Colin Wilson's Double Brain

(This article is based on a talk I'll be giving at the Fourth International Colin Wilson Conference held in Soho, London, 7 July 2025.)

In 2011 I was invited to Oslo, Norway, to take part in several events having to do with the esoteric teacher Rudolf Steiner. A Norwegian translation of my book about Steiner had just been published and I was there to promote it. There is a strong anthroposophical presence in Oslo – a part of the city is even called the Anthroposophical Quarter – and my hosts were members of the local anthroposophical group. (Anthroposophy is the name Steiner gave to his teaching.) I even stayed in a house Steiner himself had stayed in.

I enjoyed my visit very much, taking in sites like the house where Knut Hamsun had lived, whose novel Hunger I had read years earlier, and meeting local dignitaries in the Grand Café, a favourite of Ibsen and Munch. But one strong memory of my visit is of reading the book I had brought along on the trip. I have a very vivid recollection of sitting at an outdoor café, ordering a noticeably highly priced coffee, and leaning back in the sunlight and opening it. Soon into it I knew it was one those books that prove to be very important.

It was The Master and His Emissary (2009) and its author was Iain McGilchrist. McGilchrist is a neuroscientist as well as an English scholar, and in a nutshell what he does in the book, at great length and with much persuasive detail, is reboot the ‘right brain/left brain’ conversation that had petered out sometime in the 1990s. I had read a great deal about our two brains in Colin Wilson’s work, but I was aware that the ‘right brain artist, left brain scientist’ view had been abandoned by mainstream neuroscientists, mostly because it had been picked up by new age enthusiasts and ‘pop psychologists’ – in which camp hardline neuroscientists would no doubt include Wilson himself.

Colin Wilson

But cliched as it became, the ‘artist right, scientist left’ polarity is rooted in fact. Our left brain is geared toward language, precision, logic and sequential thought; it is pragmatic, practical and efficient. It is focused on dealing with the world and it does this best by turning reality into a set of symbols, dehydrated abstractions from the real thing. Our right brain does not speak in words, but communicates in feelings, intuitions, hunches, physical sensation. It isn’t interested in getting things done, like the obsessive left brain, but in ‘appreciating’ what is. It likes to be, as we say, “in the moment,” unlike the time-conscious left brain, which is always in a hurry. The right brain grasps patterns; it sees things simultaneously, not in sequence. It perceives reality freshly, with a kind of ‘primal perception’. When we have the feeling that we have just seen a leaf for the first time, it is the right brain that has seen it. The left brain sees them all the time – or rather it thinks it does.

Yet, for all this difference, it seemed that the early localising of ‘language left brain’ and ‘image right brain’ was too neat. Although there is an emphasis in each cerebral hemisphere for certain actions, both brains seem to ‘do’ the same thing, or are involved to differing degrees in the same action. This led scientists to wonder why we have two of them. We don’t have a spare heart or kidney. There seemed no reason for the redundancy. And with pop psychologists telling their readers how to draw on – or with – the right brain, tenure-minded researchers thought it best to drop the brain, both of them.

The Master and His Emissary

What McGilchrist does in The Master and His Emissary is to show that there is a reason we have two brains. But the difference between them is not so much in what they do as in how they do it. As I say above, the left is geared toward manipulating the world, to navigating us through it successfully. That is, its prime directive is to survive, and it does that best if we do. It does this by ‘unpacking’ the global, total gestalt that the right brain presents of the world.

The right sees ‘everythingallatonce’; its consciousness is relational, as Wilson says in Poetry and Mysticism (1970), although here he is not yet talking specifically about the right brain.[1] It ‘spreads out’, like the ripples on a clear pond after a stone has pierced the surface, encompassing more and more reality. But in order to bring the details of this global picture into focus, the right brain relies on the left. It brings a measure of precision, zeroing in tighter and tighter on what William Blake called “minute particulars.” It sees the world ‘one-thing-at-a-time’. If the right brain sees the forest as a whole, the left sees an individual tree, then an individual leaf, then the leaf’s cells and, eventually, its atoms. The right brain looks through a telescope, the left, a microscope.

           The right brain’s view is total, immediate, living but it is a bit fuzzy. Think of the warm glow of meaning that arises mysteriously from common objects after the first glass of wine of the evening. Suddenly they are ‘interesting’ when before they weren’t. This is why wine has always been associated with poetry. The obsessive left brain is inhibited – we call it ‘relaxing’ – and we can take in aspects of the world that it usually edits out.

