The Best of Colin Wilson A Free PDF eBook by Maurice Bassett Publishing Coming in January, 2004: • The Magician from Siberia • The Anatomy of Human Greatness www.ReinventingYourself.com Free Sample Chapters for Colin Wilson eBooks Use the “Find” feature (Ctrl+F) to search these sample chapters by keyword. To be notified when new eBooks are available, please use this contact form to request updates. Note: The following Electronic Books are for personal, non-commercial use only, and are not for resale. Download (1) Frankenstein's Castle 1-56 148-169 $9.95 Download (2) Access to Inner Worlds 1-69 $4.95 Download (3) New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution 1-47 179-196 $6.95 Download (4) The Ladder of Selves / The Search for Power Consciousness 1-23 98-110 $6.95 Download (5) Origins of the Sexual Impulse 1-96 $6.95 Download (6) The Age of Defeat (previously published in the US as The Stature of Man) 1-64 166-169 $6.95 Download (7) G.I. Gurdjieff: The War Against Sleep 1-37 128-133 $9.95 Download (8) The Strange Life of P.D. Ouspensky 1-46 150-154 $9.95 Download Special Offer: eBooks # 7 and # 8 (Gurdjieff / Ouspensky) in one eBook. $18.95 Produced January 4, 2004 Maurice Bassett Publishing, PO Box 4663, Chapel Hill, NC 27515 [email protected] Frankenstein’s Castle. Copyright © 1980, 2001 by Colin Wilson. Contributions by Michael Pastore are Copyright © 2001 by Zorba Press. All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced or copied in any form without permission from the publisher, Maurice Bassett: [email protected] Colin Wilson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Maurice Bassett Publishing http://www.ReinventingYourself.com Produced by Zorba Press http://www.ZorbaPress.com This eBook is for personal, non-commercial use only, and is not for resale. If you purchased this eBook from anyone other than Maurice Bassett Publishing please contact the publisher at [email protected] or 1-800-616-9498. Hardcover / paperback price for Frankenstein’s Castle. FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE 3 To Tony Britton with affection FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE 4 Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the help of Eddie Campbell, who not only suggested the writing of this book but offered many hints and suggestions. Also of two American correspondents, Dennis Stacy and Stephen Spickard, who went to a great deal of trouble to obtain for me details of the Basa case. Finally, my thanks to Idries Shah, for drawing my attention to Ornstein’s work on the split brain. CW FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE 5 Contents Detailed Contents ........................... 6 Chapter One: The ‘Other Mode’ ................. 10 Chapter Two: The Riddle of the Two Selves ......... 16 Chapter Three: More Mysteries ................. 37 Chapter Four: Frankenstein’s Castle .............. 56 Chapter Five: The Powers of the Right ............ 73 Chapter Six: Clues ......................... 90 Chapter Seven: Discoveries ................... 110 Endnotes To Frankenstein’s Castle .............. 139 Appendix A: Afterword to Colin Wilson’s Frankenstein’s Castle (essay by Michael Pastore) .................... 141 Appendix B: Colin Wilson and The Path To Personal Happiness (essay by Michael Pastore) .................... 144 Appendix C: The Energies Of Men (essay by William James) .................... 148 FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE 6 Detailed Contents Chapter One: The ‘Other Mode’ .................10 Flashes of the ‘other mode’ of consciousness. Examples. The ‘Romantic Outsiders’ and the ‘other mode’. Is the ‘other mode’ bad for the health? The ‘near and the far’. Des Esseintes at the Gare St Lazare. Maslow and the ‘peak experience’. T. E. Lawrence and ‘primal perception’. The robot and the ‘doors of perception’. Does the secret lie in the pre-frontal cortex? Chapter Two: The Riddle of the Two Selves .........16 Why do we have two brains? Is one a ‘spare’? The great cerebral commissure. Experiments to prevent epilepsy. Sperry investigates. Man has two separate minds. ‘You’ live in the left half of the brain. Are poltergeists due to the inhabitant of the right-brain? The Rosenheim case. Dowsing. The red-and-green light experiment. Poetic experience and the right-brain. The ‘false me’. Learning to turn intuitions into words. The left looks ‘inward’, the right ‘outward’. The right controls our energy supply. How can we persuade it to give us more? Freud and mesmerism. Charcot and his hysterical patients. Freud discovers the unconscious. He becomes convinced that consciousness is a puppet. The real cause of neurosis: ‘negative feedback’ between the halves. The Laurel and Hardy theory of neurosis. Janet on hysteria. Cyril Burt’s case of May Naylor. Wilder Penfield’s discovery about memory-storage. ‘I’ am bigger than I realise. Steppenwolf and Yeats. The ‘partial mind’. Do we all suffer from hysteria? James and his ‘Energies of Men’. The ‘habit of inferiority to the full self’. How can we get rid of the habit? FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE 7 Chapter Three: More Mysteries .................. 