Author Archives: quackenbush

Eight Dimensions of Mind: Weekly Assignments

WEEK ONE

I seem to have 44 of you in this seminar — 42 students, our Beloved Academy Admin, and an anonymous invited guest. By holy Qabala 44 = Horus. Does this mean something?

I don’t know; but according to Aleister Crowley we entered the Aeon of Horus 100 years ago — 100 years, 3 months and 20 days ago, if I calculate correctly. But perhaps that merely indicates whimsey on my part….

I hope and expect this seminar will prove a Learning Experience for all of us, especially me. I also hope we will all find it a lot of fun….

150 years ago, more or less, Emerson synthesized the barely emerging science of neuro-linguistics into a memorable mantra:

“Every word is a fossilized poem.”

That sentence ignited a flaming perception in the brain of a Harvard student named Ernest Fenollosa, and when Fenollosa died in 1914 his notebooks, turned over to Ezra Pound, ignited what some literary historians call the Revolution of the Word. One result: we all respect words a lot more and trust them a lot less.

Thus, while Freudians and Jungians speak of “levels of consciousness” or “unconsciousness,” Gurdjieff of “vibration levels,” Leary of neurological “circuits,” etc. and currently I speak of “dimensions,” this mostly represents a choice of metaphors and not a difference in subject matter.

If you grok that in its fullness, you will also dig why I call this workshop The 8 Dimensions of “Mind” and NOT The 8 Dimensions of Mind. If you don’t get it, hang in there: it will become clear as we proceed.

And just in case that bloody 44 does mean something, read and contemplate Chapter 44 from Crowley’s Book of Lies [falsely so called]:

44

Kappa-Epsilon-Phi-Alpha-Lambda-Eta Mu-Delta

THE MASS OF THE PHOENIX

The Magician, his breast bare, stands before an altar on which are his Burin, Bell, Thurible, and two of the Cakes of Light. In the Sign of the Enterer he reaches West across the Altar, and cries:
Hail Ra, that goest in Thy bark
Into the Caverns of the Dark!

He gives the sign of Silence, and takes the Bell, and Fire, in his hands.

East of the Altar see me stand
With Light and Musick in mine hand!

He strikes Eleven times upon the Bell 3 3 3-5 5 5 5 5- 3 3 3 and places the Fire in the Thurible.
I strike the Bell: I light the flame:
I utter the mysterious Name.
ABRAHADABRA

He strikes Eleven times upon the Bell.

Now I begin to pray: Thou Child,
Holy Thy name and undefiled!
Thy reign is come: Thy will is done.
Here is the Bread; here is the Blood.
Bring me through midnight to the Sun!
Save me from Evil and from Good!
That Thy one crown of all the Ten.
Even now and here be mine. AMEN.

He puts the first Cake on the Fire of the Thurible.

I burn the Incense-cake, proclaim
These adorations of Thy name.

He makes them as in Liber Legis, and strikes again Eleven times upon the Bell. With the Burin he then makes upon his breast the proper sign.

Behold this bleeding breast of mine
Gashed with the sacramental sign!

He puts the second Cake to the wound.

I stanch the blood; the wafer soaks It up, and the high priest invokes!

He eats the second Cake.

This Bread I eat. This Oath I swear As I enflame myself with prayer:
“There is no grace: there is no guilt:
This is the Law: DO WHAT THOU WILT!”

He strikes Eleven times upon the Bell, and cries

ABRAHADABRA.
I entered in with woe; with mirth
I now go forth, and with thanksgiving,
To do my pleasure on the earth
Among the legions of the living.

He goeth forth.

COMMENTARY [by Crowley]

(Mu-Delta)

This is the special number of Horus; it is the Hebrew blood, and the multiplication of the 4 by the 11, the number of Magick, explains 4 in its finest sense. But see in particular the accounts in Equinox I, vii of the circumstances of the Equinox of the Gods.
The word “Phoenix” may be taken as including the idea of “Pelican”, the bird, which is fabled to feeds its young from the blood of its own breast. Yet the two ideas, though cognate, are not identical, and “Phoenix” is the more accurate symbol.
This chapter is explained in Chapter 62. It would be improper to comment further upon a ritual which has been accepted as official by the A.’.A.’.

COMMENTARY BY RAW

PLEASE NOTE that I suggested that you “contemplate” this ritual, NOT that you perform it. Unless you have at least 10 years experince in Magick ritual of the Thelemic sort, you should not try performing any invovation of Horus. Reasons exist why occultists call him the Lord of Force and Fire.


READING:

PROMETHEUS RISING:
Preface to Second Edition*
Chapter One
Chapter Two

*If you only have the first edition, you may skip this and just meditate on how to make fire out of ice.

MAGICK AND CURSES


EXERCIZES

Do all exercizes in Chapers 1 and 2

1. How many of these exercizes relate to the meta-model? How many to the Milton model? Do any of them comingle the meta-model with the Milton model?

2. Whether you’ve tackled Finnegans Wake before or not, open to the first page [numbered page 3] and write down all the overt or covert references to the Bible you can find. [Next Tuesday I’ll send you my own list.]

3. Why, of all the teachers in the world, did you seek out me? Why of all the years in your life, this year? Try to think of “all” possible answers again…..

4.Contemplate this haiku:

All is cloaked in fog;
The world seems empty, until —
Far off, a gull shrieks.

5. Go to www.gunsanddope.net Study and discuss. [“We are operating on many levels here.”]

6. Rent a DVD or Video of our Movie of the Week, D W Griffith’s masterpiece, INTOLERANCE, and feel free to join the Academy Forum and the discussion of it.

7. Record your exercize results in your Academy Journal


WEEK TWO

What a delightfully intelligent crew we have here…
I’m enjoying this dia-[or multi]-log immensely,
and I hope all of you enjoy it, too

For this week:

Read chapters 3 & 4 of Prometheus Rising

Do at least SOME of the exercizes

Continue at least some of last week’s exercizes

Read my Introduction to Weishaupt

Read the excerpt from the Wilson/Brown interview (full interview)

Read page 3 of FINNEGANS WAKE again, this time looking for
a) Mark Twain
b) Jonathan Swift
c) Lewis Carroll

Read the forum discussions of Bible links on page 3 of Finnegans Wake

Bring forth a Theory of why Joyce left the apostrophe out of Finnegan’s


Week Three Assignments

Read chapter 5 PromRis
Do the exercizes
Add to subjects:
George W Bush
John F Kerry
Try again on exercizes from Chapters 3 and 4

Read Protecting Biblical Marriage

Re-read page 3 of FINNEGANS WAKE looking for possible references to
a. geography & history of Dublin, Ireland
b. geography & history of Dublin, Georgia

Make 4 copies of the Leary Interpersonal Grid [PromRis p 76] using yr scanner or going to a xerox shop
Black out with pencil or crayon all wodges that describe your habitual interpersonal reactions [“games.”]
This represents a profile of the first two dimensions of yr ‘mind.’
Have 3 critters who know you fill out the same grid giving their profiles on you.
PREPARE FOR SHOCKS.


Week Four Assignments

Read chapter 6 PromRis and
DO THE EXERCIZES
Try again on exercizes from Chapters 3 and 4


Re-read page 3 of FINNEGANS WAKE looking
for wot Monty Pythin calls “the naughty parts”–
a. sex and sex organs
b. urination and defecation

If you hain’t already done this, make 4 copies of the Leary Interpersonal Grid [PromRis p 76] using yr scanner or going to a xerox shop

Black out with pencil or crayon all wodges that describe
your habitual interpersonal reactions [“games.”]
This represents a profile of the first two dimensions
of yr ‘mind’
Have 3 critters who know you fill out
the same grid giving their profiles on you.

Compare the different filters we have used on the
opening of FINNEGANS WAKE with different
filters used on “the world” — Christianity, Islam,
Marxism, Buddhism etc etc

Compare LSD with seeing all possible filters at once…..


Week 5 Assignments

Read PM chapters 7 and 8
DO the exercizes

Contribute to Forum with examples
of the acceleration/deceleration dialectic —
using recent or past history

Re-read page 3 of FINNEGANS WAKE looking
for possible references to
a. geography & history of Rome, Italy
b. the Three Stooges


Week 7 Assignments

Read chapter 11 PR

DO the exercizes especially the Christian Science
texts for the month. You can now find them online
www.cssentinel.com

If they seem like gibberish,
that’s okay; just do more pranayama and/or
smoke more pot, until you can decipher them.

Contribute to Forum, if you can, any interesting results of exercizes.

Note that Mrs Eddy entangles the meta-model
with the milton-model. Attempt disentanglement.

Read the attached article on Sexual Alchemy
and discuss in the Forum.


Week 8 Assignments

Read chapter 12 PR

DO the exercizes especially 3, 4, 5 and 6

Contribute to Forum, if you can, any interesting results of exercizes.

Read the attached article on Dreams of Flying and discuss in the Forum.

Forum Topics

Discuss one of your own experiences with the the neurogentic dimension and/or Jungian Collective Unconscious

Write down at least one dream this week just upon waking and examine Jungian Unconscious insights

Do you think the Jungian Collective Unconscious has been too heavily emphasized?

What other models are useful for these type of consciousness?

If you’ve read Rupert Sheldrake, discuss his “morphogenetic field” as a model for this data.


Week 9 Assignments

Read chapter 13 PM

DO the exercizes

Contribute to Forum, if you can, any interesting results of exercizes.

Read the attached article on CSICON
and discuss in the Forum.

Forum Topics
Discuss one of your own experiences with the abnormal or paranormal.
Any UFO experiences?


WEEK TEN

Read chapters 14 and 15 PM

DO the exercizes

Contribute to Forum, if you can, any interesting results of exercizes.

Read following story and assume it is literally true:

Stephanie and her friend walked into the music store after lunch.
Stephanie wanted to buy the new CD by the group, “No Girls Allowed”.
There was only one other person in the store when Stephanie and her friend arrived.
Stephanie asked, “How much is this CD?”
Stephanie’s friend said, “Here, let me see it.
I don’t think he heard you.
This tag says it costs $11.99.”

Check each of the following inferences as T [true], F [false] or ? [maybe]

1. Stephanie wanted to buy a CD.
2. Stephanie and her friend ate lunch together.
3. Stephanie owns a CD player.
4. There was only one boy in the store.
5. Two girls walked into a music store.
6. There are no boys in the “No Girls Allowed” group.
7. Stephanie and her friend are teenagers.
8. The store’s owner didn’t hear Stephanie because the music was too loud.
9. Stephanie had enough money to buy the CD.
10. The “No Girls Allowed” CD cost $11.99.
11. The owner of the store is a woman.
12. Stephanie wanted to buy a CD as a gift.
13. One of the CDs costs $11.99.
14. There were two boys in the store.
15. The clerk was hard of hearing.

Discuss the tricky ones in the Forum.


WEEK ELEVEN

Read chapter 16 and attempt the exercizes

Consult http://www.velvet.net/~starchy/ [dead link}
for the Key to Efas Taem

Read and discuss The Relativity of “Reality” in the forum


WEEK TWELVE

Assignments — none!!

Altho’ I suggest that you read the last 3 chapters
of PR and discuss in the forum

And I wd/ feel happy if you write short [one sentence]
comments about
what you liked most about the course
and what you liked least about the course
Teaching online feels like a new and exciting art
but one which I need to learn by doing. All
feedback will help.

I want to thank all of you for what I have learned,
and I hope you all feel that you have learned
something too.

Non illuminati carborundum,


grandpaw

Conspiracy, Coincidence, and Code: Weekly Assignments

WEEK ONE ASSIGNMENTS

Read Chapters 1-5 in Cosmic Trigger III

Read entries on Howard Hughes Forgeries and
Hughes vs. Rockefeller in Everything Is Under Control
and follow as many of the links as you can until you get tired of turning pages

Read “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” essay

Try the following gedakenexperiment:

Why does the opening sentence of James Joyce’s Ulysses have 22 words? Not 21 or 23, but exactly 22?
Why does the Cabalistic Tree of Life have 22 “paths”?
Why does the Tarot have 22 Trumps?
Why does Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice have 22 chapters?
Why does the last book of the Christian Bible [“Revelations”] have 22 chapters?
Why does Revelations appeal strongly to so many serial killers?
Why does the 22-word opening sentence of Ulysses contain “state” in its first word and “cross” in its last?
Have I given you A Vital Clue in these questions or just bamboozled you with coincidences???


