Date: Tue Sep 16 21:59:50 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
Welcome to the Robert Anton Wilson Show! What better name for this very special edition of High Strangeness on Prime Time Live? The irrepressible RAW is my guest tonight; my name is Patrick Huyghe and I will be the Moderator for this chat about two-headed pigs, reality tunnels, and RAW’s new book “The Walls Coming Tumbling Down”…
For those unfamiliar with the man or his oeuvre, Robert Anton Wilson is a futurist, author, former editor at Playboy, and a stand-up comic. He is the author of the “Cosmic Trigger” trilogy, and the coauthor, with Robert Shea, of the underground classic “The Illuminatus!” trilogy. His other writings include the “Schrodinger’s Cat” trilogy, called “the most scientific of all science fiction novels,” by New Scientist, and several nonfiction works of Futurist psychology and guerilla ontology, such as “Prometheus Rising” and “The New Inquisition.” Wilson has also made a comedy record (Secrets of Power) and a punk rock record (The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy), and his play “Wilhelm Reich in Hell” was performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. Wilson’s web page is located at http://www.rawilson.com
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:00:33 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim. Mother is the best bet and don’t let Satan draw you down too fast. Hobo and Pobo and dog biscuit. If he’s happy he doesn’t get snappy.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:01:02 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
“The Walls Came Tumbling Down,” published by New Falcon, is actually the script for a film. On the surface the film is about a CSICOP-type physicist named Mike Ellis who undergoes a “reframing” experience after taking a drug combo for a tooth attack. Deep down it really deals with the scary things that happen to those who stumble into a borderless or otherworldly consciousness without any intent to go there and without any preparation or Operating Manual to tell them how to navigate when the walls tumble, the doors of perception fly open, and the bottom falls out of their mental filing cabinet…
Welcome, Bob. Your book is about reality tunnels — what people perceive as being real — and how the walls of those tunnels often collapse on people. When did the walls of your own reality tunnel first come crashing down on you?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:03:46 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
It started slowly in the 50s when I got interested in perception psychology and general semantics. It accelerated in the 60s when I found ethnomethodology and LSD.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:04:30 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
You mention that you saw your FIRST flying saucer back in 1947-8, right at the beginning of the UFO era. I thought this might have been the event that got you started.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:06:21 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
That actually felt minor. I didn’t know what I saw — swamp gas, space ship, sundog, weather balloon. What impressed me was my parents’ fear of reporting the sighting. I realized that even in our allegedly rational age many things remain unspreakble — damned, blasphemous. George Carlin can’t do his comedy on networks because the comedy depends on taboo words. We remain governed by taboo to an astounding extent.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:08:33 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
You point out that more and more people are experiencing High Weirdness of one type or another — UFOs, ESP, past lives, OBEs, etc. — whether the Establishment likes it or not. But the Establishment prefers to bury its collective head in the sand, denying it all the way to China. What is hell IS going on?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:10:58 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
The same as all the rest of history, only faster this time. The establishment always rejects the first dawning of the new paradigm. That is the function of the establishment. The function of the heretic is to create new paradigms, some of which will surive if the heretic is lucky.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:12:21 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
Can the heretic ever win? Are there enough of them to make things change faster?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:14:39 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
Heresy always wins. All establishments grow rigid and ossified and die off. The individual heretic may play a role in the new paradigm or may just serve as comedy relief, i.e. appear as nutty to the future as to the current establishment. Heresy is no game for securityseekers.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:16:38 EDT 1997
From: Moderator At
I suppose heretic are what you also call infophiles and the establishment is run by infophobics. And it’s a constant fight between the two, isn’t it? Even more so these days it seems.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:19:13 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
I see the conflict as comic and recurrent. Joyce shows it that way in Finnegans Wake, and he’s my major historical theorist. Shem and Shaun never stop their war, their comedy act, their dance – whatever you call this dialectic.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:20:01 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
We live in an age when tunnel walls of all types are falling in on the head of people who least expected it. What are some of the most recent examples, in your observation?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:22:21 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
The collapse of the Soviet Union. The racial equality in S. Africa. The Palestinian state. The sudden re-mergence of the labor unions in U.S. The growing use of alternative medicine. The eerie success of Michael Jackson.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:23:55 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
Yes, but many of these things seem very temporary.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:26:40 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
From a geological persepctive all human history looks temporary. What I mean to convey is the acceleration of chaotic (unpredictible) events in the last decade. Information and chaos are shaking everhting loose.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:27:35 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
Speaking of chaos in reality tunnels, what is your reaction to the world’s reaction to the death of Princess Di?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:29:54 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
It astounds me. To me the most important recent deaths were Tim Leary, Wm Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. The media barely covered them. Then they go into a frensy over a woman whose chief claim to fame is that she married a very very rich man and took him for millions in the divorce. Now it’s Mother Thresa who went all over Africa, wher the major problem s are AIDS and starvation, and told them not to use condoms. I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there’s no rational life here.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:34:42 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
And speaking of irrational life … Some aspects of your script reminded me of the recent movie MIB. Do the tabloids know the truth, but most of us intellectual types are too stoopid to real-eyes it?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:36:35 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
It’s not either/or. You have to read the tabloids one way (Jungian/anthropological) and the intellectuals another way (primate status games.) And you gotta read the scientists a third way. We need to understand more than one language.
