COLIN WILSON AND THE OTHER MODE: A NEW LOOK AT THE NEW EXISTENTIALISM

Chapter 1 COLIN WILSON AND MUSIC

I was very moved to read in Gary Lachman’s biography of Wilson, Beyond the Robot how, in the final months of his life, following a massive stroke, when he couldn’t speak or move,  he would occasionally listen to music – and how it quickly became too much for him and how the music had to be turned off...(1)

In the Appendix to the Pauper’s Press edition of Mozart’s Journey to Prague Wilson describes in the postscript to a letter he wrote to Paul Robertson, leader of the Medici String Quartet, who commissioned the play, how he first came in touch with classical music:

‘As a child I became an enthusiast for classical music after seeing ‘’Dangerous Moonlight’’. I had an aunt who owned a record of the Warsaw concerto, and requested it every time I went to see her. Subsequently, I was equally bowled over by a film called ‘’Concerto’’, using the Rachmaninoff 2^nd, and became just as devoted to that. I used to enrage my father by wanting to listen to the Proms when he would have preferred Gracie Fields or Tommy Handley. (Sibelius was a great discovery, after hearing Beecham do his second symphony)...’ (2)

Thus music was a strong presence in Colin’s life from start to finish.

In 2018 Colin Stanley invited me to present a paper to the 2^nd International Colin Wilson conference on Colin Wilson and Music. It was the research for this paper that led to the writing of this book. This chapter is based on that original paper.

The first thing I did on receiving Colin Stanley’s invitation was make a list of all Wilson’s writings on music. I quickly realised this was only the tip of the iceberg because references to music abound throughout all his writings. I then realised I didn’t have nearly enough time to revisit all 181 books and anyway this was not the point....

What really intrigued me was to find a way to explicate how and why music meant so much to Wilson, and how to fit it into the philosophical framework he erected, a framework that was paradigmatically teleological. In a passage I shall be quoting from later in this chapter Wilson talks about the ‘evolutionary possibilities’ of music. How, I wondered, can music have evolutionary possibilities – how to explain those evolutionary possibilities?

Finding an answer to this question seemed to me the principle challenge and, as will become plain, eventually led me off on a whole plethora of ruminations that eventually encompassed far more than just the role of music in the New Existentialism. Nevertheless the apparent dichotomy that presents itself between the language of philosophy and the language of music is at the heart of this enquiry and I believe is the clue to a true understanding of the New Existentialism.

In an interview with Michael Berkeley for BBC Radio 3 programme Music Matters in 2007 Wilson was asked:  Do all artists aspire to the condition of music? And he answered without hesitation:

‘Oh very much. I’ve often wished I was a musician – the only problem being I couldn’t put ideas into it - it doesn’t have that extension.....which is the only thing that interests me... ‘

‘What does interest me is the sheer glowing joy of great music which is something I want to say – but you can’t balance it against human beings and what’s wrong with them which is what I want to do......’ (3)

Although Wilson always said he had no aptitude for music – he only knew what he liked – he had a remarkably musical intelligence; by which I mean it was multi-layered, polyphonic, and this is how he used language. The words were only a means to an end and never the end in itself; and the end was always the world of meaning that lay beyond the words and behind the poker faced facade of the everyday world.

For me Wilson’s writing has the same quality as I find in the music of Mozart; it is unfailingly uplifting and inspiring. And maybe there was a recognition of kinship for Wilson in the fact that he wrote a play about Mozart  in which he demonstrates an acute understanding of Mozart’s temperament, and frequently used Mozart as an example of the close cooperation of left and right brain consciousness that often seems to be a hallmark of genius. Certainly books poured out of Wilson with the same extraordinary proliferation as music poured out of Mozart....

In a discussion of Bernard Shaw in Religion & the Rebel Wilson writes:

‘Half of Shaw’s greatness is symbolised by his love of Mozart. In Mozart, for all his depth, there are no self conscious explorations of the tortured mind, and for all his vision, it never overwhelms the listener with a sudden and startling revelation. In The Magic Flute, the last opera, written after years of disappointment and suffering he makes life seem transient and permanent; it would seem almost as if he were saying: Life needs no deeper meanings to make it beautiful and eternal; for all its torture and uncertainty, it is divine.’

‘This vision of life...’ he concludes ‘is the poet’s true vision…it glorifies life without any attempt to find ‘reasons.’ (4)

And this is what motivated Wilson in his Existential Criticism – what does this say about life? And I believe Wilson’s passion for music came from precisely the same place as his passion for ideas.

Wilson composed books of philosophy and philosophical novels in the same way as a composer writes symphonies and string quartets. He enjoyed ideas above all else and in all his work you get this fantastic sense of his enjoyment as he juggles ideas much as a composer juggles notes; and because he enjoys so much what he is doing so does the reader.

I know that I am not alone in finding that it is often not so much what he is writing about but the way in which he is writing about it that makes reading Wilson often so exhilarating...

In Around the Outsider Chris Nelson writes:

‘The cumulative power of Wilson’s writing lifts the reader into the very state of vision that the best novels themselves aspire to, giving us a glimpse of what we can become. This is one of the more remarkable gifts that Colin Wilson has possessed since page one of The Outsider: the ability to induce peak experiences in his readers......’ (5)

And I’m convinced this must come from his state of being at the time of writing; it is not something you can manufacture. It is in this sense I believe Wilson did not only aspire to but achieved the condition of music, which is customarily a release from the tedium of rational thought and analysis; and what it indicates to me is that Wilson managed to keep himself almost permanently in a state of what he himself described as ‘bird’s eye consciousness’, and thus to coin an expression we’ll be meeting later in this book he engendered a sort of ‘ecstatic conductivity’ between himself and his readers.

Wilson managed to contend with vast swathes of facts and ideas without ever getting bogged down as most of us do in the minutiae. So that the facts and figures and ideas in themselves receded into the distance and the reader is carried along on a tidal wave of energy and enthusiasm - which is something one normally relies on the art of music to do. Some critic once commented he could make a telephone directory exciting....

And I believe this comes down to his having been a ‘hedgehog’ rather than a ‘fox’, (the distinction coined by Sir Isaiah Berlin, that Wilson often alluded to, that distinguishes between thinkers who know one thing – hedgehogs - and thinkers who know many different things - foxes). With Wilson it was the one big Idea that kept him air borne when so many of us would just crash to the ground. My conviction is that Wilson’s work was emotionally driven. It came from the heart before all else – from a visceral need to communicate what he felt, as much as what he thought; the thinking came after the feeling.

