That you can apply all this flaky shit and forgive the guy who beats your teenage daughter to death in a robbery.

In this work, a discussion of the paraphysical and the parapsychological, Wilson writes about topics like UFO sightings, coincidence (or Jungian synchronicity), Discordianism, magic, chemically-altered states of consciousness, and immortality. For Wilson, such “fringe” phenomena (and the work of fringe thinkers such as Timothy Leary, Aleister Crowley and Wilhelm Reich) supply different ways of understanding our notions about the structure of reality, the structure of the mind, and the structure of the interactions between the two. In addition to challenging conventional views of reality and the mind, Wilson’s exploration of things like extraterrestrial intelligence, the 23 Enigma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_enigma) and Sufism is part of a bigger question: can the mind “reprogram” itself? Wilson describes some of his own experiments and experiences with respect to this latter, and in this regard the work is partly autobiographical.

My own experience of the book included one coincidence worth mentioning--I finished reading it on July 23, a date that has some significance in the context of Wilson's discussion.

Acquired May 3, 2010
Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR

This is another of those books that would've gotten a five-star rating when I first read it, in late High School or early college, but today doesn't hold up as well. While there's a lot of interesting possibilities suggested, by way of deliberate speculation on synchronicity and technological advances, there's also a LOT of really wacky unfounded psuedo-science and wishful thinking. Writing in 1977, Wilson made a number of predictions about the future here, and not one of them even remotely came true. I don't think this review will really benefit from enumerating and contradicting them; suffice to say that the author was under the influence of some rather dubious scientific renegades at the time.

Where I think the book has value, actually, is in an area most people probably miss - its narrative structure and the way it builds towards a profound personal revelation of tragedy on the part of the author. It has been suggested to me that this book was kind of a way for RAW to work through his grief at the time, and, in that sense, I find that it pulls me along with him. I remember crying myself the first time I read the sentence "It is absurd for a 45-year-old man to sit at a typewriter weeping over the words 'foot doot'." Now I'm closer to that age myself, and I still find that sentence a powerful piece of poetry. This prefaces what he calls the "final secret" of the Illuminati - which is essentially a code for the power of positive thinking. It's nice to know that he was able to work through his feelings this way, but I actually think the power of the book comes more from his willingness to lay bare his own pain so openly than from his attempt to write a meaning on to that pain.

The other interesting aspect of all this is what it may tell those who wish to consider themselves Magicians in this day and age about the dangers of Magic. Magic, when done seriously and not as sort of a Sunday-evening amusement, means re-shaping your experience of the world through deliberately altering your Subjective Universe. In other words, it means playing with your mind for fun and profit. This can be a dangerous game to play, and there is probably nothing more important than attention to the two elements Leary first suggested for the use of LSD for psychological therapy: Set and Setting. Without proper understanding of these elements, it is all too possible to end up believing in the wildest ideas and predictions, losing sight of the Objective Universe along the way.

Wilson makes a point to note at the beginning, "Belief is the death of intelligence." Carry that thought with you as you read, the menagerie of strange ideas he puts forward throughout are meant to strip away our preconceived notions of what is acceptable opinion - but that does not mean that he endorses or fully believes any hypothesis. The meat of this book, and what makes it staggering and appealing, is the idea that science and mysticism both confirm that reality is entirely subjective. While science and skepticism are the most adequate tools we have for understanding the world, they are still only a byproduct of consciousness. You don't need drugs to have your mind expanded (although he also endorses this as an option)- you just need to have the willingness to walk the tightrope of skepticism and open mindedness, and happiness becomes a choice, not a reaction to your environment.

One of my all-time favorite books...reading it is like being on psychedelics. Try it and let me know.

Many of the things I loved about Illuminatus! And Prometheus Rising can be found in Cosmic Trigger as well, with the addition of more insight into the personal life of R.A.W and how the ideas I’ve known and loved came to be.

Also an exceptional resource of important names and books in occultism, quantum physics, and consciousness science of the early 70’s, much of which is only more interesting read today (though the optimism Leary & Wilson shared of believing our exponential growth would yield near immortality by 2012 deserves a chuckle in Death-fearing hindsight.)

If you’re at all interested in consciousness, psychedelics, occultism, magick, tantra, yoga, psychic phenomena, synchronicities, extraterrestrials, the Illuminati, quantum mechanics, ancient aliens, or other ‘weird’ stuff, get turned on to Robert Anton Wilson - you won’t be disappointed.

After reading "The Postmodern Condition" and finding it tedious and convoluted, I decided to re-read a book that, as far as I can tell, describes "the postmodern condition" a million times more effectively and enjoyably.

Wilson opens the book by telling the reader "I do not believe anything". He evidently, uh... feels that human cognition is so overwhelmed by confirmation bias, the Baader-Meinhof effect, etc. that it's absurd to imagine that one can analyze things from an objective, impartial perspective without falling into the trap of motivated cognition. Instead, one should be able adopt several different views similar to how one adopts different outfits, and let these views become lenses to distort one's reality. Wilson's word for this concept is "reality tunnels". Our biases, he says, shape how we see the world to such an extent that it is as if we create the reality we live in. A Freudian sees sexual repression everywhere, a Marxist sees class struggle, a Catholic sees original sin. If, on the other hand, you are able to adopt all three of these world views without committing, then you'll be able to pick up on whatever nebulous patterns all three of these people are picking up, rather than having a limited understanding of just one. By contrast, if you are a firm skeptic who refuses to get caught up in any such thing, all of this experience will remain outside of your understanding.

