Robert Anton Wilson: The Power of Maybe

Tim Leary, Robert Wilson, 90’s Psychedelia

Sound Photosynthesis presents PSYCHEDELICS IN THE 1990'S - MAPS Conference Compilation. Historical. A gathering together to discuss the fate of psychedelics in the 1990's and their possible regulation or continued prohibition, are a group of speakers with divergent views and past experiences. Nevertheless, they share a deep commitment to the development of a constructive policy towards psychedelics. They graciously agreed to speak to help raise funds for psychedelic research, a field that has been at a standstill for a generation. Participants were: Timothy Leary, Alice Agar Wittine, Ram Dass, Rick Doblin, Mark Kleiman, Robert Zanger, Terence McKenna, Emerson Jackson, Ralph Matzner, Andrew Weil, Laura Huxley, Dennis McKenna, Jerome Beck, and Bruce Eisner. This is the closest you will get if you weren't there to begin with...if you were, this is better than your memories.

Robert Anton Wilson & Timothy Leary
@ The Bridge Psychedelic Conference 1991

Sound Photosynthesis presents Robert Anton Wilson & Timothy Leary @ The Bridge Psychedelic Conference 1991. For the full length recording please contact us at www.sound.photosynthesis.com

Robert Anton Wilson: Maybe Logic

Robert Anton Wilson Predicts Occupy Movement: Download FREE MP3

Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson (2003) Guerrilla ontologist. Psychedelic magician. Outer head of the Illuminati. Quantum psychologist. Sit-down comic/philosopher. Discordian Pope. Whatever the label and rank, Robert Anton Wilson is undeniably one of the foundations of 21th Century Western counterculture. Maybe Logic - The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson is a cinematic alchemy that conjures it all together in a hilarious and mind-bending journey guaranteed to increase your brain size 2 - 3 inches! From the water coolers and staff meetings of Playboy and the earth-shattering transmission of the Illuminatus! Trilogy, to fire-breathing senior citizen and Taoist sage, Robert Anton Wilson is a man who has passed through the trials of chapel perilous and found himself on wondrous ground where nothing is for certain, even the treasured companionship of a six-foot-tall white rabbit. Featuring RAW video spanning 25 years and the best of over 100 hours of footage thoroughly tweaked, transmuted and regenerated, Maybe Logic follows a reality labyrinth which leads through the hollows of human perception to the vast star fields of Sirius where we find one man alone, joyfully accepting his status as Damned Old Crank and Cosmic Schmuck. Beaming with insight, frustration, compassion, and unshakable optimism, the ever-open eye of Robert Anton Wilson penetrates human illusions exposing the mathematical probabilities and spooky synchronicities of the 8 dimensions of his Universe. Written by Anonymous

www.EROCx1.com

Flesh Cap Family

By Eddie D at FleshCap.com
Click on image to see higher resolution details.

This image symbolizes the knowledge of the allies being passed on from one generation to the next.

Fleshcap is a family of individuals who have united to spread
the sacred knowledge our spiritual “Allies”.

What is the FleshCap Movement?

FleshCap Media Gallery

Psychedelic Artists

Listen to FleshCap Interview with  Bob Larson
KUCI Orange County Radio Show: Download

 
Above: Depiction of an ancient Aztec man
holding the sacred mushroom in his hand.

Maybe Logic Academy: Gnosis Now in Mp3

Erik Davis of Techgnosis.com is sharing free Mp3 recordings from last springs Maybe Logic Academy course called Gnosis Now! He will post one lecture each week over the next eight weeks, along with the readings for the week. Cant wait for my iPod to arrive so I can hear for myself. I've always wanted to hear some of what goes on @ Maybe Logic Academy. Thanks Erik!

DOWNLOAD: Mp3 #1
LINK: Techgnosis.com

Week 1 readings:

(Unless otherwise mentioned, all readings from W. Barnstone's necessary collection The Other Bible, now known as The Gnostic Bible. 