It is a delightful state. But if we stayed in it, nothing would get done. We have all heard stories of the jolly imbiber who can’t fit his key in his door. So the left brain is called in to map the terrain the right presents. It does this superbly. But it achieves its pinpoint accuracy at a cost: the ‘relation’ of whatever it is focusing on to everything else. Its laser-like precision cuts its object off from its connection to the rest of reality. So if a right brain perception bereft of the left’s editing leaves us in a hazy but oddly delightful state, an overemphasised left brain perception results in a kind of crystal clear obsessive tunnel vision.

Goldilocks gettiing it "just right."

Clearly what is wanted is for both brains to work at the same time. When this happens we have what I call the "Goldilocks effect": not right or left, but “just right,” just as Goldilocks in the fairy tale chooses the bowl of porridge that isn’t too hot or too cold, or the bed that isn’t too hard or too soft. Depending on the circumstances, such collaboration can result in what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called a ‘peak experience’, a sudden, unsolicited moment of delight, like seeing a leaf “for the first time.” Or it could trigger a creative work or aesthetic experience. Or, on some occasions, even a mystical experience. In these moments, what the right brain supplies is another dimension, one of meaning. When supported by this deeper, richer perception, our experience takes on a quality of what we can only call greater reality.

Yet, most of the time, the left brain is in the driver’s seat and the right is a kind of wingman or helpful sidekick. Sometimes it is just a passenger. One of the presumptions about our cerebral hemispheres held by mainstream neuroscientists is that the left is the dominant one, with the right a compliant partner. This is a presumption McGilchrist set out to dispute. He contends that the older right brain brought the left into service, precisely in order to help define its global vision. In McGilchrist’s view, the left brain is the “emissary” of his book’s title, with the right brain being the “master.” But, he contends, something has gone wrong. The emissary has usurped control and the master has fallen under his rule.

The Industrial Revolution

Our two brains work, McGilchrist believes, like the way the United States government is supposed to work – or at least used to - with a series of checks and balances, with one branch of government keeping another branch in line. In the same way, McGilchrist suggests that each brain mitigates the excesses of the other. For most of human existence, this polarity has been characterised by a kind of friendly rivalry, in which neither brain dominated the other completely (although, as McGilchrist points out, at some periods one brain has had a kind of ascendancy over the other). What has happened, McGilchrist believes, is that for the past few centuries – certainly since the Industrial Revolution – the left brain has gradually gained dominance over the right, until, today, in our postmodern age, it seems to have completely neutralised any input from its neighbour.

The left brain is geared toward survival. Years ago the philosopher Henri Bergson said that the brain is the “organ of attention to life.” We know now that he meant the left brain (conversely, when Bergson spoke of “intuition” and “duration,” he was speaking about a right brain mode of consciousness). The left brain does its work by turning new experience into something it is already familiar with, something it already “knows.” It makes experience typical. So, rather than the leaf you see for the first time, you see a leaf, just a leaf, like the thousands of others you have seen before. Incidentally, the exchange in Dostoevsky’s The Devils, in which  Kirilov tells Stavrogin about his experience with a leaf, “just a leaf,” spells this out with absolute clarity.

Just a leaf, or one seen for the first time?

We know that each leaf is different from the others. This is exactly what we realise when we see the leaf “for the first time”. What we see is its uniqueness, in the way we would see it as a child. But in order to deal with life effectively and efficiently, our diligent left brain reduces the unique leaf to “simply” a leaf, just as it does with the rest of our experience. This indeed is a great and indispensable aid in coping with life and the world. The problem is, the left brain does its job too well, and McGilchrist argues that in doing so, the left brain has created a kind of exteriorization of itself, recreating the world in its own image, and editing out any contribution from the right. The many challenges we face in our postmodern world, from climate change to radical politics to social breakdown and the rise in mental illness, can, McGilchrist argues, be laid at the door of our over-dominant left brain.