Imho this is actually an extremely sensible epistemology, but one feels like the book Wilson ends up writing inadvertently makes the case against it. The perceived danger of this sort of postmodern thought is that it's an excuse for total relativism - you'll become so open minded your brains will fall out and end up believing something entirely crazy. As the book goes on, Wilson ends up making the case that aliens from the planet Sirius have been guiding our development as a species via the chemical LSD, so...

The book follows a sort of autobiography format. Wilson describes how throughout his life he experimented with belief systems that seem crazy to most - magic, mysticism, conspiracy, aliens - as hypotheses for his "reality tunnels", allowing him to pick up on patterns that remain outside of almost everyone's awareness. The most straightforward example of this is Wilson's "belief" that the number 23 has some sort of mystical property. Wilson never claims that this is anything other than arbitrary confirmation bias, but instead uses this to show just how powerful arbitrary confirmation bias can be, as he unveils a staggering amount of "significant" meanings of the number throughout human history. In this vein, vast amounts of impressive connections between quantum mechanics, ancient religions, UFO cults, drug experiences, conspiracy theories, occult practices are made, until the reader has no choice but to admit that, as Wilson puts it, "something is going on".

Wilson constantly proclaims that despite all of this craziness, he is a skeptic at heart, but it's hard to believe him entirely when he says this. He brings up so many tidbits from both personal anecdote and the news that "couldn't possibly be coincidence, right?" that one feels he has to be exaggerating most, if not all of it. It also seems that while he believes that no one theory can fully explain the connections he brings up, at the end of the day I think he truly feels that the Sirius hypothesis he advocates is the strongest explanation. This is a little too un-skeptical for me. Personally, it seems like everything Wilson writes is pointing to something profoundly mysterious and important in the human mind, and I would really love to read a version of this book which dialed up the skepticism several notches so we could dive into what that could possibly be rather than entertain the idea that it's aliens.

Ultimately this book brings up more questions than answers, but it's a truly fantastic tool for blowing your mind wide open in precisely the same way as the psychedelic drugs Wilson advocates, and probably the closest thing that exists in book form (as well as an entertaining look into the general zeitgeist of the 60s counterculture).

There's a part in the book where Wilson discusses The Miracle of the Sun, an event in which 100,000 people (apparently) simultaneously witnessed an appearance of a celestial entity. Wilson reflects that no matter your take on this event, it must force you to consider your perception of reality. Either something resembling celestial beings truly do exist, or thousands of people can experience shared hallucinations, and what does that say about the social construction of our reality?

This book is the same way. Either we are forced to admit that the visions of "crazy" people such as mystics, occultists, drug users, paranoid freaks, cultists, and conspiracy theorists are not just random noise and are, to a certain extent, converging towards some vast, hard-to-describe thing, OR that the human tendency towards confirmation bias and the creation of patterns is powerful enough to create vast amounts of evidence towards such a phenomenon where none exists, and in that case, what does it say about the standard narratives we use to describe our reality?

Either way, mind = blown.

(Recommended further reading: Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.)

I think most would find this book "too weird," but not me. I couldn't put it down. Wilson is one of my favorite writers for his anarchic, psychedelic philosophies. The thesis of this book is that reality is plural and mutable; that all of us, knowlingly or otherwise, shape the reality we live in through neurological filters; that we can meta-program our brain to access realms of high strangeness.

His writing mostly came out of obsucre publishing houses and can be hard to find these days.

Is this book completely bonkers? Yes. It must be read while holding in mind the approach he recommends in the intro (complete openmindedness hand in hand with absolute agnosticism), but if this can be done you will find powerful fertilizer for the imagination and prompts for further exploration into many genres of philosophy, science, and the occult. There are lots of little aha moments sprinkled throughout, and my copy has lots of dog eared pages marking ideas that sparked something in my brain I’d like to return to.

This book is largely autobiographical and filled with anecdotes of the authors relationships with mayor figures of the counterculture movement in the 60’: Leary, Lilly, McKenna, etc. It also focusses a lot in the mystic and occult influences of the Autor such as Aleister Crowley and Sufism (Islamic mysticism).

The book is filled with amazing references to other works in a wide variety of fields, from biology to psychedelics. It also features a lot of predictions for technological advancements that didn’t age well at all.

Synchronicities or non-random coincidences as described by Carl Jung, ESP (Extrasensory perception), contacting “extraterrestrial entities” commonly associated with psychedelics, Crowley’s Magick, understanding and changing how we perceive reality, and conspiracies such as the Illuminati feature prominently in this book.

The final chapter of this book "Trigger" is almost overwhelmingly moving. The rest of it ain't too shabby either.

Rehashes ideas from Illuminatus! Trilogy and Prometheus Rising, but with a personal touch. I think less accessible than Prometheus Rising. If I could recommend a reading order for the RAW I've read so far, it would be:

1. Illuminatus! Trilogy
2. Prometheus Rising
3. Cosmic Trigger I

My favorite takeaways are the expansions on Crowley, Sirius, and late Timothy Leary (the starseed transmissions and SMILE) and the reminder of constantly witnessing things beyond one's comprehension. General theme is, as before, exploiting natural tendencies toward conspiracy thinking to shake one from one's own reality tunnel.