review of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Posted on January 1, 1987 | Comments Off on review of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

reviewed by Robert Anton Wilson

from Magical Blend #17, 1987
reprinted in Email to the Universe

Some people may wonder what a holistic detective agency is, but this new book by Douglas Adams, author of the famous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, will explain that for them, with such transcendental clarity that the mind, as in Dante’s Paradise, is nearly blinded by the light.

Can you believe that the disappearance of a cat in London seven years ago cannot only be caused by, but equally be the cause of, the miraculous appearance of the music of J.S. Bach more than twohundred years ago?

If this thought is incomprehensible to you, then you should either study quantum physics or read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Mr. Adams not only explains the relationship between the missing cat and the Goldberg Variations, but also demonstrates how a sofa can get wedged into a stairwell in such a way that you not only cannotget it out but mathematical analysis will prove that it never could have gotten wedged in that position in the first place.

Oddly, there is no fantasy in this book. Dirt: Gently is as logical as Sherlock Holmes and all the macoronic inter-connections he masters are necessary parts of the world of modem physics.

It may be startling to contemplate probability matrices in which everything is the cause of everything in one sense and nothing is the cause of anything in another sense, but such is the probable world in which we probably live according to current science, and it is in one matrix that Dirk Gently has to move a sofa through a solid wall (and incidentally save humanity from extinction-for which he does not charge extra) before the missing cat is located.

Unfortunately, the cat is dead. But that’s only in one probability matrix. In the matrix next door, the cat is probably alive, but we’ve lost Bach. While cat-lovers and music-lovers ponder that conundrum, at least the matrix in which humanity is destroyed has been avoided.

But the damned couch is still stuck in the stairwell, in the probability matrix where we lost Bach and saved the cat.

Alas, I fear that those who talk of “holistic medicine” have little inkling of how holistic sub-atomic physics is. I can only urge that all who wish a glimpse of how our probable universe probably operates should rush right out and buy this marvelous book, which is a thriller, a mystery, a farce and the most scientific novel of the year.

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Posted in Book Reviews, Essays, Excerpts

Some Circuits of Evolution

Posted on September 15, 1986 | Comments Off on Some Circuits of Evolution

Some Circuits of Evolution

By Robert Anton Wilson

 from Critique: A Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics
#23/#24, Fall 1986/Winter 1987

The fifth, Neurosomatic Circuit has only appeared sporadically thus far in history and remains latent or only appears in occasion flashes in most humans.  It seems to be located primarily in the right brain hemisphere, with a feedback loop to the genitalia.  (This loop is the origin of the metaphor of kundalini or “serpent power” in system like Tantra, Ophite, Gnosticism and Voodoo).  Training methods to induce the Neurosomatic Circuit to leap into action are known in many yogic and occult schools and include: mediation, pranayama (heavy, rhythmic breathing), cannabis drugs, fasting, prayer and , in many “initiatory” orders a kind of ritualized Shock that may well be a re-imprinting experience.  (All of these Shocks, whether found in tribal shamanism or in systems as sophisticated as Tibetan Tantra, are basically similar in structure to the Shocks of Masonic initiation: the candidate is led through a heavily symbolic ritual to a moment of stunning emotional crises.)

Whereas the reality-tunnels of the first four circuits are linear and mechanical, and build up a strong sense of separateness (hyper-egotism), perception on the fifth circuit is global, non-linear, holistic and tends to blur the previously acute sense of division between Self and World.  At the same time, the conditioned sense of separateness between “mind” and “body” is also blurred or loosened.  The general feeling is one of being “at home in the universe,” “high:” or “floating:” and part of a web that extends far beyond the material organism; the sense of lonely Darwinian:”struggle for survival” is temporarily or permanently abolished. Feud called this “the oceanic experience,” Gurdjieff calls it “the magnetic center,” and in traditional Christian terminology the enlarged self on this circuit is “the new Adam: as distinguished from “the old Adam”, the isolated self formed by the rigid reality-tunnel of the first four circuits.

It seems that art is a neurosomatic circuit function, even though expressed or communicated through third circuit symbols (words in poetry, musical forms, paintings, etc.)  There is hardly any artist who has not recorded mild-to-ecstatic neurosomatic Circuit experiences, usually deepening with age, and most artists frankly attribute the artistic drive to the desire to communicate these “high” moments or “peak experiences.”  The quarrel in our Occidental culture in recent centuries between Art and Science – i.e. between some artists and some scientists – is largely a dispute over the comparative values of third circuit linear analysis and Neurosomatic Circuit holistic apprehension.  The present theory suggests that the full development of the human being involves maximum development of both of these circuits in combination with maximum development of subtlety and flexibility on the other six circuits also.

The Neurogenetic Circuit is even more alien than the Neurosomatic to most conventional scientists.  The names give to this circuit in other systems indeed indicate how strange it seems to those constricted by four-circuit tunnel-realities:  Jung calls it ”the collective unconscious” (although it may become conscious); Theosophy calls it “the akashic records;” Stanislaus Grof has named it “the phylogenetic unconscious;” Buddhism calls it “the treasury mind;” Dr. Rupert Sheldrake has recently named it “the morphogenetic field”.  All of these are regarded by conservative scientists as “mystical” and unscientific concepts, because what they all describe cannot be explained in mechanistic biology.  It seems in 1984 that Sheldrake’s “morphogenetic field” is the best name for what is involved here since Sheldrake frankly admits his “field” cannot be reduced to mechanical laws but operates as a resonance through time.  On this circuit, to be blunt, one seems to have access to the experience of all of one’s ancestors, including those who have been dead for thousands or hundreds of thousand of years.  (Experience of this circuit explains the belief in “reincarnation.”)

 

Whether or not the Neurogenetic Circuit exists latently in the unconscious of all, as Jung and Grof posit, it only becomes conscious after many years of slowly-increasing Neurosomatic sensitivity, usually accompanied by work in some logic or shamanic discipline.  At this point, consciousness, having become less linear and more global (synergetic), gradually begins to experience depth in time.  The Hindu concept of the Atman or world-soul is then not an idea but a lived experience.  In Dr. Leary’s more modern metaphor, one experiences oneself as a giant robot programmed by the DNA to do specific work in a specific evolutionary niche, and one has increasingly clear “memory” or intuitive understanding of the vectors of the evolutionary drama.  Vast tolerance and a certain Nitezschean amorality blended with Buddhist compassion also appear here:  one sees all other organisms as similar aspects of the “world-soul” or as similar robots programmed by the same evolutionary vector Life Force.  No organism seems “totally wrong” in the sense of conventional Socio-Sexual Circuit “morality,” some organisms merely appear to be mechanical or unconscious of their evolutionary role and potential.

 

The seventh Metaprogramming Circuit is even more recent, and statistically more rare, than Neurosomatic or Neurogenetic awareness:  one can hardly write about it without being accused of being either a satirist or a mental case.  It consists of the conscious, controlled ability to draw energy out of any previous reality-tunnel and to put that energy into the construction of a new reality-tunnel; that is, to consciously choose which circuits one is operating on and how the information tapped by that circuit will be organized into Gestalts.  This makes possible what theologians fallaciously claim all human beings already possess: the ability to exercise meaningful choice (”free will) and autonomy in the true sense.  This can easily degenerate into megalomania, and in many cases it has, and thus this circuit is not very “safe” unless monitored by great sophistication and subtlety on the other circuits, especially the Semantic (mapping-and-manipulating) circuit.  Talking too frankly about this circuit can also be hazardous to health to most traditional societies, as illustrated by the Sufi dervish, Manur el-Hallaj, who bluntly declared, “I am the truth and there is nothing within my turban but God” and was stoned to death for his “Blasphemy.:”  In general, statements like “I am God” and “I created all this” are inescapable on this circuit, but make severe problems if not balanced by the other circuits and a considerable sense of humor.  This circuit is called Shivadarshana in Hinduism – the dance of Shiva, god of intoxication and death – is also called “crossing the Abyss” in Cabala; that should be sufficient warning of the perils involved.

Concerning the final circuit known in 1984, the Non-Local Quantum Circuit, one must be even more gnomic.  When this circuit is activated, the conventional conditioned-imprinted reality-tunnels called “me” and “my world” are even more expanded than on the 5th, 6th, and 7th circuits; one appears to blend into Something for which most languages have no word.  The Chinese wisely call that Something wu-hsin which means “no mind” and is, perhaps, the class of all minds – which is not itself a mind for the same reason that e.g. the class of all chimneys is not a chimney.  In modern science, the closest approximation to wu-hsinis the Implicate order suggested by quantum physicist Dr. David Bohm; from this Implicate Order are projected non-local forms which create the space-time-mind continuum we normally experience.  It must be stressed that non-local in this context means also non-causal and non-energetic.  If one can imagine a kind of software that co-exists with and is prior to the hardware of the universe, then that is wu-hsin or the Implicate Order.

Accidental entry to this circuit occurs in serious trauma of the sort called “near death” or “clinical death” experience and is then limited to “astral body” or “out-of-body” experiences.  At full intensity, this non-local circuit accesses all the information of the cosmos and experience of it is called Illumination; invocation of the word “God” generally seems at that point a rather small, provincial and human-chauvinist metaphor for what is happening but “union with God” is the only term in the normal vocabulary for such information-rich and non-localized awareness.

We cannot say in 1984 what new circuits are forming or are still potential in the human brain.

It appears that the simple Aristotelian idea that we are either conscious or unconscious (asleep or awake) is inadequate.  We have seen a whole spectrum of consciousness; it seems clear that each level of consciousness opens many possibilities for new reality-tunnels, and that consciousness has evolved, and it is still evolving; we absolutely cannot predict what we might become and what we might know after the next evolutionary leap.  In particular, the seemingly intractable problems of life on this planet – such injustice, exploitation, crime and , above all, war – seem to be maintained by stupidity in the most generally rigid reality-tunnels which prevent further learning or which “hypnotize” us so that we do not see who, where, or what we are doing.  But such mechanical stupidity or Maya, or “sleep-walking” is, in this perspective, an early evolutionary state out of which we are, as individuals and as a species, slowly growing toward higher and higher levels of awareness.

That is, every rigid or dogmatic reality-tunnel is a remnant of our mammalian ancestry.  The earlier circuits are more mechanical; the later circuits are more “voluntary” or self-regulating.  If human life often looks like a spectacle in improperly-wired robots bumping into each other and knocking each other apart, this is because we are not finished as a species; we have the potential of evolving to more subtle and more sensitive functioning.  In contrast to a vast over-simplification by H.G. Wells – who said “Modern history is a race between education and catastrophe” – we can say at this point that modern history is a race between higher consciousness and catastrophe.

We have all lived through the fallout from a vast Neurological Revolution that began with the accidental discovery of LSD in 1943, peaked with the bizarre “drug culture” of the 1960’s and then mutated into dozens of new evolutionary vectors in the 1970;s and early 1980’s.  It’s become known to literally millions of social scientists, physical scientists, artists, writers, and ordinary people that consciousness can be radically altered, that many old reality-tunnels can be outgrown, that many new reality-tunnels can be imprinted and learned, and that the control of our consciousness is increasing in our own hands.  “Whatever can be accomplished by chemical means,” as William S. Burroughs says, “can be accomplished by other means.”  In retrospect, psychedelic drugs were only the initial Shock which our culture needed to being mutating into a new stage of evolution, a state for which we have no word and for which I have suggest the symbol, I2.

I2 means I-observing-I or the mind studying the mind; it also means intelligence studying Intelligence.  On a third level of reference, I2 also means Information2 or the vast information explosion being ushered in by micro-processors and the world-wide electronic network which is creating what Fuller and McLuhan called “a global village.”

Through direct brain stimulation, through Lilly’s isolation tanks, through continuous breakthroughs in organic chemistry and neurology, through scientific investigation of the mechanisms of yoga and Zen, through research into so-called ESP and “out of body experience” (7th and 8th circuit functions) through each advance in computer technology, through research on intelligence-raising drugs and vitaminic compounds, etc. we are learning more and more about how rigid reality-tunnels are imprinted and how expanded and “cosmic” realty-tunnels can be induced.  We are like sleeping beings who are just learning how to wake ourselves up.  In a sense are just discovering that the “missing link” between the ape and True Humanity is ourselves; but we are also learning how to accelerate evolution within our own brains, and how to become what in vanity we once thought we already were: free and responsible beings not limited by mammalian mechanical reflexes.

In a fascinating book on research into longevity, The Conquest of Death, Dr. Alvin Silverstein quotes some impressive figures from the French economist Georges Anderla, showing how the third circuit semantic function has increased our information about the universe since the birth of Christ.  Taking all known scientific facts of 1 A.D. as his unit, Anderla calculated how long it took that amount of information to double. The answer is that it took 1500 years – a millennium and a half.  But the next doubling was much faster, took only 250 years, and was complete by 1750.  The next doubling took only 150 years and was complete by 1900.  The next doubling took only 50 years and was complete by 1950, and the next doubling took only ten years and was complete by 1960.  The next doubling took seven years and was complete by 1967.  Etc. This acceleration is still continuing and some Futurists suggest that knowledge will soon be doubling every year, since microprocessors are accelerating the acceleration.

While we as a species are passing through this “information explosion” which is doubling knowledge each decade at a rate that only occurred in millenniums during the stone Ages, we are also participating in the aforementioned Neurological revolution, whereby we are learning more and more about the functions of the other non-symbolizing circuits of our brain.  To grasp the whole picture of what is now happening, one must think simultaneously of both the Information Explosion and of the Neurological Revolution – of both the new facts being processed and the new potentials of consciousness being explored.

It seems to me now, in 1984, that only rigid and dogmatic (or unconsciously unquestioning) adherence to a narrow atheism or futilitarianism – to what Nietzsche caricatured as Idolization of “least possible effort and greatest possible blunder” – can dismiss as “mere coincidence: this conjunction of rapid information increase and rapid consciousness expansion which I call I2.  It would be the blackest of black jokes if all this sudden coherence, this emerging of new potentials within us, were just the prologue to the final tragedy of nuclear holocaust.  Rather, I suspect it is precisely the evolutionary quantum leap that is demanded of us at this time to bypass and transcend such Doomsday scenarios, to continue the evolutionary ascent to higher and higher levels of awareness, even to levels which we cannot begin to guess or imagine at present.

This article is an edited excerpt reprinted with Permission from a larger article called “How to Tell Your Friends From the Apes” in the aforementioned Magical Blend, a quarterly Magazine (Issue 12)

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Tagged

Compuserve chat

Posted on April 14, 1986 | Comments Off on Compuserve chat

Online conference with Dr. Robert Anton Wilson
14 April 1986

(Sysop Jim) OK, quiet peoples. I present Dr. Robert Anton Wilson.
(Bob Wilson) Cocaine is natures way of telling you the Vatican Bank needs your money more than you do.
(Ben Rowe) Bob, since magick, and the cabala play such a role in your books, I’m curious to know just what you attitude towards such things are, here in the real(?) world. Could you state your feelings briefly?
(Bob Wilson) I regard magick and cabala as doorways to archeological levels of the human brain.
(Ben Rowe) Do you practice any form of it yourself?
(Bob Wilson) Yes.
(Ben Rowe) Care to say what kind?
(Bob Wilson) Ritual invocation, gematria.
(Avatar) To follow up on Ben’s question, are you presently a member of any secret societies or occult orders and could you tell us the names and your grade within them?
(Bob Wilson) That would be telling. Ippsissimus maximus of the Illuminati
and toenail of the Head Temple of the High Priesthood of Eris Esoteric.
(Avatar) Amusing to the last.
(Peter da Silva) I’m not sure what book this was in, I think maybe Right Where you are Sitting Now–you were talking about the possible future of human sexuality. I thought that the sorts of things you were talking about were rather pedestrian. Were you…
(Bob Wilson) Define pedestrian?
(Peter DA Silva) Well, you only considered two sexes, to begin with.
(Bob Wilson) Oh.
(Sysop Jim) A major oversight, no doubt.
(Rodney) When will the next volume of THE HISTORICAL ILLUMINATUS be out and will there be more to follow?
(Bob Wilson) It will be finished a year after I finish writing it. There will be five volumes in this series, of course.
(peter) do you think machines will ever be smarter than people?
(Bob Wilson) they’re already smarter than some people.
(Sysop Georgia) true!
(Peter DA Silva) Can I be obnoxious some more?
(Bob Wilson) Yes.
(Peter DA Silva) Back to my previous question/comment/speech. You didn’t seem to get too heavily into the possibilities of bioengineering as touched on by such people as John Varley (Ophiuchi Hotline, Titan, etc.).
Have you any more thoughts on the subject now that technology has begun to catch up on you?
(Bob Wilson) I think we can engineer immortal superhuman beings in many dimensions of superiority to us. I hope we can learn to re-engineer ourselves neurologically to become more superhuman than our creations by learning from them.
(Peter DA Silva) How about technological immortality?
(Bob Wilson) To understand anything, you must be able to make a working model of it. The more we model the human brain, not only through bioengineering but through computers, the more we can make better brains for ourselves.
(Avatar) First, do you think western civilization will survive the next century, and what do you think will be the significant events which will characterize its existence? Second, what do you think of the “magic” energy machine of Joseph Newman?
(Bob Wilson) Just heard of the Newman machine two days ago. Too soon to form an opinion.
(Sysop Jim) On the first question then.
(Bob Wilson) I think western civilization will survive. It will be increasingly like a libertarian, pagan, psionic science fiction novel, probably by me.
(Geoff) Hi Bob… A question about skepticism. As one of the resident skeptics, I’ve always advocated “keeping your B.S. detector turned up on high” when investigating these strange phenomena. My question… what degree of skepticism is appropriate and when is it time to turn skepticism off?
(Bob Wilson) Skepticism should be dialectical. Doubt A, then doubt NOT A. Then doubt both A and NOT A. Then doubt your own ability to doubt enough.
(Geoff) GREAT!!
(Bob Wilson) Doubt also Doubt itself.
(Ben Rowe) A crowley fan, I see.
(Bob Wilson) Experiment with Alternative belief systems, enter alternative, cognitive grids and as the Zen Master said when asked the way of the Tao, “Move!”.
(Geoff) Thanx, Bob. And welcome to CIS!!!
(Ben Rowe) Bob, one of the perpetual arguments here is about the degree to which subjective phenomena, such as the results of magickal invocations, can be usefully dealt with from a an “objective”, scientific viewpoint. Could you tell us your feelings as to the place of objective inquiry in such fields?
(Bob Wilson) Buddha said, “doubt, and find your own light.” Ritual is to the inner sciences what experiment is to the outer sciences. Believe nothing on faith. Test all things. Enter every reality tunnel If there are only cannibals inside close the door quickly and move to the next reality tunnel. Fear nothing, never complain.
(Sysop Jim) “Test all things” Applying what tests?
(Ben Rowe) I take it that means you think science is pretty much useless in that area.
(Bob Wilson) If the hypothesis gets the result you want, tentatively continue the hypothesis. If the hypothesis busts, make a better hypothesis. As John Lilly says, “Science is the Yoga of the West. Yoga is the science of the East”. Do the experiments , watch the results. I don’t see that that’s not scientific.
(Ben Rowe) The problem we run into here seems to be more in finding some basis to talk about such things. The objectivists wont accept the “evidence” of the subjectivists such as myself, and vice versa. Any ideas about finding a common ground for this sort of discussion?
(Bob Wilson) Objectivists are disciples of Ayn Rand. See mmy definition of “disciples” under NEW AGE in religion SIG.
(Peter DA Silva) I wish I had your optimism about the future, BOB. I don’t see libertaria any time soon. Can you give any of your thoughts as to how it will come about? (wonder if I can get a straight answer this time.)
(Bob Wilson) I will do my part, the part only I can do from my position in space-time. I believe others are doing the same thing from their space. Do what thou Wilt shall be the Whole of the Law
(Peter DA Silva) Sigh…
(Sysop Jim) Peter, these ARE straight answers. Remember, space is curved. Follow up?
(Peter DA Silva) Was hoping for a scenario or prediction, not an oath of allegiance. Right now the authoritarians seem to be winning and my position in space time is a bummer.
(Bob Wilson) Sorry… you created that reality tunnel, you can find your way out… You built the Trap… you know the design better than anyone…
(rich) Bob, ALL phenomena subjective. Is not search for objectivity really search for means of communicating those that are more subjective than others? Does “science” really have any meaning as an “object/idea” unless applied?
(Bob Wilson) Can’t understand your terminology. Question meaningless in my reality tunnel. Try Again!
(rich) Everything is subjective. Inability to express ideas makes it so, but recourse to science demands communication in terms others understand, no?
(Bob Wilson) That means as little to me as everything is green. If everything is Green, we still need separate words for the kind of green that looks like Red and the kind of green that looks like blue. If everything is subjective, we still need words for the subjective things that everybody sees, the subjective things that only one person sees, and the subjective things that you break your leg on, and the subjective things that are called, “the Ballad of the Long Legged Bait.”
(Avatar) The model that modern science uses to explain the world in terms of atoms, molecule, particles, and fields works quite well for many things that we do, but is occasionally assaulted by interesting loopholes like rains of hazel nuts, ancient rocks containing live frogs, screwups in space and time, etc. What extensions to conventional science have you found most effective to enable you to model anomalous events, and could you explain some of them to us?
(Bob Wilson) JUNG’s theory of synchronicity (psychologically-induced space time relativity). Bell’s theorem of non-local hidden variables. Transcending space-time. Persinger’s theory of geomagnetic fluctuations linked to human brain function. I wonder if the link works both ways. Edwin Harris Walker “the complete quantum anthropologist (proceedings of the American Anthropological Association, 1974) unifying Bell theorem with psychokinetic experimental results. Garfinkel.
(Avatar) Of “Simon and Garfinkel”?
(Bob Wilson) Garfinkel on reality glossing and Leary on imprinting of reality tunnels not when they become ordinary by repetition.
(Sysop Jim) If I may, anecdotal or scientific repetition?
(Bob Wilson) Both.
(Peter DA Silva) Problem with tuning perception of reality is it doesn’t get you off the front lines (unless I’m psychotic & dreaming we’re in authoritarian state while we’re in libertarian paradise. If so, please wake me up). So, please quit treating me like parapsychologist at the AAAS & give some indication as to how transition is to occur.
(Sysop Jim) Ha!
(Bob Wilson) Breath normally, eat less sugar… eat foods… get high frequently…
(Peter DA Silva) Hey! I quit putting sugar in my coffee already!
(Bob Wilson) learn to meditate, stop being afraid and angry… you are surrounded by a network of love… take down the bricks, remove the armor… there is nothing to fear. Stop Complaining… have chicken soup once a day…
(Peter DA Silva) Do chicken fajitas count?
(Sysop Jim) I hope you’re getting all this down, Peter.
(Peter DA Silva) In my print buffer.
(Bob Wilson) Learn to laugh, learn to give… lighten up your act, and remember who made the grass green…
(Peter DA Silva) Newton.
(Robby) we all do
(Bob Wilson) and who put the insect monsters in your reality tunnel…
(Peter) Do you believe in GOD?
(Bob Wilson) God is a ridiculously small human concept compared to the coherent intelligence of universe. Everything doesn’t need to have a primate Alpha male in charge to be an intelligent system.
(Mark) Can you tell me the formula for AUM (or where to find said formula)?
(Bob Wilson) Don’t know the laws relating to communication of such information. Don’t want the owner of this machine busted.
(Mark) Data source?
(Bob Wilson) Who makes the grass green?
(Robby) magick in theory and practice by a.c.
(Bob Wilson) Oral Tradition!
(Robby) true
(Sysop Jim) What is AUM?
(Peter DA Silva) Ultimate acid.
(Bob Wilson) Those who know do not speak…
(Mark) Drug to convert neophobes into neophiles.
(Sysop Jim) I see. hokay, Kaci?
(Bob Wilson) Drug obsolete, electrons are the psychedelics of the 80’s
(Peter DA Silva) “Turn On, Tune In, Link Up”?
(Bob Wilson) And shine like stars….
(kaci) dare i digress and ask what persinger’s theory of geo flux is??
(Bob Wilson) Persinger has found statistical links between geomagnetic cycles and fortean data anomalistics and parapsychology. See his space-time transients and unusual events (co-author).
(kaci) in what kind of periodicity?
(Bob Wilson) LAFRENSERIE and brain-mind bulletin circa December 1985… I hope…. Anomalistics correlate with earthquake activity and strong psychic experience with low geomagneticactivity.
(rich) what physical means is postulated for existence and use of psychic powers/uses?
(Bob Wilson) The careless postulate vague psycho-kinetic energies. Persinger postulates measurable geomagnetic fields. Walker derives psychokinetic effects from basic equations of non-local quantum connectedness.
(ELAD) I have found this discussion interesting. but, sorry to say…i am not familiar with mr. Wilson’s books. since there was no bio at the beginning I would appreciate his book listing and books that he recommends.
(Bob Wilson) “This I like”: The book of the Breast , sex and drugs, Illuminatus!, Cosmic Trigger, The Universe Next Door, the Homing Pidgeons, the Trick Top Hat, Neuropolitics, Right Where You are Sitting Now, Masks of the Illuminati, The Illuminati Papers, Prometheus Rising, The Earth Will Shake, The Widows Son, and two I’d rather forget.
(Sysop Jim) And numerous issues of Playboy, yes?
(Bob Wilson) I only wrote the short editorials on why pot should be legalized abortion should be legalized, victimless crimes should be abolished, the draft should be abolished, and a few similar ideas now trite and soon to be conservative. Even Buckley now agrees with me about drugs. Remember the Zen Master who said, “move”.
(Peter DA Silva) Sorry… can’t stop asking hard questions… is my role here. 2 questions this time. 1) have you read and if so what do you think of Julian Jayne’s book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. 2) I wish you would write some Science Fiction (where defined as so:- a SF writer is embarrassed by his inconsistencies, a fantasy writer is proud of them). 3) (I lied) Do you really think there are psychedelics of the ’80s?
(Bob Wilson) Jane’s model interesting. So is Stan Gooch in total man. I prefer Pribram hologram model and Leary 8 circuit model.
(Peter DA Silva) (of course)
(Bob Wilson) Inconsistencies of my books are inconsistencies of quantum mechanics, which is why new scientist magazine called me “most scientific of all science fiction writers” … I blush…. But facts are facts. Thank you for exchanging electrons, the psychedelics of the 80’s.
(Peter DA Silva) If these are psychedelics, I’m going back to drugs.
(Bob Wilson) Have a high Holiday…
(Robert Wiggins) Bob, I’ve been reading you for many years (more than 10) now (I even have Sex and Drugs in hardcover) and wanted to tell you I still go back to read “10 Reasons to Get Out of Bed in the Morning” that appeared in Oui magazine. My question is mundane (but I’m enjoying the conversation here) do you know of a place in NYC that carries your books (and/or Leary’s)
(Bob Wilson) Thou art beat, Forbidden planet and Laissez Faire books, Weisers, ga
(Robby) are you the BOBO of subgenius fame
(Bob Wilson) That would be telling.ga
(Robby) i saw de Selby today he was wearing pink
(Bob Wilson) Others said, “he was a pink elf” but he was glad to be there and meet all of you.
(Robby) de self-by?
(Bob Wilson) I did not invent de Selby. As professor LACKANOOKIE says,
“TIJENTIEN, TIEN JEN TAO , de Selby TZU JAN”. Very roughly, the earth creates people, the sky creates earth. de Selby became what he always was”.
(Peter DA Silva) What are the two books you don’t want to remember, and what do you think of Steve Jackson’s game “Illuminati”?
(Bob Wilson) When did you stop eating your wife …no wait… When did you stop beating your wife?
(Peter DA Silva) I like the first one better.
(Bob Wilson) and was there ever a dog that praised its fleas
(Avatar) OK – I am honored – two quickies. What is your birthdate? and do you believe in Death after Life?
(Bob Wilson) January 18th, 1932. Death and Life are unscientific concepts, as such. All we know is the tuned-in and the not tuned-in. The not tuned-in may be tuned in. /TUN DEATH /MON LIFE with the proper technology or neurology. We are made out of the debris of exploding stars. The not-tuned-in is not nonexistent since nonexistence is a metaphysical concept. Operationally stars, people, quarks Tune in, or tune out, the dance is eternal. LO! The happy moron, he doesn’t give a damn. I wish I was a moron…. MY GOD! Perhaps i am! Love to All. Stop being afraid, Peter. Goodnight.
(Peter DA Silva) Not in my program.

