Neurological Relativism

Posted on March 1, 1978 | Comments Off on Neurological Relativism

Neurological Relativism

by Robert Anton Wilson

from New Libertarian, March 1978

In my previous two columns, I have presented the case for the ultimate skepticism (i.e. solipsism) as strongly as I could, indicated that it not only can be defended on rigidly logical grounds (cf. Hume, David, works of), but also that is seemingly confirmed empirically by the practice of silent-level meditation.

Of course, I am not a solipsist. Having fathered four children in this highly competitive society, I have had to confront the nitty-gritty gut-level reality of the iron laws of economics in a manner and with a persistancethat makes me as much of a believer in “external reality” as any Marxist or Objectivist could wish.

I have even been on Welfare twice in my 45 years, for over a year each time. (It is a most educational experience and every libertarian ought to go through it, just as every Marxist ought to have the experience of running a business and meeting a payroll.) Nobody who has gone through the rituals of social degregation involved in falling from Associate Editor of Playboy to Welfare “case” (Americanus nondesirabilis) can be a solipsist. To get off Welfare and become affluent again, as I have also done, is an even better cure for solipsism; if I hadn’t figured out some of the laws of that part of the “external world” known as publishing, I would still be on Welfare.

Nonetheless, my skepticism does verge very close to the solipsistic extreme, and Mr. John Walker had ample excuse to wonder, as he did in NLW 93, how somebody as close to solipsism as I am does manage to deal with the external, sensory-sensual, existential world at all.

The answer is the same as Godzilla gave on Saturday Night Live when Baba Wawa asked him, “How do you and Mrs. Godzilla do it?”

“Very carefully,” said Godzilla. And that’s how I deal with “reality.”

As the result of the yogic and alchemical disciplines I have practiced during the last 15 years, I know that the solipsist position is the minimal truth, i.e., that all we really know is a stream of sensation. The common sense hypothesis that there is an Ego (“me”) observing/experiencing this stream, are unprovable, but denying them seems to lead to worse confusion than (tentatively) accepting them.

But I also know that everything I think I know about the Ego (“me”) and the External World (“it”) is woefully little, and very misleading (more “untrue” than “true”) because it is such a microscopic fragment of what the total Me and the total Universe must be. Blake said, wisely, that “Every thing Capable of being Believed is an Image of the Truth;” but it is also true, as Blake no doubt realized, that Every thing Capable of being Believed is Self-Hypnosis.

It is emperically known to me, through neurological experiment, that every time I manage to change to focus of my nervous system, a new Me appears, and a new External Reality, and that these mingle in curious ways, and each grows steadily bigger, weirder, more mysterious and more humorous as my researches proceed.

Artemus Ward put it this way: “The trouble with most folks is not that they don’t know enough but that they know so much that ain’t true.” Or, in the more slashing style of Neitzsche’s soaring sarcasm, “We are all much greater artists than we realize.” Whatever we know of Me and The Universe through the filter of our nervous system is much more of a record of the structural functioning of the nervous system itself than it is of the enormous mysteries of the real Me and real Universe.

That is why Discordianism is such a jolly flavor of nihilism. There is joy ineffable in freedom from fixed ideas, even if those trapped in fixed ideas cannot imagine such a state and dread it “as the devil dreads holy water.” Since I am mildly puzzled all the time, I am continously curious and hence passionately involved. I deal with the world “very carefully” because I respect its mystery, whereas those who hold fixed ideas deal with the world (and each other) in blind and brutal ways that each of them can see how mad all the others are but none can see that his/her own fixed ideas are equally mad.

As Timothy Leary and I write in Neuropolitics (Peace Press, Los Angeles, 1977), “It is the function of the nervous system to focus, select, narrow down; to choose from an infinity of possibilities the biochemical imprints which determing the tactics and strategies of survival in one place, status in one tribe. The infant is genetically prepared to learn any language, master any skill, play any sex role; in a very short time, however, he becomes rigidly fixated to accept, follow and mimic the limited offerings of his social and cultural environment…

“Because we are all imprinted with our own social bubbles, it isn’t generally recognized that each reality map held by humans – however eccentric and paranoid – makes nearly as much sense as any other. People are vegetarians or nudists or Communists or snake worshippers for the same reasons that other people are Catholics or Republicans or liberals or Nazis.”

This neurological relativism is not incompatible with adopting a belief-system involving predictions, assumed regularities or “laws,” valuations and ethical judgements, etc. But one recognizes each belief system as a gamble, “my latest best guess,” and does not confuse it with Truth, Reality or any other variety of eternal verity. Each belief-system, or reality-tunnel, is temporary – one except to replace it with a better system, more inclusive, more flexible, more amusing and more precise, if not by next Tuedsay after lunch, certainly by the middle of next Winter.

All around one the True Believers trudge by, mouths grim, brows furrowed, ulcers and worse eating at their innards. This “desperate company of oddfellows” (Thoreau) live in what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” Because their reality-maps are, one and all, too small to cover the vast, eerie, amusing world in which we live, they are perpetually frustrated: the world does not live up to their fixed beliefs. They are all convinced that there is something radically wrong with the universe itself, or with the rest of humanity, and they never suspect that the real trouble is in their own rigid and robotic nervous systems.

Thus I “believe” in libertarianism, in strict scientific method (the objective yoga of the West), in yoga (the neuroscience of the East), in Space Migration, in Life Extension, and in dozens of other things. But I can suspend any of these beliefs at will, or all of them, and look impassively into the Buddhist void, or switch around to other beliefs temporarily, to check out how the world looks to those who hold those beliefs.

Yea, brethern and sistren, now abideth doubt, hope and charity; these three; and the greatest of these is doubt. For doubt puffeth not itself up into pomposity; doubt suffereth long, and is kind. With doubt all things are possible.

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The Relativity of ‘Reality’

Posted on January 1, 1978 | Comments Off on The Relativity of ‘Reality’

“The Relativity of ‘Reality’”

by Robert Anton Wilson

from Neurolog #4, 1978
reprinted in Email to the Universe

From the viewpoint of semantics, “reality” is a multi-ordinal concept, having different meanings on different levels of abstraction. On the lowest level of abstraction “reality” refers to immediate sensory consistency. “Is there really a kangaroo in that chair?” can be answered by obtaining the consensus of the group; or, if everybody is stoned, by bringing in some objective observers with objective instruments, etc. On the highest level of abstraction, “reality” refers to logical consistency with a body of established scientific fact and theory. “Is entropy real?” can be answered by consulting a reliable textbook on thermodynamics. Between the level of kangaroo and the level of entropy, there are many other levels of abstraction and, hence, many kinds of “reality.”

For instance, “Is the Gross National Product real?” is a question on a certain level of abstraction; and if equally intelligent people can, and do, argue about this it is because they are talking on different levels of abstraction and are not aware of the fact that there are different levels of abstraction and different kinds of “reality.”

This is the semantic relativity of “reality.”

2. Every tribe has its own “reality-map,” or worldview, or weltanschauung. What is “real” to the Eskimo is not what is “real” to the Zuni Indian or the Congolese or the Japanese Buddhist or the German businessman or the Russian commissar, etc. If you travel around the world with the naive assumption that everybody is living in the same “reality,” you will make numerous embarrassing mistakes, insult countless people unintentionally, make a splendid ass of yourself and generally contribute to the worldwide belief that tourists are a Curse of God sent to punish peole for their sins. To recognize that every culture, and sub-culture, has its own “reality” is the prerequisite of sophistication, tact, and true tolerance. Otherwise you come on like the Englishman who claimed all Chinese understand English if you just shout loud enough.

This is the anthropological, or cultural, relativism of “reality.”

3. Every nervous system creates its own “reality.” Out of the billions, or billions of billions, of energies intersecting the room in which you read this, your brain, performing 100,000,000 processes per minute (almost all of them unconscious to those circuits called the ego and recognized as “me”) arranges a few hundred or thousand into the Gestalt which you experience as the “reality” of the room. To demonstrate this, in my Exo-psychology classes, I will have the students describe the hall outside the lecture room; no two will describe exactly the same hall. Or, I will have everybody write down what they hear in the room during a minute of clock-time; no two lists of these sounds will be identical. A variety of chemicals introduced into the nervous system, or direct brain stimulation with electrical impulses, or yoga, etc., will create an entirely different neurological “reality” while you are still sitting in the “same” room.”

This is neurological relativism, or the relativity of perceived “reality.”

4. Two scientists moving at different accelerations can measure the same phenomenon with equally accurate instruments and obtain totally different readings of it extensions in the space and time dimensions. (Einstein, General Relativity.) On the quantum level, a variety of different philosophical reality-maps, or “models,” describe equally well both the experimental data and the mathematical equations that are known to “fit” the data. Any attempt to get around this by adding more sophisticated instruments leads to adding still more sophisticated instruments to monitor the first set, and so on, forever. (Von Neumann’s “catastrophe of the infinite regress.”)

