I was ready to put this book in the 2-3. star range - at first glance, it’s filled with overly optimistic predictions of the future based on little more than conjecture and pontification. I did enjoy the imaginative tributaries of human potential that Wilson explores, but it eventually started to come across as naive. That all changed in the last section of the book when Wilson reveals it was written during a period of extreme grief due to very tragic circumstances. I realized I was reading a personal diary of a person navigating loss, and all the starry eyed hopes for the future was really form of negotiation. It humanizes the whole experience, and you immediately connect with Wilson’s vulnerability.

Awesome, amazing, a must read, and a perfect follow-up for Illuminatus! Only that this book is a non-fiction analysis of the same weird things, for clear headed hard-hat science-type thinkers. I'm still not sure if I can believe everything it says, although he makes sure to emphasize again and again that he'd been just as skeptical about all the incredible stuff he's confronting the reader with.

An autobiographic novel about RAW early years. Esoterism, skepticism, exploration of consciouness, philosophy, science, ufology, psychedelics, the friendship with Tim Leary and... some strange communication with other worlds. A lot more also, the cream of the cream. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a skeptic Carl-Sagan-fanboy and i'll never jump off the windom, but now it´s open and i can enjoy the views and the wind =).

And the final, when The Final Secret of Illuminati is revealed, OMG... just heartbreaking. What a tragedy. Deep, touching, but absolutely heartbreak. What a lovable and sensible man RAW is. Got me crying like a lil' bitch.

Not a single one of Wilson's predictions actually occurs within the time-frame he's suggested in this work. This serves best as a first hand account of the various stages a person intentionally manipulating their conciousness into different states in order to map meanings onto the Universe and Experience.

It also serves as a bold warning against the optimism of massive advances in technology and how that sort of personal quest for immortality ultimately ends in heartbreak and disillusionment. Wilson was savvy, but at least in this first volume, he lacks wisdom.

Cosmic Trigger is an excellent companion piece for the RAW reader, essential but also part of a larger picture. Obviously, read Illuminatus! first. And if you want to utilize metaprogramming 'magikal' powers, Prometheus Rising may be more useful.

But for a summary and rehash of all the essential philosophical takes by the great Robert Anton Wilson, enjoy this. All over the place, it covers Crowley and telepathy theories and much autobiography (sad at the end, but is what it is). Learn about the Timothy Leary 8 circuit model and how all psychedelics fit in that. Tragically, when the book gets into life-extension medical optimism the book sure feels dated as we've definitely not made the progress that was expected.

In a way, the book is a window into what was cutting edge in the 1970s, and there is value in that.

Perhaps it's still too ahead of its time, and perhaps it's not always best to be that ahead of your time that 40 years later readers are still waiting for the world to catch up to all those post-2012 space migration theories.

It is fun to refresh on Wilson every so often, because there's still no mind quite like his after all this time!

Quite a naive story about the 60s simulacra with a great deal of hero worshiping of Temple's Sirius Mystery, published a short time before. The most real thing about the book is the incredibly sad retelling of the death of Wilson's daughter near to the end.

Robert Anton Wilson gave the modern world a great gift : a compass to navigate it with. In our increasingly complex, highly polarized modern world. I think this is the best book to get to know Robert Anton Wilson, and I think the best version is the one with the John Higgs introduction as it gives you insight on what you should expect.

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-83...

Mind blowing stuff. Tons of crazy anecdotes. I will certainly read part 2

This book was like a psychedelic trip. Absolute mind fu**ry that takes you places you least expect and stretches every limit to your imagination and then ends up leaving you doubting the reality of everything, every system around you.
Many predictions made in the book haven't aged well obviously. I could feel RAW had total conviction that all of that he's writing about the future will come true, which showed some naivety on his part considering he was urging his readers to approach life with skepticism.
But a fascinating read nonetheless. And the author does come through as completely honest.

