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.

Part 1: In the first part of this WIE 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.

Part 2: In the second half of our interview with Zoltan Torey WIE 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.

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