• Excerpts from “The Gospel of Thomas” (verses 1, 2, 3, 7, 11, 13, 19, 24, 28, 29, 37, 39, 42, 49, 50, 51, 55, 56, 61, 62, 70, 777, 89, 91, 108, 113);

• Richard Smoley: “Who Were the Gnostics?”, from his great survey Forbidden Faith.

• Excerpts from “The Gospel of Philip” (“Names,” “Rulers,” “Jesus Tricked Everyone,” “The Lost,” “Seeing,” “God is a Man-Eater,” “Leaving the World,” “Joseph and the Wooden Cross,” “Superiority of Chrism to Baptism,” “Laughing Christ,” “Knowledge of Self,” “Slaves and Freedom,” “Root of Evil,” “The Perfect Light”)

Robert Anton Wilson: Free your mind

RAW on E-Prime, Reality Tunnels, General Semantics, Alfred Korzybski, Maybe Logic, linguistic structures, [BS] Belief Systems, War, the Universe, Mysticism & Science and more.

Flash Mob @ Antwerp Central Station

Ive just seen this flashmob video and had to share it here. For those unfamiliar with what a flashmob is, they are a large group of organized people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time and then quickly disperse. For example there is Worldwide Pillow Fight Day were massive pillow fights go down in public places. In the UK there was Mobile Silent Clubbing at various London Underground stations were thousands of people gathered with their ipods at a specific time and began dancing to their headphones as if on a dance floor. As a fully ordained Discordian Pope, it is solemn duty to encourage everyone to participate in Santarchy when the opportunity presents itself. If it does not present itself, please take some initiative and launch your own Santa rampage in the name of Eris!

Back to Central Station Antwerp in Belgium. There was a beautifully choreographed performance to the Sound of music at 8:00am, right in the middle of Central Station. Words can describe it, so just watch.

FROM: Alternative Reel

Top 10 Greatest LSD Quotes

#10 - JERRY GARCIA [1942-95]

“Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you’ve been to some of those places, you think, ‘How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?’”
—Quoted in Rolling Stone, November 30, 1989

#09 - TERENCE MCKENNA [1946-2000]

"LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us."

Comments by EROCx1: Terence McKenna spoke many wise words on the subject of psychedelics. I will share my two favorite McKenna LSD quotes below.

"Well at the time I thought it had to do with LSD. But at that point in my life I thought everything had to do with LSD".

Next was McKenna quoting Leary (maybe),

"well, I always thought Tim Leary said this, but when I asked him, he completely disowned this brilliant remark, which let me know he was an enlightened man cause I never would have disowned it. So, somebody said -- not Tim Leary -- "LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally cases psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it." Now many drugs are like that, and we have many psychotic people running around who have been driven mad by drugs they never took. But what they did take was your civil rights, your freedom to guide your own life, and your right to make your own decisions. This kind of thing is intolerable. If there is an iota of possibility that these substances enhance consciousness -- and remember, they used to be called "consciousness expanding" drugs (just a straight phenomenological description) -- if there's an iota of possibility that they augment consciousness, then we have to put the pedal to the metal in this matter. Because it is the absence of consciousness that is pushing us toward extinction, that is causing us to loot our children's future, that is causing us to accept the elimination of thousands of species per month without pouring into the streets to loot and smash the institutions of those who allow these kinds of atrocities to go forward. I think the era of politeness has gone on just about long enough. And there's going to have to come a moment where people stand up and are counted. We have seen our freedom taken away, we have seen our environment destroyed, we have seen our political dialogue polluted, and still we take it, and take it, and take it. You know, being counter-cultural is more than a fashion statement. I recall an obscure Chinese philosopher named Mao Tse Tung, who once said, "The Revolution is not a dinner party!" Of course, he went on to say it's an armed struggle, prosecuted by the forces of the people. I don't think we're ready to call for armed struggle, but I think it is time to call for "HANDS OFF THE AMERICAN MIND. GIVE US BACK OUR MIND." The American mind is one of the most creative minds in the world, and it is being confined, compromised, and sold down the river by people who can't think of anything better to do with the world than fabricate it into stupid products and sell it at twice its natural worth."