In Beyond the Occult discussing the mechanisms of the peak experience Wilson writes:

‘The heart, oddly enough, seems to be the essential organ concerned. When we are in a hurry, or doing something we dislike, we clench the heart, exactly like clenching a fist, and nothing can get in. When we are filled with a sense of multiplicity and excitement we somehow 'open' the heart and allow reality to flow in.... the 'trick' of the peak experience lies in this ability to relax out of our usual defensive posture and to 'open the heart'.’ (6)

Music is probably the best way known to man of opening the heart....

In his book Human by Design the bestselling author Gregg Braden refers to ‘the little brain in the heart’. In 1991 a team of scientists led by J. Andrew Armour, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Montreal, studied the intimate relationship between the brain and the heart and found that about 40,000 specialized neurons, or sensory neurites, form a communication network within the heart. Braden comments ‘What makes this discovery exceptional is that the neurites in the heart perform many of the same functions that are found in the brain.’ The scientists discovered that the brain in the heart can function both independently of and in synergy with the cranial brain. It would seem that the function of the brain in the heart is to convert the language of the body into the electrical language of the nervous system so that the body’s needs can be communicated to the brain. (7)

This gives a whole new significance to Schwaller de Lubicz’s concept of the ‘intelligence of the heart’ and also indicates that so called primitive peoples who identified the heart with the soul were closer to the truth of the matter than we might like to admit.

In Religion & the Rebel, writing about Blaise Pascal, Wilson comments:

‘All man’s experience is emotional experience. Even the mathematician, plunged in his calculations, is undergoing emotional experience. His intellectual activity is accompanied by a pleasure and an excitement that is emotional, and it is this that makes him pursue mathematics. An electronic brain takes no pleasure in its calculating. All life is continual emotional experience.’(8)

Much of Wilson’s philosophy is devoted to identifying means by which we may take control of our ordinary everyday consciousness in order to better realise our innate possibilities. Music specifically provides a means of taking control of the emotions which is the essential pre requisite for taking control of our lives.

In Wilson’s third novel The World of Violence Hugh Greene reflects on how music is a means of achieving this control:

‘Man knows a little about altering his emotions. If he likes music, then he will play a Tchaikovsky symphony when he feels a need for romantic emotion, Chopin when he feels melancholy, Wagner when he wants heroics, and so on. But he is still submitting himself to new experience to change his emotions; he never asks himself why he should not have as much control over his emotions as over his ideas....It seemed to me that a person should be able to wake up and say: ‘Now, how shall I feel this morning? Shall I wear my Tchaikovsky mood? Or my Bach mood? Or perhaps my Beethoven mood?’ (9)

And this of course was why Wilson was fascinated by the Black Room, the subject of his spy novel of the same name (1971) and numerous references throughout his writings at the time. The question clearly fascinated him: how do we gain such control over the emotions that even in a condition of total sensory deprivation we can still decide to be happy?

This was also very much a part of the Great Work of G.I Gurdjieff which Wilson writes about at length in The War Against Sleep. Music is a viable tool in the war against sleep.

Earlier in the same chapter of The World of Violence Hugh reflects on the role of music in the life of the spirit:

‘The life of the spirit was all very well – and Bach and Delius and Schopenhauer had been an incomparable enrichment to the world – but it was never supposed to be kept separate from the life of the body. Music and philosophy were like wine- they were intended to enhance the pleasure of being alive, not to replace it.’ (10)

Music cannot be divorced from physical sensation. William Blake wrote ‘Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy’. (11)

This was something Nietzsche apprehended when he wrote:

‘To the despisers of the body will I speak my word. I wish them neither to learn afresh, nor teach anew, but only to bid farewell to their own bodies,—and thus be dumb.

"Body am I, and soul"—so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children?

But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: "Body am I entirely and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the body." (12)

At the outset of his career Nietzsche had already apprehended the special role of music: In The Birth of Tragedy he writes:

‘Language can never adequately render the cosmic symbolism of music, because music stands in symbolic relation to the primordial contradiction and primordial pain in the heart of the primal unity, and therefore symbolizes a sphere which is beyond and prior to all phenomena.’ (13)

And in The Will to Power he states unequivocally:

‘Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalize; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.’ (14)

Anthony Storr in his book Music and the Mind quotes from Viktor Zuckerfandl’s book Sound & Symbol:

‘Words divide, tones unite. The unity of existence that the word constantly breaks up, dividing thing from thing, subject from object, is constantly restored in the tone. Music prevents the world from being entirely transformed into language, from becoming nothing but object, and prevents man from becoming nothing but subject...’ (15)

The conclusion must be: the importance and significance of music in human functioning cannot be understood from a dualistic perspective. It can only be understood from the perspective of a unitary universe – in which there is no separation between mind and body, conscious and unconscious. While music is associated solely with non-rational states it will always be considered as diversionary and non-essential.

There is scientific evidence for the efficacy of music in developing neuroplasticity in the brain thus assisting in recovery from brain injury induced by stroke and trauma, and ameliorating brain dysfunction caused by neurodegenerative diseases. Here is an extract from an article published on Greed Med Info by Ali de Vere (16):

‘In one study, researchers examined the brains of individuals using functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), a technique that tracks cerebral blood flow. They found that when subjects listened to songs from their preferred musical genres, they exhibited enhanced levels of brain connectivity. Most pronounced was connectivity in the brain region called the default mode or resting-state network, which is implicated in internal mentation, or “the introspective and adaptive mental activities in which humans spontaneously and deliberately engage in every day. (17).

This brain area, which may be compromised in neurological disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer's disease, is correlated with internally focused thoughts such as daydreaming, past recall, empathy, and self-awareness, which illuminates why music has been shown to trigger self-referential thoughts and memories. “Described as functioning somewhat like a toggle switch between outwardly focused mind states and the internal or subjective sense of self, this network appears to include mind-wandering experiences such as imagining the future, the discovering of new possibilities (hopes), and the affective significance of aspirations or dreams.’  (18)

It sounds suspiciously like Faculty X to me... 

