Access to Inner Worlds [Hardcover]

Colin Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 14, 1983

A compelling study in right-brain awareness with practical methods for contacting the creative "other self" within us. This ebook edition contains the complete 160 page text of the 1990 paperback edition.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 143 pages
• Publisher: Rider & Co (March 14, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 009150080X
• ISBN-13: 978-0091500801
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,164,615 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars A study of one man's conscious right-brain activity, November 30, 2011

By 

Megg (Washington, DC, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Access to Inner Worlds (Paperback)

Colin Wilson is perhaps best known for his works on occult phenomena such as poltergeists and witchcraft. But this book serves, rather, as a case study of an otherwise undistinguished man he met at a conference in Finland in 1980. In talking with Brad Absetz, an expatriate American living there with a Finnish wife and family, he became intrigued by Absetz's ability to give free rein to what Wilson observed to be exclusively right-brain activities. Absetz had discovered this inadvertently during long periods of single focus as he waited patiently for his sick and troubled wife to stir from her torpor. In time, he learned to identify this state and trust it with the authority to move his body, select his food, and even create art and poetry as he observed the process with conventional left-brain judgment.

The author traces references to this too-rare integration of human activity through ancient and modern philosophies and literature, not sparing references from Plato to Proust. He examines the roles of perception, imagination, inspiration, intention, and discipline. Wilson concludes that although the practical left brain has been responsible for virtually all of the advances of civilization, it has also channeled us into lives of automatic responses largely deprived of meaning. Both Wilson and Absetz offer advice for learning to cultivate this liberating balance by consciously selecting and monitoring our subjects, attitudes and interpretations -- in effect creating our own reality.

Since this book was published in 1983, medicine, psychology, and spirituality have addressed this issue much more comprehensively. "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor is a natural companion piece.