"I of my own knowledge…"

A science-fiction book by someone named Colin Wilson

It was February, 1970, and I was 23 years old. I was in a drugstore checkout line when a strong impulse led me to pick up a paperback book off the rack, a science-fiction novel called The Mind Parasites, by an author I’d never heard of named Colin Wilson. I bought it, and that moment turned my life.

The plot was simple enough. Two scientists at the end of the twentieth century discover that humans are unsuspecting hosts to — well, to mind parasites, creatures that sap our vitality and our sense of purpose. After sundry adventures, they learn to defeat the parasites, and for the first time begin to take possession of humanity’s unsuspected abilities, including a host of powers then usually called occult.

When I read that book, something within me went “click!” I was seized with the conviction that the author was telling the truth. We do have such powers, and they are inexplicably beyond our grasp. What is more, it was clear to me that the author believed it too. The strength of his conviction ran like a strong current beneath the surface of the story, and was spelled out clearly in his preface. And when I began looking for his other books, beginning with The Outsider, I found that in whatever form he uses — and he has written novels, volumes of criticism, biography, history, essays, plays — the same underlying message comes through.

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You can learn how to obtain first-hand knowledge of life beyond what our society considers normal. You can learn how to extend your abilities in ways that our society considers to be impossible. Most important, you can experience the world in ways that shed new light on the reality that has been set forth (and then repeatedly misunderstood) in all the world’s scriptures.

My own experience convinces me that this life is not our only life. We are immortal spirits temporarily inhabiting bodies. And we are not separate “individuals” but are all connected one to another because we are part of a larger being. This larger being cares about us and can be trusted, and is a source of foresight and wisdom except when we lose communication with it by failing to remember that we are more than we appear to be.

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My life now seems magical to me. It didn’t always seem that way.

I started as a solitary, lonely individual, struggling along, afraid of others, afraid to open my heart, afraid to trust myself. I lived (as I would now say) only Downstairs, without day-to-day connection with my higher self or with other levels of being. I did try to believe in God. Many times I believed quite strongly, and learned that I could safely rely on invisible support. At my best, I said, “Dear God, show me the way,” and trusted. At my best, I loved. But it was all so intermittent! So hit or miss!

I was a member of the last generation to grow up in what I call the Medieval Catholic Church. By nature, I was a mystic. The Latin Mass, the sense of the all-pervading infinite world behind this one, the firm belief in an unchanging order of things, including a black-and-white code of behavior, appealed to me at my deepest levels. When, as a teenager, I found myself unable to remain a believing Catholic, I didn’t realize that Catholicism was only one specific religion expressing humanity’s supernatural connections. I thought it was all or nothing, and I had seen — I thought — that it was nothing.

Atheism didn’t suit me. I couldn’t see worshipping The Big Nothing, and couldn’t see how anyone could say absolutely that There Is No God. I could imagine saying either “I have experienced God” or “I haven’t experienced God.” But how could anyone say “I have experienced No-God”? It didn’t make sense. Atheism seemed a bigger act of faith than believing.

So, what was left?

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Do you know how sometimes a book will sit on your shelf, unread, for years perhaps, and then something — the revolving universe’s timing mechanism, perhaps — draws your attention to it, and you sit down with it, and until you have finished it you are unable to leave it? Whenever that happens to me, I pay close attention. I can take a hint.

Last week it was John Anthony West’s Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt, which I have owned probably a dozen years, and had been unable to read.

About halfway through it, I sent him an enthusiastic e-mail, and began recommending the book to certain of my friends. It is good for a book to be informed, literate and important. It is better for it to be wise, and better yet to be witty as well. When a book has all those qualities and in addition demonstrates that the author knows something, and he is giving you pointers, the book is beyond price.

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In ancient Egypt (so says Joan Grant, in Winged Pharaoh), the priests used this formula in their teaching: “I of my own knowledge tell you that this is the truth.”

Not, “This is what I have been taught,” but, “I of my own knowledge…”

Where, today, would we find equivalent knowledge? Equivalent institutions?

Our universities and churches cannot produce such teachers. They teach what is said to be true, or might be true, or ought to be true, or what we wish were true. But knowledge cannot be transmitted by those who do not know.

Who has first-hand knowledge of the true nature of physical-matter reality? Of the worlds beyond physical life? Of what we as individuals and as groups can achieve?

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