Our pointless universe

We can also hold it responsible for the overarching sense of meaninglessness that has characterised much of culture, at least in the West, for more than a century now. The astrophysicist Steven Weinberg famously said that the more the universe seems comprehensible– to the left brain, that is - the more it also seems pointless. From existentialism to postmodernism and deconstructionism, as well as logical positivism and linguistic analysis, contemporary philosophy seems to agree. It is the right brain that perceives meaning, but this meaning is implicit, felt. Think of the effect of great music. The meaning the right brain perceives isn’t explicit, measurable or quantifiable, and cannot be pinned down exactly, only alluded to, shown, as Ludwig Wittgenstein, a very left brain individual, makes clear at the end of the Tractatus[2]. This is what art, poetry and music do – or at least used to. And in a left brain dominated world, being measurable and quantifiable are what count. All else is “merely subjective.”

Readers of my books know that McGilchrist’s work has informed my own. I have written about his ideas in several places.[3] I have met him on several occasions and more than once we have taken part in talks and seminars. The same readers will also know the influence Colin Wilson’s work has had on mine. On at least one occasion I mentioned Wilson’s ideas about the relationship between our brains to McGilchrist and suggested he might take a look at them. And although the stroke he suffered in 2011 – the year I came across McGilchrist’s book -  prevented Wilson from reading The Master and His Emissary, I knew it was a book that would have interested him, and I suggested as much in an email to his wife Joy, who later told me that she had read some of it to him. So, in some small way, I have tried to stimulate a cross-fertilization between them. What I’d like to do here is look at Wilson’s view of the relationship between our two brains and how my own reading of it over many years, prepared me for the insights I came upon in McGilchrist’s book.

Among the many things that grabbed my attention in The Master and His Emissary, one immediately stood out as a link to Wilson’s work. It was McGilchrist’s use of an account by Thomas De Quincey of an exchange he had with his friend William Wordsworth, to illustrate the differences between our cerebral hemispheres.[4] De Quincey asked Wordsworth how he came to write poetry. What was the process? Wordsworth said he didn’t know. They were in the Lake District at the time, and as evening set in, Wordsworth put his ear to the road to hear if the mail coach was on its way from Keswick. As Wordsworth got up, he saw a star, which struck him as beautiful. Suddenly he told De Quincey that now he did know how poetry comes to him. He told De Quincey that “If ever I am concentrating on something that has nothing to do with poetry”– like listening for the mail coach – “and then I suddenly relax my attention, whatever I see when I relax appears to me to beautiful.”

William Wordsworth

Thomas De Quincey

McGilchrist says that this illustrates a switch from a left brain to a right brain perception. The practical left brain listening intently for the mail coach relaxes, and the right brain perception of the star as beautiful – a distinctly non-utilitarian characteristic - is allowed into consciousness. As McGilchrist writes, “The vision comes because of an effort made and then relaxed.”[5] Poets, it seem, have a natural ability to slip into the kind of relaxed state most of us require a glass of Chardonnay to achieve.

When I read this account in McGilchrist’s book I knew that I had come across this story before. And indeed I had, some thirty years earlier. In January, 1981, during a holiday in London, I attended a talk Colin Wilson gave at the Village Bookshop on Regent Street; sadly it no longer exists. Wilson was promoting his new book, Frankenstein’s Castle (1980), about the right brain. And in the talk he told the same story of De Quincey and Wordsworth. I remember this distinctly because I recorded the talk on my then state-of-the-art Sony Walkman and for many years listened to it. Wilson used it as an illustration of his insight that a process of mental “contraction” and “expansion” can produce something like Maslow’s “peak experience,” or Wordsworth’s sighting of a beautiful star. First the grip, then the release, like clenching and unclenching a fist. But in this case it is a fist of the mind.[6]

Although I had read Robert Ornstein’s The Psychology of Consciousness (1972), which discusses split-brain theory, as early as 1974, when I was first at university, it wasn’t until I bought a copy of Frankenstein’s Castle at Wilson’s talk – which he very kindly signed for me – that I looked into the matter seriously. In the book Wilson himself mentions that it wasn’t until 1978 that he came across Julian Jaynes’ influential work The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), as well as Ornstein’s book. He remarks that the importance of split-brain psychology should have struck him sooner, as he had read Roger Sperry’s groundbreaking article on it in Scientific America in January 1965. Yet one wonders if he had subconsciously recognised its importance – or if perhaps his right brain had.