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Man Bites Dogma

Posted on July 23, 1985 | Comments Off on Man Bites Dogma

Man Bites Dogma

A Conversation with Robert Anton Wilson 
about Politics, Religion, Drugs, and Quantum Mechanics 

by Michael Dare
L.A. Weekly, 1988

wilsonrobertantondare

He’s been called a cult figure to various lunatic fringe groups, Tom Robbins calls him “a dazzling barker hawking tickets to the most thrilling tilt-a-whirls and daring loop-o-planes on the midway of higher consciousness,” he calls himself an iconoclastic comedian, and whether Robert Anton Wilson is a philosopher or a public nuisance is now up to you. His books, The Illuminatus Trilogy, Schroedinger’s Cat, and The Cosmic Trigger all fall somewhere in between non-fiction and pure fantasy, full of unquestionable facts and quotes that somehow always add up to utterly preposterous conclusions. This devotion to eccentricity and breaking down barriers reaches it’s zenith in The Illuminati Papers, a book seemingly written by characters from all his other books. It contains, among other esoterica, a whole page of Haiku by Raymond Chandler in which Wilson has simply taken short descriptive excerpts from Chandler’s work and reformatted them into beautiful miniature poems.

With all the passion of a religious crusader, Robert Anton Wilson is out to destroy all personal belief systems, to force every one of his readers to seriously question any and all thoughts they hold dear. His specialty is in analyzing systems that seem to contradict each other and trying to find the points at which they do agree. In Prometheus Rising he synthesizes the works of Leary, Jung, Freud, Sagan, Gurdjieff, Berne, and several others into a general system that shows how much they have in common, where they disagree, and why. His newest work, Reality is What You Can Get Away With, reads like a screenplay by Picasso – it’s cubist, outrageous, completely non-linear, constantly startling, and very funny. All of his books are part of a series; they’re cinematic, full of cross cutting, montages, flashbacks, and flash forwards. But no one seems to be able to figure out if this new one is a movie or a book since it actively defies both definitions. He’s raised the put-on to the highest art form.

Wilson holds a Ph.D. in psychology, edited the Playboy Forum for six years, has made a comedy record (Secrets of Power) and a punk rock record (The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy), the stage version of his Illuminatus trilogy has been seen in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Seattle, Jerusalem, and was performed recently in Liverpool by the London National Theater in a 12 hour noon to midnight marathon. His latest play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell has only been seen in Ireland where Wilson has lived for the past five years. A screenwriting job brought him to Hollywood recently, where he has been delivering lectures and running fantasy role-playing encounter groups. These evenings are enlightening, self-contradictory, very funny, and hazardous to your dogma. We started out talking about one of his favorite subjects.

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wilsonrobertanton2  DARE
Do you see everything as a conspiracy?

WILSON
No. Somebody once accused me of claiming that everything is subjective, but I don’t make statements about everything, I only make partial statements. I think conspiracy is very prevalent behavior on this planet. It even precedes humanity. Lions conspire – one lion will frighten a herd of antelope to get them running in a certain direction where the other lions will be waiting there to eat them. That’s a conspiracy against antelopes, and I’m sure the antelopes are very bitter about it. Ants conspire, they seize territory and drive off interlopers, rats have very vigorous conspiracies, when a rat from a strange pack gets into a house they’ll hunt him down and kill him. It’s just like the mafia, “Don’t do anything on our territory.”

DARE
Is it possible for a conspiracy to be benign?

WILSON
It would have to be open. The difference between a conspiracy and an affinity group is that when me and my friends do it it’s an affinity group and when someone we don’t like does it it’s a conspiracy. Conspiracies run the literary world, the art world, marijuana arrives here due to conspiracies. It’s a conspiratorial world.
People naturally form groups and to the extent that they’re competing with each other, they try to hide what they’re doing. The best explanation of conspiracy is in The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, a very thick mathematical treatise. It explains that it’s very beneficial to have conspiracies in competitive situations – the bigger an alliance you form, the quicker you move ahead.
The function of every alliance is to conceal information from the other alliance and to spread false information, just like in a poker game. You don’t want them to know what hand you’ve got but you want them to think they know. Poker is the essence of conspiracy. Everybody’s trying to deceive one another. A benevolent conspiracy would have to be open, without the factor of concealment, and everybody’s invited in. That’s the only kind of conspiracy that could really improve the world.

DARE
So you think that Summit Conferences should be broadcast live to everybody?

WILSON
Of course. People are so paranoid about the Bilderbergers because they’re so secretive. For all we know they’re only getting together to look at stag movies once a year. The Bilderbergers have a lot of members in common with the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs. To a great extent they’re financed by the Rockefellers and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. They’re all part of one gang that meets once a year in secret. They’re called the Bilderbergers because their first meeting was in Bilderberg. They get more coverage each time they meet because they’re so secretive about what they’re doing. They say they’re meeting to discuss international harmony and the peaceful resolution of our problems, but no one’s allowed to hear what they’re talking about.

DARE
Would giving away the Bilderberger’s secrets make them more benign?

