Posted By: Thad McKraken AUG 3, 2016
I’ve been a long time fan of Robert Anton Wilson, but in truth I hadn’t read any of his books in nearly a decade before I had an “alien contact” encounter back in 2010 where his name was mentioned specifically. First words out if their/my mind projected telepathically into my conscious experience: “We are the beings from the Sirius Star System who were communicating with Robert Anton Wilson”. Of course that’s just one of the things they/I informed me/them that I/they were (okay I’m going to stop doing that now), which actually fits right in with what Bob said about his Sirius encounter. Was it his Holy Guardian Angel, alien beings, or Harvey the white rabbit? Depends on who’s perceiving it. It’s a message about the increasingly subjective nature of the higher astral realities, but he translated it to a worldly philosophy of reality tunnels and intentionally manipulated perception. The whole thing was a metaphoric communication and Bob was part of the metaphor “they” wanted to inject into me (and have me spit back out into the world I imagine).
So obviously, that lead to me going back and re-reading Cosmic Trigger I, then reading Cosmic Trigger II, and III, which I hadn’t actually gotten to before (like most people).
For good measure I also went back and read through Sex, Drugs, and Magick because that was actually my first exposure to his works back as a, hmmm, 22 year old maybe? Something about that book in particular implanted ideas in my head that for some reason never really went away when I contemplate it. A year or so after finishing it I wrote my first fictional short story. It was about a loser guy who connects with an alternate dimension version of himself by beating off and sucking down whippets in unison. Later he’s summoned into some sort sex magick mind control science experiment or some shit. I didn’t say it was good, but looking back I suppose that’s what I aspire to do with my books (new one out, $5 download, get on it). If I can subtly hypnotize just one or two aspiring weirdos on a near subconscious level, I suppose I’ve served my purpose here.
Anywho, in just talking about this I’ve realized it’s been 3 or 4 years since I last read any R.A.W., and they just re-released a couple of his books on the new Hilaratas Press (the royalties actually go to his family this time). So I’m going to get my Prometheus Rising on soon because it’s probably been 15 years since I last went through that one. In gauging Wilson’s continued cultural influence, I’ve found it rather fascinating how dense his work actually is. I mean, I’ve mentioned the books, but let’s face it, because of YouTube I’ve now listened to a gajillion of his extended rants as well. He throws out so many concepts it’s tough to keep up with and my mind has personally been blown by articles by other fans I’ve read about him, because I’ve been like, that’s what you stuck with you? Almost like a Rorschach test of far out concepts. Everyone focuses in on something completely different, and it’s funny because I personally think the guy was dead wrong about roughly as many things as he was right about, which is something I’ll get to in another piece. This is all about the Bob concepts that make him one of my all time favorite writer/philosophers, and you know what? I’m going to write it in easy to digest click bait listicle format. Go.
5. F is for Fake
The title there is a reference to the Orson Welles film of the same name, which Bob repeatedly urges his audience to check out. I actually just got around to doing that a few years back, and I have to agree, it’s definitely worth your time. I honestly think the generalized concept is far more important than the film itself though, which asks the question, if someone comes to visit a famous painting in a museum, and they instead see a precisely faked version of said painting, but they believe it to be the real painting, the experience is identical. Let me try and phrase that another way. If you wife cheats on you, and you never find out that your wife cheats on you, in your little microverse, she’s always been faithful. This is getting into more magickal or mystical realms of thought, which are what now? Thinking of the world as being comprised from consciousness rather than matter. From a perspective of consciousness, your perception of an event or object dictates your experience of said object or event. There is no real and not real, there is only the narrative you frame around things, or more often, the narrative that’s been framed around them for you by your culture.
This gets particularly ridiculous as things have hyper-jumped into the information age. As R.A.W. liked to say, “if you think you know what the hell is going on, you’re probably full of shit.” The job of the mystic is to mystify reality. It doesn’t matter how much science or critical thinking we apply to our worlds, I’m never going to know what goes down in the inner realities of all the people who live in the apartment complex across the street from me. And that is but the tiniest slice of our strange little fuck monkey world. God, as time has gone on I’ve been forced to confront the fact probably like half the things I think I know about anything are just shit I read in an article somewhere. Did I ever honestly check the facts on that? Uhhhh, no. In fact, I’ve often read total bullshit, passed it off as fact, and then realized I’d done so yeeeears later. I had zero clue either Casteneda or Crowley were total frauds until maybe six years ago and I still tried to ignore both of those things to the best of my abilities until the reality was fragrantly thrown in my face by means of synchronicity.
And it’s getting worse. I stare at my computer reading click bait shit how many hours a week now? As supposedly scientific and “rational” people, we’re raised to think that everything needs to be clearly divided into convenient realms of real and unreal, yet my thoughts on nearly any topic come down to, “well, I saw this documentary special this one time”, or “I read this one book” or “I took a class years ago where a professor told me that” which amounts to: my inner version of any topic typically comes from something someone with an agenda was trying to sell me. It’s always an insanely oversimplified picture, because there’s only so much of anything our minds can actually process with their feeble limitations. Another way of putting that would be, pretty much everything you think you know is probably at least 75% factually inaccurate. No one is immune to this. No one. Which is actually a reason I really like weed, it makes it sort of hard for me to take myself too seriously. When you know that you, and everyone else is mostly full of shit and living in largely fictional worlds, we probably shouldn’t be taking ourselves too seriously now, should we?
4. Intelligence Squared
This is a good one and one that doesn’t come up nearly enough as far as I’m concerned. Fortunately for me, it’s pretty easy to explain. The idea is that our culture and upbringing imprint a personality on you, and the one thing I will say is that social psychology has in fact proven that people are alarmingly conformist. So you have this imprinted personality from both your environment and experience, like say, I’m Steve. I grew up a Yankees fan and became an auto mechanic. I like playing baseball on the weekends and hanging out with my wife and two kids. I have two parents, John and Martha, and like to vacation in Mexico in the winter. Now, when this same person has a mystical or what the psychology set likes to call a transpersonal experience, this shifts. Obviously, being a card carrying hippie, the implication in Wilson’s case is that these sort of mind blowing god experiences can be brought about by the likes of certain super hallucinogens, although that’s by no measure the only means of doing so.
What these cosmic mindgasms do is detach the experiencer from their mundane imprinting and make them start questioning the scope of their imprinted narrative more than a bit. Wait, I’m Steve, and I love the Yankees and my parents John and Martha, but I’m also something else looking at this Steve personae from a distance. I’m more than just the imprinting. I’m more than just Steve. Who the fuck is Steve anyway? I know I started asking myself these questions in greater detail pretty much immediately after having my mind obliterated by psilocybin as a teenager. According to Wilson, this act of the self profoundly questioning its conditioned plot structure has always been how intelligence increases exponentially. We need to harness this potentiality, but currently we suppress these states with a vengeance. We should probably work on that.
3. Relativity of Consciousness
Here’s the thing. I can’t fucking believe that the subjective nature of reality isn’t taught in every single school, in every single church, in every single philosophy class ever. It should be such an obvious accepted truth about the fundamental nature of human experience that its importance can’t really be overstated enough. Yet, it’s almost never mentioned because our entire philosophy is based on this mythical idea of objective truth, which only truly applies to repeatable external phenomenon. In fact, when you start talking about the subjective nature of reality, most people raised in western culture will just stare at you blankly and it’s not like you’re talking high level coding or some shit. I personally give R.A.W. credit for illuminating my young mind to the idea that our world is in fact experienced largely through subjective perception and internal narrative.
Of course, he talks in terms of “reality tunnels” (a term he borrowed from Leary) and I’m not a huge fan of that verbiage from purely an aesthetic standpoint. I like to use the word microverse or subjective microverse, and pointing out the subjectivity and relativity of consciousness is a topic that pervades my writing continually. Here’s a question: How can one thing be 2 things simultaneously? Easy, it’s perceived in different ways by different people.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all. I personally can’t stand hipster darlings Andrew W.K. or Die Antwoord (who both dabble in a “Stoopid is Kooool!” schtick that irks me on a fundamental level). But like, millions of people, even people I mostly respect love these acts. So, are they the worst musicians ever, or genius creative types? The answer is both. In fact, it gets more complicated than that. To many people, they’re generally mediocre. To others, they had one good album or one cool song but most of their other stuff sucks. So, they’re not two things, they’re a million different things because that’s how many people have experienced their “art”.
Again, on a mystical level, this reflects what I’ve been shown about the higher astral realms. Perception and experience are even more subjective there to the point that this world could be considered an exercise in fixed perception. If you’re going to understand things like dreams, understanding the subjective nature of reality is pretty much THE single most important concept you have to get a grasp on.
2. He Made the Occult Seem Non-Douchey
Earlier I mentioned the book Sex, Drugs, and Magick and how that was actually my first exposure to the Bob. How I somehow encountered the dude through one of his least known works is bit odd to say the least, but that’s the book my college roommate loaned me back in the day. The thesis of the book is fairly clear: while the Occult largely gets labeled as devil worship, this is really more a reflection of a history of sexual and pharmacological repression than anything else. It could more accurately be considered stoned orgasm worship, and is that evil really? Of course the answer is no. How could extreme pleasure be considered evil in a world where war is so heavily funded? More importantly, R.A.W. genuinely comes across as a smart hippie dude with a humorous no fucks given attitude that’s maybe inspired me more than anything else. In a way, I’d sort of consider him the father of what I’m now referring to as psych magick, which is basically the combination of hermetic philosophy, subjective sigil practice, and the ritualistic use of psychedelic drugs (i.e. shamanism). He’s obviously been a huge influence on both Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, who have sort of carried the torch of that philosophy and pushed it further than he ever did.
