Colin Wilson's book The Outsider received unanimous acclaim in 1956, instantly hailing him as one of the century's most notable thinkers. Almost 50 years and more than 100 books later, he's still as passionate about the ideas that obsessed him at the start of his career

Colin Wilson was 24 when he composed his most famous work, The Outsider, writing it by day in the British Library reading room and sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath by night. He explored themes of social alienation and examined how the health of a society can be measured by how it treats the people on its fringes.
The book was an instant best-seller with great critical acclaim. A week before The Outsider was published, John Osborne's play Look back in Anger hit the stage to similar attention. The 'Angry Young Man' movement was born and, although much of his subsequent work has been attacked by the literary community, Wilson retains his legendary status among his fans.

Unfashionably cheerful
Although comfortably nestled in a well-loved armchair, 73-year-old Wilson still appeared to be tall as a tree. He smiled at us sat on the couch opposite, enjoying our astonishment at the 30,000-strong book collection that threatens to swamp his Cornish house where he's lived with wife Joy since 1959.
He's full of beans, almost unfashionably cheerful for such a deep thinker, and he still writes every day. When we inquired whether he'd ever considered retirement he smiled knowingly, "I dare say I shall retire one of these days but my real ambition is to be the oldest writer to produce a masterpiece. What I would like to do is to keep going until I'm 90 and then produce a volume of Spider World, which I think is probably my most important fiction. It's my Lord of the Rings."
As well as concentrating on his Science Fiction Wilson still writes extensively on psychology, mysticism and the paranormal. At the time of our visit he had just finished an article for one of the nationals about the devil-worshipping naval officer who requested the right to have a Satanic altar on his boat. When the paper rang and asked if he knew anything about Satanism, Wilson gleefully replied that, "Yes, I know everything about Satanism!" And you get the feeling that he probably knows at least a little about everything. But it's his obsession with one idea, that of the 'peak experience' - that reality is phenomenally wonderful and the drabness of our everyday perceptions is an illusion - that has gripped him all his years. He's still as animated and keen to explain what these ideas mean to him as he would have been 50 years ago.
"I've written the same book 100 times over. The same basic ideas always obsess me and I approach them from completely different angles. For example, I wrote a book on wine because I suspected that wine had been one of the most important evolutionary advances of the human race. When our ancestors accidentally discovered that if you left fruit and it fermented resulting in a drink that made you feel good, the realisation that you could get into these strange floating states of mind, put them in touch with the very essence of being human. I think that's of terrific importance.
"I also happen to think that the novel is the greatest modern invention after the wheel because when the novel was invented in about 1740 by Samuel Richardson, for the first time in history people were carried away like on a magic carpet, escaping and living another person's life."
Wholly extolling the virtues of drunkenness, we asked what other forms the peak experience can take. "The peak experience is a feeling of happiness that can happen to anybody. One of my favourite descriptions was when a marine, whom hadn't seen a woman for years, had a peak experience on seeing a female and he suddenly realised that men are different from women. We take that fact for granted, but he saw that the two sexes are as different as cows and horses. That sudden recognition of the difference between two things is like looking at those 'magic eye' pictures, where a flat form instantly transforms into a three dimensional image. That type of awakening is the thing that really interests me.
"We normally see things from the worm's eye view but occasionally we get into these curious states where we see things from a bird's eye view and suddenly you're seeing your life from above and it fills you with happiness and courage. Things that were making you miserable a few hours earlier suddenly seem absurd. I spend my whole life trying to do this."
Wilson spoke with infectious energy of his own first peak experiences when as a boy he would get thrilled at the magic of Christmas, then in his teens when he discovered poetry. "When I realised just how pessimistic modern literature really is it seemed to be completely absurd...the heroes of all the great novels would be destroyed in some way or another because they feel the world is too much for them etc. Well, my job and the reason I've been put on earth is to turn things around and make people realise things could be completely different - pessimism won't be taken for granted.
"A modern psychologist called George Pransky has taken this insight a step further, although he learned it from an ordinary non-academic, non-professional working man called Sydney Banks. Banks had been telling a friend how unhappy he was when the friend remarked: 'You're not unhappy, Syd, you just think you are.' As it sank in, Banks looked at him in amazement. 'Do you realise what you've just said?' What had suddenly dazzled him was the insight that nearly all our psychological problems arise from our thoughts. What the friend was saying was: people make themselves unhappy with their thoughts. Pessimists do not have peak experiences because they are pessimists. Optimists do have peak experiences because they are optimists.
"It's your own thoughts that make you miserable - they settle on you like dust on a windscreen but we don't realise we've got a windscreen wiper and washer to just wipe them away and everything's different. It's not a matter of what you do - it's about knowing something."
Wilson told us that when he lectures on the peak experience he watches the audience get happier and happier as they realise his observations are obviously true. "People aren't really creating their own misery, they just kind of drift into it. But sometimes you only have to say something to someone, like, 'do you realise you favourite TV programme is on tonight?' and quite suddenly they're all cheerful. So it can happen in a single flash."

Under pressure
A few years ago he experienced panic attacks brought on by stress and exhaustion from overworking. "One day I was driving down the lane to post a letter, feeling really low and tired. A car shot past the end of the lane rather fast and it occurred to me that it could have knocked my bumper off. This immediately made me pull myself together and it was enough to make me say this was the last panic attack that I would ever have - and it was. We don't recognise how easy this is to do."
About six months ago Wilson got into a mental state that he refers to as 'broadband' where he can remain in a permanent state of optimism. He believes there are seven levels of consciousness ranging from zero (fast asleep) to seven, where what Wilson describes as 'Faculty X' occurs. He describes this as, "a feeling that you are totally aware of the reality of another time and place - where quite suddenly your consciousness wakes up so much that you can imagine things that happened in the past as occurring now."
The conversation moved onto ideas of happiness on a larger scale - what does he think of what's going on in the world nowadays? "When you have no pressure on you things tend to go badly, so for some reason history keeps whipping up terrible pressures on the human race. Hitler and Stalin, for example. There was a sense of cheerfulness in the war, of being banded together against a clear enemy. We all thought it would be marvellous when it ended and of course it wasn't. Rationing continued for longer than anyone thought and the feeling of camaraderie had gone. As soon as you place us in a pleasant situation, where we should be extremely happy in theory, immediately everything drops, and quite suddenly and instead of being happy in the pleasant situation, we're happy for a few seconds, and then we're bored."

I, Robot
Late into the evening and a few bottles of good wine and a sumptuous dinner later, Wilson spoke of Gurdjieff's ideas on recognising that we each have a 'robotic' self that carries out many of our unconscious tasks.
"When you wake up in the morning you're 50% robot and become more 'real' you, less mechanical, as the day goes on. But towards the end of the day when you get tired, the robot drives your car, writes your letters etc. How quickly we get used to things. There's no earthly reason why we can't get to this level of always seeing things anew, as people do after hardship. When you say something and mean it in that wide-awake state, then you absolutely mean it. You get into a nice state of realising you're happy...knowing you're happy. We're happy all the time without realising it."

Further information
Colin Wilson's latest book is his autobiography, Dreaming to Some Purpose (published by Century, £20, HB)

This article has been taken from the February issue of Prediction which also included features on: Chinese Alternative Health, How to Create Your Own Tarot Set and How to Make Money with Feng Shui. For all back issues of Prediction call: 01733 385170