Bøger af Colin Wilson

Essential reading for everyone interested in the paranormal, this is the sequel to Colin Wilson's bestselling The Occult and a classic in its own right, drawing on the author's extraordinary first-hand investigations.

The Stature of Man: An Essay on the Concept of the Hero is a non-fiction book written by Colin Wilson. The book explores the concept of the hero, a figure who embodies the highest ideals and values of humanity. Wilson argues that heroes are essential to the human experience, as they provide us with a sense of purpose and meaning, and inspire us to strive for greatness.The book is divided into several chapters, each of which examines a different aspect of the hero. Wilson begins by tracing the history of the hero, from ancient mythology to modern literature and film. He then explores the psychological and philosophical dimensions of the hero, examining the ways in which the hero reflects our deepest desires and fears.Throughout the book, Wilson draws on a wide range of sources, including literature, psychology, philosophy, and mythology. He also includes numerous examples of heroic figures, from ancient Greek heroes like Achilles and Odysseus to modern-day heroes like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.Overall, The Stature of Man is a thought-provoking exploration of the concept of the hero, and the ways in which it has shaped human history and culture. It is a must-read for anyone interested in mythology, psychology, or the human condition.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

KNOCK is a novel about the final days of a London postman suffering from terminal pneumonia. "He belongs, really, to the streets of Dublin - or perhaps Mr Harbinson's Belfast - not London. So do most of the other characters in this sad, moving, often beautifully funny and engagingly stately progress through a man's mind and past." (London Daily Telegraph) KNOCK "belongs to an Irish tradition that runs from Charles Lever and Samuel Lover, down through Joyce, Beckett and Donleavy. (Colin Wilson, Afterword).

In The Age of Defeat, the third volume of the Outsider Cycle, Colin Wilson introduces his New Existentialism as the basis for the revolution in thought that we need to bring about; a revolt against insignificance and ordinariness. The New Existentialism is a practical and strong-willed philosophy that will renew the concept of Man as hero. It emphasises the extraordinary in us.The Age of Defeat examines the loss of the hero in Western culture and the implications of that loss for humanity. When it was written in the middle of the 20th century, it was the idea of the hero that was endangered. Today it is Man, his identity and his masculinity, who is verging on extinction. The concept of Man is one of the most ambiguous and puzzling in our culture. It might be a good moment to remember what to be a Man used to imply.

Religion and the Rebel, Colin Wilson's second volume from his internationally acclaimed Outsider Cycle, is a casebook about and for rebels. With inspirational wisdom and engaging clarity, Wilson shows us that the purpose of religion, of our personal relationship with the sacred and the all-pervading mystery of existence, is to expand our consciousness and intensify our sense of life. Wilson heroically claims that the power to create meaning resides in our mental and spiritual discipline. Examining the lives and works of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Rilke, Shaw, Pascal, Swedenborg, Rimbaud and Scott Fitzgerald, among others, Wilson explores the main existential questions and shows how these remarkable writers, scientists, philosophers and poets faced their need for transcendence. Like many of us, they were driven by a need to become more than men. Religion and the Rebel is an outstanding and enjoyable book that combines philosophical analysis, historical interest, and religious insight.

Perhaps Colin Wilson's most important work, Super Consciousness combines his existential and occult thinking to explain how we can find profound meaning and joy in life by inducing states of Peak Experience.

Colin Wilson's great classic work is a comprehensive history of mystery and "e;magic"e;. His genius lies in producing a skilful synthesis of the available material; clarifying without simplifying, seeing the occult in the light of reason and reason in the light of the mystical and paranormal. It is a journey of enlightenment a wide-ranging survey of the whole subject and an insightful exploration of Man's latent powers. Republished two years after the author's death and with a new foreword by bibliographer Colin Stanley, Wilson brings his own refreshingly optimistic and stimulating interpretation to the worlds of the paranormal, the occult and the supernatural. "e;The Occult is the most interesting, informative and thought-provoking book on the subject I have read"e; --Sunday Telegraph

The best of Colin Wilson in one fantastic volume. Containing extracts from Wilson's work on existentialism, criminology, psychology and the occult, this is an invaluable introduction to one of the late twentieth-century's most incisive thinkers.

As the number of serial killers worldwide has risen steadily - from the emergence of Jack the Ripper in 1888 to Harold Shipman and Ivan Milat, the backpacker killer of the Australian outback - the need to understand mass murder is becoming more urgent. Using privileged access to the world's first National Centre for the Analysis of Violent Crime, Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman bring you this incisive study of the psychology of serial killers and the motives behind their crimes. From childhood traumas to issues of frustration, fear and fantasy, discover what turns an ordinary human being into a compulsive killer.

Inspired by the revelation that the Sphinx had been weathered by water and not by wind-blown sand and was, therefore, thousands of years older than the oldest civilisation known to man, Colin Wilson sets out to explore the remote depths of history. The compelling argument of this bestselling book is that, thousands of years before Ancient Egypt and Greece held sway, there was a great civilisation whose ships travelled the world and who possessed some knowledge system that offered a unified view of the universe, alien to modern man. In this fascinating exploration of the world at a time when, according to Plato, the 'lost civilisation' of Atlantis was destroyed, the author makes a ground-breaking attempt to understand how these long-forgotten peoples thought, felt and communicated on a universal plane.