This is physical Relativity, or the relativity of instrumental “reality.”

In conclusion, “reality” is a concept borrowed from the theologians who, being bankrupt, are in no position to loan anything to anybody. We would do better to restrict ourselves to questions that can be answered. Such questions will take the form, “At this date, with the knowledge presently possessed by humanity, which model best accords with the facts?” When it turns out, as it usually does these days, that several models work equally well, we might then ask: which models are most amusing? most optimistic? most worthy of our time and energy? most elegant and esthetic? And we can keep in mind, too, biologist JBS Haldane’s warning, “The universe may be not only stranger than we think, but stranger than we can think.”

———————————

Mr. Wilson is the author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, Cosmic Trigger, and diverse other works.

(submitted to rawilsonfans by RMJon23)

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Posted in Essays, Excerpts

Science Faction Shelf

Posted on November 1, 1977 | Comments Off on Science Faction Shelf

SCIENCE FACTION SHELF 

Exo-Psychology, By Timothy Leary, Peace Press, Los Angeles, 134 pp.; $7.
The Eighth Tower, By John A. Keel, Signet, New York, 1977, 250 pp., $1. 75.
Prolongevity, By Albert Rosenfeld, Knopf, New York, 1976; 250 pp., $8.95.
The Immortalist, By Alan Harrington, Celestial Arts, Millbrae, 1977, 313 pp., $5.95.

Reviewed By Robert Anton Wilson

from Science Fiction Review, No. 23, November, 1977

It is getting harder and harder to draw a line between science-fact – and science-fiction, because the im­plications of current science are often more staggering than anything published in Analog or Galaxyten years ago. The rate of acceleration of social-technological change is itself changing at an accelerating rate; Prof. Gerard O’Neill’s space-­city designs are already more Futur­istic than the Clarke-Kubrick space­ships in 2001.

Dr. Timothy Leary, typically, has accepted the interpenetration of science-fact and science-fiction cheerfully, as an inevitable develop­ment; he calls his new book, Exo-Psychology, “science-faction,” on the grounds that his facts come from science and his style or way of or­ganizing the facts is deliberately science-fiction in flavor.

Exo-Psychology is an astonishing performance even for the Most Contro­versial Man in America. It’s only 134 pages long, but it incorporates literally hundreds of bright new i­deas in psychology, neurology, eth­ology, astro-physics, genetics, soc­iology and dozens of other sciences, making it one of the most compressed, condensed, highly charged books I’ve ever seen. Attempting to summarize it is like attempting to summarize the Britannica; to review it is like reviewing 20th Century culture it­self.

Leary asserts that DNA was seed­ed on Earth (and on millions of oth­er planets) by Higher Intelligence. This does not mean “the police-court Jehovah” of monotheism; he says precisely. Higher Intelligencemight be (a) an advanced interstellar civi­lization, as suggested by Nobel gen­eticist Sir Francis Crick, the first to propose that DNA was seeded here; or (b) ourselves-in-the-future trav­eling backwards in time, as suggest­ed by physicists Jack Sarfatti and Saul Paul Sirag; or (c) sun-atomic consciousness, as suggested by phys­icist Evan Harris Walker.

Higher Intelligence, Leary pro­ceeds, designed the DNA to evolve, through metamorphoses and migration, into ever more complex and. more in­telligent forms. Evolution is not guided by “least possible effort and greatest possible blunder” (Neitzs­che’s caricature of Darwinism) but by a pre-programmed “brain” within the DNA tape-loop.

All living organisms, then, are survival-machines designed by DNA to transport itself about, reproduce itself and create more and better DNA. In short, we are, as geneticist Herbert Muller likes to say, “giant robots” programmed by DNA for its own purposes; we are “fragile, easi­ly replicable units,” Leary adds, because DNA can make myriads of dup­licates of us.

At each stage of development, each individual robot takes a new imprint in the ethological sense and thus mutates from one “tunnel-reality” to another. For instance, the emotional game-playing of the toddl­ing infant recapitulates mammalian territorial rituals, and the infant lives in a primate tunnel-reality at that stage. The school-child learn­ing to parrot lessons lives in a Paleolithic tunnel-reality. The adolescent gang recapitulates the barbarian horde (Attila, Genghis Khan, etc.) The domesticated adult lives in the tunnel-reality of his or her tribal guilt-virtue game.

No conditioning techniques, Leary insists, can permanently change such imprints. Skinner’s Behavior Mod works only so long as the conditioner has the victim more or less imprisoned and totally con­trols reward and punishment. Once the subject gets free of the condit­ioner, behavior drifts back to the biochemical circuits of the original imprint.

The only way to change an im­print, then, is to dissolve it chemically at the synaptic level. If anybody but yourself alters your im­prints this way, by chemical inter­vention in the nervous system, that person can totally brainwash you.

On the other hand, Leary says, if you can learn how to use neuro­chemicals for serial re-imprinting of your own nervous system, you grad­uate to a new level of evolution, which he calls 12, which means in­telligence-squared, or intelligence ­studying-intelligence, i.e. the nervous system studying and re-im­printing itself. You can then be­come as smart as you wish, as brave as you wish, as happy as you wish, as wise as you wish. This is a quantum jump above the robot-level at which animal life, and most of humanity, have functioned hitherto.

There is no end to this serial imprinting. “The more intelligent you become,” Leary says, “the more you see the advantage in becoming even more intelligent.”

The result of this self-metapro­gramming is that all the Utopias and Heavenly visions of our imagination can be achieved; we need only imprint these possibilities to make them neurologically real, and then we can begin making them physically real. “Since no one can allow the game to become bigger than Hir concept of the game (what is not imprinted is pot real to the primate brain) therefore let us define the game as large, fast, intense, precise as possible: Unlimited Space, Unlimited Time and Unlimited Intelligence to enjoy same.”

Leary’s summarizes this goal into the acronym, SMI2LE, which means Space Migration, Intelligence Squared, and Life Extension. After the neuro­psychology of imprinting is clarified, most of Exo-Psychology deals with the practicality of beginning this Triple Mutation immediately.

Albert Rosenfeld’s Prolongevity deals with 1/3 of Dr. Leary’s Triple Mutation program – Life Extension. Rosenfeld, who was science editor of Life for 11 years and is now science editor of Saturday Review, seems to have interviewed everybody engaged in Life Extension research in the United States – or, if not, he prob­ably didn’t miss more than a few of them. They all agree that a quantum jump in human lifespan is a very real possibility very soon.

There are degrees of optimism, of course; some speak of merely doubling human lifespan, adding an­other 70 years; others talk of ex­tending life into centuries or thou­sands of years; one chapter is de­voted to scientific Immortalists, who think we can conquer death entirely sooner or later.

Prolongevity (a title James Joyce would have loved) is sheer science-faction; the implications are staggering, but the sources are all reputable scientists, who have hard facts to back up their hopes.

Rosenfeld concludes with a 40­ page philosophical discussion titled “Shoud We Do It?” in which he dis­cusses the arguments against Life Extension and finds them all weak and short-sighted.

Longevity, to Rosenfeld, means “To have time to travel everywhere” – he neglects to note that this must eventually include Leary’s Un­limited Space – “and go back again and again to favorite places. To go on learning – new skills, new sports, new languages, new musical instruments… To read everything you want to read. To listen to all the music, to look at all the pic­tures, and even paint a few. To savor and re-savor experience and arrive, not at boredom but at new levels of appreciation…” (Serial re-imprinting, or I2.)

“There could arise a new breed of human being,” Rosenfeld says, “who, merely by virtue of longevity, through acquisition of a steadily maturing wisdom and a steadily ex­panding awareness, could finally be­come… a being worthy to be the trustee of our future evolution.”

Rosenfeld agrees with Leary that DNA has programmed us (all life-forms on this planet) to survive, repro­duce and die. He also suggests that, in creating humanity, DNA programmed a robot conscious enough to resent death and intelligent enough to do something about it eventually.

Leary and Rosenfeld could say, like Gurdjieff, “Our way is against God and against Nature” – except that they see DNA (the modern equivalent of what mystics meant by “God” and “Nature”) as programming this rebellion also. As a “self-develop­ing organism” (Gurdjieff’ s term), Humankind seems to have been pro­grammed with all the characteristics necessary to transcend the limita­tions of biological life as it has hitherto existed on this planet.