WEEK TWO ASSIGNMENTS

Read Chapters 6-10 in Cosmic Trigger III
and discuss in the forum.

Read p3-16 in Saharasia and use the chart on p 5
to classify the vibe of the Republicans;
the Democrats;
the Greens;
the Libertarians;
the Guns&Dope party;
and discuss in the forum.

Read entry on ‘Hawthorne Abendsen’ in Everything is Under Control
Try the following gedakenexperiment:

“Maybe” is a thin reed to hang your life on but it’s all we’ve got.
–Woody Allen

This may not seem startling to gamers, but it sure woke me up; I learned about it on Law and Order last Sunday.

A type of program called a”bot ” can play a computer game “just like a human” and in the style of any chosen human, given enough skill on the part of the bot-maker.

It seems to me this surpasses virtual reality and approaches electronic cloning. After all, the bot can go on playing after the human has “died.”

A bot can also exist which, like an art forgery, seems to have the style and habits of a certain human but actually emerged from the brain of a clever faker.

This seems to me like virtual virtual reality and electronic immortality of a sort. If a bot plays chess like Alekhine, in what sense can we call Alekhine totally “dead”?

More: computer tech in general as brought us to the stage where producing a photo of a crime or even a moving picture of it does not prove a damned thing anymore. “I saw it with my own eyes” has become a bad joke.

I begin to feel that Maybe Logic will soon replace the Aristotelian either/or, not because of my books or Korzybski’s or von Neumann’s. but because virtual reality and artificial intelligence have destroyed certitude and left us with only degrees of probability.

BTW, do you feel absolutely sure “Robert Anton Wilson” wrote this and not some gol-danged bot?


WEEK THREE ASSIGNMENTS

Read Chapters 11-19 in Cosmic Trigger III
and discuss in the forum.

go to
http://www.lysanderspooner.org/bib_poll.htm [dead link]
and discuss in the forum
[via the Wayback Machine, Wilson seems to be pointing to No Treason by Lysander Spooner]

go to
http://www.madsci.org/%7Elynn/juju/surr/images/surr-imagery.html
and discuss in the forum


WEEK FOUR ASSIGNMENTS

Discuss in the forums,
in the order listed

One
http://www.madsci.org/%7Elynn/juju/surr/paranoia/CP.html

Two
From EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL:
Language as Conspiracy
G I Gurjieff
James Jesus Angleton
Principia Discordia
Knights of Malta
OM
David Ferrie
The Con

Three
[Introduction to THE PRANKSTER AND THE CONSPIRACY]


WEEK FIVE ASSIGNMENTS

If conspiracies never happen, why do so many states and nations have laws against them?

Have our laws resulted from paranoids in power?

Discuss

In EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL, read and discuss
Bisociation
Gordon Brown
Giordano Bruno
Timothy Leary
Wilhelm Reich
American Dynasty

Consider what I call The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon

Our psychic universe is expanding even more rapidly than the physical universe. Let us define the measurement of known scientific facts in the year 1 A.D. as “one jesus,” using the name of the celebrated philosopher born that year.

Before going any further, let us ask how long it took to arrive at one jesus. One way of estimating is to take the estimated age of homo sapiens, in which case it took 40,000 to 100,000 years.

How long did it take to double this accumulation of knowledge, to achieve two jesuses? It required 1500 years – until 1500 A.D. How long did it take to double again and obtain four jesuses? It required 250 years, and we had four jesuses in our larder by 1750.

The next doubling took 150 years, and by 1900 A.D. humanity had eight jesuses in our information account. The next doubling took 50 years, and by 1950 we had 16 jesuses. The next, ten years, and by 1960 we had 32 jesuses. The next doubling took seven years, and by 1967 we had 64 jesuses. And the next doubling took 6 years; by 1973 we have 128 jesuses.

There is no reason to imagine that the acceleration has stopped. Thus, we almost certainly reached 256 j around 1978-79 and 512 j in 1982.

In short, we are living in a mental transformation space; that is, an omnidimensional halo expanding toward infinity in all directions. And the electronic center of this halo of mentation is possibly everywhere. It is all available to you right where you are sitting now. Just plug in a terminal. The machine doesn’t care who or what you are.

Infophobia/Infophilia Quiz

Add the next term to the series:
1.walk
2.ride horseback
3.fly by jet
4.__

A certain job can be performed either by a human or a machine. We should
1.employ the human because “the devil makes work for idle hands.”
2.employ the human because otherwise he or she might be bored
3.employ the human because there is no way to organize society except by having most people work for wages
4.employ the machine because technology has no function other than to free people from toil.

Add the next term to the series:
1.hunt and gather
2.farm
3.industry-commerce
4._______

There is a magic machine with two buttons, each of which will create equality among humans. You will push
1.the button that makes everybody equally poor
2.the button that makes everybody equally rich

Working for wages
1.has always existed and always will exist
2.is ordained by God
3.did not appear on large scale until the Enclosure Acts drove the serfs off the land in the past 300 years
4.will become obsolete in the next 100 years
5.will become obsolete in the next 10 years

The best way to search for Higher Intelligence is to
1.find the right religion
2.support Carl Sagan’s Project Cyclops, which is searching for radio signals from advanced civilizations in the galaxy;
3.investigate UFO’s
4.research our own nervous system
5.build a starship and go looking.

Add the next term to the series:
1.Black Pride
2.Women’s Lib
3.Gay Pride
4.___

How much of the changes now happening result from conspiracies?

How much from the Jumping Jesus Phenomenon?

Ponder and discuss Lenin’s words on his deathbed:

“THE MACHINE CONROLS THE ENGINEERS!”


WEEK SIX ASSIGNMENTS

Read “Malthus, Machiavelli, and Pop-Ecology” from my 1982 book,
RIGHT WHERE YOU ARE SITTING NOW
Cuss and/or discuss in the forum.

Ponder Bucky Fuller’s claim that “we”
remain hooked on mideastern oil because the
corporate state hasn’t figured out how to put a METER
between us and the sun.

In EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL, read and discuss
Gerard de Sede
Merovingians
Kenneth Grant
Golden Apple Corps
Holy Order of the Lemon
The Sirius Mystery


WEEK SEVEN ASSIGNMENTS

Read and discuss
http://www.infowars.com/print/Secret_societies/vladtree.htm
http://www.bridgeoflove.com/bookstore/bol/rept-agenda1.html

Read Cosmic Trigger III, Chapter 22. “Beneath the Planet of the Priory of Sion.”

How much of this stuff seems “real’?
How much seems like fantasy or science fiction?
Could some of it make sense as metaphor?
As code?

In EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL, read and discuss
Abductees Anonymous
Demonic Duck
Aiwass
Philip K Dick
Robert Morning Sky
Philip J Corso
Crying of Lot 49

Do you think this course intends to teach you new ways of reading and evaluating,
or to gradually reveal the Most Monstrous Conspiracy in the Galaxy?


WEEK EIGHT ASSIGNMENTS

In EVERYTHNG IS UNDER CONTROL read & discuss
John Birch Society
LAWCAP
MMAO
In Banks We Trust
The Naked Pope
Noble Drew Ali
World War II Deniers

Read and discuss–

A John Birch View:
The Red/Blue Map vs. Conspiracy Theories [source unknown]


WEEK NINE ASSIGNMENTS

http://www.geocities.com/gwbushart/gallery65/gallery65.htm

EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL
President George Bush
The Second George Bush
Skull and Bones
Collier Brothers
Flight 553

I’m just learning to use my new computer….more comments Will follow later!

You are the most complicated thing in the cosmos. You can’t figure you out.
–Alan Watts


WEEK TEN ASSIGNMENTS

A basic crack will split the GOP’s Christian/Capitalist coalition apart.

Xtianity, a faith-based system, does not have to accept ANY facts at all, at all, and wd like to ban research-based groups.

Capitalism, a profit-based system, has to recognize SOME facts [those related to profit] and cannot afford to ban all research-based groups.

Out of this tiny crack an earthquake will emerge

What do you think? and how does this relate to conspiracies in general?

Read and discuss from EIUC
John Adams on Banking
Bank of England
Great Pirates
Desovereignization
LAWCAP
MMAO
Ezra Pound


WEEK ELEVEN ASSIGNMENTS

Read. Worry about. Discuss:

EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONROL
John F Kennedy Asssassination
Martin Luther King Assassination
MMAO
Murder of Marilyn Monroe
Marina Oswald
Mary Pinchot Meyer
David Ferrie
Clay Shaw
Hale Boggs
Buddy Walthers
Sam Giancana
Eladio del Valle
“The Whole Bay of Pigs Thing”
Louis Lomax
Lee Bowers
ALBERT Guy Bogard
Mona Chaen
George de Mohrenscholdt’
The Three Tramps
Robert Kennedy Assassination

Does this look like coincidence? Happenstance? or–Something Sinister?

Meditate upon Ian Fleming’s aphorism “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

Consider and discuss synchronicity as yet another alternative…


Week Twelve Assignments

Divide all the groups we have examined into two groups – those fundamentally faith-based and those basically research-based. Does history make sense as a long quarrel between these two forces?

Does our society seem more faith-based or more research-based?

From what you know about Jefferson and our founders, do they seem more on one side or the other?

Read in EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL –
LORD ACTON
THE ANTI-BOB
THE ANTI-CHRIST
NICHOLAS BOURBAKI
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
THE CON
THE UMRELLA MAN
THE 23 ENIGMA
SATAN CLAUS
PROJECT DUMBO

HAPPY HOLIDAYS and I hope to chat with you all Thursday!

bob

34 Years After Bell’s Theorem: A Whole New Ball Game

Bell’s Theorem, a mathematical demonstration by physicist John Stewart Bell published in 1965, has become more popular than Tarot cards with New Agers, who think they understand it but generally don’t. Meanwhile it remains controversial with physicists, some of whom think they understand it but many of whom frankly admit they find it as perplexing as a chimpanzee in a Beethoven string quartet.

In a [hazardous] attempt to translate Bell’s math into the verbal forms in which we discuss what physics “means,” Bell seems to have proved that any two “particles”once in contact will continue to act as if connected no matter how far apart they move in “space” or “time” [or in space-time.] You can see why New Agers like this: it sounds like it supports the old magick idea that if you get ahold of a hair from your enemy, anything you do to the hair will effect him.

Unfortunately, things “aren’t” that simple.

Most physcists think a long series of experiments, especially those of Dr Alain Aspect and others in the 1970s and Aspect in 1982 have settled the matter. Particles once in contact certainly seem “connected,” or correlated, or at least dancing in the same ballet….But not all physicists have agreed. Some, the AntiBellists, still publish criticisms of alleged defects in the experiments. These arguments seem too technical to be summarized here, and only a small minority still cling to them, but this dissent needs to be mentioned since most New Agers don’t know about it. You can find more about this here. [See also, for general problems associated with Bell’s Theorem]

The most daring criticism of Bell comes from Dr N. David Berman of Columbia, who believes he has refined the possible interpretations of Bell down to two: (1) non-locality [“total rapport”] and (2) solipsism. We will explain non-locality below, but Dr Berman finds it so absurd that he prefers solipsism. [“Is The Moon There When Nobody Looks?”Physics Today, April 1985. He says it isn’t.]

Among those who accept Bell’s Theorem, Dr David Bohm of the University of London offers three interpretations of what it means:
‘It may mean that everything in the universe is in a kind of total rapport, so that whatever happens is related to everthing else [non-locality]; or it may mean that there is some kind of information that can travel faster than the speed of light; or it may mean that our concepts of space and time have to be modified in some way that we don’t understand.”(London Times, 20 Feb 1983)

Bohm’s first model,”total rapport,” also called non-locality, brings us very close– very, very close — to Oriental monism: “All is One,” as in Vedanta, Buddhism and Daoism. It also brings us in hailing distance of Jungian synchronicity, an idea that seems “occult” or worse to most scientists, even if it was once endorsed by Wolfgang Pauli,a quantum heavyweight and Nobel laureate. You can see why New Agers like this; it is argued with unction and plausibility in Capra’s The Tao of Physics. It means the particles “are” correlated because everything “is” correlated.

