Beyond the Robot Quotes

“Students of Husserl will know his philosophy is dense and difficult, but this central insight about the intentionality of consciousness will inform everything Wilson writes from now on. As I quoted Wilson saying earlier, we have a "will to perceive as well as perceptions." Intentionality is our will to perceive. How we can become aware of this will and learn how to consciously direct it will one aim of Wilson's new existentialism.”
― Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson

“The real world, the world revealed during mystical illumination, is not like our everyday world, and within it our everyday ways of knowing and understanding simply don’t work. Wilson points out that the philosopher Henri Bergson realized this earlier in the century. Bergson argued that while excellent for enabling us to maneuver through the world, the intellect is not very good at grasping reality. When we try to do this, it slips through our fingers. What is time? Where does space end? Our mind numbs when faced with these questions. What was needed for this, Bergson said, was intuition, which was a way of getting inside the world, knowing it from within. The intellect looks at things from outside and analyzes experience into parts. This is good for obvious uses, but it is useless if we want to grasp the reality of things. The intellect falsifies reality to a great extent in order to make it manageable for us. What seems to happen in mystical moments is that we see the world through intuition, not intellect, and the experience can be overwhelming. But”
― Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson

“In both the mystical and the paranormal there seems to be a kind of direct knowing, not mediated by the usual routines of the intellect. In both a kind of shift of consciousness occurs, a kind of turning inward that reveals another world. In”
― Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson

“Because it feels lost, bewildered, unsure of itself, the conscious ego”—our left brain—“searches obsessively for meaning.” In the process “it has achieved more in three thousand years of bicameral consciousness than in the previous million years of inner unity.” Wilson”
― Gary Lachman, Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson