FACULTY X

Gary Lachman (2016). Beyond the Robot:

                                     The Life and Work of Colin Wilson.

Lachman is a spiritual seeker and writer that chronicles the life of Colin Wilson, especially the ideas from the books Wilson wrote and the circumstances of publishing them. 

The central question occupying most of Wilson's life was: how to transform consciousness at will. There are hints along the way, sensory deprivation, dreams, breaking the habitual robot mentality, using sex to intensify consciousness to obtain more energy and activate the imagination, occult practices...AND my main criticism is Wilson does not, in Lachman's book (he may in his own books which i have not read), get down to pragmatics, to method, to what one should DO to facilitate intentional shifts in consciousness. This is disappointing...after an entire lifetime of pursuing "Faculty X" (the mysterious faculty for inducing shifts in consciousness at will), Wilson does not instruct us in method, something that could be passed on and improved in the next generation. 

Despite this criticism, there are many gems of wisdom sprinkled throughout the book such as (paraphrasing):

1)everything of real value to a human being is UNRREAL, that is, non-material, for example, love, beauty, goodness, truth, purpose, meaning are not objects of the material world that one can point to and say "this is it", rather they are internal experiences, part of consciousness. Sadly, my observations suggest that, for most people, much of their life-energy is devoted to acquiring material things that are often at the expense of personal relationships and things of "real value."

2)psychedelics that "bliss one out" weaken the will, the ability to discern, to consciously make decisions, to do things in life...in this sense, psychedelics are not the ideal path to transforming consciousness at will.

3)as we learn to do things, the robot mind inside us tends to take over by habituating things, making our lives "easier" by transferring the activity to autopilot. The problem is that some things we don't want to experience on automatic pilot, like making love, listening to good music, absorbing a beautiful sunset...to prevent the robot from taking over all aspects of our lives, we need to keep a creative edge, to playfully switch things up, to do things different, to add uniqueness into our days.

as a practice, we can reduce the autopilot habits of the robot mind by creating some "newness" in our days by, for example, eating with your nondominant hand, taking a different route to school or work, trying a different dish each week (check for vegetarian recipes on-line), drawing with a different medium (pencil, pen, colored pencils, charcoal, crayons, pastels...), listening to a different type of music...let yourself be surprised and renewed by your efforts to add some newness to the day and thereby decrease the grip of the robot in your life.