The strongest form of this non-local model is called super-determinism and means that everything”is” one thing, or at least one process. From the Big Bang to the last word of this sentence and beyond, nothing can be other than it is,since everything is part of a correlated whole. Nobody has openly endorsed this view but several (Stapp, Herbert et al) have accused others, especially Capra, of unknowingly endorsing it.

Bohm’s second alternative, information faster-than-light, brings us into realms previously explored only in science-fiction. Bell’s particles may be correlated because they are parts of an FTL (faster than light) cosmic Internet. If I can send an FTL message to my grandpa, it might change my whole universe to the extent that I wouldn’t be here at all. [E.g., he might be so shocked that he wouldn’t survive to reproduce.] This must either be rejected as impossible, or else it leads to the “parallel universe” model. I’m here in this universe, but in the universe next door the message removed me, so I never sent it there.

Even more radical offshots of this notion have been offered by Dr John Archibald Wheeler and Dr Jack Sarfatti. Dr Wheeler has proposed that every atomic or sub-atomic experiment we perform changes every particle in the universe everywhichway in time, back to the Big Bang. The universe is in constant creation, as in Sufism, but atomic physicists “are” its creators.

Dr Sarfatti is working on the theory of information-without-transportation and hopes to develop an FTL system which will indeed allow me to send an email (or its equivelant) to Julius Ceasar with all the paradoxes that might result producing multiple parallel universes.

Dr Bohm’s third alternative, modification of our ideas of space and time, could lead us anywhere…including back to the Kantian notion that space and time do not exist, but are only human projections, like persistent optical illusions.(Some think Relativity already demonstrates that…) The particles are correlated because they never moved in space or time, because space and time are just “in our heads.”

And there are other alternatives. Harrison (see URL above) suggests that we may have to abandon Aristotelian logic, i.e give up classifying things into only the two categories of “true and real” and “untrue and unreal.” In between, in Aristotle’s excluded middle, we may have the “maybe” proposed by von Neumann in 1933, the probabilistic logics (percentages/gambles) suggested by Korzybski, the four-valued logic of Rapoport (true, false, indeterminate and meaningless) or some system we haven’t found yet.

Others would rather give up “objectivity” — the basic pre-Bell axiom that we can describe an external world apart from our experiments or meddlings. Some say this rejection of objectivity was always meant by the Copenhagen Interpretation (invented by Neils Bohr long before Bell appeared,c 1926 in fact.) Generally, the Copenhagen view is stated as, We can only describe observer-observed interactions; we can never know anything about any hypothetical “observed” without an observer. Sounds like Zen to some, but others fear this is opening the door to Dr Berman’s solipsism and the moon that “is” only there when we look at it….

Bell’s Theorem “means a whole new ball game,” physicist Saul Paul Sirag told the present author once. Unfortunately, as we have seen, nobody feels really sure about the rules of the new game.

All we can say for sure is that “reality” ain’t what it used to be.

Introduction to Diogenes’ Lamp

Introduction to Adam Weishaupt’s  Diogenes’ Lamp

by Robert Anton Wilson

 

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?  –George W. Bush

The only book you’ve got to read is The Godfather.  That’s the only one that tells how the world is really run.  –Roberto Calvi, President, Banco Ambrosiano; stretched, London, 18/6/1982

Adam Weishaupt founded — or revived — the secret Order of the Illuminati on May 1, 1776; that much seems like Historical Fact. All else remains disputed and heatedly controversial.

Most historians believe the Illuminati originally recruited only high degree Freemasons, and every generation since 1785 — when the Bavarian government discovered and outlawed the Illuminati — Freemasons have faced the charge that they remain “under Illuminati control.”

They all deny it, of course.

Well, not all of them; a Scotch Freemason, John Robison, in his Proofs of a Conspiracy [1801], claimed the damned Illuminati had taken over Continental European Masonry; he wrote chiefly to warn the lodges of England, Scotland and Ireland against a similar coup.

Ever since Robison, the Masonic/Illuminati debate has included those who think the Weishauptians have taken over all Freemasoic lodges, those like Robison who think they’ve only infiltrated some, and those, including the Encyclopedia Britannica, who see Illuminism as a “short-lived movement of Republican free thought” which never had a major influence on Masonry — or on anything else.

But the Illuminati debate covers a lot more ground than that.

For example: Kris Millegan in his Fleshing Out Skull & Bones presents that Yale society as a branch of the Illuminati. In case you don’t know, some prominent Bonesmen have included Bush I, Bush II, Henry Luce of Time, Justice Potter Stewart, an all-star cast of the Captains of American banking, publishing and politics, and most of the directors of the C.I.A….. oh, yes, and John Kerry.

Sure you really want to know more about this?

From another angle, Akron Daraul, in his History of Secret Societies, argues that Weishaupt did not invent but only refurbished the Illuminati, which he relates to earlier movements known as the Holy Vehm (Germany), Allumbrados (Spain),Roshinaya (Persia) etc.; while the more exuberant John Steinbacher in Novus Ordo Seclorum traces them all the way back to the Garden of Eden! They were founded, he says, by Cain, the son not of the holy marriage of Adam and Eve but of an illicit and Satanic coupling between Eve and the Serpent.

How’s that for Hot Stuff? Bestiality, Satanism and all the themes for a new X Files movie……

Meanwhile, Eliphas Levi’s History of Magic traces the Illuminati back to Zarathustra and claims its secret doctrine came down to Weishaupt via Manichaeism, the Knights Templar and Freemasonry. This places them as part of the same occult tradition as Giordano Bruno, Dr. John Dee, Aleister Crowley and the Sufis of Islam.

But on the fourth or fifth hand, a British researcher named Nesta Webster sees the Illuminati as the brains behind socialism, communism, anarchism, and the Prussian government from 1776 to 1918. [She wrote shortly after England’s first war with the latter.]

On the sixth hand, J.F.,C. Moore argues that the Illuminati, a secret source of fascist occultism, inspired such odd birds as Aaron Burr, Adolf Hitler and J. Edgar Hoover; but Philip Campbell Argyle-Smith clams they are extraterrestrial invaders from the planet Vulcan. They call themselves “Jews” on this planet, he adds.

Whether that means all Jews “are” Vulcans or only some of them seems unclear to me, but the most famous Vulcan, Mr. Spock, “is” Jewish insofar as being performed by a Jewish actor makes one at least partially “Jewish,” whatever that means.

Maybe Argyle-Smith has looked at too many Star Trek movies.

He also credits the Illuminized Vulcans with managing the Thugs of India, the Zionists in Israel, the Rothschild banks, the Communist International, the Theosophical Society, Freemasonry and the Assassins of medieval Afghanistan. I don’t know why he left out George Bush and Al Qaeda; probably he just wrote too soon.

Another Cosmic Illuminati theory appeared in the East Village Other June 1969; it included Skull & Bones, the Rothschilds, the Nation of Islam [“Black Muslims”], Richard Nixon, the Black Panthers, the Bank of America, the Rosicrucians, the Holy Vehm, the Federal Reserve and the Combine’s Fog Machine. That one must contain some hidden jokes [I hope].

According to the RogerSpark, a radical Chicago newspaper [July 1969] Weishaupt actually murdered George Washington and served in his place for his two terms as president.[Then who wrote Weishaupt’s books? Hegel maybe; they sounds like him at times……]

The John Birch Society, of course, has a different slant on all this. According to Gary Allen, the editor of their news magazine, American Opinion, Adam Weishaupt “was” a “monster” but the Illuminati only got really monstrous after its capture by English adventurer/billionaire Cecil Rhodes, who used it to establish British domination of the world. The Council on Foreign Relations acts as its most important “front” in the U.S. today, according to Allen.

Sandra Glass, however, thinks of the Illuminati as a group of clandestine pot-heads [cannabis abusers] which included the medieval Assassins, Weishaupt, Goethe, Washington, the first mayor Richard Daly of Chicago and Ludvig van Beethoven.

“Beethoven?” you may gasp. Well, oddly enough, a recent, scholarly and non-conspiratorial biography of the great Ludwig van, by Maynard Solmon, says Mr B wrote some of his music under commission from the Illuminati and had many friends in the Order itself. Solomon doesn’t mention the pot, though; maybe Ludvig, like a recent president with a perpetual hard-on, didn’t inhale.

Then again, Adam Gorightly in The Prankster and the Conspiracy claims that all recent Illuminati research [post-1960s] has become confused and chaotic because of a hoax conspiracy, also called the Illuminati, founded by one Kerry Thornley, a man accused of involvement in the JFK assassination by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison. According to Gorightly, this neo-Illuminati aims only to bedevil and mock the efforts of sincere conspiracy researchers, and he even accuses the author of this essay [me, R.A.W.] of involvement in this Fiendish Plot!

I, of course, refuse to dignify this absurd charge with a denial, which nobody would believe anyway. Besides, as Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the Sub-Genius says in Maybe Logic, “Well, if I was a member of the Illuminati, I wouldn’t say so, would I?”

ANTICHORUS

We are not victims of the world we see, we are victims of the way we see the world.
— Dennis Kucinich

I think God is sending us a message: “If you can’t take a joke, go fuck yourselves.”
–Woody Allen

What does this book reveal about the “real” Adam Weishaupt and the “real” Illuminati?

A book works like a mirror, somebody said once: when a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out. I can only tell you what this book seems to me; others, I feel certain, will find other things in it — including coded references to Vulcans, Skull & Bones, Zarathustra, the Holy Vehm, communism, Mary Magdalene, the Federal Reserve, the Combine’s Fog Machine et.al.

To me, this book seems to support the most cautious and conservative of my sources, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and old Adam looks much like a weary defender of “Republican free thought,” 18th Century style. In other words, he seems a distant relative, philosophically speaking, of Adam Smith, Hume, Voltaire, Jefferson, Franklin, Tom Paine — i.e. of all those libertarian ideas currently as unfashionable in this country as in the Bavaria in Weishaupt’s day. I know why he seems weary to me: trying to teach liberation to people who feel reconciled to their slavery can really grind you down, in 1804 or 2004…

I also think I see an influence of Kant, and perhaps a foreshadowing of Hegel, in the semantic structure used continually by Weishaupt — “X seems true; not-X also seems true; we’ll have to think more about that.” Aquinas did the same trick, but always comes down on the side of safe orthodoxy, Papist flavor. Weishaupt throws the ball back to the reader,although you may not always catch him doing that.

I do not see any conclusive proof that the Illuminati plotted anything nefarious or even illegal, except insofar as free thought itself remained illegal in southern Europe. But I also don’t see any conclusive proof that they wouldn’t and couldn’t and didn’t do nasty things. As a secret society hidden inside the secret society of Freemasonry, the Illuminati will always remain somewhat mysterious, and pedants and paranoids will argue about it until the last galoot’s ashore.

Perhaps Tom Jefferson got it right, when he said that secret societies seemed necessary in Europe, haunted by monarchy and Papism, but not in the United States. Certainly, when the Constitution remained the law of the land [i.e. before the Supremes (s)elected Bozo] no sane person would feel the need for secret societies here. Do I dare add “But now with the Constitution in cryonic suspension –“?

No: I better not….better safe than sorry….

On the other hand, not just secret societies but secrecy itself or even privacy seem increasingly impossible under the reign of George III.

They have hidden cameras everywhere.

They bug our phones.

If they want to, they can “read” every keystroke on my computer, including this one:

They can even pry into the contents of our bladders, in random tests explicitly forbidden by that wonderful, moribund Constitution. Sweet grieving Jesus, there’s no place we can escape or hide or feel alone, is there?

Sometimes, tossing and trying to sleep in the wee hours, I explore the ideas rejected by my skeptical waking mind. Maybe the most paranoid fantasies about the Illuminati contain some truth. .. maybe….

Maybe the All-Seeing Eye on the dollar bill does represent the totally fascist state those bastards want.

Maybe all those Internet rants about Skull and Bones serving as a recruiter for the Illuminati have some foundation in fact, after all.

Maybe we should really worry when the choice in the next election remains limited to two rich Bonesmen…What is it Weishaupt wrote?– “Whoever is rich — very rich — can do anything….”

Maybe we should regard “Illuminati” as a generic term, or a metaphor?

Maybe every Power Structure acts a lot like the most paranoid fantasies about the Illuminati, especially when it feels threatened.?

No, no — that way lies madness, schizophrenia and Usenet trolls. After some sound sleep, I wake, the shadows flee, and I remember that “all’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds.”

Voltaire didn’t intend that as sarcasm, did he?

Robert Anton Wilson
Deep Underground
Somewhere in Occupied U.S.A.
23 February 2004

Recommended Reading and viewing:

Argyle-Smith, Philip Campbell — High IQ Bulletin, Colorado Springs 1970, IV, 1

Bauscher, Lance — MaybeLogic, http://www.maybelogic.com

Daraul, Akron — History of Secret Societies, Citadel Press NY, 1961.

Ellul, Jacques — Violence, Seabury Press, NY,1969.

Glass, Sandra — “The Conspiracy,” Teenset, March 1969.

Gorightly, Adam — The Prankster and the Conspiracy, ParaView Press, NY, 2003.

Gurwin, Larry — The Calvi Affair, Pan Books, London, 1984.

Knight, Stephen — The Brotherhood, Grenada, London, 1984.

Levi, Eliphas — History of Magic, Borden Publishing, Los Angeles, 1963.

Millegan, Kris — Fleshing Out Skull & Bones,Trineday, Walterville, OR, 2003.

Moore, J.f.C. — “The Nazi Religion,” Libertarian American, August 1969.

Morals, Vamberto — Short History of Anti-Semitism, Norton, NY, 1976.

Robison, John — Proofs of a Conspiracy, Christian Book Club, Hawthorn, CA, 1961.

Solomon, Maynard — Beethoven, Schirmer Books, NY, 1977.

Vankin, Jonathan — Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes, IllumiNet Press, Lillburn,GA, 1996.

Webster, Nesta — World Revolution, Constable, London, 1921.

Wilgus, Neal — The Illuminoids, Sun Press, Albuquerque NM, 1977.

Hang the TSAR!

Robert Anton Wilson
In Conversation With R.U. Sirius

from Neofiles @ LifeExtention.com

In a smarter world, Robert Anton Wilson would be widely acknowledged as one of the most important writers and thinkers in America. Of course, there is a smarter world within this one, and Wilson has a huge following both nationally and internationally. Most of our culture, indeed, operates beneath or beyond the mainstream media’s radar.

For many of us, Wilson is a subversive sage. He didn’t coin the phrase “guerrilla ontology” but he has been the world’s most valuable practitioner (MVP). The guerrillaontologist is a kind of memetic warrior who lives to dynamite people’s static reality tunnels (belief systems or b.s.). Since The Illuminatus Trilogy, a fictional tour de force published in 1975, he has managed to combine the most extravagant surrealism with unimpeachable logic; sometimes leaving us guessing as to which of these tactics he was employing.

Favorite books include the aforementioned Illuminatus Trilogy, Cosmic Trigger, and The Illuminati Papers, Masks of the Illuminati, The Earth Will Shake, and Prometheus Rising. (Many of you have your own list of faves, no doubt). NeoFiliacswho are willing to risk having the walls fall down around their own belief systems should read (or re-read) The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, published in 1986.

Now at 71-years-old, Wilson has spent the last few years fighting off Post-Polio Syndrome with a little help from medical marijuana. At the same time, he wrote T.S.O.G.: The Thing that Ate the Constitution, a coruscating and hilarious rant against the current rulers of the USA, which he calls the “Tsarist Occupation Government.” T.S.O.G. rips into the drug war, imperial militarism, and a million or so other absurdities in a land ruled by “the Bush crime family.” And he appeared in a superb documentary about his life and philosophy called Maybe Logic.

Four of us gathered in Marin for a drive down to Santa Cruz to see the Wizard. The caste of characters that participated in this conversation includes:

Will Block: CEO of Life Enhancement Products and a long time friend and fan of Bob

Severe Tire Damage: Part of the original cast of characters around Mondo 2000 and another BobManiac

Videobrain (a.k.a. Eve): She goes all the way back to “The Network,” a group who would gather at Wilson’s Berkeley home to SMI2LE. She’s been confusing Mr. Wilson at regular intervals ever since.

RU Sirius: That’s me. I stole my pseudonym from RAW’s hallucinations. ‘Nuff said.

NEOFILES: Stem cell research, gay marriage … can panicky neophobes block the future?

ROBERT ANTON WILSON: They can’t stop scientific research. They keep on trying. Throughout all history they tried, but scientific research continued even during the inquisition. They can slow it down but they can’t stop it. Stem cell research will just continue in other countries.

NF: William Burroughs used to say that “the mark of a basic shit is that he can’t mind his own business.” I’ve been thinking about that during this gay marriage controversy. I mean, why in the world would anyone think that what those people over there are doing ruins it for me?

RAW: Yeah … what the hell is with that?! I saw Bob Barr debating Barney Frank on TV and Barr said that gay marriage will dilute the meaning of marriage. And Frank was saying, “I can’t understand. What would someone else’s marriage have to do with your marriage?” And Bob Barr said, “I don’t mean my marriage, I mean the institution of marriage.” It’s so damn stupid. Talk about “diluting” an “institution” makes as much sense as asking “Why is a duck?” Barr lives in the 13th Century. Next he’ll inquire into how many angels can dance on the head of a Pookah.

NF: I was trying to figure it out the other day and I realized it’s not even so much about bigotry, it’s just these people saying “the world is changing too fast. Make it stop.” Maybe we should take the state out of marriage entirely.

RAW: Have you looked at my Guns & Dope website?

NF: I have.

RAW: My new mantra is “Everybody for President.” Everybody can write in their own name and take responsibility forthemselves. We’re not going to pass on our responsibility to some asshole like George Bush or a Congress of assholes and corporate whores. We’re going to take our own responsibility. We don’t need a czar. Who the hell needs a fucking czar? Why should 21st century America be like 19th century Russia? My doctor and I can make our own medical decisions for me. The whole idea of the TSOG — the Tsarist Occupation Government — is that the Tsar is in communication with God just like in 19th Century Russia. He knows how to handle my health problems better than me and my doctor and my friends and family. And he does it without even seeing me! He knows because he’s in direct communication with God. And this horseshit is what the American people are supposed to believe? I don’t believe it. I think he’s a political hack. I don’t think he knows anything about my health at all. I’d like to debate him. Or I’d like to ask him about my health problems … “Do you think I can go back to eating chocolate now that I’m no longer officially borderline diabetic?” (my doctor changed my status to non-diabetic six months ago.) Does the Tsar and his God want to over-rule that medical opinion too?

NF: What do you think of the Barr McClellan scandal? One of this guy’s sons is press secretary to President Bush; another is head of the FDA. And their dad, a lawyer for LBJ, has written a book claiming that LBJ shot JFK … had him shot.

RAW: I have a copy of the TV special about that on video. They have about four or five inside figures who say he did it. It’s pretty interesting. It’s kind of a fringe theory. Most people think it was the CIA or the Mafia, and the worst most people say about LBJ is that he knew about it. But that’s the way LBJ worked. He got rid of people he didn’t like. And now the whole LBJ family is all screaming about slander and libel. I don’t know but it’s interesting.

NF: So what’s happening with the medical marijuana situation here in Santa Cruz?

RAW: Well, we’ve decentralized it. They’ll have to raid 100 gardens next time or maybe 200. It’s very decentralized. It’s working very well. I mean, what the hell are they going to do, arrest everybody in Santa Cruz County? 85%support medical marijuana. And it’s pretty much the same in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and the Counties of Mendocino, Humboldt, Marin, and Los Angeles … everybody knows that California is the marijuana capital of the country. They can’t really do anything about it. All the Tsar and his God can do is huff and puff.

NF: It always wins wherever it gets on the ballot so why don’t any mainstream politicians back medical marijuana?

RAW: I have three theories on this one. In the first place, if you’re of a superstitious nature, you’re afraid of marijuana. Politicians want to appeal to people who are of a superstitious nature. That’s the largest voting bloc in the whole country. And then there are the pharmaceutical companies. If anybody can treat their own pain by growing a plant in their own house or on their own balcony … you could see a very sudden drop in the use of very expensive painkillers that are legal and addictive. And people will go with this example and look into other herbs as well. That’s a real threat to the pharmaceutical monopoly that gives a lot of money to both the parties in every election.

NF: I always thought baby boomer “liberals” like Al Gore were just being hypocritical about medical marijuana but I was thinking about it recently and realized that they’re probably actually genuinely offended by the idea of routing around the regulatory process through a populist vote.

 RAW: I read a book about ten years ago that said that seventy million Americans are pot smokers. How can you keep something that seventy million people do illegal? We’re the largest persecuted minority in the country. Eventually they’re going to have to back down.

If you look at the Dreyfus Case, then you know how governments work. They wouldn’t back down. Everybody inEurope knew he was innocent. Still they held him on Devil’s Island much longer than seems humanly possible. Governments hate to admit mistakes. People for years were lead to believe that the pope was infallible. Governments make more mistakes than anybody else because they don’t have to make a profit. Any other business that operated like the government would go bankrupt. They don’t go bankrupt; they just borrow more money and charge us the interest on it. They borrow more money from the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve prints the money, and then we all have to pay the interest on it forever. My children and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren will still be paying this debt that Bush has run up for his war in Iraq.

NF: One thing that makes me scratch my head are things that slip by, such as galantamine, a grandfathered nutritional supplement that’s also being sold as a drug called Reminyl for Alzheimer’s disease by Johnson and Johnson. Now, J & J is a big pharmaceutical company … yet neither they, nor the FDA, have been able to do anything about its sale as a supplement despite a huge and potentially huger multi-billion dollar market. From everything that you know, you would think that J & J is so powerful that no one could bump heads with them without getting blown out of the water, and ditto for the FDA. Yet they didn’t choose to do that despite their disgruntlement and admission, through the grapevine, that they screwed up. So here is a very powerful pharmaceutical company backed by a very powerful regulatory agency that appears to have its power very unevenly distributed on some levels ….

RAW: It’s my famous SNAFU principle — those on top don’t get accurate honest views from everybody else. Wherever I go I ask audiences if anybody there would swear that they would tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth to someone who was a government employee. Nobody ever raises their hand! Everybody lies to the government. We all want as little to do with them as possible. So that’s the first level of government corruption; theaccumulation of all the lies people tell to people just above them in the hierarchy. They make sure they don’t say anything to the one above them so they don’t have to write up reports or whatever and those above them lie a bit more to please the one above them so by the time the information gets up to George Bush, who knows what he’s getting? So they’re all running around asking, “How did we believe in the weapons of mass destruction when there aren’t any?” And the answer is that when you’re in a hierarchy of that sort, people won’t tell you what they know you don’t want to hear.

NF: Bush the other day was talking about how he met with a group of Iraqis who all told him how thankful they were that America had invaded their country and I thought … “ah hah … the burden of omniscience”

So what gives you the most hope in the midst of all this madness?

RAW: I don’t think politics is all that important. Spending too much time focused on politics leads to total despair with the state of the human race. But if you look at the whole spectrum of human behavior, I think the science and the arts are driving it. I think the sciences and the arts relate to a lot more of human behavior than politics does. They’re going to try to stop developments in science but they’re not going to stop it and it’s going to change everything. I think we’re going to have major breakthroughs in biotech in the next five-ten years and they can’t do a damned thing to stop it. It’s going to change the whole world. Meanwhile the Japanese are planning on building hotels in space.

NF: We just interviewed some people who are planning to build some space hotels.

RAW: Of course. It’s just a game these politicians play. It’s a permanent anchor on development but it never stops it.

NF: So we can just wait ‘em out?

RAW: I don’t know, but the acceleration of change is coming faster and faster all the time. There are more patents every year; more internet website opening every month … change is happening faster and faster everywhere.

Hey, I’ve got a replay TV. I didn’t even know they existed until a couple of months ago. I can set the replay TV and it will record anything I want. I can go to sleep and it will record a movie at three o’clock in the morning that I can watch the next evening. And I don’t have to ever look at a commercial if I don’t want to ever again. Now I can enjoy the TV as much as anybody in the country. I love TV.

NF: Back in the late ‘70s you wrote about the coming immortality pill …

RAW: Oh yeah … heh ….

NF: Are you optimistic about something like that?