And I would say a big part of Wilson’s musical criticism, as of all his criticism, was motivated by the question: To what extent – if at all - does this work of art stimulate Faculty X? To what extent does it help us to affirm life? For this is what Faculty X amounts to.

Wilson concludes his Introduction to Brandy of the Damned thus:

 ‘Only a critic who judged music superficially would dream of calling either Britten, Schoenberg or Stravinsky ‘great.’’ (19)

Well of course in the musical establishment it is probably the case that Wilson is in a minority of one in not considering Britten, Schoenberg or Stravinsky great – all three have entered the pantheon of great composers. And throughout his writings on music we encounter most of music’s sacred cows being brought down to size; but this is only to highlight how different is the perspective of existential criticism from ordinary music criticism.

The whole point of Existential criticism is that it is judging works and their creators by an ultimate standard of values. What Wilson is looking for, taking his cue from Nietzsche, is a higher type of man – a man who can be a great creator and still function as a human being...

So how does Wilson define a great human being? He confronts this question head on in his essay on Bela Bartok in Brandy of the Damned:

‘There is one answer that covers the whole problem. Greatness is a form of life-affirmation, when life is understood to mean ‘spirit’ rather than everyday activity. When William Blake wrote:

The Angel that presided o’er my birth

Said ‘Little creature, formed of joy and mirth,

Go love without the help of anything on earth,

He was expressing an ultimate form of human greatness....Unfortunately all human beings are spoilt. To some extent adversity stimulates them, but a point always comes when they refuse to make any more effort...Beethoven had hard beginnings, so that he was closer to Blake’s ideal of loving ‘without the help of anything on earth’; that is, feeling a basic delight simply in being alive, whether life chooses to carry one or not.....’ (20)

As Nietzsche realised, all philosophy – and the same could be said of music - is a kind of disguised autobiography; and this is of course the starting point for Existential Criticism. It takes as its motto Kierkegaard’s ‘Truth is Subjectivity’.

It is in Wilson’s fourth novel Man Without A Shadow (1963) that music comes to the fore, with the other-worldly composer Kirsten in a central position representing the dedicated life of an artist that Sorme struggles to commit to.

Kirsten appears hopelessly out of touch with reality – leaving all the business of survival to his wife, who has to work all the hours God gave so her ‘genius’ of a husband can concentrate on his music. Kirsten worships the memory of Robert Schumann, who was utterly incapable of coping with the real world, and who Wilson frequently uses as an example of the Romantic artist with several skins too few.

Wilson had little patience with this sort of ‘genius’ – he was always of the opinion that the creative artistic types should toughen up and learn to survive in the real world...In ‘Introduction to the New Existentialism’ he compares Schumann with Strindberg (21). Strindberg succeeded in turning his neurosis to good account and effectively wrote himself out of a state of near insanity (as for that matter did Wilson himself when subject to the violent panic attacks described in the Introduction to ‘’Mysteries’’). Schumann was less well equipped. All his life he had a dread of going insane, and, rather like Diaghileff, who had a dread of drowning and duly died in a drowning accident, destiny obliged and realised his worst fears when he was ultimately committed to an insane asylum...

Nevertheless Kirsten, for all his failings, represents one of Wilson’s evolutionary types. One evening when Sorme has been invited to dinner with Kirsten and his wife the composer tells Sorme how he came near to committing suicide:

‘One evening the family were all out; I thought that if I intended to gas myself, now was the time to do it. First of all, I sat down at the piano, and played myself some Mahler – my own transcription of the adagio of the tenth. Then all at once, I went into a condition of ecstasy. I had a vision. I thought that the ceiling of the room dissolved, and I was looking up into the heavens. I cannot explain my feeling, but suddenly I understood why the world has to suffer....Then I started to laugh, and I played one of Beethoven’s bagatelles – the third of opus 126 – and vowed that I would live as a pure artist, without compromise.’  (22)

The passage must surely draw on Wilson’s own experience of nearly committing suicide – a description of which opens his autobiography Dreaming To Some Purpose (23). But it also invokes the description quoted in The Outsider of Sri Ramakrishna who, when just about to commit suicide, had a vision of Kali that sent him into a state of ecstasy:

‘Suddenly the blessed mother revealed herself to me....the buildings...the temple and all vanished, leaving no trace; instead there was a limitless, infinite, shining ocean of consciousness or spirit. As far as the eye could see, its billows were rushing towards me from all sides...to swallow me up. I was panting for breath. I was caught in the billows and fell down senseless.’  (24)

When I first read this passage it irresistibly recalled to me the words from the Liebestod at the end of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde:

Sind es Wogen                                                   Are these billows

wonniger Düfte?                                              of delightful fragrances?

Wie sie schwellen,                                           How they swell,

mich umrauschen,                                           how they sough around me,

.........

In dem wogenden Schwall,                          In the billowing  torrent,

in dem tönenden Schall,                                in the resonating sound,

in des Welt-Atems wehendem All ---       in the wafting Universe of the World-Breath ---

ertrinken,                                                            to drown,

versinken ---                                                       to be engulfed ---

unbewußt ---                                                     unconscious ---

höchste Lust!                                                     supreme delight!

In Dreaming To Some Purpose Wilson describes how Wagner’s Liebestod was the occasion of a near mystical experience when he was working as a hospital orderly in the 1950’s:

‘I was lying on my bed listening to a concert on the radio; they played the ‘Liebestod’ from Tristan und Isolde.......At that time my admiration for Nijinsky often made me improvise a dance to music, ...... So I now stood up and, in the fairly small space between my bed and the opposite wall, began to perform slow, sinuous movements with outstretched arms...... As the music reached a climax, it seemed to penetrate the depths of my being, and for a brief moment consciousness reached a clarity that made me feel I was above time, as if I could look down on it like a bird on the earth.’

