Category Archives: Essays

A collection of essays from the mind of Robert Anton Wilson

Four Trends That Scare the Hell Out of Me

“Four Trends That Scare the Hell Out of Me”

 by Robert Anton Wilson

Published in Loompanics’ Greatest Hits, 1990

 To paraphrase H.G. Wells, modern history has become a race between education and miseducation. There are very few people around who really don’t know anything, but there are multitudes who know many things that don’t happen to be true.

The trends in the modern world that most terrify me all result from the general tendency, increasingly manifest since the 18th Century, whereby education has ceased to be a Church monopoly (outside Ireland and the Islamic nations) and has increasingly become a State monopoly. In a memorable phrase from Ezra Pound, we have been delivered from “one gang of damned scoundrels (tonsured)” to “another gang of damned scoundrels (untonsured).” The results have been pre­dictable.

In the days when the Church was All and the Individual was Nothing, schools were staffed by Church employees who taught that obedience to the Church was the supreme virtue. Today, when the State is All and the Individual is still Nothing, schools are staffed by State employees who, not surprisingly, teach that obedience to the State is the supreme virtue. This should be called progress?

In this context, the second trend in our world that seems ominous to me consists of a continuing increase in State power everywhere, even in the formerly “democratic” Western capitalist nations.Everybody seems aware of this in general, but I would like to cite some recent and horrific examples.

When I was a boy (even though Roosevelt II was already President and the New Deal had begun) you could walk into a bank anywhere in this country with five dollars in your pocket and start an account without showing I.D. or answering any questions you thought impertinent. (The banks seemed glad to get their hands on your cash in those days.) When I returned to the U.S. early this year, after six years in Europe, I couldn’t find a bank in Southern California that would take my money, even though I had over ten thousand dollars in travelers checks for my initial deposit and, knowing the drift toward totalitarianism, had I brought my passport and credit cards as I.D. The banks would not accept the credit cards (and matching signature) as I.D. and the passport alone was not enough, even though guaranteed by the U.S. State Department. They all insisted on a California driver’s license, which as a new arrival I did not have.

Of course, I have since learned that other States do not act as “strictly” yet as California, but I also have observed that everything that starts in California eventually spreads throughout the nation.

Similarly, in California now, if you are in a car that is stopped for a traffic violation, you must have I.D. or you will be taken into custody – even if you are not the driver. See how it goes? First drivers must have I.D. which seems reasonable to almost everybody but the most “extreme” or “eccentric” libertarians; now passengers must have I.D., too… and how far are we from the nightmare of the old anti-Nazi movies where the question “Do you haff your papers?” notified the audience that we were seeing a totalitarian State and that the hero was about to be caught in its coils.

In June this year, the Supreme Court ruled that the public has no “reasonable expectation” of privacy when they put their garbage out for the night, so the police may now rummage through anybody’s trashwithout even bothering to get a search warrant. If you don’t relish the thought of the gendarmerie peering through your old love letters, financial re­cords, discarded porn magazines, marijuana stems or other signs of your individual foibles or weirdities, you will just have to imitate Our Glorious Leaders in Washington and buy yourself a paper shredder. This is hardly what I thought they meant when they taught me to sing that song about “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

The third trend that disturbs my slumber is the steady increase of what looks like “deliberate stupidity” or “duckspeak” in political debate. I want to be very careful here. The term “deliberate stupidity” was coined by Arthur Koestler to describe certain contortions of Marxist (or actually, Stalinist) logic in the 1930s and 1940s, which Orwell later called “duckspeak” – the substitution of slogans for thought, and dogma for analysis; in short, a general rejection of common sense on the part of alleged intellectuals. I am less judgmental than Koestler or Orwell and not at all sure the stupidity is totally deliberate, but I do find it appalling.

The Nazi ideology was based on the proposition that some Jews are bankers and therefore all Jews “are” “evil;” cur­rently fashionable Radical Feminism offers the isomorphic proposition that some men are rapists and therefore all men “are” “evil.” In bon ton Liberal circles it seems strictly forbidden to notice, or comment upon, the ghastly similarities pf these two systems of organized bigotry. It is also forbidden to remark that overt male sexism, as an openly avowed Ideology of hate, has virtually disappeared (however much covert male sexism may remain…) while the Rad Fems stir up more and more overt female sexism, as an openly avowed Ideology of hate. But openly avowed Ideologies of hate, which ascribe alleged group qualities to individuals, can only be considered “true” or “sincere” stupidity in the very ignorant and uneducated; in the educated, they seem to deserve Koestler’s charge of deliberate stupidity.

Pop Ecologists and Ecomaniacs (as distinguished from scientific students of ecology) frequently represent extremes of duckspeak never equalled by either the, Nazis or the Stalinists, and in most “New Age” magazines the polemics against reason are totally redundant; one cannot read a paragraph of this stuff without realizing the authors seem to be either deliberately or ignorantly imitating the Dark Ages, apparently under the leadership of such glorifiers of medievalism as Fritjof Capra and Theodore Roszak.

Some New Agers seem to have made a whole career out of duckspeak, and I often wonder if any of them ever realize consciously that the last 300 years of history, which they totally condemn, were the only centuries in which any individual liberty has ever appeared on this backward planet, except as the prerogative of a repressive aristocracy. The modern epoch the Eco-cult despises appears to be the only historical period in which freedom of speech or of the press, or any libertarian tendency whatsogoddamever, has been allowed to the masses. Pop Ecologists generally choose Francis Bacon or Rene Descartes as the prime villains of history, and that obscures the palpable fact that most of the values they reject are more closely associated with Thomas Jefferson and our tattered but still weakly surviving Bill of Rights.

The fourth trend that appalls me is the “war” against crack. As far as I can obtain objective scientific data about this derivative of cocaine, I would say that crack should be considered the most dangerous drug ever introduced to this country. This gives me nightmares when I consider that the government’s way of trying to control the crack problem imitates the same techniques that have been so monumentally counter-productive in dealing with other drugs. Washington has taken the course that seems guaranteed to make crack even more popular and lucrative.

There were only a few thousand heroin addicts in the U.S. when the government declared “war” on that drug; now there are millions. There were less than 200,000 pot smokers, mostly in New Orleans and Texas, when the government declared “war” on that drug; now there appear to be somewhere between 40 million and 70 million regular users, depending on whose estimate you believe. LSD seems such a powerful psychological change-agent that I, personally, don’t believe it would have ever gotten out of the laboratories onto the streets, if the government hadn’t declared “war” on it. And so on. Nothing increases the sales and profits of a drug like making it illegal. The result is always the same: the young, the adventurous, the scientifically curious, the artistic and other adventure some types get very interested, a black market appears, the mob sees profits and takes over, and the prices go sky-high, with an ever-increasing rise in police cor­ruption and violent crime associated with the import and distribution of the for­bidden substance.

Now crack is about to go through this same process. There are two crack-related murders a week in South Central Los Angeles, and other cities are moving up to compete with that record. With a full-scale “war” against crack, based on the same technique as other anti-drug “crusades,” we can expect the corruption, the violence and the prices to rise steadily and dizzily.

I can only conclude that, unless the people come to their senses and demand that the government take a more intelligent and less military approach, the Mafia will graduate from a billionaire club to a trillionaire club and soon own all the banks, instead of just owning most of them.

(submitted to rawilsonfans by RMJon23)

Four Trends That Give Me Hope

“Four Trends That Give Me Hope”

 by Robert Anton Wilson

Published in Loompanics’ Greatest Hits, 1990

Despite superficial impressions caused by our brutally short lifespans (73 years average, at present), something that can be called “progress” clearly exists in history and can be demonstrated mathematically. Brooks Adams, Alfred Korzybski and Buckminster Fuller, among others, have given examples of this “progressive factor” in their books. A recent and more rigorous demonstration comes from the French economist-statistician, George Anderla, who used Information Theory to convert knowledge into binary units and calculated how fast these units increased since the birth of Christ.

Taking all knowledge at 1 AD as x, the rate of acceleration has been as follows: 1500 AD – 2x, 1750 AD – 4X, 1900 AD – 8x, 1950 AD – 16x, 1960 AD – 32X, 1967-64X, 1973 AD – 128x.

That this process is accelerating is immediately obvious; the acceleration of the acceleration is clearer if we express this in terms of the time interludes for each doubling of knowledge. Then we see that the first doubling took 1500 years, the second 250 years, the third 150 years, the fourth 50 years, the fifth 10 years, the sixth 7 years and the seventh 6 years.

All available indicators suggest that the doubling has accelerated further since Anderla completed his study in 1973. Patents granted per year, new books, new computer software, new scientific papers, etc., have all continued to “multiply like rabbits.”

Of course, the pessimist or cynic can say that “we” will just mis-use new knowledge as “we” have, allegedly, misused all previous knowledge. I have disputed this view (and given more details on the Anderla calculations) in my Prometheus Rising; in this brief space, I will say only that as knowledge increases, and as tech­nology increases, human options widen. At the very least, people today can choose from a larger variety of kinds of misery than our forebears in 1888 and much, much more than those in 1788.

I also object to the fictitious “we” that cynics invoke as the omnipresent fuck-up factor in history. I have never met “we” except in books of grammar or politics, or other works of fiction; in experience, I only encounter phalanxes of individuals. Some individuals mis-use knowledge and some use knowledge very intelligently. I assume that as knowledge increases, however much the stupid continue to mis-use it, the intelligent will find in­creased options give them greater free­dom in which to exercise their ingenuity.

A second evolutionary trend that I find hopeful consists in the accelerated speed of travel and communication in the mod­ern world. According to Professor Platt of Michigan State university, speed of travel has increased a thousandfold since 1900 2nd speed of communication a millionfold; and both are increasing faster ail the time. The “one town world” forecast by Bucky Fuller is appearing all around us. Look through the Restaurant section of any large city’s phone directory and you will find the cuisine of the whole planet available; walk through an art museum and you will see all the art of humanity; turn on the TV in a really big city and you will find Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Spanish, English, Jewish, French and vari­ous other imports available at the turn of a dial. Like all increases in options or pos­sible choices, this omni-cosmopolitanization seems to me a liberating and wonderful evolutionary transformation.

Concretely, my childhood reality-tunnel was bordered by one neighborhood in Brooklyn; my current reality-tunnel is bordered by Berlin and Maui, those being the furthest-apart points that I visited last year. They are 12 time-zones, or halfway around the planet, from each other, and I expect to see China next year. (I also expect to visit a space colony sometime in the next 20 years…) Similarly, in a recent computer conference, I spoke to people all over the US and Canada; that would have been science-fiction if I wrote it 30 years ago…

Having friends who are Punk Rockers in Berlin, computer executives in San Jose, actors in London and Dublin, psycholo­gists in Maui, etc., has not only re-edu­cated me but liberated me from mental limitations I didn’t know existed until I lost them. “What one fool can learn, another can,” as the ancient primate proverb says. More and more people are traveling all the time (one man flew the Atlantic in 1928 and 200,000,000 flew it in 1978), so I have high hopes that existen­tial re-education through experience will eventually liberate more and more minds.

As the potential knowledge and the potential human experience available to us both multiply faster, our lifespans are also increasing, a third trend that fills me with joy. In 1976, a survey found 500 people over 100 years old in England; in 1986, a similar study found over 3000. In America, lifespan has increased so fast since the 1970s that life Extension Re­searcher Durk Pearson admitted to being surprised by it (on a recent Donahue show). Ironically, due to AIDS, more money is being spent on immunological research than ever, and research on the immune system is the most likely path to super-longevity. We may all live hundreds of years, or longer.

With more space (due to faster travel), more time (due to longevity) and more knowledge (due to the accelerating In­formation Explosion), I see no reason to believe that any past limits on me or you or “humanity” in general need to be re­garded as permanent. I think we are mov­ing rapidly toward some evolutionary Quantum Jump of which the “Harmonic convergence” is only the Mickey Mouse cartoon version of simple minds.

The fourth trend that gives me hope consists of all the problems and symp­toms of breakdown on this planet which motivate most of the cynicism and panic around these days. Ecological mismanage­ment. The Permanent War Economy. The increase of State power to the point where government has become a pest in everyone’s life. The continuing risk of nuclear war. All these problems seem as real and dreadful to me as they do the cynics, but I see them in a different light. In a world of increasing information, in­creasing richness of experience and in­creasing lifespan, our problems may serve as the evolutionary challenges which will force more and more people to use our new options creatively.

After all, it seems quite likely that there would be no “progress” and no evolution at all, if serious problems did not compel living beings to innovation and experiment.

(submitted to RAWilsonFans.com by R. Michael Johnson)

The Land Where Bulls Are Pregnant

magical blend 20

The Land Where Bulls Are Pregnant

by Robert Anton Wilson

 from Magical Blend, Issue 20, Aug-Sept-Oct 1988

There are four clocks atop the City Hall tower in Cork, facing the four quarters, and since Cork is in Ireland the four clocks always show four different times, none of which is ever correct. People in Cork refer to them as “the Four Liars.”

After six years in the Alternative Reality of Erin, I find the Four Liars to be the single best symbol, or synechdoche, to summarize all that I have learned about the Irish people and the strange, eerie charm of Gaelic culture. Do not understand me too quickly. It is not that “the Irish” as a collective or “ethnic” group lack some genetic endowment connected with mechani­cal ability, or do not know how to repair a clock. Not at all: they build excellent computers-my Irish-built Macintosh Plus is a superb instru­ment-and most of the computer companies are in Cork where the Four Liars continue to tell you the wrong time four different ways if you walk all the way around the City Hall.

Irish Time simply is not identical with ordinary or linear time. My wife Arlen and I never found two clocks in the whole country that agreed. Once, when I was still new to Irish Time, I returned to Ireland from the continent and set my quartz watch to agree with the time on the official radio station, RTE; the next day the watch and the radio station disagreed by four minutes. I wondered if something was wrong with my watch and re-set it; the next day it disagreed with the radio by six minutes…Then I discovered the radio time and the television time also disagreed, even though Irish radio and TV come out of two facilities in the same building complex in Donnybrook. When it is 6:05 on Irish radio, it is often 6:10 on Irish TV.

James Joyce once pointed out that there are only three world-class philosophers of Celtic origin-Scotus Erigena, Bishop Berkeley, and Henri Bergson (who was a Breton Celt)-and all three of them denied the reality of time. Joyce indeed seemed to think there was some genetic basis for the Celtic rejection of the normal time-sense of the rest of the Occident. I’m not sure of that. Others, including some Irish sociolo­gists, claim that the Irish time-sense is similar to that of other colonial or post colonial people and represents a form of unconscious sabotage of the colonizer’s reality-grid.

Whether the basis be genetic or sociological, there is no doubt that Irish Time is more relative than even Einsteinian time and seems infinitely flexible in all directions. For instance, if you hire a plumber and he tells you he will come “Tuesday week,” that literally means one week from Tues­day but actually he’ll come when he feels like it. “Tuesday fortnight,” however, is even more daunting: it literally means two weeks from Tuesday but actually it indicates that the job sounds hard and the plumber will probably never come at all. Most events in Irish Time occur in the oc­cult interval between temporarily uncertain Tuesday week” and for-ever uncertain “Tuesday fortnight,” which I think is the time it takes Schrödinger’s cat to jump from one eigenstate to another.

If you suspect that the wobbly time-sense of Eire can be explained entirely as a manifestation of the cal­culated procrastination of colonial peoples, you are probably missing the complexity of the Gaelic mindset. One story tells of the two clocks in Padraic Pearse Station, Dublin, which, of course, being Irish clocks always disagree. An Englishman, this story claims, once commented loudly and angrily on how typically Irish it was to have two clocks in a train station that gave different times. “Ah, sure,” a Dublin man replied, “if they agreed, one of them would be superfluous.”

The logic there might not be Aristotelian but it has its own internal consistency, like a Monty Python routine. One encounters such ratio­cination frequently on the Emerald Isle. The day I arrived (16 June 1982: Bloomsday), I heard some interviews on radio, which were part of what I later learned was an oral history of modern Ireland being compiled by RTE-Radio Telefis hEirann, the government radio-TV monopoly. These interviews concerned the pookah, a six-foot-tall white rabbit often reported in County Kerry-al­though one pookah, named Harvey, wandered as far as Broadway and became the hero of a famous play. Legends of the pookah probably date back to the Stone Age, and some etymologists even think “pookah” and “god” come from the same pre-Indo-European root, which also gave us Shakespeare’s Puck (pronounced “pook” in Elizabethan times), the Russian bog (god) and that familiar childhood demon, the bogie or boogie.

One Kerry farmer interviewed on this documentary was particularly knowledge-able about the pookah and had endless stories about men who had encountered him on their way home from the pub at night. (For some reason, the pookah seems to prefer to play his tricks on men returning from pubs, especially if they have had more than fourteen pints of Guinness. In the Broadway play, Harvey the pookah first encounters Elwood P. Dowd coming out of a bar.)

“Do you believe in the pookah yourself’?” the interviewer asked finally.

“That I do not,” said the farmer with exquisite Kerry logic, and I doubt very much that he believes in me either.

Most of the Irish insist that such reasoning is peculiarly native to Kerry. I doubt it, but there are countless Kerry legends that are cited as examples. In the time of the Troubles, it is claimed, an English landlord in Kerry was found dead of forty-seven pistol wounds and the jury pronounced it the most aggravated case of suicide in our experience.” In another case, a Kerry jury allegedly ruled, “We find the defendant innocent, but he better not do it in this town again.” There is even a story claiming that one judge released a defendant with the words, “You have been found not guilty and may leave the court with no stigma on your name, except of course for being acquitted by a Kerry jury.

Most of this, no doubt, is folklore-and Kerry stories are indeed most popular in Dublin. (They even say you can sink a sub-marine full of Kerry men by knocking on the door.) I’m told that in Kerry they tell similar stories about Dubliners. One yarn claims that a millionaire left all his money to build hospitals for the insane. The executors, it is said, built one hospital in Galway; and another in Limerick, and then put a roof over Dublin.

I could go on about such local Irish chau­vinism at great length, but instead I would like to explore further into what baffled commentators call the Celtic Twilight. In Illuminates! I proposed that all oppressed people seek revenge against their oppressors by pretending to be even more “backward” than the propaganda line of the oppressor claims. Women used to do this, too, before Feminism: remember the dumb wife played by Gracie Allen and all the dumb blondes in old films?

Ireland was colonized before any part of Asia, Africa or the Americas-the first British invasion began on 23 August 1170—and British troops even today patrol six counties that arc called Northern Ireland and are still part of the British Empire.

Meanwhile, an Irish Bull is a kind of oxymoron, or sentence that contradicts itself. Some linguists love Irish Bulls so much they have made book-length collections of them. One of my favorites is the legendary Dubliner’s response to “Bad weather for this of year, is it not?” The reply was “Ah, faith, it isn’t this time of year at all.” Perhaps the all-time classic Bull was uttered by an Irish member of Parliament: Children who are too young to walk or talk are running about the streets blaspheming their Maker.” Joyce’s Ulysses is full of Irish Bulls; a choice example is All Bergan’s reply when asked who made certain allegations: “I’m the alligator:”

One theory alleges that Irish Bulls result from thinking in Gaelic and trying to talk in English at the same time. Maybe; but I tend to agree, rather, with Anthony Burgess who argues in his RE:JOYCE that the English spoken in England and America has become increasingly “functional” in recent centuries, but Irish English retains the “ludic” qualities of earlier epochs.

On the other hand, an Irish Bull is like a surrealist painting: it jolts you out of your ordinary reality-tunnel and shows you a whole new landscape of possibility.

Ireland is the land where Bulls are pregnant.

But, listen now: during the 1840s Potato Famine, while two million of the Irish died, the English continued to enforce the Poaching Laws. Any Irishman who tried to feed himself or his family by hunting or fishing was hanged if caught, because the land and the rivers both were owned by English landlords.