 
#08 - STEVEN WRIGHT [1955- ]

"If God dropped acid, would He see people?"

 
#07 - BILL HICKS [1961-94]

"Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it. 'Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy.' What a dick! Fuck him, he’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he take off on the ground first? Check it out. You don’t see ducks lined up to catch elevators to fly south—they fly from the ground, ya moron, quit ruining it for everybody. He’s a moron, he’s dead—good, we lost a moron, fuckin’ celebrate. Wow, I just felt the world get lighter. We lost a moron! I don’t mean to sound cold, or cruel, or vicious, but I am, so that’s the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought. How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn't that be news-worthy, just the once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition and lies? I think it would be news-worthy. 'Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves' . . . 'Here's Tom with the weather.'"

#06 - JIM MORRISON [1943-71]

"In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night . . . starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music."

#05 - KEN KESEY [1935-2001]

"I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it's so evil? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it? Because they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control."
—Quoted in the BBC documentary, "The Beyond Within: The Rise and Fall of LSD," 1987

#04 - TOM WOLFE [1931- ]

“The Pranksters had what looked like about a million doses of the Angels’ favorite drug—beer—and LSD for all who wanted to try it. The beer made the Angels very happy and the LSD made them strangely peaceful and sometimes catatonic, in contrast to the Pranksters and other intellectuals around, who soared on the stuff . . . The Angels were adding LSD to the already elaborate list of highs and lows they liked, beer, wine, marijuana, Benzedrine, Seconal, Amytal, Nembutal, Tuinal. Some of them had terrible bummers—bummer was the Angels’ term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and very quickly it became the hip world’s term for a bad trip on LSD. The only bad moment at Kesey’s came one day when an Angel went berserk during the first rush of the drug and tried to strangle his old lady on Kesey’s front steps. But he was too wasted at that point to really do much.”
—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968

#03 - TIMOTHY LEARY [1920-96]

"'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. 'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.'"
—Flashbacks, 1983

#02 - HUNTER S. THOMPSON [1937-2005]

“That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling ‘consicousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously . . . All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel.”
—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971

#01 - ALBERT HOFMANN [1906-2008]

"Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous—that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego. One can also arrive at this insight through scientific reflections. The problem of reality is and has been from time immemorial a central concern of philosophy. It is, however, a fundamental distinction, whether one approaches the problem of reality rationally, with the logical methods of philosophy, or if one obtrudes upon this problem emotionally, through an existential experience. The first planned LSD experiment was therefore so deeply moving and alarming, because everyday reality and the ego experiencing it, which I had until then considered to be the only reality, dissolved, and an unfamiliar ego experienced another, unfamiliar reality. The problem concerning the innermost self also appeared, which, itself unmoved, was able to record these external and internal transformations. Reality is inconceivable without an experiencing subject, without an ego. It is the product of the exterior world, of the sender and of a receiver, an ego in whose deepest self the emanations of the exterior world, registered by the antennae of the sense organs, become conscious. If one of the two is lacking, no reality happens, no radio music plays, the picture screen remains blank."
—LSD: My Problem Child, 1980

 

I think Robert Anton Wilson should have made this list, he must have some how been over looked by the author.

So I am adding #11 below.

"imagine gigabytes of information entering your brain not in two years, but in two nanoseconds, and radiating not just from this page but from the fruit on the table, the wall paint, the pencil, the cars passing in the street..... and the furthest stars.

That's why LSD has altered the world for so many of us in the last 60 years. Like English poet William Blake we have found "infinity in a grain of sand" and the deeper we look, the deeper the abyss grows. And like Nietzsche, we often suspect that as we gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into us......