WILSON
No, it would just make them more paranoid, more devious. My business is not to expose but to collect comparative exposes so that the readers can see that conspiracy is normal behavior and that there’s no one big conspiracy that runs everything.
In the ’30s, the Nazis were very much into the theory that the Jewish bankers controlled everything, and that led to such horror that it became forbidden to think about conspiracies at all for decades thereafter. The first people who said there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination were all denounced as obstinate nut cases and wandering loonies. My attitude, after looking at the evidence for a long time, is that there is no one big conspiracy, that the historians who refuse to admit conspiracy as a factor in history are just over-reacting to stupid conspiracy theories.
There really are conspiracies of varying sizes, but they’re so busy fighting each other that they have nothing to do with us. Most of them are for monetary reasons. There are conspiracies to decide whose book is going to be reviewed on page one of the New York Times or the Herald Tribune. Often it’s the same book in both, more often than coincidence or even synchronicity can account for. There are commercial conspiracies to fix prices. Some have ideology or mysticism behind them. I don’t think you can understand history until you understand the element of poetic whimsy and sheer irrationality in the minds of so called practical people.
In WW2, both Churchill and Hitler thought they were in direct communication with God. So did MacArthur and Patton. Hitler and Mussolini both outlawed Freemasonry in Germany and Italy. The leaders of the war against them were Roosevelt, a 33rd degree Freemason, Churchill, another high ranking Freemason, Hoover, the head of the secret police in America was a 33rd degree Freemason

DARE
What exactly to those degrees stand for?

WILSON
They indicate how many initiations you’ve gone through. Actually, any Freemason who is nominated to the presidency of the United States gets elevated to the 32nd degree right away. Then if he’s elected, he’s given the 33rd degree, which is only honorary. The 32nd degree in mainly concerned with the Knights of Malta, who are the enemies of Freemasonry.
The Freemasons claim that the Knights of Malta have sworn an oath to stamp out liberalism, free thought, and restore the total reign of tyranny and superstition that existed in the dark ages. It’s a secret society within the Catholic Church that doesn’t seek publicity at all. Very little is known about it. William Casey of the CIA was a Knight of Malta, Alexander Haig is a Knight of Malta. According to Gordon Thomas, an English journalist, the Knights of Malta now act as couriers between the Vatican and the CIA. His theory is very complicated, but it illustrates how conspiracies operate in the real world as distinguished from paranoid fantasy.
The Gray Wolves are a Muslim fundamentalist group who deal heroin to get money to buy arms to carry on their campaign to exterminate Israel. They’ve been very involved in gunrunning because they have a link with the Bulgarian secret police, who are very much into selling munitions underground. The KGB uses the Gray Wolves for operations that, if they’re ever blown, can’t be traced back to Russia. Roberto Calvi of Banco Abrosiano was taking a great deal of this heroin money from the Gray Wolves and the mafia and running it through the Vatican Bank, which doesn’t have to show records to anybody. The Italian government can’t examine their records, it belongs to the government of the state of the Vatican, so they’re the only ones who can look at their own books. If you can get illicit money into the Vatican Bank, it disappears forever, nobody can find any trace of it.
The Gray Wolves had a grudge against the Pope because of his involvement with Calvi, who embezzled so much money that everybody got swindled. He was found hanging from a bridge in London, his secretary was pushed from a window at Banco Abrosiano the same day, a few more executives have died mysteriously since then. Calvi’s partner in the swindles, Michele Sindona, was convicted in this country of 65 counts of stock and currency fraud and faking his own kidnapping to escape prosecution. Back in Italy, he was convicted of the murder of the examiner hired to investigate his bank. After that they were going to put him on trial for conspiracy in 80 murders, but he was poisoned in his cell. All of this is part of how the Bulgarian secret police hired a killer from the Gray Wolves to get the Pope.

DARE
Isn’t the Pope just a figurehead without much power, sort of the Gerald Ford of the Vatican?

WILSON
That’s not true, the Pope does have a lot of power. Consider the case of Pope John Paul I. He was a rebel who didn’t like the way the church was being run, and in 1978 he announced that he would be going through a complete overhaul, throwing out a lot of the old crowd and bringing in new people. Observatori Politico sent him a list of 115 Freemasons in the Vatican, including members of P2, who had infiltrated 900 members into the Italian Government, including the secret police. John Paul ordered an investigation, and within a few days he was mysteriously found dead.
The Vatican has never shown a death certificate and no autopsy was performed. They told two different stories about who found him dead, things disappeared out of his bedroom that have never been accounted for, including his will, his medicine bottle, and his glasses. Pecorelli, the editor of Observatori Politico who sent him the list of P2 and other Freemason members in the Vatican, was shot to death through the mouth, Mafia fashion, on the streets of Rome a few weeks later. You can’t explain that in terms of one big conspiracy, there are obviously interlocking and feuding conspiracies – the Mafia, P2, the Freemasons, the Bulgarian secret police, the CIA, and God knows who else.
Licio Gelli, the grandmaster of the P2 Lodge, was on the payroll of the CIA and the KGB. He was that kind of operator. He disappeared from Italy, which shows how many friends he had in the police. He showed up in Switzerland a few months later to take some money out of a bank account, and he was recognized and arrested. The Swiss put him in a maximum security prison but he was out within two days. One guard claimed he was hypnotized. The fascinating thing is that if you look at pictures of Reagan’s second inaugural, you’ll see Licio Gelli right next to Reagan.
Most of this information can be found in two books, In God’s Name by David Yallop, and In Banks We Trust by Penny Lernoux, which explains how the whole international banking system interlinks with the heroin and cocaine laundering business that the Vatican has been running.

DARE
Are you saying the Pope is a drug dealer?

WILSON
The biggest drug laundromat ever busted in this country was the World Finance Corporation in Miami. The president and several other senior executives were convicted. Two directors of the bank were allegedly former CIA agents, but the prosecutors were blocked in Washington when they tried to investigate the connections between the bank and the CIA.
In any case, the WFC had all this money going into it from South American countries that are in the cocaine business, and they sent it to the CIS Alpine Bank in the Bahamas, which is owned by Archbishop Marcinkus who runs the Vatican Bank, which is where the money ended up. After that it’s in a black hole, it disappears from human vision forever, most likely ending up in Swiss bank accounts. The profits from this go towards keeping those dictators in power, maintaining the secret police and the death squads.
After the second world war, Liccio Gelli was shrewd enough to start an escape route for Nazi war criminals, getting them to South America for a fee, giving them new identities, and complete cover. He kept in touch with them as they found jobs as organizers of the death squads, doing the same sort of things they did in the ’40s, only now they’re doing it for Ronald Reagan and the money is going into the Vatican Bank. Obviously you can’t run a church on just Hail Marys.
The only reason cocaine is illegal is because there’s so much money to be made out of it while it’s illegal. If it were legal, the prices would go way down.

DARE
So Nancy Reagan’s whole JUST SAY NO campaign is just a ploy to keep the prices up?

WILSON
Or sheer stupidity. There’s so much money in the cocaine business that a lot of Latin American governments depend on it for their survival. The CIA has been in the cocaine business for 20 or 30 years now, and it’s very useful for them to keep it illegal. That way they can use it as a form of currency that doesn’t leave any records. When you hear about big cocaine busts, those are just renegades, the entrepreneurs who were trying to work outside of the system.

DARE
You’ve painted a rather bleak picture of a conspiratorial world. Are there any positive actions we can take to change things?

WILSON
In my books, I’m trying to show people how to free their own minds. I think that’s the first step. People have got to become less mechanical and more aware. My books are all constructed as mindfucks, to get the readers to open their brains up, receive new signals, and come out of their conditioned patterns of thought and perceptions.
There are a lot of Utopian ideas in my books that I don’t think are impractical at all. I call them Utopian because they’re beyond anything the human race has achieved in the past, but we’re moving incredibly fast. I think there are changes right ahead of us that are even bigger than the industrial revolution. The human life span will be doubled by the year 2000 and quadrupled by 2010. One man flew the Atlantic in 1928, 200 million flew the Atlantic in 1978. Taking that fifty year time span as a model, people started going into space in the 1960s so by 2010 we should have 200 million going into space every year.

DARE
Are there any existing political systems you admire?

WILSON
Scandinavian socialism. I found the Scandinavians to be about the most admirable people in Europe – clean streets, a low crime rate, a general air of high civilization – luxuries for all and a total absence of slums, poverty, and ugliness. They seem very happy and productive, with one of the most way out futurist movements in the world. They’re the California of Europe.
I hate to sound like a Marxist, which I’m not, but the reason you haven’t heard about Scandinavian Socialism is because the media of this country is controlled by rich people who are scared shitless of socialism. They want Americans to think there’s only one type of socialism, Soviet Communism, which is the kind of place where dissident scientists get thrown in lunatic asylums, all of which is true. Americans are paranoid about Russians but Scandinavians regard them with amusement; they’re those backwards people who think that you can only have socialism by putting all the poets and painters in jail. The Scandinavians reward their poets and they don’t put anyone in jail for dissident political opinions.

DARE
Aren’t you scared of getting in trouble, of finally saying the one thing you shouldn’t have said?

WILSON
We’re all living in a world in which one cannot apply one’s highest ideals without getting into a lot of trouble. I’ve gotten in trouble, but I haven’t gone to jail, which shows I may have more common sense than Tim Leary. I certainly don’t claim to be more intelligent than him. He’s the most intelligent human being I’ve ever encountered.

DARE
Do you share his conclusions about LSD?

WILSON
LSD breaks up habitual circuits of the brain. It opens new circuits, breaks down old circuits, and there’s no evidence whatsoever that it destroys brain cells. LSD is very much a metaprogramming device, it changes the basic programs, that’s why it’s dangerous. It creates acute paranoid states in bureaucrats who’ve never used it.
To get the best out of it needs a scientific or religious approach, one or the other. People who are just tripping for the fun of it are more likely to imprint a whole new reality tunnel or personality on themselves that they weren’t looking for. If you’re going to do LSD, you should decide the changes you’re aiming at and structure the trip to lead to that kind of change.
There’s no doubt that you can change every part of your personality with LSD, that’s why Leary calls it a re-imprinting drug. It changes basic imprints which are much more rigid than conditioning. There’s no doubt that I am a different person than I am before I took it.
I was a statistical materialist before I started experimenting with LSD, that is I didn’t believe the laws of the universe were absolutely deterministic because I knew enough quantum mechanics to know that it broke them down. But I was still a statistical materialist, everything could be explained by the accidental permutations of little hunks of energy that solidify into matter. I was perfectly satisfied with that explanation of the universe, and I never realized that I was as dogmatic about it as any Catholic was about their faith. After LSD impacted on me, I became a total agnostic, and I’m not dogmatic about anything anymore. I know that every system I make up is my own brain making up a system. None of the systems is big enough to include the whole universe, so all of my beliefs are only relatively true. Some are undoubtedly wrong because I’m not that brilliant that I never make a mistake.
There are a lot of people who don’t realize how conceited they are. By asserting with such certitude the things they believe in, they don’t realize that they’re saying “I’m the smartest person in the world, I can answer all the questions.” People like Carl Sagan. I just don’t know how he can be so sure of everything when, by and large, the more intelligent you get, the more you realize you can’t be sure of anything.

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DARE
Since Newtonian physics don’t apply to sub-atomic particles, how can you apply logic on the quantum level to objective reality?

WILSON
There’s a lot of disagreement among quantum physicists on that subject, but I am very interested in, and almost believe, the school that includes David Bohm, who was driven out of the United States during the McCarthy era, and considered the most brilliant pupil of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
There is a non-locality principal in quantum mechanics, which means that things are correlated even if they’re not connected mechanically or by energy transmissions. Up until this was discovered, everything in physics could be explained by energy transfers. You hear me because sound waves move from my voice to your ear, and so on.
Then they discovered that there were things that were moving in harmony with each other, and that there was no way that energy could be getting between them. Energy can’t move faster than speed of light, and yet these actions were instantaneously correlated. There are several approaches towards understanding non-locality, but, as Schroedinger put it, the sum total of all minds is one. The appearance of separate egos is only a hallucination, like that of the flatness of the earth or the movement of the sun around the earth. These ideas have all been corrected, and the idea that we’re different from the animals has created mass hysteria. The appearance of separate egos is a hallucination. We are all facets of one mind.