Wilson comments:

‘I remain convinced that what I did that day was to achieve a glimpse of man’s evolutionary possibilities, of freedom from the slow, inevitable movement of time. Shaw had talked of the necessity for man to live to be three hundred, but could not suggest a method by which this could be achieved. I feel that the ‘timeless moment’ I induced that day by sheer concentration was a flash of insight into the answer. The body’s flow in the direction of death could be slowed, or even halted, by using the will as a brake.’ (25)

In The Outsider when writing about Ramakrishna’s experience, and mystical experience in general, Wilson makes the important observation:

‘The bombardment of the ‘self’ with emotions and sensations like so many shooting stars make the visionary realize that his interior being is more like a ‘mill-race’.....At once he becomes aware of two things, the kinetic nature of the world, and the kinetic nature of his own soul.’ (26)

In ‘The Magician from Siberia’ when Rasputin discovers his true mission Wilson writes ‘Then deep inside himself, he saw the answer.....It was that he was not Grigory Rasputin. He was the force that surged through him when he performed healing ....’ (27)

This I believe is the true meaning of Wilson’s bird’s eye consciousness – and of mystical vision, and incidentally the role of music. It gives objective expression to the force surging through us – or as Dylan Thomas said ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’....

Like it or not we are all merely vehicles for a greater force that flows through us – if we allow it to. And music, as Schopenhauer apprehended, gives expression to that undiluted force.

It is in The Philosopher’s Stone that Wilson truly explores the evolutionary possibilities he finds in the world of music.

Music features large in the first part of the novel which is entitled ‘The Quest of the Absolute’. (28)  Sir Alastair Lyell supplies Howard Newman with a liberal education beyond anything he could have acquired from his home life. Lyell possesses a collection of gramophone records to rival that of The Gramophone Magazine.  He has a particular penchant for listening to very long pieces of music (‘I think he simply enjoyed the intellectual discipline of concentrating for hours at a time’). Thus he and Howard spend whole evenings listening to the complete ‘‘Contest Between Harmony and Invention’ of Vivaldi, the complete Well Tempered Clavier, whole operas of Wagner, the last five quartets of Beethoven, symphonies of Bruckner & Mahler, the first fourteen Haydn symphonies...He even had a strange preference for a sprawling, meandering symphony by Furtwangler, simply because it ran on for two hours or so’ (29)

Later Newman/Wilson uses the gramophone record in an extended analogy of the nature of human consciousness:

‘We live too close to the present, like a gramophone needle travelling over a record. We never appreciate the music as a whole because we only hear a series of individual notes...I realized that all science had simply been man’s attempt to get his nose off the gramophone record, to see things from a distance, to escape this perpetual tyranny of the present...

And in a critical realisation which may explain how the young Wilson came to turn his attention from science to literature he writes:

‘It came to me with a shock that art is really an extension of science, not its opposite; science tries to store and correlate dead facts; art and literature try to store and correlate living facts...And then, the clearest insight of all: science is not man’s attempt to reach ‘truth’ .He doesn’t want ‘truth’ – in the sense of mere ‘facts’. He wants wider consciousness, freedom from this strange trap that holds our noses against the gramophone record. This is why he has always loved wine and music...’ (30)

He summarizes ‘although science may not have understood its real aim, religion and poetry had always understood theirs. The mystics, like the poets, knew all about this ‘bird’s eye consciousness’ that suddenly replaces our normal worm’s eye view...’(31)

There is a clear equation between music and mysticism. Howard goes out in search of books of the mystics but finds all the woolly language off putting. Instead he comes home with a record of Gerard Finzi’s Dies Natalis, a setting from Traherne’s ‘Centuries of Meditation’ – which he finds ‘immediately moving’. More importantly he discovers the symphonies of Bruckner – and this provides him with a key to an understanding of the great mystics:

‘Now I came across Furtwangler’s remark that Bruckner was a descendant of the great German mystics, and that the aim of his symphonies had been to ‘make the supernatural real’. I knew he had begun by composing church music, surely then it followed that he came to the symphony because he wanted to go further in expressing ‘the supernatural? I put on Furtwangler’s recording of the Seventh symphony, and immediately understood that this was true. The music was slow, deliberate because it was an attempt to escape the nature of music – which, after all is dramatic; that is to say it has the nature of a story......Bruckner, according to Furtwangler, wanted to suspend the mind’s normal expectation of development, to say something that could only be expressed if the mind fell into a slower rhythm...this music is not descriptive of nature; it attempts to approximate to nature...’ (32)

Now Howard finds far from the symphonies being too long they are too short! So he piles the records up on the repeater spindle of the gramophone and listens to assorted movements of the symphonies in no particular order...and comments ‘With Bruckner this makes surprisingly little difference, since for him, a symphony was always an incantation to induce the same state of mind, the sense of detachment from our humanity, of entering into the eternal life of mountains and atoms...’ (33) (My italics)

Which is little different from the Eastern mystic’s search for Nirvana. I would suggest that Howard’s discovery of the symphonies of Bruckner as a means for attaining a detached mode of consciousness is little different from the mystic’s aim to obliterate the separation caused by all dualities, to achieve a total identification of subject and object. And in order to do this the first requisite is to silence the rational mind.

As we will see in Chapter 3 the rational mind only functions through a constant juggling of polarities. Duality is ingrained in the very structure of the language we use and with which we think. Within the verbal matrix of language there is no way to discuss anything without reference to the dualities. Wilson himself is perpetually contrasting the worm’s eye view with the bird’s eye view – neither concept has any meaning without reference to the other....

In the final chapter of From Atlantis to the Sphinx Wilson refers to Gurdjieff’s concept of the Third Force:

“The Law of Three states that all creation involves a 'third force'. We are inclined to think in terms of dualities: positive and negative, male and female, good and evil. Gurdjieff – who derived the idea from the Sankhya philosophy of India - stated that, instead, we should try to think in terms of three. Positive and negative merely counterbalance one another, but if anything is to come of them, they must be given a push by a third force.’’ (34)

In his excellent biography of Wilson Gary Lachman introduces this concept in discussing The Criminal History of Mankind:

‘Gurdjieff said that if we think of only two forces, as we tend to do, we remain static, at loggerheads. A third force is necessary to break the deadlock; otherwise a situation will remain stuck. For human evolution, Wilson says, the third force is the imagination.’(35)

The reason evolution only got going relatively recently in spite of the fact early man would appear to have had very similar intelligence to our own is the absence of this third force – the absence of the ability to think beyond the stalemate of polarities, the absence of imagination.

Now I would suggest this is where music comes in - that music is a language that is constantly juggling polarities and then transcribing them into a higher synthesis, and in the process leading us towards the possibility of a more visionary type of consciousness - often in spite of ourselves. When we submit ourselves to the power of music we are no longer juggling the polarities dictated by our conceptualization of the world in language. Music itself provides a Third Force that helps break the deadlock. It is both a reflection of the power of imagination and a stimulus to it. It provides in fact a meta-system, a la Gödel, for ordinary language. (See Chapter 2 for further discussion of Gödel).

