Robert Anton Wilson Speaks to Me From Beyond the Grave

Robert Anton Wilson: Beyond Conspiracy Theory – V. Vale (2019)

            Robert Anton Wilson (A.K.A. RAW) has been one of the most important literary figures in my life, ever since I first picked up the Illuminatus Trilogy around age 19-20.  I devoured almost all of his books, even digging up the out of print ones through the internet.  His ideas on philosophy, language, reality tunnels, and general agnosticism are deeply important to me and help drive my intellectual curiosity and awareness of the world around me.  Through his work I have been introduced to other awesome writers and thinkers such as Buckminster Fuller, Alfred Korzybski, and Benjamin Tucker.  His passing in January of 2007 from Post-Polio Syndrome complications was felt very deeply by me, especially as I thought it silenced a voice that had so much more to share.  This is what he posted online just a few days before his death, after a groundswell of support managed to raise money for his crippling medical debt, "I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd."

            A few months ago, as I was perusing the internet, I saw a post about a new book being published, containing a recently re-discovered interview of RAW from 1985 found in the RE/Search Publisher archives.  What a surprise!  I placed my pre-order and waited.  When it arrived in my mailbox I was so excited.  When I began reading it, and could hear RAW’s voice in my head again, I was thrilled.

            Reading so much in the field of occult knowledge, conspiracy theories, and such high weirdness sometimes leaves me with a deep need for some humor, as so many of the writers of these books seem humorless.  They feel like they must take themselves very seriously or else their ideas will not be properly considered.  Robert Anton Wilson never fails to be hilarious.  Reading this interview reminded me of how funny RAW was, and how much his humor actually shines a light on our reality.  He who cannot find something to laugh at is not looking hard enough.

            This book not only contains the aforementioned interview, but also several other sections that Robert Anton Wilson had prepared for publication.  These items were to be part of a book about RAW to be published by RE/Search Publications in the mid-1980’s, but the project was shelved, and the interview was archived and forgotten.  These parts include a list of 50 books from RAW’s personal library, which is bad-ass for a book nerd like myself!  It also includes a section with a 120+ question International Conspiracy Trivia quiz he created, and a listing of 8 different lecture titles and descriptions, lectures that RAW was available to deliver to any group or organization that wished to invite him to speak.  Many of these are available to view on YouTube.

            One of the greatest things about Robert Anton Wilson was that his ideas were not framed as high intellectualism, suitable solely for the refined mentalities of elite thinkers.  His work speaks directly to the normal human, hoping to stir something in them that will improve their life and the lives of those around them.  Not only did he describe his ideas in his fiction books, but he expounded upon them in his non-fiction work, providing methods and techniques by which to help expunge the conditioned reactions we all have, and allow us all to understand ourselves and the world around us as much more than an either/or scenario.  This is the core of his “Guerrilla Oncology,” which is how RAW described his writing.  It sucked you in with a good story while at the same time rewriting the way one thinks.  He fought an endless battle against what is called Aristotelian logic, the idea that every question can be answered solely by a Yes or No.  This faulty logic has caused so much trouble to our world, and has invaded our collective thought so successfully that no one thinks about it anymore. 

RAW pushes a “Maybe Logic” where every question has many more possible answers than just Yes/No.  For example, “Does acupuncture actually work?”  The answer could be Yes, No, Maybe, I Don’t Know, etc.  Nothing in our experience just “IS.”  Instead of “You are evil,” RAW would state it as “You seem evil to me at this time.”  Instead of the statement “Beethoven is better than Mozart,” which is inherently meaningless, RAW would say “Beethoven seems to me to be much better than Mozart.” This is a true and verifiable statement, applicable only to the mind that is speaking, and not a wholesale generalization.  This is how scientists talk, because it is the only really truthful way to convey information and it allows for the variety of experience and chance that is inherent in our existence.  Our language is limited and unless we recognize it and fight it, our thinking is also limited.

I am so glad I got a chance to order this book and add it to my Robert Anton Wilson collection.  I highly recommend his books, and hope that more and more people will read them and understand the point.  Thanks to V. Vale from RE/Search for sending me the book, and for including such a cool photograph of Robert Anton Wilson alongside!  Much appreciated!

(This book can be ordered directly from RE/Search Publications HERE )

Schopenhauer, where have you been all my life?

