No one I know seems to be familiar with the writings of Colin Wilson. I stumbled upon him quite by accident while browsing in a college library – one of those afternoons when you’re not looking for anything in particular, just drifting along the shelves. A slim paperback caught my eye: The Outsider. I started reading, and within a few pages, I was hooked.
Wilson was young when he wrote it – barely in his twenties -but he wrote as if he’d already lived several intense lives. He was asking the kind of questions that had been buzzing faintly in my own head but that few people around me seemed to take seriously: Why do some people feel life so deeply, almost painfully, while others drift through it half-asleep? Why do we sometimes experience sudden flashes of meaning, only to lose them again in the dullness of routine?
What fascinated me was the way he connected philosophy, literature, and lived experience. He wrote about Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, T.E. Lawrence – all these “outsiders” who couldn’t quite fit into the world because they saw and felt too much. But Wilson wasn’t just analysing them; he was trying to understand how we could all wake up to that same intensity of life – what he later called “Faculty X”, a kind of higher consciousness or expanded awareness.
Over the years I found that Wilson had written about almost everything -existentialism, mysticism, crime, even the occult – all with the same fierce curiosity and restless energy. Reading him felt like being in conversation with someone who refused to accept the limits of ordinary thought.
I later discovered that he wasn’t alone in this quest. Aldous Huxley had written about similar awakenings in The Doors of Perception. Hermann Hesse, in Steppenwolf and Siddhartha, explored the inner journeys of seekers and misfits. Alan Watts brought in the wisdom of the East, showing that enlightenment could be found not in grand gestures but in everyday awareness…
“Religion, mysticism and magic all spring from the same basic ‘feeling’ about the universe: a sudden feeling of meaning, which human beings sometimes ‘pick up’ accidentally, as your radio might pick up some unknown station. Poets feel that we are cut off from meaning by a thick, lead wall, and that sometimes for no reason we can understand the wall seems to vanish and we are suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of the infinite interestingness of things.” – Colin Wilson, The Occult
An ordinary life 
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