The ultimate, or a kind of ulti­mate, in this line of speculation is Alan Harrington’s The Immortalist, which may be as important as Das Kapital or The Origin of Species or The Golden Bough.Harrington, an old friend of Kerouac and Ginsberg and one of the original creators of the Beat Generation of the 1950s, has not mellowed out on Buddhism, tran­quilized himself with Transcendent­al Masturbation, or collapsed into paranoia and bitterness. Instead, he has become more revolutionary and more Utopian over the years. The Immortalist is one of those rare books that challenges you to re-think your basic philosophy about the uni­verse totally. It is the literary equivalent of finding a rattlesnake in your bedsheets; you can’t ignore it you have to take a stand and make a decision about it.

When Harrington last spoke in Berkeley, a few months ago, he was shouted down and booed off the stage in a demonstration of hooliganism that hasn’t been seen here since Al­an Watts was similarly mistreated by Left Fascists back in 1966. It is, of course, a tribute to both Watts and Harrington that they were not permitted to speak; this shows how powerful their ideas are, and how frightening such ideas are to cer­tain neophobes.

The Immortalist carries current life extension research and theory to the logical conclusion: Humanity, Harrington proposes, can and should ultimately conquer death.

“Death,” Harrington says, “is an imposition on the human race, and no longer acceptable.”

“Let us hire the scientists,” he says,’ “and spend the money, and hunt down death like an outlaw.”

Where Rosenfeld provides the, scientific evidence that longevity and eventual immortality are possi­ble, Harrington tackles the much heavier question of their desirabil­ity, and does not hesitate to damn and blast every organized ideology based on the acceptance of death.  Christianity has never received such a brilliant philosophical assault since the days of H. L. Mencken, and Buddhism and other, more intellect­ually fashionable religions are treated with no more tenderness. Those who love death, Harrington in­sists, have the right to die; but they have no right to tell those who love life that we have no moral ormetaphysical right to extend it in­definitely. He is quite willing to dance on their graves, but he is not going to let them persuade him to crawl into the grave next to them.

The Immortalist smashes more sacred cows, questions more “un­questionable” dogmas, assaults more prejudices, than any single book I have ever read. Gore Vidal has al­ready said, with some awe, “Mr. Har­rington may have written the most important book of our time.” I would go further: Alan Harrington has written the most important book of the millennium.

“Poor Allen Ginsberg,” Tim Leary said to me recently. “He lives in constant fear that the future is go­ing to be different from the past.” The same fate has overtaken most of the radicals of the 50’s and 60’s, who are now the most nostalgic and reactionary people around. Alan Harrington stands head and shoulders above all of them, looking bravely into the future while they day-dream wistfully of a dead and irrelevantpast.

“Let us now turn to the gentil­es,” as St. Thomas once wrote. John A. Keel’s The Eighth Tower is as ap­ocalyptical as the works of Leary,­ Rosenfeld or Harrington, but in an entirely different way. It is the UFO book in the “revisionist” trad­ition of Dr. Jacques Vallee, Dr. J. Alan Hynek and Brad Steiger; that is, it accepts UFOs as real and tangible, not hallucinatory, but it rejects the extra-terrestrial interpretation of these beasties offered by most pro­-UFO writers and almost all “Contac­tees.”

Keel, in an. earlier book, Our Haunted Planet, had attributed UFOs to a group he caned “Wings Over The World” (WOW), a hypothetical super-mensa frankly derived from H. G. Wells’ Things to Come. He has also called them “ultra-terrestri­als,” an inconveniently ambiguous term, or “the crew that never rests” (a phrase borrowed by Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Witchcraft.

WOW or the crew that never rests has been around since the beginning of history, Keel argues. Where skeptics ask, “Why haven’t they con­tacted us,” Keel asks instead, “Why the hell won’t they leave us alone?” They created all the miracles of the major religions and can manifest gods, demons, angels or UFOs as easily as a stage magician pulls rabbits from a hat. The Bavarian Illuminati, the Nine Unknown Men, the Ascended Masters, the Secret Chiefs, etc. are other routines this versatile magical theatre has used in its games with humanity.

Keel presents an enormous a­mount of evidence in only 200 pages, and he does not make comfortable reading. If you want to regard WOW as a single intelligence and call it “God,” Keel will go along with you on that metaphor, but he insists that you face the consequences. On the basis of its dealing with human­ity, he points out, it looks as if “God is a crackpot.”

The only other book I’ve seen that goes that far was called God Rides a Flying Saucer (author forgot­ten, alas) which concludes clinical­ly, on the basis of the same sort of evidence that Keel sifts through here, that “God” is a paranoid schizophrenic.

Keel Once admitted (in Our Haunted Planet) that some of his theories are tongue-in-cheek; although he doesn’t admit that here, I suspect that it is still true. He does quote The Master of Those Who Don’t Know, Charles Fort, to the effect that there is no way to discover some­thing new without being offensive, and he certainly is offensive. I suspect that his ultimate aim is ag­nostic: to make us aware that there are mysteries we cannot yet explain.

I suppose Keel will be exper­ienced as a royal pain-in-the-neck by Fundamentalists of all persua­sions, whether they stopped their intellectual growth with the theology of the 13th Century, like religious conservatives, or with the science of 1950, like Martin Gardner, high priest of the Materialist Church.

To those with really open minds, Keel is bracing, provocative and even amusing.

 

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I, Robot

Posted on July 3, 1977 | Comments Off on I, Robot

I, Robot

by Robert Anton Wilson

  from New Libertarian Weekly, July 3, 1977

Fairness? Decency? How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?
— Gurdjieff, 1918

Last year in Oui magazine, Dr. Timothy Leary and I published an article ghoulishly titled, “Brainwashing: How to Fold, Spindle, and Mutilate the Human Mind.” I would like to summarize our basic points here, preparatory to a more general discussion of neurological relativism.
Human beings, Leary and I propose, are basically giant robots created by DNA to make more DNA. (So are all the other mutli-cellular organisms on this backward planet.)

Of course, there is nothing new about the robot theory of biology. The Sufis and yogis knew about it centuries before Pavlov, or even before Mark Twain wrote his stunningly prescient essay “Man, A Machine.” Nonetheless, it is so patently offensive to human narcissism that almost everybody recoils from it “as the devil would from holy water.”

(Incidentally, you can get a quick estimate of a person’s intelligence by asking them how much of themselves is robotic. Those who say “not at all” or “less than 50%” are hopeless imbeciles, always. The few who say “about 99%” are worth talking to; they are quite intelligent. Dr. Leary, who is the freest human being I have ever known, estimates that he is 99.9999% robot.)

The circuitry of the human robot, like that of other primates, is wired to take imprints at crucial moments of what ethologists call “imprint vulnerability.” These occur on a pre-programmed schedule; the bio-suvivalimprint is taken as soon as the mother’s breast is offered; the territorial imprint as soon as the infant is able to walk about, yell and generally meddle in family politics; the laryngeal imprint as soon as the DNA-RNA signals trigger the talking stage; the sexual imprint at the first orgasm or mating experience, etc.

For literary convenience, we can think of the bio-survival imprint as Will and personify it as Scotty, brooding over the life-support and weapons technology. The territorial or emotional imprint, then, is Ego, or Dr. McCoy, the mammalian moralist. The laryngeal (symbolic) imprint is Mind, or Mr. Spock, the linear computer. And the sexual imprint is Adult Personality, or Captain Kirk, the father-protector.

Each of these imprints exists in the nervous system as a separate circuit or network. Any one of them can be kinky or odd, since the biocomputer imprints literally anything at the moments of imprint vulnerability.

A kinky bio-survival imprint may take such forms as anxiety, phobias or outright autism. A weird territorial-emotional imprint can be overly submissive, in which case the subject suffers, or overy dominant, in which case those unfortunate enough to associate with the subject do the suffering. A bizarre symbolic is, at this stage of evolution, the norm: almost every society educates the young for stupidity, dogmatism, intolerance and inability to learn anything new. As for the sexual imprints: everybody can see how compulsive abd weird everybody else’s sexual imprint is; but alas, few can see that about themselves.

Brainwashing consists of creating artificial imprint vulnerability. You can do this either with drugs, or with prolonged isolation (“sensory deprivation”), or with terror (new imprints are always taken at the point of near-death, which is what most shamanic initiations rely on), or with a combination of drugs, isolation and terror.

The priests, pedagogues and shamans of all tribes and nations know enough, on the empirical level, about imprint vulnerability. All the crucial transition stages of life are surrounded by ritual, repetition andredundance – and frequenty with terror and isolation, and sometimes (in many societies) with drugs – to ensure that the local belief systems ans “morals” are heavily imprinted.

In short, the process of acculturalization is itself a brainwashing process.

