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Access to Inner Worlds: The Story of Brad Absetz
A compelling study in right-brain awareness with practical methods for contacting the creative "other self" within us. This ebook edition contains the complete 160 page text of the 1990 paperback edition.
- GenresPsychologyNonfiction
143 pages, Paperback
First published March 14, 1983
2 people are currently reading
56 people want to read
About the author
Colin Wilson
405 books1,291 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Colin Henry Wilson was born and raised in Leicester, England, U.K. He left school at 16, worked in factories and various occupations, and read in his spare time. When Wilson was 24, Gollancz published The Outsider (1956) which examines the role of the social 'outsider' in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh and Wilson discusses his perception of Social alienation in their work. The book was a best seller and helped popularize existentialism in Britain. Critical praise though, was short-lived and Wilson was soon widely criticized.
Wilson's works after The Outsider focused on positive aspects of human psychology, such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. He admired the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow and corresponded with him. Wilson wrote The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff on the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff and an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic in 1980. He argues throughout his work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. Wilson views normal, everyday consciousness buffeted by the moment, as "blinkered" and argues that it should not be accepted as showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us from being completely immersed in wonder, or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. Wilson believes that our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness are as real as our experiences of angst and, since we are more fully alive at these moments, they are more real. These experiences can be cultivated through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work.
Colin Henry Wilson was born and raised in Leicester, England, U.K. He left school at 16, worked in factories and various occupations, and read in his spare time. When Wilson was 24, Gollancz published The Outsider (1956) which examines the role of the social 'outsider' in seminal works of various key literary and cultural figures. These include Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William James, T. E. Lawrence, Vaslav Nijinsky and Vincent Van Gogh and Wilson discusses his perception of Social alienation in their work. The book was a best seller and helped popularize existentialism in Britain. Critical praise though, was short-lived and Wilson was soon widely criticized.
Wilson's works after The Outsider focused on positive aspects of human psychology, such as peak experiences and the narrowness of consciousness. He admired the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow and corresponded with him. Wilson wrote The War Against Sleep: The Philosophy of Gurdjieff on the life, work and philosophy of G. I. Gurdjieff and an accessible introduction to the Greek-Armenian mystic in 1980. He argues throughout his work that the existentialist focus on defeat or nausea is only a partial representation of reality and that there is no particular reason for accepting it. Wilson views normal, everyday consciousness buffeted by the moment, as "blinkered" and argues that it should not be accepted as showing us the truth about reality. This blinkering has some evolutionary advantages in that it stops us from being completely immersed in wonder, or in the huge stream of events, and hence unable to act. However, to live properly we need to access more than this everyday consciousness. Wilson believes that our peak experiences of joy and meaningfulness are as real as our experiences of angst and, since we are more fully alive at these moments, they are more real. These experiences can be cultivated through concentration, paying attention, relaxation and certain types of work.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 19, 2019
It's become fashionable for the right-brain/left-brain separation to be boiled down to the kind of thing that lets one take an online test to decide whether or not they're more creative or more practical. Left unsaid in this kind of talk is that there is interaction between left and right, and that using one's creative faculty has practical applications:abstraction allowed man to prepare for the hunt and elude predators who were physically superior to him, and the practical, logical mind is necessary to bring any massive creative endeavor to fruition (filmmakers, for instance, only get to let their imaginations soar after navigating hurdles involving everything from financing to pre-production headaches).
Some thinkers and writers, as disparate as Bruno Snell, Julian Jaynes, and Colin Wilson himself, believed that Man may have previously lived in a more integrated, "animal" state, and that this separation of the minds inside the brain was a sort of schism that led to man's psychic dyspepsia manifested in movements as disparate as Romanticism and Existentialism.
In "Access to Inner Worlds" Colin Wilson takes the anecdotes and "automatic writing" poetry of a man he meets during a retreat (the eponymous Brad Absetz) as the starting point for linking bicameralism to his lifelong obsession with what he called "Faculty X." This "X" was a cornerstone of his philosophy of "Positive Existentialism" (which no doubt strikes some existentialists as a contradiction in terms).
Mr. Wilson lays out his case in the book that we, as humans, possess the ability to use both the left and right "worlds" of our mind to create a third world whose existence is at once as miraculous and yet obvious as "perspective drawing" must have seemed to people who'd perceived art as something done on a two-dimensional plane before that moment when some artist blew their minds open for good.
According to Mr. Wilson peak performance of the mind does not require peak experience, which can many times be destructive. Hard drugs and brushes with death may allow one to experience a sort of focused perception (opium, contra what many claim, gives users a sense of euphoric "clarity," not the muddled high we associate with depressants or most strains of marijuana), but putting a needle in one's arm or a revolver to one's head (a la Graham Greene) is a strategy with diminishing returns. Wilson argues that access to this World 3 can be summoned nearly at-will, through retraining of the mind and recognition of some basic facts that should have been self-evident, had we as humans not ceded so much control to the robot (see "Beyond the Robot," a solid biography of Colin Wilson, for more on this subject).
Based on one's own disposition and beliefs, Colin Wilson and his book may strike you as everything from the vague hucksterism of a charlatan to providing a kind of hidden code for unlocking your higher potential as a sentient being. For me, what I can extract from such a book in a utilitarian sense is irrelevant, because Wilson is always such a congenial and knowledgeable guide through whatever subject he explicates that it's impossible to not find oneself infected by the man's enthusiasm, his joy at learning and sharing that learning.