The whole foundation of Wilson’s philosophy was built on his awareness of another mode of consciousness experienced in moments of ecstasy or orgasm – Maslow’s peak experiences. In his autobiographies he describes how he overcame the boredom and tedium of his early years when forced to work at menial jobs in entirely uncongenial surroundings; he coped by immersing himself in the world of the great poets and of the Eastern mystics, particularly the Bhagavad Gita.

And yet Wilson could never have retired to India and sat under a Bo tree. His consciousness was fiercely analytical and could never have been satisfied by a purely contemplative existence. Like Howard in The Philosopher’s Stone, like Gerard Sorme, he wanted to employ his formidable powers of analysis to store and correlate ‘living facts’ and share these living facts with the rest of Mankind.

In The Musician as Outsider Wilson quotes Nietzsche’s definition of The Dionysian: ‘the glorious delight which arises in man from the very depths of Nature, at the shattering of the pricipium individuationis...the Dionysian rapture, whose closest analogy is drunkenness’ (36)

 Wilson asserts at the opening of the essay that the main reason Nietzsche turned away from music and concentrated on philosophy was that he found the ecstasy induced by great music incapacitated him for real life; in other words he was scared of the Dionysian. Why? Because submitting to the Dionysian automatically involves a cessation of control – and for a man of Nietzsche’s temperament this was all but impossible. Later in this book we’ll review other instances of highly intelligent individuals who have faced the same conundrum.

Music is the most Dionysian of the arts. To truly appreciate music requires a suspension of the controlling ego. In The Misfits Wilson examines the strange case of Percy Grainger who reckoned he owed his talent to his sadistic impulses; and to a certain extent Wilson agrees with Grainger’s self diagnosis:

‘All these strands – the Nietzscheanism, the athleticism, the ‘Nazism’, the sadism – were not separate elements of Grainger’s character: they were essentially different facets of the same thing: what Nietzsche called ‘the Dionysian’, the ‘blissful ecstasy that arises from the innermost depths of man, ay, of nature...’ in which our puny human individuality is swept away by a kind of tempest of sheer power.’ (37)

If we are prepared to give ourselves to its Dionysian power music  provides an immediate access to the ‘other world’ – to the world of the unconscious, the irrational and the emotions; which is of course why the early Church laid down strict guidelines as to its use in religious services – they knew what a powerful tool it was for inciting the passions; and inciting the passions was linked inevitably with lasciviousness – in the same way as spiced food and alcohol, and for that matter anything that induced a physical ‘high’ – was considered to be of the devil. In spite of which many of the great mystics employed an extraordinarily erotic language when attempting to convey their visions.

The Protestant abomination of music was no different from its abomination of graven images or incense or art work or stained glass windows. It made the entirely spurious division between the life of the body – which belonged to Satan - and the life of the spirit which belonged to God.

The reason Aleister Crowley was abominated as the ‘wickedest man in the world’ was he threw all this out of the window, and declared in his Book of the Law we should drink strong wine, take drugs indulge in sex whenever and with whomever we so please and do anything that induced ecstasy – and allowed us to approach the Godhead as he conceived it. He was in other words a total anarchist; and this was as a direct result of his abolition of all dualities, (which in turn was as a result of his revolt against the strict moralistic upbringing he endured at the hands of his Plymouth Brethren parents).

And it is for this reason that organised religion has always insisted on the absolute nature of the duality between flesh and the spirit, between God and Man, between good and evil. Because if anybody can stay at home and meet God through indulging freely in sex and drugs and other stimulants - such as listening to beautiful music - where would the church, or for that matter society, be? The absoluteness of the dualities is the foundation stone of the social fabric we inhabit...and also the reason, as we have already seen, for the stasis in human consciousness. (38)

But it is of the essence of the New Existentialism that the individual is not here merely to serve society. Society is an artificial construct for better or worse constructed to protect the interests of the individual. When it goes wrong it ceases to fulfil its proper function and may only serve the interests of monstrous vested interests, whether of Church, State or individual piracy; but that is of little concern to Wilson’ Outsiders or anybody seeking self transcendence.

 In order to get beyond being merely useful social units the individual needs to find ways to transcend the barren world of the dualities and find ways in which to access a sense of meaning that always lies beyond duality, and this is the province of the language of music - and for that matter the cornerstone of all Colin Wilson’s work.

When it comes to explicating in language the power of music some of the most profound insights are to be found in the writings of Kashmiri Shaivism, and I want to refer to two of these concepts now as I believe they will assist in placing Wilson’s passion for music in the conceptual framework of his philosophy.

In an essay included in ‘Music, Physician for Times to Come’ edited by Don Campbell, Swami Chetanananda writes about the concept of Spanda in Kashmiri Shaivism:

‘Critical to the Kashmir Shaivite discussion of sound is the principle of Spanda. It means throb or pulse. It also means an urge. It might be described as the essence of a wave in the ocean of Consciousness— an impulse or desire to create and enjoy. Perhaps originally it was a flutter of love.....From deep inside the ocean of Consciousness, something moves. From that spanda, the whole world comes forth. This ocean of Consciousness is the Absolute; the throb is its creative power.’ (39)

Paul Eduardo Ortega-Muller describes the movements and effects of Spanda in his classic book, The Triadic Heart of Shiva: “The Ultimate is Spanda: it vibrates, it expands and contracts; it manifests and reabsorbs; it is full of waves and waveless; it is full of bliss and yet suffering occurs; it plays a game of hide-and-seek with itself in which ignorance alternates with knowledge, and in which enjoyment and liberation can coincide.” (40)

This description of the principle of Spanda in turn made me think of a passage from Wilhelm Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy (which is the sequel to The Function of the Orgasm and forms the second part of Reich’s The Discovery of the Orgone, bearing the same relation to its predecessor as Wilson’s Religion and the Rebel bears to The Outsider) in which he defines the orgasm as a process of contraction and expansion no different from the act of peristalsis that is most clearly illustrated in the way in which simple organisms such as worms move, digest and excrete. We’ll examine in depth the way in which Reich’s work relates to the work of Colin Wilson in Chapter 5 of this book.