Beyond the Outsider

In Beyond the Outsider (1965), in the context of presenting the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s notion of a “transcendental ego” as a precursor to Husserl’s phenomenology, Wilson, remarking on the difference between our everyday ego and our “transcendental” one, suggests that “The left side of the mind doesn’t know what the right side is doing.”[7] This seems a remarkable anticipation of what Wilson will later recognise as a similar relationship between our two brains. Readers of Beyond the Outsider will also know that it is in this volume of the “Outsider cycle,” that Wilson introduces the notion of what he calls “the St. Neot’s Margin,” or “the indifference threshold.” This is the name Wilson gave to the insight that there is a state of human consciousness in which pleasant stimuli have no effect but in which unpleasant ones will get a reaction. As he writes, in this state of indifference, “pain and inconvenience stimulates [our] vitality far more than pleasure.”[8]

This seems an anticipation of what we might call “the Wordsworth effect,” with an inconvenience forcing us to “make a fist of the mind,” and then relaxing it. Wilson doesn’t yet relate this to a switch from left to right brain consciousness, as he will later, but the effect, the phenomenology of the experience is the same. (In Frankenstein’s Castle p. 110 he does in fact make this connection.) In Wordsworth’s case, the “inconvenience” of listening for the mail cart and then relaxing produced a vision of a beautiful star. In Wilson’s case, it produced the “absurd good news” – as he often refers to this state – that he would make it to Peterborough, where he was hitchhiking to, for a visit he didn’t want to make.[9]

Perhaps the most dramatic “inconvenience” Wilson refers to in this context, and one he will return to many times – he did, in fact, in the talk at the Village Bookshop in 1981 – is that of the novelist Graham Greene dispelling teenage boredom by playing Russian roulette with his brother’s revolver on Berkhamsted Common. Greene, clinically depressed, put the barrel to his head, grimaced, and pulled the trigger. When he heard only the click of the hammer on an empty cylinder, his depression vanished and he was suddenly flooded with an overwhelming sense of meaning and beauty.

Colin Wilson, myself and unknown other, Village Bookshop, January 1981

Five seconds before Greene was bored enough to risk suicide. Now everything was more marvellous than he could tell. What had happened? The same thing that had happened to Wordsworth and to Wilson, although in Greene’s case, the “tightening” was more intense – he had a one-in-six chance of blowing out his brains - and hence so was the relaxation. Yet as McGilchrist said of Wordsworth, “the vision comes because of an effort made then relaxed.” The same was true of Wilson and Greene. Readers of Wilson will know that he offers similar examples of the same phenomenon throughout his work, such as Sri Ramakrishna triggering a vision of the Divine Mother Kali  by his own attempt at suicide that Wilson relates in his first book, The Outsider (1956).[10]

As far as I can tell, Wilson first mentions split-brain psychology in Mysteries (1978). In the chapter “The Mechanisms of Enlightenment,” he refers to Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind as outlining an “interesting theory of mystical experience.”[11] Given that Mysteries  was published in 1978 and Wilson writes about Jaynes’ theory, he must have come across Jaynes’ book earlier than that year, although in Frankenstein’s Castle he gives that year as when he first read it. In Dreaming to Some Purpose (2004), Wilson writes that he was introduced to Jaynes’ book by Ira Einhorn, a “alternative thought” networker, whom Wilson had met in Philadelphia.[12] Einhorn arrived at Wilson’s house with a copy of the book. Wilson says he was “three quarters of the way through”  Mysteries when Einhorn visited, so we can assume this must have been sometime in 1976, when Jaynes’ book was published. This was around the same time that Wilson went through the series of “panic attacks” he writes about in the Introduction to Mysteries. Subsequently Wilson brought our two brains into his work on biography (The Quest for Wilhelm Reich (1981)), parapsychology (Poltergeist! (1981)), criminality (A Criminal History of Mankind (1984)), the occult (Beyond the Occult (1987)), ancient civilizations (From Atlantis to The Sphinx (1996)), UFOs (Alien Dawn (1998)) and other books.

Ira Einhorn

Although Frankenstein’s Castle was Wilson first “full length” treatment of the right brain – even so, it is a short book – he had written about our two brains in a few other places.[13] In The War Against Sleep (1980), his short book about Gurdjieff, he relates our two cerebral hemispheres to what Gurdjieff called “essence” and “personality.” In Gurdjieff’s system, “essence” is what we are born with; it is our true, essential self. “Personality”  is a kind of protective coating we develop, in order to deal with the world. It starts around the age of six or seven, and develops through our interaction with other people. Soon it takes over, shunting essence aside, which suffers a kind of “arrested development.” The essence of most of us stop there, remaining childlike, adolescent.

