dated, because it speaks with such solemnity about "left brain" and "right brain"; but of course that once fashionable distinction always did have something to it. It's a short volume of typically Wilsonian speculation, brought on this time by a fascinating individual he met at a conference in Finland, one Brad Absetz. Brad is a case study in split-brain behavior worthy of several chapters in one of those Oliver Sacks books - except for the fact that his brain is physically intact. Over a long, demanding, traumatic period when watching over his wife's epilepsy required him to be an a perpetual state of passive alertness, Brad began learning how to let his unconscious self act for him without his conscious control. It made surprising, consistent, usually very wise decisions. And he learned a sort of discipline which let it expand into larger and larger arenas of action, including eventually writing its own poetry. Wilson relates this second self of Brad's to the right brain, but also to Gurdjieff's "emotional body". As always, Wilson is interested in practices that lead to quieting the rational mind, and leading to presence in the moment. But what makes his ponderings interesting is the goals that he doesn't share with most mystical / meditation literature: maximizing vitality, opening the inner eye to visionary worlds like those of Blake and the Romantic poets. He also raises the intriguing possibility that what makes experiences of such connection to the other self so rare in the modern world, is our failure to trust the other self enough to yield it control, being full of such notions as "the sinful lower nature", Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde, and the Freudian id. The musings aren't all that conclusive in the end, and it's not surprising, since Wilson has been so prolific and much of his work is bound to go out of print, that this text is not available in hard copy. But the musings make pleasant reading and they run off the beaten track. Three and a half stars.