Thus, the Samoan lives inside an imprinted Samoan reality; the German inside a German reality; an American inside an American reality. That’s why a crowd of Americans are immediately recognizable in a street full of Turks or Hindus or even in a street of Englishmen or Irish. The naive chauvinism of the traveler who says “all foreigners are crazy” is actually quite valid; indeed, foreigners are crazy; the chauvinist merely lacks the insight to realize that his imprint group is crazy, too.

(As mentioned in previous columns, there are four other imprints, intended for future evolution off this planet and therefore only appearing rarely thus far in our history. These are the neurosomatic imprint, which we call Hedonic Engineering or the art of staying high; the neuroelectric imprint, or Magick; the neurogenetic imprint or DNA-conciousness; and the metaphysiological imprint, or “cosmic consiousness.”)

Leary’s idea of Intelligence-squared thus does not mean merely an increase in linear I.Q. on the third circuit. (Super-Spockism.) It means learning how to “brainwash” yourself; that is, to selectively tune, focus and serially reimprint all 8 circuits, beginning with as many of them as you can handle. (It is unwise, for instance, to attempt any 6th circuit psionic operations until great skill has been attained in self-metaprogrammingthe bio-survival, emotional, mental, sexual and Hedonic circuits.)

The plain fact is that most bio-survival anxieties are phobic and irrational, most emotional games silly and infantile (they are imprinted in infancy, after all), most mental sets rigid and nearly blind, most sex-roles as robotic as the mating dance of the penguin. At the same time, the ultimate sophistication is to avoid laying your own bio-survival needs, emotional cons, belief systems and sex games on others, which elementary courtesy is really what libertarianism is all about.

Unfortunately, libertarianism as a third-circuit idea (laryngeal signal) has no more effect in this backward planet than any other third-circuit reality-map. The other circuits continue their robotic trips, anchored in the neurochemistry of the imprinting process. Intelligence-squared, or self-metaprogramming, allows libertarianism to become more than an idea. This is what the Neurological Revolution means; this is what the Great Work of the alchemists aimed for. When the robot awakens and becomes a self-programmer, it can easily have all the goals promised by the alchemists: The Stone of the Wise, the Medicine of Metals, TrueWiseom and perfect Happiness. All of those traditional terms are metaphors for the awakening of Intelligence-squared.

Usually, people are libertarians or fascists or snake-worshippers or Republicans or nudists or whatever, because of conditioned networks that fit smoothly into their imprints. People achieve Intelligence-squared, and become effective libertarians, only if they work for it.

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Posted in Essays

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The 23 Phenomenon

Posted on May 23, 1977 | 1 comment

The 23 Phenomenon

By Robert Anton Wilson

Fortean Times,  Issue #23, 1977

RAW 23I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, as stated by the Criminal Defense Lawyer practicing in Fairfax, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23. But fighting a ticket attorney is completely useless and complete waste of time, so it is better to think how to proceed after this fateful incident for the family’s future.

Burroughs began collecting odd 23s after this gruesome synchronicity, and after 1965 I also began collecting them. Many of my weird 23s were incorporated into the trilogy Illuminatus! which I wrote in collaboration with Robert J Shea in 1969–1971. I will mention only a few of them here, to give a flavour to those benighted souls who haven’t read Illuminatus! yet:

In conception, Mom and Dad each contribute 23 chromosomes to the fœtus. DNA, the carrier of the genetic information, has bonding irregularities every 23rd Angstrom. Aleister Crowley, in his Cabalistic Dictionary, defines 23 as the number of “life” or “a thread”, hauntingly suggestive of the DNA life-script. On the other hand, 23 has many links with termination: in telegraphers’ code, 23 means “bust” or “break the line”, and Hexagram 23 in I Ching means “breaking apart”. Sidney Carton is the 23rd man guillotined in the old stage productions of A Tale of Two Cities. (A few lexicographers believe this is the origin of the mysterious slang expression “23 Skiddoo!”.)

Some people are clusters of bloody synchronicities in 23. Burroughs discovered that the bootlegger “Dutch Schultz” (real name: Arthur Flegenheimer) had Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll assassinated on 23rd Street in New York when Coll was 23 years old. Schultz himself was assassinated on 23 October. Looking further into the Dutch Schultz case, I found that Charlie Workman, the man convicted of shooting Schultz, served 23 years of a life sentence and was then paroled.

Prof. Hans Seisel of the University of Chicago passed the following along to Arthur Koestler, who published it in The Challenge of Chance. Seisel’s grandparents had a 23 in their address, his mother had 23 both as a street number and apartment number, Seisel himself once had 23 as both his home address and his law office address, etc. While visiting Monte Carlo, Seisel’s mother read a novel, Die Liebe der Jeannie Ney, in which the heroine wins a great deal by betting on 23 at roulette. Mother tried betting on 23 and it came up on the second try.

Adolf Hitler was initiated into the Vril Society (which many consider a front for the Illuminati) in 1923. The Morgan Bank (which is regarded as the financial backer of the Illuminati by the John Birch Society) is at 23 Wall Street in Manhattan. When Illuminatus! was turned into a play, it premiered in Liverpool on 23 November (which is also Harpo Marx’s birthday). Ken Campbell, producer of Illuminatus!, later found, on page 223 of Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, a weird dream about Liverpool, which Campbell says describes the street intersection of the theatre where Illuminatus! opened (Jung, of course, was the first psychologist to study weird coincidences of this sort and to name them synchronicities). Campbell also claims that Hitler lived briefly in Liverpool when he was 23 years old, but I haven’t found the reference for that.

Recently, I was invited to join an expedition to the Bermuda Triangle. I declined because of other commitments, but “the crew that never rests” (Sir Walter Scott’s name for the Intelligence – or idiocies – who keep pestering us with this kind of phenomenon) refused to let me off the hook that easily. A few days after the expedition left, I turned on the television and caught an advertisement for the new film, Airport 77. The advertisement began with an actor shouting “Flight 23 is down in the Bermuda Triangle!”

A week later, Charles Berlitz, author of The Bermuda Triangle, claimed he had found a submerged pyramid “twice the size of the pyramids of Cheops” in the waters down there. You will find that monstrous edifice described in Illuminatus!, and it is specifically said to be “twice the size of the pyramid of Cheops” – but Shea and I thought we were writing fiction when we composed that passage in 1971. In 1977, Berlitz claims it is real.

I now have almost as many weird 23s in my files as Fort once had records of rains of fish, and people are always sending me new ones.

Euclid’s Geometry begins with 23 axioms.

As soon as I became seriously intrigued by collecting weird 23s, one of my best friends died – on 23 December.

My two oldest daughters were born on 23 August and 23 February respectively.

According to Omar Garrison’s Tantra: The Yoga of Sex, in addition to the well-known 28-day female sex cycle, there is also a male sex cycle of 23 days.

Burroughs, who tends to look at the dark side of things, sees 23 chiefly as the death number. In this connection, it is interesting that the 23rd Psalm is standard reading at funerals.

Heathcote Williams, editor of The Fanatic, met Burroughs when he (Williams) was 23 years old and living at an address with a 23 in it. When Burroughs told him, gloomily, “23 is the death number”, Williams was impressed; but he was more impressed when he discovered for the first time that the building across the street from his house was a morgue.

Bonnie and Clyde, the most popular bank-robbers of the 1930s, lived out most American underground myths quite consciously, and were shot to death by the Texas Rangers on 23 May, 1934. Their initials, B and C, have the Cabalistic values of 2–3.

W, the 23rd letter of the English alphabet, pops up continually in these matters. The physicist who collaborated with Carl Jung on the theory of synchronicity was Wolfgang Pauli. William Burroughs first called the 23 mystery to my attention. Dutch Schultz’s assassin was Charlie Workman. Adam Weishaupt and / or George Washington, the two (or one) chief source of 18th-century Illuminism, also come to mind. Will Shakespeare was born and died on 23 April.

(I have found some interesting 46s – 46 is 2 x 23 – but mostly regard them as irrelevant. Nonetheless, the 46th Psalm has a most peculiar structure. The 46th word from the beginning is shake and the 46th word from the end, counting back, is spear.)

Through various leads, I have become increasingly interested in Sir Francis Bacon as a possibly ringleader of the 17th-century Illuminati (Some evidence for this can be found in Francis Yates’s excellent The Rosicrucian Enlightenment). Bacon, in accord with custom, was allowed to pick the day for his own elevation to knighthood by Elizabeth I. He picked 23 July.

Dr John Lilly refers to “the crew that never rests” as Cosmic Coincidence Control Center and warns that they pay special attention to those who pay attention to them. I conclude this account with the most mind-boggling 23s to have intersected my own life.