I liked that he advocated being receptive to/reading about not only the stuff you're inclined to but also what you may have aversion to. For we are better for having more/wider variety of experiences than being lost in our own echos, stuck in a feedback loop and getting revalidated what we already know over and over.
I am going to take that advice and read as broadly as I can.
The poem his daughter wrote made me cry. Later half of the book was especially enjoyable with the author just laying bare his truth, grief, probably the most intimate events one can go through. That was powerful. It was satisfying how the book was concluded.

I have come to Robert Anton Wilson’s actual texts pretty much by standard measurements a man of middle age. Though this is a more than serviceable eventuation, I cannot help but note how turned on I would have been by this stuff as a young feller, a time when I knew peripherally about Wilson but never so much as dipped my toe in. You see, in my late teens and my twenties I was a wildman psychonaut turned on by hallucinogenic drugs, conspiracy lore, occult timelines, and sex-magick etc. while at the same time being an ardent academic and student of legitimate progress in multiple more or less respected fields. I was a Liberal Arts guy rather than a Science guy. This does not excite shame in me. COSMIC TRIGGER 1: FINAL SECRET OF THE ILLUMINATI serves as a scintillating primer on one man’s consciousness expansion during a monumentally decisive period, as such relating personal phenomena equivalents of which I would experience some decades later, starting in the late 1990s, not in nearly so redoubtable a context. My thing however, the central part of my experience for as long as I shall live, is that I am a drug addict and an alcoholic in recovery who also happens to be bipolar with psychotic features (the psychosis-proneness perhaps genetically constituted as such, perhaps a byproduct of reckless misadventure, most likely an epigenetic combination of the two). Wade deep enough into the murk of conspiracy theory and/or psychedelic mutation and/or the occult, Wilson assures us, and you will come to the decisive station, Chapel Perilous, at which point you become “either a stone cold paranoid or an agnostic.” Wilson got to the real deal gates of Chapel Perilous reading Crowley’s THE BOOK OF LIES in 1971 and agnosticism about literally everything is the crux of his scene. Fundamentally. As an agnostic regarding consensus reality at the level of the phenomenal and pretty much everything else, Wilson nonetheless allows himself, in solidarity with compatriots the likes of Timothy Leary, to wax passionately utopian about various frontiers (especially as relates to space exploration, immortality, and dormant neural circuits). This is not my personal trip, and the history that has been the future of COSMIC TRIGGER 1 (up to 2019 at least) has to some extent laughed in the face of these men, but I dig the good-natured speculation and find these dudes congenial in the extreme. My contact with Chapel Perilous led to psychosis and dissolution, as such involving many emergency rooms, psych wards, and treatment facilities. I still strive to look like a bit of a freak, with this long hair wholly unsuited to advancing age, and I still wear a gold eye of Horus ring on my left index finger, but I am in every way more like Trappist monk Thomas Merton these days then I am like any kind of an Aleister Crowley. I try to do my Buddah under a tree thing. It serves me. I’m a fellow who needs to be a little careful. Technically the post-psychotic is a pre-psychotic. One thing you should know: anybody who is practicing a legitimate program of recovery knows a thing or two about metaprogramming the biocomputer, perhaps the theme most central to Wilson’s personal narrative. Also: I am a dude who created an utter hell on earth for himself, imprinted that reality fiercely, and here I find myself at thirty-nine a very happy guy, spreader of good cheer and hard-won wisdom, not unlike the guys Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson became as the counterculture around them succumbed to paranoia, blanket depression, addiction, and/or woeful co-option. These are cheerful guys. Cheer has something to teach, friend. Look, the first revolution is an inside job. Start there. I knew I needed to read COSMIC TRIGGER 1 not long ago when I came upon a quote that speaks to metaprogramming, representing everything I have been trying to impart to my friends who suffer and those I have met working on the frontlines of homelessness and addictions, a quote that actually appears in a Preface for a new addition Wilson wrote about a decade after the original publication in 1977: “Since we all create our habitual