Essays & Aphorisms – Arthur Schopenhauer (1851)

            Philosophy, as a field of study, is fascinating to me.  Ideally, it is pure thought/reasoning, utilized to explore and understand ourselves, the world around us, and the workings of existence, providing answers that empirical data cannot.  This is the purported goal of philosophy, yet too many philosophers undercut themselves right off the bat by assuming certain basic truths to be unquestionable, and proceeding to extract their philosophical thought from this basis.  This error results in whole streams of thought that are easily discounted by anyone who does not assume their initial postulates are verboten.  It also makes it very easy to justify horrible things, such as the subjugation of women, the superiority/inferiority of this or that race or people, or the idea that the state of being alive is a punishment meted out by a vengeful creator deity and which, if we suffer through the horror with dignity and the proper rituals/beliefs we will be rewarded with everlasting joy and happiness once we die.  Schopenhauer was the first philosopher to start off his work without the crutch of pre-existing, non-verifiable beliefs, and man, does it make for extremely interesting reading!

            I feel that the field of philosophy is one where the individual great thinkers should be studied, not for the truth they uncovered about the world, but for how they saw the world they inhabited.  Too many pedantic people get fixated on one philosopher whose ideas about existence so mirror their own ideas that other philosophers are neglected.  This is the sign of a closed, simple mind, one that cannot comprehend that it is in their best interest to read widely,  think deeply, and then to come up with their personal ideas about existence.  This is the best way to read philosophy.  It is a map to human thought, not a set of rules to live by.

            I had heard the name Schopenhauer mentioned in much of my reading over the last 20 years.  Many of the writers I admire see him as a crucial point in their own development.  In his life he wrote extensively but the book he published early on, his masterpiece The World As Will & Representation, is really the definitive statement of all of his extremely well-thought out ideas.  I will read that one day, but for an introduction I am glad I found this book which collects many different writings under various subject headings, such as religion, ethics, women, the arts, psychology, and writing itself. 

            Schopenhauer is described as an atheistic, philosophical pessimist.  This description is due to where Schopenhauer chose to begin his exploration of philosophy.  He did not start from the tenets that any specific religion’s ideas were a priori truth.  His philosophy was the first that took all of the recent scientific advancements for its basis, instead of the theological arguments that most philosophers use as a crutch when creating their thought.  Schopenhauer saw through the lies inherent in organized religion of any kind, and because of this, his philosophy is truly a humanist one.  The supernatural is never evoked as the cause of anything, nor as the redemption of anything.  This does not mean that he did not find beauty and value in the ethics and wisdom found in religious texts.  Not at all.  He was widely read on the Christian texts, Buddhists texts, and was the first major European philosopher to read and understand the value of the India Vedas, mythological tales which preceded most of the monotheistic religions by thousands of years.  He was a world thinker in the best sense, and understood the deep correlations between the Buddhist philosophies (Buddhism being an atheistic religion) and the Christian philosophies that Jesus preached in the New Testament.  He understood the warped desecration of these ideas by the organized church. 

            Some of the greatest writers and artists are ignored in their lifetime and only praised and championed once enough time has passed to allow the indignation to die down and the work to be seen honestly for what it is.  The list of greats that were directly influenced by the philosophy of Schopenhauer reads like a who’s who of the greatest minds of the last 150 years.  These include Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Leo Tolstoy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Otto Rank, Gustav Mahler, Joseph Campbell, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, to name but a few.  I am so glad I finally dove into Schopenhauer’s world.  It is a world I will keep returning to and exploring my entire life.  I wish I could just quote endless passages from Essays & Aphorisms but perhaps a few will do.

            On Ethics: “Every good human quality is related to a bad one into which it threatens to pass over: and every bad quality is similarly related to a good one. The reason we so often misunderstand people is that when we first make their acquaintance we mistake their bad qualities for the related good ones, or vice versa: thus a prudent man will seem cowardly, a thrifty one avaricious; or a spendthrift will seem liberal, a boor frank and straightforward, an impudent fellow full of noble self-confidence, and so on.”

            On Philosophy and The Intellect: “If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age you must keep in step with it.  But if you do that you will produce nothing great.  If you have something great in view you must address yourself to posterity: only then, to be sure, you will probably remain unknown to your contemporaries; you will be like a man compelled to spend his life on a desert island and there toiling to erect a memorial so that future seafarers shall know he once existed.”