DARE
But it’s a necessary hallucination. You can’t play chess with yourself.

WILSON
It’s necessary for the game on this planet that every organism have a sense of self and a sense of the hive, the pack, it’s us against the rest of them out there. Antland Uber Alles is the song the ants sing in T.H. White’s Merlin stories, and every gene pool has that basic philosophy, just as every individual has it’s “self”. You can go through consciousness alterations by means of yoga, certain types of shamanic magic, and various drugs that teach you how to identify with the gene pool instead of your private ego. You can get beyond that and identify with the whole biosphere.

DARE
Can you actually affect your own genetic structure so that these structural changes can be passed on to other generations?

WILSON
I tend to believe in Sheldrake’s morpho-genetic field, in which he proposes that there’s a non-local connection in biology too. Biologists are denouncing him as a nut and a heretic. Though the first two experiments to check Sheldrake have tended to very strongly support him, they’ve been ruthlessly criticized.
It makes sense that if you’ve got non-local connections in physics that you could have them in biology too. Freud and Jung and Leary have all tried to account for racial memory or our ability to remember past lives. They’ve had to posit that somehow genes are carrying information from one organism to it’s descendants, but this part of modern psychology has always been rejected by biologists because there’s lots of evidence that genes can’t do that. Freud had racial memory, Jung had the collective unconscious, Leary has the neuro-genetic circuit, but there’s no way any of it can work mechanically, and that’s why biologists reject it. The only way it can work is with Sheldrake’s non-local morpho-genetic field, which, if it exists, would let me send signals that will be able to effect the genes of future generations, and not just those directly descended from me. I can control the direction of evolution through thought forms I’m putting out, and so can everybody else.
People can’t stay in their old reality tunnels any longer, they’ve got to start accelerating their brain activity. Very specifically, a world full of Islamic fundamentalists, Protestant fundamentalists, dogmatic Marxists, and Reaganite chauvinist Americans is moving us closer and closer to World War III, and the only thing that’s going to head that off is if people stop being Midwestern Methodist bankers or Shuto computer executives or Muslim heroin smugglers and develop a bigger identity. They’ve got to get out of these narrow little trips. Buckminster Fuller used to say that one of the consequences of the traditional game is nationalism. Planet earth is a spaceship with 150 independent and sovereign admirals all steering in different directions.

DARE
What is the next stage in evolution?

WILSON
The model I use is adapted from Leary. The oral-bio-survival circuit is what the amoebas operate on – taste everything. Babies operate on that too. That’s the circuit we go back to whenever we’re in danger, and depending on what we imprinted there, we will either attack or run away.
Then there’s Freud’s anal circuit, which has to do with claiming territory and status within it. That’s when we go through the mammalian rituals concerning who runs the family, outsmarting our brothers and sisters and trying to run the whole show, imprinting our domination and submission reflexes. It’s why people can hold jobs; their boss becomes a father substitute and they attach all their reflexes to him.
Next there’s the rational circuit in which we do our abstract reasoning with words and mathematics, and the socio-sexual circuit where we imprint the pattern of how we relate to people; with what degree of amity or sexuality. Everybody has a different imprint, and society has only one general set of rules, so everybody is a heretic as far as that circuit is concerned. Those four circuits are the natural child, the adoptive child, the adult, and the parent in Berne’s system.
Beyond that is the neuro-somatic circuit, where, through yoga or drugs or body work like Rolfing, one gimmick or another, you are able to turn on to your own body in a new way, and instead of just reacting to the conditioned and imprinted programs on the first four circuits, you are able to relax and go with the flow and enjoy life.
The sixth circuit is the neuro-genetic circuit, which has to do with morpho-genetic resonances, coming in contact with the experience and religious symbols of your ancestors, learning that they’ve been controlling you below the level of consciousness all your life. This is what Shamanism traditionally deals with. Jungian psychology was the first attempt to deal with it scientifically, now we’ve got dozens of others trying to bring people into harmony with archetypes of the collective unconscious or genetic heritage.
The next is the metaprogramming circuit, which is learning how the brain can work on the brain, how you can imprint different identities and reality tunnels as you go along. Before you get to that circuit, you have no idea what true freedom really is, you’re being manipulated all the time whether you know it or not. It’s the circuit where you develop true choice.

DARE
How do you get there?

WILSON
If you do a lot of work on the 5th and 6th circuits, the 7th tends to click on. First you get a lot of synchronicities, meaningful coincidences, accidental reinforcement from your environment, like someone coming by to loan you a book that’s exactly the one you were looking for. Jung found that his patient’s dreams had more and more symbols out of Greek and Egyptian and Hindu mythology as they progressed into that circuit, even without studying them consciously. They pulled them out of the collective unconscious, which I think is actually the morphogenetic field.
Above that there’s the non-local quantum circuit, which is the circuit in which we get true out of body experiences, cosmic identification with the whole of existence.
We’re learning so much about the latter four circuits, which Leary calls the extraterrestrial circuits, that we’re moving into a new stage of evolution. More people are on the fifth circuit than ever before in history, and there are growing sixth and seventh circuit minorities. It’s not an accident. We’re changing just as we have to change. These circuits were there, ready to be used, when we got to this point in evolution. Earlier, mankind could just coast along on the first four circuits, and only visionaries and mystics and poets ever turned on the higher circuits. Now everyone does it.

DARE
How to you teach people to turn on their higher circuits?

WILSON
You’ve got to teach with humor to make the pill palatable. Besides, humor is the essence of realizing our true situation in space and time. We are these tiny fallible beings crawling around on a relatively small planet, and anybody who pontificates dogmatically about anything is giving evidence that they are an idiot, even if you agree with them. They shouldn’t sound that certain. We think we’re so damn smart and we know so fucking little.

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Posted in Interviews

Notes from the Pop Underground

Posted on January 1, 1985 | 1 comment

Interview from Notes from the Pop Underground
edited by Peter Belsito, 1985

How would you describe yourself politically and how did you become that way?

RAW: I was born in Brooklyn in 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression. Until World War II, my father was several times unemployed and my childhood memories are of poverty and anxiety. I think this marked me permanently; although my temperament is individualistic in the extreme, I’ve always been a Left Libertarian rather than a Right Libertarian. I loathe Marxism because it is a religion and I detest religions and dogmas, but I find nothing pernicious in democratic socialism, even though I would prefer a syndicalist or anarchist or guild socialist system. If I were forced to choose between democratic Fabian socialism and capitalism (which thank Gott I am not) I would choose the democratic socialist system.

Why do you detest religions so much? Has that loathing led to anything particular about your style of writing?

RAW: I was educated in grammar school by nuns, who filled me with religious horror stories. I think this led directly to (a) my loathing for all religions and (b) my emphasis on horror in my fiction. I think I use horror, not to scare the reader (like Stephen King, for instance) but to transcend horror, by resolving it into satire and crazy humor. My books are never simply journeys into terror but journeys beyond terror, back to sunlight, a good laugh, and renewed optimism. To say it otherwise, I cannot leave the horrors out because they were imprinted on me when I was so young, but I am always looking beyond them. I agree with Sean O’Casey’s great line, “Life contains terrible things but life itself is not terrible.”

How much influence did your parents have on your development as a writer?

RAW: Parental influence? My mother was off her head part of the time during my childhood and I was what is now called a battered child. She gradually recovered after World War II came along and my father became full-time employed at a good salary again, but angry women still make me more nervous than angry men. I always feel I can handle an angry man, but I want to leave the room when a woman starts shrieking. This is probably why, although sympathetic to Feminism, I flee the scene when a Women’s Libber approaches. What about your father’s influence?

RAW: My father’s principle influence on me was saying many, many times, “Ah, God, the union is not what it used to be, but I’d never do without it. When there were no unions, the working man didn’t have a chance, not a chance, he got screwed every way.”

What were your primary interests as a teenager?

RAW: Teenage interests? My main interest was in getting laid, and I was not successful until I got out of my teens, partly because that was in the 1950s and partly because I was still myself recovering from Roman Catholic brainwashing.

When and how did you become interested in scientific theory?

RAW: As soon as motion was autarchic, I got out of the Catholic Church (aged fourteen) and majored in sciences, at Brooklyn Tech and later Brooklyn Polytech. Although I have worked mostly as an editor until age forty and have been a full-time freelance writer since then, I remain fascinated by the hard sciences and especially by Futurism–the attempt to forecast future technology and its effects on social behavior. Everything I write, whether published as fiction or not, is in a sense Science Fiction, an attempt to imagine vividly what science is doing and will be doing to our lives, our minds, our relationships.  I feel that this is the most interesting field for a writer today, just as theology was for Dante circa 1300. We are living willy-nilly in a world science has made, and I keep trying to understand science better so I can understand that world better.

What did your parents think of your leaving the church?

RAW: My parents never objected to my leaving the RC Church; they were fairly lapsed Catholics themselves and sent me to a Catholic school only because they thought “it was good for chiddren.” [sic] What were your literary influences as an adolescent?

RAW: Major intellectual influences on my adolescence were Darwin, H.L. Mencken, Frazer’s Golden Bough, Clarence Darrow, Tom Paine, and Marx and Trotsky for a short while only.

What have been the continuing influences in your life?

RAW: Major continuing influences on my thought: Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics, R. Buckminster Fuller, and quantum mechanics, all of which impacted on me in my early twenties and continue to mold my way of seeing the world. Timothy Leary has been a major influence almost as long, since 1964. Much of what you write in your books seems to make light of culture and history. With that in mind what do you think the future will be like?

RAW: Although a lot of the ideas in my books are jokes, satires, provocations etc., I am serious about the idea that history is accelerating and I do expect more changes before 2000 A.D. than in ALL previous history. I think we will have life extension by then, and I think we will evade nuclear war but only at the cost of another major depression, more massive unemployment and some kind of gizmo close to world government or closer to world government than the present United Nations. That is, I think governments cannot borrow enough from the international banks to keep on Welfare the growing numbers of the unemployed, so the system will crack somewhere and a new system will emerge out of the chaos.

What is your association with the O.T.O., Golden Dawn and other occult orders?

RAW: Those are only two of the occult orders into which I have been initiated. For a while in the early ’70s I was going around to occult conventions the way some people go to every science-fiction con, and frequently members of one occult order would initiate the members of another order _en masse_. If I listed all my mystical titles, the catalog would be quite impressive (to those who are impressed by titles). Chiefly what I learned from all this hocus-pocus was that ritual can be a very effective method of brain-change or neurological reprogramming, but only if it contains a high element of symbolic drama and a certain carefully calculated shock. That is, the reason most church rituals accomplish nothing and are so bloody *dull* is that the drama and shock are missing. The real reason for the secrecy of occult orders (including the Freemasons) is that the drama and shock are most powerful if the candidate literally does not know what is about to happen next.

A true ritual, containing a neurological shock, can be as effective as many years of meditation or other yogic practices. Of course, it doesn’t always work; amateurs often botch their rituals and the effect then is like a syrupy Disney film that’s supposed to make you cry but just makes you squirm, or a comedy that doesn’t make you laugh, or a horror film that doesn’t scare you. But when a ritual is performed correctly, everybody feels the energy and knows they have entered a new level of reality.

