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At its simplest, what Colin Wilson calls Faculty X is "simply that latent power in human beings possess to reach beyond the present." Yet its existence is evinced in all those phenomena that modernity files under "supernatural" or "occult." As difficult to explain as it is impossible to omit from any honest survey of human existence, the occult haunts the modern, not just as a vestige of the past but also, perhaps, as a promise from a time to come. For Wilson, magic isn\'t the living fossil the arch-rationalists would like it to be, but a "science of the future." Faculty X is an evolutionary power, innately positive, inseparable from the will to live and the unshakeable conviction that, somehow, this world has some real, ineffable meaning. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss Wilson\'s concept of Faculty X as elaborated in his monumental 1971 work, The Occult.

REFERENCES

Colin Wilson, The Occult: A History
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\\nDavid Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence
\\nMaking Sense, episode 107: Is Life Actually Worth Living?
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\\nThomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
\\nFrancisco Goya, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters
\\nEmil Cioran, Franco-Romanian essayist
\\nArthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher
\\nAt the Fights: American Writers on Boxing, Library of America collection
\\nJoe Frazier, American pugilist
\\nHenri Bergson, Matter and Memory
\\nEdouard Schur\\xe9, [The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religions](Edouard Schur\\xe9, _The Great Initiates: A Study of the Secret History of Religion
\\nWeird Studies, episode 8: On Graham Harman\'s "The Third Table"
\\nThomas Merton, American monk
\\nGary Snyder, American poet