I don’t think the English were worse than any other conquerors. Similar horror stories can be told about any land occupied by an imperialist power. But you do not understand Irish humor unless you understand the enor­mous human tragedy out of which that humor grew.

Oscar Wilde was more Irish than readers in America generally realize. It is very Hibernian, indeed, that his best-known (and funniest) play has a title that suggests it is about the importance of honesty or sincerity, but the play is actually about clandestine homosexuality and impersonators imper­sonating other impersonators…

Wilde also wrote a little-known essay, ‘The Reality of Masks,” which uses the drama as an example to demonstrate that illusions are often real and reality is often illusory. “The reality of metaphysics is the reality of masks” is the typically Wildean paradox on which the essay climaxes; and Yeats developed his poetic theories of Mask and Anti-Mask out of Wilde. This Yeatsian mystique of Mask, Anti-Mask, Self, Anti-Self, etc. helped make classic Japanese drama comprehensible to Westerners; but what would you expect? Yeats himself pointed out that “Ireland was part of Asia until the Battle of the Boyne. I often think it is still part of Asia.

But, again, the Celtic Reality-Labyrinth cannot be reduced to a formula. Most critics think Yeats’ Mask and Anti-Mask have only a poetic and metaphysical meaning. A look at the man’s life reverses that opinion. Yeats was not only a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most high-voltage occult group then active in Europe, but also of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was hatching the conspiracy that birthed the bloody revolution of 1916. “How can you tell the dancer from the dance?” he once asked explicitly. How can you tell the Mask from the Anti-Mask?, his best poems all ask implicitly. In Ireland, you seldom can and eventually you stop trying.

Thus, in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman – which I consider the greatest Irish novel since Finnegan’s Wake – the nar­rator reflects that while it is good if people know nothing about you, it is even better if they know several things which are not true. This could almost be called the first Axiom of Irish Sociology. Naturally – this should be no surprise, if you have followed me this far – Flann O’Brien himself did not exist. He was considered the funniest Irish novelist of his time, just as Myles na gCopaleen was con­sidered the funniest newspaper columnist of the same years (the mid-1930s to mid-1’950s), but then Myles na gCopaleen never existed either. Both O’Brien and na gCopaleen Were inventions of Brian O’Nolan, a minor clerk in the government bureaucracy. (If Kafka had lived in Ireland, he would have been equally perplexed but more amusing about it.)

When Time magazine discovered O’Brien’s novels, or O’Nolan’s novels, they did an interview with him, in his normal space-time identity as O’Nolan. They printed every yarn he told them, including a marve­lous fantasy about defeating Alekhine, the world champion, at chess. Evidently, Time did not fully understand Irish Facts. I doubt that anybody does understand Irish Facts, but Professor Hugh Kenner attempts to define Irish Facts in his study of recent Irish literature, A Colder Eye. Prof. Kenner gets quite metaphysical about the matter, and seems to regard Irish Facts as incomprehensible to the non-Irish, but I think an Irish Fact is simply, like a rubber inch or one of Dali’s melting clocks, an attempt to create a realm of communication wherein six-foot-tall white rabbits can survive despite all “English” or Rational attempts to banish them.

For instance, if you ever studied Modern Literature at all, you know the story about

what Joyce did on Yeats’ 40th birthday. He went to the hotel where Yeats was staying and said, “I hear you’re 40 today.” Yeats allowed that such was the case. “Too bad,” Joyce replied. “That means you’re too old to be influenced by me.”

That is a typical Irish Fact. It is in many biographies of Joyce, most biographies of Yeats, standard histories of Irish Literature, etc. It got into all those sources because, as Prof. Kenner pointed out, most American researchers do not understand Irish Facts and assume they are similar to American Facts or English Facts or ordinary everyday Facts,

The source for this widely published story was Oliver St. John Gogarty, one of the greatest inventors of Irish Facts in this century (and the model for “Buck Mulligan” in Joyce’s Ulysses). The major flaw in this par­ticular Gogarty invention is that when Yeats was 40, Joyce was living a thousand miles from Dublin in Trieste, Italy.

Nonetheless, an Irish Fact has its own beauty, even if it does not correspond to ordinary actuality. The more you understand the relationship between Yeats and Joyce, the more you realize that if Gogarty’s yarn never happened, it should have happened. It is not just Irish Bulls that are pregnant; Irish Facts are equally fertile.

Gogarty, incidentally, is the hero of one of the great stories of the Civil War. He was one of the senators who voted to accept the Treaty of 1922, which granted Ireland semi-inde­pendence from England, and the IRA set out to assassinate all the senators who had voted for that Treaty. They grabbed Gogarty at his home one night, took him to a car, and drove him to a lonely spot in the country for the execution.

“Am I expected to tip the driver?” Gogarty asked, or claims he asked.

Then, when the IRA was about to shoot him, he asked for permission to take a piss CO. Being Irish, they allowed him to go behind a bush. He kept going until he got to a river, swam to the other side, and escaped.

I don’t know whether that’s an Irish Fact or a normal Fact, but it was a story Gogarty loved to tell. Ezra Pound wrote a poem about it, too, `so now, like many things Gaelic, it is literature even if it is not actuality.

And Joyce, when asked for maybe the thousandth time why he was writing a book as “queer” as Finnegan’s Wake, replied “To keep the Ph.D. candidates busy for the next thousand years.” Was that another Irish Fact? Does it represent Joyce’s Mask or his Anti‑

Mask? His Self or his Anti-Self? And (to parody one of his famous parodies) if not, why not? You have to deal with such puzzles if you want to read Irish literature, and you even have to deal with them if you ask the time in Dublin.

There is a sea-walk at Sandycove, on the southern rim of Dublin Bay, that illustrates the sociological ramifications of Irish Time, Irish Logic, Irish Facts and the Hibernian imagination in general. This sea-walk is about ten feet below the street-walk, and gives one a more intimate view of the Bay and the birds and other flora and fauna that flourish there. Just as you come in sight of the James Joyce Tower-an unpopular building commemo­rating the man who may be Ireland’s greatest (or perhaps its only) Rationalist-the sea-walk gives you a Celtic Surprise, There is a brick wall in the middle of it, and you cannot walk further. You can try to climb the wall, if you feel athletic, or you can jump in the water and swim around It you don’t mind getting your clothes wet, or you can turn around and go back the way you came.

The sea-walk does not terminate, please understand; it continues on the other side of the brick wall. You really ought to go there someday to look at that brick wall, and then try to decide for yourself if there is a solution to the puzzle better than the three alternatives above-or if the wall is another Gaelic satire on the Rationalist’s faith that all things in the Universe are comprehensible.

Arlen probably has the right answer. She suggests the sea-walk was constructed before 1922-i.e. when all Ireland was still colonized-by Irish workers who were supervised by an English foreman. If so, I imagine they constructed the wall while he was watching but, as Holmes would say, not observing.

A similar explanation was offered to me by a student at Trinity to explain why the Dublin telephones are notoriously the worst in Europe (even worse than the French) but Irish country phones work quite well usually. The Dublin phone lines were installed during the British occupation. The country phone lines have been installed since Independence. See?

But the socio-psychology of Colonialism only carries one part of the way in grappling with Celtic Mysteries. For instance‑

Ireland has the highest schizophrenia rate in Europe, and 90 per cent of the schizo­phrenics live in the same two counties (Clare and Connemara), which suffered the greatest population loss during the Potato Famine of the 1840s. Many Irish writers had a special fondness for those counties – “A.E.” (George Russell), Liam 0′ Flaherty, W.B. Yeats and John Millington Synge, for instance-and found the people there especially “wise” and “mystical.” Did some genes mutate during the famine, or did the trauma of mass starvation send psychic terrors down through the gener­ations to the present?

Bob Quinn, a native of Connemara, doubts both these theories. Quinn, a producer of films for RTE, claims the West Irish, especially in those two counties, are not basically Celtic but pre-Celtic. He thinks that what makes the West Irish seem “schizophrenic” to doctors and “mystical” to poets is that they are not really Europeans at all. (I find this fascinating because 25% of my ancestors come from that area…) In three one-hour films collectively and misleadingly titled “Atlantean,” Quinn preaches his doctrine using such evidence as:

Irish step-dancing resembles Spanish flamenco and the dancing of North African Berbers.

The journey from North Africa around the Celtic-speaking coast of Spain, up past Celtic France to West Ireland, is a trade route known to exist for several hundred years, and perhaps for millenniums.

West Irish music hasa different tonal scale than ordinary European music. Playing the tunes of Connemara to musicologists and asking them to identify the tunes, Quinn found most of them guessed “African” although a

few said “Asiatic.”

Type 0 blood is rare in Europe, but com­mon in North Africa. It is also common in Clare and Connemara.

A Christian cross with the Arabic word BISM’ILLAH (“In the name of God…”) has been found in Kerry and carbon-dated at 900 AD.

Basically, itis Quinn’s thesis that the Irish as an ethnic group contain more African-Arabic and pre-Celtic genes and cultural traits than they realize. He wants the Irish to give up Celtic Pride they developed during their Revolutionary epoch and develop a sort of pre-Celtic Pride, you might say. He even claims the Celts never existed as a distinct ethnic group and “Kelltoi” was just a general label the Romans pinned on all tribes they met in Europe.

Only God and Bob Quinn know why he presented this theory using an English-speaking narrator for his three films and yet appears in them himself speaking only Gaelic, the language that has been associated with Celtic Pride since the Gaelic revival of the 1890s.

I mentioned earlier that the IRA once tried to assassinate every Senator who ratified the Treaty of 1922. One article that the IRA found unacceptable ordained that every member of the Irish Parliament, dail hEirann, had to take an oath of loyalty to the English king (or queen).

When de Valera left the IRA and entered the dall in 1927, he took the oath of loyalty. Or did he? They are still arguing about it, in Dublin. Dev ‘s followers spread the rumor that he carefully did not let his hand actually touch the Bible while taking the Oath, and ergo the Oath was null and void. (In any case, Dev was able to get that article of the Treaty abolished in 1937, ten years later.)

You see, Dev, like most Irish politicians (and intellectuals), had a Jesuit education, and the words “casuistry” and “equivocation” have been associated with Jesuits for so long that to say one had a Jesuit education is to say that one can prove two plus two equals five anytime there is a need to prove it, and also that one can quickly reconstruct the proof that two plus two equals four if one’s opponents try to argue that it equals five.

Irish Logic and Irish Facts and Irish Time and all the rest may not be entirely explicable in terms of the psychology of the colonized, or Celtic mysticism, or possible non-European genetic/cultural traces, etc. A lot of the ex­traterrestrial or at least extramundane quality of the Irish imagination may result from Jesuit education…

I once interviewed Sean MacBride, co-founder of Amnesty International, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize, the U.S. Medal of Justice, the Dag Hammarskjold Medal of Honor of the UN, and the Nobel Peace Prize. He probably did more to secure the release of political prisoners, all over the world, than any man of his time.

“Ireland is a third world country,” he told me.

Ireland is officially reckoned the second poorest country in the European Economic Community (only Portugal has more pover­ty), yet in public opinion polls the Irish always rate themselves as much happier than other Europeans. American tourists are always astounded that the Irish can be happy without being rich.

“It’s the gargle,” said Irish TV star Gay Byrne, trying to explain this. “The gargle” is Irish whiskey; Byrne meant the population is too drunk most of the time to notice how miserable they are. But Byrne is a Social Critic by profession and Social Critics hate to admit that anybody is really happy.

An American friend who spent six months in Ireland once told me that the honesty of the Irish was the most striking thing about them. Indeed, coming from America, one’s first impression is that the Irish are less paranoid than Americans; only later do you realize that they trust you because they trust one another and have little experience with con-artists and swindlers.

“You know what it is?” my friend asked me rhetorically. “They still believe in Hell. If you leave your wallet in a pub, the waiter will chase you down the street to give it back, because he thinks he’ll go to Hell otherwise.”

Yet Liam O’Flaherty’s Autobiography begins with the blunt warning sentence All men are born liars.” (Empedocles the Cretan, who said Cretans always lie, must have been part Irish, I guess…)

Ireland is 95% Catholic and every August the natives of Kerry have a holiday in which a goat is crowned and Dionysian revelry fol­lows. The Church has fulminated and fretted for centuries, but the good Catholics of Kerry insist on remaining good pagans as well. What else could you expect in a place where six-foot rabbits still roam the night?

It was in Kerry, also, in 1986, that literally thousands of people saw a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary move and make gestures, over a period of three months. To show how contagious such things are, foreign tourists saw the “miracle” as often as natives, and June Levine, a Jewish Feminist from Dublin, also saw it.

Some people, including agnostic Conor Cruise O’Brien and a cameraman from RTE, saw strange lights in the sky when the Lady was performing. “UFOs?” you may ask. Search me. The Kerry people probably thought they were seeing fairies.

Incidentally, the BVM in Kerry-in a town, by the way, which had the wonderful name, Ballinspittle-finally stopped moving after October 31, 1986. Two Protestants from Dublin drove down to Kerry that night-Halloween, to Americans; Samhain, to the Celts-and bashed Her head in with ham­mers, while ranting against “Idolatry” to the Catholic witnesses.

The joke in Dublin the next day was “Why didn’t She duck?” Dublin has more atheists per square foot than Moscow, I think. They were all educated by the Jesuits and express themselves with superb eloquence. After Archbishop McNamara issued some dog­matic thoughts on “God’s plan for family life,” one of these Jesuit Atheists wrote a letter to the press imploring His Eminence to ex-plain, in detail, how, and with what degree of metaphor, a timeless being can be said to have plans.

Up until the 19th century, nobody but an Irishman would seriously argue against the proposition that, in algebra, pq = qp, which means that if you multiply two quantifies the result is the same whether you multiply the first by the second or the second by the fast.

Even those of you who hate mathematics remember that much algebra, I’m sure. 3 x 5 = 5 x 3. If you buy 3 oranges for 5 cents each, it will cost you as much as buying 5 apples for 3 cents each, because 3 x 5 always equals the same as 5 x 3, namely 15 cents. That’s what the general expression pq = qp means. Right? It’s only common sense.

Naturally, an Irishman finally challenged that. His name was William Rowan Hamilton and he made so many original contributions to math that some consider him on a level with Euclid, Gauss or Descartes. His most astounding and Celtic production, however, was what is called non-communicative algebra, or Hamiltonian algebra, and it is the system in which pq does not equal qp.

The most startling recent finding in quantum math, as everyone has heard by now, is Bell’s Theorem, which proves that quantum systems once in contact remain correlated no matter how far a part in space or time they may move. Prof. Nick Herbert explains this in the homely language it deserves. “There is no difference between anything,” Herbert says. “Here is there.”

The inventor of Bell’s Theorem was an-other Irishman, John S. Bell, born in Belfast

Irish Logic may have survived, evolutionarily speaking, because even the Western half of the human race needs alternatives to orthodox European (Aristotelian) logic. Until we discovered Buddhism and Taoism in this century, we needed the Irish to remind us that clock time is not living time and a bull may be pregnant Maybe that’s why the Irish survived, despite all the Brits did to eliminate them.

[submiteed to rawilsonfans by RMJon23]

Sexual Alchemy

Sexual Alchemy

by Robert Anton Wilson

from GNOSIS Issue #8: Alchemy
Summer 1988
reprinted in Email to the Universe

The Chariot of Antimony by Basil Val­entine (1642) contains the following typical bit of Alchemical exposition:

Let the Lion and Eagle duly prepare themselves as Prince and Princess of Alchemy – as they may be inspired. Let the Union of the Red Lion and the White Eagle be neither in cold nor in heat … Now then conies the time when the elixir is placed in the alembic retort to be subjected to the gentle warmth…. If the Great Work be transubstantiation then the Red Lion may feed upon the flesh and blood of the God, and also let the Red Lion duly feed the White Eagle – yea, may the Mother Eagle give sustain-molt and guard the inner life.’

In general, the preceding passage is representative of the Iimpid clarity of exposition and crystalline lucid­ity of style to be found in alchemical literature. We can already see why so many Rationalist historians have concluded that the alchemists simply went off their skulls from inhaling too many narcotic and/or toxic vapors and wrote hallucinogenic gibberish.

Occultists of various schools, of course, have other ideas. They all agree that alchemical literature was written in code – because “humanity is not ready to receive certain knowledge,” say the esoteric; because any alchemist who wrote clearly would bring down the wrath of the Inquisition on his head, say the more pragmatic. Unfortunately, there are a few dozen theories about what the code means. What follows is the theory that I have found most satisfactory over the years, although I am not smart enough to be absolutely sure it is the one and only correct theory.2

According to Louis T. Culling, Grandmaster of an occult lodge called the G.B.G. (short for Great Brotherhood of God), in his Manual of Sex Magick, the main terms in the code, and their translations, are as follows:

RED LION – the male Alchemist, or his penis.

WHITE EAGLE – the Alchemist’s mate, or her vagina.

RETORT – the vagina and/or womb.

TRANSMUTATION – (or transubstantiation) an altered state of consciousness.

ELIXIR – the semen.3

Applying this key to Valentine’s gnomic paragraph, we find that he is instructing the novice alchemist to find a suitable mate, and to take a “royal” or lofty atti­tude – i.e. he is a Prince, she a Princess, ergo they are no longer ordinary people. (cf. Tim Learys 1960s’ slo­gan, “Every man a Priest, every woman a Priestess, every home a shrine.”) The union of the alchemical mates should be neither in cold nor in heat” —- they must be passionate, not indifferent to each other or merely cas­ual, but they must not be too damned passionate. That is, they should not gallop toward Climax in the man­ner all too typical of our culture. The sexual commun­ion, in short, should be tantric, leading to the “tran­substantiation” – a higher state of consciousness.

The late Dr. Francis Israel Regardie, an egregious chap who had two separate selves and careers — as Dr. Francis Regardie he was a neo-Reichian psychothera­pist, while as Israel Regardie he wrote a series of books which have influenced contemporary American oc­cultism more than the work of any other single author — also taught this interpretation of alchemy, but, un­like Culling, only in the traditional codes. For instance, inThe Tree of Life Regardie offers the following advice on how the Cabalistic Magician may add alchemy to his working armory:

“Through the stimulus of warmth and spiritual Eire to the Athanor, there should be a transfer, an ascent of the Serpent from that instrument to the Cucurbite, used as a retort. The alchemical marriage or the mingling of the two streams of force in the retort causes at once the chemical corruption of the serpent in the menstruum of the Gluten, this being the Solve part of the al chemical formula of Solve et coagula…. the opera­tion should not take less than an hour.4

Dr. Regardie offers the further helpful hint that, complex as it sounds, the operation is “no harder than riding a bicycle.” In correspondence, Dr. Regardie cheerfully acknowledged that I had decoded this cor­rectly. Culling differs from Regardie chiefly in claiming that the ascent of the Serpent requires at least two hours.

If some readers still feel a bit in the dark about what is involved in the prolonged tantric act, consider the following broad hints from Thomas Vaughn, another 17th Century alchemist roughly contemporary with Basil Valentine:

The true furnace is a little simple shell… But l had almost forgot to tell thee that which is all in all, and is the greatest difficulty in all the art – namely the fire… The proportion and regimen of it is very scrupulous, but the best rule to know it by is that of the Synod: “Let not the bird fly before the fowler.” Make it sit while you give fire and then you are sure of your prey. For a close I must tell thee that the philosophers call this fire their bath, but it is a bath of Nature, not an artificial one; for it is not of any kind of water… In a word, without this bath, nothing in the world is generated.5

As Kenneth Rexroth noted in his introduction to The Works of Thomas Vaughn, Vaughn seems to have been less concerned with hiding the secret, like earlier alchemists, than with making it clear by progressively broader and broader hints. There is only one bath from which all creatures are generated and ‘that is the bath of vaginal fluids, which is “not of any kind of water.” The furnace that is also a shell is a nice poetic image of female anatomy, worthy of John Donne -‑ whose poems sometimes suggest that he was in on the secret. Note especially Donne’s “Love’s Alchemy,” with its “pregnant pot” and “The Ecstasy,” with its clear tantric emphasis.

The “bird” (English slang for woman, but also a cross reference to the traditional Eagle symbolism) must sit while the alchemist gives fire. This is, of course, the traditional tantric position, which slows down the sexual communion and creates maximum intimacy and tenderness. Similarly, the lovers in Donne’s “The Ecstasy” sit and make “pictures” in each other’s eyes, leading most commentators to think no sexual connection was involved, but the yabyum (sitting) position of Tantra also demands communion by eye contact.

John Donne and other Elizabethans who show signs of knowing this tradition – Sir Philip Sydney and Sir Walter Raleigh, especially, but try re-reading Shakespeare’s sonnets with this model in mind – probably came under the influence of Giordano Bruno of Nola, who was lecturing at Oxford while Donne was there. It was during those Oxford years that Bruno published his Eroica Furioso, which alternates love poems with prose passages on the union of the soul with God. It is usually assumed that the poems are allegories about the soul’s pilgrimage, but they may just as well be keys to the yoga that produces the ultimate union and communion. (Incidentally, the historian Frances Yates believes that Bruno was the model for at least two of Shakespeare’s characters – Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost and Prospero in The Tempest.)6

Bruno, of course, ultimately returned to Italy, where the Inquisition locked him in a dungeon for 8 years and then burned him at the stake. Most historians note only that the Nolan (as he liked to call himself) was condemned for teaching the Copernican theory of astronomy, but actually he was charged with 18 offenses, including practising Magick and organizing secret occult societies dedicated to overthrowing the Vatican. Francis Yates suspects that the latter might be true and finds a Bruno-esque influence in the first Rosicrucian manifestoes.7 Certainly, The Alchemical Marriage of Christian Rosycross shows more than a tinge of Bruno’s Tantrism, and “dark sayings” like “It is only on the Cross that the Rose may bloom” strongly suggest both Bruno’s sex-magick and his love of paradox.8 (Two of the Nolan’s favorite koans were “In filth, sublimity; in sublimity, filth” and “In joy, tears; in tears, joy.”)

The question of how this tantric tradition got into Europe has no clear, unambiguous answer. Ezra Pound, in addition to his other achievements and infamies, was one of the leading scholars in the area of early French poetry, and in the revised 1916 edition of The Spirit of Romance included a chapter presenting evidence that a tantric cult existed in Provence at the time of the Troubadours and is referred to guardedly in much of their poetry. In addition to the data presented by Pound, I have noted that the characteristic verse-form of the Troubadours, seven stanzas, may refer to the seven “chakras” involved in tantric yoga. Certainly, there is nothing earlier in European literature (but much in Tantra) to foreshadow Pierre Vidal’s shocking, “I think I see God when I look upon my lady nude.” That was hair-raising blasphemy when written; but even more in the inner tradition of Tantra is Sordello’s lovely:

And if flee you not, Lady who has captured my soul, No sight is worth the beauty of my thought

Pound guessed (and admitting he was guessing) that this “yoga of male and female energies” had surfaced in medieval France after a thousand years of underground existence as Gnostic heresy. Louis de Rougemont, however, in Love in the Western World, presents an impressive body of evidence that the Troubadour yoga had been brought back from the Middle East by crusaders who learned it from Arab mystics, probably the more oddball Sufis.9

Louis Culling, op. cit., claims that the tantric tradition in the West is of definite Sufi origin and is also coded into the Rubiyat of Omar Khayaam. This allegation is based, alas, on “inner teachings” of various occult orders and not on sources recognized by historians. Surely, there seems to be a tantric element in the 14th Century Sufi Mahmoud Shabistari who wrote, “In every atom a thousand rational beings are contained.”

The Ordo Templi Orientis (of which Aleister Crowley was Outer Head for a quarter of a century) teaches the elements of Tantra in nine slow and care-fully scheduled “degrees” of initiation; the first degree unambiguously attributes this tradition to Sufism in general and, in particular, to Mansur el Hallaj – a Sufi martyr who was stoned to death for proclaiming the eminently tantric (and vedantic) doctrine, “I am the Truth and there is nothing within my turban but God.” (Some O.T.O. initiates think the true story of Mansur is the origin of the myth of Hiram in orthodox Masonry.) In my Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits (Falcon Press, 1988), I give some credence to all these theories but suggest that a major role was also played by Hassan i Sabbah, founder of the Ishmaelian sect of Islam, who used both drugs and tantric sex to produce psychedelic experiences, which allegedly caused many to believe they had literally been privileged to experience Paradise while still alive.

This is the point at which most commentators on this Art tend to stumble or to wave their arms excitedly and start howling in rage. Some think all you have to do is adopt the “right attitude” during sex and – hey, presto – you are an alchemist or a magician or at least a Hermeticist of some sort. Others proclaim that all such yoga is “black” and “left-hand” and undoubtedly diabolical. While I cannot hope to dissolve the preju­dices of the latter group in a short article, I can at least jar the naivete of the former group somewhat.

Tantric yoga requires at least as much discipline as hatha yoga and as much capacity for loving and giving of oneself as bhakti yoga. To be effective at all, that is, the Tantra of sex must have the delicacy of a first-rate ballet troupe and the tenderness of true communion – in the religious sense of that term. Aleister Crowley, our century’s leading proponent of this yoga (and the teacher of Louis Culling, by the way) said this yoga requires “the nine and ninety rules of Art.” Elsewhere Crowley expressed this in the mantra, which has many additional meanings outside Tantra, “Love is the law, love under will.” One only knows if the art has been mastered if one comes to a state of consciousness in which one can immediately grasp, without doubt or hesitation, the meaning of another of Crowley’s hermetic aphorisms, “Every man and every woman is a Star.”

The power of Tantra may be indicated by the fact that Ezra Pound, who never studied this art under a Master, learned enough from his years scrutinizing Troubadour texts that, by 1933, in his essay on Guido Cavalcanti, he speaks of “magnetisms that border on the visible” and consciousness “extending several feet beyond the body.” These are characteristic signs of passing from ordinary sex to meta-sex, from the crude act Shakespeare called a “momentary trick” (and D.H. Lawrence called “the sneeze in the loins”) to tantric transcendence. What happens beyond those magnet isms and that expansion of consciousness is not worth discussing; those who know, know – and those who know not will simply not believe.

One might venture, however, that the mingling of yang and yin magnetisms tends to produce a synergetic third which burns up or consumes the original elements. Kenneth Grant, an oddball Crowleyan obsessed with menstrual magick (“the Mystery of the Red Gold”), speaks of this as the “bisexualization of both partners.”10 More precisely, one can say that, in Chinese terms, active yang becomes passive yang, passive yin becomes active yin, and both tend to merge into the Tao, to re-emerge in new and unexpected forms. Crowley’s notorious 2 = 0 equation, which he alleged explained the universe and would eventually explain quantum mechanics, at least serves as a useful glyph for this stage of the alchemical mutation. And, although Crowley loved to play the bogie-man and terrorize the naive and nervous, one should take with some serious­ness his warning when he says in Magick:

The Cup is said to be full of the Blood of the Saints; that is, every saint or magician must give the last drop of his life’s blood to that cup in the true Bridalchamber of the Rosy Cross… It is a woman whose cup must be Filled… the Cross is both Death and Generation, and it is on the Cross that the Rose blooms.11

One has to be knowledgeable in both Freudian and Jungian analysis to understand this even dimly, until one has had the experience. But then everybody who did LSD in the ’60s knows a little about Death and Rebirth; we are not a totally unprepared generation for these Mysteries.

This begins to sound too metaphysical. The processes involved can be defined very materialistically, in terms of exercizing to move the center of Consciousness from usual domination by the left brain hemisphere and the sympathetic (active) nervous system to balance between both hemispheres and a growing ability to relax into the parasympathetic (passive, receptive) nervous system. The old mystic terminology lingers on chiefly because it is poetically precise and psychologically highly suggestive.

It is, however, worth quoting Dr. J. W. Brodie-Innes, an initiate of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in England in the 1890s, who said of the relevance of traditional occult concepts:

‘Whether the Gods, the Qlipothic forces or the Secret Chiefs really exist is comparatively unimportant; the point is that the universe behaves as though they do. In a sense the whole philosophy of the practise of Magick is identical with the Pragmatist position of Pierce the American philosopher.12

In other words, we never know “the universe” per se; we know the universe as filtered through our consciousness, and when consciousness alters, the known universe alters. Crowley defined Magick as “the art of causing change by act of will,” and Dion Fortune defined it as “the art of causing change in consciousness by act of will,” and neither was over-simplifying or being cute: The traditional Aristotelian “Iron Curtain” between Mind and Universe has no meaning in magick, for the same reason it no longer has any meaning in quantum physics. As John Lilly wrote:

…if one plugs the proper beliefs into the metaprogrammatic levels of the (brain)… the computer will then construct (from the myriads of ele­ments in memory) those possible experiences that fit this particular set of rules. Those programs will be run off and those displays made which are ap­propriate to the basic assumptions and their stored programming.13

The Puritan looking at the Playmate of the Month sees something disgusting, awful, diabolical, and sinful; Pierre Vidal would see another manifestation of the glory of God. It all depends on the programs in the bio-computer. But all programs have a tendency to be-come self-fulfilling prophecies: a classic case is the sad, melancholy man who sits often in the dark, shunning sunlight, or walks around wearing dark glasses all the time, and gradually becomes even gloomier until he arrives at clinical depression. He has created the set and the setting for depression.

Conversely, those who achieve Divine Union with a beloved sexual partner tend to create their own self-fulfilling prophecies, and the most common effect is that all things become as beautiful as Vidal’s nude lady was when he saw Her as God. This transmutation of experience is technically called “the multiplication of the first matter” and many alchemists said of it, wittily, that this “gold, unlike ordinary gold, could not be spent or used up, because the more of it you pass on to others, the more of it you find you still have.

All religions preach charity and forgiveness; but those virtues are hard to practice when you are surrounded by sons of bitches. When the alchemical gold” is found, when consciousness mutates, you are surrounded by gods and goddesses, and the more of the “gold” you give away, the more comes back to you from an increasingly divine Mother Eagle. Quite simply, it is a short and almost inevitable step from Tantra to pantheism. It is no accident that William Blake, who, like Shabistari, saw “infinity in a grain of sand,” also penned the most searing indictment ever written of the puritan and ascetic hatred of Eros:

Children of a future age

Reading this indignant page

Know that in a former time

Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.14

Robert Anton Wilson is the author of numerous books including the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, The New Inquisition, and Cosmic Trigger (Falcon Press, Santa Monica).

 

NOTES

1.       See The Triumphal Chariot of Antimony, reproduced in The Alchemical Tradition in the Late Twentieth Century, ed. Richard Grossinger, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 2nd edition 1983, pp. 34-47.

2.       However, I am quite sure that many readers of GNOSIS are that smart, and you can look forward to seeing their corrections of my ignorant guesses in the letters column of the next issue.

3.       A Manual of Sex Magick, Louis T. Culling, Llwellyn Publications, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1971, p. 57.

4.       The Tree of Life: A Study in Magic, Israel Regardie, Samuel Weiser, New York, 1975 edition, p. 251.

5.       “Coelum Terrae, ” in The Works of Thomas Vaughn, ed, A. E. Waite, University Books, New Hyde Park, NY, 1968, pp. 219-221.

6.       Giordano Bruno the Hermetic Tradition, Frances A. Yates, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 357.

7.       The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Frances A. Yates, Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston, 1974 ed., p. 216.

8.       Reprinted in Commentary on the Chymical Wedding, Gareth Knight and Adam McLean, Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks #18, Edinburgh, 1984.

9.       Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont, Harper & Row, New York, 1974.

10.   The Magical Revival, Kenneth Grant, Samuel Weiser, New York, 1974, p. 142.

11.   Magick in Theory and Practice, Aleister Crowley, Dover Publications, New York, 1976, pp. 41-42.

12.   For more writings of Brodie-Innes, see: The Sorcerer and His Apprentice: Unknown Hermetic Writings of S. L. MacGregor Mathers and J. W. Brodie-Innes, ed. R. A. Gilbert, Aquarian Press, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, 1983.

13.   Programming and Meta programming in the Human Biocomputer, John C. Lilly, Bantam Books, New York, 1974, p. 50.

14.   From “A Little Girl Lost,” Songs of Experience, William Blake, Dover Publications, New York, 1984, p. 40.

Dreams of Flying

Dreams of Flying

by Robert Anton Wilson

 from Magical Blend #19, May-June-July 1988
reprinted in Email to the Universe

I have recently been reading a most enjoyable novel called The Dream Illuminati by Wayne Saalman (Falcon Press, Santa Monica, 1988). Mr. Saalman has found an epic theme – dreams of flight, and the achievement of flight.

Historically, dreams of flying appeared in the collective unconscious before the reality of flight existed in technology, and it seems plausible that if we understood our dreams better we would use our technology more wisely. Our machines manifest our dreams in matter crafted to coherence, and a psychoanalysis of our culture could easily derive from an examination of how we use science to materialize our fantasies and nightmares.

Mr. Saalman’s science-fantasy made me wonder: Why have we always dreamed of flying, and why have we built flying machines? This question seems “eminently” worth pondering in a world where 200,000,000 people pass through Kennedy International Airport every year, flying the Atlantic in one direction or the other.

To understand the profound, it often appears helpful to begin with clues that seem trivial. I suggest that we contemplate what our children look at every Saturday morning on TV. One of the most popular jokes in animated cartoons shows the protagonist walking off a cliff, without noticing what he has done. Sublimely ignorant, he continues to walk-on air-until he notices that he has been doing the impossible,” and then he falls. I doubt very much that there will be any reader of Magical Blend who has not seen that routine at least onec; most of us have seen it a few hundred times.

It might seem pretentious to see a Jungian archetype adumbrated in crude form in this Hollywood cliché, but follow me for a moment.

When Hollywood wishes to offer us the overtly mythic, it presents Superman, who can “leap over tall buildings in a single bound,” and a more recent hero named Luke Skywalker.

The Tarot, that condensed encyclopedia of the collective uncon­scious, begins with the card called The Fool, and the Fool is depicted walking off a cliff-just like Donald Duck or Wily Coyote in the cartoons. Funny coincidence, what?

A Greek legend (which James Joyce took as the archetype of the life of the artist) tells us of Daedalus and Icarus: Daedalus who, imprisoned in a labyrinth (conventional “reality”), invented wings and flew away, over the heads of his persecutors, and Icarus, the son of Daedalus, who flew too close to the Sun Absolute and fell back to Earth. Like Porky Pig walking off a cliff, Icarus’ fall contains a symbolism many have encountered in their own dreams.

The Sufi order employs as its emblem a heart with wings (and the Ordo Templi Orientis employs a circle – symbolizing both emptiness and completion – with wings). The Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth, had the head of a winged creature, the ibis; his Greek equivalent, Hermes, was portrayed as more human, but had bird’s wings on his sandals.

The Wright Brothers, who made flying possible for all of us, remain beloved figures in the folk imagination-but how many readers can name the inventors ouch equally marvelous (but earthbound) devices as the television, the vacuum cleaner, the computer, the laser or the modern indoor toilet? Yet while other gen­iuses seem “forgotten by the masses,” the classic put-down to satirize any conservative who sets limits to what human art can accomplish remains “I told Wilbur and I told Orville, you’ll never get that crate off the ground.”

I suspect that part of the function of flight consists in destroying our concept of limit; opening us to the insight Dr. John Lilly expressed so eloquently in The Center of the Cyclone:

In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experimentally and experientially. These limits are further beliefs to be tran­scended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits.

The poet Hart Crane, trying to describe what Wilbur and Orville Wright meant to his generation (he died in the 1930s), wrote that from Kitty Hawk onward, he sensed “the closer clasp of Mars.” By 1938 people tuning in on an Orson Welles radio program after the drama started believed they were, hearing a newscast and the Martians were already here. A quantum jump had occurred in the limits of our social imagination_ Humanity had, like the poet, sensed the “closer clasp” of Mars.

Just slightly more than 30 years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, like a character in the fiction of Jules Verne, and ten years later, our instruments invaded the Martian desert already familiar to “us” through the visions of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. If this does not confirm William Blake’s notorious claim that “Poetic Imagination” should be considered another name for God, it certainly suggests that Poetic Imagination may function as another name for Destiny.

Perhaps we should ponder more deeply on the fact that Daedalus means artist in Greek. Daedulus, designer of labyrinths, imprisoned by those he served in a labyrinth he himself built – Daedalus, inventor of wings that took him from the Earth to Outer Space – why does he represent Art, instead of Science?

Well, to understand this we must remember that the ancient Greeks did not distin­guish Art from Science as we do. The genius of an artist, Aristotle says, lies in his texne, the root from which we get our word technology;” but texne basically means skill or craft, or the ability to make things that never existed before.

In our age, by contrast, Stravinsky was regarded as “witty” or “paradoxical” (or deliberately enigmatic) when he called him-self a “sound engineer.” An artist who con­siders himself a kind of engineer? That is a hard thought for us to grasp. Yet a few moments’ reflection will show that as much precise structural knowledge can be found in Stravinsky’s music as in Roebling’s blue-prints for the Brooklyn Bridge-that edifice (considered “miraculous” when it was new) which Hart Crane took as a symbol of the unity of Art and Science.

Our dichotomized and dualistic thinking has been denounced so often lately that I hardly need to labor this point. I would prefer to suggest a possible common origin of both art and science. The musician and the architect, the poet and the physicist, all inventors of new realities-I propose, all such Crea­tors may be best considered late evolutionary developments of the type that first ap­pears as the shaman. Please remember that shamans in most cultures are known as “they who walk in the sky,” just like our current shaman-hero, Luke Skywalker

It should not be regarded as accidental or arbitrary that Swift put Laputa, the home of the scientists, in the sky, in order to disparage the wild-eyed and Utopian scientists of his time for not having all four feet on the ground; Aristophanes put Socrates in the clouds, to similarly disparage speculative agnostic philosophy. Outer Space seems the natural home of all descendents of the shaman, whether they be called artists, philosophers or scientists.

The ironies of Swift and Aristophanes, and the myths of the fall of Icarus and Donald Duck, indicate that the collective unconscious contains a force opposed to our dreams of flight. This appears inevitable. As Jung, the foremost explorer of the collective psyche, often pointed out, an ineluctable polarity exists in the symbols of dream and myth, a “Law of Opposites” which Jung compared to the Chinese concept ofyin and yang energies. Jekyll contains Hyde; love easily becomes hate; Cupid and Psyche reappear as the Phantom of the Opera and Margaritta, and also as King Kong and Fay Wray.

In the present context, the Law of Opposites means that we yearn to soar, yet we fear to fall. Our “inner selves” are mirrored not just in Orville Wright rising like a bird from Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk, but also in Simon Newcombe, the great astronomer who “proved” mathematically that such flight was impossible.

As I have elsewhere suggested, neophilia and neophobia – love of the novelty and fear of novelty – result from the primal polarities of the first imprint of the newborn infant. In other words, what Dr. Timothy Leary calls the bio-survival “circuit” of the nervous system-the oral bio-survival system, I prefer to call it, since it includes the immune, endocrine and neuropeptide sub-systems as well as the autonomic nervous system-imprints either basic explorativeness or ba­sic conservatism very quickly. That explains, I think, why some babies “chortle with delight” when tossed up in the air and caught, while others scream with terror. In­fants who like this experience of flight, I suggest, already have the neophiliac imprint and those who act terrified have the neophobe imprint.

Of course, “the universe” can count above two (even if Aristotelian logicians cannot) and few of us are either pure neophilics or pure neophobics. Rather, we wobble about on a gradient between neophilia and neophobia-between joy and anxiety, between conservatism and experimentalism, between yearning to soar and fear of falling. A t times we feel like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, convinced that “a true Heaven has no limits” and trying to fly higher and faster; other times we become the old Reaganite gulls, nervously warning that to fly too high too fast will ruin your brain and directly contradicts the traditional mores of the flock (“Just say no to soaring.”) We contain both Orville Wright leaping into the air toward a future “where no man has gone before” and Simon Newcombe proving that Orville will certainly fall and smash himself like Humpty Dumpty.

As Joyce so poetically writes:

My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud. In peace and silence. I could have stayed up there for always only. It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall-ill seen him come down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down under his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup.

Despite the multiple dream-images here-the Irish rain falling to become the Irish river Anna Liffey, Lucifer and his hosts falling from Heaven, the falls of Adam and Eve and Humpty Dumpty, Mary receiving the divine seed from the Archangel, Magdeline washing the feet of the Saviour, the Paraclete descending as a dove to bring the Apostles the Gift of Tongues, a housewife washing up the breakfast dishes-Joyce primarily invokes our deep awareness that gravity “pulls us down,” our deep yearning to break-free of this “drag” and soar back to our home above the clouds.

In 1988, the ancient Egyptian and Gnos­tic belief that our origin and our destiny reach far beyond Earth no longer seems as quaint and queer as it did in recent generations. In books like Dr. Timothy Leary’s Info-Psychology, Dr. Francis Crick’s Cosmic Panspermia and Sir Fred HoyleEvolution from Space, there appears a body of evidence strongly suggesting that life did not begin on this planet but arrived here from elsewhere in space. While the interpretations of these brilliant philosopher-scientists differ,’ their various kinds of evidence, from diverse fields of enquiry, does make a strong case that evolution is older and more universal than we traditionally think. One leaves their books suspecting that the orthodox biologi­cal view regarding Earthly evolution apart from Cosmic evolution results from un­voiced pre-Copernican assumptions about Earth’s centrality and its isolation.

In addition to the sophisticated and learned works of Leary, Crick and Hoyle, we have also recently witnessed the growth of a vast body of “vulgar” or at least popular literature arguing the proposition that An­cient Astronauts seeded this planet, not with all life, but merely with (post-Neanderthal) humanity. Instead of dissecting the flaws in the arguments of this seemingly “crank” literature, it might be more illuminating, I think, to wonder why this popular mythos provides the masses with an unsophisticated and anthropocentric form of the theories more soberly presented in works like Info-Psychology, Cosmic Panspermia,and Evo­lution from Space. Why do we find both first-rate and second-rate minds suddenly preoc­cupied with extraterrestrial evolution, while ninth-rate minds increasingly embrace Pop UFOlogy?

And why, one may next wonder, does this theme also appear centrally in the most beautiful, the most “haunting” and the most of­ten-revived science-fiction film of all time-Kubrick’s magnificent 2001?

When one Idea or Archetype appears in learned tomes, in tabloids, in folk-belief, in new cults, and in great art, all at about the same time, one suspects the presence of what Jung called, in his book Flying Saucers, “a shift in the constellation of the archetypes.” In terms of current neuroscience, what Jung means, I think, is that the DNAICNS “dialogue”-the neuropeptide “language” between genes and brain-is preparing us for a new evolutionary leap.

In The Dream Illuminati, there is a scene in which the hero says bluntly:

I realized that 1 was only as free as I thought myself to be and that there was no limit to how high we can fly!

Here we see again that the Archetype of flight carries always an umbilical connection to the idea of the transcendence of all limits. (“What is believed to be true is true or becomes true…”)

And we must wonder again if more than childish fantasy lurks in the concept of Donald Duck walking on air only until he “remembers” that this “is” officially “im­possible” in our current reality-tunnel.

In 1904, when Einstein was starting to write his first paper on Relativity and the Wright Brothers were testing the airplane design that finally worked after many failures, Aleister Crowley, the most controver­sial mystic of our century, “received”-or created by Poetic Imagination-a document which he ever after believed was a commu­nication from Higher Intelligence. In this work, called Liber Al or The Book of the Law, there is contained what purports to be a message from Nuit, the Egyptian star goddess, interpeted in Crowley’s commentaries as the supreme consciousness of the cosmos, or the sum total of all synergetically interac­tive intelligences throughout space-time. Among other things this “entity” or corpora­tion told Crowley;

Every man and every woman is a star…I am above you and in you. My ecstasy is in yours. My joy is to see your joy…For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union…Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendor within you: come unto me!

Many interpretations of these verses are possible, of course. Of course.

Personally, after reading some of the current scientists who see evolution as both terrestrial and extraterrestrial, I cannot look at the words of Liber Al without thinking that, in some sense, the interstellar creators who planted life here may be sending us a signal to return to our home in the stars—that “great blue bedroom” which Joyce poetically invokes on the last page of Finnegans Wake and in which the astronaut, David Bowman, abruptly finds himself at the climax of 2001.

Of course, the language of poetic myth, like that of dream, should always be consid­ered analogical and allegorical, not literal; to see only one meaning here means that one will “fall into the pit of Because and perish with the dogs of Reason” (to cite Crowley again). The content of a true archetype con­tains an infinity of mirrors.

For instance, my Dream Diary for 23 April 1968 records that when I woke in the morning I remembered the following images from my night’s hermetic journey:

I am in a Chicago nightclub once patronized by John Dillinger. I find that the present patrons are also a group of gang­sters. They regard me with hostility, and I become frightened. I try to leave; they try to stop me. I open a door.

I find myself on the IRT subway in New York. I am riding in the front car and watch­ing the tunnel ahead of the train (as I did as a boy). Suddenly, I see a brick wall ahead and realize the train is going to crash into it and kill everybody aboard, including me.

I am out of the subway and walking in Cicero, Illinois. An angry mob surrounds me. They seem to know that I was in the recent Martin Luther King march against segregation here. I cannot escape them. Suddenly, I know intuitively what to do. I cry out, “Elohim!” and sprout wings and fly above their heads. The sky is beautiful and I feel free of all anxieties, at peace, unrea­sonably hopeful about everything.

When I awoke, I was thinking of Chesterton’s description of the mystic expe­rience as “absurd good news.”

At the time of this dream, I was involved with Chicago friends in propagating the John Dillinger Died For You Society, a parody of Fundamentalist religions which, like all good jokes, had its serious side. I was fasci­nated by the way that certain outlaws like Dillinger (or Jesse James, or Robin Hood) were virtually forced to live to the full the archetypal myth of Osiris, Dionysus, Adonis, Christ and Joyce’s Tim Finnegan. I also meditated much on the way in which outlaws who did not even approximately “live” the myth subsequently had their lives rewritten in folk-imagination to conform to it. The first part of the dream-record con-fronts me with the dark side of the archetype, and reminds me that real gangsters are not the mythic figures imposed on them by Poetic Imagination but nasty and frightening sociopaths.

In the second part of the dream, I enter into the Underground Initiation. Although using symbols from my own life (the subway), I find myself retracing the steps of Ishtar in the land of the dead, Odysseus sailing to Hades for wisdom, Jesus and Dante descending to Hell, etc. In alchemy this was called negrito, which Jung com­pares to the initial stages of psychotherapy.

In a sense, the Underworld Journey ap­pears the reciprocal of, and preparation for, the Achievement of Flight. Dante had to walk through Hell before climbing Mount Purgatory and soaring above the clouds to Heaven. In retrospect, I am especially de-lighted with the Freudian wit of the uncon­scious in using modem “Underworld” fig­ures-gangsters-to represent the mythic Underworld.

In the third part of the dream, the tradi­tional Wrathful Demons attack me, personified by the citizens of Al Capone’s home town, Cicero-perhaps because the people out there always reminded me of Wrathful Demons whenever I had to associate with them. I escape by crying out a name from the Hebrew Bible, whereupon I am able to fly, like Dante or Daedalus, from the Pit to the Stars.

What I find most curious about these dream fragments is that, when I experienced them in 1968, I knew nothing about Cabala. I was puzzled on awakening about the name Elohim and the way I had magically used it in the dream. All I knew about that name in those days was that it appears in the first chapter of Genesis and that there is a dispute between philologists and theologians about whether it means “God or “the gods”- i.e. whether the first chapter of the Bible is or isn’t a fragment left over from a polytheistic phase of Judaism.

It was over two years after this very Jungian dream that I became interested in Cabala and eventually learned that Elohim is therein considered a great Name of Power – used in e.g. the Middle Pillar Ritual, which every Cabalist in training is expected to do at least once a week. The function of Cabalistic ritual in general, and this ritual in particular, was once defined by Crowley as “to raise the mind of the student perpendicularly to Infinity” – beyond all limits. This is symbolized in my dream, as in many dreams and myths, by the imagery of flight and the conquest of gravity. The 1968 dream seems to contain precognition of Cabalistic work I would be doing very seriously c. 1971-75.

Of course, if one dares to suggest that a dream contains precognition; the Rationalist immediately declares the connection between the dream image and later waking events is” “mere coincidence.” Those with a psychological block against recognizing electricity would probably say, similarly, that when you flick the switch and the light goes on that “is” also “mere coincidence.”

At the time I had this dream or set of dreams in 1968, I was suffering from a moderately severe depression and the general symptoms of what is now called “mid-life crisis.” I had a very good job at Playboy magazine, with an excellent salary for the ’60s, but I was approaching 40 and wanted to write full-time. (Three years later, after beginning Cabalistic work, I quit my job and have been writing full-time ever since. Al-though I have experienced the usual share of shocks, disappointments and bereavements, I have not suffered clinical depression again.)

The reader might find it illuminating to compare this record with a dream recounted in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. In this case, the dreamer saw a winged horse with one wing broken, struggling lofty and falling continually back to Earth. Campbell does not even bother interpreting this symbolism, merely inform­ing us that the dreamer was a poet forced to work at a menial job to support his family; one understands immediately.

In a sense, we have all had our “wings” broken; it remains the major function of such “hallowed institutions as organized religion and Free Compulsory Education to see that our “wings” are broken, or at least clipped, before we reach adulthood. How else will society have the insectoid units it needs to fill the cubicles in its hive economy?

But what if we begin to regrow healthy organs of Poetic Imagination and flight? What if we “put on the wings and arouse the coiled splendor within as Liber Al urges? Is it not predictable that society will react with the fury described by Wayne Saalman in The Dream Illuminati? (Think of the careers of Dr. Wilhelm Reich and Dr. Timothy Leary…) Joyce did not name his emblematic Artist merely Daedalus but Stephen Daeda­l s-after St. Stephen, the Protomartyr who reported a Vision and was stoned to death for it.

And does it not appear ultimately beneficial, in evolutionary perspective, that society should react in that manner? Those of us who have no avocation for martyrdom must learn, when we realize how much neophobia remains built into the contraptions of “society” and the State, the art of surviving in spite of them. In a word, we must “get wise in both the Socratic meaning of that phrase and in the most hardboiled street meaning. Neophobia functions as an Evolutionary Driver, forcing the neophiliac to get very smart very fast.

This theme is inexhaustible, but my space and time are not. As a final bit of hermetic wisdom, I offer you Proposition 12 of Aleister Crowley’s masterwork, Magick:

Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limi­tation is based on experience ofthe past, and every step in his progress extends his empire. There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or to what he may do.

FOOTNOTE

‘Leary thinks life was planted here by advanced intelligences lovingly seeking “children” for companionship, while Crick proposes that advanced civilization coldly and scientifically created Earthside DNA as an interesting experiment, and Hoyle argues that some seeds got here by accident (on comets, etc.) and some was deposited by Higher Intelligences for reasons inscrutable to us at present. I suspect that all three theo­ries are influenced by the personal traits of their inventors.

[submitted to RAWilsonFans.com by RMJon23]

The Return of Philip K. Dick

The Return of Philip K. Dick
A Review of Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection

by
Robert Anton Wilson

 from Magical Blend #18, February 1988

 I tell you these things for what they are worth. They are true things; they happened.   –VALIS

Of all the books I’ve read in the past year, none has impressed and moved me quite as much as Scott Apel’s Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection. The story Scott tells is about as uncanny as a kangaroo in a Mozart string quartet, but it is all based on fact.

I assume that readers of Magical Blend will be aware of who Phil Dick was and of the mysteries and controversies that have made his final years as enigmatic as John Kennedy’s last six seconds in Dallas. Briefly, for the benefit of those who aren’t hip to the Dick Phenomenon:

Philip K. Dick was one of the most prolific and also one of the most disturbing of recent American science fiction writers. His books, by ordinary literary standards, are better written, more humanistic and insightful, more “artistic” and, above all, more philosophically profound than almost anything you can find in the sci-fi field. Also, the majority of them were more frightening, or at least more unsettling, than most current novels, inside or outside of science fiction. You always had the feeling that his books might bite you.

Phil Dick was a man obsessed with the basic questions of philosophy and epistemology: What is real (if anything)? How much of our experience can be trusted? Do we really know anything about the strange universe in which we live or are we just guessing? Reading him was about as soothing as the 11 o’clock news and almost as likely to drive you to booze or downers. Or, if that is hyperbole, Phil at least had the same capacity as the TV news to make you wonder if you had somehow gotten onto the wrong planet.

Those who don’t read science fiction have probably encountered one of Phil Dick’s esoteric fables in film version. The gruesomely poetic (or poetically gruesome) Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford, was based on Phil’s novel,Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The most Dickian things in the movie are the Christian symbolism sensitive viewers have noted (the dove and the dying android) and the ironic implication that some androids may be more human than some humans. Phil, in fact, was fascinated by the Turing problem, as it is called in computer circles: how can you tell a sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligence from a “real” human being? This was related, in Phil’s philosophical musings, to the classic problem of ontology: how much of perceived “reality” is an illusion of our own minds?

Blade Runner also contains one of Philip K. Dick’s major obsessions: the image of a United States under totalitarian control, but of such a subtle nature that most citizens aren’t even aware that democracy has died and has been secretly replaced by fascism. You might say that, while many radicals shout that “extreme” view in their rhetoric, Phil never howled about it in political speeches, but quietly, in his fiction, brooded over the possibility that it could happen or it might even have happened already. He gets under your skin. He makes you wonder if the 11 o’clock news isn’t just a preview of the Bela Lugosi classic that follows it: maybe our country really is like that?

This obsession grew after the mysterious break-in at Phil’s house on November 17, 1971. This was preceded by what Phil, at the time, feared was an onset of paranoid thinking on his part. He thought he was being watched for many weeks. He tried to evaluate this “irrational” thinking and worried that he had done too many drugs back in the wild 1960s. Then it happened. Persons unknown broke into Phil’s house, stole many of his papers, and set off a small bomb to destroy other of his records and documents. Phil assumed, at the time, that some government agency was responsible (he had been active in the Peace Movement for many years) but, in retrospect, this is just one more weird piece of the jigsaw puzzle of Phil’s last decade.

After exploring basic questions about reality and illusion in his fiction for over 20 years, and then wondering for three years who had trashed his house and why, in 1974 Phil Dick had just about the most mind-blasting “mystical” experience to hit anybody in our times. Phil spent the rest of his life (he died, tragically, of a sudden stroke in 1982 at the age of only 53) trying to understand in some rational way this 1974 experience which was, in its intensity and content, no more rational than country that has a Statue of Liberty as its symbol and compulsory urine testing as its sacrament. Phil’s last and best novels are all attempts to make sense of the 1974 Epiphany at least in artistic terms; these mind-bending epics are Radio Free Albemuth, VALIS and The Divine Invasion.

Phil’s 1974 “illumination” (or whatever it was) began while he was under the influence of sodium pentothal, given by a dentist during an extraction. On returning home, Phil had a sudden flood of memories involving a past life in ancient Rome. Later, other memories about that “past life” came back to him repeatedly, in intervals between sleep and waking. Other visions involved seeming contact with extraterrestrials; seeming contact with another Philip K. Dick in a parallel universe where the United States of America did not exist and was replaced by the Portuguese States of America; seeming experiences of channeling in which Phil knew ancient languages he had never studied; and, at one point, a night-long and encyclopedic vision of the history of painting which seemed to be a part of a transmission from Russian parapsychologists to interstellar telepaths. Those are the highlights of the less crazy parts of the original experience.

Other parts Phil always found impossible to verbalize or conceptualize, but he was left with the strong intuition that a divine being of some sort, a new Buddha or Christ, was about to appear on this planet. This was reiterated in subsequent visions, less chaotic and more traditionally religious, that came to Phil in later years.

Those locked in a Fundamentalist Materialist reality-tunnel will, of course, say that Phil Dick simply went goofy. Phil himself seems to have entertained certain worries on that score, and only his robust and healthy sense of humor saved him from being terrified about what happened in 1974 and some of the strange after-tremors in later years. Besides, as a man who was both an original philosophical thinker and a creator of scientific romances, Phil was able to generate so many “explanations” of his altered states of consciousness that he never lapsed into believing any one explanation was necessarily the true and only explanation.

If at various times Phil Dick thought that perhaps he had undergone a temporary psychotic break, after all, he also thought, other times, that maybe he had telepathically contacted extraterrestrials, or had gotten caught in a PSI channel through which Russians and extraterrestrials are communicating (without notifying the rest of humanity). He also hypothesized that the megavitamins he was taking in 1974 might have “blown a hole” as it were in the corpus callosum, allowing vast amounts of non-verbal data from the holistic right hemisphere of his brain to pour into the analytical left hemisphere, which tried to make verbal maps of a Noah’s flood of visual/transpersonal information that does not lend itself to coherent verbal description. (I like this alternative in some ways. The first maps Phil made of his experience were the maps a science fiction writer would naturally use in trying to define the undefinable.)

An oddity of the extraterrestrial hypothesis is that Phil specifically made the ETs denizens of Sirius when he wrote the semi-fictionalized VALIS. Make of this what you will. Phil never identified his “guides” with Sirius in any of his conversations. Nonetheless, I was having experiences in 1973-74 which, at the time, I thought were telepathic communications from Sirius. (This “psychotic episode” or transcendental communion with Higher Intelligence is recounted in my book, Cosmic Trigger.) Later, one psychic reader told me I was actually channeling an ancient Chinese Taoist alchemist; but another psychic reader told me I was channeling a medieval Irish bard. Growing less bold in my theorizing as I get older, I now tend to think, most of the time, as Phil tried to think most of the time, that I was merely receiving signals from the right hemisphere of my own brain. I still wonder about Sirius occasionally, however.

It is interesting that, also in the 1970s, English mainstream writer Doris Lessing began writing science fiction novels about ETs from Sirius who are intervening on Earth to save us from a calamity of our own making. In the third of these novels, The Sirian Experiments, Ms. Lessing tells a tale that parallels Phil Dick’s experiences and my own in dozens of ways. When I met Ms. Lessing in 1983, she said she had never read anything by Mr. Dick or myself.

I guess we better file that under the Funny Coincidence department. I almost wish we could file it under the It Never Happened department.

I must emphasize that a great deal of the time, Phil Dick suspected that he had received a religious vision, and that his training in scientific and modernistic modes of thinking was blocking him from understanding fully the transcendental gnosis he had been granted. He was increasingly preoccupied with Gnostic Christianity in his last years.

Many of the themes of the 1974 Epiphany and of later visions have a Gnostic flavor but are also pregnant with numinous Jungian archetypes. The “head Apollo,” symbol of artistic intuition, was prominent in many of Phil’s visions. Various forms of female Messiahs appear in his fiction, as artistic analogs of this image. The cryptic but unforgettable mantra or koan, “The Buddha is in the park,” connected to both the new Messiah and the Head Apollo, came in a hypnogogic dream and later haunted Phil. The nonsensical and/or prophetic phrase “King Felix” — connected by synchronicities to Felix the Cat, the reborn messiah, and an odd printing alignment in one of Phil’s early novels — came to unify all opposites, like a Jungian archetype of reconciliation.

Personally, although I only met Phil a few times, I formed the strong opinion that he was as sane as most writers or poets, and saner than a great many I could name. Certainly he was never as grandiose or cranky as William Blake, or as pompous as Walt Whitman, nor seemed seriously unbalanced to his friends, like Christopher Smart did (to mention just three other writers who were granted trans-human visions).

When Phil died in 1982, much of the sci-fi world was engaged in debating whether his visions came from extraterrestrials or Russian mind-researchers or some kind of real “God” out there or just from “the collective unconscious” of Jung. Then things got really strange.

A letter Phil had written in 1981, circulated by him to about 70 friends, began to be reproduced and distributed in all sorts of places. In that letter Phil states that Jesus has been reborn and lives on the island of Sri Lanka. This religious proclamation is very hermetic, however, in that Phil also says Jesus is incarnated in the whole biosphere of Earth and then distances himself from the message of the letter by attributing the vision of the new Christ to Horselover Fat, a character in Phil’s novel, VALIS. (But then Horselover Fat clearly is Philip K. Dick, or part of him…)

While Phil Dick fans were trying to figure that one out, the post-mortem mysteries began. Rumors circulated all over the U.S. and Europe that Phil was not dead at all; some claimed that he had faked his death and gone into hiding, for unknown reasons. Some even insisted they had seen Phil — in Boston, in Amsterdam, in all sorts of odd places. About the only place he wasn’t reported was the men’s room in the Pentagon, but then, if he showed up there, those bastards would never tell us, would they?

The Philip K. Dick Society, a serious group of friends and fans of Phil’s, has investigated Phil’s death rather thoroughly, and there is no doubt that he is, medically at least, really dead. The people who claim to have seen him wandering about are either liars, or hallucinators, or are seeing his ghost. (Take your choice.)

Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection is largely a personal account of D. Scott Apel’s personal involvement with Phil and Phil’s mystical ambience. The first, and longest, part is an in-depth interview by Scott and Kevin Briggs in which Phil Dick discusses his Epiphany of 1974 with intelligent skepticism, good humor and flashes of brilliant wit; but, despite his lack of grandiosity and his willingness to consider all possible theories, Phil clearly indicates that he really suspects the experience was of crucial importance, not just to himself but, possibly, to the future of humanity. Some form of Higher Intelligence is trying to tell us something, using Phil as one of its channels — maybe. When you think he is about to accept the gnosis literally, Phil retreats again to agnosticism.

These pages are not only intellectually exciting but deeply moving; never before has a man with such a truly religious vision tried so hard to be intelligently skeptical and remember that the emotional depth of an experience is no proof of its objective validity. Nietzsche, who claimed the mystics were never honestly analytical and philosophical about what happened to them, would have had to admit that this criticism did not apply to Phil Dick.

This long, fascinating interview is followed by a hitherto unpublished story by Phil, “The Eye of the Sibyl.” Like Phil’s last novels, this is one more attempt to make an artistic analog of the transcendental visions he had experienced, and it is interesting both as science fiction and as a parable, similar to the teaching stories of the Sufis, in which suprarational matters are conveyed by indirection. A Priest of the Sibylline oracle in Rome is transported forward in time, becomes a little boy in Berkeley named Phil Dick, grows up to be a science fiction writer, and gradually remembers that he is actually an ancient Roman living in modern America. The conclusion indicates that extraterrestrials have caused this time-warp because America needs a science fiction writer who understands fully the doom that comes inevitably to imperialistic nations. In fact, the story is based on another of Phil’s visions, between sleep and waking, about his earlier life in ancient Rome.

In that vision of time-travel from Rome to America, Phil got a view of the extraterrestrials who were manipulating him. He says they looked like the ones described by Betty and Barney Hill in that famous UFO contactee case.

This means they also look like the little jokers who kidnapped Whitley Strieber, according to his recent book, Communion. Students of occultism are quite familiar with these mischievous midgets, because Aleister Crowley painted one of them over 50 years ago. Crowley called them “Enochian entities,” because he contacted them by using the “Enochian calls” – Cabalistic formulas (in no known language) which Crowley learned from the notes of 17th century sorcerer, Dr. John Dee. Jungians, no doubt, would say these dwarfs are archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Another short piece follows, “A Dream of Amerasia” by Ray Faraday Nelson, a gifted sci-fi writer who had once started to collaborate on a novel with Phil Dick, called Ring of Fire. Both got involved in other projects and that novel was never written. This essay describes a dream in which Phil’s ghost appeared to Mr. Nelson and encouraged him to sit down and write Ring of Fire. While this is less eldritch (as Lovecraft would say) than the reports of those who claim to have seen Phil’s ghost walking around in broad daylight, in this context it gives one pause, does it not? It is implied that Phil, from beyond the grave, will continue to act as collaborator. Ray says he is going to write that novel – which concerns an alternative universe in which Japan won World War II and occupies California. (Like the “Portuguese States of America” in Phil’s 1974 vision, such a world might be as real as our own, according to the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model which increasing numbers of young physicists now embrace.)

A much longer section, “The Dream Connection” by Scott Apel again, takes up in a sense where Ray Nelson leaves off. Like Ray, Scott encountered Phil’s ghost in a dream — but it did not just happen once in Scott’s case. It happened over and over again. Each dream was followed by one or more Jungian synchronicities, all of them weird enough to convince Fundamentalist Materialists that Scott is as mad as Phil was or else is a damned liar. Most of these synchronicities have a surrealist humor to them (especially the ones involving Disneyland) that reminds me powerfully of the novels and personality of Dick…

I know Scott Apel quite well and I am totally convinced he is not crazy and not a liar. In any case, such webs of dream-and-synchronicity are very common in certain groups; for instance, patients in Jungian therapy, acid-heads, students of yoga or Cabala, and artists and poets are particularly prone to this kind of experience. But even scientists have occasionally endured such spooky interminglings of dream and reality (Wolfgang Pauli, Nobel laureate in physics, is a notable case).

Scott Apel concludes that the evidence of his dreams and synchronicities, the analogous case of Ray Nelson’s dream-contact with Phil, and a few ambiguous seances in which Scott attempted to contact Phil Dick directly, all add up to a good argument for the survival of the individual consciousness after death. You can think what you want about that. The data remains fascinating whatever way you choose to interpret it.

One of the most suggestive anecdotes in The Dream Connection happened before Phil’s death, by the way. Phil had once told Scott of a dream in which he was told that he would be contacted by a certain woman who was an agent of an underground society of humans who are in communion with the extraterrestrials who are manipulating events on this planet to save us from catastrophe. Just before his death, Phil said he had finally received a letter from a woman who fit the description of the promised messenger from Higher Powers. Nobody has yet shed light on whether Phil met her or what happened if he did meet her. (In Radio Free Albemuth, the Phil Dick character does meet her, and then they are both killed by the Secret Police…)

Concluding matter in this anthology contains a letter about Phil’s philosophy by Theodore Sturgeon, a copy of Phil’s Gnostic epistle about Christ being alive in Sri Lanka, and an afterward by myself in which I give a Jungian and somewhat Buddhist interpretation to the events Scott prefers to interpret within the models of Christian Spiritualism. The metaphors may be a matter of taste. Those trained in shamanism would say that Phil Dick was a man of Power and his Power lingers in the world his body has left.

There are more books about Phil Dick coming out every few months, it seems. Few of them, so far, have shown as much insight and empathy as this anthology by Scott Apel. For a while at least, Scott’s book will be the definitive work on the science fiction writer who became as much of a mind-bender as his own most imaginative novels.

What are we to make of the case of Philip K. Dick? I have thought a lot about that since Phil first told me of his “out of body/out of mind” experiences at a sci-fi convention in 1977, and my comments in Scott’s book are not my final thoughts by any means. Somehow, I keep circling back to the allegory in VALIS — a variation on the theme we have already encountered in “The Eye of the Sibyl.”

In VALIS, the last 2000 years of history never happened. Certain evil forces, never quite defined, have placed us in deep hypnosis and we do not realize that we are actually still living in the Roman Empire. One man, Horselover Fat, discovers the truth, but his friends all think he is crazy and try to persuade him to be “cured.”

Yet, while these brainwashed subjects continue to hallucinate Richard Nixon and the CIA and moon-rockets and Bubble Gum Rock and so forth, Fat alone sees what is really happening: the Roman Empire survives, and slavery and madness and sadism survive as they always have. We are governed by Caligula and his kith and kin; the people of gnosis (the awakened) are being thrown to the lions every day. We do not see the mass murder going on, but retain dream-distorted images of part of the genocide: the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon…

Somehow I think all Phil’s theorizing about extraterrestrials and parallel universes were attempts to put into words the same urgent insight that Horselover Fat conveys by insisting, over and over, “The Empire never ended.”

Similarly, in Radio Free Albemuth the United States appears to have been taken over by an anti-Communist dictatorship, and all sorts of Communists or alleged Communists are being locked up in concentration camps. This sounds like a ghastly parody of the Joe McCarthy era, but then comes the typical Phil Dick switch. The dictatorship is actually run by the Communists and the persons exterminated are not Communists after all but Christians. Grok? The Empire never ended.

If I may offer my own exegesis: Phil’s visions are telling us that people who claim to be Christians (and especially the ones who claim to be anti-Communist) are not true Christians at all; the true Christians, or gnostics, have been driven underground and hide below the surface of our civilization, which is a Black Iron Prison to those who have awakened enough to see a bit of what is really going on. The last 2000 years have been a nightmare, and in a sense never happened. The Redeemer is alive, either in Sri Lanka, or in the whole ecosphere (Phil gave both versions in the same letter). This summary contains the parts of Phil Dick’s revelation that seemed most important to him. I think Phil’s vision is most important to all of us, whether we accept it literally or interpret it as an allegory.

Scott Apel has done a marvelous job of taking us to a Disneyland of the Illuminati, and Phil Dick’s spirit is indeed alive and brilliantly shining in this mind-boggling book.

The Semantics of “Good” & “Evil”

The Semantics of “Good” & “Evil”

by Robert Anton Wilson

from Critique: A Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics #28, 1988

The late Laurance Labadie once told me a parable about a king who decided that everytime he met somebody he would kick them in the butt, just to emphasize his power. My memory may have elaborated this yarn a bit over the years, but basically it continues as follows: since this maniac wore a crown and had an army, people soon learned to tolerate being kicked fairly often, and even began to accept it philosophically or stoically, as they accept taxation and other impositions of kings and governors. They even learned to bend over as soon as they saw the king coming.

Eventually, the king died and his successor naturally continued the tradition and kicked anybody he chanced to meet. Centuries passed, and, in the usual course of things, the nobility as a whole had demanded, and acquired, the same “right” as the king: any baron could kick anybody of lesser rank, and the knights could kick anybody except the barons or the royal family, etc. A large part of the population spent most of its waking hours facing a wall, crouched over, waiting for the next boot in the bottom.

The coming of democracy, in that amazing parallel universe, could only be understood according to the traditional thought-forms or acquired mental habits of the strange people there. Democracy therefore meant to those peculiar folks that anybody could kick anybody else as long as the kicker could prove that he (or she) had a bigger bank balance than the person receiving the boot in the rump. Within the context of the gloss or grid or reality-tunnel in that world, “democracy” could not have any other thinkable meaning. (See Berger and Luckman’s The Social Creation of Reality if this sounds fantastic to you.)

Of course, at first everybody rejoiced in the Constitution of the new democracy, for now “justice” (as they understood it) had been achieved: if you had good health and good luck, you could eventually accumulate enough money in a bank to have the “right” to kick as many people as had the “right” to kick you, and if you were especially shrewd or especially lucky, you could rise to the level where you could kick almost everybody and nobody whoso ever could kick you.

Of course, eventually Heretics appeared in that world, as in ours. These people wanted kicking abolished entirely, and they refused to admit that this constituted a “wild and radical idea.” They said it just seemed like “common sense” and “common decency” to them. Naturally, no sane, sound person would take such loonies seriously for a moment. In order to avoid thinking about the arguments of the Heretics, the sane, sound citizens developed a vocabulary to dehumanize and discredit them. Anybody who objected to being kicked regularly was called a “whiner,” a “malcontent,” a “coward,” a “queer,” a “gutless Liberal,” a “loser,” a “defective,” a “deviant,” a “nut,” a “bum” etc.

You see, the people in that world had been conditioned to believe that if you pinned such labels on Heretics, then it was not necessary to think about any of their arguments. (I will pass over in silence the creepy possibility that certain contributors to Critique seem to have arrived from that goofy alternative reality with their ideas of what constitutes reasonable debate unchanged during spatio-temporal transformation.)

Larry Labadie had his own point to make in creating that parable: as an anarchist, he believed the State Socialists were carrying over the worst features of Capitalism in their proposed Utopia. To me, however, the parable has a more general meaning, which I would state as follows: If people have lived with something every day of their lives, and especially if they know it has continued for many centuries, it becomes almost impossible to question it without sounding like some kind of pervert or eccentric, or, at best, like an intellectual wiseacre who can be suspected of just playing head-games or merely “toying with ideas.” At worst, the sane, sound domesticated people will decide you want to destroy the world or overthrow the deity or intend some atrocity equally drastic, and they will conspire to silence you.

To illustrate: after two centuries, most educated people can understand the philosophy of Deism as expounded by Voltaire. Historical research makes abundantly clear, however, that most of Voltaire’s contemporaries did not understand Deism at all; references to him as an “atheist” can be found continually, not just in writers with polemical intent, but also in many who evidently thought they were writing objective expository prose. It seemed impossible at that time for most persons to comprehend that denying the Christian God (Gc, for convenience) did not mean denying any and all possible Gods (Gx).

Midway between Voltaire’s time and our own, Theodore Roosevelt, in a celebrated speech, referred to Thomas Paine as a “dirty little atheist.” Contemporary accounts describe Paine as clean and tall, and his own writings express a Deist, not Atheist, philosophy. It seems that c. 1900 many still found it hard to recognize that between Christian Orthodoxy and Atheism many other possible philosophical positions — Aristotelian “excluded middles” — can be found by the independent enquiring mind. To proceed from philosophical kindergarten to graduate school in one step, consider this more advanced illustration: between 1900 and c. 1926, quantum physicists discovered that certain Aristotelian “laws of thought” simply do not apply to the sub-atomic level. Specifically, one cannot meaningfully speak of a sub-atomic “particle” as a thing-in-itself possessing indwelling “properties’ apart from the observer and the observerational apparatus. Worse: a sub-atomic “particle” cannot even be called a “particle” without the quotation marks, since it acts like a wave as often as it acts like a particle.

As I say, this sub-atomic non-Aristotelianism emerged from experiments and analysis in the first quarter of this century. The subsequent half a century has confirmed that the sub-atomic world acts in an even more non-Aristolelian fashion than appeared at first, and no attempt to hammer the data into an Aristotelian framework has succeeded.

What has emerged as the consequence of this? As Labadie’s parable of the alternative world indicates, the consequence seems to be that quantum mathematics not only seems weird to laypersons but even to the leading physicists themselves, who have trouble understanding each other. If a scientific system cannot be stated in Aristotelian terms, nobody in our society is quite sure how it *can* be stated. To return to our metaphor, quantum philosophers seem to be trying to think of a world without arse-kicking while their minds are subtly programmed by a world in which such arse-kicking remains a predominant feature.

Thus, the famous or infamous “Copenhagen Interpretation” of Neils Bohr and his students (c. 1926-28) seems to me to mean that we cannot talk meaningfully about any absolute Aristotelian “reality” apart from us, but only about the relative “realities” we existentially-experimentally encounter and/or measure — but that Interpretation of the Copenhagen Interpretation must be described as only the way it seems to me. According to Dr. Nick Herbert of UC-Santa Cruz, the Copenhagen Interpretation means that no such animal as “reality” can ever be found at all, at all. I do not mean to exaggerate: in _Quantum Reality_, Dr. Herbert actually states the Copenhagen view as “There is no deep reality.” But, then, he dislikes the Copenhagen view, and has called it “the Christian Science school of physics.” Prof. Mermin of Columbia, defending the Copenhagen Interpretation, does sound as radical as Dr. Herbert, attacking it; Mermin says bluntly that “the moon is demonstrably not there when nobody is looking at it.”

John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist, also actually writes bluntly that the Copenhagen view means “nothing is real” on one page of his book, In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat, but more restrainedly he says later that “‘reality’ in the everyday sense” appears not useful in physics. Nobel laureate Eugene Wiegner, meanwhile, says that the Copenhagen position proves that we create the manifestations we observe in a laboratory (by designing the experiments that produce those manifestations) and therefore cannot apprehend anything as itself but only as it appears to us. Or, rather, I *think* that describes what Wiegner says. Wiegner’s critics claim that he says we create “reality” by thinking about it, which makes the old man sound like he has overdosed on acid or too many Shirley MacLaine TV specials.

John von Neumann, meanwhile, suggested in 1933 that quantum systems should be mathematically considered as having three possible states (yes, no and maybe, in nonmathematical language) in contrast to the two states of Aristotelian logic (yes and no.) Prof. David Finkelstein still argues that this makes more sense than any other way of talking about the sub-atomic world, but the majority of physicists think von Neumann merely performed a mathematical “stunt” with no physical significance.

The dominance of kicking in the thoughts of Labadie’s alternative world, and of Aristotelian logic in our world, indicates the difficulty humans experience in trying to perceive, or communicate their perceptions, outside the grid or gloss of the conditioned reality-tunnel of their “tribe” or society.

For instance, we often hear, and perhaps ourselves say, “It is raining.” Such a sentence illustrates what Bertrand Russell called the domination of subject-predicate grammar over Western “thought” or philosophy (or perception?). “It” seems to appear in that sentence only because subject-predicate grammar demands a subject for the verb-form “is raining.” If you ask yourself what that mysterious “it” denotes, you will find the question rather puzzling (unless you believe in a primitive rain-god like Zeus or Jehovah . . .) The same subject-predicate structure underlies most pseudo-scientific thinking, such as that of Moliere’s physician who said opium makes one sleepy because it contains a “sleep-producing property.” Most folk-explanations of human behavior notoriously fall into this category – e.g. a woman does not work because she has a “laziness-producing demon” in her or “is” “lazy,” where a functional analysis would seek a crisper, less demonological explanation in a depressed economy, in nutritional or endocrine imbalances, or, most likely, in some syngergetic combination of social and internal dynamics.

In general, traditional Western thought, especially on the folklore level, posits indwelling Aristotelian “essences” (or spooks) to explain virtually everything, where science – and, curiously, Eastern philosophy  tend to find explanations in functional relationships described phenomenologically in terms of observed interactions. This may explain why science and Eastern philosophy appear equally absurd (or equally nefarious) to those raised in the traditional Western Christian reality-tunnel.

Specifically, we in our Western world have been conditioned and/or brainwashed by 2000 years of Christian metaphysics about “Good” and “Evil,” and to question that system of thought or reality-tunnel — or to offer a phenomenological alternative — creates a high probability (of about 99.97%, I estimate) that nobody will understand what one wishes to communicate. Nonetheless, I intend to take that risk here. I will experience great surprise and no small delight if any of the negative comments this elicits show any comprehension of my actual meanings.

To begin with, it seems to me that, as Nietzsche said, naive or intuitive concepts of “good” and “bad” have a different history than, and can otherwise be distinguished from, hypothetical indwelling spooks like “Good” and “Evil.” As probably used by our earliest ancestors, and as used by most people today, “good” and “bad” have the same meanings as they have for any other animals: “good” means “good for me” and “bad” means “bad for me.” Thus, a dog “knows” somehow that foul-smelling food should be considered “bad for me;” an educated human knows further that some sweet-smelling food may act “bad for me” also. All animals, including humans, “know” at birth, and continue to “know” — unless (in the case of humans) counter-conditioned or brainwashed — that hugging, cuddling, petting and oral and/or genital embrace definitely act upon the organism in ways “good for me.”

From this pre-metaphysical or phenomenological or operational point of view, I quite readily and easily identify many events or “things” in space-time that appear “good for me” (e.g. tasty food, freedom of the press, clever comedy, great painting, love-making, Beethoven, my word processor, money arriving regularly in large doses, certain drugs and vitamins, the above mentioned hugging-petting-fusion etc., etc.). I also observe easily many “things” or events in space-time that appear “bad for me” (e.g. Fundamentalist Christianity, Communism, Naziism, all other attempts to interfere with my liberty, toxic food, toxic waste, horror movies, certain drugs etc., etc.). I also observe that many things that seem “bad for me” seem “good” or harmless for others.

Continuing on this existential-phenomenological basis, it next appears to me that “good for me” and “bad for me” must be considered relative functions, in several senses. What appears “good for me” often appears “bad” for somebody else; or what appears “good for me” may sooner or later have consequences “bad for me;” or what appears “good for me” when age 20 may no longer appear “good for me” at age 50; and some recreations I judge “good for me” may later clearly appear “bad for me.” In general, “good for me” always remains relative to my knowledge or ignorance at the time I make the judgement, and I know from experience that I judge wrongly at times. (Notably, although hugging, cuddling etc. always appear “good for me,” the consequences of picking the wrong partner or the wrong time may clearly emerge later as unequivocally “bad for me.” This probably underlies most sexual superstitions, phobias and fixations.)

Some animals seem at times genetically programmed to recognize, some of the time, “good for my pack” or even “good for my species,” as documented in e.g. E. Wilson’s _Sociobiology_, Dawkin’s _The Selfish Gene_ and similar works. With or without such genetic programming as hidden agenda, many humans clearly show the capacity to think about, and aim for, that which appears “good for my species” or even (recently) “good for the biosphere as a whole.” Such judgements still remain relative to the general welfare of the judger, relative to location and history in space-time (what appears good for the foxes will probably appear bad for the chickens) and, even in the case of “good for the biosphere” relative to the knowledge or ignorance of the judger.

Before proceeding, I beg the reader to notice that if human semantics had remained on this primitive phenomenological level, and the relativity of judgement remained obvious to all, negotiation and compromise would perforce play a larger role in history than they have hitherto, and violent “crusades” and religious/ideological wars would have played a comparatively smaller role. It always appears possible to negotiate about what appears good and bad to us in concrete situations; but it becomes increasingly impossible to negotiate successfully when metaphysical “Good” and “Evil” enter the universe of discourse. The tendency becomes then to fight, and to fight as violently as possible, as the blood-curdling history of Christian dogmatism clearly shows, and as such secular religions as Naziism and Communism have proven again in our own century.

By comparison, the Confucian ethic remains phenomenological; Confucius explicitly said that his system “was not against human nature” and compared it to “loving a beautiful flower or hating a bad smell, also called “respecting one’s own nose.” Taoism and Buddhism differ from Confucius chiefly in greater awareness of the relativity of judgements (and the possibility of trans-ego perception or detached-from-ego perception); but neither contains anything like the Occidental metaphysical concept of “Good” and “Evil.” Indeed, some of the most famous passages in Taoist and Buddhist scripture hurl ridicule at any metaphysical notions of nonrelative “Good” and “Evil” — notions which apparently emerged occasionally in the Orient, among eccentrics, as Oriental pantheism occasionally appears in the Occident, among eccentrics.

Nietzsche, as most people know, believed that metaphysical “Good” and “Evil” not only contradict most intuitive organismic evaluations of “good for me” and “bad for me” but appear to have been devised with the intent of contradicting (and confusing) such naive or “natural” reactions. (Most priestly notions of sexual “Good” and “Evil,” notoriously contradict and confuse naive or natural organismic evaluations, for instance.) In other words, Nietzsche claimed that priests invented “Good” and “Evil” to obtain *power over others* — to persuade people not to trust their own evaluations; to place all trust, instead, on the priests themselves as alleged representatives of a hypothetical gaseous vertebrate of astronomical heft and mass called “God.” It appears to have been Nietzsche’ opinion that since this hypothetical gaseous vertebrate could not be located in normal sensory-sensual (existential) space-time, the priests, in effect, intended to teach people, “Don’t trust yourself; trust us” or, more bluntly still, “Don’t think; we’ll do the thinking for you.”

According to this analysis, political tyrants, who only control our bodies and actions, exhibit less raw “lust for power” than Popes or Ayatollahs or other priests who try to control our thoughts and judgements, i.e. to invade our inmost sanctuary. (See Nietzsche’s _Will to Power_ for an extensive analysis of this phenomenon.)

Whatever one thinks about this Nietzschean attempt to psychoanalyze the motives of the ancient priestcraft, it appears historically that the “Good” and “Evil” metaphysics, as distinguished again from simple organismic judgements of “good for me” and “bad for me,” has functioned to give power, and always more power, in horse doctor’s doses, to priests and preachers of all hues and persuasions. (It seems easy to think of a Buddhist or Taoist monk or Confucian gentleman-scholar as possibly living in isolation, but a Christian clergyperson, by definition, seems to be somebody who tells *other people* what to think and what to do., i.e. has *power* over then usually based on raw fear and threat, e.g. “You will go to Hell if you doubt me.”) After 2000 years of Christianity, most people accept being told what “is” “Good” and “Evil” by an alleged expert just as automatically as the people Labadie’s parable accepted being kicked.

Does history tend to justify Nietzsche’s view that this system of otherworldly metaphysics (interpreted by alleged experts on that alleged other world) leads to “degeneracy,” “decadence,” “sickness,” “neuroses,” “lunacy,” “epilepsy” etc.? Well, I don’t know about epilepsy (which now appears organic or genetic rather than sociological) but Nietzsche’s other terms all refer to the prevalence in Christian society of what he called “resentment” and “revenge” — envy or rage against those who live without Christian metaphysics, coupled with ferocious desire to punish or destroy such people. It seems impossible to real a page of St. Paul without encountering this kind of resentment-and-revenge compulsion almost immediately, and you can hear it on TV any night by turning the dial to the Fundamentalist channels in the high 40s, where the leading evangelists will usually be found fomenting hatred against non-Christians (when not tearfully confessing whatever personal sins or crimes have previously been unearthed and well-publicized by the pagan media). The Christian theologian, historically, seems a person intent on terrorizing others into doing what he wants them to do and thinking what he wants them to think, or killing them if they will not submit.

The animal, the child, the pre-literate society, the Confucian, the Buddhist, the Taoist, and most of the world live in reality-tunnels in which “good” and “bad” remain demarked by organismic evaluations of “good for me/good for my tribe” and “bad for me/bad for my tribe.” Only the Christian sects – and such secular religions as Naziism and Communism which may be considered, as the historian Toynbee considered them, late Christian heresies – contain the idea of absolute “Good” and “Evil” and the encitement to violence implied in such a concept.

It appears to me, then, that by “turning everything upside down” (Nietzsche’s phrase) – i.e. by denying organismic and relative evaluations of “good” and “bad” and replacing them with definitions of “Good” and “Evil” decided by some priestcraft or some Central Committee – we have strayed far from sanity and into the realm of fantasy and madness. Concretely, when I decide to class something as “good” or “bad,” I remember that I have done the classifying, and also that I have no overwhelming evidence of personal infallibity; I take responsibility for the judgement, in the Existentialist sense, and I remain open to learning, and to changing my mind, if new data indicates that I should revise my evaluation. But if I classify something as “Good” or “Evil” in the metaphysical sense, defined by some priesthood or Party Line, I do not “take responsibility,” I become virtually a ventriloquist’s dummy through which the priests or ideologists speak and act, and I abdicate all possibility or learning more or revising my mistakes. It does not seem terribly exaggerated when Nietzsche calls this “turning everything upside down” because in submitting to such an abstract system and denying my own perceptions, I have reversed evolution and “resigned” as it were from the human race. I could easily be replaced by a robot or servo-mechanism at that point. Humans generally do not behave like robots unless they have been indoctrinated with some metaphysical system like Christianity or its close relatives, Judaism and Islam, or its late heresies, Nazism and Communism.

If this essay can escape being regarded as intemperate polemic or wild exaggeration, I must explain in more detail the concrete functional difference between organismic “good” and “bad” evaluations — “respecting one’s own nose” in the Confucian sense – and metaphysical “Good” and “Evil.” Then my point will perhaps appear clear, even to those who most vehemently reject it.

I propose that the organismic, intuitive, primitive, “naive” evaluations of “good for me or my gene pool” and “bad for me or my gene pool” — even when condensed into the simpler “good” and “bad” – reflect our actual situation as bodies moving in space-time. Evolution has given surviving species an assortment of genetic programs that roughly inform each individual organism about “good for me” and “bad for me.” These genes do not appear infallible – as witness the dog who drank spilled paint because paint smells more like good food than like bad food. These genetic programs may tolerate modification by learning experience, in dogs, cats and other higher mammals, including some (non-dogmatic) human beings. Empirical learning itself may be modified by careful reasoning from inferences, etc. All of these (genetic programs, learning, reasoning) reflect an endeavor to gather the data for an accurate map of our position in space-time and of what profits or harms us or our tribe or species. On the other hand, the metaphysical doctrines of absolute “Good” and “Evil” do not reflect our trajectories as bodies in space-time in any respect. Metaphysics and its language structure reflect rather a fantasy-world or world-created-by-definitions which does not meaningfully refer to our concrete existential history in space-time at all. If this point appears as recondite or hermetic as the most inscrutable pages of Heidigger, I will try to make it more simple with the following two columns of examples.

I

II

The electron is a wave.

The electron appears as a wave when recorded by this instrument.

The first man stabbed the second man with a knife.

The first man appeared to stab the second man with what appeared to be to be a knife.

The car involved in the hit-and-run accident was a blue Ford.

In memory, I think I recall the car involved in the hit-and-run accident as a blue Ford.

This is a fascist idea.

This seems like a fascist idea to me.

Beethoven was better than Mozart.

I enjoy Beethoven more than Mozart.

This is a sexist movie.

This seems like a sexist movie to me.

The first column consists of statements in ordinary English, as heard in common usage at this primitive if of evolution. I believe this column contains the same structural implications as Aristotelian logic and the Christian metaphysics of “Good” and “Evil.” I also believe this column reflects a fantastic view of the world in which we assume ourselves not “personally” involved in the act of evaluation but paradoxically able to discern the spooky, indwelling “essences” of things.

The second column consists of parallel statements rewritten in E-prime, or English-prime, a language proposed for scientific usage by such authors as Alfred Korzybski, D. David Bourland and E.W. Kellogg III. E-prime contains much the same vocabulary as standard English but has been made isomorphic to quantum physics and modem science generally) by abolishing the Aristotelian “is” of identity and reformulating each statement phenomenologically in terms of signals received and interpreted by a body (or instrument) in space-time. In short, believe that E-prime contains the same structural impications as science, radical Buddhism (Zen, Mahayana) the naive evaluations of “good” and “bad” that seem natural to most people who have not been indoctrina Christianity or its totalitarian modern derivatives.

Concretely, “The electron is a wave” employs the Aristotelian “is” of identity and thereby introduces the false-to-experience notion that we can know the indwelling Aristotelian “essence” of the electron. “The electron appears as a wave when recorded with this instrument reformulates the English sentence into English-prime, abolishes the “is” of identity and returns us to an accurate report of what actually transpired in space-time, namely that the electron was constrained by a certain instrument to appear a certain way.

In English we talk blithely about things or entities that may or may not exist, and often about things that a never be proven to exist or to not exist; in E-prime we can only talk about what has actually been experienced and by what method it has been experienced. Aristotelian English encourages our tendency to wander off into worlds of fantasy; E-prime brings us back to concrete phenomenological recording of what we actually experienced in space-time.

Similarly, “The first man stabbed the second man with a knife,” even though lacking the formal “is” of identity appears Aristotelian English to me, because it assumes the non-involvement of the observer and of the observer’s nervous system. The proposed E-prime translation, “The first man emed to me to stab the second man with what seemed to be a knife,” scientifically includes the instrument (the speaker’s nervous system) in the report, recognizes phenomenology, and, incidentally, often happens to accord with brute fact. (This example refers to a well-known experiment in General Psychology, in which a banana in the first man’s hand performs the “stabbing” but most students, conditioned by Aristotelian habits, nonetheless “see” the knife they expect to see. This experiment dramatizes the fact that hallucinations can be created without hypnosis or drugs, merely by taking adantage of our habit of thinking we see “things” when we only see our brain’s images of things.)

“The car involved in the it-and-run accident was a blue Ford” again contains Aristotelian absolutism and ignores the instrument used — the brain. The E-prime translation reminds us that the brain often “remembers” incorrectly.

“This is a fascist idea” contains the Aristotelian “is” and asserts that the speaker has the mystic ability to discern the hidden “essence” within or behind phenomena. The E-prime translation reminds us that the speaker has actually performed an evaluative act in interpreting signals apprehended by his or her body moving in space-time.

“Beethoven is better than Mozart” contains the usual Aristotelian fantasy about indwelling spooks or essences. The E-prime translation, “I enjoy Beethoven more than Mozart” places us back in ordinary space-time where the speaker’s ears and brain can be recognized as the source of the evaluation, and we realize that the statement actually refers to said ears and brain and not to the two collections of music seemingly discussed.

“This is a sexist movie” (standard English) again assumes a fictitious uninvolved observer mystically perceiving inner essences, while “This seems like a sexist movie to me” (E-prime) returns us to Earth and ordinary face-time by including the existential fact that the observer has been involved in making the evaluation.

It has been claimed, by Korzybski, that the neurolinguistic habit of regularly using E-prime trains the brain to avoid common errors of perception, uncritical inferences, habitual prejudices, etc. and to show increased capacity for creative thought and greater enjoyment/involvement in life. This has not been proven, since few have taken the trouble systematically to retrain themselves in E-prime and they have not been exhaustively tested by psychologists. However, it remains my impression that those scientists and laypersons most apt to use “the spirit of E-prime” (if not always the exact letter) do exhibit the positive traits claimed by Korzybski, or at least exhibit these traits more than a random sample of the population.

On the other side, those most apt to use and over-use the “is” of identity, historically, make up the major part of the world’s long, tragic list of fanatics, paranoids, Crusaders, Inquisitors and Ideologists, and have responsibility for the bloodiest and most horrible atrocities recorded in human annals.

In summary, I suggest that existence never contained “Good” and “Evil” – or “inches” or “pounds” or “ergs of energy” or “degrees Fahrenheit” – until complicated primate brains (“human minds, “in more polite language) put them there as systems of classification. I suggest further that the “naive” view of “good for me or my clan” and “bad for me or my clan” contains all that can meaningfully be said about our actual experience in space-time, and that metaphysical “Good” and “Evil” speak fantastically of mythic realms beyond any possible verification or refutation in space-time.

I will scarcely find myself surprised if this article inspires heated and fervent rebuttals. I await such ripostes with equanimity. I do hope, however, that nobody raises the spectre of the old, hackneyed argument that without the metaphysical concept of absolute “Evil” we will lose our desire or will to protect ourselves against such monstrous gentry as Hitler, Stalin, Jack-the-Ripper, etc. Nobody but Ahab himself ever seems to have believed the whale was absolutely “Evil” (for biting off his leg while he was trying to kill it) and one does not have to regard tigers, polio microbes or other natural entities phenomenologically “bad for us” as also metaphysically and absolutely “Evil” in order to combat them. It does not take metaphysical dogma to fight the patently nefarious; it only takes quick wits in spotting the “bad for me” as soon as it appears on the horizon. Animals literally do this, and humans figuratively do it, by the method of Confucius: respecting one’s own nose.

Art as Black Magick and Moral Subversion

Critique 27
Art as Black Magick and Moral Subversion

by Heinrich von Hankopf

from Critique: A Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics #27, 1988

Bob Banner’s long review of David Tame’s The Secret Power of Music (Critique, Vol. VI, No. 1,2, Spring/Summer, 1986; #21/22) certainly goes a long way toward exposing the diabolical, sinister, unhallowed, un-Christian and un-American influences within Jazz and Rock, but I feel that all this merely scratches the surface of the Greatest Conspiracy of All Time – the revolutionary, socialistic, immoral, demonic, hellish, mind-corrupting, occult and Satanic influence of virtually all the so-called “art” of the world.

Mr. Tame points out that Rock derives from Jazz which possibly derives from voodoo, and that voodoo is certainly evil because some people who dislike Blacks have alleged that Voodoo involves animal and (sometimes) human sacrifice. This should, of course, immediately lead us to suspect equally sinister influences at work in the music of Mendelssohn and Mahler, who were both Jews, since some people who dislike Jews have alleged that the Jewish religion involves the sacrifice of humans — Christian infants, according to most of these sources – and certainly the Old Testament makes clear that animal sacrifice was once part of the Jewish religion. If you listen closely, the melodies of Mendelssohn and Mahler reek of eerie, eldritch and nameless influences, strongly suggestive of such blasphemous rituals.

In this unholy context, it is alarming to note the major reputation in the modern world of George Gershwin, who was not only Jewish but admittedly incorporated jazz techniques into his music, thereby invoking Papa Legba, Erzulie and the other terrible voodoo gods and goddesses that Mr. Tame warns us against–and quite possibly summoning Yahweh, the bloodthirsty monster in the Old Testament, as well.

(Incidentally, although Liberal Historians will argue that there is no credible evidence of human sacrifice by Voodooists and Jews, and animal sacrifice may be only part of their distant past – pace, Mr. Tame – there is no doubt at all that the Jews killed Christ. In 2000 years they have not yet produced a convincing alibi for this atrocity, and the obscene, drug-mad and subversive “sick comic” Lenny Bruce offered only the weak, and contradictory, excuses, “I am often asked why we killed Christ. What can I say? Maybe it was one of those wild parties that got out of hand. I don’t remember. Maybe we killed him because he wouldn’t become a doctor.”)

But there are worse depths to explore, as everybody knows by now, Mozart and Haydn were both Freemasons – and Nesta Webster, the Abbe Barruel, the United Methodist Church of Scotland and the majority of Conspiracy researchers of the past two hundred years all agree that Freemasonry is intimately allied to Zionism, atheism, secularism, scientism, humanism, skepticism, socialism and almost everything else conservatives dislike. (I also think I heard the Rev. Gene Scott – or was it the Rev. Pat Robertson? —read a pamphlet one night on TV proving Freemasons are the fiendish cabal who have taken cream out of our restaurants and replaced it with that sinister white powder that “coincidentally” resembles the hellish drug cocaine and always gets spilled when you try to open the microscopic plastic packets in which it is served.) In any event, the melodies of Haydn and Mozart reek of sensuality, and the Ninth Degree of Freemasonry justifies murder and treason, as every Conspiracy book for two centuries will tell you, and as Stephen Knight recently documented again in The Brotherhood.

Beethoven was not only a Freemason, too, like his libertine heroes Haydn and Mozart, but also closely allied with the most infamous of all Masonic orders, the monstrous Illuminati of Bavaria–a fact discussed at length in Maynard Solomon’s scholarly and objective biography, Beethoven. Solomon also shows that Beethoven’s first major work, The Emperor Joseph Cantata, was directly paid for by the Illuminati. This Satanic, subversive, diabolical, socialistic piece of music glorifies the Emperor Joseph von Hapsburg, whom it hails as “the foe of darkness and superstition,” because he closed the Christian schools of Austria and replaced them with modernistic secular humanist education–a sure sign of the most insidious kind of Illuminati conspiracy afoot, as the late Gary Alien will certainly agree. (The von Hapsburgs continue to plot mischief. Johann von Hapsburg financially supported the foul, noisome and probably Gnostic Priory of Sion conspiracy, as you can read in Holy Blood, Holy Grail; and the current scion of the family, Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, is a Bilderberger!!!)

Beethoven continued to associate with Freemasons and Illuminati throughout his Vienna years, and much of his music contains clearly Promethean and revolutionary (i.e. Satanic) impulses. Like the libertine (and foul-mouthed) Mozart, Ludwig patronized whores and probably died of syphilis.

