Tag: Synchronicty

Beyond the Robot Part 2, H. P. Lovecraft, Precognition, and Holy Russia.

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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.

Lost Knowledge with Jung the Mystic - and a Dark Star

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I’ll be speaking about my books Jung the Mystic and Lost Knowledge of the Imagination at three Saturday Salons hosted by the Salome Institute of Jungian Studies. (Odd, just as I wrote “Salome,” the announcer on BBC Radio 3 - their classical station - commented on Salome’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” from Richard Strauss’ opera… That’s synchronicity for you.) The dates are April 11 and 25, and May 9. The talks are on Saturday mornings, 10:00 AM PST, which is 6:00 PM GMT. The Salome Institute is offering a 3 for 2 deal. If you’re tired of looking at cat videos, this might be a surprising change.

I’m also talking about my book Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump at an online event hosted by the Science and Medical Network. This starts at 7:30 PM GMT on 6 April.

I hope everyone is staying safe. As I mentioned on Twitter, I’ve been looking over my dream journals of several years - going back to the late 1980s and early 90s - and in a dream from 1998, I am told to “Just stay home. There’s no reason to go out. Just stay home, where it’s safe.” Here’s the link. I don’t know if this counts as a precognitive dream - that’s the focus of my next book - but it is certainly quite a coincidence.

 

Colin Wilson: Beyond the Robot, A Talk for the Theosophical Society

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Here’s a link to a video of a talk I gave on 29 February 2020 on Colin Wilson’s life and ideas for the Theosophical Society here in London. As often happens with my talks, Part 1 ran over the original hour scheduled, so it was agreed that I would return later this year to give Part 2. The first part deals with Wilson’s early career, with The Outsider and the “new existentialism” he tried to establish through the books of the “Outsider Cycle.” Part 2 will deal with Wilson’s ideas about the occult, the paranormal and mystical experience. As readers of Wilson know, all of his work is centered around the question of the evolution of consciousness.

As you may notice, toward the beginning of the video I mention an odd synchronicity I had on the way to the talk. En route I stopped at a local market. While in the checkout queue, I casually looked at the magazine rack. There were a stack of Vogue magazines with most of the cover of the top one obscured by the magazines in the lower rack. But what was visible were the words “The Outsider.” As it turned out, this was the title of an article about a current pop singer and had nothing to do with Wilson. But as I was on my way to talk about The Outsider, I took it as a sign. It was the kind of synchronicity that Wilson himself would have loved, and it will feature in the book about precognitive dreams and synchronicity that I am about to start. It’s tentative title is Time and the Dreaming Mind.

Here’s a link to my tweet about this.