RAW: Oh yeah, something like that. I don’t think it will be a single pill but there’s so much going on in biotech. Even now, the number of people on this planet over 100 is more than it’s ever been, and the average age of death inAmerica has gone from 73 to 77 just in the last few years. We’re getting closer to it all the time.

In that film, Maybe Logic, you said that you didn’t think I was really an optimist because you’re not an optimist … so I can’t be an optimist, I must be putting you on. Look in my condition. If I was a pessimist I wouldn’t be walking today. I have to be an optimist. Pessimism is a luxury that only the comfortable can afford.

NF: A recent article in Science by a demographer named James Vaupel has concluded that if there was a limit to the increment in average lifespan — which increases in the world’s healthiest countries by about 2.5 years every ten years — that increment would start to decline indicative of an approaching ceiling. But Vaupel says that the data indicates that there’s no ceiling … or that lifespan is going to shoot right through the presumed ceiling.

RAW: Yeah, Buckminster Fuller points out that most people in the 19th Century died after fifty years … that was the average lifespan … it was 27 in Europe during the French Revolution.

NF: That was an averaging out though wasn’t it?

RAW: Yeah, you have to account for crib deaths.

NF: … there appears to be something happening to increase the probability of longer life for every decade we live … that will tend to enable more of us who hold out to live to100 or more in better, more vibrant health..

RAW: Hell, when George Burns reached one hundred the whole country paid attention. When Bob Hope recently turned 100 hardly anybody noticed.

NF: They’re saying that the universe isn’t even entropic now. Starting with the big bang it just expands ….

Do you feel a rapport with young people?

RAW: It seems to me that every ten years I get a new audience among young people. It seems to me that some of my books are rather dated by now but they keep on selling so I guess they’re not as dated as they seem to me.

NF: I just re-read The Illuminati Trilogy. It was actually only the second time I read it all the way through. I think maybe references to stuff like SDS might be a little bit obscure but that’s about it. The names of the bands are right up to the moment.

RAW: [Laughter] Well, when I write a novel I set it somewhere definite, not in never-never land. So there will always be references specific to whatever time I’m setting it in. That’s not what I mean. I wasn’t thinking about Linda Lovelace or SDS. I was thinking of the scientific knowledge, but I can’t do anything about that.

NF: Is there anything specific that you can think of that you feel has been superceded?

RAW: I can’t think about it right now. You can’t be a generalist in this world. So many things I’ve written about have changed by now I don’t know how out-of-date I am. I just know I must be out-of-date.

NF: Do you follow the cosmological discussions about the origins of the big bang and all of that?

RAW: Nah. I don’t believe in any of it. They keep changing it every few years. It’s all guess work.

NF: I read somewhere recently someone saying that most of the versions of what Bell’s theorem could mean have been eliminated … disproved.

RAW: Yeah, that’s what I mean. I was doing an article about Bell’s Theorem about five years ago. I found out a new interpretation of Bell’s Theorem that I’d never seen before and I wanted to do some more research before writing the article. I had no idea that most of the theories had been discarded. You can’t keep up with everything. I can’t even keep up with Joyce scholarship.

NF: In the process of doing this site, dealing with biotech, brain science, nanotech … it seems like it’s increasingly difficult when you read the literature to distinguish between stuff that has actually happened and stuff that just inevitably will happen.

Do you follow the idea of the Singularity at all?

RAW: No. I know what it is … but I feel that cosmology is not of great interest to me because the models are changing so rapidly. By the time I learn about a model to the point where I can talk about it I have to replace it with a new one. It gets harder as you get older. Isaac Asimov wrote an article called “The Sound of Panting.” It’s about how it’s harder and harder to just keep up with his own field which is biochemistry.

NF: Do you think artificial intelligences … robots … will become smarter than human beings? Do you follow that discussion?

RAW: Definitely. I think they have to. In some ways some of the equipment I have around here is smarter than me. The Replay TV in some respects…

NF: One of the things that always touched me deeply in your work is the level of optimism.

RAW: Well you see I had polio at the age of four. I had to learn to be an optimist or I never would have walked for most of my life. Now I have return [Ed.: Post-] Polio Syndrome and now I’m walking again. If I wasn’t an optimist I’d still be in the goddamned wheelchair. I don’t understand how pessimists survive. If they all believed what they say, they would all sit down and starve to death. You have to have some optimism to accomplish something. When I was a child I just kept falling down. I wouldn’t believe that I couldn’t walk. Eventually I walked…

Now I’m for a war against pain. Medical marijuana laws are a great victory in the war against pain. All you’ve got to do is hang the goddamned TSAR. Let everybody and their doctor decide for themselves what to do with their pain. I don’t see why pain can’t be abolished. I think we could abolish both starvation and pain in the next ten years.

NF: We had an interview with David Pierce who wrote this online book, The Hedonistic Imperative. He talks about abolishing pain and ….

RAW: Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen it. “The Biology of Paradise.” Beautiful stuff ….

NF: Not just eliminating pain but eliminating negative mind states ….

RAW: I’m all for it. Leary was all about that.

NF: You’ve noted before that all the messages that spiritualists get when they channel seem really obvious and banal.

RAW: Yeah, I guess spirits are boring. At least I got something more interesting when I tried it. I got Harvey the rabbit, Olga the Ostrich, the talking dogs from Sirius … a Chinese alchemist, an Irish bard … now I’m channeling Olga. [Laughs]

NF: What are the great scientific paradigms of recent times?

RAW: Well, quantum physics and general relativity and the emerging one I think is neuroscience. We’re receiving billions of signals all the time all over our brain and our brain processes all that. Talk about paradigms. So in my next book, Tale of the Tribe, I deal with Leary’s eight dimensions … I don’t use brain circuits. Brain circuitry is a little bit too mechanistic.

NF: As we lose track of the changes in fields like quantum mechanics how do you keep track of what’s influencing the general culture? How is the general culture being supplied with information?

RAW: I can only talk about the United States. I’ve lived and traveled in Europe but mostly I’ve been in the United States. Most of the culture here is running on a sheer terror of how rapidly things are changing. George Bush might have won the election, it’s at least possible. People are screaming “Go back go back! Let’s have simple answers.” It’s very difficult to have useful answers to everything that’s going on. There aren’t simple answers. Things are complex. We need precise knowledge of complex systems. We don’t need simple answers. Most of the public wants simple answers like let’s stop gay marriage.

Right now the most poplar belief systems or BS in the country are, in descending order, Protestant, Catholic, Agnostic, Buddhist, Jewish, Islam, Mormon, atheist, Sikh, Hindu — I remember the descending order with the mnemonic P-CAB-JIM=ASH. This country is so damn ignorant most of them don’t even know what a Muslim looks like. Four nuns were turned off an airline flight today because they looked like Muslims. They were Hindus! I heard it on CNN.

NF: Have you been to Burning Man?

RAW: The Guns & Dope Party is going to be there. The Guns & Dope party is going to have a presentation at BurningMan. I keep on saying if the gun people and the dope people could get together they would be a majority of the country. All they have to do is get over their paranoia about each other. Really, if the gun owners and dopers could get together we could really overthrow this whole system. After all, anybody who takes your money without your consent and then will try to throw you in prison if you don’t pay up … they’re not going to use the money to do anything for you obviously. They’re going to try to use the money to enslave you. And of course the next step after stealing our money is to take away our guns so we can’t fight back.

Live From Chapel Perilous

reason dec 2003

We’re living in Robert Anton Wilson’s world

 from the December 2003 issue of Reason Magazine

In 1973 Thomas Pynchon published an enormous experimental novel called Gravity’s Rainbow. In 1975 Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson published an enormous experimental trilogy called Illuminatus! Both were written at about the same time, and both offered panoramic perspectives on history, liberty, and paranoia.

Read More

The Monster in the Labyrinth

“The Monster in the Labyrinth”
by Robert Anton Wilson

Foreword to THE PRANKSTER AND THE CONSPIRACY
by Adam Gorightly, 2003

Ye have locked yerselves up in cages of fear — and, behold, do ye now complain that ye lack FREEDOM!
Ye have cast out yer brothers for devils and now complain ye, lamenting, that ye’ve been left to fight alone. –“Epistle to the Paranoids,” The Gospel According to Fred by Kerry Thornley

Kerry Thornley wrote those words in the mid 1960s and within 10 years he had become a clinical paranoid himself, in the judgement of almost all of his friends, including Dr Robert Newport. a psychiatrist who had known Kerry since high school. The moral of this seems to me: take great care which nut cases you dare to mock, for you may become one of them.

I do not write in any spirit of smugness or superiority. I became somewhat paranoid myself, for a while there, or at least experienced acute anxiety attacks. For several months I literally could not leave my house without looking around to see if Kerry crouched behind a bush waiting to shoot me.

You see, he had become convinced that I worked for the C.I.A. and served as one of his “manangers” or “brainwashers,” but I thought I worked as a freelance writer and considered myself his friend. As his letters to me grew increasingly hostile and denuciatory, I began to fear that he might have graduated from “weirded out” to “dangerous.”

This now seems sillly to me — certainly, an over- reaction — but the violence and paranoia of the Nixon years made everbody in this country feel a bit jumpy. A Black Panther leader in my part of Chicago seems to have gotten shot by the local police while sedated; the extreme Right and extreme Left both had wild conspiracy theories about everybody else; anti-war meetings, anti-segregation meetings, even pot-legalization meetings all had people making nervous jokes about who the government had infiltrated among us to report on our Thoughtcrimes. The government not only appeared irrational and out of control, but so did a large part of the population.

I finally moved to Ireland to start a new life as an expatriate, and my worries about Kerry executing me for “brainwashing” him made up only a microscopic part of my motive. The whole country seemed “a bit funny in the head” and I had to hide out and lie low for a while. Silence, exile and cunning, as Joyce had advised.

Looking back, I feel amused and humbled. Like Kerry, I had satirized the paranoids before the sheer number of them frightened me into acting just like one of them.

I remember my last phone conversation with Kerry, during which he announced that just a week earlier I had come to Atlanta, argued with him about my alleged CIA connections, spiked his drink with LSD and brainwashed him again. I told him that I had not left San Francisco in months, and that if he had a Bad Trip last week somebody else gave him the acid, not me. I insisted on this, as persuasively as I could.

Finally, Kerry relented — a bit. “Well, maybe you believe that,” he said. “But that means your bosses have been fucking with your head and implanting false memories in you too!”

How do you argue that you haven’t had your head altered? “Look,” I said, “I’ll put my wife Arlen on. She’ll tell you I haven’t left here in months. ”

“That won’t prove anything,” he said with the calm certitude of a Grand Master announcing checkmate. “They probably fixed her head too.”

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation. I felt lost in an Escher painting.

A few weeks, or a few months, before or after that conversation, the police found a young woman raped and murdered two doors from the house where Arlen and I lived. A few days before or after that atrocity I attended a meeting of the Physics/Consciousness Research Group in which the assembled Ph.D.sserously discusssed a quantum model in which the universe contains only one electron, and everything else, including this seemingly solid Earth, our own bodies and our “minds” [if we still think we have “minds”] results from the virtual interactions of virtual particles, or of probability waves.

So Arlen and I packed up and moved to a land where the wierdest critter, a six-foot-tall white rabbit, seldom roams far from the fens and farmlands.

I’m only kidding — not. – Madonna, Truth or Dare

But let us,as the Chinese say, draw our chairs closer to the fire and examine this soberly.

All the above happened because Kerry and I, with a few others, invented a new religion; and because Kerry and I and a hell of a lot of others dared to doubt the official “lone nut” theory of the JFK assassination.

Perhaps I should say something about the religion before getting into the even murkier waters of the politics.

We called the religion Discordianism and its central catma* declares “All affirmations are true in some sense,

——————–
*Other, and hence lesser, religions have dogmas or absolute beliefs. Discordianism only has catmas or relative meta-beliefs. You’ll learn more about that in the book which follows
——————–

false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.” We owe this Divine Revelation to Gregory Hill [Malaclypse the Younger], the chief architect of Discordianatheology.

In my ministry I have added a rider promising that if you repeat this catma 666 times you will achieve Supreme Enlightenment, in some sense.

Many people consider Discordianism a complicated joke disguised as a new religion. I prefer to consider it a new religion disguised as a complicated joke.