LSD seems to suspend the imprinted and conditioned brain circuits that normally control perception/emotion/thought, allowing a flood -- an ocean -- of new information to break through. The experience will seem either very frightening or exhilaratingly educational, depending on how rigidly you previously believed your current map contained "all" the universe. Since I learned that no model equals the totality of experience long before I tried LSD, I never had a bad trip; but I have seen enough anxiety attacks and downright wig-outs in cases of the naive and dogmatic that I have never favored or advocated LSD's promiscuous use by the general population. As J.R. "Bob'' Dobbs says, "You know how dumb the average citizen is? Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that."

While splashing about and trying not to drown in this ocean of new information, you generally experience a second LSD surprise: an explosion of newfound energy within your own body. Whether you call this kundalini or bio-electricity or orgone or libido or Life Force, it can trigger muscle spasms, unbridled Eros or just "warm and melting" sensations -- or all three in succession, or all three almost simultaneously -- usually followed by something loosely called "near-death experience" or "out of body experience." Again, this can seem either psychotically terrifying or "religiously" ecstatic, and can imprint short-or--long-term tendencies toward paranoia ["everything wants to destroy me"] or metanoia ["everything wants to help me."] In either case, one tends to retain a heightened awareness of those peculiar coincidences that Jung called synchronicities and Christian conspiracy buffs attribute to hostile occult forces.

In my case, after a few years I found myself seemingly forced to choose, not between paranoia and metanoia -- both by then appeared pitiful oversimplifications -- but between mysticism and agnosticism. I solved that problem, for myself anyway, by choosing agnostic mysticism in the tradition of Lao-tse:

Something unknown, unspeakable,
before Earth or sky,
before life or death,
I do not know what to call it
So I call it Dao

What do I think we should do with Dr. Hoffman's "problem child"? Well, no commodity becomes safer when its manufacture, sale and distribution all fall into the hands of professional criminals; and prohibition, of alcohol and all other drugs, inevitably has that effect, followed by police corruption and public cynicism. Maybe governments should leave this arena entirely and let professional scientists, medical and otherwise, write the guidelines? - Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson explains Quantum Physics

Posted By Scotto @ DoseNation.com

In this charming video, Robert Anton Wilson tours the subject of quantum physics in his own inimitable style.

Any model we make does not describe the universe it describes what our brains are capable of saying at this time. All perception is gamble. We believe what we see and then we believe our interpretation of it we don't even know we're making an interpretation most of the time.

Translator: "She wants to know what Quantum Physics is..." *takes sip*

RAW: "WHAT?"

Translator: "Quantum Physics, explain it simply she asks"

RAW: "Explain Quantum Physics simply?"

Translator braces herself and RAW explains it wonderfully!

RAW, U R missed!

Santa’s Crimes Against Humanity

By Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson was the author of the legendary The Illuminatus! Trilogy. He died earlier this year.

In Burlington, North Carolina in 1990, a group of decent, Christian, hard-working folks who called themselves the Truth Tabernacle Church held a trial featuring the well-known elf Santa Claus as defendant.

They charged Mr. Claus, represented in court by a stuffed dummy, with all sorts of high crimes and misdemeanors. They charged him with paganism. They charged him with perjury for claiming to be Saint Nicholas. They even charged him with encouraging child abuse by appearing in whiskey ads. Worse yet, they found him guilty on all counts, for basically being a jolly old elf — i.e., a pagan god trying to steal Christmas from Christ.

It wasn't the first time Mr. Claus got the boot from a Christian congregation. Pope John XXIII threw the suspiciously merry old clown out of the Roman Catholic church back in the late 1960s. The Jehovah's Witnesses have always denounced Santa for his unsavory pagan past. (They also recognized Christmas trees as phallic symbols long before Freud.) Many fundamentalists believe that all pagan gods are basically one false god — the same demon in different disguises — and they think the disguise is thin in the case of this particular elf. It only takes a minor letter switch, they point out, to reveal Santa Claus as SATAN Claus.