Creatively and intellectually there is no other species that has ever come close to equalling humanity s achievements, but nor is any other species as suicidally prone to internecine conflict. We are the only species on the planet whose ingrained habit of conflict constitutes the chief threat to our own survival. Human history can be seen as a catalogue of cold-hearted murders, mindless blood-feuds, appalling massacres and devastating wars, but, with developments in forensic science and modern psychology, and with raised education levels throughout the world, might it soon be possible to reign in humanity s homicidal habits? Falling violent crime statistics in every part of the world seem to indicate that something along those lines might indeed be happening. Colin and Damon Wilson, who between them have been covering the field of criminology for over fifty years, offer an analysis of the overall spectrum of human violence. They consider whether human beings are in reality as cruel and violent as is generally believed and they explore the possibility that humankind is on the verge of a fundamental change: that we are about to become truly civilised. As well as offering an overview of violence throughout our history from the first hominids to the twenty-first century, touching on key moments of change and also indicating where things have not changed since the Stone Age they explore the latest psychological, forensic and social attempts to understand and curb modern human violence. To begin with, they examine questions such as: Were the first humans cannibalistic? Did the birth of civilisation also lead to the invention of war and slavery? Priests and kings brought social stability, but were they also the instigators of the first mass murders? Is it in fact wealth that is the ultimate weapon? They look at slavery and ancient Roman sadism, but also the possibility that our own distaste for pain and cruelty is no more than a social construct. They show how the humanitarian ideas of the great religious innovators all too quickly became distorted by organised religious structures. The book ranges widely, from fifteenth-century Baron Gilles de Rais, Bluebeard , the first known and possibly most prolific serial killer in history, to Victorian domestic murder and the invention of psychiatry and Sherlock Holmes and the invention of forensic science; from the fifteenth-century Taiping Rebellion in China, in which up to 36 million died to the First and Second World Wars and more recent genocides and instances of ethnic cleansing , and contemporary terrorism. They conclude by assessing the very real possibility that the internet and the greater freedom of information it has brought is leading, gradually, to a profoundly more civilised world than at any time in the past.

Colin Wilson has explored the paranormal universe ever since he researched his first highly successful work,The Occult: "e;the most interesting, informative and thought-provoking book on the subject."e;* Now, 20 years later, he offers an even wider examination of the mystical and paranormal. And what he has produced is amazinga thoroughly convincing general theory of the occult. Wilson powerfully posits that our so-called "e;normal"e; experience may in fact besubnormal, and that evolution has brought us near the edge of a quantum leap into a hugely expanded human consciousness. Combining fascinating glimpses into the paranormal world with the latest scientific thinking on the nature of "e;physical reality,"e; he reveals the usually unseen powers of the human mind and discusses why he has become convinced that disembodied spirits do exist.

Colin Wilson revitalised existentialism with a completely new approach. This book, first published in 1966, is a clear summary of his ideas, and also develops them to a new stage. Wilson's 'new existentialism' sees philosophy as an intellectual adventure that aims at a real command of human existence, and this book is its clearest exponent.

Carl Gustav Jung is one of the seminal figures in the history of depth psychology. An enormously influential and original thinker, Jung was for some time Freud's principal disciple, but he became more and more critical of the Freudian emphasis on repressed sexual tendencies and after the publication of "Symbols of Transformation" in 1912, Jung broke away from Freud to develop his own technique of 'analytical psychology'.

An engrossing portrait of this complex and enigmatic figure and his eclectic system of magick.Poet, Magician, Mountaineer, Polemicist and Pornographer, Aleister Crowley was the most famous, or infamous, name in twentieth century occultism. With his usual flair and style, Colin Wilson brings this complex and enigmatic figure to life and provides an engrossing portrait of the self-styled Great Beast, the man whom the contemporary press dubbed "The Wickedest Man in the World".The popular image of him as, in the words of Francis King, 'an insatiable sexual athlete, a pimp who lived on the immoral earnings of his girl-friends, and a junkie who daily took enough heroin to kill a roomful of people', has a basis in fact; but there were other, less obnoxious and despicable, aspects of this highly original character.Crowley's greatest legacy is his eclectic occult system: his Magick persists, a potent synthesis of Golden Dawn magic, oriental esoteric techniques, sexual magic, and the all-encompassing Law of Thelema with its two fundamental principles, 'Every man and woman is a star' and the notorious 'Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law'.

Literary Nonfiction. Essays. First published in 1965, this iconic collection by a great philosopher contains essays on David Lindsay, L.H. Myers, George Bernard Shaw, Ayn Rand & Henry Williamson, among others. Wilson's eclectic style is displayed in essays that range over John Cowper Powys and Ernest Hemingway, Nietzche and the modern novel. In print again for the first time, this edition brings to light new studies in existentialism from a great master.

One of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, Pyotr Demianovich Ouspensky was a complex and romantic soul. A promising young intellectual in Tsarist Russia, he won recognition as a novelist and philosopher, yet descended into self-chosen obscurity as a teacher of 'the Work', the system of his great contemporary Gurdjieff. Today, it is as Gurdjieff's chief disciple that he is remembered, yet Colin Wilson argues convincingly that he is to be considered a major writer and man of genius in his own right. A nostalgic melancholy Russian, on of Ouspensky's deepest instincts was that man can find his own salvation, yet towards the end of his turbulent life he lost faith in the System and drank himself to death. With sympathy and admiration, Colin Wilson throws new light on this gentle man and deep thinker.

Presents the life and work of one of the most influential psychological theorists of modern times, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. This examination of a psychologist and teacher of genius also provides an introduction to the philosophy of Gurdjieff. This work presents the life and work of one of the most influential psychological theorists of modern times. George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff is one of the most enigmatic figures of our time. He attracted legends as easily as disciples. But behind the Gurdjieff myth lies a solid corpus of thought, the importance of which is only now being generally recognized. At its heart was the idea of 'the war against sleep', the fact that man, in Colin Wilson's words, is like 'a grandfather clock driven by a watch-spring'. This brilliant and much praised examination of a psychologist and teacher of genius has established itself as the most important and accessible account for the general reader of Gurdjieff's life and work. This edition has been revised and expanded, providing the definitive introduction to the philosophy of Gurdjieff.