Looks like nobody turned up but you and me. Anybody out there?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:38:14 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
Do you think that science is crapping out on the hard stuff – ESP, UFOS, past lives, etc. — or that it’s right for it to ignore these subjects?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:39:44 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
Crapping out. These subjects are all worthy of more careful study. Very careful study.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:40:02 EDT 1997
From: Moderato
(I don’t know if they opened up the chat to outside questions. Hope there is someone out there!)
So how do you get orthodox science to have a reframing experience?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:42:31 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
It happens every generation. Wait for the old farts to die off, and the young turks will open up every lad they tried to screw shut.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:43:08 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
What do you see in your crystal ball for the future of CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) and their not-always-lovable fanatic anti-fanatics?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:43:36 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
That should be “lid” not “lad” but let’s give the Freudians a thrill, what the hell.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:44:44 EDT 1997
From: Moderator At: 168.100.204.161
I agree. Beep Beep. Kaneepsheep!
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:45:22 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson At
Well, when the old farts die off, the new leaders may actually dare to do scientific investigation of claims of the paranormal instead of just writing establishment agit-prop.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:46:56 EDT 1997
From: Moderator At: 168.100.204.161
Yea, but these guys have a lot of power in the US. The world, thank God, has not been infected by them yet.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:47:35 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
Anyway, I love CSICOP, the way Swift must have loved Partridge. For those of satiric bent, some targets seem sent by Divine Love to give us fuel for our humor.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:48:59 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
They are clownish, but the media for the most part doesn’t realize it and takes their taboos seriously.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:49:25 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
They don’t have a lot of power; they just make a lot of noise. Without them the art of slapstick would die off, like the 3 stooges without Moe. Anybody who still believes in the media must have been in a coma for the past 30 years.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:51:11 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
Change of subject … You were just “reframed” — You just appeared in a movie for the first time in your life. What was it and what was it like for you?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:53:12 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
The move is called “23.” It’s about Karl Koch,the kid who burrowed into all of the U.S.’s top security systems from his home in Hanover. He was a fan of my books, and I play myself, giving a lecture on freedom of information and autographing a a book for Karl.
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:54:05 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
Do you believe everything you write (and say)?
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:56:14 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
I don’t believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.)
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:57:25 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
Time is running out. So plug your next book. What is it? (And why do you have your books published by New Falcon Publications, a small house in Arizona, when your work could certainly command the attention and bucks of some big New York publishing house?)
Date: Tue Sep 16 22:59:37 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
Next book, “Everything Is Under Control,” an “encyclopedia of conspiracy theories,” for Harper Collins, due next summer. Most of my books come from Falcon because NY publishers were not interested when I wrote them. Those ideas have only become fashionable 10 or 15 years after I wrote them.
Date: Tue Sep 16 23:00:37 EDT 1997
From: Moderator
Welcome to the Fashionable World, Bob. Now you’re in big trouble! Thank you very much Robert Anton Wilson for a delightful reframing experience. I urgue everyone to check out “The Walls Come Tumbling Down” and Bob’s web site at http://www.rawilson.com. For High Strangeness, this is Patrick Huyghe. Goodnight!
Date: Tue Sep 16 23:02:14 EDT 1997
From: Robert_Anton_Wilson
Good God, we were the only ones on line. Ah wilderness