I sort of think the fundies have it right for once. Santa not only has an unsavory pagan ancestry but a rather criminal family history all around. Let me Illuminize you...
As Weston La Barre pointed out a long time ago in his classic Ghost Dance: The Origins of Religion, you can find remnants of a primordial bear-god from the bottom of South America up over North America and over the North Pole and down across most of Europe and Asia. This deity appears in cave paintings from southern France carbon-dated at 30,000 BC. You can find him and her (for this god is bisexual) disguised in Artemis and Arduina and King Arthur, all unmasked via canny detective work by folklorists -- and etymologists, who first spotted the bear-god when they identified the Indo-European root ard, meaning bear. You can track the bear-god in dwindling forms in a hundred fairy tales from all over Europe and Asia. And you can find the rituals of this still-living god among the indigenous tribes of both American continents.
And Santa, like Peter Pan and the Green Man of the spring festivals, and the Court Jester — and (in an odd way) Chaplin's beloved Little Tramp — all have traits of the god that walks like a man and acts nasty sometimes and clownish sometimes and who was ritually killed and eaten by most of our ancestors in the Stone Age, who then became one with their god and thus also became (if the ritual worked) as brave as their god. See Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough for the gory details.

And I swear the same god-bear tromps and shambles through every page of Joyce's masterpiece of psycho-archeology, Finnegans Wake. If you don't believe me, consult Adaline Glasheen's Third Census of Finnegans Wake.

Most folklorists recognize "the cannibal in the woods" as a humanized relic of the bear-god. The heroine, in 101 tales, meets him while on a mission of mercy. He generally sets the heroine to solve three riddles, and when she succeeds, instead of eating her he becomes her ally and helps her reach her goal. One variation on that became The Silence of the Lambs. Another became Little Red Riding Hood.

What? Hannibal Lecter another of Santa's uncouth family?

Yes, indeedy.

In some rustic parts of Europe and probably in Kansas, Santa retains traces of his carnivorous past. Children are told that if they are "good" all year, Santa will reward them, but if they are "bad" he will EAT THEM ALL UP. Yeah, the Boogie Man , or Bogie, or Pookah, or Puck, are all of somewhat ursine ancestry, although other animal-gods got mixed in sometimes.

As Crazy Old Uncle Ezra wrote in Canto 113, "The gods have not returned. They have never left us."

Jung might state the case thusly: Gods, as archetypes of the genetic human under-soul (or "collective unconscious"), cannot be killed or banished; they always return with a new mask but the same symbolic meaning. Related example: Young ladies in ancient Greece were often seduced or raped by satyrs; in the Arab lands, we note a similar outbreak of randy djinn; it India, it was devas. In the Christian Dark Ages, it began happening to young men, too, especially to monks. They called the lascivious critter an incubus. Now it's happening all around us, and the molesters come from Outer Space. The sex-demon, like the Great Mother and the Shadow and our ursine hero, and the three brothers hunting the dragon (recognize them in Jaws? Spot them doing their Three Stooges gig?) — these archetypal forces always come back under new names. Sir Walter Scott called them "the crew that never rests."

And the bear-god seems wakeful elsewhere. He has appeared prominently in other bits of pop culture — the movies Legends of the Fall and The Edge (both of which, curiously, star Anthony Hopkins, who also starred as Hannibal Lecter) and snuck into Modern Lit 101 not only via Joyce but also via Faulkner's great parable "The Bear." He also pops up to deliver the punch line in Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?

We will see more of him, methinks.

Meanwhile, Santa, the Jester/Clown/Fertility God aspect of Father Bear, is doing quite well also, despite getting the bum's rush by some grim, uptight Christers. He has quite successfully stolen Xmas from X and brings pagan lust and pagan cheer to most of us, every year, just when we need it most — in the dead of winter. His beaming face appears everywhere and if we have a minor cultural war going on between those who wish to invoke him via alcohol and those who prefer their invocations per cannabis, we all share the pagan belief, at least for part of a week, that the best way to mark the solstice and the year's dying ashes is to form a loving circle and all get bombed together.

As a pagan myself, I wouldn't have it any other way.

By Robert Anton Wilson