Colin Wilson: A Quintessential Outsider!

On 5 December 2013, a prolific writer died. He was a profound philosopher to his admirers and a mixture of crank oddities to his critics. But none can deny that this writer who was 82 years old when he died, made the entire intellectual world look at him when he was 25. That is when he was 25, and when he was not having any college degree or any proper job but was having an estranged marriage, tensed relations with the family and was living in a water proof bed and living a very lonely life trying hard to write a novel.

It was Christmas season 1954. And hear from his own words what made him write Outsider, which since its publication in 1956 is to date a bestseller:

That was how Outsider was born — a powerful book which churned its way through the different powerful literary characters in Western literary tradition and through the womb processes that should have given birth to these characters. It also studied the philosophers and artists.

Colin Wilson goes into various mystics in the Western tradition. He also presents Sri Ramakrishna as an 'outsider' — but with a difference: "Here we can see what happens when the Outsider can slip into a tradition where he ceases to be a lonely misfit." The way Wilson presents Sri Ramakrishna in Outsider is filled with possibilities of studying Sri Ramakrishna-phenomenon for the psychological and social well-being of individual and the society both East and the West. Unfortunately that never happened. The field has been usurped by the likes and clones of Wendy and Kripal.

Here, by civilisation, he means Western civilisation, though we Hindus must remember that we too are inevitably getting modernised Western way. But Hindu Dharma essentially is also an ecosystem that constantly generates and provides acceptance for the ‘outsider’ in the most holistic way.

In Colin Wilson we have a potential framework to study Hindu society and culture from this perspective.

His book ‘The Occult’ (1979) is an extraordinary book which unfortunately did not receive the attention it deserved. With more than 750 pages, the book studies the occult and mystical traditions of the West both in their historical and psycho-spiritual aspects. For every Hindu student of Western civilisation this book is a must read. Consider the following depiction and evaluation by Colin Wilson of the criticism of Theosophy by Swami Dayananda Saraswati, the founder of Arya Samaj:

Unfortunately, the views of Colin Wilson could never get serious scholarly attention. One of the reasons is that when science is not ready, minds like that of Colin Wilson easily start searching for facts validating their worldviews in suspicious realms and in this domain charlatans galore. This was the problem not peculiar to Wilson. Earlier, brilliant biologist Lyall Watson (1939-2008) also faced the same problem.

Not that Colin Wilson was 100 per cent right in his books even otherwise. There are deficiencies. Nevertheless for students interested in the deeper history and psychology of mystic traditions, his works should not be ignored.