37 The case of Teresita Basa, and the ‘possession’ of Mrs Chua. Is personality a part of the structure of the brain? The case of Jasbir Lal Jat. The case of Lurancy Verrum. The case of Louis Vive. Christine Beauchamp and ‘Sally’. Doris Fischer and ‘Margaret’. Levels of personality? Different brain patterns of the ‘personalities’. Galton induces ‘persecution mania’. James and automatic writing. Is the left a villain? Hesse’s ‘Russian Man’. The Dam Busters and the ‘two beams’ of consciousness. Gibbon and the Decline and Fall. ‘Forgetfulness’ of existence. What has gone wrong with human evolution? We fail to make proper use of consciousness. The alliance of the left-brain and the robot: how it operates. Durrenmatt’s Angel and Greene’s whiskey priest. How can we break through to a new evolutionary level? Chapter Four: Frankenstein’s Castle .............. 56 Ward’s Drug Taker’s Notes: ‘a state of consciousness already more complete than the fullest degree of ordinary awareness’. Disappearance of the sense of time. The role of serotonin. The pineal gland. The brain is a Frankenstein’s Castle. The right-brain as criminal. Huxley and mescalin. The drawbacks. The ‘bad trip’. My own mescalin experience. The objection to psychedelics. Cossery’s advocacy of hashish in A Room in Cairo. The objections. Julian Jaynes and his theory of the ‘bicameral mind’. The development of the left-brain ego. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the rejection of ‘civilisation’. Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents. De Sade unintentionally demonstrates the fallacy in the ‘rejection’ argument. How to avoid being trapped in left-brain consciousness. Hans Selye and stress. Coue, Schult and Liebault. Auto-suggestion and its power to repair the homeostatic system. Kamiya and bio-feedback. Neil Miller’s FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE 8 trained rats. The objections to bio-feedback as a solution: James and the Chautauqua Community. Aleister Crowley and Jane Wolfe. Crowley’s limitations. Jacob Boehme’s mystical vision. Robert Graves and ‘The Abominable Mr Gunn’. Plotinus. The dual ego. Chapter Five: The Powers of the Right .............73 Thomson J. Hudson and The Law of Psychic Phenomena. The ‘objective mind’ and the ‘subjective mind’. The powers of the subjective mind: man who talked with Socrates. Zerah Colburn as an example of the subjective mind. Hypnosis and telepathy. Janet’s case of Leonie. Dr Julian Ochorowitz and paranormal powers induced by hypnosis. Ochorowitz visits Janet. Liebault’s experiment: the red hat. Clairvoyance under hypnosis. Didier and ‘travelling clairvoyance’. Hudson cures a relative suffering from arthritis. Multiple personality and paranormal powers. Christine Sizemore and ESP. The Stockwell poltergeist case. Where does the energy come from? The earth? John Taylor’s electromagnetic theory. William Roll’s epilepsy theory. Spontaneous combustion. Human electric eels. The mystery of animal ‘homing’. Sensitivity to earth magnetism. Levitation. St Joseph of Copertino. Sir Jack Harris and the Polish violinist. Chapter Six: Clues .......................... 90 Personal experiences. The importance of optimism. The importance of the Christmas experience. Loss of confidence. The Bhagavad Gita. Marriage and the study of Christian mystics. Is human life basically futile? The paradoxical nature of freedom. Raskolnikov and his ‘narrow ledge’. Ivan Karamazov’s sinner. The ‘St Neot margin’. The insight at Teignmouth. The London train experience. Control of consciousness by effort. The Cheltenham experience. The FRANKENSTEIN’S CASTLE 9 bicycle ride. The walk over Helvellyn. Panic attacks. The attack at Ullswater. Robert Ardrey and the ‘dominant 5 per cent’. The flatworm experiment. The real danger — the instinct-robot alliance. Chapter Seven: Discoveries ................... 110 Hudson’s three propositions. The turn of the tide. No mad monsters in the castle. Howard Miller and hypnosis. The dentist who could control bleeding. Miller’s experiments with cancer patients. Is thought independent of the brain? The ‘Unit of Pure Thought’. The inner phantasmagoria. The computer. Is Miller merely echoing Husserl? My own insight into the ‘controlling ego’. The two Irish navvies. Hemingway’s ‘Soldier’s Home’. The ladder of selves. Habit-neurosis. D. H. Lawrence and his objections to the personal ego. Forgetfulness — Nietzsche’s cows. Yeats and Michelangelo. Frankl’s prisoners at Dachau. The power of suggestion. Maslow and his students. The hosepipe and the garden tap. The flatworm experiment again. The mechanism of ‘life failure’. Failure of the ‘triple-alliance’. The ego is to blame. The fatal alliance of instinct and robot. Why does the split-brain operation make so little difference? Mozart and creativity. The vicious circle. Graham Greene and the ‘Revolver in the Corner Cupboard’. The housewife who discovered she was free. Human beings are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings. The ‘if-only’ feeling. ‘To be free is nothing; to become free is heaven’. The broken spring. Ramakrishna and samadhi. Summary: the newness of the triple alliance. Ramakrishna’s grass-eating tiger.