A Teacher
Colin Wilson
Faculty X and the evolution of consciousness
The transmission
Colin Henry Wilson was born on 26 June 1931 in Leicester, England, and died on 5 December 2013. Largely self-educated, he achieved sudden fame at the age of twenty-four with his first book, The Outsider (1956), a study of alienation, intensity, and the search for meaning among artists, mystics, and thinkers who feel estranged from ordinary life.
Despite an uneven critical reception thereafter, he sustained a prolific career of more than a hundred books spanning existential philosophy, psychology, criminology, the occult, and fiction. Wilson is best known in mind-power circles for his concept of “Faculty X,” an ordinary but usually dormant potentiality of consciousness by which a person grasps the reality of other times, places, and possibilities with unusual vividness.
He linked this to Abraham Maslow’s “peak experiences” and to Gurdjieff’s “self-remembering,” arguing that human beings habitually drift through a dulled, mechanical “robot” mode of awareness and can, through disciplined attention and the cultivation of intensity, awaken a fuller faculty of perception.
His sprawling survey The Occult (1971) framed magical and psychic traditions as humanity’s imperfect attempts to access these latent powers, presenting the evolution of consciousness as the central project of human life.
What they gave
Faculty X: Named a heightened mode of consciousness, available to anyone, that perceives reality with extraordinary vividness and reach.
- The “robot” and peak experience: Diagnosed habitual mechanical awareness as the obstacle to fuller perception, and recast Maslow’s peak experiences as cultivable rather than accidental.
- Reframing the occult: Interpreted magic and psychic phenomena as crude expressions of genuine latent human faculties rather than mere superstition.
- Evolutionary optimism of consciousness: Argued that humanity stands on the threshold of routinely accessing heightened states, making consciousness-expansion the species’ real task.
In their words
The individual begins that long effort as an Outsider; he may finish it as a saint.
He sees ‘too deep and too much’.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Abraham Maslow (peak experiences), G. I. Gurdjieff (self-remembering), the phenomenology of Husserl, and the psychology of William James.
- Taught / Influenced: a broad readership of popular occult and consciousness writers, and the existential and “outsider” strand of twentieth-century literature.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- The Outsider1956
- Religion and the Rebel1957
- The Occult1971
- Mysteries1978
- Beyond the Occult1988