Others consider Discordianism an American form of Zen Buddhism. I think Kerry held that view most of the time.

Whether one considers Discordianism a joke, a new religion or Yankee Zen, it emphatically does not belong in the same arena as Aristotelian logic or criminal law, yet the life of Kerry Thornley dragged it into those precincts and I can find no way to disentangle them in disccussing him. Everybody who ever looked into “the Thornley case” feels a strong need for basic either/or answers to such questions as: Guilty or Innocent? Sane or Insane? Victim of the C.I.A. or victim of his own delusions?

All I can say consists of a devout wish that logic could stretch to include a maybe,or a phalanx of probabilities, between the Aristotelian yes and no, and that our law could include the Scotch “not proven” between guilty and innocent.

I think it entirely posssible that Kerry went bananas on his own, due to genetics and/or traumatic early imprints and/or Too Damned Much LSD and/or other causes unknown, with no help from the C.I.A. at all. I also think it entirely possible that the C.I.A. did subject Kerry — and his Marine Corps buddy Lee Harvey Oswald — to some form of “Manchurian Candidate” mind control and that his seemingly “psychotic” words and actions represented an intelligent man’s attempts to break the strings of his puppet masters and find his way back to a world that made sense again.

In short, I regard all his brilliant satires and all his “psychotic” rants as true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.

For instance, you will read in this book about Kerry’s “delusions” concerning fascist manipulations of the C.I.A. and/or Naval Intelligence. Pure nonsense, right?

Wrong. Let me illuminize you a bit.
Nazi worms began to infest the U.S. way back in 1945, when Gen. Rheinhard Gehlen, Hitler’s Chief of Soviet Intelligence, surrendered to the U.S. Army, after first prudently burying several truckloads of “inside information” about the Soviet Union at a secret location.

Gehlen seems not only a master spy but a wizard negotiator. Within a week, he got out of his Nazi uniform and into a U.S. Army General’s uniform; the U.S.intelligence services, in return, got the info about the Soviets, including access to Gehlen’s agents in the Soviet government, – a group of Mystical Tsarists who had infiltrated both the Red Army and the KGB.

You see, their leader and Gehlen’s major “asset,” General Andrei Vlassov, had a fervent belief, not just in common or garden Tsarism but especially in the “mystical Tsarism” espoused in the later half of the 19th Century by the anti-Semitic novelist Dostoyevsky and even more by Konstantin Pobedonostsev, an advisor to two Tsars [Alexander III and Nicholas II].

Pobedonostsev, popularly called “The Grand Inquisitor” because of the vast platoons of spies, snoops, agents provocateur and informers he unleashed upon the Russian people , combined theological obsessions with reactionary politics, always an explosive and nefarious mixture.

“Mystical Tsarism” deserves a whole book in itself. especially since it now rules our own country; but we must remain brief here. This holy religion, or superstition — as you will –has two major tenets: (1) The Tsar is guided by God and can do no wrong (2) Science “is” cold and inhuman, faith “is” warm and human; therefore we should ignore reason and guide ourselves by faith in the Tsar, our “Little Father,” who receives his orders directly from a gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft called “God.”

I don’t think any of Pobedonostsev’s crew actually believed in the Tooth Fairy, though.

Gen. Gehlen and Gen. Vlassov formed what became the Gehlenapparat, the CIA’s main source of info on Soviet affairs; Gehlen became the fulcrum of the CIA’s “Soviet penetration” sector, working under James Jesus Angleton, Chief of Counter-Intelligence, breeder of prize orchids, lover of the arts, and a devout Catholic.

Since the U.S. government based its foreign policies on CIA reports, and the CIA based its Soviet reports on Gehlen and some other former Nazis, plus a crew of Mystical Tsarists, as filtered and interpreted by a Papist intellectual, the U.S. government’s ideas and actions became increasingly “wierd, ” bizarre and frightening, in the view of the rest of the world. The results seem very sad and very funny. In a nutshell, most of the planet thinks we’ve gone batshit crazy.”Tsarists and Nazis and spooks, oh my!”

As Harry Browne, Libertarian Party candidate for president in 2000, wrote in July 2003, “The whole world is now afraid of America, and America is afraid of the whole world.”

Although James Jesus Angleton served as Gehlen’s alleged supervisor, data indicates that the Gehlenapparat engaged in many activities, including kidnapping, extortion, murder etc. about which Angleton either did not know or devoutly did not want to know.

But James J. Angleton seems to me a pathological case of some sort himself; he often hid his middle name because it revealed his half-Hispanic genes. An exceptionally intelligent and sensitive student of modern literature while at Yale, Angleton adored Ezra Pound, T.S Eliot, I.A. Richards, e e cummings and otherSuperStars of Modernism; he met most of them personally. They collectively influenced Angleton’s fascination with multiple perspectives, Byzantine ambiguity and the eternal uncertainty of all inferences and “interpretations.”

These modernist tendencies, which also appeared in science and philosophy at the same time, blossomed into obsessions and, perhaps, raging madness when Angleton systematically applied them to the spy-game. After all, modernism really begins with Wilde’s “The Reality of Masks” and Yeats’s hermetic theory that the world we know emerges from interactions of Mask, Anti-Mask, Self, and Anti-Self: which may or may not fit all of us or all the world but certainly fits the world of spooks and snoops that Angleton created.

Records indicate that the Oswald who enlisted in the Marines was 5’11”. Comrade Oswald, who went to Russia, was 5’6″. while the dead version measured in at 5’9″.  – Richard Belzer, UFOs, JFK and Elvis

Another CIA officer, Edward Petty, described Angleton as “a lone wolf” and “a strange bird”; every other source I have found bluntly calls him “paranoid.” He suspected everybody else in the CIA, and in “our” government generally, of being KGB moles, and he operated with so much modernist ambiguity and hidden trapdoors that, in Petty’s words, “nobody really knows” what he was doing most of the time. In short, he became as esoteric as the poets he admired, and remade the C.I.A. and, increasingly, our whole nation into a theatre of impenetrable mystery.

A.J. Weberman, a leading Kennedy assassination buff, thinks Angleton personally organized the JFK hit, an idea also strongly hinted at by Norman Mailer’s documentary novel, Harlot’s Ghost, in which Angleton appears as “Hugh Montague.” If James Jesus really arranged the JFK assassination, he had probably identified Kennedy as the top Soviet mole of all,at least to his own satisfaction.

Why not? Angleton had Tsarist agents in all sorts of nooks and crannies of the Soviet system, and he knew the KGB was smart enough and tireless enough to reciprocate by planting their own Masks and Anti-Masks in his own backyard, or maybe under his bed at night. According to Edward Jay Epstein, J.J.A.sendless search for Soviet moles nearly destroyed the C.I.A. itself. Certainly, everybody in “the Company” learned to distrust everybody else.

Imagine a U.S. Caine with not one Queeg as captain, but a whole crew of Queegs, each worrying about what the others might be plotting. Angleton created that ship of shape-shifters in the C.I.A. and then by osmosis it spread through the government, evolving into the Tsarist Occupation we now endure.

In short, the government cannot trust us, because it can never know with absolute certainty what mischief we may hatch; and every sentence we speak into a bugged phone may have as many possible meanings as Eliot’s “The rose and the fire are one.”

“Trust No One,” the motto of X Files, seems the only safe rule in the world Angleton created.

We even have a Tsar of our own now, who supervises American medicine. Allegedly, this official knows what drugs, herbs etc. you should use for your medical problems better than your doctor knows, and our Tsar knows this without doing any physical examination, blood pressure readings, other scientific tests etc. that your doctor does, and often from a distance of 3000 miles — without even looking at you.

This makes sense if and only if we have a devout faith that our Tsar, like the Russian Tsars, recives guidance directly from “God;” the government accordingly spends more and more of our tax money financing “faith-based organizations.” Without faith we might relapse into scientific or rational thinking.

Tsarism represents an intermediate form between European monarchism and Asian despotism, being, possibly, closer to the latter of these two.  — Leon Trotsky, Russia’s Social Development and Tsarism

How much of this did I dream up the way Kerry Thornley [I still insist] imagined my own C.I.A. activities? For objective info on the Gehlenapparat, and Nazi /CIA links, see The Yankee and Cowboy War by Boston University historian Carl Oglesby [Berkeley Medallion, NY, 1977] On fascist/CIA/Mafia links, excellent books include The Strange Death of God’s Banker by Foot and della Torre[ Orbis, London, 1984] and The Calvi Affair, by Larry Gurwin, of the Financial Times [Pan, London, 1984]

CIA/Mafia “ghost banks” and their strange links with real banks, including Chase Manhattan, are discussed amply in In Banks We Trust, Doubleday, NY, 1984, by Penny Lernoux.

For CIA involvement in general — and Angleton’s personal involvement — in the JFK hit see http://webermancom, probably the largest site on the World Wide Web.

Our most recent Tsar’s responsibility for barbaric war crimes — as bad as any of Thornley’s “fantasies” — appears well documented in “Overwhelming Force,” by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, 22 May 2000.

Or — you can find most of the data on Tsarist/fascist infiltrations of “our” government, in one form or another by simply surfing the web. Set your search engine for “Rheinhold Gehlen,” “Cisalpine Bank,””Licio Gelli,” and “Gladio” to start with and follow the links where they lead you. I promise you will find the journey as startling as anything in this book.

I have no certitude about how “crazy” to consider Kerry Thornley on any given day of any year, but I don’t believe he ever became a simple damned fool. Heunnderstood the government of this country better than 99% of its citizens.

In the RAW

In an exclusive interview with Good Times, author and conspiracy theorist Robert Anton Wilson reflects on a world gone mad

By Charles O’Neill

Despite the internet rumors that he was assassinated by the CIA in 1994, Robert Anton Wilson, the man Timothy Leary once called “one of the most important scientific philosophers” of the 20th century, is alive and well and remains an influential voice in the American counter-culture. On September 18, 2002, he was the first patient to receive medical marijuana from members of the Santa Cruz City Council.

A former Associate Editor of Playboy, Wilson is perhaps best known for the classic Science-Fiction opus, Illuminatus!, co-authored with Robert Shea, in 1975. His subsequent trilogy, Schroedinger’s Cat, was hailed by New Scientist magazine as “the most scientific of all science fiction novels.” The scope of his work ranges from sci-fi and historical fiction to erudite and witty commentaries on psychology, the paranormal and quantum physics.

In his latest work, TSOG: The Thing That Ate The Constitution, Wilson takes the reader on a wild ride from the optimistic emancipation of Amsterdam to the Nazi-influenced inner workings of the U.S. Government. It is social satire and political revelation all in one – exposing the hypocrisies of faith-based organizations and revealing why Hannibal Lecter would make a better president then Dubya. He is subject of the documentary film, Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson (www.maybelogic.com).

Wilson recently sat down with Good Times and, from his apartment overlooking the Monterey Bay, shared his impressions of the current political situation in America and around the world.

Good Times: What is your opinion of George W. Bush?

Robert Anton Wilson: I like Bush a lot. He gives me a deep sense of self-satisfaction. Despite all my suspicions, I am not the dumbest schmuck on the planet after all. That’s nice to know. He constantly reminds me of that. Bush was C-student in both high school and college. His former speech writer described him as incurious and uninformed. That is exactly the ideal president for this time in history. Most of the public is made up of C-students who are incurious and uninformed. What Bush says makes sense to them because they don’t know any more about the world then he does. No wonder he is so popular. The dumber you are and the dumber you appear, the more popular you will be with the public.

GT: How do you feel about this administration’s opposition to cloning?

RAW: They want to ban cloning which will put the United States, in the life sciences, decades behind the rest of the world. They don’t mind that we are behind in the life sciences, which primarily deals with the preservation of life, as long as we are ahead in the death sciences, which is how to deliver more and more explosive power over longer and longer distances in shorter and shorter times to kill more and more people. As long as the United States stays ahead in the death sciences the government doesn’t mind how far behind we fall in the life sciences. They are going to ban cloning and they won’t let you use the medicine your doctor believes in. Your doctor has no more rights then you do now.

GT: What is happening in Iraq right now?