Antonio Vivaldi, the hero of some naive musical conservatives–who recognize and deplore the anarchist tendencies of Romantics like Mozart and Beethoven — appears to present a pleasant surface, but there are erotic, cthonic, pantheistic and lascivious elements in some of his concerti if you listen closely, and it is known that he led a shameful life. Although a Catholic priest (which perhaps gave him access to holy wafers for Black Masses?), he had so many mistresses that the Church removed him from all priestly duties and banished him from Naples to Ireland, which was then so isolated that further news of his amours would not scandalize the Continent. Even now they say in Dun Laoghaire and Baile-atha-Claith that in Father Vivaldi’s day you couldn’t throw a brick over a wall without hitting one of his bastards.

Richard Wagner was not only a Freemason but was probably a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis (according to Aleister Crowley, who should know about that, being Outer Head of the O.T.O. himself.) A close study ofParcifal will clearly demonstrate that, as Crowley claimed, the whole opera is an adaptation of the ninth degree (Sex Magick) rite of the O.T.O. and the insertion of the lance into the cup has Tantric, erotic, prurient and Black Magick symbolism (just as Mozart’s Magic Flute is based on the blasphemous third degree of orthodox Freemasonry, which replaces Jesus by the Widow’s Son, Hiram, as the martyred savior). The cthonic, Cthuhoid Evil of Wagner’s works are indicated by the fact that Hitler said National Socialism was directly inspired by them–as confirmed by Adolfs close friend, August Kubizek, and Wagner’s widow, Cosima. Although some still quarrel over numbers, it seems evident that National Socialism practiced human sacrifice on a scale far beyond that attributed to Voodooists or Jews by even the most avid xenophobes, and the Nazi State even came close to the record genocides committed by the Christian churches.

After Wagner, all is chaos and the formless void, as I am sure Mr. Tame will agree. The atonalities of the Jew Mahler and the ambiguous Schoenberg; the barbarisms of the homosexual Tchiakovsky; the aleatorisms of Bartok or John Cage–the whole tendency of modem music bears the stamp that Mr. Tame has clearly recognized as socialistic, anarchistic, barbaric, Satanic and un-American. It all reminds one of the inhuman antedeluvian frenzies Lovecraft has so terrifyingly portrayed in “The Music of Erich Zann.”

The anthropologist William Irwin Thompson has said that Hard Rock represents “music played on the interface between noise and information.” Such has been the sick, decadent, socialistic tendency in much of our music since those damnably weird late string quartets of the Illuminatisymp Beethoven, but it is also the tendency of modem art in general – and, as I shall show, of art throughout history, although some artists are more clever at concealing their seductive, socialistic, un-American and hellish purposes than others have been.

The warped perspectives and unreal “psychedelic” colors of the Marxist and probably syphilitic Vincent Van Gogh are a clear illustration that decadence is not confined to music. This demoniac Dutchman also poisoned his brain with absinthe, a drink now illegal because it acts like a hallucinogenic drug in the LSD family. Even Hitler, steeped in occultism, found Van Gogh decadent and ordered his paintings banned, saying in warning to those who might imitate such unwholesomeness, “Anybody who paints the sky green shall be sterilized at once.” It is also noteworthy that Van Gogh was expelled from the clergy for his socialist and subversive acts–he once gave his bed away to a poor family who owned none–and, like the fiendish musicians we have been discussing, he often consorted with whores.

Paul Gaugin heartlessly deserted his wife and family, went to live with nonwhite savages (whom he preferred to white civilized men and women) and painted, like his friend Van Gogh, in a suspiciously psychedelic style. Cezanne was wilder still, and some contemporary critics claimed that he must have had an eye disease, just as Beethoven’s deafness may explain the unholy, kakadaemoniac barbarism of his later music. (But all who received their sex education in a good Christian school know what causes blindness and deafness. Ludwig was a lifelong bachelor.)

The Dadaists produced accidental art by combining elements at random; Tristan Tzara even produced “poems” by picking words out of a hat while blindfolded. This is non-Aristotelian, certainly, and therefore, like modernism in general, un-American. Picasso was an openly avowed Communist and, although there is no clear evidence of overt membership in the BILDERBERGERS, the number of his mistresses and concubines undoubtedly surpasses that of King Solomon, Aleister Crowley or even George Washington. Like Van Gogh, Gaugin and the whole “modernist” movement, and like Jazz and Rock, Picasso’s art definitely “plays on the interface between noise and information.” He actually painted a Jazz band once, and he said, in defense of decadence, “One must run faster than beauty, even if it appears one is running away from it.” He even deliberately imitated the primitive art of Africa instead of the art of nice white people, and if Mr. Tame looks closely I am sure he will see Voodoo symbolism in some of Pablo’s Cubist renditions of tortured bulls and sexually frenzied women. Evil is everywhere, for those whose eyes are open and ready to see it.

Jean Cocteau, 23rd Grand Master of the ill-famed Priory of Sion, was homosexual and his paintings, poetry and films are as non-linear, non-Aristotelian and therefore barbaric as the works of his friend Picasso. Cocteau said specifically that “To be an artist is to be a suspicious character” and “The true artist is always a revolutionary.” He helped launch Surrealism, with all its barefaced celebration of erotic, African, primitive, irrational and overtly Communist elements. Andre Breton revealed the anarchistic and sociopathic impulses behind Surrealism blatantly, hanging a lurid sign in the gallery that inflicted the first exhibit of Surrealist art on the unsuspecting and previously sane and decent public; the sign, seemingly humorous, gave a clear warning of what was to come. It said:

DADA IS NOT DEAD!

WATCH YOUR OVERCOAT!

Salvador Dali differed from the other Surrealists only in preferring Hitler to Communism, and once offered the typically Surrealist rationalization, “Hitler has three balls and four foreskins.” Dali also said, “The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad” and insulted us with such degenerate un-American paintings as the Cthulhoid, monstrous, unspeakable Debris of an Automobile Giving Birth to a Blind Horse Biting a Telephone and the vile, vulgar, lewd and infamous Great Masturbator. (Although not a lifelong bachelor like Beethoven, Dali has lived in so-called “celibacy” since the death of his wife.) Worse yet: he once gave a lecture inside a diving suit, making it impossible for the audience to hear him.

Nor is any of this a peculiarly modern development. Mark Twain once pointed out (in “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism”) that the very term Old Masters “is a contraction, an abbreviation.” Raphael painted so many voluptuous nude females that Sir Henry Merivale called his paintings “fit furnishings for a brothel” and the Dublin critic, de Selby, has said “The man must have had one hand on the paintbrush and the other on his Willy,” it would be no exaggeration to call him the Playboy Centerfold artist of his day. Why the Feminists and the Moral Majority are not crusading to have his paintings burned is a mystery to me. Renoir was even worse; even the libertine Gaugin said, “This man paints with his penis.”

Michelangelo, another of the endless list of homosexuals and therefore un-American artists, painted and sculpted many raunchy male nudes with the same lubricity Raphael leeringly depicted in his lurid renditions of naked women. The same sodomistic Michelange1o physically assaulted the Pope when His Holiness objected to the obscenities and blasphemies on the celling of the Cistine Chapel, which still embarrass church authorities today. Leonardo was such a raving queen that mothers hid their boy children in the cellars when they heard he was in town; the second Christ in his egregious The Last Supper clearly indicates that he was privy to the secret Gnostic teaching about Jesus’s twin brother and lends weight to the claim that, like Cocteau, he was a Grand Master of the abhorred and loathesome Priory of Sion. The life of the whoremonger Fra Filippo Lippi is memorialized in Browning’s scandalous poem of that name.

In fact, the eminent critic George Jean Nathan, in & celebrated essay, “Art as a Corruptor of Morals,” argued seriously that it was impossible to find a major artist anywhere in history who was not a rascal or scoundrel of some sort. The record of the poets and novelists, is particularly shocking to decent, God-fearing Americans. Sappho was a lesbian. Homer must have led a secret life because nothing is known about him, leaving us to wonder what enornities he took such care to hide – Catullus and Propertius show overt signs of sado-masochism (as do, more recently, Swinburne, almost all English novelists and, of course, de Sade and Masoch.) Ovid wrote bawdy and indecent verse, lived an un-Christian life, and was exiled for gross indecency. Dante imported drugs to Italy for money, had an erotic obsession with a little girl younger than Lolita, and was  exiled for political conspiracy. Villon was a whoremaster and thief. Malory of the Morte d’Arthur was jailed for robbery and rape.

Shakespeare’s first child was born only six months after the wedding and his love poems are not written to his legally wedded wife at all–but some to a promiscuous Negress and some to a Gay Boy seemingly named Willy Hughes, perhaps because of the size of his virile member. Swift, although a clergyman, had two or three mistresses, was rumored to be an atheist, wrote treasonable pamphlets under various pen-names, and authored several works so vile that unexpurgated editions are seldom encountered; one of his “poems” has the perverse refrain, “But Celia, Celia, Celia shits.” Defoe was a spy, a thief and a blackmailer. Lewis Carroll shared Dante’s preference for little girls rather than grown women and perverted his mathematical treatise on symbolic logic by including weird, Surrealist, mind-corrupting pseudo-proofs that lead to such conclusions as “some dowagers are thistles.”(A few commentators have wondered, as we all should, about the hookah or hashish pipe in Alice in Wonderland and the magic mushrooms that also appear.)

Baudelaire, Gautier and Flaubert all smoked hashish (as Mark Twain also did, at the instigation of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, who seems to have also seduced Robert Louis Stevenson into this vile habit, while the latter was in San Francisco.) It is no surprise that Baudelaire and Flaubert both had mistresses, and that both were prosecuted for gross indecency. Some of Twain’s drug-warped works were so vile that his wife persuaded him not to publish them, and others were so blasphemous and indecent that they were withheld from print by his family for over 70 years. Melville and Whitman were both bisexual, with a strange passion for sailors, and Poe was a drunkard and drug-abuser. Wilde was another bisexual and in the poem “To Liberty” and the essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” bluntly advocates anarchist and pacifist principles. Yeats, who managed to be an anarchist and a fascist at the same time, belonged to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the same Black Magick society that spawned the infamous Aleister Crowley. Yeats wrote one poem, “Easter 1916,” glorifying socialist revolutionaries and another, “The Second Coming,” prophesying a “rough beast” (Crowley?) who will replace Christ in the New Aeon. In addition to his membership in the diabolical Golden Dawn, Yeats also joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, direct ancestor of the terroristic Irish Republican Army of today. Joyce admired Wilde, was also an anarchist and lived in sin with a peasant girl for 27 years before he finally grudgingly married her (only to ensure that his bastard children would receive the royalties to his books after his death). Like Yeats, Joyce was once associated with the Theosophical Society, founded by the hashish-fiend Blavatsky, who despised Christian orthodoxy and espoused ecumenicism and World Government. Ezra Pound, a friend of both Yeats and Joyce, was a fascist and lived in a menage a trois with a wife and a mistress; he collected books on magick and shows an unwholesome sympathy for Gnostic immanentalism. The influence of the non-linear, relativistic, non-Aristotelian and therefore un-American experiments in prose and poetry by these two arch-conspirators, Joyce and Pound–who blatantly promoted each other’s works and sneeringly satirized the simple and decent literature of more wholesome minds–has been poisonous and omnipresent ever since. Joyce and Pound can be found as major influences in the poetry of the Jewish homosexual Jazz fan Alien Ginsberg, the New Deal “liberal” Charles Olson, the Black Revolutionary Leroi Jones &c and in the prose of the homosexual Punk Rock fan and drug addict William S. Burroughs, as well as in the brutal Hemingway, the decadent Beckett, the socialistic Steinbeck, the alcoholics Faulkner and Fitzgerald etc.

The record grows increasingly tedious and distressing. Like George Jean Nathan in “Art as a Corruptor of Morals,” I will not examine the shocking careers of the actors and opera singers at all, but merely refer you to the police records, wink knowingly, and pass on. The simple fact is that artists as a group tend to be totally unacceptable in polite society, unruly and un-Christian in behavior, and look at things from weird personal angles that seldom have anything in common with the views of decent, ordinary people. If I may risk a Joyceism, most people are like Mr. Tame, quite tame, but most artists are like Mr. Wilde, quite wild.

This brings us back to Dr. Thompson’s remark about “the interface between noise and information.” I am sure that Thompson was using the terms in their technical sense in mathematical communication theory. Noise, in this theory, is chaotic, erisian, stochastic; information is structured, orderly and “harmonious.” It is immediately clear that the wild will always prefer noise and the tame will always prefer information; but there is a paradox here. Shannon, the creator of mathematical information theory, demonstrated that if a signal is too “rich” in information, it will *appear at first* to be noise. The conventional mind, it appears, requires redundance to identify information, and suspects noise where the amount of new information (creativity) is inordinately high.

But where ordinary domesticated humans fear the noisy and chaotic, the artist is always attracted to them, suspecting that they may contain hidden information which only appears “noisy” because it is “a shocking revaluation of all we ever been” in Eliot’s phrase. This is why Nietzsche defined art as a synergy of Apollonian and Dionysian elements–that is, of rational order and irrational exhuberance, or of the “classical” and the “romantic”–in short, of the interplay of noise and information, the familiar and the unfamiliar, valuation and revaluation. As Pound said somewhere, what the public loves, because it is familiar, is precisely what the creative artist is bored with now. However, popular and seemingly ordinary books or paintings, adored by the public and boring to the creative minority, were or appeared chaotic and noisy when they were first produced. Yesterday’s Dionysian rebel is today’s Apollonian norm, and today’s erisian chaos is tomorrow’s boring cliché.

In this dialectic of noise and information, the artist is always trying to seduce the public away from its habitual perceptions into new and startling states of awareness. Burroughs, the greatest and therefore the most sinister of modern writers, has stated the case with brutal frankness: “Whomever makes a strong impression on you is a vampire and will possess you.”

Mr. Tame’s fear of certain kinds of music is only one example of the public’s general fear of artistic anarchy and creativity. The artist-vampires are always trying to lure straight, square citizens into coming away from their familiar reality-windows to look through new and startling windows that show a strange and bizarre new world. This is why Kenneth Burke declared all art to be “perspective by incongruity,” the symbolic equivalent of an electrical shock or a psychedelic drug. It is for this reason that every State, every Church and every conservative philosopher from Plato onward has feared novelty and originality in art, and has tried to control it with the strictest possible censorship. For those who wish a totally Apollonian world, with all the fecund and “dangerous” Dionysian elements buried in that part of the unconscious which Jung called the Shadow, this is the sound policy and the safe politics. (Only those who share the scientistic Jungian-Freudian view that the Repressed always returns explosively, can challenge this.)

In short, art like science is innately revolutionary and unwholesome. A new breakthrough in art, like a new scientific theory or a new technology, always transforms the world in dangerous and unpredictable new directions. This is sufficient reason for all sane, sound, domesticated people to fear and loathe the artistic personality. Those courageous conservatives who dare to declare their opposition to scientism should now be brave enough to recognize this fact and take a firm, uncompromising stance against artism also.

Ten years ago in Berkeley, California, an old woman died. Her landlord, whom I knew, had to enter the home after the police had removed the body, to check up on how much cleaning and refurbishing would be needed before he could place the house on the market again. He had heard from neighbors that the woman never was seen to go out, but he was not prepared for what he found. There were no electric lights; when bulbs burned out, the woman had not replaced them. The accumulated clutter and trash of at least 15 to 18 years was everywhere. All shades were drawn and all shutters closed. The woman had lived for perhaps two decades in the urban equivalent of a cave.

I think I understand that old woman. She had created her own reality-tunnel and she had hermetically sealed it so that no alien signals could penetrate her shields. She was safe from the “vampires” who might make an impression on her. The great conspiracy in mind-manipulation and consciousness expansion which is art, and the thousand and one other conspiracies old women worry about, could not get through to her. She was alone. She was safe. She was self-enclosed.

I suggest that Mr. Tame and certain other contributors to CRITIQUE should seriously consider this old woman’s example. Nobody knows how many metaphysical conspiracies are afoot in the world, how many mind-manipulators are out to get us, how terrifying the world is when you consider that Satan is not only subtle, insidious and tireless, but also very often quite plausible, according to some of the best-known passages in Holy Writ. Perhaps the safest course is to follow the old woman’s path of isolation, create our own caves, and hide out until we are ready to die.

(this article posted across usenet by Dan Clore)

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Letters to the Editor from Critique: A Journal Questioning Consensus Reality, #28
Dear Editor,

I really enjoyed CRITIQUE #27 like every issue before. I appreciate the new size and the improving layout. I had some good laughs reading Heinrich Von Hanfknopf’s review of your review of David Tame’s SECRET POWER OF MUSIC. By the way, HANFKOPF is a rather unusual German name. HANF is the German expression for the now illegal substance you can use for making paper, cloth or joints. KOPF just means head. Is it much far away to suspect Mr. R.A. Wilson exploring covertly the boredom of Mr. Tame’s Correct Answer Machine? Anyway, I always enjoy Mr. Wilson’s witty pieces. Though I still presume that Timothy Leary was in the beginning a tool of the Russel-Wells-Huxley network, introducing drug use on mass-scale not for liberation but for mind control. Mr. Wilson’s scribbling always gives me a fresh look on things and prevented me even sometimes from falling into the fundamentalist trap. Thanks for that. In the case of drugs I prefer the view presented by Phillip K. Dick in A SCANNER DARKLY. This book was really a breakthrough for me. Having seen so many zombies myself (sometimes by looking into the mirror), having experienced so many drug-induced coercive behavior patterns (I call it the Woodstock/Altamont Syndrome), I came to the conclusion that in certain societies drug use is indeed harmful to the majority of users, plunging them into self-destructive or just stupid reality tunnels instead of freeing them. Reading A SCANNER DARKLY I found out that seeing the dark side of it doesn’t mean you have to lose your humor and forget about the goodness (the divine spark) of the people involved. However, with the coming of the mind machines we will hopefully find a way to deal properly with the two sides of our brain.

A last word: Please Mr. Editor, stay on the edge, don’t read HEIDI.

Thomas Fink

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Dear Editor:

My elation felt over the new shape of “Critique” Journal was shortened by finding in it the deplorable article by “Hanfkopf” “Art as Black Magick.” Well, what can you expect from a “Hanf-” (cannabis, hemp, hashish, marijuana) “-kopf (head), an “acid head” plain and simple. If you want to know about Louisiana Medical Marijuana Doctors and the effects of medical marijuana, you can check it out here!

I am quite certain that this cannabis freak is unable to produce one work of art apart from looking for recreational marijuana near me, be it music or painting or sculpting. Yet he scandalizes great artists in a way that has nothing to do with critique–it is just slander. Why are you dirtying your magazine with such?

Especially outrageous I find on p. 54: “…evident that National Socialism practiced human sacrifice on a scale far beyond that attributed to Voodooists or Jews–and the Nazi State even came close to the record genocides committed by the Christian Churches.”

You as the editor had the power to cut out this incredible piece of insane calumny. You must know better that during the NS time in Germany such crimes as “genocide” (planned extermination of humans) did not occur. And that “human sacrifice” idiotic charge would offend the last aboriginal tribe somewhere in darkest never-neverland. Against Germans anything goes, right? There is no need for probity and accuracy? Just mouth anything that comes to poisonous minds–the calumnies come thick and fast against Germans since 74 years now, beginning with the Belgian children’s hands chopped off by the Kaiser’s soldiers, we have had nearly everything that can possibly be thought up by professional liars and “Hemp Freaks.” Voodooism, human sacrifice, this halfwit “Hanfkopf” even draws composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) into the slime: You print it.

No, my friend, things in “Nazi” time were absolutely different, and I know because I was there, born 1914. And Germans can walk proud. In the name of all Germans–I am offended, Mr. Banner. Our patience is worn out. We now strike back with the truth, against vilification.

Oscar W. Grussendorf

Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective

Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective

by Robert Anton Wilson

 from Critique: A Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics #27, in 1988
reprinted in Email to the Universe

Our esteemed editor, Bob Banner, has invited me to contribute an article on whether my politics are “left” or “right,” evidently because some flatlanders insist on classifying me as Leftist and others, equally Euclidean, argue that I am obviously some variety of Rightist.