As we’ll see in Chapter 5 Reich came to the conclusion that the orgasm was illustrative of a function that he found at the root of all physical life. He called it the TC function – the function of tension and charge. Fundamentally this is a pulsation; this pulsation is what the ancient Shaivites identified as Spanda. There cannot be life without it.

The notion of a pulsating universe in which every atom, every molecule is in a constant state of vibration has become scientific orthodoxy; it is the ineluctable conclusion from the researches of quantum physics. Swami Chetanananda compares the conclusions of quantum physics with the conclusions of the early Shaivite scholars:

‘Because the special theory of relativity states that energy and mass are actually variations of the same stuff (called mass-energy), quantum physics is led to conclude that everything is a form of energy, i.e., that the “solid particles” that compose our world are formed by the intersection of waves of energy. When the Shaivite scholars characterized the world as a combination of different frequencies, they were saying much the same things as the quantum physicists, since sound and movement are inseparable. Indeed, because sound in the Shaivite texts refers to much subtler vibrations than the gross sounds that we are familiar with, one would be safe in saying that the ninth century Shaivites and today’s scientists are saying exactly the same thing.’ (41)

A relatively modern illustration of the way in which our universe is constructed from ‘much subtler vibrations’ of sound can be found in the work of the renegade American scientist Royal Raymond Rife. Royal Rife died a broken man – discredited and condemned for quackery, and if you look him up on Wikipedia or any other established reference work you’ll find his work dismissed; but in the 1930’s he enjoyed huge acclaim for his work, and the result of his researches lives on to this day. (42)

Rife reckoned he’d found a cure for cancer when he identified specific audio frequencies that could be used to shatter cancer cells. He designed a machine to do just this. The theory behind Rife’s machine is that every pathogen or bacteria that can be found in the human body has an MOR – a Mortal Oscillatory Rate – that is a rate of vibration at which it will explode. Rife used the analogy of the opera singer and the wine glass to emphasise that sound can have a direct influence on physical matter.

When my daughter was diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer, and the medical profession appeared to be powerless to treat it I commenced a period of intensive research into alternative cancer treatments (see Autobiographical Introduction); electro medicine – the use of sound frequencies to heal the body, was one of the first things I came across. To cut a long story short we eventually invested in a Rife Frequency Generator, and introduced a whole host of different protocols aimed at targeting what Rife had identified as the specific pathogens associated with cancer.

Now I have no way of knowing if the Rife frequencies cured my daughter of her cancer, since we introduced a vast number of different modalities into her life style at the same time as we introduced the Rife frequencies; but what I do know is that I have subsequently used the frequencies for a host of other common ailment – colds, flu etc and have seen the problems evaporate sometimes within a matter of hours; if nothing else the frequencies stimulate the body’s own capacity to fight infection – they stimulate the immune system. And the conclusion must surely be: sound frequencies unquestionably have a direct influence on the cells of our bodies.

As a musician myself I have absolutely no doubt about this; music is nothing but organised sound waves and it has a direct physical effect upon us. Read descriptions of the first audiences at performances of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde or Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps to see how drastically the human organism can react to unaccustomed frequencies.

The work of Royal Rife and all who experiment with sound frequencies marks a meeting point between science and the art of music and points to the primacy of Spanda in the created universe.

The second concept from Kashmiri Shaivism that I wish to introduce is that of Matrika, which I believe is particularly relevant where Wilson is concerned. In a transcultural on-line free web magazine, co-founded by Nadeshwari Joythimayananda, Joythimayananda describes Matrika thus:

‘Matrikas are defined as tiny mothers of “creation” who represent the deep roots of each vibration of sound from which letters, words and language are shaped.

Matrika is the subtle strength that is behind the thought and the word. Matrika is the force that can cause a spark, a movement that can change people life (sic). Matrika reveals itself when awareness starts to walk the new path......

 “Oh Goddess, the whole universe from Brahman until the earth is filled with matrika, which is filled with the glory of the Supreme Consciousness ego” (Tantrasadbhava 900 A.D.)

The basis of every world, created inside us by the Consciousness, is located in the alphabet letters. Words and letters create thoughts, thoughts generate feelings and emotions: happiness and unhappiness, sadness and cheerfulness, love and hate, jealousy, fear, desire and anger. You can experience directly the power of words.’

And Joythimayananda proceeds to describe ways in which you may experience the power of the ‘little goddesses’ yourself:

‘If you try to sit down quietly, you’ll notice how easily letters and words arise spontaneously from you. Try to think suddenly:  “I’m inadequate”. The letters joined together composing words, words created a sentence, the sentence has a meaning and this has an effect. When that idea comes across our mind, a suffering is generated. Now try to think: “I’m clever and beautiful”. As soon as this thought is given birth, you feel happiness.

Close your eyes and try to play to the game just described above…

Take your time to listen to your body’s answers since you think “I’m inadequate” to “I’m clever and beautiful”.

Allow your sensations to emerge and to make this experience given.

This is how the letters create your feelings.’ (43)

This surely is no different from Syd Banks’ Eureka moment  when his friend told him: ‘You’re not unhappy – you only think you are.’ (44)

What becomes clear is that in Kashmir Shavaism there is very little distinction between the Word and Sound. The word is only a formation out of sound. First there is Spanda the primal throb, then there is the urge to articulate something about that primal throb – inspired by Matrika shakti.

Joythimayananda’s description of Matrika is saying precisely the same thing as Wilson in the passage from The World of Violence quoted above concerning the power of music; the differentiation between words and music is only apparent. Both serve the same purpose – to enable us to take control of our consciousness. It is only a question of degrees of differentiation. Music works by combining different rates of vibration that have an instant physical effect upon the cells of our bodies. Words introduce concepts into our brains that similarly have an instant physical effect; but the end result is the same – both modalities are changing the rates of vibration in the cells of our bodies enabling us to feel more alive.

In Frankenstein’s Castle, in the chapter entitled ‘More Mysteries’ Wilson writes: ‘Meaning like food, is not an end in itself. My body converts food into energy, and my mind converts meaning into purpose.’ (45)

From this perspective music is a means of accessing meaning – through its capacity to subvert and transcend the habitual dualities of our consciousness. It is then our job to make use of the awareness of meaning received from the music and convert it into purpose; this is what Wilson means by evolutionary possibility; but the problem is learning to rememberthe visions of meaning that we achieve in moments of intensity - and when we fail to remember the meaning we fail to find the purpose.