RAW: It has to do with the life sciences vs. the death sciences. They don’t want anyone to have any weapons of mass destruction except governments they have under their own control, like Israel. Israel gets 3 billion dollars a year from the United States to kill Arabs. They don’t want the Arabs to get any money to fight back because Israel is the United States colony in the Mid-East. As long as they have access to atomic weapons and the others don’t then the others are all going to be terrorized. The United States doesn’t have to do its own fighting except when somebody gets especially uppidity like Saddam Hussein. Besides, that son of a bitch is sitting on our oil.

GT: Do you believe there is a link between the al Qaeda and Iraq?

RAW: Look at CNN and MSNBC or any of the corporate media, you can see the women in Iraq going around with their bare faces hanging out. Do you think Osama bin Laden approves of that? They are a very westernized country. They have no connection with al Quada at all. They are both on opposite poles in the Moslem world. All these attempts to link them to al Quada are like trying to link the Pope to Jerry Falwell. They are in the same general racket but they disagree with each other on every point of doctrine. There is no real connection between Iraq and al Quada. That is just the smoke screen they are putting up. It’s the oil. Everything is oil until the oil runs out and then they will find something else to fight over.

GT: What are your thoughts on Osama bin Laden?

RAW: If he hated freedom he would have bombed someplace like Amsterdam, where they have real freedom. He wouldn’t have bombed a country like this one that is run by a Tsarist Occupation Government. He doesn’t hate us for our freedom. He hates the West because the West is attacking the Arab world all the time.

GT: What do you think of the War on Terror?

RAW: It should be called the “War on Some Terrorists,” unless he plans to bomb the CIA headquarters in Langly, VA. If Bush was serious about making a war on terrorists, that is the first place he would bomb because they have been the worst terrorists in the last 50 years.

GT: How much of what we see of George W. Bush is the real George W. Bush?

RAW: When the teleprompter breaks down and he has to ad-lib, that’s when we see the real George W. Bush. When the teleprompter breaks down that’s when he comes up with those wonderful Bushisms like “they mis-underestimated me,” or “it would be a hell of a lot easier if this were a dictatorship and I was the dictator.” Otherwise he is just reading what’s written by professional liars that know how to stack the lies in a way to fool a population of C-students. The whole secret of how to run a government was reveled by J.R. Bob Dobbs (founder of the Church of the SubGenius) who said, “You know how dumb the average guy is? Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are ever dumber than that.”

GT: Why is there a difference in the ways we are dealing with North Korea?

RAW: North Korea threatens to catch up with us in the death sciences so we are a bit afraid of North Korea. If we start heaving nuclear bombs at them, they may start heaving nuclear bombs back. The reason they keep talking about Saddam Hessein posing a threat is because he might have access to nuclear weapons and we want to get him before he gets the nuclear weapons because once he gets the nuclear weapons, we will have to treat him with diplomacy, like North Korea. That is very frightening for this administration because diplomacy requires the ability to think and the ability to negotiate and see the other guy’s playing field. All this is completely foreign to Dubya and his terminal gang. They understand war. They don’t understand diplomacy. North Korea frightens them much more than Iraq.

GT: What is your opinion of Bush’s proposed medical coverage for seniors?

RAW: I am a senior citizen, which means I am an old fart. Bush is offering us a choice between staying on Medicare with no prescription drug coverage or joining an HMO and getting prescription drug coverage, which means they are going to screw us every way they can. Everybody I know in my age group that has ever joined an HMO has quit it because it doesn’t do a damn thing. They take your money and they don’t give you anything in return. Nobody wants to belong to an HMO. Now he is trying to force us into the HMO’s by offering free prescription drugs, and it will turn out that’s another fraud, too, I’m sure. They are worse bandits then the Jesse James Gang. The only difference I can see between the HMO’s and the James Gang is that the James Gang rode horses.

GT: What is your feeling about this administration’s favor towards faith-based organizations?

RAW: Bush wants to put his money into faith-based organizations. You know what faith means? Huckleberry Finn explained it at the beginning of that great novel: Faith is believing what you know ain’t so. That is what Bush’s whole career and the whole Bush crime family career is based on: getting people to have faith in what they know ain’t so – like his prescription drug plan.

GT: Concerning the battle between the states and the feds over medical marijuana?

RAW: The 10th Amendment says very clearly that powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are reserved to the states and the people. It seems very clear that 55 percent of the voters in California voted to let me have marijuana for my leg pains and the state agreed, but then the Attorney General of the United States said, “Well that doesn’t count.” States have no rights. The people have no rights.

GT: AIDS treatment in Africa?

RAW: All the AIDS relief for Africa means, to me, is that they are going to sell them more drugs from the big drug companies, some of which the Bush family has major interests in.

GT: What is your opinion of the anti-war movement?

RAW: I am really happy to see the extent of the protest even before this war has started. The last protest in Washington (on Jan. 18, 2003) was bigger than the biggest anti-Vietnam protest. So the protest has started before the war and that gives me some hope.

GT: Are the protests having any influence eon Middle America?

RAW: The average people in Middle America, despite all the sarcastic things I have just said about them, aren’t quite as dumb as I usually think because there have been more objections to this war than any war in my lifetime. Either the Bush gang are less talented liars than our previous governments, or this war is so goddamn absurd, no matter how they dress it up, they can’t sell it to the majority.

High Times Interview, 2003

Paul Krassner Interviews
Robert Anton Wilson

from High Times #331, March 2003

I [Paul Krassner] first met Bob Wilson in 1959. The ’60s counterculture was in its embryonic stage, exploding out of the blandness, repression and piety of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration, Reverend Norman Vincent Peale’s positive thinking and Snooky Lanson singing “It’s a Marshmallow World” on TV’s Lucky Strike Hit Parade.

Wilson had written his first article, “The Semantics of God,” which I eagerly published in The Realist. “The Believer,” he wrote, “had better face himself and ask squarely: Do I literally believe ‘God’ has a penis? If the answer is no, then it seems only logical to drop the ridiculous practice of referring to ‘God’ as ‘He.'” Wilson then started writing a regular column, “Negative Thinking.”

His books include The Illuminatus! Trilogy (with Robert Shea); the Cosmic Trigger trilogy, The New Inquisition, the Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy, Prometheus Rising, The Walls Came Tumbling Down, Wilhelm Reich in Hell, Natural Law, Sex and Drugs, and Everything is Under Control: An Encyclopedia of Conspiracy Theories.

He is also the subject of a feature-length documentary movie by Lance Bauscher, Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, featuring 23 different Bobs, Tom Robbins, R.U. Sirius, George Carlin and myself. For more information, go to maybelogic.com.

In 1964, I published Wilson’s front-cover story, “Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb.” “The future may decide,” he began, “that the two greatest thinkers of the 20th Century were Albert Einstein, who showed how to create atomic fission in the physical world, and Timothy Leary, who showed how to create atomic fission in the psychological world. The latter discovery may be more important than the former; there are some reasons for thinking that it was made necessary by the former….”

I hereby nominate Bob Wilson as the third greatest thinker of the 20th Century, who continues to explore his consciousness and communicate his ideas and causes—with passion, wit, imagination and insight—into the 21st Century. This interview was conducted by the electronic magic of e-mail.


Q. You’ve written 34 books with the aid of pot. Could you describe that process?

A. It’s rather obsessive-compulsive, I think. I write the first draft straight, then rewrite stoned, then rewrite straight again, then rewrite stoned again, and so on, until I’m absolutely delighted with every sentence, or irate editors start reminding me about deadlines—whichever comes first. Hemingway and Raymond Chandler had similar compulsions but used the wrong drug, booze, and they both attempted suicide. Papa succeeded but poor Ray didn’t and just looked like a sloppy alcoholic. (He tried to shoot himself in the head and missed.) Faulkner also had obsessive components and died by falling off a horse, drunk. I don’t think booze is a very safe drug for us obsessive-compulsives. Almost as bad as becoming known as a Sage. By the way, Congress should impeach Dubya and impound Asa Hutchinson.

Q. The piss police read High Times. What would you like to tell them?

A. “You are all equally blessed, equally empty, equally coming Buddhas.” But some of them are such assholes it will take a long time to get from there to here.

Q. Columnist Clarence Page recently wrote about the DEA raiding “a legitimate health co-operative [WAMM, the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana] that was treating more than 200 patients, some of them terminally ill, in Santa Cruz. Snatching medicine out of the hands of seriously ill patients sounds like terrorism to me. In this case it was federally sponsored and taxpayer-financed.” Tell me about your own relationship with WAMM.

A. I thought you’d never ask. Long before I needed WAMM, Valerie Coral, the founder, came regularly to my Finnegans Wake reading/rapping group and I considered her incredibly bright. As I learned about her WAMM activities, distributing pot to terminal cancer and AIDS patients, sitting with them, giving love and support during the death process, I decided she was also a saint. I never thought I would become another WAMM patient. My post-polio syndrome had been a minor nuisance until then; suddenly two years ago it flared up into blazing pain. My doctor recommended marijuana and named WAMM as the safest and most legal source. By then, I think I was on the edge of suicide; the pain had become like a permanent abscessed tooth in the leg. Nobody can or should endure that. Thanks to Valerie and WAMM, I never have that kind of torture for more than an hour these days. I pop one of their pain pills and I’m up and back at the iMac in, well, if not an hour, then at most two hours. By the way, Congress should impeach Dubya and impound Asa Hutchinson. Or did I say that already?

Q. I think you did.

A. Well, it bears repeating.

Q. When the City Council staged a public giveaway of medical marijuana, a DEA agent asked, “What kind of message are city officials sending to the youth of Santa Cruz?” How would you answer him?

A. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” I didn’t invent that; I found it in the back of my dictionary, in a dusty old historical document called “U.S. Constitution,” which Dubya seemingly has never heard of, but it’s supposed to be the rules of our government. I wish more people would look at that document, because it has a lot of other radical ideas that seem worth thinking about. Look it up before the Bush Crime Family forces dictionary publishers to remove it. Congress should impeach Dubya and impound Asa Hutchinson. Or does this begin to sound like an echo chamber?

Q. How does all that tie in with your new book, TSOG: The Thing That Ate the Constitution? First, what does TSOG mean, and how do you pronounce it?

A. TSOG means Tsarist Occupation Government and I pronounce it TSOG, so it sounds like a monster in a Lovecraft story. The book presents the evidence that ever since the CIA-Nazi-Tsarist alliance of the 1940s, the Tsarists have taken over as the “brains” of the Control System and America has become a Tsarist nation, with the Constitution only known to those who peek in the back of their dictionaries, like I did. Hell, we even have an official Tsar and he has the alleged “right”—or at least the power—to come between my doctor and me, and decide how much excruciating pain I should suffer before dying. What next? Is he going to rule on controversial questions in physics and astronomy? In mathematical set theory? In biology? Believe me, there’s no Tsar mentioned in the Constitution. Personal doctor/patient matters are left to the individuals. You see, this was supposed to be a free country, not a Tsarist despotism.

Q. You were brought up as a Catholic and became a Marxist when you were 16. What disillusioned you about each of those belief systems?

A. Their rigidity. All rigid Belief Systems (B.S.) censor and warp the processes of perception, thought and even empathy. They literally make people behave like badly-wired robots. Philip K. Dick noticed this too, and worried a lot about the possible robots among us. Some people think he was crazy, but I’ve never met anybody with rigid beliefs who seemed fully human to me. Phil got it right: a lot of them do act like robots. Especially in government offices and churches. Gort, Dubya marada nikto, dig?

Q. What was the purpose of what you call the Christian conspiracy?

A. Well, I regard the Bill of Rights as the result of a conspiracy by the intellectual freemasons of the Enlightenment Era. It’s always had a precarious existence because of the rival Christian conspiracy to restore the dark ages—Inquisitions, witch-hunts and all. With the Tsarist take-over, the Christians appear to have won. Not a single clause in the Bill of Rights hasn’t gotten either diluted or totally reversed.

Q. Why are you so skeptical about organized skepticism?

A. Like I keep saying, rigid Belief Systems frighten me and make me think of robots, or “humanoids”—some kinda creepy mechanism like that. Organized skepticism in the U.S. today contains no true skeptics in the philosophical sense. They seem like just another gang of dogmatic fanatics at war with all the other gangs of dogmatic fanatics, and, of course, with us model agnostics also. Look at the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. They never do any Scientific Investigation at all, at all. Why? My guess is that, like the Inquisitors who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, they have a deep fear that such research might upset their dogmas.

