Painting by William Arkle
Colin Wilson wrote extensively - from The Outsider-Religion and the Rebel (1956-7) about the need for a change in 'perception' - such that the disaffected and alienated modern consciousness could learn a more visionary, wide-ranging and meaning-full mode of perceiving reality.
One explanation he came to favour was related to the insight he derived from Husserl that perception was intentional; that in fact we 'grasp' reality actively... or at least we should do not. Perception should not be passive - and we should not merely accept the way that we perceive from 'society'.
But how to do this? Wilson wrote a lot about this, but somehow none of his suggestions really worked for me: certainly they did not work well-enough to induce any significant or lasting transformation of my consciousness.
A big part of this failure was my rejection of God in general, and Christianity in particular. But a further aspect was that I could not really understand how I might change, for the better, the way I perceived - trying didn't seem to help.
I now see that the best way to approach (which I think implicitly Colin Wilson did himself - to some extent - but did not explicitly understand it in the way I am outlining it here. The insight derived from Rudolf Steiner's early philosophical work culminating in Philosophy of Freedom (1894). Steiner developed a metaphysical description of knowledge that described it in terms of Thinking which is as a consequence of a Percept (sensory perception) and a Concept (idea) - it is the joining of a Percept with a Concept that enables us to know.
Extending Steiner; it is clear that valid knowledge depends on the Percept being joined-with a True concept; and access to True concepts is something that all men have when thinking with their True Self. The True Self provides valid concepts because it is divine - that within-us which is divine.
My point here is that we cleanse The Doors Of Perception (the phrase is from William Blake) Not by doing anything with our senses (as implied by Aldous Huxley in his book of that name, concerning his use of mescaline). Nor by simply allowing our natural spontaneous consciousness to emerge - by losing control (e.g. by drugs, trances, in sleep, in Zen, in psychosis... various of the sixties counter-culture ideas) because that is hardly conscious at all.
Not by changing perception or suppressing consciousness; but by developing thinking in the direction of further consciousness and purpose; which means thinking-from our divine Self.
As both Steiner and his 'disciple' Owen Barfield saw; this requires understanding how Jesus Christ made this kind of thinking possible: made it, indeed, Man's destiny, Man's proper path in being offered the opportunity to become more divine; to become God-like: a godling or child of God.
All that is necessary - but we need to be clear that the doors of perception can be cleansed, as Wilson stated more than sixty years ago - but cleansed indirectly, by a transformation and strengthening of thinking.
One explanation he came to favour was related to the insight he derived from Husserl that perception was intentional; that in fact we 'grasp' reality actively... or at least we should do not. Perception should not be passive - and we should not merely accept the way that we perceive from 'society'.
But how to do this? Wilson wrote a lot about this, but somehow none of his suggestions really worked for me: certainly they did not work well-enough to induce any significant or lasting transformation of my consciousness.
A big part of this failure was my rejection of God in general, and Christianity in particular. But a further aspect was that I could not really understand how I might change, for the better, the way I perceived - trying didn't seem to help.
I now see that the best way to approach (which I think implicitly Colin Wilson did himself - to some extent - but did not explicitly understand it in the way I am outlining it here. The insight derived from Rudolf Steiner's early philosophical work culminating in Philosophy of Freedom (1894). Steiner developed a metaphysical description of knowledge that described it in terms of Thinking which is as a consequence of a Percept (sensory perception) and a Concept (idea) - it is the joining of a Percept with a Concept that enables us to know.
Extending Steiner; it is clear that valid knowledge depends on the Percept being joined-with a True concept; and access to True concepts is something that all men have when thinking with their True Self. The True Self provides valid concepts because it is divine - that within-us which is divine.
My point here is that we cleanse The Doors Of Perception (the phrase is from William Blake) Not by doing anything with our senses (as implied by Aldous Huxley in his book of that name, concerning his use of mescaline). Nor by simply allowing our natural spontaneous consciousness to emerge - by losing control (e.g. by drugs, trances, in sleep, in Zen, in psychosis... various of the sixties counter-culture ideas) because that is hardly conscious at all.
Not by changing perception or suppressing consciousness; but by developing thinking in the direction of further consciousness and purpose; which means thinking-from our divine Self.
As both Steiner and his 'disciple' Owen Barfield saw; this requires understanding how Jesus Christ made this kind of thinking possible: made it, indeed, Man's destiny, Man's proper path in being offered the opportunity to become more divine; to become God-like: a godling or child of God.
All that is necessary - but we need to be clear that the doors of perception can be cleansed, as Wilson stated more than sixty years ago - but cleansed indirectly, by a transformation and strengthening of thinking.