The aim of Gurdjieff’s demanding system is to slowly loosen the hold of personality so to allow essence to develop. Wilson points out that one of Gurdjieff’s most significant remarks about essence and personality is that they are located “in different parts of the brain.” When Gurdjieff made these remarks, in London in the early 1920s, split-brain theory was non-existent; but Wilson made the connection.[14]

“Personality” seems to live in our left brain, given that our verbal “I” resides there, while our less sophisticated “essence” seems to occupy the right. Wilson relates this to the famous experiments of Roger Sperry. Cutting the knot of fibres joining the two hemispheres – known as the corpus callosum - Sperry discovered that this resulted in the patient literally splitting into two different people, a verbal ‘self’ in the left brain, and a non-verbal ‘other self’ in the right, who can often be at odds.[15] Readers of Wilson will know the examples of this he gives in several books. With such split-brain patients, it is literally true, as Wilson suggested fifteen years earlier, that the “left side of the mind doesn’t know what the right side is doing.”

The Laurel and Hardy Theory of Consciousness

The earliest account of our two brains by Wilson that I can locate is an article he wrote for the magazine, Second Look, that was put out by the writer Robert Temple. “The Laurel & Hardy Theory of Consciousness” appeared in 1979 and was  later published as a pamphlet by Broadside Editions in 1986.[16] Wilson begins the article by asking a question that anyone who looks into the matter has asked: “Why, in fact, do we have two brains?” Admitting that he is neither a brain physiologist or even a scientist, and recognising that any answer to this question from him will be one born of pure speculation, he nevertheless proceeds to “extrapolate” and “spin interesting and totally unproven theories” about our brains, something his more fastidious colleagues find deplorable.[17]

It is with one of these “unproven theories” that I will close this article. It is one in which Wilson, whose intuitive insights into our two brains anticipate much of McGilchrist’s later more detailed account fairly closely, disagrees with him on an important point. The disagreement is over how we understand the ‘dominance’ of the left brain.

Wilson agrees with McGilchrist about the disadvantages of an overly left brain consciousness: the manic drive to efficiency, the leeching out of any “meaning” from experience, the tunnel-vision and loss of connection to wider reality, the substitution of a set of dehydrated symbols for the right’s “primal perception,” the loss of spontaneity and so on, and the ill effects this has had. And he understands the attraction of right brain consciousness to writers like D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, who argue that our problem is too much “head consciousness” and not enough of the kind the solar plexus and other parts of the anatomy provide.[18] But Wilson argues that the means of correcting the imbalance isn’t for the left brain to give up its position in favour of the right. The two must work together. But, he argues, it is for the left to realise that it isn’t fulfilling its proper function. What is that? It is what we might call being the director of consciousness. Indeed, pre-echoing McGilchrist but with a bit a twist, Wilson even tells us that the left-brain ego is, or should be, the master of consciousness.[19]

Laurel and Hardy

And what does the old comedy team of Laurel and Hardy have to do with this? If we think of Ollie as “personality” and Stan as “essence,” it may help. In the old films, Ollie is the “boss,” much as the left brain is, and Stan seems to fit the bill of the helpful sidekick right brain, although how helpful he is can be debated (he’s always getting Ollie into “another fine mess”). Wilson points out that Stan always looks to Ollie for his cue. If Ollie is happy, Stan is ecstatic; if he is sad, Stan is miserable. Wilson points out that however Ollie is, Stan always overreacts.

Why is this important? Wilson mentions that when he read Robert Ornstein’s book, he was working on his biography of Wilhelm Reich, the renegade Freudian. He mentions that Freud tended to see the unconscious as some sort of monster of the depths. Freud came to this conclusion after seeing at first hand the effect of hysteria, with phantom pregnancies and other physical conditions brought on by the mind. Freud also knew that hypnosis could produce the same effects. Our conscious mind cannot, and so Freud concluded that the unconscious mind is much more powerful than its conscious partner. Where Freud went wrong, Wilson thought, was in concluding that since the unconscious mind is more powerful than the conscious mind, it must be “in control.” Hence the notion that “we”, our conscious egos, are the puppets of our unconscious.