If we think of the rates of vibration that we respond to as being on a spectrum then we have the throb of Spanda, the primal urge, followed by the primal Vowels and the most primitive music of shamanism, at one end of the spectrum; and the written word as concept at the other end of the spectrum - with the entire history of music occupying a central position between the two extremes

And we make a very dangerous mistake if we assume the written word as concept is entirely divorced from Spanda – the first throb. This is the mistake made by the whole cult of transhumanism, robotics etc – which is the inevitable outcome of our assuming that the distinctively human is solely contained in the ability to abstract and conceptualise.

And it seems to me this error came in with the prevalence of the written word where we lost the sense of the word being first and foremost a sounding, a vibration – which up until the introduction of printing the word always was.

Once the word ceased to be a Sounding, ceased to be Tone, language began to concretize in a way that wouldn’t have been possible previously when it was only used in living interactions; because with the age of printing there was suddenly a need to customize the written word - to systematize a hierarchy of agreed meanings. With this came a distancing of the written word from lived experience; thus the word became divorced from the primal force of Spanda. This is what Nietzsche meant when he said that language only consists of ‘metaphors gone stale’.

In the Introduction to The Occult Wilson quotes the cybernetician David Foster: ‘The universe is a total construction of waves and vibrations whose inner content is ‘meaning’...’ and a couple of pages later Wilson comments ‘the definition of a living organism is an organism capable of responding to energy vibrations. These vibrations constitute ‘meaning’’. (46)

Looked at like this music could be said to be a far more efficient means of communicating and apprehending meaning than the ‘metaphors gone stale’ of everyday language; for music is unadulterated vibration - it retains the primal force of Spanda.

Wilson instinctively knew that head consciousness was not the sole solution. In The Occult he writes:

“The poet, the mystic and the 'magician' have this in common: the desire to develop their powers 'downward' rather than upward. In the Symposium, Socrates expresses the ideal aim: to do both at the same time – to use increased knowledge to reach out towards a state of instinctive unity with the universe. In the two and a half thousand years since then, civilisation has been forced to devote its attention to more practical problems, while the artists and mystics have continued to protest that 'the world is too much with us,' and that triumphant homo sapiens is little more than a clever dwarf. If man is really to evolve, then he must develop depth, and power over his own depths.  (47) 

Wilson never tired of quoting Whitehead concerning ‘experience drunk, experience sober etc’, i.e. the necessity of including all of which we are capable. And it seems to me this is the value of these concepts from Kashmiri Shaivism, and incidentally the whole Hindu system of chakras which we’ll be reviewing later in this book.

One of the prime means of opening the chakras is through the chanting of Mantras which are fundamentally unique combinations of Matrika Shakti brought together in order to effect a raising of the vibrations of the practitioner. Every piece of music we listen to has the capacity to do the same.

I would suggest our obsession in the West with listening to music serves the same purpose as the Indian guru chanting his mantras – it is about taking charge of consciousness and opening the chakras. The advantage of the concept of chakras is it embraces all aspects of human functioning, from the most basic at the root chakra Muladhara, taking in the sexual centre, the solar plexus (centre of the will), the heart (centre of love & compassion), the throat, (centre of communication and articulation) and the third eye, (centre of intuition and psychic consciousness) en route for the transcendent consciousness at the crown chakra Sahasrara. (48)

In his remarkable book The Infinite Harmony, (wholeheartedly endorsed by Wilson - See From Atlantis to the Sphinx Chapter 10) Michael Hayes declares:

‘....as I looked deeper and deeper into the workings of the genetic code I became convinced that God Himself was a musician.........’ (49)

Hayes presents an impressive volume of evidence for his theory that the double helix of DNA reflects basic laws of the universe that can be found throughout human history and culture. What one comes away with is a conviction that whether or not God is actually a musician – the laws of western tonality (founded on the principles of solfeggio – do re mi fa so la si do etc) reflect some fundamental laws of the universe – which is why this music speaks to us....

And if this is the case it also argues for the fact that it may be more than just personal prejudice that made Wilson so unenthusiastic about the avant garde school of music that emerged out of Schoenberg’s experiments with atonality and all that came after – for this fundamentally entailed a total abandonment of tonality, and ergo those same laws of proportion which provide such a powerful link between music and the laws of the universe...

The world of manifestation relies on polarity. In the context of Shavaism, Spanda finds expression in the manifest universe through Tonality which employs the conflict of polarities. It could be said that when Schoenberg abolished tonality he abolished the role of music as a means of expressing Spanda dynamically in the world of manifestation...

The back cover of my copy of Hayes’ book summarises its thesis thus ‘The basic structures of subatomic particles and of DNA have one thing in common – they can be explained in terms of the rules of music. The same is true of the belief systems of the world’s great religions. Is music therefore the invisible bridge between science and religion?’

I would say absolutely. It seems to me that music speaks a quantum language – it automatically includes the knower in the known. The transcendent power of music is encoded in our genes. This if anything offers resounding support to the notion of an existential criticism of music....for Music and Existence would appear to be inseparable.

Chapter 3 Colin Wilson and Music Footnotes

1 Gary Lachman Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson Penguin Publishing Group page 348

2 Mozart’s Journey to Prague Paupers Press 1992 page 42

3 From private tape in the author’s collection of Music Matters BBC Radio 3 January 21^st 2007

4 Religion and the Rebel Ashgrove Press 1984 page 246

5 Stanley, Colin. Around the Outsider: Essays presented to Colin Wilson on the occasion of his 80th birthday (Kindle Locations 2326-2329). John Hunt Publishing. Kindle Edition.

6 Beyond the Occult 1988 page 360

7 Gregg Braden Human by Design Hay House 2017 page 71-72

8 Religion and the Rebel Ashgrove Press 1984 page 191

9 The World of Violence Victor Gollancz 1963 page 134

10 Ibid page 133

11 William Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – The Voice of the Devil 1790

12 Nietzsche Also Sprach Zarathustra Of the Despisers of the Body (trans Thomas Common)

13 Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy trans Kaufmann Vintage Books 1967 p 55-56

14 Nietzsche The Will to Power trans Kaufmann Weidenfeld & Nicholson 1968 p442

15 Anthony Storr Music & the Mind Harper Collins 1993 page 165

16 http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/how-music-can-support-brain-regeneration-healing

© February 9th 2018 GreenMedInfo LLC. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of GreenMedInfo LLC. Want to learn more from GreenMedInfo? Sign up for the newsletter here //www.greenmedinfo.com/greenmed/newsletter.