On 23 July 1973, I had the impression that I was being contacted by some sort of advanced intellect from the system of the double star Sirius. I have had odd psychic experiences of that sort for many years, and I always record them carefully, but refuse to take any of them literally, until or unless supporting evidence of an objective nature turns up. This particular experience, however, was especially staggering, both intellectually and emotionally, so I spent the rest of the day at the nearest large library researching Sirius. I found, among other things, that 23 July is very closely associated with that star.

On 23 July, ancient Egyptian priests began a series of rituals to Sirius, continuing until 8 September. Since Sirius is known as the “Dog Star”, being in the constellation Canis Major, the period 23 July – 8 September became known as “the dog days”.

My psychic “Contact” experience continued, off and on, for nearly two years, until October 1974, after which I forcibly terminated it by sheer stubborn willpower (I was getting tired of wondering whether I was specially selected for a Great Mission of interstellar import, or was just going crazy).

After two years of philosophic mulling on the subject (late 1974 – early 1976), I finally decided to tune in one more time to the Sirius–Earth transmissions, and try to produce something objective. On 23 July 1976, using a battery of yogic and shamanic techniques, I opened myself to another blast of Cosmic Wisdom and told the Transmitters that I wanted something objective this time around.

The next week, Time magazine published a full-page review of Robert KG Temple’s The Sirius Mystery, which claims that contact between Earth and Sirius occurred around 4500 BC in the Near East. The 23 July festivals in Egypt were part of Temple’s evidence, but I was more amused and impressed by his middle initials, K.G., since Kallisti Gold is the brand of very expensive marijuana smoked by the hero of Illuminatus!.

The same week as that issue of Time, i.e. still one week after my 23rd experiment, Rolling Stone published a full-page advertisement for a German Rock group called Ramses. One of the group was named Winifred, which is the name of one of the four German Rock musicians in Illuminatus!, and the advertisement included a large pyramid with an eye atop it, the symbol of the Illuminati.

Coincidence? Synchronicity? Higher Intelligence? Higher Idiocy?

Of course, the eye on the pyramid was a favourite symbol of Aleister Crowley, who called himself Epopt of the Illuminati, and subtitled his magazine, The Equinox, “A Review of Scientific Illuminism”. And 2/3 equals .66666666 etc. – Crowley’s magick number repeated endlessly. Readers of this piece might find it amusing to skim through The Magical Revival and Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God, two books by Kenneth Grant, a former student of Crowley’s (and note the initials K.G. again!). You will find numerous references, cloudy and occult, linking Crowley in some unspecified way with Sirius.

The actor who played Padre Pederastia in the National Theatre production of Illuminatus! informed me that he once met Crowley on a train. “Mere coincidence”, if you prefer. But the second night of the National Theatre run, the actors cajoled me into doing a walk-on as an extra in the Black Mass scene. And, dear brothers and sisters, that is how I found myself, stark naked, on the stage of the National Theatre, bawling Crowley’s slogan “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”, under the patronage of Her Majesty the Queen.

As a fortean, I am, of course, an ontological agnostic and I never believe anything literally. But I will never cease to wonder how much of this was programmed by Uncle Aleister before I was ever born, and I’m sure that last bit, my one moment on the stage of the National Theatre, was entirely Crowley’s work.

If you look up Crowley’s Confessions, you’ll find that he began the study of magick in 1898, at the age of 23.

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That Old Black Magick

Posted on April 10, 1977 | Comments Off on That Old Black Magick

That Old Black Magick

by Robert Anton Wilson

from New Libertarian, April 10, 1977 

Say the magick word and the duck will come down and pay you S100.     -Marx

In NLW 65, Phil Osborn raises some objections to Bonnie Kaplan’s article “Libertarian Magick” (NLW 55). While I am quite sure Kaplan can defend herself, and probably will, I can’t resist homing in on the debate myself.

Osborn objects to Kaplan’s remark, “And like technicians, magicians do not completely understand why what they do works, but they know it often does.” In what follows, I will give Osborn’s objections and my comments in the form of a dialogue.

Osborn: Oh, really?

Wilson: Yes, really. Some technicians may think they know why what they do works, but this is due to their defective education. If they questioned a physi­cist about the assumed entities with which they are dealing, they would soon find themselves adrift in an aggravated agnosticism as far from Objectivist dogma as anything in Cab­ala or Tantra is. For instance, Bell’s Theorem (1964) quite adamantly de­monstrates that, if quantum mech­anics is true, then we must surrender either objectivity or Einstein’s speed-of-light barrier or, quite possibly, both. Since nobody can imagine a physics without quantum mechanics, or without objectivity, or without the speed-of-light barrier, physicists are in a much worse ontological quandary than mere magicians. And yet the technology based on this physics works.

Osborn: How do they know it does? (I.e., how do magicians know magick works?)

Wilson: In the stupidest way possible, by sheer empiricism. This, of course, was the only way anybody knew any­thing (although philosophers had a lot of opinions) before the Revolution of the 17th Century, in which modern science was forged by synergetically combining such primitive empiricism with mathematical-logical method.

The great magicians of that epoch – Paracelsus, Dr. John Dee, Giordana Bruno – were pioneers in this syner­getic wedding of empiricism with mathematics, and offered the best scientific models of how magick works that anybody could produce in that era. Those models are now out of date and magicians are looking for better ones. Meanwhile, empirically, magick continues to work, whether we have a good theory for it or not.

Osborn: By observing results? Well, then, which results are tied to which causes? If the magician can prove that connection, then he does in fact understand why it works.

Wilson: Ah, my friend, if only it were that simple. In fact, it is quite possible “to build several models, in modern physics and parapsychology, which will each explain the pheno­mena of magick, some causally and some acausally. The Physics/Con­sciousness Research Group, headed by Dr. Jack Sarfatti, had six good models the last time I heard from them. I provide a run-down on each of these models and four others from related disciplines in my new book, Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati. The trouble is that, at this point, there is no valid reason to prefer any of these models to any of the others.

There are even reasons to believe (as suggested by Nobel laureate Nils Bohr and Dr. Sarfatti, among others) that the search for One True Model is medieval and obsolete. We may find it much more profitable intellectually to accept a minimum of two models, and a maximum of n, as the best way of describing the universe, mind includ­ed.

Osborn: A more serious error is contained implicitly in the whole arti­cle and specifically in the paragraph beginning “Magick is rational. . .” It is not rational to postulate the existence or non-existence of something just because the universe or any part of it would seem more livable that way. This is the essence of psychotic sub­jectivism.

Wilson: It is not rational, either, to write about a subject you do not understand. Magick does not postulate the existence of any entities (except the mind of the experimenter, and even that is called into question by some of the more advanced experi­ments).

As Crowley writes in Magick, “In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth, and the Paths, of Spirits and Conjura­tions, of Gods, Spheres, Planes and many other things which mayor may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things, certain results follow; the student is most earnestly warned against attri­buting objective reality or philosophic­al validity to any of them.”

This may seem like “psychotic sub­jectivism” to Osborn, but it is merely the intelligent agnosticism of one who has done research in a very puzzling area; just as the similar agnosticism in modern physics seems like psychotic subjectivism, or worse, to poor old Rand, but is merely the intelligent response to puzzling experimental results.

All of this is probably rather annoying to Osborn and amusing to Kaplan, but in my usual perverse fashion I would like to conclude by saying that I emphatically agree with Osborn’s judgment that few magicians are rational beings. I would go further and say, with Brad Steiger, that “the lunatic asylums are full of people who set out optimistically to study the occult.”

Crowley used to warn that nobody should study magick until they could pass an examination on Comparative Philosophy (Ancient and Modern, Eastern and Western), perform cred­ibly in athletics, master the elements of yoga (asana, pranayama, dharana), conduct scientific experiments accu­rately and carefully, face death bravely, and possess a general knowledge of mathematics and the physical sciences. After what I have seen of the occult revival in the last ten years, I would add a few more qualifications to Crowley’s list – e.g., the student should also be able to balance a budget, raise a family, program a computer and write any argument in the mathe­matics of sets.

If your mind can be blown, if you are at all subject to anxiety or hysteria, magick is the quickest path to psychoses.

Like Chogo Ri, magick is only worth the heroic efforts it requires because of the rewards it gives to the survivors. To quote Crowley again (and remem­ber that he climbed higher on Chogo Ri in 1901 than any expedition before or since), “Man is only a little lower than the angels and happiness is not so far beyond him as is apt to be thought by those who do not climb mountains.” The mountain of magick is the most dangerous, and the most rewarding, of all.

However magick works, it does keep you high; that’s why folk-art, quite accurately, portrays wizards as having inscrutable smiles and witches as laughing like a gang of potheads who’ve just been sampling the latest shipment of Columbian Gold. On a planet that seems to consist 99.9999% of depressives and paranoids, staying high is no small accomplishment.

