Emendations and a two page epilogue from CW’s own copy of his imperative 1966 masterwork (Introduction to) The New Existentialism, privately published by Maurice Bassett in 1995 and only available in the UK if you were a subscriber to the late Mr. Newman’s Abraxas. Item A130 in Stanley’s bibliography and now almost as rare as the copy it’s taken from. [Edit: the publisher still “has a few copies in storage” so you could contact him] This is from the Epilogue:
“So the next possibility that suggests itself to me is this. If the ignorance of my conscious mind is untrue – a fake – then how about my ignorance of who I am, what life is about, where I was before my birth and where I’ll be after my death…? Could I say that my birth was intentional too? This certainly seems to be the content of moments of mystical insight. One’s deeper layers come awake, and one loses the feeling of ‘alienation’ (which is due to the lack of contact with one’s intentional layers.) Is this why mystical experience makes death seem nonsense? Because we are propelled into birth and death by a deep intentionality, just as we are propelled into sleep or waking? That this will of mine, that is at present thinking these thoughts and using this typewriter to express them, continues to operate on deeper and deeper levels, and ultimately, beyond birth and death?”
Note the question mark.
“Deeper and deeper levels”; primal perception, pre-conceptual awareness; like the poets and philosophers said –
“The Antediluvians who are our energies […] formed this world into it’s sensual existence, and now seem to live in it in chains, are the causes of it’s life and the sources of it’s activity; but the chains are the cunning of weak and tame minds which have power to resist energy; according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning.” (Blake)
“The frightful energies – those which are called evil – are the cyclopean architects and road makers of humanity.” (Nietzsche)
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.”
(Lovecraft)