The principal methods of altering consciousness are drugs, meditation, special breathing techniques like pranayama, and a heightening of shock or confusion. A good ritual creates that shock and confusion in which you begin to see with new clarity and hear what is being said. It opens you to experiences that your cultural conditioning has previously armored you against.

After a while, however, all ritual becomes vain repetition. There is no more to learn from it. I dropped out of all occult orders, with no hard feelings on any side, many years ago. My work on consciousness these days is involved only with meditation and yogic breathing. In my experience, those techniques never become repetitious or redundant. You learn more from them every year.

You had an article published in Science Digest in 1982 called “Mere Coincidence?”, which seemed to me to be stretching the limits of science to suit your own ends. At the same time, once I had read the article my interest in “coincidence” was so aroused that I began noticing several per day. Was your article on coincidence one of your jokes or do you defend this theory?

RAW: I’ve been studying this subject for over twenty years now, and still haven’t come to any final conclusions . . . except that it was worthy of further study. The basic question raised by synchronicities, or seeming synchronicities, is: how much of what we experience is created by our own minds? I think that is really the most important question in modern science. It is naive to think our minds are like typing paper and just register experience passively; this has been thoroughly refuted by cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis, perception experiments, and dozens of other bits of clinical data. We do create part, maybe a great deal, of our experience. On the other hand, those who claim we create all our experience are asking us to believe an astonishing doctrine and I see no reason to go that far. So, we create a great deal of our experience, not necessarily all (did you create the universe?), and the Big Question (or the Wig Question) is: how much are you creating right now? Every synchronicity is like a Zen koan, forcing you to ask that question again and think about it deeply.

Freud noticed strange coincidences happening in psychotherapy long before Jung, although he never called them synchronicities. The reason these coincidences make us feel uncanny, Freud said, is because they are isomorphic to things in our unconscious. That is, a coincidence gets our attention, and makes us feel eerie (and nowadays gets called a synchronicity) only if it corresponds to something our unconscious is “trying to tell us” and we are trying to repress. Jung’s theory is that such congruencies indicate a connection across space-time between our minds and other minds, and between mind and matter, this does not seem at all implausible to me. There are very similar ideas in quantum mechanics-non-local connections, they are called, which act as if space-time were unreal. Physicists such as Dr. David Bohm, Dr. E. H. Walker, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, Dr. Fritjof Capra, and many others, have written extensively about such non-local connections, which seem to be mathematically necessary if quantum mechanics is valid. The question still remains when you notice a coincidence that moves you: Is this case an example of that non-local connectedness in nature, or is this case just the result of chance and is the meaning all in your own head? I can’t answer that question, but I think it is worth investigating the subject more and thinking about it.

Someone pointed out to me that your current home (Sandycove, Dublin, Ireland) was also the home of James Joyce, whom you use as a character in Masks of the Illuminati. Why did you move to Ireland, and why Sandycove in particular?

RAW: I always said that if Ronald Reagan were elected President, I would get the hell out of the country. He was elected, so I got the hell out of the country. As W.C. Fields said, “You must take the bull by the tail and look the facts in the face.”

Of all the places in Europe I could have settled, I picked Sandycove on the Dublin shore, because of its associations with James Joyce, my favorite writer. He was as fascinated by synchronicities as I am. In Finnegans Wake, he calls it the “coincidance” – the dance of coincidences that make life possible. Coincidentally enough, he was born on the same day as my mother, February 2, 1882. Eamon de Valera, the most influential man in Irish politics in this century, was born on that day too: February 2, 1882. Is that enough coincidences to make a synchronicity?

Are you aware of the Church of the SubGenius? Do you think the Church of the SubGenius was somewhat based upon your writing?

RAW: There’s a rumor going around that the Head of the Church, Bob Dobbs, is really me under an assumed name. I don’t think I should dignify such wild and irresponsible stories by commenting on them at all; but it is true, you know, that if you say “There’s no prob with Bob” a thousand times you’ll get exactly the same effect as if you had said “Hare Krishna” or “Twas brillig and the slithey toves” a thousand times. Really. You get the same effect from fifty “Our Fathers” and twenty-five “Hail Marys,” too. It’s called boredom.

A while ago I got a record to review in the mail by a group from the Boston area called Magic Mose and His Royal Rockers, featuring Blind Sam. One of the songs on the record, titled “Dating a Witch Beats Dating a Nun,” had your name in it. Did you ever hear it? I think they mention Aleister Crowley, the Bavarian Illuminati and a few other occult figures in the same song.

RAW: Never heard of it, but I’m delighted that somebody has put my name in a song. There was also a group a few years ago, called the Bavarian Illuminati, who had a picture of me on the jacket of one of their records, along with Crowley and George Washington and somebody who looked like King Lear. (Maybe that was Nostradamus?)

How would you describe your style of writing?

RAW: I change my style and perspective from book to book, or even from paragraph to paragraph–as Joyce did–because I am engaged in what I call guerrilla ontology. What e.e. cummings said about Ezra Pound is true of me, also: “The damned sadist is trying to force his readers to THINK!” Ramming dogmas into the reader’s head until the reader starts regurgitating some of them out of his or her mouth-the kind of thing that is called teaching in schools, or conversion in religious cults–doesn’t interest me at all. I try to present a phalanx of urgently exciting puzzles and possibilities, and offer two or three ways of organizing them into a pattern. Or a dozen ways of organizing them, or two dozen. Then the readers can either start thinking for themselves, or be left with all these annoying puzzles to haunt them forever. One of the reviews that pleased me most was by Jay Kinney; he said my books were deliberately annoying. Well, they are – for people who hate to think and want somebody else to do their thinking for them, That’s not my job. Why the hell should I do anybody else’s thinking; when it’s hard work already to do my own thinking? Besides, those who really can’t or won’t think just have to look around – there are hundreds of Perfectly Enlightened Masters who will be glad to do their thinking for them. A Perfectly Enlightened Master is ideal, if you want to become a Perfectly Benighted Slave.

I have a few disciples, despite the fact that I keep telling them I don’t want no bloody disciples. Some of them in Providence, the Providence Random Assembly, have a letterhead that says “Purveyors of Doubt and Choice Since 1976.” I like that. That’s what my books are doing – purveying doubt and choice.

Of course, that’s only the philosophical reason for my style; the real, pragmatic, gut reason that I don’t reveal the final answers is that I haven’t found any final answers yet. Every time I think I have a final answer, I turn it over and find another annoying question underneath it.   I think this keeps me young, or at least curious. If I ever do find any final answers, however, I will gladly share them with the world, and they can elect me Pope or Ayatollah or whatever is fitting for a case like mine, but in the meanwhile all I’ve got to offer is–doubt and choice. As God said to Moses (at least in Illuminatus!), “Think for yourself, schmuck!”

Since Illuminatus! deals with anarchy, rock-‘n-‘roll, and youth culture, and predates Punk rock, do you think that your writing may have had an influence on the Punk scene?

RAW: I never thought of myself as an influence on Punk, but you may be right. I used to be an anarchist and a nihilist, but I had to drop out of that because the anarchists and nihilists had too many rules. I guess I’m still allied to anarchy and nihilism in that I don’t believe in any Authority that wants to tell me what’s true or false or what’s right or wrong; I want to decide for myself. In general – I could be wrong – I have the impression that there’s a lot of anger in Punk, and that’s not my bag at all. As some great philosopher of the ’60s said, “I used to be disgusted, but now I’m just amused.” When a nation of two hundred million allegedly sane people elects Ronald Reagan as President, the only choices are despair or just sitting down and laughing your head off. I prefer to sit down and laugh my head off. Why couldn’t they have picked the fat guy who played the police chief in Plan 9 From Outer Space? He’s just as funny as Reagan and maybe he can count past ten without taking his shoes off.

Is this idea Punk? My basic opinion, after more than fifty years on the planet, is that there is very little difference between wild primates in the jungle and the average domesticated primate in a large city. We are literally living on the Planet of the Apes. Once you realize that, there’s no point in being angry about it anymore. We’re in a zoo, and the biggest, ugliest, meanest baboons are always picked to lead the herd. If you look at the news and think that the incredible stupidities and brutalities you hear have been done by human beings (who are rational beings according to Aristotle) you can only despair or take to heroin, I guess. But if you realize these things are being done by primates–by apes dressed up in funny “customes” [sic], like chimps who drive motorcycles in circuses – then it all makes sense, and it’s quite astounding that the apes can handle the machinery and walk upright and so on. There have been damned few human beings; the human being is something that is evolving and about to happen, but has not happened yet.

Earlier you mentioned Futurism. The only Futurists that I’m aware of were the turn-of-the-century Italians who called their art movement Futurism. Could you explain further what you mean by Futurism?

RAW: Futurism, as I use the word, has nothing to do with the Italian art movement of 1909. Futurism, also called Future Studies or Futuremics, is a branch of sociology and social psychology that studies the effects of technology on society and attempts to project trajectories of where present trends are taking us. My Ph.D. was in psychology only because the university where I got it, Hawthorne, had no department of Futurism or Future Studies; my dissertation was pure Futurism actually. I’ve been studying that field since I was in high school, back in the 1940s. The books that opened me up were Manhood of Humanity and Science and Sanity, both by Alfred Korzybski, a mathematician who was obsessed with social problems. He had two great ideas, and a lot of others too of course, but his main ideas were, one, that information is increasing faster every generation, which leads to more and more rapid technological change, and two, that traditional education and religion both train us to assume certainty prematurely. That is, we are trained to be, or pretend to be, certain about things which just are not certain. The result of this, Korzybski said, is that the world is changing faster and faster, but our ideas aren’t changing and we are growing more and more disoriented. Now, a lot of people have noticed that since then, and many want to stop the acceleration of technology, but Korzybski thought this was impossible. He said language itself creates information–it I tell you a fact, and you tell me a fact, the very telling makes us suddenly discover a relationship between the two facts, which is a third fact. Korzybski also thought language creates a compulsion to communicate – people are in prisons, in fascist and Marxist states all over the world, because they just would not shut up, even when they knew talking would get them in trouble. In a sense, you could almost say Korzybski’s thesis was that we are transmitters created by language to spread information  around the world faster and faster. We can’t stop this, he said, so we have to adjust to it, and we can only adjust to it by changing our brains – by taking out all the rigid  reflexes that create false certainty, and by learning to think in a more flexible, agnostic way. Since this proposal goes directly against traditional education and religion, not to mention advertising and politics, it’s no surprise that few people have ever heard of Korzybski.

Another major Futurist who impacted on me in my youth was R. Buckminster Fuller. I first met him in 1954 and I interviewed him for Science Digest just shortly before his death in 1983. For over thirty years his ideas have been running around in my head, and meanwhile the world has changed rapidly, always in the ways Fuller had predicted. He has more successful predictions on record than any other Futurist. I believe in the argument of his last two books, Critical Path and Grunch of Giants, that we now have the technology and resources to abolish starvation and poverty world-wide and even to give everybody a living standard equal to that of the Rockefellers, and that the only thing preventing this is greed at the top level of society and stupidity at all levels. I think a lot of the rage and fury around these days-terrorism and revolution and coup d’etats and maybe even Punk in a way–is registering the fact that people, without knowing the specific facts about our planetary resources etc. are still able to intuit the general picture. They realize that most of the misery that’s going on is totally unnecessary and is not caused by lack of food to feed people or a lack of transportation to get the food delivered or any kind of real lack; it’s caused only by the greed and stupidity I just mentioned. Spaceship Earth, as Fuller called this planet, could now be a paradise, and instead the Giants (the multi-nationals and governments) are rapidly turning it into a hell. The world situation today is quite like two gangs of lunatics who are fighting and trying to murder each other over possession of a glass of water, in the middle of a rainstorm. To continue the metaphor, if they came out of their hypnotic hate state for even a second, they would wake up and notice that there is enough water falling for everybody to take thousands of gallons of it.