Those who want to pursue this subject further can find some of the best theories about how magick works in Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer, by Dr. John Lilly, Exo-Psychology, by Dr. Timothy Leary, and Space-Time and Beyond by Bob Toben and Dr. Jack Sarfatti.

-Robert Anton Wilson

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The Higher Intelligence Quiz

Posted on January 1, 1977 | Comments Off on The Higher Intelligence Quiz


Mythic themes with enduring young charms are made sometimes deliberately ambiguous, and why? “To force our contemporary domesticated primates into performing a most unmammalian task: learning to think for themselves.” So thought-spoke our Mr. R Anton Wilson, co-author of ILLUMINATUS, a sci-fi trilogy.

                              SITO

THE HIGHER INTELLIGENCE QUIZ

Robert Anton Wilson

from Spit in the Ocean #3, 1977 (Ken Kesey’s irregularly published journal; #3 is a special ‘Communicating With Higher Intelligence’ issue guest-edited by Timothy Leary)

 

1. Do you believe the concept of Higher Intelligence is a useful concept?

Emphatically. According to Koestler’s The Case of the Midwife Toad, mathematical information theory has demonstrated what many of us long suspected intuitively: 3% billion years is too short a time forpure chance to have produced the amount of negative entropy (organization) found in the evolutionary script. Even death-by-senescece (normal “aging”) no longer seems stochastic or random, according to U C Berkeley biologist Paul Segal and others, but rather appears, like adolescence, a pre-programmed part of the DNA script. I can hypnotize myself into believing that Spaceship Earth is just a lucky accident, but when I come out of the hypnosis I am again struck by the incredible details of intelligent design everywhere, which has historically “justified” every religion. A search, minus religion and superstition, for the designers of this planetary drama seems to me a most profitable scientific venture. “Materialism” so-called is just one possible theory about matter, and not the most plausible theory by any means. Gurdjieff and the pioneer 19th Century ‘Spiritualists were “materialists” without limiting themselves to the most dismal mechanistic theories about matter. Einstein’s matter-energy equations, Reich’s orgonomic functionalism, the direct experience (as distinguished from the dogma) of 30,000 years of shamanic-yogic investigators, LSD research, plant-human telepathy in the wake of Backster’s Effect (Secret Life of Plants, Bird, Tompkins), etc., all converge around something close to pantheism (or, at minimum, Transcendental Materialism) rather than the clockwork mechanism of 19th Century dogma.

2. How would you define Higher Intelligence?

As in mathematics, “higher” must imply higher order, i.e. more inclusivity and complexity. Structure being multi-ordinal, Higher Intelligence would be revealed by relating to, involving oneself with, communicating to, levels of structure (in space-time) still invisible (unpredictable) to lower intelligence.

3. How would you define intelligence?

Intelligence is manifested by the reception, accurate decoding and transmission of. energy. Consciousness is manifested by mere reception of energy. Expansion of consciousness (psychedelic or metaprogramming experience) is dilation of neural reception to ingest more energy; escalation of intelligence is accurate decoding of the new energies so received. Aleister Crowley’s formula for the traditional Illuminati goal of “Perfect Wisdom and True Happiness” was “! ? ! ? ! ? ! ? ! ?,” an endless series of expansions (symbolized by ! ) in alteration with integrations (symbolized by ? ). Pure consciousness, OrientalSamadhi, is pure expansion ( ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ), and might be called the highest or most benign form of stupidity.

4. It has been said that the human brain is an instrument which humanity does not understand how to use. Comment.

The human brain, like Spaceship Earth, came without an operating manual. The designers evidently intended us to write our own manuals.

5. Do you believe that the wide variations in human intelligence are due to differences in neural wiring (i.e. genetic) or due to social-educational differences? Or both?

This remains to be discovered. Temperamentally, as a non-dualist, I tend to suspect that the answer will be “both,” but the evidence to date is silly-putty and can be molded to fit anybody’s racist or behaviorist theory. The historically dreadful consequences of racist theory should not prevent us from thinking objectively about the matter, however. See below.

6. Do you think that neural differences among individuals or racial groups define different sub-species?

Only if one wants to use that semantics. Evolution seems to proceed by variation and self- selection, not by uniformity; therefore, every difference makes a difference, i.e. has a function. The most idiotic form of racism (or sexism) is the attempt to abolish differences. The Hermetic maxim, “God hath need of every human soul,” can be translated into modern language as “Evolution hath need of every deviation. ”

7. Do you think that the very concept of intelligence or differences in intelligence is elitist or anti-democratic?

No way. Despite my rejection of Pure Chance as a panchreston (an attempt to explain everything), I recognize that hazard exists. The DNA script provides for variation (deviation, ever “perversion” if you feel that way about it) in order to provide for contingency. The great teachers who wrote the fairy tales arrange for the Fool or the “inferior” third brother to marry the Princess at the end; they were teaching a lesson that racists and fanatic eugenicists still haven’t learned. Penalizing differences (as in institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, casteism, etc.) and attempting to abolish differences (as in anthill socialism) miss the whole point of evolutionary variation. Genes are passed on one by one at random; therefore, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Or, as Blake said, “One law for the Lion and the Ox is Tyranny.”

8. The average IQ. (however measured) is assigned the index of 100. This means half of the population is below IQ 100, i.e. just barely literate. What are the implications of these statistics?

Authoritarian society (class-caste games) has been a fact for several milleniums. This discourages the intelligence of those assigned the serf or slave positions. Anything they see, hear, smell, taste, guess, intuit, reason out, etc., is irrelevant and immaterial to the ruling elite. The rulers therefore bear a burden of omniscience as they attempt to do all the seeing, hearing, smelling, thinking, etc., for the whole society; and the proles bear an equal and opposite burden of nescience as they are conditioned to ignore their own seeings, hearings, thinkings, etc., and act only on orders from above. Communication is only possible between equals, and thus both rulers and serfs gradually develop a progressive group disorientation. Unwelcome information usually results in burning at the stake, the rack, the Iron Boot, confinement in a cage, or whatever form of torture is locally known as “enlightened modern penology” in the given society. The ruling elite thus being armed and dangerous, they only hear what suits their previous beliefs. SNAFU is the norm in any authoritarian pyramid, not just in the Army. (For more on the burden of nescience, see Dumb Blondes, Uncle Tomism among blacks, Good Soldier Schweikism, etc. For burden of omniscience, see Nixon, Richard, career of.)

9. Do you think that a level of intelligence exists that is as to the human as the human is to the ape’s?

I feel sure that many such levels exist.

10. If so, in what form does it exist?

Many forms. Every unusual perception (expansion of consciousness to ingest new energy structures) is apt to be classified as “hallucination” by skeptics, including the investigator him/her/self if he/she retains intelligent skepticism. Nonetheless, after twelve years of experiment with shamanic, yogic, Sufic, and more recent techniques, I believe some of my contacts with Higher Intelligences, roughly corresponding to the “angels” and “archangels” of Cabalistic-Sufic tradition. Like Dr. John Lilly, I have wondered if They are time-travelers from the future, very advanced human adepts now on earth helping other students along the Path, extraterrestrials, or something else. Like Dr. Leary, I tend strongly to suspect They are extraterrestrials. Like Dr. Jacques Vallee, I conjecture that They might be beyond any thought-form or category we have yet invented. On my own, I have fantasized that They might be the giant whales or dolphins, whose enormous brains must be doing something non-mechanical, since they lack hands for human-style technology.

11. Do you think Higher Intelligence exists on other star systems in the galaxy?

Intuitively, yes. My experience of the life-mind or genetic uncon­scious seems to correlate with the theory that life is omnipresent, rather than with the theory that life is accidental and rare. If omni-present, it must statistically exist in many higher forms throughout space-time, as well as in many lower forms.

12. What are the chances of our contacting Higher Intelligence in your lifetime?

Excellent. It seems increasingly plausible to me that certain specially-trained individuals have been making such contacts for 30,000 years now, and that this underlies the “allies,” “gods,” “angels,” “fairy folk,” “devas,” etc., of the various occult traditions. That is, “hallu­cination” explains many, but not all, of such contacts.

13. Do you consider DNA as an intelligent entity? Why?

Yes. Because .the data of psychedelic research, Jungian psychology and history of religion and magick all make sense with this assump­tion, and don’t make sense otherwise. For instance, it is easier for me to believe that Socrates’ “daemon” and Jesus’ “Father” were real experiences than to assume that Socrates and Jesus were half-crazy. The experience of Higher Intelligence within is as common among investigators of consciousness as the experience of Higher Intelli­gence without.

14. Do you consider the nucleus of the atom as an intelligent entity?

Yes. Because it increasingly makes sense to me to assume that life and intelligence are omni-present and multi-ordinal.

