A single obsessional idea runs through all my work: the paradoxical nature of freedom. When the German tanks rolled into Warsaw, or the Russians into Budapest, it seemed perfectly obvious what we meant by freedom; it was something solid and definite that was being stolen, as a burglar might steal the silver. But when a civil servant retires after forty years, and finds himself curiously bored and miserable, the idea of freedom becomes blurred and indefinite; it seems to shimmer like a mirage. ‘When I am confronted by danger or crisis, I see it as a threat to freedom, and my freedom suddenly becomes positive and self-evident – as enormous and obvious as a sunset. Similarly, a man who is violently in love feels that if he could possess the girl, his freedom would be infinite; the delight of union would make him undefeatable. When he gets her, the whole thing seems an illusion; she is just a girl …
I have always accepted the fundamental reality of freedom. The vision is not an illusion or a mirage. In that case, what goes wrong?
The trouble is the narrowness of consciousness. It is as if you tried to see a panoramic scene through cracks in a high fence, but were never allowed to look over the fence and see it as a whole. And the narrowness lulls us into a state of permanent drowsiness, like being half anaesthetised, so that we never attempt to stretch our powers to their limits. With the consequence that we never discover their limits. William James stated, after he had breathed nitrous oxide, ‘our normal walking consciousness … is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different’.
I formulated my theory of ‘Faculty X’ on a snowy day in Washington, D.C., in 1966; but the other day, someone pointed out to me that as long ago as 1957 I had told Kenneth Alisop: ‘One day I believe man will have a sixth sense – a sense of the purpose of life, quite direct and uninferred.’* And in 1968 I wrote in a novel devoted entirely to the problem of Faculty X, The Philosopher’s Stone: ‘The will feeds on enormous vistas; deprived of them, it collapses.’ And there again is the absurd problem of freedom. Man’s consciousness is as powerful as a microscope; it can grasp and analyse experience in a way no animal can achieve. But microscopic vision is narrow vision. We need to develop another kind of consciousness that is the equivalent of the telescope.
This is Faculty X. And the paradox is that we already possess it to a large degree, but are unconscious of possessing it. It lies at the heart of all so-called occult experience. It is with such experience that this book is concerned.
Colin Wilson
* The Angry Decade (London, 1958), p. 154.