The big question in Future Studies is: will the peoples of the world wake up and see the rainstorm, the potential technological abundance around them, or will they remain fixated on the tiny glass of water (the visible energy) they started fighting over 6,000 years ago? Can they look critically, even momentarily, at their false dogmatic certainties, and see the statistical possibilities and probabilities? All the rage and alienation around us these days is caused by the hopeless feeling that the stupidities and brutalities on the news (every night will continue until they blow us away entirely. Future Studies gives one more hope, eventually, because the pattern emerging does show that information is getting around faster everywhere, so there must be some mental activity occurring behind the melodramatic facade of the two gangs of rival apes throwing sticks and stones at each other.

Gurdjieff said, “Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?” What he meant by the metaphor of sleeping is what I mean when I say there are many more apes among us than there are human beings. Most people are still controlled by the mammalian emotional-territorial circuits in the old back-brain. I think as the planetary emergency worsens, we as a species will mutate and begin to use the more human frontal lobe circuits. We are being drenched in information and information itself excites and provokes thought. It is even possible that by 1987 something remotely like the idea or a thought might penetrate even the skull of a clergyman or a high school principle.

Other Futurists who’ve influenced me include Marshall McLuhan, Alvin Toffler and Timothy Leary. McLuhan stressed how communication media create the tunnel-reality we perceive, and showed that the information explosion is accelerating even faster than Korzybski realized.  Toffler points out that every major social change has happened, on the average, ten times faster than the major change before it. Leary keeps insisting, correctly I think, that if we survive until 2000 A.D., we will have a lot more space and time than humans ever had before – that is, space colonization and life extension are coming much faster than most people realize.

Nietzsche is a major influence, too. Every year I see more meaning in his famous lines, “What is Man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman – a bridge over an abyss.” The possibility of superhumanity is quite real now: we can live thousands of years, and roam among the stars, and become smarter as a species than we have ever been. But the abyss is quite real, too: we can use our technology and our old ape-psychology of territorial squabling to blow this planet right out of space-time. Despite the evening news, I am an optimist. I think intelligence of the species is greater than the intelligence of the individual; and the intelligence of the earth itself, the living biosphere, is greater than that of any species; and there are hierarchies of intelligence quite invisible to those who think that the abominations of politics are the important things happening on this planet.

(posted across UseNet by Dan Clore)

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A New Writer: F.W. Nietzsche

Posted on October 1, 1984 | Comments Off on A New Writer: F.W. Nietzsche

A New Writer: F.W. Nietzsche

by Robert Anton Wilson

from New Libertarian, October 1984

Borges has a story about an early 20th Century French writer who, by a tremendous effort of concentration, managed to re-create a few chapters of Don Quixote. These hard-won pages of Renaissance Spanish irony, Borges points out, are in all respects identical with the same pages in Cervantes’ original, but are much richer and more complex, simply because we know they are the work of a French intellectual contemporary with Freud and Lenin and Einstein.

Of course, we might – almost – be able to find the same meanings in Cervantes himself (since his text is identical with that of Borges’ imaginary Frenchman). But we could only do this and see Cervantes in that perspective if we first managed to brainwash ourselves and forget everything we know about Cervantes himself and the times in which he lived.

I have recently been trying to recreate Nietzsche in that way. Less heroic, or less demented, than Borges’ hero, I haven’t actually tried to clone chapters or even pages from the original German text, but just to read Nietzsche again as if I had never read him before, and as if he had lived my life along with me and was, in some sense, my psychological twin brother.

I see, from this perspective, that Nietzsche was very heavily influenced by the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s and also has read a great deal of Logical Positivism, General Semantics, Ethnomethodology and Sociobiology. He is, in fact, one of the best educated and most scientifically hip writers of the 1980s. I am also happy to note that he is a Discordian and a neo-pagan, just like me.

Thus, Nietzsche’s concept of Chaos makes perfect sense to me, as the natural conclusion of anybody who has experimented with LSD and also kept up with recent sociology and anthropology. Those who read Nietzsche before the 1980s, not understanding his warning that he would be born posthumously, could not comprehend this aspect of his philosophy. Chaos sounded nihilistic to them, and they did not understand how he could accept Chaos in one breath and denounce nihilism in the next; naturally, they accused him of being self-contradictory.

Actually, it is quite clear, now, that what Nietzsche meant by Chaos was not entropy – as if he believed the universe had already reached its theoretical Heat Death – but rather the infinite diversity of existence. There is not one principle that can explain this infinite diversity, he held, for the same reason that there is no Platonic Form or Kantian ding an sich behind it all. It is too rich and abundant to be nailed down under a formula. Becoming is real, but being is only a grammatical convention created by the subject-predicate structure of Indo-European languages. This is a much more elegant expression, I think, than Heidegger’s “existence precedes essence.”

Nietzsche’s analysis of the Will to Power shows equal semantic sophistication and neurological knowhow. The Will to Power is not the first principle of the world, he says specifically; “first principles” are just attenuated forms of “God” or Platonic idealism. The Will is not even a thing in the vernacular sense or in the Kantian ding an sich sense; the Will is just a description. When analyzed, he points out, it always resolves into the resultant of various other forces, and we are back to Chaos again – the evolutionary becoming which replaces all static Aristotelian categories in Nietzsche’s post-Darwinian universe.

When one transcends conditioned social-game consciousness and internalized grammatical conventions – whether with LSD or via meditation and yoga, or by whatever method – one experiences the dissolution of “real space,” “real time,” and “real bodies” “moving” in this “real space and real time,” etc. The Buddhists seem to be pretty hip in saying that if you regard what remains as One (the Hindic Atman, etc.), you have not gone far enough. If you go far enough, they say, you will see that the One also implodes, and only Void remains. That is all good enough, for c.400 B.C., but the void never seemed quite the right metaphor to me. I think Nietzsche is more contemporary by saying that what remains is Chaos, infinite meaning in infinite flux, and Will to Power, the spirit of abundance and creativity, which is not One, not a final principle or a God-in-disguise, but just the resultant of the forces that make up the mesh of Chaos.

The existentialists know that we create ourselves, but Nietzsche knows, like the sages of the Consciousness Movement, that we create our world, too. (“We are all better artists than we realize,” as he phrases it in one place.) The Will to Power, either functioning unconsciously [when we still believe in “real space,” “real time,” and “real objects”] or else functioning consciously [when we have experienced Chaos and learned that space, time and objects are just mind-constructs] always determines what reality-tunnel we are living in. The artist is Nietzsche’s model of the conscious Will to Power because he or she knows that he or she creates an appearance, an illusion, an ordering of the infinite flux. It almost sounds as if Nietzsche has been reading Don Juan (or Carlos Castaneda; or Harold Garfinkle, who was Castaneda’s sociology teacher and the possible original of Don Juan.)

Chaos, then, is Nietzsche’s poetic shorthand for the recognition that the universe is infinite Becoming rather than static Being; and the Will to Power is the resultant of all forces tending to creativity, innovation and the sheer joy of imposing one’s own meaning on this universal flux. Thus, Nietzsche’s notorious “I could only believe in a god who dances” and his attacks on “the spirit of gravity” are both expressions of the fundamental insight that we can not only survive the Death of God (the Absolute) but enjoy it. The existentialist experiences the collapse of the absolute, shudders, decides the universe is meaningless, and determines to be brave and impose a meaning on life anyway. Nietzsche experiences the collapse, laughs joyously, decides the universe contains all possible meanings, and tells us to pick the meaning that will liberate our own Will to Power most totally.

In a sense, the existentialists’ nihilism (no meaning) and Nietzsche’s Chaos (all possible meanings) are logically similar; and both are heavily influenced by the world of scientific materialism out of which they grew. But Nietzsche and the existentialists are at opposite poles psycho-logically. You can see it in their styles. The existentialists whine, mutter and complain. Nietzsche laughs, jokes, flashes with wit and capers like a clown.

It is this Nietzschean humor (especially his sarcasm) that contains his ultimate “message.” The famous, or infamous, Nietzschean “style,” the vertigo of brilliant aphorisms and almost childish puns, is not at all a surface or an accident. The aim of his work, he tells us several times, is to destroy the rationalization of the Revenge motive, to lay bare every hidden resentment in every philosophy that provides justifications for intolerance and hatred. His bitter (but hilarious) onslaughts on dogmatic Christianity and Socialism are not just attacks on one specific religion and one specific political party, but are analytical paradigms showing how the Revenge motive can disguise itself as altruism, charity, humanitarianism and even as progress. To understand Nietzsche’s wit, his habit of sarcasm, is to understand the essence of his system of psychology. We are released from Revenge, he obviously feels, only when we see deeply enough into its disguises to laugh at them. A style that dances and plays with ideas is the only style to convey that perspective, the view (as Nietzsche said) from the mountaintops, looking down at human passions.

To live in the Nietzschean multi-varied universe, to pick one’s own values out of infinite possibilities, seems like painful choice to the existentialist, blasphemy to the Christian, monstrosity to the Objectivist; but it is actually only to become consciously an artist. All art begins with Chaos, with infinite vistas suddenly opening, and proceeds through play and permutation into new Creativity (the sublimated Will to Power, Nietzsche calls it) – going from the ridiculous to the sublime, as it were.

Or as Nietzsche sums it up in one lightning-like sentence, “One must have Chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”

The Overman (who has nothing in common with the Nazi vulgarization of Nietzsche) is he or she who contains enough Chaos to give birth to stars. Less poetically, it is he or she who, having reached the mountaintop and looked down at primate psychology, neither weeps nor despairs but laughs. Again, there is no understanding Nietzsche without accepting his humor as fundamental. H.L. Mencken, often regarded as another vulgarizer of Nietzsche by Certain Authorities in Academia, may have understood the ultimate Nietzsche best of all. Mencken, at least, also wrote very funny books; whereas those who write more “profoundly” about Nietzsche while still possessed by that spirit of gravity he despised, seems not to have understood him at all. —RAW

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The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy

Posted on March 18, 1984 | Comments Off on The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy

goldenhorde-chocolate-irl-fc-lp

The Chocolate-Biscuit Conspiracy with The Golden Horde, 1984

Side one:

1. The Chocolate Biscuit The song that has become the anthem for a dedicated new generation. “In my innyr myndes eye, I have seen Tim Leary jam with The Archives” – GuruWeirdbrain

2. Young and Happy  Here because we love it, and we love you too ……

3. Communist for the F.B.I. The song that started it all. The first ever written by The Horde for Bob, on which they spontaneously create together, a maelstrom of aural conceptual and experiential (not to say conspiratorial) uniqueness.

Side two:

4. Little U.F.O.  At last, the truth about flying saucers! surf music lives, as Bob explains.

5. Black Flag  Bob’s lyrics, written for The American Medical Associations’ final gig at Ingolstadt with The Horde attacking the listener with a virtual sonic assault!!