reality-tunnels, either consciously and intelligently or unconsciously and mechanically, I prefer to create for each hour the happiest, funniest and most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with the signals my brain apprehends. I feel sorry for people who persistently organize experience into sad, dreary and hopeless reality-tunnels, and try to show them how to break that bad habit, but I don’t feel any masochistic duty to share their misery.” That quote summarizes perfectly the last five years of my life. This is the part of Wilson’s trip that is in large part also mine, today. In an introduction for COSMIC TRIGGER 1, Timothy Leary, not excessively beholden to humility, which we do or ought to know about him, compares Wilson to Lao-tse and the Buddah but also to the Pynchon of GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, on account of Wilson having a vision (as demonstrated in COSMIC TRIGGER 1 and THE ILLUMINATUS! TRILOGY which R.A.W. coauthored) that is not only, uh, chemically enhanced but both “encyclopedic” and “epic.” This is actually exactly right. What makes Wilson such a terrific psychonaut, as with Leary, is a formidable bedrock of encyclopedic learning. This ain’t no wishy-washy mysticism. What makes the personal journey relayed in COSMIC TRIGGER 1 epic is a matter of time, place, and courageous good-humoured commitment. I am not going to simply reformulate the narrative at this point. Let me instead lay out some of the major threads, get a napkin sketch of the spider web. (I will never forget seeing all of phenomenal reality as a spider web the first time I took psilocybin mushrooms as a teenager.) What did consciousness expansion through hallucinogenics, yoga, sex-magick, and study make available to Robert Anton Wilson? We already mentioned the centrality of Crowley. Ordo Templi Orientis. Western occultism, Eastern yoga, modern scientific method. As with LSD and the peyote with which Wilson himself got started: it’s all ultimately about new neurological circuits. Staunch materialist. First “drug trip” in 1962, at the age of thirty, “in the woods outside Yellow Springs, Ohio.” July 1973 to October 1974, “receiving telepathic messages from entities residing on a planet of the double star Sirius.” Yes, sir. A little honest to goodness interstellar telepathy. I have also experienced this phenomenon. Both when psychotic and tripping I have personally engaged in telepathic communication with plants, a phenomenon Wilson notes and says synchronistically lead him, by way of the revelations of polygraphs researcher Cleve Backster, to confirmation that this is probably a legitimate scientific thing. Guess what? I have also seen a variation on the little green cactus sprite Mescalito. Wilson saw Mescalito years before reading about him in Castaneda. Mescalito is also a kind of Jungian archetype, naturally. Leprechauns? Little green men from Venus? Hmmm. UFOs! Oh, yes. What of UFOs? Well, remain agnostic, stay curious, take it all in. Jungian synchronicities. Everywhere. All of us who spend time at the outer reaches come to be aware of mounting deluges of synchronicity. Spooky shit. It’s fucking real. Trust me. A legitimate phenomenon. Numerology often plays into this. It did for Wilson, it did for me. After all, that's the whole Kabbalah trip, right? “Many other scientists have agreed with Carl Jung’s opinion that the number of startling coincidences in ‘the Net’ increases sharply around anybody who becomes involved in depth psychology or in any investigation that extends the perimeter of consciousness.” Wilson relates himself to the Kennedy assassination by way of ‘the Net,’ and, yeah, it’s delightfully spooky. We have terrific stuff on Wilson’s involvement with the pathbreaking Discordians. Kerry Thornley. Some thought him the Other Oswald. He himself would seem to have been worried that he was the Other Oswald. Discordianism is a delightful prankster religion that predates the Yippies and cannot help but be sort of serious in its playful way. Worship of Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos and confusion, known as Discordia in Latin. Their mantra (or one of them): “Convictions cause convicts.” Their outreach campaign: “Operation Mindfuck.” Guerilla Ontology, the Cosmic Giggle Factor. I couldn’t get enough of this sort of shit when I was a young man. It still pleases me immensely. But Wilson’s journey, of course, was both more scientific and more spiritual than that of your average anarchist muckraker. He was a kind of descendent of the Big Three from recent history: Crowley, Gurdjieff, and Madame H.P. Blavatsky. These are keys to his real Illuminati, not some sinister cabal, but rather a glorious tradition of adepts reaching back into antiquity. Sufis and