Sigmund Freud

Wilson agreed that the unconscious mind – whose gateway, he believed, led through the right brain – was more powerful than the conscious mind. But he saw that “power” does not necessarily mean “control.” An ocean liner is immensely more powerful than its captain, but it’s the captain that decides where it goes. Likewise, the small boy riding an elephant could easily be crushed by it, but he nevertheless steers it where he likes. But if this was the case, what’s wrong with human beings? Why aren’t our conscious minds (captain) steering our unconscious minds (ocean liner)? Wilson concluded that the problem is that we don’t realise that we, our conscious egos,  should be in control.

But the conscious ego – the left brain -is causing all the trouble, isn’t it? Yes, Wilson said, but not for the reasons we think it is. If  Stan, the right brain, controls our energies – the kind that can produce hypnotic phenomena and also poetic vision – he nevertheless looks to Ollie for his cue. So if Ollie sees that it's a dull day, he passes that assessment on to Stan, who grimaces and closes the purse strings on our energy supply. Because Stan is economising, Ollie gets less energy, and his assessment of the day worsens. “It really is a dull day…”

But if Ollie gets an unexpected bit of good news – say a surprise royalty cheque – he lets Stan know. Suddenly  they are both beaming with delight.

Stan, the source of power, looks to Ollie for when to draw on it. The problem is, Wilson says, most of the time, Ollie isn’t sending Stan upbeat messages. Most of time, what he hears from us are complaints, groans, heavy sighs and expletives. We have developed a habit of anticipating the worse and expecting life to be a grim struggle with infrequent breathing spaces. And Stan’s overreactions only make the situation worse. He curls up and turns away and releases less energy. But given that Stan – the right brain – supplies our experience with a dimension of meaning, the meagre provisions he offers results in our experience becoming meaningless.

Yet, when crisis or inconvenience turns up, we do take control. We give Stan the order to supply us with as much power as we need and he does. We’ve seen inconvenience lead to poetry, to an unexpectedly delightful journey, and a gloomy teenager’s mystical experience. In Frankenstein’s Castle Wilson makes the point that a hypnotist is able to give a command to his subject that he would be unable to fulfil in his conscious state but which he easily does while hypnotised, even to the point of not bleeding when a tooth is extracted.[20]

Why? Why can the subject perform the feat when hypnotised but not when in his normal state of mind? Because “he,” the conscious ego, does not believe that he can, and this lack of conviction is communicated to the unconscious mind. Wilson argues that in hypnosis, the conscious ego – left brain – is put to sleep, while the right remains awake. The right responds to the commands of the hypnotist because they are given with authority, the kind of authority the right brain only feels from the left when it is confronted with crisis. If the conscious ego could speak with the same authority as the hypnotist, the unconscious (right brain, Stan) would respond post haste.

Crisis, anyone?

I should perhaps point out that the “voice of authority” here is ultimately the same as that of Fichte’s and Husserl’s “transcendental ego.” According to Wilson, this ego may not be as transcendental as they thought and may be much closer to home than they suspected.

Wilson argues that this suggests that what is wrong is that the left brain, Ollie, is constantly giving the right brain, Stan, the wrong sort of message. Most of the time, we are not faced with challenge, crisis or inconvenience, nor are we bored enough to try our hand at Russian roulette. Most of the time we find ourselves in the kind of desiccated, hyper-tense state of left brain consciousness that we have come to accept as normal, and we rely on stimuli of some kind to ‘unwind’ and allow some of our ‘other mode of consciousness’ equal time. Drugs and alcohol are popular expedients. They have their effect by inhibiting the left brain.

But in moments of crisis, of the “effort” that precedes the “vision,” the left brain isn’t inhibited. It is in the driver’s seat, but instead of wondering which way it should head, as it often does, it knows exactly where it wants to go. To change to an earlier mobile metaphor, most of the time the captain of our ocean liner is in his cabin, looking out the portal and wondering where the captain is and why the ship is going round in circles. Then something wakes him up – crisis, inconvenience, some outer challenge – and he realises that he is the captain, and he races to give the orders. The problem, Wilson says, is that as soon as he has the ship back on course, he forgets he is the captain and wanders back to his cabin…

What is needed is some means of keeping the captain awake and at his post. In practical terms, this amounts to what Wilson elsewhere called “the challenge of no challenge.” That is, the challenge of maintaining the kind of authority we have when faced with challenge, but without the actual crisis. Can we make a fist of the mind without putting a gun to our heads? Can we discipline ourselves to maintain a purposive attitude that would act as a kind of constant call to concentrate the mind and “pay attention,” so that Stan gets the message and increases our ration of “meaning?” Abraham Maslow discovered that psychologically healthy people, leading purposeful lives, were often subject to “peak experiences.” If we relate Maslow’s peak experiences with moments when the two brains work together, as I do above, this suggests that Wilson was on to something. The “purposiveness” suggested here is not the same as the obsessive manic busyness that the left brain often gets caught up in. Nor is it some austere ascetic regime. It is a way of living with “intention.” When we do this the emissary who has usurped power from the master realises that working together is better for both of them.