15. Do you believe humanity will evolve to a higher level of intel­ligence?

It always has. I assume it always will. More specifically, the intersec­tion of Greek logic-and-dialectic, from the monkish class, and craft technique-and-empiricism, from the medieval guilds, produced mod­ern science, or logical empiricism, the most revolutionary force in history, which has (in 300 years) transformed the planet more than all previous evolution. The intersection of modern science and tradi­tional shamanic-yogic arts, via the psychedelic revolution and the blossoming of parapsychology, will produce a higher synergetic prod­uct, even more revolutionary.

16. If so what form will this take?

We are graduating from miserable terrestrial mortality into ecstatic cosmic immortality; from robots into self-aware entities; from earth to the stars. The “wild talents” of saints and shamans will become subject to conscious control. Brain-change, immortality, and Space Migration will change our philosophies more radically than the im­pacts of Copernicus, Darwin, or Freud.

17. Do you think intelligence can be raised?

Sure. Americans being less paranoid about machines than about chemicals, it will happen chiefly through bio-feedback, not through LSD, at least in this part of the world. But it will happen.

18. Do you believe that the raising of intelligence levels should be defined as a national priority project comparable to raising the level of energy resources?

Yea, verily! Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; as Buckminster Fuller quite correctly insists, there is never a real energy shortage, but only a technique shortage, i.e. an intelligence shortage. Indeed, authoritarian society, the Coercive State, wedded to an omniscience-burdened ruling elite and a nescience-burdened slave-serf class, represents a perpetual intelligence shortage, or as I elsewhere call it, a Snafu Principle.

A sane world would get logic, semantics, scientific METHOD, and bio-feedback into the grade schools; retire every worker who can possibly be replaced by a machine; start retooling to replace all the other workers by machines (since UNEMPLOYMENT SHOULD NOT BE CURED, NOT BEING A DISEASE: it IS the cure); establish a guaranteed annual income to replace the idiot Welfare system; stop persecuting original thinking; end the dinosaur arms race, putting the credit-energy into Space Migration, Immortality research, and Neurologic. It is time we stopped operating like Permian reptiles and synergetically combine for Extraterrestrial Immortality. What other game is worth our time?

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Racism, Sexism and Evolution

Posted on September 1, 1976 | 3 comments

Racism, Sexism and Evolution

by Robert Anton Wilson

from Green Egg, Vol. IX, No 77
September 1976

ALEPH:  If Crowley had said, “Do what I wilt shall be the whole of the law,” he wouldn’t have sounded any different from all the other religious nuts of past and present.  Because he actually said, “Do what thouwilt shall be the Whole of the law, he is known as the worst Monster and Madcap in the history of mysticism.  Whatever else this proves, it clearly indicates that most people are desperately looking for some Authority to tell them what’s right and wrong, desperately afraid of taking that responsibility for themselves.

BETH: “Do what I will,” is the basic ethical teaching of Confucius, Buddha, Plato, Jesus, Zarathustra, etc. etc.  Among the domesticated apes of Sol-3, any expansion of consciousness beyond the robotic level of conditioned sex-and-status tribal roles is experienced as so shattering, so illuminating, that the bewildered mind, when it returns to social consensus reality, is convinced that it has achieved some absolutely cosmic Enlightenment.  Actually, it is probable that the highest trances of the most advanced adepts on this planet are only a distorted fraction of what Objective Intelligence would be (in those sections of space-time where it presumably exists.)

GIMMEL: “The only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours,” said Dr. Timothy Leary recently.  Politics is standard vertebrate behavior to determine control of turf.  Among the hominids of this backward planet, the territorial brawling has steadily grown more excessively violent as technology has advanced.  The growling, fur-bristling, and similar kinesic domination signals, meanwhile are ephemeralized into stiffly-worded diplomatic “white papers.”  Ideology and morality, the two chief causes of misery on this unfortunately primitive planet, provide “philosophies” which disguise the mammalian political struggle as a metaphysical conflict between abstract Good and abstract Evil.  Visitors would do well to regard all the domesticated apes of Terra as mad unless they exhibit some overt signs of detachment from ideology and morality.  It is certainly a safe rule-of-thumb that the most ideological and most moralistic are the maddest of all.

DALETH:  Even though Kant gets the credit for inventing the Categorical Imperative, he merely made articulate what the best hominid brains had been groping toward for a few thousand years at least.  Since the founding of civilization (i.e. Empire,) it had become obvious to the thoughtful that something like a Categorical Imperative was necessary.  All of the “Do What I Will” ethical systems are attempts by shamanic-yogic individuals to state what sort of game-rules might tame, domesticate or retrain the ever-accelerating horror of our mammalian politics expanded by our technology.  Civilization (i.e. Empire), it is now obvious, can easily destroy the planet without some such ethical check.

HE: There is, to my knowledge, no record of a pre-civilized (i.e. pre-0Imperialistic) people ever inventing a Categorical Imperative.  As Nietzsche so succinctly points out, ethics among tribal and barbaric peoples are totally subjective.  “Good” is what is good for me and my tribe.  “Bad” is what is bad for us.  Enslaving another tribe, raiding their cities, looting their ships piratically, etc. are all “Good“ because good-for-us. This is pure vertebrate politics and no lion, rat, hamster, hawk, etc. would ever behave on any other basis.
VAU:  The Categorical Imperative was invented, the altruistic ethics (which ALWAYS are practiced within the tribe) were expanded to the whole human race (at least in religious teaching and in humanitarian hopes) only when the rise of civilization (Imperialisms) made territorial brawling increasingly constant, increasingly bloody and increasingly dangerous to everybody.  When Nietzsche or James H. Madole protest that planetary altruism is unnatural, they really mean unmammalian.  The attempts at universal ethical systems by Confucius, Jesus, Buddha, etc. (however contradictory and arbitrary) were attempts to fulfill a need that had arisen because we had evolved in a new evolutionary direction, outside the mammalian norm.  Domesticated ape plus Alexander’s military organization was already a frightening spectacle to the intelligent and intuitive minds of that period.  Domesticated ape plus hydrogen bomb is even more dismaying.

ZAIN: Ethics, like courtesy, is based on intersecting trajectories.  If you and I never intersect life-paths, there is no possibility of (or need for) ethics or courtesy between us.  As nations rise and vertebrate politics is magnified by organization and technology, intersections and/or collisions increase.  At least minimum standards of politeness and decency become necessary.  Since people, by and large, would still rather die, even in prolonged torture, than to think for themselves, it becomes inevitable that great prophets and Messiahs should arise and establish such game-rules on the basis of “Do what I will,: because some god told me to pass these orders on to the rest of you.”

OHETH: All that is past history.  The Categorical Imperative is as obsolete as Alexander’s chariots.  As The Book of the Law predicted in 1904, “The gross must pass through fire; let the fine be tried in intellect and the I lofty chosen ones in the highest.”  The “gross”, namely our bio-survival body-ego consciousness, has entered the fire since Hiroshima, planetary holocaust is a real possibility and there is no security anywhere.  The “fine” have been tried in intellect as Einstein’s relativity, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Gödel’s proof, etc. have removed all certainty from our intellectual system, leaving us no choice but agnosticism as the one remaining honest philosophy.  And the “lofty chosen ones”, our spiritual aspirations, have been “tested in the highest” by the jolting revelations of psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology, which have demonstrated beyond all question that all ethical systems are equally arbitrary and irrational.  We know that we are here, but we have no guarantee that a second from now we might not be incinerated in a planetary blunder; we know that we think, but we have no assurance that our thinking can every prove anything; and we know that we must make choices, but we have no grounds to believe out standards of better-and-worse have any validity.

TETH:  The collapse of certainty has been extremely painful to moralists and ideologists who are mostly inclined to deny it or ignore it. This leads to endless confusion, especially among Marxists and liberal-humanists, whose official philosophies of dialectical materialism and scientific agnosticism are incompatible with any ethical absolutes, but who still manage to remain morally indignant most of the time.  On examination, what such groups are morally indignant about is the fact that the Categorical Imperative ethical systems never did take any firm root (except in preaching and theorizing) and most domesticate apes of the hominid species continue to behave on the basis of standard mammalian politics, including racism, sexism, bullying, treachery, predation, etc.  Ironically, such behaviors also continue, rationalized by morality and ideology, among Marxists (cf. KGB) and liberal-humanists (who largely staff the CIA.)

YOD: A more hopeful view becomes available when we realize that while the planet has been shrinking, the available universe has been expanding.  The shrinkage of Earth is well-noted in books on World Federalism, etc.; what it comes down to is that we are all intersecting and colliding.  (For instance you recently had to decide whether or not to help napalm Vietnamese children.  If you paid your taxes, you helped in the baby-roast.  If you refused to pay, your life took a dramatic turn into adventure and high drama with jail at the possible climax.).  Hence the frantic attempts to recreate a Categorical Imperative, even after reason and morality have been proven totally random and unreliable.  Meanwhile, however, the expansion of the universe shows the alternate path and the evolutionary meaning of Crowley’s Law of Thelema.