gnostics and the Egyptian mysteries and the Zoroastrian tradition. Ancient Motherfucking Babylon. The Dogons of Africa and their flummoxing knowledge of the existence of and sundry specificities germane to Sirius B. The seers and mystics “have been dosing their nervous systems with metaprogramming drugs since at least 30,000 B.C.” Etc. Hard not to get worked up about this stuff! Who could blame a guy? Especially if he has gone deep with the drugs, and the yoga, and the, you know, incantations and whatnot! I got zapped hard but I never went near as far as Wilson, who seems always to have comported himself judiciously! Remember that stuff about him receiving telepathic communications purporting to come from Sirius? At the same time this was happening, and unbeknownst to Wilson, the Starseed Transmissions were delivered “in 19 bursts” to the imprisoned Timothy Leary and his three co-communicants. There is a pronounced connection between the Starseed Transmissions and Crowley’s THE BOOK OF THE LAW, which Clowley claims was dictated by a Higher Intelligence named Aiwass. Synchronicities, and synchronicities, and synchronicities. I remain very happy, in my Thomas Merton phase, just basically constantly reading, to recall that Milan Kundera insisted that people who read a great deal also become hyper-aware of their immersion in inexplicable synchronicities. I find this consoling. Still, so much to consider! I am pleased by Wilson’s discovery of the repeated cry of “Sirius!” and earth’s apocalyptic contact with same in the Unbelievably Fucking Great Antonin Artaud’s one-act play THERE IS NO MORE FIRMAMENT. Yowza! Etc. Etc. Etc. Okay, okay. We have to come to a pertinent point. Wilson has a lot to teach us. He has made metaprogramming work for him in as fantastic a way as is imaginable. He has had a hell of an adventure. I haven’t done a half bad job myself and I salute him. I like that he is a happy dude and I like that I am a happy dude. That shit HAS GOT to be the bottom line. But. Falling in with Leary and a whole passel of ebullient quasi-utopian scientists, Wilson basically transforms into a humanist. Humanist? That’s bad? It is. I think it is bad. I am not talking AT ALL about the fact that Wilson, avowed agnostic regarding most everything, asserts that he provisionally believes most of all in the “reverence for life” of Jesus and Buddha. No, no, of course, as it should be. I am not talking about the truly beautiful Final Truth of the Illuminati that is in fact revealed and is most definitely what you ought to take away from the book. What I am basically talking about is Wilson and Leary’s apparent devotion to man’s role in harnessing what is stored in the DNA, taking evolution by the horns, and becoming Pure Fucking Masters of the Universe (or Multiverse or What-Have-You). I steadfastly do not go in for such shit. God is dead. Western Enlightenment values replace God with Man. I find this development unspeakably crass and want no part of it. I'm kinda with Herbert Marcuse when it comes to "technological rationalism." Also: Wilson is completely unable to convince me, in part because he laconically takes its desirability as a given, that immortality is desirable beyond the level of thought experiment. All this utopian projection is precisely why many 2019 readers will laugh at this book or even perhaps toss it at the wall. Still, this is a hell of a trip. There is tremendous spiritual insight here. You may not want Timothy Leary’s thoughts exactly, but wouldn’t you love his roguish smile? Leary retained that smile even in handcuffs. That is a valuable lesson. And Wilson. Wilson enjoyed the hell out of this stuff. This even in the face of a destabilizing confrontation with grief. How about you? Not blissed-out on your weird journey through the experience of experiencing? You could be. You have that option at your direct disposal. Believe me. I came back from hell.

this book is pretty out there and that’s why i like it. Originally read this in my early twenties and it left a big impact on me and so felt like rereading it. What I like about this book is how it blends psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, science fiction, and a number of other wierd topics into one stream of consciousness. It has definitely influenced my writing a lot no doubt about it. I also really feel like there is a real desire in this book to make the world a better place underneath all the jokes. there’s a sense that we can improve all our lives if we’re willing to try crazy ideas and reinvent everything. this book can come across as childish but that’s exactly what i like about it, because in many ways it’s also much more than that. it’s just one of those books you can’t really explain to anyone, including yourself