 [1] Colin Wilson Poetry and Mysticism (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1970) pp. 55-58.

[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961) pp. 149-51.

[3] Specifically The Caretakers of the Cosmos (2013), The Secret Teachers of the Western World (2015) and Lost Knowledge of the Imagination (2017).

[4] Iain McGilchrist The Master and His Emissary (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009) p. 377

[5] Iain McGilchrist The Master and His Emissary (London: Yale University Press, 2010) p. 377.

[6] Wilson relates this story of Wordsworth and De Quincey in his Postscript to the 1967 edition of The Outsider, reprinted in the 1982 reissue, published by Tarcher/Penguin, p. 301.

[7] Colin Wilson Beyond the Outsider (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965) p. 56.

[8] Ibid. p. 30.

[9] Wilson came to his insight about “the indifference threshold” when he was hitchhiking out of London on a visit he didn’t want to make. He was in a bad mood and felt nothing when a lorry stopped for him. Soon into the journey, the lorry developed trouble and Wilson found himself hitchhiking again. Even when a second lorry stopped his mood didn’t change. Oddly enough, soon that lorry developed trouble. At this, Wilson says that he felt his first “positive feeling,” “Oh no, not again!” Then the driver said that if he kept to a certain speed, they’d be able to make their destination. He asked Wilson to pay attention (my italics) to the sound of the engine for signs of the trouble. When the driver said they’d get there fine, Wilson was positively ecstatic. When he realised the absurdity of this, he asked why had his mood changed? He concluded that it was the introduction of an inconvenience and its overcoming, that had cheered him up. Until then, he was indifferent to his experience. The inconvenience concentrated  his consciousness, and with its removal, he, like Wordsworth, relaxed. Wilson came to this insight as they passed the town of St. Neot’s, hence the name “St. Neot’s Margin.”

[10] Wilson, 2001 p. 254.

[11] Colin Wilson Mysteries (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978) p. 570.

[12] Ira Einhorn, known as “the Unicorn,” was a New Age mover and shaker. He was an associate of the parapsychologist Andrija Puharich and is credited with some responsibility for founding the Earth Day celebrations, which began in 1970. He is also notorious for evading a murder charge in 1981 and being on the run in Europe for two decades, until his capture in France in 2001. He died in prison in 2020. In 2005 I had a brief correspondence with Einhorn, brought about by Colin Wilson. Einhorn had read my book In Search of P.D. Ouspensky  (2003) and had written a review. Wilson had given the book an endorsement and Einhorn asked if he could put us in touch. We exchange a few letters. I later wrote about Einhorn in the UK edition of Turn Off Your Mind, The Dedalus Book of the 1960s (Sawtry, Cambs:; Dedalus Books 2010) pp. 512-25.

[13] He writes about the two brains in Starseekers ( London: Hodder and Stoughton,1980) p. 12. Soon after Frankenstein’s Castle,  Wilson published Access to Inner Worlds (London: Rider & Company, 1983), which related the story of Brad Absetz, an individual who Wilson believed developed a creative relationship between his cerebral hemispheres.

[14] What was recognised at the time was the neurologist’s Hughlings Jackson’s remark “Expression on the left; recognition of the right,” which sums up the central difference between the two neatly.

[15] Colin Wilson The War Against Sleep (Wellingborough, UK: The Aquarian Press, 1980) pp.56-58.

[16] Colin Wilson The Laurel & Hardy Theory of Consciousness (San Francisco: Robert Briggs Associates, 1986).

[17] Ibid. p. 3.

[18] Ibid. pp 7-8.

[19] Colin Wilson Frankenstein’s Castle ((Sevenoaks, UK: Ashgrove Press, 1980) pp. 106-07.

[20] Wilson Frankenstein’s Castle pp. 104-08.