Naturally, this debate intrigues me. The Poet prayed that some power would the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us; but every published writer has that dubious privilege. I have been called a “sexist” (by Arlene Meyers) and a “male feminist . . . a simpering pussy-whipped wimp” (by L.A. Rollins), “one of the major thinkers of the modern age” (by Barbara Marx Hubbard) and “stupid” (by Andrea Chaflin Antonoff), a “genius” (by SOUNDS, London) and “mentally deranged” (by Charles Platt), a “mystic” and “charlatan” (by the Bay Area Skeptics) and a “materialist” (by an anonymous gent in Seattle who also hit me with a pie); one of my books has even been called “the most scientific of all science-fiction novels” (by New Scientist physics editor John Gribbon) and “ranting and raving” (by Neal Wilgus). I am also frequently called a “Satanist” in some amusing, illiterate and usually anonymous crank letters from Protestant Fundamentalists.

I can only conclude that I am indeed like a visitor from non-Euclidean dimensions whose outlines are perplexing to the Euclidean inhabitants of various dogmatic Flatlands. Or else, Lichtenstein was right when he said a book “is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no philosopher looks out.” Of course, we are living in curved space (as noted by Einstein); that should warn us that Euclidean metaphors are always misleading. Science has also discovered that the Universe can count above two, which should make us leery of either/or choices. There are eight – count ’em, eight – theories or models in quantum mechanics, all of which use the same equations but have radically different philosophical meanings; physicists have accepted the multi-model approach (or “model agnosticism”) for over 60 years now. In modern mathematics and logic, in addition to the two-valued (yes/no) logic of Aristotle and Boole, there are several three-valued logics (e.g. the yes, no and maybe Quantum Logic of von Neumann; the yes, no and po of psychologist Edward de Bono; etc.), at least one four-valued logic (the true, false, indeterminate and meaningless of Rapoport), and an infinite-valued logic (Korzybski). I myself have presented a multi-valued logic in my neuroscience seminars; the bare bones of this system will be found in my book, The New Inquisition. Two-valued Euclidean choices – left or right of an imaginary line – do not seem very “real” to me, in comparison to the versatility of modem science and mathematics.

Actually, it was once easy to classify me in simple Euclidean topology. To paraphrase a recent article by the brilliant Michael Hoy [Critique #19/ 20], I had a Correct Answer Machine installed in my brain when I was quite young. It was a right-wing Correct Answer Machine in general and Roman Catholic in particular. It was installed by nuns who were very good at creating such machines and implanting them in helpless children. By the time I got out of grammar school, in 1945,1 had the Correct Answer for everything, and it was the Correct Answer that you will nowadays still hear from, say, William Buckley, Jr.

When I moved on to Brooklyn Technical High School, I encountered many bright, likeable kids who were not Catholics and not at all right-wing in any respect. They naturally angered me at first. (That is the function of Correct Answer Machines: to make you have an adrenaline rush, instead of a new thought, when confronted with different opinions.) But these bright, non-Catholic kids – Protestants, Jews, agnostics, even atheists – fascinated me in some ways. The result was that I started reading all the authors the nuns had warned me against–especially Darwin, Tom Paine, Ingersoll, Mencken and Nietzsche.

I found myself floating in a void of incertitude, a sensation that was unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable. I retreated back to robotism by electing to install a new Correct Answer Machine in my brain. This happened to be a Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine, provided by the International Socialist Youth Party. I picked this Machine, I think, because the alternative Correct Answer Machines then available were less “Papist” (authoritarian) and therefore less comfortable to my adolescent mind, still bent out of shape by the good nuns.

(Why was I immune to Stalinism – an equally Papist secular religion? I think the answer was my youth. The only Stalinists left in the U.S. by the late ’40s were all middle-aged and “crystalized” as Gurdjieff would say. Those of us who were younger could clearly see that Stalinism was not much different from Hitlerism. The Trotskyist alternative allowed me to feel “radical” and modern, without becoming an idiot by denying the totalitarianism of the USSR, and it let me have a martyred redeemer again a I had in my Catholic childhood.)

After about a year, the Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine began to seem a nuisance. I started to suspect that the Trotskyists were some secular clone of the Vatican, whether they knew it or not, and that the dogma of Papal infallibility was no whit more absurd than the Trotskyist submission to the Central Committee. I decided that I had left one dogmatic Church and joined another. I even suspected that if Trotsky had managed to hold on to power, he might have been as dictatorial as Stalin.

Actually, what irritated me most about the Trots (and now seems most amusing) is that I already had some tendency toward individualism, or crankiness, or Heresy; I sometimes disputed the Party Line. This always resulted in my being denounced for “bourgeoisie tendencies.” That was irritating then and amusing now because I was actually the only member of that Trot cell who did not come from a middle-class background. I came from a working class family and was the only genuine “proletarian” in the whole Marxist kaffeklatch.

At the age of 18, then, I returned to the void of incertitude. It began to seem almost comfortable there, and I began to rejoice in my agnosticism. It made me feel superior to the dogmatists of all types, and adolescents love to feel superior to everybody (especially their parents – or have you noticed that?). Around the same time as my Trotskyist period, I began to read the first Revisionist historians, whom I had been warned about by my high school social science teachers, in grave and awful tones, as if these men had killed a cat in the sacristy. My teachers were too Liberal to tell me I would go to Hell for reading such books (as the nuns had told me about Darwin, for instance), but they made it clear that the Revisionists were Evil, Awful, Unspeakable and probably some form of Pawns of the Devil.

I recognized the technique of thought control again, so I read all the Revisionists I could find. They convinced me that the New Deal Liberals had deliberately lied and manipulated the U.S. into World War II and were still lying about what they did after the war was over. (In fact, they are still lying about it today.)

The Revisionist who impressed me most was Harry Elmer Barnes, a classic Liberal who was a til of a Marxist (in methodology) – i.e., in his way of looking for economic factors behind political actions. I was amused and disgusted by the attempt of the New Deal gang to smear Professor Barnes as a right-wing reactionary. Barnes, in fact, was an advocate of progressive ideas in education, economics, politics, criminology, sociology and anthropology all his life but the New Deal Party Line had smeared him so thoroughly that some people have heard of him only as some cranky critic of Roosevelt and assume he was a Taft Republican or even a pro-Nazi. In fact Barnes supported most of the New Deal’s domest policies, and dissented from Liberal Dogma only in opposing the spread of American adventurism and militarism all over the world.

Charles Beard, another great historian of classic Liberal principles, agreed that Roosevelt deliberately lied to us in World War II and was smeared in the same way as Professor Barnes. This did not encourage me to have Faith in any Party Line, even if it called itself the modern, liberal, enlightened Party Line.

(I have never been convinced by the Holocaust Revisionists, however, simply because I have met a great many Holocaust eyewitnesses, or alleged eyewitnesses, in the past 40 years. Most of these people I seemingly met by accident, in both Europe and America. A conspiracy that has that many liars planted in that many places–or has always paid such special attention to me that it placed these liars where I would meet them – is a conspiracy too omnipotent and omnipresent, and therefore too metaphysical, for me to take seriously. A conspiracy so Godlike in its powers could, in principle, deceive us about anything and everything, and I wonder why the Holocaust Revisionists still believe that World War II occurred, or that any of past history ever happened.)

I reached 20 and became an employee (i.e. a robot) in the McCarthy Era and the Eisenhower years; my agnosticism became more total and so did my suspicion that politics is a carnival or buncombe (as Mencken once said). It seemed obvious to me that, while Senator Joe was a liar of stellar magnitude, a lot of the Liberals were lying their heads off, too, in attempts to hide their previous fondness for Stalinism. That was something I, as a former Trotskyist, knew about by experience. In bon ton East Coast intellectual circles, before McCarthy, Stalinism was much more “permissible” than Trotskyism; it was almost chic. If I still regard the McCarthy witch-hunt of the 1950s as abominable, I also remember that some of the victims had engaged in similar witch-hunts against the Trotskyists in the early 1940s.

It is probably impossible for a social mammal to be totally “apolitical.” Even if I was allergic to Correct Answer Machines, my mind kept searching for some general social ideas that I could take more or less seriously. For a while I dropped in and out of colleges and in and out of jobs and searched earnestly for some pragmatic mock-up of “truth” without a Correct Answer Machine attached. And yet both Left and Right continued to appear intellectually bankrupt to me.

*     *     *     *

Coming from a working class family, I could never have much sympathy for the kind of Conservatism you find in America in this century. (I do have a certain fondness for the classic Liberal Conservatives of the 18th Century, especially Edmund Burke and John Adams.) After I married and had children to support, the abominations of the Capitalist system and the wormlike ignominy of the employee role began to seem like prisons to me; I was a poor candidate for the Conservative cause. On the other hand, the FDR Liberals, I was convinced, had lied about World War II; they first smeared and then blacklisted the historians who told the truth; and they had jumped on the Cold War bandwagon with ghoulish glees.

I was anti-war by “temperament” (whatever that means – early imprints or conditioning? Genes? I don’t know the exact cause of such a deep-seated and life-long bias). Marxist dogma seemed as stupid to me as Catholic dogma and as murderous as Hitlerism. I now thought of myself as an agnostic on principle. I was not going to join any more “churches” or submit to anybody’s damned Party Line.

My agnosticism was also intensified by such influences as further reading of Nietzsche; existentialism; phenomenolgy; General Semantics; and operational logic. There have remained major influences on me and I want to say a few words about each.

Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Superman did not turn me on in youth; coming from the proletarian, I could not see myself as one of his aristocratic Uebermenschen. On the other hand, his criticism of language, and of the metaphysical implications within languages, made a powerful impression on me; I still re-read one or two of his books every year, and get new semantic insights of them. He is, as he bragged, a hard nut to digest all at once.

Existentialism did not convert me back to Marxism (as it did to Sartre); it merely magnified my Nietzschean distrust of capitalized nouns and other abstractions, and strengthened my preferences for sensory-sensual (“existential”) – modes of perception-conception. The phenomenologists—especially Husserl and the wild man of the bunch, Charles Fort – encouraged my tendency to suspect all general theories (religious, philosophical, even scientific) and to regard human sense experience as the primary datum.

My polemics against Materialist Fundamentalism in The New Inquisition and the Aristotelian mystique of “natural law” (shared by Thomists and some Libertarians) in my Natural Law; or, Don’t Put a Rubber On Your Willy are both based on this existentialist-phenomenologist choice that I will “believe” in human experience, with all its muddle and uncertainty, more than I will ever “believe” in capitalized Abstractions and “general principles.”

General Semantics, as formulated by Korzybski, increased this anti-metaphysical bias in me. Korzybski also stressed that the best sensory data (as revealed by instruments that refine the senses) indicates that we live in a non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean and non-Newtonian continuum. I have practised for 30 years the exercises Korzybski recommends to break down Aristotelian-Euclidean-Newtonian ideas buried in our daily speech and retrain myself to perceive in ways compatible with what our instruments indicate about actuality.

Due to Korzybski’s neurolinguistic training devices, it is now “natural” for me to think beyond either/or logic, to perceive the unity of observer/observed, to regard “objects” as human inventions abstracted from a holistic continuum. Many physicists think I have studied more physics than I actually have; I merely neurologically internalized the physics that I do know.

Operational logic (as formulated by the American physicist Percy Bridgman and recreated by the Danish physicist Neils Bohr as the Copenhagen Interpretation of science) was the approach to modern science that appealed to me in the context of the above working principles. The Bridgman-Bohr approach rejects as “meaningless” any statements that do not refer to concrete experiences of human beings. (Bridgman was influenced by Pragmatism, Bohr by Existentialism.) Operationalism also regards all proposed “laws” only as maps or models that are useful for a certain time. Thus, Operationalism is the one “philosophy of science” that warns us, like Nietzsche and Husserl, only to use models where they’re useful and never to elevate them into Idols or dogmas.

Although I dislike labels, if I had to label my attitude I would accordingly settle for existentialist-phenomenologist-operationalist, as long as no one of those three terms is given more prominence than the other two.

In the late ’50s, I began to read widely in economic “science” (or speculation) again, a subject that had bored the bejesus out of me since I overthrew the Marxist Machine in my brain ten years earlier. I became fascinated with a number of alternatives – or “excluded middles” – that transcend the hackneyed debate between monopoly Capitalism and totalitarian Socialism. My favorite among these alternatives was, and to some extent still is, the individualist-mutualist anarchism of Proudhon, Jossiah Warren, S.P. Andrews, Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. I do not have a real Faith that this system would work out as well in practice as it sounds in theory, but as theory it still seems to me one of the best ideas I ever encountered.

This form of anarchism is called “individualist” because it regards the absolute liberty of the individual as a supreme goal to be attained; it is called “mutualist” because it believes such liberty can only be attained by a system of mutual consent, based on contracts that are to the advantage of all. In this Utopia, free competition and free cooperation are both encouraged; it is assumed persons and groups will decide to compete or to cooperate based on the concrete specifics of each case. (This appeals to my “existentialism” again, you see.)

Land monopolies are discouraged in individualist-mutualist anarchism by abolishing State laws granting ownership to those who neither occupy nor use the land; “ownership,” it is predicted, will then only be contractually recognized where the “owner” actually occupies and used the land, but not where he charges “rent” to occupy or use it. The monopoly on currency, granted by the State, is also abolished, and any commune, group, syndicate, etc., can issue its own competing currency; it is claimed that this will drive interest down to approximately zero. With rent at zero and interest near zero, it is argued that the alleged goal of socialism (abolition of exploitation) will be achieved by free contract, without coercion or totalitarian Statism. That is, the individualist-mutualist model argues that the land and money monopolies are the “bugger factors” that prevent Free Enterprise from producing the marvelous results expected by Adam Smith. With land and money monopolies abolished, it is predicted that competition (where there is no existential motive for cooperation) and cooperation (where this is recognized as being to the advantage of all) will prevent other monopolies from arising.

Since monopolized police forces are notoriously graft-ridden and underlie the power of the state to bully and coerce, competing protection systems will be available in an individualist-mutualist system, You won’t have to pay “taxes” to support a Protection Racket that is actually oppressing rather than protecting you. You will only pay dues, where you think it prudent, to protection agencies that actual perform a service you want and need. In general, every commune or syndicate will make its own rules of the game, but the mutualist-individualist tradition holds that, by experience, most communes will choose the systems that maximize liberty and minimize coercion.

Being wary of Correct Answer Machines, I also studied and have given much serious consideration to other “Utopian” socio-economic theories. I am still fond of the system of Henry George (in which no rent is allowed, but free enterprise is otherwise preserved); but I also like the ideas of Silvio Gesell (who would also abolish rent and all taxes but one–a demmurage tax on currency, which should theoretically abolish interest by a different gimmick than the competing currencies of the mutualists.)

I also see possible merit in the economics of C.H. Douglas, who invented the National Dividend–lately re-emergent, somewhat mutated, as Theobold’s Guaranteed Annual Wage and/or Friedman’s Negative Income Tax. And I am intrigued by the proposal of Pope Leo XIII that workers should own the majority of stock in their companies.

Most interesting of recent Utopias to me is that of Buckminster Fuller in which money is abolished, and computers manage the economy, programmed with a prime directive to advantage all withoutdisadvantaging any – the same goal sought by the mutualist system of basing society entirely on negotiated contract.

Since I don’t have the Correct Answer, I don’t know which of these systems would work best in practice. I would like to see them all tried in different places, just to see what would happen. (This multiple Utopia system was also suggested by Silvio Gesell, who was not convinced he had a Correct Answer Machine; that’s another reason I like Gesell.) My own bias or hope or prejudice is that individualist-mutualist anarchism with some help from Bucky Fuller’s computers would work best of all, but I still lack the Faith to proclaim that as dogma.

There is one principle (or prejudice) which makes anarchist and libertarian alternatives attractive to me where State Socialism is totally repugnant to my genes-or-imprints. I am committed to the maximization of the freedom of the individual and the minimization of coercion. I do not claim this goal is demanded by some ghostly or metaphysical “Natural Law,” but merely that it is the goal that I, personally, have chosen – in  the Existentialist sense of choice. (In more occult language, such a goal is my True Will.) Everything I write, in one way or another, is intended to undermine the metaphysical and linguistic systems which seem to justify some Authorities in limiting the freedom of the human mind or in initiating coercion against the non-coercive.

…and then came what Charles Slack calls “the madness of the sixties.” I was an early, and enthusiastic, experimenter with LSD, peyote, magic mushrooms and any other compound that mutated consciousness. The result was that I became even more agnostic but less superior about it. What psychedelics taught me was that, just as theories and ideologies (maps and models) are human creations, not divine revelations, every perceptual grid or existential reality-tunnel is also a human creation–a work of art, consciously or unconsciously edited and organized by the individual brain.

I began serious study of other consciousness-altering systems, including techniques of yoga, Zen, Sufism and Cabala. I, alas, became a “mystic” of some sort, although still within the framework of existentialism-phenomenology-operationalism. But, then, Buddhism–the organized mystic movement I find least objectionable–is also existentialist, phenomenologist and operationalist….

Nietzsche’s concept of the Superhuman has at last become meaningful for me, although not in the elitist form in which he left it. I now think evolution is continuing and even accelerating: the human brain is evolving to a state that seems Superhuman compared to our previous history of domesticated primatehood. My favorite science is neuroscience, and I am endlessly fascinated by every new tool or technique that breaks down robot circuits in our brains (Correct Answer Machines) and spurs creativity, higher intelligence, expanded consciousness, and, above all, broader compassion.

I see no reason to believe that only an elite is capable of this evolutionary leap forward, especially as the new tools and training techniques are becoming more simple. In neuroscience as in all technology, we seem to follow Bucky Fuller’s rule that each breakthrough allows us to do more work with less effort and to create more wealth out of less raw matter.

Once I broke loose from the employee role and became self-supporting as a writer, the “horrors of capitalism” seemed less ghoulish to me, since I no longer had to face them every day. I became philosophical, like all persons free of acute suffering. I prefer to live in Europe rather than pay taxes to build more of Mr. Reagan’s goddam nuclear missiles, but I enjoy visiting the U.S. regularly for intellectual stimulation….

I agree passionately with Maurice Nicoll (a physician who mastered both Jungian and Gurdjieffian systems) who wrote that the major purpose of “work on consciousness” is to “decrease the amount of violence in the world.” The main difference between our world and Swift’s is that while we have stopped killing each other over religious differences (outside the Near East and Northern Ireland), we have developed an insane passion for killing each other over ideological differences. I regard Organized Ideology with the same horror that Voltaire had for Organized Religion.

Concretely, I am indeed a Male Feminist, as L.A. Rollins claimed (although seeing myself often on TV, I deny that I simper; I don’t even swish); like all libertarians, I oppose victimless crime laws, all drug control laws, and all forms of censorship (whether by outright reactionaries or Revolutionary Committees or Radical Feminists).

I passionately hate violence, but am not a Dogmatic Pacifist, since I don’t have Joan Baez’s Correct Answer Machine in my head. I know I would kill an armed aggressor, in a concrete crisis situation where that was the only defense of the specific lives of specific individuals I love, although I would never kill a person or employ even minor violence, or physical coercion, on behalf of capitalized Abstractions or Governments (who are all damned liars.) All these are matters of Existential Choice on my part, and not dogmas revealed to me by some god or some philosopher-priest of Natural Law.

I prefer the various Utopian systems I have mentioned to the Conservative position that humanity is incorrigible and I also think that if none of these Utopian scenarios are workable, some system will eventually arrive better than any we have ever known. I share the Jeffersonian (“Liberal”?) vision that the human mind can exceed all previous limits in a society where freedom of thought is the norm rather than a rare exception.

Does all of this make me a Leftist or a Rightist? I leave that for the Euclideans to decide. If I had to summarize my social credo in the briefist possible space, I would quote Alexander Pope’s Essay On Man:

For forms of Government let fools contest;

Whate’er is best administered is best:

For modes of Faith let graceless zealots fight;

He can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.