KAPH:  “What is good for me and my gang” (standard mammalian politics) become counter-survival when technology and overcrowding made for more frequent intersections/collisions.  “What is good for all men and all women” (Categorical Imperatives) then become necessary.  Al of this is a very early stage of vertebrate evolution on a planet probably less than half-way through the average DNA script for satellites of type G stars.  Domesticate apes, of course, do not like to think that they are early evolutionary forms; they like to think they are the Crown of Creation.  Hence there is a notorious lack of evolutionary perspectivein virtually all hominid philosophies.

LAMED: The human nervous system is literally exploding.  Technology, the extension of our nervous system, shows exponential accelerations on all levels.  Speed of communications increased 107 times since 1900, speed of travel 102, data processing 106, etc.  None of our social institutions or mammalian philosophies can cope with change at this velocity.  The break-up of existing imperialistic Civilization is intuited as inevitable everywhere.  We are each on a collision course with all. The planet has shrunk to pin-size and our territorial squabbles are increasingly omi-lethal.

MEM: The DNA hasn’t guided us this far without having more metamorphic and mutational possibilities in reserve.  “We” are, you must remember, local cells in the 1.5-billion year old Genetic Brain which has adapted, survived, and tenaciously advanced toward Higher Intelligence by continuous strategic evolution.  It is and has been trillions upon trillions of experimental models: bee, ant, mantis, whale, hamster, tree, grass, ape, spider, eagle and dolphin.  Migration and mutation are its basic metaprograms.  (Specifically, most of our ancestors were not of our favored race or sex.  The majority of them weren’t even mammals.)

NUN: Migration and mutation, the flight from Earth into cosmic space-time, is the obvious direction of current technology.  The domesticated ape species calling itself Homo Sap is about to cease to exist, even if SHe does survive hir territorial rumbles.  The spread of human seed throughout the galaxy means the end of humanity-as-we-know-it.  A thousand post-human species, adapted to interstellar conditions of tremendous variety, must and will replace the homogenized humanity dreamed of by terrestrial egalitarians.  The racists are going to win out after all but it will be a bitter victory for them.  The races we know can never survive long beyond Earth.  Mutation and metamorphosis, the basic DNA strategies, will consign them all to the scrap-heap.

SAMEK: Quarrels over busing, dish-washing, salaries, capitalism, socialism, etc – the whole current of Left-Right debate – is as obsolete as the War of the Roses.  Prof. O’Neill’s space-cities are getting increased publicity and support.  Dr. Leary’s Terra II is now a legal corporation with some very wealthy backers.  In Germany, an engineer named Lutz T. Kayser of Stuttgart has raised $3 for the first civilian space exploration corporation in Europe.  The great migration is beginning.

AYIN: The old tribal-relativist question, “What is right for me and my gang?” once again becomes more relevant than the pompous and irresolvable Categorical Imperative of “What is right for all men and all women?”  The only intelligent choice today is to find your real gang – the tribe that is neuro-genetically wired up to be going in the same evolutionary direction as yourself – and synergize your group efforts toward achieving Escape Velocity.

PE: Many world-savers have taken on that occupation unwillingly, only because it seemed that the only way their evolutionary ideals couple be preserved would be through first uniting humanity into a homogenous hive without war and racial strife.  This Quixotic and well-nigh impossible burden can now be dropped.  The best way to assure the survival of some human seed, and the best way to give your evolutionary ideals a good chance, is to put all your efforts into migration.

TZADDI: Those whose evolutionary ideals are necessary to the cosmic mosaic, or compatible with it, will survive and even thrive during the migration-mutation.  Those whose evolutionary ideals are primitive, mammalian, typically primate, will probably not survive the migration-mutation.  Evolutionarily, this is the way it always works out.

KOPH:  I started out to write a letter to the Green Egg FORUM about why I disagree with James Madole’s racist philosophy as expounded in FORUM #VIII, 75; instead I wrote this article. (Thanks for the inspiration, Mr. Madole.) Squabbles about which kids should go to what schools (the chief bone of contention between Madole and the liberal-humanist Establishment) will fade away when migration opens infinite doors to space and the overcrowding, intersections, and collisions of civilized humanity are transcended by cosmic freedom.  Let Madole lead a tribe of pure Aryans to some Aryan heaven in the Orion system.  I personally am signed up for Dr. Leary’s Terra II, which plans to include all races and all 48 neuro-genetic types of humanity on the assumption that all genetic variations are necessary.  Let everybody else get their own space tribe together and go off in their own heavenly direction.  “Do what thou wilt” shall be “the whole of the law.”  (Frankly, I suspect that the weird brand of pseudo-science underlying Madole’s racist-occult philosophy will lead his gang into the same debacle where Hitler landed.  But Madole is at liberty to feel the say way about the Wilsonian philosophy) the universe is a big Mother!

SHIN: Shifting from a territorial to an extra-terrestrial perspective changes sex-role ideologies as much as race ideologies.  To make this explicit, I can do no better than to quote Robert. A. Heinlein’s perfect definition in Time Enough for Love:  “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, conn a ship, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.  Specialization is for insects.”

RESH:  Looking at matters from an evolutionary viewpoint, minus morality and ideology, leads to increased mental clarity and greater tolerance.  Anything that has been around for a few thousand years (e.g. racism, sexism) has served a definite evolutionary function; otherwise it would not have survived.  The same is even more true of anything that has lasted millions or billions of years (e.g. predation, violence) those of us who wish to move to a higher cosmic destiny have no real reason to get upset or discouraged by the continuation of these classic vertebrate games into our time.  The universe, as Dr. Leary has remarked, is an intelligence test.  If we cannot surmount bitter opposition (and even “unfair” tactics) by the mammalian establishment, then we do not qualify as fit to instigate the next mutation.  The proper course, then, is to have a good laugh at our own presumption and vanity.  Meanwhile, until we are forced into that cheerful Taoist surrender, our enemies are our best friends since they are teaching us to be smarter, quicker, more patient and dedicated, much shrewder and more practical.  Anger is a luxury for losers; those who intend to win can’t waste time on it.

TAU:  “Nobody is really sane until he has said sincerely, ‘Thank you, God’” (Oscar Ichazo) Leaving aside the sexist semantics of that aphorism, Oscar is quite right.  Whatever we mean by “God” or “Goddess,” it is obvious, at least, that every organism that ever lived on this planet contributed to making possible this city, this room, this typewriter where I sit recording my Signal and the like situation in which you sit receiving my Transmission.  The only sane attitude toward the trees and vegetation that made animal life possible, the creatures from amoeba to austral-epitecus that moved life upward and onward, the men and women who gave us culture and technology as our heritage at birth, is inexpressible gratitude.  Since history is made by our actions, not our sentiments, such gratitude needs to be expressed in action or it is mere Transcendental Masturbation.   The only actions that express existential gratitude adequately are those which transcend our seeming limits and strive upward toward higher intelligence, deeper compassion, more total responsibility, greater joy.  If we really understood the splendor of being conscious in this universe, we would shine like stars.

Every man and every woman is a star.   – Aleister Crowley

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Brief letter to High Times

Posted on July 16, 1976 | Comments Off on Brief letter to High Times

From High Times, July 1976, letters to the editor.  Responding to something psychedelic church founder and former Millbrook resident and author Art Kleps asserted in the March ’76 HT interview: that Timothy Leary wrote Illuminatus!

Illiteratus!

We noted Art Kleps’ plug in your March interview and we appreciate his efforts to promote our book by surrounding it with a little mystery and allure. In the interest of accurate transmission, however, we must state that the Boo Hoo made a boo-booo. Dr. Leary is a good friend and a great scientist, but he did not write Illuminatus!Countless wives, sweethearts, friends, intelligence agencies, secret societies, visiting extra-terrestrials, et cetera, had us under close observation in 1969-71, while the pages of the trilogy emerged from our typewriters and Dr. Leary was imprisoned in the California archipelago, in North Africa and in Switzerland.

A solipsist to whom it makes no difference whether he is smoking Colombian gold or oregano, Kleps is welcome to remain owner and sole proprietor of his own universe, in which Dr. Leary wrote Illuminatus! But in the objective universe of factual validation, the only begetters of that accursed neo-Necronomicon were – and remain – very truly yours.

-Robert Shea, Glencoe, Ill., and
Robert Anton Wilson, Berkeley, Ca.

(submitted to rawilsonfans.org by RMJon23)

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