Missed this one! Writer Colin Wilson died on December 5th so he had the misfortune of dying on the same day as Nelson Mandela! (Like Aldous Huxley and C S Lewis with John F Kennedy.)
I've read and enjoyed a fair few of his books. He had his own cod philosophy which involved something he called "Faculty X", a latent ability in people to achieve intenser forms of consciousness. You could never work out exactly what he was getting at but his interest in abnormal sexual behaviour and in the paranormal worked well in his fiction. Some dismissed him as a "scrambled egghead"! Although he never learned TM he took a positive interest in it and wrote the forward to Joyce Collin-Smith's autobiography of her time with MMY in the sixties in the UK. You may find the following extract from Wilson's "Dreaming to Some Purpose" of interest: "But I was also aware that too much relaxation can be dangerous. I recalled a strange story told to me by a friend called Joyce Collin-Smith, the sister-in-law of one of Ouspenky’s most brilliant disciples, Rodney Collin. In August 1960, she became a follower of the Hindu guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who was convinced that the world could be transformed by ‘transcendental meditation’. S he described how she had gone to the house the Maharishi had rented near Regents Park, taking a flower as an offering. The Maharishi, a little man with a high voice and a sing-song Indian accent, taught her a brief mantra in Sanskrit, which immediately brought a strange, deep sense of peace. He told her to go and sit near the window, on the carpet; as she did so, the mantra seemed to be repeating itself in her brain without her volition. Time slipped peacefully by - three hours - before she noticed the evening traffic in the street, and realised she had to get home to cook her husband’s dinner. From then on, the mantra would plunge her into the same deep state of blissful serenity. She saw the Maharishi do the same thing repeatedly; once a long queue stretched down the corridor of a hotel in Oxford, and the Maharishi saw each person in turn, accepted the flower, then touched the donor on the forehead and told him to go and sit down; all obviously experienced the same instantaneous feeling of peace. Joyce was by then acting as the Maharishi’s unpaid secretary, and it was she who took a phone call from the management saying that an old lady who lived on the same floor was complaining about the noise and threatening to leave. Joyce asked the Maharishi: ‘What shall we do?’ ‘Do nothing’ said the Maharishi, smiling benevolently, ‘It will be all right’. And so it was. They heard nothing more from the old lady. This was one of many examples of the Maharishi’s odd powers, which were to some extent telepathic – as was illustrated on another occasion, when he read Joyce’s mind as she sat in the audience listening to him, and answered the question she meant to ask. Every one of the Maharishi’s followers seemed to be happy and light-hearted; he was surrounded by an atmosphere of gaiety. But Joyce soon noticed that not all was well. Some of the disciples began spending more and more time sitting in a state of bliss, and it was obvious that they were becoming less and less capable of coping with everyday life. They didn’t want to come back and face reality. Joyce herself began to experience something more disturbing. She found it increasingly difficult to focus her mind, and seemed to see too deep into the underlying reality of things. She had always understood intellectually that everything changes, but now she could actually see it happening. Looking at her hands, she would see them change into the hands of a child, and at the same time into the hands of an old woman., then into a skeleton. Looking at a chair, she could see it as new timber still smelling of sap, and as a worn out old chair about to be thrown on the bonfire. Everything fluctuated all the time. Finally she could stand it no longer, and decided to commit suicide. She took a rope and went to a tree in the garden. But as she looked at the rope, she suddenly noticed that it was staying still, remaining unchanged. Instead of dissolving into strands, then into flax, or becoming old and frayed, it was holding steady. The emergency had shaken her subconscious mind awake. Which meant that she had to set out to train her mind to fix her attention on the present. And as soon as she learned to do this, the problem went away. By this time she was becoming disillusioned with the Maharishi, who was changing from a child-like guru into a super-tycoon, so she left the movement. Joyce had discovered the same trick I had learned to control [my] panic attacks: focusing the mind to prevent it from wavering. The answer lies in one word: attention."
