The point to observe here is that although hypertension may not be necessary, it is as widespread as the common cold. It is the result of ignorance, of bad management of our vital economy. However, it is not a necessary and inescapable price. Hypertension is the price we pay for the symphonies of Beethoven, the novels of Balzac, the advances in medical knowledge that prevent children dying of smallpox. And if the inhabitants of some Amazon village are ‘closer to nature’ than New Yorkers, this is usually at the cost of dirt and ignorance and inconvenience. The farm labourer going to work is as likely to ignore his surroundings as the harassed car salesman. It is a disease of consciousness-that is, of being human. Weird Studies, episode 8: On Graham Harman's 'The Third Table'“Now, although hypertension is accentuated by modern civilisation, it is not specifically a disease of civilisation. Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Raceįrancisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces MonstersĪt the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, Library of America collectionĮdouard Schuré, (Edouard Schuré, _The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religion Peter Wessel Zapffe, Norwegian philosopher

Making Sense, episode 107: Is Life Actually Worth Living? In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Wilson's concept of Faculty X as elaborated in his monumental 1971 work, The Occult.ĭavid Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence

For Wilson, magic isn't the living fossil the arch-rationalists would like it to be, but a 'science of the future.' Faculty X is an evolutionary power, innately positive, inseparable from the will to live and the unshakeable conviction that, somehow, this world has some real, ineffable meaning. At its simplest, what Colin Wilson calls Faculty X is 'simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present.' Yet its existence is evinced in all those phenomena that modernity files under 'supernatural' or 'occult.' As difficult to explain as it is impossible to omit from any honest survey of human existence, the occult haunts the modern, not just as a vestige of the past but also, perhaps, as a promise from a time to come.

The occult by colin wilson