17 Andrews-Hanna, J.R. (2012). The brain's default network and its adaptive role in internal mentation. Neuroscientist, 18(3), 251-270.

18 Wilkins, R.W. et al. (2014). Network Science and the Effects of Music Preference on Functional Brain Connectivity: From Beethoven to Eminem. Science Reports, 4, 6130.

19 Colin Wilson on Music (Brandy of the Damned) Pan Books 1967 page 21

20 Ibid page 108

21 Colin Wilson Introduction to the New Existentialism Hutchinson & Co 1966 page 170-171

22 Colin Wilson, The Sex Diary of Gerard Sorme (Man without a Shadow) Granada Publishing 1980 page 96

23 Colin Wilson Dreaming to Some Purpose Random House 2004 page 1

24 Colin Wilson The Outsider Picador Ed 1978 page 268

25 Colin Wilson Dreaming to Some Purpose Random House 2004 page 62-63

26 Colin Wilson The Outsider Picador Ed 1978 page 269-70

27 Colin Wilson The Magician from Siberia Robert Hale Ltd 1988   page 75

28 In The Mystical Qabalah Dion Fortune defines the Absolute as being that which ‘is unknown to the state of consciousness which is normal to human beings’, i.e. we may imagine the Absolute is beyond our cognition but for the Gnostic or Cabbalist, who is willing to enter upon the Great Work, there is no reason why a condition of consciousness should not be achieved by which the individual may apprehend the Absolute. In this sense The Philosopher’s Stone is the bildungsroman of a man determined to break through from ordinary consciousness to the Absolute, to that heightened awareness where anything becomes possible – or in Wilson’s parlance to break through from the worm’s eye view to the bird’s eye view. And clearly Sir Alaister Lyell considers music an ideal means of achieving this.

Fortune also gives resounding support to Wilson’s concept of the relationality of consciousness when in discussing the Cabbalistic Tree of Life she writes: ‘In working with the Tree it is wisest to keep on going over it, rather than concentrate upon a single point until it is mastered, for one thing explains another, and it is out of the perception of the relationships between the different symbols that enlightenment arises’. The more one studies The Philosopher’s Stone the more one realises how aptly titled it is....it is essentially a Cabbalistic text. See Dion Fortune The Mystical Qabalah Ernest Benn Ltd 1976 page 30-31

29 Colin Wilson The Philosopher’s Stone Granada Publishing 1978 page 17

30 Ibid page 27

31 Ibid page 28

32 Ibid page 31

33 Ibid page 32

34 Colin Wilson From Atlantis to the Sphinx Virgin Books 1996 page 249

35 In addition to the Law of Three Gurdjieff posited a Law of Seven or Law of Octaves. In his book on Gurdjieff The War Against Sleep Wilson elaborates on the Law of Octaves:

“This is, basically, the major law governing our human activity. Everyone must have noticed that we seldom reach the long-term objectives we have set for ourselves....The reason, says Gurdjieff, lies in the law of the octave. In terms of vibrations, there are two places in the octave which are ‘weaker’ than elsewhere - the space between Mi & Fa, and between Ti and Do; there are semitones between these notes, instead of full tones. And where our energies are concerned these are the points where, unless we are deliberately reinforced we change direction.

‘Creative processes depend on descending octaves. For example, in writing this book, I began by contemplating the whole of Gurdjieff’s thought, and planning it into even chapters....after it had been subdivided into seven sections, I then had to decide what to put into each section and what to leave out. If the final version of this book is anything at all like my original conception, it will only be because I applied the law of octaves, and deliberately reinforced that original stimulus at certain definite points. That is I have broken off, and carefully re-thought what I was doing. Every writer – or artist or musician – is thoroughly familiar with the process I am describing....A work of art cannot be created in one long, continuous burst of application; if the artist ignores this rule, his work becomes, quite literally broken-backed. (This is why so many of Balzac’s novels start off so magnificently and end so badly)’ Colin Wilson The War Against Sleep The Aquarian Press Ltd 1980 page 35

36 Colin Wilson The Musician As Outsider Paupers Press 1987 page 3

37 Colin Wilson The Misfits Grafton Books 1988 page 206

38 Interestingly it wasn’t always thus. Up until 869 the Christian Church held that Man was a tripartite being consisting of body, soul and spirit – something that Rudolph Steiner re-instigated in his hermeneutics... ‘Origen’s tripartite hermeneutics was considered standard Christian doctrine until a ruling at the Eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 869 made it Christian dogma that man consists of only body and soul, relegating spirit to doctrinal limbo’’ See Lachman, Gary. The Secret Teachers of the Western World Penguin Publishing Group page 129

39 Don Campbell Music: Physician for Times to Come Quest Books p. 292

40 Paul Eduardo Ortega-Muller The Triadic Heart of Shiva State University of New York Press page 133

41 Don Campbell Music: Physician for Times to Come Quest Books p. 292

42 See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w0_kazbb_U it should be noted Royal Rife is not credited in this demonstration – it would be more than the presenter’s credibility was worth; and yet there is not one word that contradicts anything that Rife discovered nearly 90 years ago. You’ll see film of cancer cells being destroyed precisely as described by Royal Rife.

43 See: http://www.matrika.co/en/matrika-shakti  This website is the window for a remarkable cross cultural project co-founded by Nadeshwari Joythimayananda and bringing together a wide range of interdisciplinary creative practitioners all united by the same understanding of a unitary universe that is the underlying thesis of this book.

44 Colin Wilson Superconsciousness Watkins Publishing 2009 Postscript page 210

45 Frankenstein’s Castle Ashgrove Press 1980 page 47-48

46 Colin Wilson The Occult Granada Publishing 1978   See page 35-37

47 Ibid page 56

48 Interestingly there is no chakra specifically designated to our intellectuality. The all important 6^th chakra Ajna located in the brain is associated with intuition and extrasensory perception while our capacity to articulate and communicate, which is the essence of our intellectual capacity, is contained in the throat chakra Vissudhi.

49 Michael Hayes The Infinite Harmony Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1994 page xv