            On Thinking For Yourself: “A truth that has merely been learnt adheres to us only as an artificial limb, a false tooth, a wax nose does, or at most like transplanted skin; but a truth won by thinking for ourself is like a natural limb: it alone truly belongs to us.  This is what determines the difference between a thinker and a mere scholar.”

 (This book is available for purchase here:  AMAZON  )

Philip K. Dick, a Mystic for our Modern Times.

The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick – Philip K. Dick (2011)

As a life-long science fiction reader, and avid follower of the nuttier, “fringe” sci-fi writers, I would hear the name of Philip K. Dick (PKD) spoken of in reverential tones.  He had died in 1982, soon after my family moved to the USA from Puerto Rico, and did not actually penetrate the mainstream culture until years later.  Because of that I did not get around to reading any of his works until I was in college, in the early 90’s.  At that time I had the good fortune of knowing other freaks who liked freaky books, and I began my dive into the world of Philip K. Dick.

It was easy to see why so many people idolized his work.  It was deeply inventive, highly cynical, and overflowing with insights and questions about topics which the standard sci-fi fare never bothered to analyze. PKD explored ideas about consciousness, what makes a person real, what makes thoughts real, what is the difference between thought and reality, and what can we truly know about the world around us when we have to filter it all through a very imperfect instrument (the human brain).  This was perfect for the Gen-X nihilists that found in PKD a sort of cultural prophet.  Here was a writer asking very deep and esoteric questions about the human experience without relying on the standard answers otherwise provided by religion, politics, and society at large.  He was a weirdo’s weirdo.  If Kurt Vonnegut was the caustic, depressed but funny grandfather of Gen X, then PKD was its warped, wasted, ranting uncle, disrupting all family gatherings with his inability to go along with the bullshit.

In-between February and March of 1974, PKD experienced a neurological/spiritual/pharmacological event that changed the course of his life from then until his death 8 years later. In one of the simpler re-tellings of this story, PKD went to his front door to answer a knock, encountered what would be described now as a “goth” girl standing there delivering something.  He fixated on her “Jesus fish” necklace and when he asked about it, she touched it and at that moment a pink laser light filled his whole sensory world.  This “light” spoke to PKD, shared inconceivably vast amounts of data in the forms of a sickeningly fast sequence of images flashed into his brain, and in every single respect scrambled him up pretty bad.  This experience, and several other similar ones that continued for the next 2 months or so, became the sole focus of his internal life until his death.

For a human being wired to instantly analyze and explore any new idea that came into his head, this event proved to be too much.  In the course of the next 8 years, PKD would repeatedly and exhaustively explore the event, the “knowledge” that was imbued in him, and the changes that this event brought to his mind in every way that a man like PKD could think of.  He analyzes it in letters to friends.  He discusses it from every possible angle.  He finds an answer, that answer is then negated, and another answer is found, eventually leading him to what is a maze of metaphysical thought.  PKD would sleep very little as he stayed up night after night, ingesting massive amounts of amphetamines in an attempt to stay awake and process what he experienced.  This led to over 8,000 mostly hand-written pages exploring the event of 2-3-1974.  (PKD always named the event 2-3-1974 as it happened between Feb-Mar of that year)

The human mind can explore a subject so deeply, that it becomes hard to tell if what is being thought is of any use.  It can quickly devolve into vicious logic circles.  For example, at one point PKD thinks that what happened must have been the “soul” of a former friend, a Reverend Pike, who came back to impart knowledge to PKD.  This is explored for possible correlations until PKD realizes that even though Reverend Pike knew Latin (some of the messages “beamed” into PKD were in Latin, a language that PKD never knew), he never knew ancient Greek, and some of the “messages” PKD received were in ancient Coptic Greek.  This led him to thinking that perhaps he had somehow connected with a re-incarnated Greek deity who had also happened to have incarnated as his friend Rev. Pike.  It goes on and on.  PKD, no matter how he turns the problem around in his head, cannot come to a satisfactory answer.

Thank goodness some of PKD’s loyal fans and editors got around to working on those 8,000+ pages.  The Exegesis contains around 900 pages and it is hard to imagine how much more recursive and self-referential the other 7,100 pages must be like.  PKD was a man who loved to learn for learning’s sake, and because of this his head was as full as any library.  He brought all of his prior studies and reading to bear in his attempt to explore the events of 2-3-1974.  A simpler man may have latched on to the first somewhat satisfactory answer and lived the rest of their life thinking an alien from Sirius came to visit him, or that he had somehow tapped into what esoteric mystics have described as the “Book of Life,” which contains all the information that the universe has ever, and will ever create.  Not PKD.  Every conclusion he arrives at can be turned on its head, since it is just his own assumption.  This makes for a very engrossing, frustrating, yet intellectually arousing philosophical work. It was never meant to be published or shared.  It was a personal exploration into his own mind.

