Zoltan Torey - Light in the Darkness

Zoltan Torey's life story is dramatic and inspirational. Left completely blind and barely able to speak by an industrial accident when he was twenty-one, Torey's indomitable spirit drove him to willfully focus his remaining senses—and considerable imagination—toward the cultivation of unique and powerful new ways to explore his world—both inner and outer. Instead of rebuilding a mental picture of the world using hearing and touch alone, he went in the opposite direction, training himself to vividly picture the world around him through his hypersensitive visual imagination.

But Torey's considerable energies have not been employed only to compensate for his loss of sight. His remarkable inner explorations have also been directed at the uncharted world of the human mind, a personal passion that resulted, after twenty-six years of research and study, in his magnum opus, The Crucible of Consciousness. An intricate and highly technical work, it employs data from evolution theory, neuroscience, biology, and psychiatry in its quest to understand the nature of the mind and what is perhaps the mind's most elusive creation: self-conscious awareness.

In  this EnlightenNext interview with editor Ross Robertson, Torey gives a detailed and riveting account of his early life and the brutal accident that robbed him of his sight but unlocked his destiny. Articulate and relaxed, he discusses the careful process by which he transformed a life-threatening event into a means of accomplishing great things, be they decoding the mysteries of the human mind, learning to “see” in perpetual darkness, or climbing on his roof to replace the gutters of his many-gabled house.

In the second half of our interview with Zoltan Torey EnlightenNext editor-in-chief Andrew Cohen enters into a lively dialogue with Mr. Torey about the future of religion, and the ultimate limits—or lack thereof—to our knowledge of the guiding principles and purpose of the universe.

BIO

Zoltan Torey was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1929. Matriculating in 1948, he escaped from Soviet-dominated Hungary and emigrated to Australia.

Enrolled in the Faculty of Dentistry at the University of Sydney, he met with an accident halfway through his second year and lost his sight. After unsuccessful eye operations, he returned to the University of Sydney in 1956 and enrolled in the Faculty of Arts and in 1955 gained an honors degree in psychology with philosophy as the second major.

Working as a consultant psychologist, he began his research into the brain-mind-consciousness problem. His neuroscience-based interdisciplinary work, The Crucible of Consciousness, was first published by Oxford University Press in 1999.

Encouraged by the eminent New York neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks, Zoltan Torey wrote his memoir, Out of Darkness, which was published by Picador (Pan MacMillan) in 2003. The book includes a foreword by Dr. Sacks, who also wrote about Torey's unusually successful adjustment to blindness and power of visualization in an article in the July 2003 issue of The New Yorker.

Both his books have been translated and released in Hungary. He writes science-based radio talks and articles, and has been a guest speaker on many occasions, including events at Queensland University, the Sydney Writers' Festival, the Neuroscience Faculty of the University of Budapest, and the Center for Consciousness Studies in Tucson, Arizona, where he was the keynote speaker of the 2004 biennial conference. A second edition of The Crucible of Consciousness, with a foreword by Professor D.C. Dennett, is scheduled for worldwide release by MIT Press in the Fall of 2006. Zoltan Torey lives in Newcastle, N.S.W., Australia.