The Mind Parasites. Colin Wilson

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      RETURN OF THE MIND PARASITES

      I FIRST CAME ACROSS The Mind Parasites some time in late 1977, when I was a young New Waver, living in Los Angeles, making a living leading my own ‘power pop’ group, The Know. For the last few years I had been reading a great deal of, well, shall we say, unusual literature: Aleister Crowley, H.P. Lovecraft, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky: practically anything I could find on magic, the occult, mysticism and higher states of consciousness. Part of the inspiration for my fascination (or, as my girlfriend at the time considered it, obsession) with the peculiar canon of books the study of which has since become a lifelong occupation, came from one of the members of the band I had just left. Before breaking out on my own, I had been the bassist with the New York group Blondie. But after writing a couple of hit songs for them, and conquering New York, San Francisco, London and other cities, I decided it was time to start my own group. Aside from a few gold records, one of the things I walked away from Blondie with was an interest in the occult. The guitarist—the lead singer’s boyfriend—was deep into horror films, voodoo, black magic, Satanism, and other kitschy aspects of magic and the supernatural. Although I regarded all that (except for the horror films) with several grains of salt, and had never been interested in the occult before, I did find some of the books in his library interesting. One in particular caught my eye; its torn cover and soiled pages suggested it had already been through the counter-cultural wringer a couple of times, and when I slipped it off the shelf one afternoon, I expected nothing more than a good read. Little did I suspect that it would change my life. The book was Colin Wilson’s The Occult, and after a week transfixed behind its pages in my dilapidated room on the Bowery, I emerged a different person.

      By the time I moved to Los Angeles a year or so later, I was a dedicated Wilson reader, and since those early days I’ve had the great pleasure of visiting him in his home in Cornwall several times, and of writing about his work (see, for example, my book A Secret History of Consciousness (2003)). Back then I scoured second-hand bookshops for his work, paying high prices for out-of-print СКАЧАТЬ