The problem is that currently, this sort of magick barely exists as far as I can tell. Bob was of course studying this stuff in relative isolation and experimenting solo (and with his wife). Maybe the Occult vibe was different back in the late 60’s/early 70’s. I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that most of what passes for magick these days is some dark uber douche goth crap that I want exactly nothing to do with. Lord, if I unintentionally lead anyone to believe that the Occult is somehow cool with my writing, I want to formally apologize. Holy crap is it lame. Cool in theory, painfully embarrassing in execution. Religion’s slander campaign won and it really ends up being a bunch of cosplay “I want to be in a horror movie” creepiness more than anything else. Very little serious spiritual exploration going down from what I can tell, and you know what maybe my biggest complaint is (well, other than horrible people using it as a spiritual philosophy to justify being horrible people)? Wow is it boring. Puts me the fuck to sleep.
Bob made it seem interesting, cool, and progressive, which it honestly isn’t (at least from my perspective). So Bob’s naivete in regards to magick ended up inspiring people like Morrison, Moore, and myself (although I was ultimately summoned into the practice), to dabble in this stuff under the illusion that it was psychedelic hippie shit when in reality, it’s mostly goth as fuck. Remember when I was talking about F is for Fake. The reality didn’t really matter, the illusion Bob projected ultimately prevailed.
1. Contacting Aliens via Hash Based Sex Magick
“So I went out and I read Robert Anton Wilson’s books when I was twenty years old – which is twenty years ago now – and I figured “Is this guy bullshitting me? He says we can talk to aliens? We can talk to people from Sirius? Is he talking crap?”
Of course that’s a quote from Grant Morrison’s now notorious speech at Disinfo.Con in the year 2000. Sixteen years later and here I am, seemingly the only one mentioning this shit anymore. And that’d be why I’m writing this piece currently. “We are the beings from the Sirius Star System that were communicating with Robert Anton Wilson!” First words projected out of that transdimensional weirdo’s mind and into mine. The following message it projected into my spirit about the nature of the holy trinity is something I’ll continually contemplate until the day I die. Man, you should really read my books if you’re still not hip to this story by now (you can download both of them for a total of $8 bucks). Because of this transmissions I reread Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret and was fairly shocked at the fact that what these entities were supposedly going to do was teach you a lesson about the perceptual nature of time. Which is of course exactly what they did. “We exist, OUTSIDE OF TIME. That’s why it’s difficult for us to communicate with you!” I’d read Cosmic Trigger maybe nine years before that point and I did not remember this aspect of the book at all. He also talks about what I call ganj-i-tating and hearing voices in his head teaching him lessons of forgiveness. Never read a more precise description of exactly what I’ve been experiencing for years now anywhere else. Sirius transmissions regarding my karmic impact on the collective whole of the human timeline. Knowledge and Conversation with your Holy Guardian Alien.
Anyway, I think it’s pretty important to point out that when both Morrison and Wilson had their contact experiences, they weren’t just playing around with sex magick, they were playing around with sex magick in conjunction with psychedelics drugs. I think that’s pretty important actually. I’ve listened to a bunch of weird alien contact-esque stories people have told me online over the last several years. Most of them involved psychedelics and almost zero involved any sort of Occult practice whatsoever. Occult people who aren’t using psychedelics specifically don’t seem to have these stories and yet, it also spontaneously happens to dead sober people like Whitley Strieber as well. DMT seems to be the only real reliable way to make this shit go down, but as far as I can tell it’s such a disorienting state that it’s hard to learn from.
Which is where the hash based sex Tantra comes in. What I also love about Cosmic Trigger is that he goes on and on about how marijuana in particular can be quite effective when used as a means of intentional consciousness manipulation. Where on earth has this rhetoric gone? Weed is legalized where I live and its sex meditational applications aren’t being publicly discussed by seemingly anyone other than me as far as I can tell. Seems like a selling point. Seems like we could design strains specifically for this purpose and make a bundle. I mean, we finally legalized and ancient Occult practice that was once strictly forbidden and no one seems to be pointing that out or taking advantage. Get on it people.
Anyway, this needs to wrap up here due to internet attention spans. As I was saying, Wilson’s work is almost like a Rorschach test in a way. There’s so much intel there that people pick up on vastly different aspects of it. Those are some of his more intriguing areas of philosophical exploration in my weird little microverse, and the thing is, I could have probably added like 5 more categories no probs. Also, I think he was dead wrong about at least as much shit, but that’s another story for another day and until that day. Robert Anton Wilson. Never forget tripsters.
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