Q. What’s the basis of your obsession with Hannibal Lecter?

A. Hannibal Lecter, M.D., please. In the books, he seems one of the greatest creations in literature to me. I admire Thomas Harris more than any novelist since James Joyce. Everything about Dr. Lecter is likeable and even admirable except that one Nasty Habit [cannibalism], but that habit’s so intolerable, even to libertarians, we can never forget it even when we find him most likeable and most admirable. A paradox like that can inspire Ph.D. candidates for 1,000 years. I mean, how can you resist a psychiatrist who tells a Lesbian patient, as Hannibal did once, “There’s nothing wrong with being weird. You have no idea how weird I am”—and really means it? In the films, of course, Dr. Lecter also has the stupendous contribution of intelligence and eerie charm only Anthony Hopkins can project. By the way, God bless Valerie Coral and God damn Asa Hutchinson.

Q. I thought you don’t believe in God?

A. I have no “beliefs,” only probabilities; but I was not speaking literally there. A poetic flourish, as it were.

Q. I know you don’t believe in life after death, but I’m intrigued by the notion that, during 42 years of marriage, you and Arlen imprinted each other’s nervous systems. Could you elaborate on that?

A. I don’t “believe” in spiritualism, but that does not keep me from suspecting an unbreakable link between those who have loved deeply. To avoid sounding esoteric, let me put it in nitty-gritty terms. I literally cannot look at a movie on TV without knowing what she’d say about it. For instance, if a film starts out well and ends up a mess, I can virtually “hear” her saying, “Well, they had one Story Conference too many….”

Q, Would you relate the tale of Arlen and the Encyclopedias?

A. She liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel—back in 1980, before I was online—I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson’s 22nd Law: “Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.”

Q. How has the Internet changed your life?

A. It has felt like a neurological quantum jump. Not only does the word-processing software make my compulsive rewriting a lot easier than if I still had to cut my words on rocks or use a typewriter or retreat to similar barbarism, but the e-mail function provides most of my social life since I became “disabled.” I do most of my research on the World Wide Web, get my answer in minutes and don’t have to hunt laboriously through my library for hours. It has improved my life a thousand ways. I also have a notion that Internet will eventually replace government.

Q. How do you discern between conspiracy and coincidence?

A. The way Mr. and Mrs. Godzilla make love: very carefully.

Q. A dinner party was scheduled for March 31, 1981, the day after an assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan, which, if successful, would have elevated Vice President and former CIA chief George Bush to the presidency. The dinner was immediately cancelled. It would have been held at the home of Neil Bush, and a guest was to be Scott Hinckley, brother of the would-be killer. Hinckley’s father and Bush were friends and fellow oil industrialists. A PR firm issued a statement: “This horrible coincidence has been devastating to the Bush Family. Our condolences go out to all involved. And we hope to get the matter behind us as soon as possible.” Congressman Larry MacDonald was the only legislator who demanded an investigation, but his plane crashed. Whattaya think—coincidence or conspiracy?

A. To me, it looks at first glance like coincidence by about 75% probability. I mean, who would be dumb enough to use an assassin with such obvious links to his employers? But then again, the Bush Crime Family seem to think they can get away with anything, from S&L fraud to stealing an election in the clear light of day with the whole world watching. They must have an even lower opinion of the intelligence of the American people than I do. Maybe I should change the probability down to about 50%. I guess this does deserve further investigation, by somebody who doesn’t fly in airplanes.

Q. Ishmael Reed said, “The history of civilization is the history of warfare between secret societies.” Do you agree?

A. Yes and no. I would say there is no history, singular; only histories, plural. The warfare between secret societies is a history, one that both Ishmael and I have explored. There also exists a history of class war, a history of war (or competition) between gene pools, a history of primate/canine relations, etc., ad infinitum. None of them contradicts the others, except in the heads of aristotelian logicians, or Ideologists. They each supplement all the others.

Q. You and I have something in common. Lyndon LaRouche has revealed the truth about each of us: You’re really the secret leader of the Illuminati; and I was brainwashed at the Tavistock Institute in England. Do you think he actually believes such things, or is he consciously creating fiction, just as the FBI’s counter-intelligence program did?

A. I still don’t understand some of my computer’s innards and you expect me to explain a bizarre contraption like the brain of Lyndon LaRouche? I can only hazard that he seems more a case for a bile specialist than a psychiatrist.

Q. What was LaRouche’s factoid about the Queen of England?

A. He said Liz sent Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts over here to destroy us with Oriental religions and drugs, so England could become the top Super-Power again. If you took Liz and England out and put Fu Manchu and the Third World in her place, it would make a great matinee thriller. I think Dubya lives in that film with Mickey and Goofy and Osama bin Laden and Darth Vader.

Q. What’s the most bizarre conspiracy theory you’ve come across?

A. A group called Christians Awake claims Ronald Reagan was a Gay freemason and that he filled the government and courts with other Gay freemasons. I suppose they let Clarence Thomas in as a concession to the Gay Prince Hal lodge.

Q. And what would be the least known conspiracy theory—I mean, that you know of?

A. The Church of Positive Accord believes—and I think they make a damned good case—that the God of the Bible is corporeal, not spiritual. In udder woids, he eats and shits just like you and me. And, contrary to my 1959 heresies, he definitely has a penis. He even has boogers: they proclaimed that in an interview with [SubGenius Church reverend] Ivan Stang. They point out that all “spiritual” ideas of God derive from Greek philosophy, not the Bible, and claim that gaseous Greek god has been promoted by a conspiracy of intellectuals. Just re-read the Bible with that grid and it makes sense, in a Stone Age sort of way. He walks, He talks, He’s a serial killer, and in the sequel He even knocks up a teen-age chick.

Q. Your readers can’t always discern—when you write about the Illuminati, for example—whether you’re sharing information or satirizing reality. Does it make any difference?

A. To quote Madonna, “I’m only kidding—not.” Add my Celtic sense of humor to Niels Bohr’s model agnosticism and out comes my neo-surrealist novels and “post-modern” criticism.

Q. I’ve had many occurrences of satirical prophecy, where something I invented turned out to become reality. Has that happened with you?

A. Well, in Illuminatus! (published 1975), terrorists attack the Pentagon and only succeed in blowing a hole in one of the five sides. Sound familiar? Also, in Schrodinger’s Cat (published 1981), terrorists blow up Wall Street. I don’t regard either of those “hits” as precognition or even “intuition,” just common sense. It seemed obvious to me that the TSOG could not run amok around the planet, invading and bombing damned near everybody, without somebody firing back eventually.

Q. Here’s a confession. In my article on the conspiracy convention in High Times, I did a reverse of satirical prophecy. I had once asked Mae Brussell, the queen of conspiracy researchers, why the conspirators didn’t kill her, and she explained that agents always work on a need-to-know basis, but they would read her work and show up wherever she spoke, in order to get a peek at the big picture, because it was “a safety valve for them,” she said, “on how far things are going.” I asked, “Are you saying that the intelligence community has allowed you to function precisely because you know more than any of them?” And she replied, “Exactly.” Well, in my HIGH TIMES satire, I put those words into the mouth of somewhat fraudulent conspiracy researcher David Icke. Anyway, my question is, do you think the conspirators allow you to live because you know too much?

A. I doubt it. I don’t think they’ve ever heard of me. They don’t read books.

Q. The original meaning of conspiracy was “to breathe together.” What’s your personal definition of conspiracy?

A. When me and me friends gits together to advance our common interests, that’s an affinity group. When any crowd I don’t like does it, that’s a goddam conspiracy.

Q. After my HIGH TIMES column on the Prophets Conference, in which I referred to you as “the irreverent bad boy at this oh-so-polite conference,” why were you disinvited from speaking at future Prophets Conferences?

A. A lot of my fans think I got booted for lack of respect for His Royal Fraudulency George II. I take that as an assertion beyond proof or disproof. The managers said it was for finding a Joycean epiphany in a Spike Lee movie. I take that as an assertion beyond even comprehension.

Q. I’d like to hear about your—perhaps psychotic?—experience with higher consciousness and the resulting epiphany.

A. I have had not one but many seeming encounters with seemingly nonhuman intelligences. The first was a Christmas tree that loved me—loved me more than my parents or my wife or my kids, or even my dog. I was on peyote at the time. With and without other drugs—for instance by Cabala—I have seemingly contacted a medieval Irish bard, an ancient Chinese alchemist, an extraterrestrial from the Sirius system, and a giant white rabbit called the pook or pookah from County Kerry. I finally accepted that if you already have a multi-model ontology going into the shamanic world, you’re going to come out with multi-model results. As Wilson’s Fourth Law sez, “With sufficient research you will find evidence to support your theory.” So I settled on the magick rabbit as the model nobody could take literally, not even myself. The real shocker came when I discovered that my grandmother’s people, the O’Lachlanns, came from Kerry and allegedly have a clan pookah who protects us from becoming English by adding periodic doses of weirdness to our lives.

Q. The dedication in my book, Murder At the Conspiracy Convention and Other American Absurdities, reads: “This one is for Robert Anton Wilson—guerrilla ontologist, part-time post-modernist, Damned Old Crank, my weirdest friend and favorite philosopher.” Since these are all terms you’ve used to label yourself, would you explain what each one means?

A. Well, I picked up “guerrilla ontology” from the Physics/Consciousness Research Group when I was a member back in the 1970s. Physicists more usually call it “model agnosticism,” and it consists of never regarding any model or map of Universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes. I give most of modern physics over 90% probability, the Loch Ness Monster around 50% probability and anything the State Department says under 5% probability. As Bucky Fuller used to say, “Universe is nonsimultaneously apprehended”—nobody can apprehend it all at once—so we have no guarantee that today’s best model will fit what we may discover tomorrow. My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory. Also, I have a strong aversion, almost an allergy, to Belief Systems, or B.S.—a convenient abbreviation I owe to David Jay Brown. A neurolinguistic diet high in B.S. and low in instrumental data eventually produces Permanent Brain Damage, a lurching gait, blindness and hairy palms like a werewolf.

Then I started calling myself a post-modernist after that label got pinned on me in two different books, one on my sociological works and one on my science-fiction. Then I read some of the post-modernists and decided they were only agnostic about other people’s dogmas, not their own. So then I switched to Damned Old Crank, which seems to suit my case better than either of the previous labels. Besides, once my hair turned snowy white, some people wanted to promote me to a Sage, and I had to block that. It’s more dangerous to a writer than booze. By the way, Congress should impeach Dubya and impound Asa Hutchinson.

Q. Since you believe that the universe is indifferent, why are you an optimist?

A. It may have genetic origins—some of us bounce up again no matter what we get hit with—but as far as I can rationalize it, nobody knows the future, so choosing between pessimism and optimism depends on temperament as much as probabilities. Psychologist John Barefoot has studied this extensively and concludes that optimists live about 20% longer than pessimists. When the outcome remains unknown, why should I make the bet that keeps me miserable and shortens my life? I prefer the gamble that keeps me high, happy, and creative, and also increases lifespan. It’s like the advantage of pot over aspirin. Pot not only kills pain better, but the High boosts the immune system. High and happy moods prolong life, miserable and masochistic moods shorten it.

Q. Recently, when I spoke at a college campus, a student asked what I wanted my epitaph to be. I replied, “Wait, I’m not finished.” What do you want your epitaph to be?

A. I have ordained in my will that my body will get cremated and the ashes thrown in Jerry Falwell’s face. The executor of my will should then shout one word only: “Gotcha!”

Robert Anton Wilson is the coauthor (with the late Robert Shea), of the underground classic The Illuminatus! Trilogy which won the 1986 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award. His other writings include Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy, called “the most scientific of all science fiction novels” by New Scientist, and many nonfiction works of Futurist psychology and guerilla ontology. Wilson, who sees himself as a Futurist, author, and stand-up comic, regularly gives seminars at Esalan and other New Age centers. Wilson has made both a comedy record (Secrets of Power), and a punk rock record (The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy), and his play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell, has been performed throughout the world. His novel Illuminatus! was adapted as a 10-hour science fiction rock epic and performed under the patronage of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at Great Britain’s National Theatre, where Wilson appeared in a special cameo role. He is also a former editor at Playboy magazine.