Not many people have the ability or the temerity to fully explore the truly life-altering events of their life.  Most of us just move on, trying to forget the strange stuff, and shuddering when the memory comes back at odd times.  Others change their entire lives and blindly follow what they feel is the true interpretation of what happened to them without questioning any deeper.  Philip K. Dick was willing to exhaust himself to understand his own experience.  That takes a lot of guts and a maniacal devotion to truth, even knowing that the final Truth will never be reached.  This is a kick-ass book, and I recommend it to anyone who has read PKD’s works and wants a deep glimpse into the mind behind them.  It is not an easy read.  It is not a clear and logical read.  It is however, one of the very few mystical explorations we have into a metaphysical event from a thinker of our modern times.  In time, I could see this Exegesis being codified and worked into a visionary treatise, much like the Prophets of the Old Testament.  It may all have been a hallucination brought on by a stroke, a vision brought on by too many drugs, or a genuine inter-dimensional communication, but the fact that it happened, and PKD chose not to ignore it, is amazing indeed.

(This book can be downloaded (VERY large file) in PDF form here: Exegesis of Philip K. Dick )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

My favorite book of all I have read in the past few years!

The Story of Religious Controversy – Joseph McCabe (1929)

            This one’s a doozy.  First, let me describe how I came across this gem of an out-of-print book.  I was going through the library shelves with a list of books to look for, when I saw the spine of this book.  It was black with gilt lettering.  I thought, “Hmmmm….” and grabbed it.  Opening it up, I looked at the chapter list and was blown away by the contents.  Seeing as how I love to learn about the history of free thought, skepticism, and atheism, and how I like to find books that have massive amounts of well-researched data, I almost creamed my pants!  This book is so great, and it introduced me to a writer from 100 years ago, Joseph McCabe, who I otherwise would never have read.  I love “library angels!”

            (“Library Angels” are defined as the beneficent entity/force that allows just the right book to be discovered by you at the right time, even if you were looking for something else.  I love how that happens!  Some researcher came up with the concept after experiencing this several times, and then speaking to others who have also experienced the phenomenon.)

            They say that history is written by the victors, and that is nowhere more true than in the “histories” of religion, especially the Christian (Roman Catholic) religion.  Mr. Joseph McCabe was a monk, then a priest, and he personally witnessed the lies that feed religion and the trauma caused by these lies, both on those who lead and those who follow.  He left the church, and his faith, and proceeded to delve into the original source material for the Bible.  He studied countless religious writings from all eras.  He translated those that did not have ready translations, to better understand them and to share the knowledge, learning ancient Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew to do so.  He wrote over 40 books on everything from the history (hidden and otherwise) of the Popes, to treatises on matters of morality and its sources in human affairs.

            This book, The Story of Religious Controversy, deals with the history of free thought, agnosticism, and atheism, and its relation to the belief systems of the times.  It is awesome.  Not only does Mr. McCabe detail the various sources of our morals, religious beliefs, etc., but he describes in great detail and with impeccable research the ways the lies of religion took shape and were forced upon the masses.  He points out how the religious powers rewrote or straight up forged the very source material they sought to venerate.  It is amazing stuff.  Every chapter is a new revelation to explore.

Sometimes revelations are confusing.

            Having read many similar books, the freshness of this nearly 100 year old book blew me away.  Mr. McCabe never becomes petty, or spiteful, or vindictive, even though he has every right to be.  He shares his knowledge as if he was educating a person, not preaching to those already in agreement with him.  He lays out all the evidence in the best scientific manner possible.  Joseph McCabe has become one of my intellectual heroes and I hope to collect as much of his writing as I can.

            For me, this book is indispensable.  I will buy it one day.  It is out of print and expensive, but I will buy it.  It will serve as a reference for the rest of my life.  What a bad-ass.

(The complete book is available for viewing online, divided by chapters, here:  http://infidels.org/library/historical/joseph_mccabe/religious_controversy/ )