6. Lawrence Talbot Suite  Lon Chaney Jr, The Easter Bunny, The primeval sleeve note, red curtain, the stings, a crush-can dominates a scowling buddha.

 

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My Debt to H. P. Lovecraft

Posted on April 1, 1983 | 1 comment

My Debt to H. P. Lovecraft

By Robert Anton Wilson

 Crypt of Cthulhu #12, Vol. 2, No 4, Eastertide, 1983

The influence of H. P. Lovecraft on my fiction is rather obvious –­ mostly because I never tried to hide it. HPL appears in person as a char­acter in The Golden Apple. Some of his Old Ones pop up in that book and in Leviathan and Masks of the Illumi­nati. The last-named book is written in a variety of styles, because James Joyce is one of its major characters and it seemed artistically apt to pre­sent Joyce in Joyce’s own manner, changing “styles” and narrative voices rapidly as he did in Ulysses; but one of the voices is, of course, the typical Lovecraft narrator per­petually worried about what “name­less” or “blasphemous” secret is about to be revealed next. Even my autobiographical fragment, Cosmic Trigger, begins with a paragraph that is a deliberate parody of the standard Lovecraft opening.

More subtly, my typical structure – which I call guerilla ontology – is designed to keep the reader guessing about what is real and what isn’t. That derives partly from Borges, of course, and from Joyce, and from my classes in semantics and percep­tion psychology when I was in col­lege; but it all began when I was thir­teen and started reading HPL. The “classical” Lovecraft book-list, in which real works like The Golden Bough are cited side-by-side with the Necronomicon, is the germ out of which I devised the labyrinthine puzzles which have caused so many readers to ask me with painful sin­cerity, “Hey, really, how much of that stuff is a put-on?” My answer is always a deliberate ambiguity, since, unlike HPL, I am not satisfied to scare my readers, nor am I sat­isfied to make them laugh; I am trying to arouse their curiosity to a pitch that will intrigue them into such dan­gerous hobbies as undertaking origi­nal research and starting to think for themselves. I am didactic at heart, I guess.

The Lovecraft story, generally, is the gradual revelation, through a series of increasingly explicit hints, of some Horrible Secret that the world should never know. I use this form constantly, but never in the way HPL used it. Rather than building toward horror, I build toward both horror and humor, and I never cli­max on the Final Secret but on a further ambiguity. This reflects the difference in philosophy and temper­ament between HPL and me. He was a rationalist and materialist, so he naturally believed there was some final “explanation,” some ultimate truth. Since he specialized in hor­ror, it was always an ugly truth. I am, on the other hand, an agnostic and a “mystic” (of some sort) and I do not believe in any final truth. Like Nietzsche, I believe that behind every deceptive mask – is another deceptive mask. Nietzsche’s aphorism, “The true nature of things is a profound illusion” sums up my attitude better than any other single sentence I have ever read.

Like Colin Wilson (no relative, as far as I know), I am also tempera­mentally incapable of writing the typ­ical Lovecraft ending – the note of bleak cosmic despair that makes HPL strangely akin to mainline fic­tion of our day with its ever-defeated heroes and ever-hostile universe. I use Lovecraftian horror because I think it is an aspect of the truth, a poetic mythos that says something real about our predicament as mammals aware of our own fragility and mortality. I cannot restrict my­self to that horrible perspective, be­cause I think it is only one aspect of many. Again I echo Nietzsche in seeing us as midway between the primate and something beyond all previous nature. As a veteran acid-tripper in the ’60s, I have seen the Ultimate Horror, but I have also seen beyond that to the Cosmic Joke and the Starchild and the Superman and the One Mind and a variety of other odd, amusing and educational per­spectives. Like a Tibetan mandala, my fiction shows both the Wrathful Demons a la HPL and the Protective Buddhas; more like a circus, it also shows the clowns and the heroes who walk the tightrope over the Abyss.

What annoys me most in HPL criticism is the constant reiteration of the same complaints about his style. At times, this moves me near to the despair of the history teacher, in chapter one of Aldous Huxley’sAntic Hay, who in correcting student essays on Nineteenth Century Italy finds each and every student has de­scribed Pope Leo XIII as a good­hearted man of low intelligence. That not one student has cared enough, or thought enough, to have a differing opinion – that each has simply regur­gitated an epigram from Lord Acton that the teacher quoted in class – ­drives the teacher to give up all hope of educating anyone. He retires from academia and becomes an inventor and seducer.

Lovecraft’s style is rather awful at times; but that is true of every writer whoever risked the conscious development of a personalized and highly unique  style. Hemingway sounds like a parody of himself as often as HPL does; Faulkner sounds like a parody of Faulkner at times; the same is true of Melville and Hen­ry James and Conrad and most of the classics. It seems to me that at its best HPL’s style does exactly what he invented it to do – it becomes the perfect medium for the kind of mythic effect he wanted to convey. I also suspect that where unconscious self-parody is “discovered” by critics one should be extremely wary. Ev­ery writer has moments of irony in which he engages in subtle self-parody; I am convinced that Heming­way did this, at times, with his eyes open, and I think HPL did it, too. His letters contain so much humor, and so many hidden jokes have been found in his stories, that I think it badly underestimates him to think that he was incapable of trying for a double effect, creating an emotion and simultaneously parodying the technique by which he does it.

Basically, I like Lovecraft and Olaf Stapledon better than any other writers in the areas of fantasy, sci­ence-fiction and “speculative fiction.” This is because I think HPL and Sta­pledon succeeded more thoroughly than anyone else in creating truly “inhuman” perspectives, artistically sustained and emotionally convinc­ing. That HPL makes the “inhuman” or the “cosmic” a frightening and depressing thing to encounter, while Stapledon makes it a source of mys­tic awe and artfully combined trage­dy-and-triumph, registers merely that they had different temperaments. Each succeeded in his own way; each managed to jump beyond humanity and see further than mere humanism. The “animal” perspectives in my books – the gorillas and dolphins in Eye in the Pyramid, the “six legged majority of Terrans” who comment so cynically upon the behavior of us “domesticated primates” in The Uni­verse Next Door – derive from eth­nology and sociobiology, of course, but they also derive from the “inhu­man” or “trans-human” perspectives I learned from HPL and Stapledon.

Ultimately, I think the value of a writer can be measured by how much he is merely expressing his own id­iosyncratic moods of joy or misery and how much he is expressing some­thing that is common to all humanity. I feel that HPL and Stapledon ex­pressed very powerfully a species-wide problem – our disorientation in space and time, consequent upon the Copernican and post-Copernican discoveries which revealed that the hu­man race is not the center of the universe and not the special darling of the gods. Few “mainstream” writers have tackled that intellectual and emotional shock as unflinchingly as did HPL and Stapledon. For that reason, I think many, perhaps most, “mainstream” writers are not ulti­mately serious. HPL, in his terrified way, and Stapledon, in his (guard­edly) optimistic way, were serious.

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Wilson on Farmer

Posted on September 1, 1981 | 1 comment

Wilson on Farmer

 from Heavy Metal, September, 1981

The Riverworld novels of Philip Jose Farmer – To Your Scattered Bodies Go; The Fabu­lous Riverboat, The Dark De­sign, and The Magic Labyrinth­ have a multitude of virtues. They boast as much smashing-­and-bashing melodrama as ten years’ worth of old Doc Savage magazines, they are full of odd and interesting bits of historical and anthropological knowledge, and they raise all the important questions of philosophy within the context of a hero’s quest that is both exciting and metaphysical. Best of all, taken to­gether they weigh just enough to make an ideal bludgeon to batter the head of the next per­son who tells you that science fiction is not serious literature.

The basic plot, or McGuffin (as Hitchcock would call it), is so simple that only a genius could conceive it. Everybody in these books has already lived and died on Earth; now they are mysteriously alive again on an­other planet, Riverworld, with no knowledge of how this “mira­cle” was achieved, or who did it, or why. The major char­acters include the materialistic Mark Twain, the agnostic Sir Richard Burton, the newly con­verted religious mystic Her­mann Goering (!), and the senti­mental Alice Liddell (yes, the same one who inspired Lewis Carroll). They all struggle desperately to make sense out of their inexplicable situation and to find a way to the North Pole of Riverworld, where the an­swer might be found. Along the way are feuds and battles and a gallery of other interesting characters (e.g., Tom Mix, Gil­gamesh, Jesus Christ), but Farmer’s greatest achievement, accomplished with brilliant understatement, is to make us gradua1ly realize that our own situation here on Earth is just as mysterious as anything on Riv­erworld, or that the answer to the enigmas of Riverworld might also be the explanation of the paradoxes of our own pecul­iar existence here and now. Once again, in a brilliant climax, Farmer demonstrates my pet theory that sf is the only serious literature around these days, because it is the only literature that grapples with the ultimate questions of who or what we are and how we got here.

One minor criticism: Farmer still seems to believe that all the great characters of modem fiction are descended from the Greystokes, even though I have demonstrated in several places that they are actua1ly descended from a peasant named Furbish Lousewart who got to Lady Greystoke while Lord Grey­stoke was off fighting in a cru­sade. A small historical error like that can be forgiven, how­ever, since the rest of the Riv­erworld epic is so rich and won­derfully wrought.

Farmer on Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) is the Kilgore Trout of the Quantum-Cum-Cthulhu uni­verses. A rereading of his books always turns up something you’d not apprehended the first time. Also, he’s very quotable, a true poet: that is, a master or testosterstoned mistress who (or which) is inspired by the muse, who sometimes looks like a moose and who dwells in the mews (labyrinthal or feline or both), a Krazy Kat bammedby the photonic Brick of Ignatz Mouse (read: Ignites Muse).

Though I’d heard much about the Illuminatus Trilology (which RAW wrote with Robert Shea), it wasn’t until five months ago that I read it. I was at once be­witched by this “paranoid” Gul­liver’s Travels. I also thought perhaps RAW had been some­what influenced by me – which was only fair since I was, in turn, being influenced by him in a helicoidal or helicoital feed­back. (But, as I and he maintain, every quantum that’s rubbed el­bows influences every other, though they’re twenty-three bil­lion light-years apart.)

Shea and RAW parted com­pany, though not quantum in­fluence, and RAW wrote The Cosmic Trigger, which unex­plained the trilogy. He then went on with Masks of the Il­luminati and Schrödinger’s Cat, a three-volume Allah’s in Won­derland. These books are vital for your health, though the recommendation carries more weight in this universe than in the one next door. Or is it vice versa?

RAW’s works, though he may not know it, are codes. Work them out, and you’ll know the secret of the universes. The codes are not sent by people/ things from Sirius. RAW is con­fused. The messages do come through the area of Sirius, but they are from a “place” a googol­plex of light-years and several universes beyond Sirius. Really? Not really. The source trans­ceiver is herein Peoria, but the bending of the medium caused by SMUT (Space-Matter-Uber­-Time) makes the codes come from way behind but along the line of sight of Sirius. (Dirty time is slower than clean time. And who dirtied it?)

I had a vision eight years ago. (Consider the octave and its temporality of significance.) The vision meant nothing until I read Schrödinger’s Cat. Then I realized what I thought it meant. And now RAW will translate for me the meaning of this vision (from Peoria round­about the line of sight of Sirius), and then I’ll translate his trans­lation for him. And so on. Feed­back.

Though Melville omitted it, Captain Ahab said, “In one sense, Aleister Crowley is lower than whale shit. In another, he’s as high as God’s hat. The true shaman knows that God’s hat is made out of dried whale shit.”

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