I’ll be giving the second part of my talk on Colin Wilson online on 30 August from 7:00 - 9:00 pm UK time. Here’s the link to register. The talk is based on my book Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson. I gave the first part back in February, just before coronamania hit town. You can find that here. In the first talk, I focused on Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, and his roots in existentialism. Part 2 will follow on from that to Wilson’s ‘comeback’ book, The Occult which established him as one of the leading thinkers in the burgeoning consciousness and paranormal world of the 1970s. I will look at The Occult and the other books in Wilson’s “Occult trilogy,” Mysteries and Beyond the Occult.
In other news, my article “The Horror at Clinton Street: H. P. Lovecraft in Brooklyn,” is in the September 2020 issue of Fortean Times, #396, which should be available at a Temple to Dagon near you. I came to Lovecraft after cutting my Weird Tales teeth on Robert E. Howard’s testosterone injected tales of Conan the Barbarian, in the Lancer paperback editions of the mid 1960s, with their fantastic Frank Frazetta covers, full of swords, sorcery, rippling muscle and buxom wenches. Lovecraft was an eccentric, neurotic man of genius who transmuted his loathing of the modern world into tales of cosmic horror that at their best, produce a sense of awe. Sadly, his time in Brooklyn in the early 1920s, was not a picnic, and his dislike of people of colour or of less than colonial American descent, reached a paroxysm that, in a lesser individual, could have erupted into violence. In Lovecraft’s case, it produced one of his lesser tales, which nevertheless, put the Red Hook area of Brooklyn firmly on the Lovecraftian map…
New Dawn magazine, which hails from down under - Melbourne, Australia, to be exact - has been reprinting some of my older articles, as well as some new ones. In recent months I contributed articles on H. G. Wells and the Open Conspiracy(May-June 2020 #180) and the little read - at least in the English speaking world - German writer Ernst Junger (Special Issue Vol. 14 #3). In their Special Issue Vol. 13 # 6, I contributed my essay “Mystical Experience and the Evolution of Consciousness, and in the July-August 2020 issue has an early article about precognitive dreams and synchronicity, “Destiny Calling.” This was originally published back in 1997 in Quest magazine and has not been available until now. I mention in a note that it can serve as an introduction to my next book, Time and the Dreaming Mind, which will be published by Floris Books sometime in 2021, and which deals at greater length with the kinds of experiences I write about in the article. In the current Special Issue. Vol 14 #4, you can find my article on the Hermetic Revolution of the Renaissance, which originally appeared in Gnosis magazine in 1996, and laid the groundwork for my book The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus.
I’ve been doing quite a few interviews for The Return Of Holy Russia. Here are links to some that have appeared since my last post.
Here I speak with Mark Jeftovic at Spokentome about A Secret History of Consciousnessand The Caretakers of the Cosmos, two of my books that he has released in spoken word editions. If I remember correctly, we cover a lot of ground…
Here I chat with Piers Kaniuka of Resistance Recoveryabout my work in general.
This time it’s about T.C. Lethbridge, pendulums and the counter culture at the Bureau of Lost Culture.
At Mind Matters it’s all things a la Russe.
Here I talk about the “Russian soul” with a real Russian
It’s The Caretakers of the Cosmos at Zeitgeist.
And at Legalize Freedom it’s Holy Russia again.
Gary Lachman 
Hi Gary,
I am one of those lucky guys who got a chance to attend your lectures on Esotericism and the Evolution of Consciousness (today will be the third one, looking forward to it). In your lectures and your article “Mystical experience and the evolution of consciousness”, you refer to Iain McGilchrist’s concept of the bihemispheric structure of the brain as a possible tool for understanding the two types of consciousness/knowledge (gnosis and episteme). If I understand correctly, the idea is to find the way to balance or bring into co-operatation the “two fundamentally opposed realities” rooted in the difference of “the manner in which” the hemispheres perceive and process the information (if one can say so)? I started digging deeper into your research on this question only recently but feel impatient to ask if you happen to come across any systematic practical approaches in this area? Apart from experiments with substances that can alter our physiology and perception but are limited in the range, reproducibility, and duration of their effects on the human mind. For example, there were some attempts to invent a technology that would facilitate the heightened states of consciousness (consciousness hacking by Mikey Siegel). I was curious about what you may think about such an approach. Or do you think that the progress here is possible only through internal personal effort? Or maybe through something else? Thank you.
Hello Polina. I’ve not experimented much in this area and tend to stick within the field of my own efforts. But I do know that Robert Monroe, who wrote about out of the body experience, developed a system he called Hemi-Sync. This is a way of balancing the two cerebral hemispheres via sound. It is suppose to be fairly effective, but I only know reports of it, I haven’t tried it myself. To be honest, I think we already have a ‘technology’ that is designed to ‘slow down’ the ever rushing left brain. We call it art. I know much of contemporary art doesn’t seem a good example, but more traditional forms of art force us to ‘pay attention’ to them in order to appreciate them. This ‘slowing down’ allows the right brain’s contribution to be heard. But things like bio-feedback are also helpful. In the past I used an ioniser to help promote dreams. It worked. Cheers!
Lovecraft and Frazetta! Two of my favorites - thanks for posting.
My pleasure.