He's a bit of a manic autodidact, which probably explains why his stint as one of the good people during his feting as an "Angry Young Man" was short lived, since the cognoscenti like their enthusiasms restrained. Colin Wilson was a writer capable of mentioning Marcel Proust, Adolf Hitler, and the Buddha in one paragraph and having it all somehow tie together. His genius was in the joy he never abandoned and always championed, even though post-war Continental philosophy was predicated for the most part on giving primacy to the hopeless, to the pointless, as some ultimate expression of genius.
Highest recommendation from me, but again mileage may vary.
Some thinkers and writers, as disparate as Bruno Snell, Julian Jaynes, and Colin Wilson himself, believed that Man may have previously lived in a more integrated, "animal" state, and that this separation of the minds inside the brain was a sort of schism that led to man's psychic dyspepsia manifested in movements as disparate as Romanticism and Existentialism.
In "Access to Inner Worlds" Colin Wilson takes the anecdotes and "automatic writing" poetry of a man he meets during a retreat (the eponymous Brad Absetz) as the starting point for linking bicameralism to his lifelong obsession with what he called "Faculty X." This "X" was a cornerstone of his philosophy of "Positive Existentialism" (which no doubt strikes some existentialists as a contradiction in terms).
Mr. Wilson lays out his case in the book that we, as humans, possess the ability to use both the left and right "worlds" of our mind to create a third world whose existence is at once as miraculous and yet obvious as "perspective drawing" must have seemed to people who'd perceived art as something done on a two-dimensional plane before that moment when some artist blew their minds open for good.
According to Mr. Wilson peak performance of the mind does not require peak experience, which can many times be destructive. Hard drugs and brushes with death may allow one to experience a sort of focused perception (opium, contra what many claim, gives users a sense of euphoric "clarity," not the muddled high we associate with depressants or most strains of marijuana), but putting a needle in one's arm or a revolver to one's head (a la Graham Greene) is a strategy with diminishing returns. Wilson argues that access to this World 3 can be summoned nearly at-will, through retraining of the mind and recognition of some basic facts that should have been self-evident, had we as humans not ceded so much control to the robot (see "Beyond the Robot," a solid biography of Colin Wilson, for more on this subject).
Based on one's own disposition and beliefs, Colin Wilson and his book may strike you as everything from the vague hucksterism of a charlatan to providing a kind of hidden code for unlocking your higher potential as a sentient being. For me, what I can extract from such a book in a utilitarian sense is irrelevant, because Wilson is always such a congenial and knowledgeable guide through whatever subject he explicates that it's impossible to not find oneself infected by the man's enthusiasm, his joy at learning and sharing that learning.
He's a bit of a manic autodidact, which probably explains why his stint as one of the good people during his feting as an "Angry Young Man" was short lived, since the cognoscenti like their enthusiasms restrained. Colin Wilson was a writer capable of mentioning Marcel Proust, Adolf Hitler, and the Buddha in one paragraph and having it all somehow tie together. His genius was in the joy he never abandoned and always championed, even though post-war Continental philosophy was predicated for the most part on giving primacy to the hopeless, to the pointless, as some ultimate expression of genius.
Highest recommendation from me, but again mileage may vary.
November 15, 2022
Colin Wilson wants to believe human beings are evolving into some mystical future, where we all possess Faculty X. In this book, he basically says the following:
Hey. You have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. You tend to think of yourself as the conscious self only. That's wrong. You need to acknowledge the unconscious mind too, as a helper and friend who can fulfill and deepen your experience. Once you make contact with this ally, you'll be a better, deeper, more fulfilled human being.
To flesh out this idea, Wilson talks about Brad Abaetz a little bit. This book is supposed to be about Brad, but there's not very much about him Wilson instead talks about Proust. And Dostoevsky. And some poets, painters, and other people. All of this is used to prop up his somewhat vague thesis: that forming a bond with your unconscious will give you psychic powers. (He only hints of this near the end.) Or open new worlds. Or something.
What's weird, I think, is anyone who has been in therapy has a good sense of their unconscious and how it can help or hinder. Wilson never treats any of this stuff from a therapeutic angle. He at one point mentions Freud as "discovering" the unconscious has a larger role in our lives than we like to admit. That's it. Which is weird because that's kind of Wilson's whole argument -- but he'd rather discuss Proust than Freud.
How many times does he talk about Proust dipping a cookie in tea and taking a bite? Way, way too many.
It's a repetitive, slow, ponderous book. And it's only 139 pages. Not recommended.
Hey. You have a conscious mind and an unconscious mind. You tend to think of yourself as the conscious self only. That's wrong. You need to acknowledge the unconscious mind too, as a helper and friend who can fulfill and deepen your experience. Once you make contact with this ally, you'll be a better, deeper, more fulfilled human being.
To flesh out this idea, Wilson talks about Brad Abaetz a little bit. This book is supposed to be about Brad, but there's not very much about him Wilson instead talks about Proust. And Dostoevsky. And some poets, painters, and other people. All of this is used to prop up his somewhat vague thesis: that forming a bond with your unconscious will give you psychic powers. (He only hints of this near the end.) Or open new worlds. Or something.
What's weird, I think, is anyone who has been in therapy has a good sense of their unconscious and how it can help or hinder. Wilson never treats any of this stuff from a therapeutic angle. He at one point mentions Freud as "discovering" the unconscious has a larger role in our lives than we like to admit. That's it. Which is weird because that's kind of Wilson's whole argument -- but he'd rather discuss Proust than Freud.
How many times does he talk about Proust dipping a cookie in tea and taking a bite? Way, way too many.
It's a repetitive, slow, ponderous book. And it's only 139 pages. Not recommended.
April 8, 2021
Very similar to Frankenstein’s Brain. Perhaps good as a psychological reminder and refresher.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews