Consciousness
Information received and decoded by a structure. In prescientific human beings, the structure is the nervous system as defined and limited by its imprints.
Intelligence
Information received, decoded, and trans-mitted by a structure. Operationally, we cannot say an entity is "intelligent" until it transmits information received.
Imprints
Electrochemically bonded neural circuits defining and limiting the capacity to receive, decode, and transmit information. There are at least eight imprint circuits in the human, of which only four are normally used.
Higher consciousness
Neurological states in which suspension of imprint or serial reimprinting allow for de-tection of information usually not received by the four primitive circuits.
Higher intelligence
(1) Neurological training which allows for high-fidelity reception, decoding, and transmission on all eight circuits of the human nervous system. (2) Presumed ex-traterrestrial races which have evolved to such hi-fi information processing.
"Reality"
The Gestalts which a given nervous system integrates out of information received. Each "reality" is relative, being defined and limited by the imprint circuits of the receiv-ing nervous system.
Brainwashing
Forcible reimprinting of a nervous system to eliminate old "realities" and imprint a new "reality."
Hedonic engineering
The art and science of reimprinting one's own nervous system for more ecstatic or intelligent functioning. Serial reincarnation in one body.
Information
The measure of the amount of order in a system. The mathematical reciprocal of entropy, the amount of disorder in a system.
Signal
A unit of information at a velocity equal to,
or less than, the speed of light.
Electromagnetic chauvinism The belief that information requires transportation, i.e., signals, i.e., energy moving at, or less than, the speed of fight.
Neurologic
The logic of the nervous system; how the
imprint circuits process information.
Terrestrial circuits
The imprint circuits concerned with survival, status, and reproduction in a gravity well, i.e., on the surface of a planet. These are the four circuits normally used by most human beings.
Left hemisphere
The portion of the brain concerned with linear processes. The presumed control center of the four terrestrial circuits.
Extraterrestrial circuits
The imprint circuits concerned with what
have been called "religious" or "mystical"
consciousness. These are now assumed to
be the four circuits of quantum logic for use
in space migration, higher intelligence, and
longevity-immortality.
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Right hemisphere
The presumed brain location of the
quantum-logic circuits of extraterrestrial
consciousness.
Light cone
An hour-glass-shaped figure in which the spacetime paths of light make up the cone itself. All signals move at, or slower than, the speed of light and must be inside the light cone. Thus, only events in the past light cone can affect A. And, in turn, A can affect only those events in its future light cone. This is the rule of special relativity. However, there may be quantum events that do have effects outside the light cone. These effects would have to be nonener-getic effects: information without transportation, or without signals.
FUTURE
ELSEWHERE \!/ ^
^r / ' \
Y / \
/-------1 ^
C ' D
PAST
ERP
The Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky paradox, which holds that if quantum theory is true, nonlocal effects must occur (outside the light cone). This was offered as a reductio ad absurdum of quantum theory, since it sug-gests "telepathy," as Einstein pointed out.
Bell's theorem
John S. Bell's proof (1964) that any objective quantum theory must include nonlocal effects: effects outside the light cone (faster than light). Thus, if we reject nonlocality with its suggestion of "telepathy," we seem
driven to nonobjectivity, which suggests psychokinesis or the merging of physics and parapsychology into paraphysics.
Decoding
Finding the meaningful structure (informa-tion) within a system. Beethoven's Ninth and the Crick-Watson DNA model are both decodings of the life script of Terra.
Neuro-
A prefix denoting "known by or through the human nervous system." Thus we have no physics but neurophysics, no psychology but neuropsychology, no linguistics but neurolinguistics, and, ultimately, no neurology but neuroneurology, and no neuroneurology but neuroneuroneurology, etc. See Von Neumann's catastrophe immedi-ately below.
Von Neumann's catastrophe More fully known as Von Neumann's catastrophe of the infinite regress. A mathematical demonstration by John Von Neumann, showing that any attempt to remove uncer-tainty from the quantum realm by introducing a second order of instruments to monitor the first order will still contain uncertainty, leading to a third order of instruments, a fourth, etc., to infinity... or to a decision by the observer that we can bear the remaining amount of uncertainty.
Guerilla ontology
The basic technique of all my books. Ontol-ogy is the study of being; the guerilla ap-proach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page "How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?" This literary technique seems justified by the accelerated acceleration of new knowledge, new theories, new inventions, and new possibilities in our time, since any "reality" map we can form is probably obsolete by the time it reaches print.
Dissociation of Ideas, 2 istinguish between Feminism and Women's Liberation.
Feminism is, simply, a demand for justice which all ethical persons must support. It may be more basic than any other demand for justice, because the exploitation of women is damaging also to children and thereby to the whole human race; so that anybody who works for Feminism is working for the sanity of the species.
Women's Liberation is a specific brand of Feminism born out of the ugliness and fanaticism of New Left politics. To some extent, it has outgrown the worst aspects of that background; to some extent, it has not. It will outgrow that ugliness eventually, as the HEAD revolution teaches everybody to use their brains better. Meanwhile, one can support Feminism and still recognize that Women's Liberation, like all the fallout of the New Left, is partly a pathological hate trip.
Coex! Coex! Coex! 've been reading/studying/reveling in Finnegans Wake for 32 years now; I started it at 16. Joyce said in one of his joking moods, "This will keep the professors busy for the next thousand years," and I believe him. I find new depths and profundities, and more jokes, every time I reread it.
For the historical record and as a politico-literary irony, it should be recorded that I was turned on to this great novel/symphony/ jokebook/dream/myth/epic by James T. Farrell.
(Who? James T. Farrell was an influential and occasionally brilliant Marxist-realist of the 1930s and 1940s. His books became unfashionable when his politics became taboo. Farrell wasn't as good as the liberal-Marxoid critics of the '30s claimed, but he is good enough not to deserve the oblivion that has fallen upon him.)
Farrell had a defense of the Wake in one of his books of literary criticism. He said that Joyce's epic investigation of the mind of one man asleep was not devoid of social significance and that it was a perversion of Marxism to dismiss such work as irrelevant to the Revolution. I don't think Farrell convinced a single Marxist—most of them are still hostile to Joyce—but he convinced me. I bought the Wake on my 16th birthday, in 1948, started reading it, and haven't stopped yet.
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sure is to learn to think with your whole brain, "conscious" and "unconscious" circuits included, in holistic coex systems.
Dr. Nick Herbert devised Diagram A to illustrate a possible "context-dependent language" which could describe modern quantum theory.
There are many good literary studies of Joyce, but the best introduction to Finnegans Wake is probably Dr. Stanislaus Grof's Realms of the Human Unconscious, a study of the head spaces experienced under LSD. In particular, Grof's term "coex systems" should be understood by everybody who writes about Joyce or tries to read him. A "coex system" is a condensed experience montage. E.g., you are reexperiencing the birth process, remembering prebirth inter-uterine events, reliving ancestral or archaeological crises of people/animals from whom you are descended, seeing the subatomic energy whorl from which Form appears, previsioning the Superhumanity of the future, and suffering horrible guilt over your unkindness to another child when you were four years old... all atonce!
Critics have tried to explain Finnegans Wake by means of Freud and Jung, but Joyce was a quantum jump ahead of the psychology of his time. Everything in Finnegans Wake is a coex system in Grof's sense. We can only understand it in terms of the latest findings in neurology, genetics, sociobiology, and exopsychology. To learn to read Finnegans Wake with ease and plea-
In such a language A would take its total meaning from the context of B, C, D, and E; B, in turn, would take its total meaning from A, C, D, and E; and so forth. This is also the way an LSD-induced coex system operates, and the way the great dream-myth of Finnegans Wake operates.
Example: the word "thuartpeatrick" on page 1 of the Wake- With the simultaneity of a coex system, this contains the following.
1.
"Thou art Peter," the English version of the pun on which the Catholic Church is allegedly founded. (Petrus means rock, and Jesus' pun goes on "and on this Rock I will build my church.")
2.
"Tu es Petrus," the Latin vulgate of the same phrase, superimposed upon the English.
3.
A pun on "thwart," relating in the total context of the book to the sexual frustrations of the dreamer, H. C. Earwicker.
4.
The "peat ricks" which used to stand beside every Irish home, providing fuel. This is one of a few dozen puns on the first page which help locate the dreamer in Ireland; others more specifically locate him in Dublin.
5.
A pun on the Gaelic of "Patrick"
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("Paidrig"), Ireland's national saint, an-other reinforcement of the Irish locale of the dream.
6.
A pun on "pea trick," referring to the many other "pea" puns in the book, all revolving around the phrase "like as two peas in a pod" and referring to the fact that the dreamer's sons are twins, physically indistinguishable but psychologically opposite.
7.
In context, a reference to the repeated refrain "mind your p's and q's," which refers to the dreamer's guilts generally, and, by the association of the sound of p and "pea," to "pee" and the dreamer's uncon-scious urinary obsession.
8.
A suggestion mat the Cadiolic Church, or Finnegans Wake itself, or maybe literature generally, is a "pea trick," or shell game, a semantic game in which words almost become the realities they symbolize.
This is not all mere is in "thuartpeatrick," I'm sure; it's merely what I've gleaned in 30 or 40 readings of Finnegans Wake. Knowing Joyce's methods, I wouldn't be surprised if there are references to cannibalism in Lithuanian or to rivers in Russian also concealed in this word. (For instance, I was convinced for years that "the whiteboyce of Hoodie Head," also on page 1, concealed only the White Boys, an Irish revolutionary group of the nineteenth century, and the Ku Klux Klan, an American parallel. Then I learned that Hode in German is testicles, and realized the phrase signified the sper-matozoa in the testicles.)
Another delightful example of Joyce's coex language is "goddinpotty," from Chapter Four. Here we can find the follow-ing superimposed upon each other.
1. Garden party. The speaker in this scene is an Englishwoman and Joyce is par-odying English upperclass speech, in which
"garden party" indeed sounds like "god-dinpotty."
2.
Garden party also suggests the Garden of Eden theme that runs all through the book (from the appearance of Eve and Adam in the first sentence) and, hence, the Fall of Man and, thus, in the same line of dream symbolism, the Fall of Finnegan from which the book takes its title.
3.
The Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden links up with the dreamer's guilt about some mysterious "sin" he committed in the bushes in Phoenix Park, Dublin.
4.
"God" and "din" suggest the thunder god, Thor, who is one of the principal characters in the dream—possibly because the thunder strikes ten times during the night.
5.
God-in-potty suggests, to anyone raised Catholic, the Host in the chalice, the bread that becomes the Body of God when the priest speaks the magic formula over it.
6.
But the dreamer himself is the Host, in two senses: (a) in waking life, he is Host of an inn; (b) diroughout the dream, he is periodically denounced, condemned, exe-cuted, and devoured cannibalistically, and rises from the dead. This repeats the pat-tern of the Christ myth, just as the blessing and eating of the Host in the Mass does. It also repeats all the other dead-and-resur-rected vegetation gods in Jung's collective unconscious. (In the Freudian personal unconscious, the trials and executions represent the dreamer's sexual guilts.)
7.
"Potty" again brings in the dreamer's infantile urinary obsessions.
It will be observed that in analyzing only two phrases (three words) from the Wake, we have stumbled upon virtually every important theme of the dream, of the hero's personal unconscious, and of humanity's collective DNA archives. Joyce doesn't pack quite that much into every phrase, of
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course; but if you have found only two levels of reference in one of his puns, you have probably missed at least two others, and maybe as many as in these examples.
Finnegans Wake is not just a great novel and a semantic symphony; it contains a whole science of psychoarchaeology and historical neurolinguistics. As John Gard-
ner said of it, "Joyce dredged in that book. No other human being in the history of the world, including Beethoven, has ever given every single piece of emotion and thought and feeling the way Joyce did. He dredged up every ounce of his soul, every cell, every gene."
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^Illuminati papers
From: The Order of the
Muminati, Sirius Section
To: Galactic Central
he progress of the domesticated primates of Terra has been advancing nicely since we introduced the Tarot deck five krals ago. As predicted, the amusement of the Tarot game has led to wide dispersion of the cards among the primates, and some have inevitably learned to use the cards also for scanning quantum probability waves and thus foreseeing "future" events. A few have even begun to decode the evolutionary script in the structure of the deck. We have, therefore, elected to introduce a second educational device among them, once again disguised as a game.
The new game is called "chess." Detailed instructions for play, with a hologram of the playing board, are enclosed as an appendix to this report.
The purpose of the chess board is to insinuate a correct model of the primate brain into the semantic circuit of said brain, with the hope
that, as with the Tarot, the smarter primates will gradually decipher it.
To begin with, we have made the board of black and white squares, although it can be altered to black and red, or any other starkly contrasting polarity, as suits the whims of various primate artisans. The essential signal will remain the same,
although black/white is, of course, the strongest artistic expression of the encoded symbolism.
The primal message is, as Your Lucidity will readily scan, the basic positive-negative (off-on) pulsation of all energy forms. Since we have already infiltrated this signal into Terran culture in several other artifacts and toys (see Memo 2317, "On the Chinese Yin-Yang and Related Electronic Codes"), the more intuitive primates will easily recognize its reiteration 32 times in the 64 squares of the chess board. We thus hope confidentially that some of them will eventually contemplate the relation between the eight rows of the board, the eight files, the proportions of 8 x 4 = 32 and 8 x 8 = 64, etc., thereby deducing the great Law of Octaves which we are still trying to teach them.
Since the chess board itself models the Terran brain, as they will gradually realize, the black-white symbolism will help them to intuit the relationship between the active left hemisphere (Yang) and the passive right hemisphere (Yin). As in all neurogenetic codes, we include extra information in each signal. Thus we hope the on-off (positive-negative) symbol will simultaneously suggest to them the on-off nature of con-
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sciousness itself (and the unreality of their current static self-images or egos); the off-on functioning of the individual synapse; the on-off of the emotional-glandular switches; the off-on of the sleep-waking cycle; etc.
We cheerfully predict that, within only a few tneks, some Terran primate gazing at a chess board will intuit "in a flash," as they say, that the repeated pattern of black-white-black-white-black-white-black-white, etc., is the peak and crest of a sine wave, entirely
similar to their own + — H--------1---h - brain
processes. In short, a philosopher will arise among them to announce that the illusion of a continuous ego is caused by insufficient self-observation.*
To reiterate the basic application of the plus-minus polarity to the Terran brain, we have encoded die signal in a more complex and subde way into the larger design of the chess board. That is, we have divided it into a seemingly strong "King side" and a seemingly weak "Queen side." We have also divided it (rather obviously) into a "strong" white side and a "weak" black side. The strength of the white side is so blatant, in fact, that the primates, as soon as we introduced the game, established a tradition to "make the game more fair." This tradition obliges the players to exchange roles, so
* Addendum: It happened within only two krals. The philosopher was named Gotama, and his disciples made a religion (Buddhism) out of his observations, garbling the transmission considerably. Within half a kral, however, another philosopher made the same observation; his name was David Hume, and most of the other philosophers are still busy trying to "refute" him. In only an eighth of a kral since then, a group of clever investigators named Maxwell, Faraday, Planck, Bohr, and Schrodinger made the proper applications of this signal to cosmic energy generally, and a psy-chologist named Jung expressed in better scientific language than Gotama or Hume its application to consciousness.
that whoever is white (has the advantage) in one game must play black (have the disadvantage) in another game.
This is where we get sneaky. Having discovered that one side of the board is stronger, going up the ranks, they will soon try to learn if one half is stronger, going across on the files. It will seem obvious to them that the "King" side (from white's perspective) is stronger. To make the neurological lesson obvious even to a Terran primate, we have placed the "strong" King side where the right hand of the "strong" (white) player naturally rests. Thus, each time primates play this "harmless game," they will be neurologically absorbing the information that the "strong" right hand is connected with the "King side" modes of thought, i.e., those in the left hemisphere of the brain (Vang).
It is our estimate that, given the dominance of right-hand, left-hemisphere functions in all primitive species at this stage of development, and given also the mode of male superiority that the primates of Terra have currently adopted, they will almost all try to win the game on the "King side." This is one of the jokers built into our code.
We estimate that it will take 1.5 krals before even the cleverest of the Terrans realizes that the "Queen side," corresponding to die left-hand, right-hemisphere neurological mode, is actually the stronger side. This lesson should have a dramatic "shock treatment" effect on their evolution.*
* Addendum: As predicted, when the superiority of the "Queen side" was discovered, the event was syn-chronous with such related righi-hemisphere phenom-ena as the use of Oriental perspective in Occidental painting; the Bohr-Schrodingcr discoveries mentioned above; the rise of Feminism; rapid evolution from "psychology" to precise neuroscience; creation of syn-ergetic geometry and holistic philosophies of evolution; a Yin revolution; etc.
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It is further hoped that the 64 squares of the total chess board will eventually transmit the concept of the 64 codons of the genetic code, especially since we have already infiltrated this suggestion into the 64 hexagrams of the/ Ching. Even if the 8x8 structure does not totally communicate the Law of Octaves to them, we have reason to hope that within a kral or two they will at least stumble upon the eightfold nature of the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements.
To represent their present primitive stage of self-awareness, we employ eight pawns. Each pawn represents an ego state, and the primates will easily identify with each pawn as they move it. The fact that there are eight pawns, not one, will, we expect, give them some subliminal suggestions about the narrowness of their "one ego" view of themselves.
We have also arranged the metastructure of the game so that the quickest win can be obtained by sacrificing the first pawn moved (if the opponent is gullible enough to succumb to the "grab-at-once" or "attack-at-once" reflex, without using the higher brain circuits). The art of sacrificing pawns skillfully, to win the larger game,
will, we hope, insinuate into the Terrans an awareness of the necessity to sacrifice each and any ego state for the maximum func-tioning efficiency of the brain as a whole. In short, the player who is attached to or identified with any given ego state (pawn) will be defeated by the player who thinks in gestalts, using the whole board, i.e., the whole-brain model. The other eight pieces, like the eight pawns, hint again at the Law of Octaves, and reiterate once more that the single-ego view of consciousness is false, for each piece represents a different mode of consciousness or a separate brain circuit.
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The king's rook, which can move only orthogonally, forward, back, or sideways, represents the most primitive amphibian cir-cuits of the brain, having to do with biosur-vival fight-or-flight reflexes. The orthogonal symbolism also correlates with the crawling of the newborn infant, when this circuit is being imprinted. The double symbolism is, we submit, neat but not gaudy.
The king's knight, which leaps up from the board to descend in an unexpected place, represents the mammalian predator who leaps upon the prey. Since this section of the brain is imprinted in the stage wherein the infant rises up, walks, and begins struggling for power in the pack or family, the up-down symbolism is, we think, neurolog-ically apt.
The king's bishop, which moves on the diagonal, represents the semantic circuit, which creates Euclidean 3D reality maps in the primate brain. We put it on a diagonal, instead of at right angles to the orthogonal rook and up-down knight, because 3D chess is beyond the primates at this point.
The king, which stays at home, represents the fourth circuit: mating and reproduction.
Thus we have provided a complete model of the circuits of the left brain, standing before the right hand of the "white" player and hinting powerfully of the right-hand/ left-brain feedback loop.
The queen side contains a complete model, in turn, of the extraterrestrial circuits waiting to be activated by DNA-RNA signals at the proper evolutionary time.
The queen's rook represents the more intense/less intense modulations of the neurosomatic circuit.
The queen's knight, which contains many surprising potentials that chess players will not discover for at least a tnek,
(Jliitnrituttt papers
represents the electronic perspectives of the sixth, metaprogramming circuit.*
The queen's bishop, moving diagonally like the king's bishop, represents the neuro-genetic circuit of DNA evolutionary intelli-gence, as contrasted with the narrow egotistic intelligence of the individual primate.
The queen herself, the only piece that can move any distance in any direction, represents the neuroatomic circuit, beyond all their concepts of space and time. (She also represents Our Lady of the Stars, but it will take an oroblram before they figure that out.)
* Addendum: Not until the twentieth century of their calendar did the Terran primates discover that it was stronger to move the queen's knight out before the king's. Male chauvinism blinded them to many of the strengths of the queen's side.
Finally, to illustrate that any mode of consciousness can graduate through HEAD work to the neuroatomic transtime perspec-tive, we have arranged the rules of the game so that any pawn, by moving upward to the eighth rank (i.e., through the eight brain circuits), can become a Queen, i.e., a space-time traveler.
We confidently believe, Your Vastness, that the chess game will be one of the most successful educational devices we have in-troduced to the Terran primates.
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em
<*
Hej, man, are you using
only half your brain?
You're pretty hip. We all know that.
You can throw an / Ching hexagram and intuit its meaning. You know all about Hedonic Engineering and staying high. You've seen through all the social games.
When it comes to the neurosomatic circuit of the brain, and body wisdom, you're a champ. And everybody knows it.
But what about those mysterious left-hemisphere brain functions? Wouldn't you like to learn the secrets of the West, previously known only to the adepts at the esoteric Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies? Strange arts like the Equation, which predicts things before they happen, or the Syllogism, which allows you to test an argument for internal validity? Or
wouldn't you like to know how the mysteri-ous Stereo works, or what keeps planes from falling out of the sky?
Imagine trying to live with one eye, or one lung, or one testicle.
Isn't it equally a handicap to use only half your brain?
Subscribe to SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN (not a religious organization)
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Conspiracy Digest
Interview 2
Conspiracy Digest: Jefferson was allegedly a dupe. After all, it was John Adams and his Federalists who put a cap on the American Revolution and laced the constitution with defects that have led our current commu-nazi synthesis!
Wilson: I'm more inclined to blame the defects in the constitution on Alexander Hamilton, as Ezra Pound does in his won-derfully provocative Impact: Essays on Ignorance and the Decline of American Civili-zation. But finding somebody to "blame" for history is Newtonian push-pull thinking. I prefer to analyze events as in modern physics, in terms of relativistic signals creating alternative reality maps for different observers. For instance, the California welfare system, on which I lived for two years once (gasp, shudder, arrgh!), seems, if looked at in a linear way, to be nothing but a concerted effort to degrade and destroy the poor. When you look into it more closely, you find that nobody planned it that way; it grew out of constant conflict between the liberals, who wanted one type of welfare system, and the conservatives, who wanted another. The result was a gigantic snafu.
The same is true of the constitution, which, as Beard showed (with much more scholarship and objectivity than eitiier Josephson or Pound), grew out of a real class war between Federalist proprietors and Republican small farmers, and ended up satisfying neither of them. Pm not interested in blaming anybody for anything. Most people, as Bucky Fuller says, are too ignorant to be responsible for what they do. I'm interested in getting the hell off the Planet of the Apes and building free libertarian communes in space, where the Free Mind can develop to its full potential, without the communication jamming of the 24 conspiracies on Terra.
CD: Getting back to Aleister Crowley, do you know anything about his alleged affilia-tions with German Intelligence during World War I? In Crowley's Confessions he admits writing for registered German agent George Sylvester Viereck's propaganda newspaper, International, while in New York (1914), but claims he was actually a double agent for British Intelligence. Could Crowley's involvement in the Theodore Ruess (German) Ordo Templi Orientis have led to Crowley's having become involved or instrumental in Establishment conspiracies?
Wilson: I don't know for sure, but it would fit my picture of Uncle Aleister if he worked for both British and German Intelligence and also played his own game against both of them. Never underestimate Uncle Al's sense of humor. Crowley's real game, of course, was the Consciousness-Intelligence Revolution, which will eventually raise humanity out of mammalian territorial politics, as we have already outgrown the gills or tails of earlier evolutionary stages.
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CD: In your book, Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits, you advocate Dr. Timothy Leary's principle that drug use should be voluntary and thus, presumably, oppose any sort of drug-controlled 1984-type society. In spite of the sincere motives of drug advocates, is it not possible that they are unconscious tools of the ruling-class conspiracy? Isn't it probable that the Establishment is planning for a drug-controlled culture, a la Ira Levin's novel This Perfect Day? Could the Carter administration's "softening" on drugs (advisor Peter Bourne has launched a trial balloon on heroin, marijuana, and cocaine) be part of a tyrannical, forced drug plot?
Wilson: First of all, I object to the term "drug advocates," which is an inaccurate as calling Kinsey a "homosexuality advocate" because he wrote factually and objectively, without inflammatory propaganda, on that subject. Or calling Justice Hugo Black an "obscenity advocate" because he believed people should have the right to decide whether or not they wanted to read a given book. All Leary and I have ever advocated is that the individual, not the government, should decide what experiments (chemical or otherwise) should be conducted within the individual's own nervous system.
Leary's "Two Commandments for the Neurological Age," 1966, were, first, "Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy neighbor without his or her consent," and the second, which is like unto this, is "Thou shalt not prevent thy neighbor from altering his or her own consciousness." (Dr. Leary has recently added a Third Commandment, 1975, which says, "Thou shalt make no more commandments.")
As the first commandment shows, Dr. Leary has always been most urgently aware of the problem you raise. Our article on
"Brainwashing" in Neuropolitics explains how mind-programming works and how to outwit it. Dr. Leary's Exo-Psychology is a manual on brain change and on how to become self-programming. Any brain-washing system, even those that use the most powerful metaprogramming chemicals like LSD, can be successfully resisted by those who understand the techniques being used. Programming, imprinting, and conditioning whole populations can only work where there is total secrecy about what is being done. I say in all seriousness that the more people who understand the mindfucking techniques dramatized in Illuminatus! and scientifically analyzed in Exo-Psychology, the safer we all are against misuse of those techniques. Meanwhile, keeping Leary's Two 1966 Commandments in print is beneficial in itself, because every reader has to decide to agree with both of them, to deny both of them, or to agree with one and deny the other. Deciding where you stand on that issue is itself a learning experience. Do you think anybody but yourself has the right to experiment on your nervous system? That really is the basic philosophical-ethical question posed by the Neurological Revolution. Remember: the nervous system is what pre-scientific primates call the "self" or the "soul." The "self" at the moment depends on which circuit is activated. The "soul" or metaprogrammer decides which circuit or "self" to be at each time-juncture. Do you want to choose your own "self" or do you want your "soul" on ice?
CD: In Sex and Drugs you reveal your acquaintance with Dr. Joel Fort. How do you respond to the U.S. Labor Party's charge, in their book Carter and the Party of International Terrorism, that Dr. Fort's San Francisco Project One was a "brainwashing center" that spawned the Symbionese Lib-
i3Uwmiiurti ^aperss
eration Army synthetic zombies for use by the Rockefeller-CIA in "social drama" operations? Purpose: to justify a police state by creating terrorist episodes.
Wilson: Well, since the USLP doesn't offer any documentation or anything that would pass as evidence in a court of law or a meeting of historians, rebutting them is like hunting for something solid in a tapioca pudding. I would merely say that, under the rules of evidence in civilized nations, no jury would convict Dr. Fort on the basis of the kind of allegations made by the USLP; no sane District Attorney or Grand Jury would indict him in the first place; and no sober police department would even call him in for questioning.
USLP says, for instance, that the Fort Help office "houses a fully equipped brainwashing and terrorist command center." That is not evidence; evidence requires testimony (preferably by a qualified expert) that the equipment in Fort Help has been used for brainwashing, or at least could be so used. Without such testimony, a statement of that sort is allegation, or hearsay, and has no evidential value, however inflammatory it is to the imagination of the naive. I could just as well say that USLP headquarters "houses all the equipment to make porno movies and rape old ladies." USLP also points out that Fort is "a former collaborator with Dr. Timothy Leary during the 1950s government-sponsored experimentation with LSD." That sentence is (a) guilt by association, a type of argument known to be invalid in the first place, (b) factually untrue, since Dr. Leary didn't do any LSD research, for the government or anybody, during the 1950s, and (c) irrelevant even if it were true (which it isn't), since literally hundreds of scientists have worked with Dr. Leary on one project or another over the
three decades of Leary's professional career, and that doesn't prove anything, except that scientists often work in teams or groups.
USLP also points out that Fort Help has a mental-patient liberation group "similar to the Heidelberg Mental Patients Collective in Germany that became the Bader-Meinhof gang." The fallacy there was pointed out by Aristotle 2,500 years ago (similarity is not identity). I could just as well say USLP has a typewriter "similar to the one on which the Lindberg kidnap notes were written." I feel silly myself even having to point out such elementary logical fallacies. USLP, in general, seems to aim their publications at people of extreme gullibility and no critical faculties at all. (Also, of course, there are mental-patients' liberation groups all over the country, independent of Fort Help, and it isn't even clear if, in this particular slander, USLP wants us to believe that only the Fort group is like unto the German group or that all mental-patients' liberation groups are like unto it. And, of course, they offer no documentation that the German group did turn into a "gang.")
USLP also claims to have found one staff member of Fort Help who is, they claim (without documentation), also a member of something called Revolutionary Union. Oh, for Christ's sake, when Joe McCarthy sank that low—finding one member of the Welch law firm who had once been a communist and trying to use that to discredit Welch—even Roy Cohn was embarrassed, and McCarthy's most gullible dupes began to wake up.
Of course, the slanders against many others in USLP's Carter book are just as logically and legally invalid, nonevidential, and undocumented as the slanders against Dr. Fort.
I would also like to add in this connection
,3IUuminaii papers
that every major religion, not just the Old Testament, has some version of the com-mandment against bearing false witness against thy neighbor. When a man's character is slandered, not just he suffers, but his wife, his children, his parents, often his friends. Those who make a career out of spreading unproven accusations against other humans can only be forgiven if they really are so ignorant and stupid that they don't know the difference between an assertion and an eviden-tial demonstration. I think it's awfully late to accept that kind of ignorance as an excuse. I think we have a duty to try to know, and to act rationally, responsibly, and decently. In this connection, I recommend Wilhelm Reich's The Murder of Christ, especially the chapter on Mocenigo, the guy who turned Girodano Bruno in to the Inquisition. Reich points out that the slanderer and the assassin are similar types, psychologically; being ugly and unattractive personalities themselves, they can only achieve status parasitically, by "stealing" it from the innocent victims they destroy. Mocenigo wouldn't be remembered at all if he hadn't caused the burning of Bruno, and he only gets a footnote for that. The people who have defamed Freud, Reich, Leary, Fort, Sakharov, Oppenheimer, and other great scientists in our time will also only get footnotes. Who the hell would remember Mildred Brady today if she hadn't been the one who incited the FDA to burn Dr. Reich's scientific books in an incinerator?
CD: A major theme in Illuminatus! seemed to be that die authoritarian Illumi-nati seek to achieve immortality (peak experience?) by inflicting death and suffering, while Hagbard Celine's Legion of Dynamic Discord achieved same through sexual orgasm. How do you defend this apparent dichotomy against those who claim (per-
haps like Freud and some conservatives) that sex and sado-masochism are inseparably one? Surely this seems to be the position of the Marquis de Sade in Philosophy in the Bedroom. Was Sade an Illuminatus?
Wilson: Jesus, don't confuse the peak experience with the quest for immortality. I agree with Bergson that the search for immortality is a basic human drive (after all, it's the theme of the oldest novel in the world, the Epic ofGilgamesh) but, because of ignorance and primitive technology, it has taken many crazy and malevolent forms. In the allegory oi Illuminatus!, the Illuminati are seeking spiritual immortality through black magick (human sacrifice), Robert Putney Drake is trying to outwit Death by making it into his company cop — his power kick — and Hagbard Celine quite intelligently is seeking immortality through modern science. See Seger-berg's The Immortality Factor, Tucille's Here Comes Immortality, Ettinger's Man Into Superman, and Rosenfeld's Prolongev-ity for current trends in life-extension research and eventual immortality. That's the LE (Life Extension) part of he SMI2LE formula. I can't see why any sane human being would settle for less.
As for the peak experience, that can indeed be achieved in varying degrees by sado-masochism, by polyphase orgasm, or by other methods (isolation, fasting, LSD, etc.). But actually "the peak experience" is a loose and inaccurate phrase; there are 12 ascending states of higher consciousness, catalogued by Dr. Leary and myself in our Game of Life, and each of them sequentially is a higher peak. As a libertarian I am opposed to anything that involves coercive misuse or abuse of other human beings; so I will not condone sado-masochism except among totally voluntary participants.
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I disagree with Freud about sado-maso-chism. I think Dr. Wilhelm Reich was right, in Mass Psychology of Fascism, saying sado-masochism is a secondary drive that arises only when the primary sex drive is repressed or warped. The anthropologist Malinowski, for instance, found no sado-masochism (and no rape) among the sexually free Trobriand Islanders before the Christian missionaries got in.
Making de Sade one of the Inner Five of the original Illuminati in Illuminatus! was one of my little jokes. But who knows...??
CD: Was black writer Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo the inspiration for Illumi-natus!} Could you give us your reaction to Mumbo Jumbo}
Wilson: I didn't read Mumbo Jumbo until about 3 years after Illuminatus! was finished. The same is true of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. The astonishing resemblances between those three books are coincidence, or synchronicity, or Higher Intelligence (take your pick). I love everything Ishmael Reed writes, and I once sent him an official Discordian certificate making him a Pope in the Legion of Dynamic Discord. One of the many hidden jokes in Illuminatus! (which is only the tip of the iceberg, being part of a much larger artwork called Operation Mindfuck) is that the Legion of Dynamic Discord actually exists, despite its prepos-terous sound, whereas some of the more plausible parts of the trilogy are deadpan put-ons. As e. e. cummings said to Ezra Pound, "You damned sadist, you're trying to force your readers to thinkV
CD: Are you familiar with Francis King's Satan and Swastika and Ravenscroft's The
Spear of Destiny} Do you think black-magick Crowley-type cults were behind Hitler and Nazism?
Wilson: I'm familiar with most of the lit-erature on Nazi occultism, and puerile stuff it is. The writers all disagree about which occult trade union really controlled Hider, and every writer tends to blame it on the one occult group he is personally most paranoid about. Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientis was banned by Hitler, and Karl Germer, Crowley's successor as Outer Head of the OTO, spent several years in a concentration camp (where he very intelligently occupied himself with the invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel and came out higher than he went in). My impression is that Hitler was a medium, not a true shaman, and hence subject to obsession and possession by all varieties of insane, weird, destructive influences and entities.
CD: Do you think Hitler was influenced by Crowley's mysterious Book of the Law, as claimed by Crowley in Magick Without
Tears}
i
Wilson: Crowley didn't claim Hitler was influenced by die Book of the Law, just that one of Crowley's German disciples tried to get Hitler interested. If she succeeded, and Adolph actually looked into it, the results were as prophesied in the Book itself: "There is a great danger in me; for who doth not understand these runes shall make a great miss" (II, 27); and "The fool readetk this Book of Law, and its comment; & he under-standeth it not" (III, 63).
© Copyright 1977, Conspiracy Digest, Box 766, Dear-bom, MI 48121
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The picture of the captured Viet Cong officer being shot through the head by Brig. Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan tripped a kind of emotional trigger in the United States. Rep. Henry Reuss (D-Wis.) protested the killing as "horrible." The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Earle Wheeler, felt required to suggest that Gen. Loan acted more in a flash of rage than in cold blood. Newspapers have had a spate of letters objecting to the picture as too brutal for tender eyes.
There is not much point now in going queasy over a picture of one man shooting another; there is worse to come. There is not much point at this moment in debating the quality of the South Vietnamese leadership or their enthusiasm. They are what we've got and our only option is to bring forth the best effort we can, and hope it is good enough.
President Johnson was right in saying that it is not so much our power as our will and our character that are being tested here, and character starts with a strong stomach.
Chicago Daily News February 7,1968
Christian Prayer, 1968
Help us, Prince of Peace, we pray, To keep strong stomachs as we
slay, And, gentle Jesus, give us Will Not to vomit when we kill.
Though the whole world turn away Full of anger and dismay, Let us keep our lunches down And maintain an iron frown.
Give us Character, dear Lord, Not to wince when we're
abhorred, And save us from the vice of pity As we napalm hut and city.
Dear God (and dear Chicago
News) Just as Eichmann killed the Jews, We must kill again tomorrow: Empty us of guilt and sorrow.
Simon Moon
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Science Fiction Review
Interview 1
Science Fiction Review: The theme of "immanentizing the Eschaton" runs throughout Illuminatus!, but the phrase is never defined or explained. In the framework of the book, this seems to imply that various secret societies are working to bring about the end of the world. Is that a valid interpretation?
Wilson: The phrase was coined by a Christian historian, Eric Vogelin, and refers to the Gnostic doctrine that people aren't really as hopelessly mired in Original Sin as Christians think. Eschaton, from the Greek, means the last thing, and, in Christian theology, this would be Heaven. "Im-manentizing the Eschaton" means seeking Heaven within the "immanent" universe, i.e., the only universe we know.
To a thoroughgoing Christian pessimist like Vogelin, anybody who tries to be happy or make others happy is dangerously close to Gnostic heresy. I am all for immanentizing the Eschaton in this sense, next
Tuesday if possible. Vogelin detects imma-nentizing tendencies in humanists, liberals, technologists, optimistic philosophies of evolution like Nietzsche's, communists, anarchists, and most of the post-medieval thought of the Western World, all of which are overtly or covertly aiming at the verboten "heaven on the material plane."
In the novel, we make the point that conservatives are also in danger of imma-nentizing the Eschaton by continuing a cold war that can only result in Hell on the material plane: nuclear incineration.
In one sense, Illuminatus! is a reduclio ad absurdum of all mammalian politics, right or left, by carrying each ideology one logical step further than its exponents care to go. Voltaire used that satirical judo against the Churchmen, and I decided it's time to turn it on die Statesmen. The only intelligent way to discuss politics, as Tim Leary says, is on all fours. It all comes down to territorial brawling.
SFR: I understand the Eschaton theme stems from an anti-Gnostic campaign in the National Review some time ago. Could you fill us in on the origins of the term?
Wilson: As I say, it was coined by Vogelin. The anti-Gnostic theme was chronic in con-servative circles during the early '60s and even got into a Time editorial once. As an ordained priest of the Gnostic Catholic Church, I find this amusing, since it makes most of the educated classes into unknowing disciples of us Gnostics. As Marx said under similar circumstances, "I once shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know."
SFR: How serious are you about the rule of fives and the importance of 23?
Wilson: If Illuminatus! doesn't answer that, nothing else will. The documented
(dUiuminati papers
fact that I have published serious, or at least pedantic, articles on Cabala should add to the mystery. The philosophical point of the book is the reader's own answer to the question, "Is the 5-23 relationship a put-on or an important Cabalistic revelation?" Of course, Cabala itself is a complicated joke, but all profound philosophies turn out to be jokes.
SFR: How serious are you about the Illu-minati and conspiracies in general?
Wilson: Being serious is not one of my vices. I will venture, however, that the idea that there are no conspiracies has been pop-ularized by historians working for universi-ties and institutes funded by the principal conspirators of our time: the Rockefeller-Morgan banking interests, the Council on Foreign Relations crowd, the Trilateral Commission. This is not astonishing or depressing. Conspiracy is standard mammalian politics for reasons to be found in ethology and Von Neumann's and Morgen-stern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Vertebrate competition depends on knowing more than the opposition, monopolizing information along with territory, hoarding signals. Entropy, in a word. Science is based on transmitting the signal accurately, accelerating the process of in-
formation transfer. Negentropy. The final war may be between Pavlov's Dog and Schrodinger's Cat.
However, I am profoundly suspicious about all conspiracy theories, including my own, because conspiracy buffs tend to forget the difference between a plausible argument and a real proof. Or between a legal proof, a proof in the behavioral sciences, a proof in physics, a mathematical or logical proof, or a parody of any of the above. My advice to all is Buddha's last words, "Doubt, and find your own light." Or, as Crowley wrote, "I slept with Faith and found her a corpse in the morning. I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning." Doubt suffer-eth long, but is kind; doubt covereth a multitude of sins; doubt puffeth not itself up into dogma. For now abideth doubt, hope, and charity, these three: and the greatest of these is doubt. With doubt all things are possible. Every other entity in the universe, including Goddess Herself, may be trying to con you. It's all Show Biz. Did you know that Billy Graham is a Bull Dyke in drag?
Interview with Robert Anton Wilson copyright © 1976 Richard E. Geis, for Science Fiction Review No. 17, May, 1976.
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I
TOP SECRET RELEASE TO ALL MEDIA
From: Mordecai die Foul, Illuminati
International, Weishaupt Cabal. To: Theophobia the Elder, TLETC, House of Aposdes of Eris.
Dear Theo,
No, we are not responsible for what is happening to American TV, and I'm sur-prised tJiat you should imagine we would be involved in such a neurological catastrophe.
Of course, we do control the major net-works—nominally, that is. Unfortunately, the mehums we placed in executive positions at the New Bavarian Conspiracy (NBC), the Conservative Bavarian Seers (CBS), and die Ancient Bavarian Conspiracy (ABC) are totally inept and lack all confidence in their own taste and judgment. Since the matter of TV seemed trivial to us, we allowed diem to drift and flounder in dieir own morass.
What these dumb-dumbs did, Theo, was to abdicate all responsibility entirely. They make no decisions at all. They have turned control of the medium over to a mysterious group known as the Nielsen Families.
You may well ask, "Who are the Nielsen Families?"
These are several thousand households selected—allegedly at random—by a pollster named Nielsen. What the Nielsen Families look at on the tube supposedly
represents die taste of the whole country (as would be the case, staristically, if they were indeed selected at random).
For a long while, we were deceived along widi everybody else. After all, as Henry Louis Mencken once said, "Nobody has ever gone broke by underestimating the in-telligence of die American people." But then, with the sinister increase in shows like Laveme and Shirley and Tic Tac Dough, we began to wonder. We conducted our own secret investigation.
What we found, Theo, was diat the Nielsen Families were not selected at random. Our old antagonist, Mr. Markoff Chaney, had gained access to the Nielsen Corp. headquarters at night, reprogrammed the computer entirely, and selected his own candidates for the Nielsen Families.
Chaney, if you haven't heard of him, is an electronics whiz with a strong grudge against the establishment, based on the facts that (a) he is a genius and (b) he is three feet tall and hence regarded as "cute" by die normal-sized majority.
What Chaney did was to select only die following groups to be part of the Nielsen sample of American taste.
1. Descendants of the famous Juke family, dull-average morons studied in a pioneering generic survey of the last century. Chaney found every surviving Juke in the
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United States, and included them in the Nielsen group.
2.
Descendants of the Kallikak family, imbeciles who were the subject of a famous Supreme Court case over fifty years ago.
3.
Descendants of the Snopes family of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a clan renowned for bestiality, idiocy, and greed.
That's all there was to it, Theo. The Nielsen people never discovered how their computer had been snafued. The TV execs have never had die courage to offer anything not immediately pleasing to the Nielsen Families. And thus it has come about that American TV consists only of shows that are comprehensible and amusing to the idiots, morons, and imbeciles of the Juke, Kallikak, and Snopes families.
I know you will find this hard to believe, especially since you have more than once voiced your suspicion that, as you say, "a True Illuminatus is a Master Put-on Artist." I assure you, Markoff Chaney really exists; in fact, there are several novels about his exploits for sale right now.
Also, Theo, if you don't believe this explanation, how do you account for the taste of the Nielsen Families?
MORDECAI THE FOUL is High priest of the Head temple of the Bavarian Illumi-
naii. "Since the Illuminati are all atheists," he says, "I don't have many priestly duties to perform—except a Black Mass now and then—so I spend most of my time hanging around Washington and Wall Street, getting to know the Trilateral Commission people and planting evidence, here and there, that we in the Illuminati are still running the world. The gang who really run the world pay me for it, you see, because as long as people blame us for what's going on the real conspirators are safe. Actually, we Illuminatuses gave up politics long ago and now devote ourselves to Cabala and quantum physics. You won't tell Mae Brussell, will you?" Mordecai is suspected by many of being a shameless Put-On Artist.
THEOPHOBIA THE ELDER is an imaginary being created by Mordecai the Foul. Since he is fairly bright, Theophobia has figured this out and knows he has no real existence aside from the mind of Mordecai. Nonetheless, he still relapses into taking him-self seriously on occasion.
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Ten Good Reasons
to Get Out of Bed
in the Morning
his is for all you people who lie in bed every morning and wonder if it's going to be worth the trouble to get up. So die job is a drag, your friends let you down, and the price of coffee is outrageous. Listen to me. I have survived two bouts of polio. One of my daughters was gang-raped by three hoods in 1971; another, my youngest, was brutally murdered in 1976. Yet, to quote Faulkner's Nobel Prize address, I still "decline to accept the end of man." I firmly believe that we are entering an age that will make the Renaissance look like a tempest in a teapot, and that each of us can play a role in turning man into superman.
An old Sufi legend: The venerable sage Mullah Nasrudin was once condemned to death for certain witty and satirical sayings that disturbed the local Shah. Nasrudin immediately offered a bargain: "Postpone the execution one year," he implored the Shah, "and I will teach your horse to fly." Intrigued by this, the Shah agreed.
One day thereafter, a friend asked Nas-rudin if he really expected to escape death by this maneuver.
"Why not?" answered the divine Mullah. "A lot can happen in a year. There might be a revolution and a new government. There might be a foreign invasion and we'd all be
living under a new Shah. Then again, the present Shah might die of natural causes, or somebody in the palace might poison him. As you know, it is traditional for a new Shah to pardon all condemned criminals awaiting execution when he takes the throne. Besides that, during the year my captors will have many opportunities for carelessness and I will always be looking for an opportunity to escape.
"And, finally," Nasrudin concluded, "if the worst comes to the worst, maybe I can teach that damned horse to fly!"
Nasrudin was expressing the key element in the Sufi view of the world, which holds that each man and woman is an incarnate part of God, with infinite chances to improve his or her circumstances and likewise to improve the world. "Maybe the damned horse can fly" is a Sufi proverb, indicating that it is always premature to abandon hope.
We live in an age when despair is fashion-able, even chic; when human self-contempt has reached heights not known since the Dark Ages; and when it is considered naive to believe that anything good can ever be accomplished. This is partly due to the trauma of the Vietnam war, in which many learned for the first time that Americans can be as beastly as Germans; partly due to the
50
T
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Nixon counterrevolution, in which the op-timism and utopianism of the Sixties were clubbed to death; and partly due to the exposure of Nixon and his cronies, which made millions of previously trusting main-stream Americans aware that their highest officials can be liars, thieves, and worse. We have lived through the slaughter of innocence and, like embittered adolescents en-countering the harshness of life for the first time, we are afraid to trust again or to entertain hope.
I believe that I have as good reasons as anyone to be depressed. Besides my personal misfortunes, I have been visiting prisons for three years now, and I know the horrors of what our society looks like from the very bottom, from the black holes of isolation cells where men are chained like beasts. Twenty years ago, I worked as an ambulance attendant in Harlem, and I saw what poverty and racism can do at their worst. Nobody needs to teach me anything about the inhumanity of humanity. Yet I still believe that there is, as the Sufis say, a divinity within each person that can be released if love and faith and optimism can be released.
In that spirit I offer die following ten reasons for hope.
One. Consider for a moment the impli-cations of what sociologists call the self-fulfilling prophecy. Simply stated, this means that if you are sure a woman will reject you, you won't make a pass at her. If you believe you can't pass the examination, you will not bother to study. If you think you can't get the job, you won't go for the interview. As a result, the lady will bed down with somebody else, the exam will be passed by those who did study, and the job will go to one of die guys who made an effort to get it.
The outstanding example of the negative
self-fulfilling prophecy in our century is Joseph Stalin, who always believed himself surrounded by enemies. His own party, he suspected, was permeated by deviationists who hated him. He steadily increased the size and powers of the secret police, and each chief of the secret police, in turn, was executed as one of the plotters against him. They all signed confessions before they died; Stalin insistedon that. He wanted it in black and white, proof that his suspicions were justified. Eventually, it appears, his closest associates conspired to poison him.
Stalin's paranoia was a self-fulfilling prophecy; so was Bucky Fuller's optimism.
In contrast, there is the case of R. Buck-minster Fuller, who stood one day in 1928 on the shore of Lake Michigan contemplating suicide. He was despairing because of his daughter's death by polio and his own lack of financial success as a construction engineer. But, in a moment of Sufi insight, Fuller decided to gamble that the universe had some use for him. Today, he is not only one of the most influential scientists in the world, the inventor of a new system of mathematics and a universally respected philosopher and poet, he is also a multi-millionaire. He is one of the most radiantly optimistic men on this planet, as everybody who has ever heard him lecture will appreciate.
Stalin's paranoia was self-fulfilling; Bucky Fuller's gambler's optimism was also self-fulfilling.
^Uluminati Papers
Now, let's not confuse self-fulfilling prophecy with the puerilities of positive thinking or other Pollyanna philosophies that ignore reality totally in favor of a cocoon of self-delusion. Bucky Fuller, for instance, has had his share of hard times since his act of faith in 1928. His dymaxion automobile cracked up on a trial run and was never mass-manufactured. His most important scientific ideas were ignored for nearly two decades during which he was dismissed as a brilliant crank. He has experienced the usual human bereavements. Nevertheless, he transcended all such setbacks by believing that he could do something good in this universe.
Two. There is evidence to suggest that our situation is every bit as hopeful as it is desperate. As Alvin Toffler noted in his famous book Future Shock, there are more scientists alive and working today than in all previous history combined, and this means that we will see more changes in the next two decades than in any 1,000 years of the past. These changes need not be for the worse. If science gave us the atomic bombs that demolished Hiroshima and Nagasaki, science has also, for example, practically abolished smallpox in just ten years. World Health Organization figures are: in 1967, total reported smallpox victims on earth, 2,500,000; in 1976, total smallpox victims, less than 40 (and diose were confined to Somalia).
Societies, like individuals, are subject to the self-fulfilling prophecy. If we believe that science will produce nothing but worse Hiroshimas, then diat is likely to happen. If we believe that science can conquer every disease, as it has vanquished smallpox, then that is also likely to happen. After all, we put our money and our energy where our beliefs lead us.
Biologist Dr. W. H. Thorpe, of Cam-
1967: total smallpox victims,
2,500,000.
1976: total smallpox victims,
40.
bridge University, speaks for the majority of informed scientists when he says that the breakthroughs of the next generation will "rank in importance as high as, if not higher than, the discovery of fire, of agriculture, the development of printing, and the discovery of the wheel." Our situation is in fact bluntly stated in the title of one of Fuller's books, Utopia or Oblivion. What we need to realize is that Utopia is just as likely as oblivion. It all depends on where we put our energy, our money, our beliefs, and our efforts.
For instance, Fuller once took the living standard of the top 1 per cent of the US population in 1900 as a base definition of affluence and calculated how many Ameri-cans are now affluent by that standard. The answer is over 60 per cent. The trend curve is to reach 100 per cent by around the year 2000. Despite the gloom-and-doom mongers, there is no reason why this cannot happen, although pessimism is certainly one of the factors diat might indeed prevent it from happening. The abolition of poverty in the rest of the world could follow soon after, according to Fuller's trend curves.
Three. The actual energy problem of this planet is not nearly so bad as the prophets of apocalypse would have us believe. Using the most sophisticated modern computer-projection techniques, physicist Dr. J. Peter Vajk studied all the relevant technological and economic trends, and reveals in Techno-
,3lUuminaii papers
logical Forecasting and Social Change that we can easily obtain all the electrical energy we will need by the year 2000 simply by using solar power. He urges the construction of the L5 space colonies designed by Professor Gerard O'Neill and his group at Princeton.
O'Neill's space habitats will not take much from the Earth in the way of resources, since 98 per cent of the materials needed can be extracted from die Moon. No new technology is needed for these space cities; we can start building them today widi the hardware we already possess. And, according to Dr. Vajk's computer projections, the solar energy these L5 dues and towns can beam back to Earth will meet the energy needs of both the advanced nations and die backward nations, even allowing the most underdeveloped lands to reach parity with the US early in the next century. As many historians have noted, the principal cause of war has always been economic competition for the limited re-sources of this planet. Once we begin tapping the unlimited resources of outer space, there is reason to think that pragmatic alternatives to this bloody competition can be found.
Four. None of these future possibilities is reserved for die unborn. There are excellent reasons to believe that all the life-expectancy tables used by insurance companies are already obsolete. You will probably live a lot longer tiian you expect.
In the very first article that I wrote on life extension (San Francisco Phoenix, 1973), I quoted the latest estimate of Dr. Johan Bjorksten, who spoke at the time of extending human lifespan to 140 years. This year, Dr. Bjorksten predicts diat humans will soon be able to live 800 years. Paul Segall, of the University of California at Berkeley, who has experimentally stopped the aging
You will probably live a lot longer than you expect.
process in laboratory animals, hopes that his work will extend the human lifespan to 400 or 500 years before 1990. Dr. Robert Phedra puts the number even higher; he says that we can begin aiming to extend human lifespan to 1,000 years.
Look at it this way: life expectancy in Shakespeare's day was about 30 years. (That's why Shakespeare wrote of himself so often as aging and declining in sonnets written when he was only in his early 30s.) In England, 100 years ago, life expectancy was still less than 40 years among members of the working class. It was 60 around the turn of the century in this country. It is now 72. Even if Bjorksten, Segall, Phedra, and the hundreds of other longevity researchers are overly optimistic, even if we can raise lifespan only 50 per cent in this generation, that still means that you will probably live at least 30 years past the projected 72.
In the meantime, the research continues. Within even a 30-year bonus of extra years, the leap into the hundreds of years is likely to occur. For instance, if you are in your 20s now, you expect to die around 2030. Add 30 years to that, and you will live to 2060. How many more years will science be able to give you by then? Even assuming that those re-searchers currendy speaking of life exten-sions of hundreds of years are doing so too soon, in 2060 an increase of 100 years will be a conservative projection. So you can live on to 2160. And where will the life-extension sciences be by then?
Five. The abovementioned research next opens up the most momentous possibility
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in the history of evolution on this planet: the chance of real physical immortality. By the gradual increment of life-extension breakthroughs we have been discussing, it is thinkable that some people alive today will never die. We are the first generation in history to have immortality as a scientific, not metaphysical, possibility. Every decade you survive increases the chances that you will live until the crossover point where longevity blends into immortality.
In Osborn Segerberg, Jr.'s The Immortality Factor, some recent estimates of that crossover point are quoted. Arthur Clarke, in 1961, set the point late in the 21st century. A poll of 82 life-extension researchers in 1964 showed growing optimism and a prediction that chemical control of aging would be achieved by early in the 21st century. Another poll in 1969 found a spectrum of predictions ranging from 2017 (the highest estimate) to 1993 (the lowest). As Dr. Timothy Leary points out in Terra II, the largest amount of research with the most encouraging results has taken place since that poll.
In 1976, F. M. Esfandiary predicted the crossover to longevity would happen by 2000. In 1980, Dr. Alvin Silverstein pre-dicted it by 1990.
Many interested citizens, following the lead of physicist R. C. W. Ettinger, who wrote The Prospect of Immortality back in 1964, have formed cryonics societies to freeze their bodies at clinical death, in the belief that future science will be able to revive them and give them a second chance. Although this method of preserving the body is available now only to the affluent, many believe that cryonic preservation of the brain, which costs as little as a few hundred dollars per year, gives an equally good chance of a person's revival—through cloning.
Six. All the possibilities we are discussing here—the abolition of poverty, the economy of abundance for all, the end of territorial competition for limited resources leading to the warfare cycle, the achievement of longevity and eventual immortality—all these are appreciably increased by the appearance of a totally new phenomenon in human life; indeed, a phenomenon so new we hardly have a name for it. Dr. Leary uses the symbol I2 (intelligence squared) to represent this new evolutionary factor; it stands for intelligence studying intelligence, the nervous system studying the nervous system. Dr. John Lilly refers to it as the self-metaprogrammer, the human brain feeding back self-change directions to the human brain scientifically. In simple language, man is graduating from being the conditioned animal in the behaviorist cage to becoming whatever he wills to become.
Part of this mutation will result from drugs similar to, but more specific than, the notorious Sixties psychedelics. Some of the change will come as a result of biofeedback training. Researchers have already taught their subjects how to achieve yogic bliss-outs in weeks instead of the years of training required by ordinary yoga. Some have learned voluntary control over emotional-physical states of many sorts, including blood pressure and the erection of the penis; others have been able to increase their ESP and other psychic abilities.
Electrical brain stimulation opens other doors to self-metaprogramming. New drugs are predicted that will allow us to foster or terminate emotional states of many kinds. Like the incremental advance from longevity to immortality, this opens a whole new ball game. As Leary points out, "The more conscious and intelligent you become, the more you want to become even more conscious and intelligent." Until now, we
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Even such geniuses as Da Vinci, Beethoven, Einstein are partial foreshadowings of what we may become.
have never come close to understanding the self-teaching capabilities of the human brain. It is possible, and not unlikely, that even such geniuses as Da Vinci, Beethoven, or Einstein are only partial foreshadowings of what the turned-on brain can do.
Seven. We are on the edge of abolishing toil and drudgery—work, in the ordinary sense of that word. As Aristotle pointed out, cynically but accurately, 2,500 years ago, "There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each instrument could do its own work, as in a shuttle weaving of itself." Such a totally automated society has been coming closer for nearly three decades now; the inventor of cyber-netics, Professor Norbert Wiener, foresaw it as early as 1948.
Fuller, Howard Scott, Dr. L. Wayne Benner, and dozens of other technologists have pointed out that the only reason such total automation does not exist yet is mis-guided ideology, not lack of hardware. Poli-ticians, for instance, are always promising a cure for unemployment, as if unemployment were a disease instead of the natural condition of any advanced technological society. As Fuller points out, if we count energy in Aristotle's slave units (the amount of work one enslaved human can do in one day), then the average American
owns 300 mechanical slaves in the form of machines servicing her needs.
We do not take the logical and practical next step of automating everything that can be automated only because we are blocked by traditional habits of thought. These habits cannot survive oncoming abundance, oncoming longevity, and oncoming neuro-logical freedom. We go on squandering the most precious resource we have—human brains—by condemning people to pointless jobs that are increasingly unnecessary and that are maintained only by labor unions fearful of lower wages. When we fully accept unemployment as the cure, not the disease, we will find that there are dozens of ways, outside the traditional wage system, to distribute abundance equitably: cybernation plus space colonization plus Leary's I2 will create an abundance that will make poverty as obsolete in 2001 as smallpox is now.
We need to remember that about 97 per cent of all humanity's art, science, culture, and philosophy has come from economically secure aristocracies supported by human slaves. When all humanity becomes an economically secure aristocracy supported by mechanical slaves, Aristotle's imagined Utopia will be practical. Immeasurable intelligence will be released to seek goals even beyond immortality, perhaps beyond spacetime as we know it.
Eight. All that we have been discussing is only the tip of the iceberg, the visible part of the possible future. We are actually un-dergoing a greater philosophical revolution than those associated with Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein. Our whole world view is literally mutating to a new level of awareness.
Cleve Backster, Marcel Vogel, and dozens of plant researchers claim to be able to communicate with vegetative intelligence.
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Dr. Jacques Vallee, cyberneticist, asserts that, in addition to tens of thousands of laypersons who claim contact with extraterrestrials, there are more than 100 trained scientists in the US alone who have had that experience. Dr. Jack Sarfatti, who is one of the 100 and who has come out of the closet about it, says that the entities may be extraterrestrials or time travelers or something for which science has yet no label.
The majority of advanced races in this galaxy may already have immortality.
This revolution can't be defined in ordinary terms, either scientific or spiritual. Our whole understanding of science and faith is being radically mutated. Just this year, Dr. Ronald Bracewell, professor of engineering and astronomy at Stanford, and Dr. Frank Drake, astronomer at Cornell, announced their belief that "we'll learn the secret of longevity from space aliens who are trying to communicate with us right now." These are distinguished men who are careful of their reputations. Dr. Drake later wrote in the prestigious Tech-nology Review of M.I.T. that he now believes the majority of advanced races in this galaxy have immortality.
Nine. The worse our present crises become, the more the pressure increases on us all to find real solutions. We stand at the pivot of human evolution. We now have the technology to blow ourselves up 1,700 times over, thus rendering the planet absolutely sterile, destroying flowers and fish and birds and everything else in a blaze of
planetary madness. We also have, or are rapidly developing, the technology for all the once-utopian scenarios discussed here. A world without poverty. Without national rivalries and wars. Without emotional twisting and vast waste of intelligence. A world of immortals who can explore all spacetime and who can contact more ad-vanced immortals.
The more real this paradox becomes to each of us, the greater the pressure to tran-scend. Every decade is important now: we can choose Utopia or oblivion by means of only a few decisions. We cannot evade or escape for much longer. We have to take responsibility and stop laying it all on the other guy. We are being forced to understand John Donne's deathless metaphor: "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
Ten. If no decisions are unimportant anymore, no individuals are unimportant anymore. Plutonium, the most explosive element known to man, is missing and nobody knows who has it. A jolly group calling itself The National Committee to Overthrow the Government Next Tuesday After Lunch has been anonymously circu-lating schematic diagrams on how to con-struct a homemade atomic bomb. Terrorism escalates everywhere, along with nuclear proliferation. One Olympic athlete said recently, "We'll soon be having the games in catacombs, like early Christians." Nobody is safe: remember what happened to the Hearst family. As Leary has been saying for ten years, "We can no longer afford to have anyone on this planet being oppressed, or even thinking he or she is oppressed." Fuller's Utopia or oblivion is really the only choice left.
"Captain Crunch" (aka John Draper) is the famous phone freak who so long amused himself and his admirers by defrauding the
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phone company. After his recent trial, he revealed that he has found ways to tap the allegedly invulnerable wires of the FBI, CIA, White House, Pentagon, and the US Army, and even how to activate computers to change bank records or fire missiles to start World War Three. According to the San Jose Mercury, for revealing all this to the government and for showing them how to install new fail-safes, Crunch had his sentence cut from four years to three months. But Crunch also says that other electronics experts eventually can get by his fail-safes, maybe by next Tuesday after lunch.
Nobody is unimportant anymore.
There we have it, the final reason to get your ass out of bed: we need you. We need you on our side—the side of hope and action—and we need you now. Every decade is a scientific milestone, which means that every year counts as well, and every month, every week, every day. In-
deed, at this point, every act of our lives is either a step toward the achievement of all our visions of glory or a step back toward the stupidity and self-pity that can destroy us. Nobody really needs LSD to see the cosmic importance of every minute.
Any single act of love and hope may be the grain that tips the scale toward survival and, conversely, any single act of cruelty or injustice may be the grain mat tips the scale the other way.
As Kurt Vonnegut says, "A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the whale." Vonnegut goes on to say mat there is nothing in science that contradicts the works of mercy recommended by Saint Thomas Aquinas, which include: to teach the ignorant, to console the sad, to bear with the oppressive and troublesome, to feed the hungry, to shelter the homeless, to visit prisoners and the sick, and to pray for us all.
If we can see and act on the wisdom of those suggestions, we can greet life with the bravery and joy it deserves.
Originally appeared in OUI Magazine; Copyright (c) 7977 by Playboy Publications, Inc.
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Dissociation of Ideas, 3
arxists, and socialists generally, have a fine, piercing, brilliant vision of all the defects of the present Monopoly Capitalism.
There is no necessity for conservatives or libertarians to blind themselves to these defects which the Marxist so clearly sees. Such blindness may be popular with con-servatives, and even with some libertarians, but there is no need for it. It is a habit of stupidity.
The conservatives, and the libertarians, have a fine, piercing, brilliant vision of the defects of totalitarian socialism, and of the diluted pseudo-democratic socialisms that are not quite totalitarian yet.
There is no need for radicals, or even for Marxists, to blind themselves to these defects that the conservative so clearly sees. Again, such blindness may be popular, but
there is no need for it. Intelligence might be better than conformity to one's group.
Try to think of one or more alternatives to Monopoly Capitalism and State Socialism. While you're trying, endeavor not to concoct a blend of the two. Combining smallpox and chickenpox may not be the only, or the best, alternative to those diseases.
If you can't think of any alternatives, you might browse in some of the books where alternatives are suggested, e.g.: Progress and Poverty, by Henry George; Economic Democracy, by C. H. Douglas; The Natural Economic Order, by Silvio Gesell; Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, by Buckmin-ster Fuller; Individual Liberty, by Benjamin Tucker; The Green Revolution, by Peter Maurin.
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MUSIC DEPT.
Beethoven
as Information
by Justin Case t is no accident that Lenin could not bear to listen to Beethoven (the music made him want to weep and treat people gently, he said); nor that Ludwig's music was banned in Communist China under Mao Tse-Tung; nor that America's leading Marxist theoretician, Herbert Marcuse, has denounced the Nindi Symphony in particular as a Great Lie "invalidated by the culture" which honors it, the culture of Occidental Individualism.
All Marxists, basically, are reactionaries, yearning for the Oriental despotisms of pre-Hellenic times, die neolithic culture that preceded the rise of self-consciousness and egoism. Beethoven as the bard of the recal-citrant individualist is the Homer of music: the "hero," not just of the Third Symphony but of all his works, is really Odysseus, "cunning in stratagems," of whom Zeus said, "Why, with a mind like that he is almost one of us gods!" Such individuals do not arise in pre-Homeric cultures, and are
not allowed in Marxist cultures: they are distinctly and distinctively the heirs of Greek truculence.
John Fowles has claimed, in a dramatic context, that eleutheria is "the most Greek of all words." Eleutheria means freedom, which is what Beethoven's music is all about.
Artistic freedom, of course, is what Beethoven's life was "all about," the constant struggle to push beyond all the limits of music and forge more meaning and more complexity of vision than sound had ever before carried. But the artist, as Joyce has dramatically demonstrated in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, is fighting the struggle which every human must fight if We are not to relapse into total robotry: the struggle to see and hear with one's own eyes and ears, not with the circuitry of social conditioning. Beethoven is one man, and struggles, suffers, and triumphs as one, but he speaks for all who are in any degree conscious of their potential individuality.
"Anyone who understands my music will never be unhappy again," Ludwig is alleged to have said. Some biographers doubt the
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source from which we get this; but it doesn't matter. If he didn't say it, he might as well have; the music certainly says it for him. It is the music of a stubborn individual who is willing to suffer anything, pay any price asked, to achieve greater organic vision than has existed in the world before him.
To be blunt about it, what went on inside Beethoven's head was more important, in the long run, than everything going on outside that head in those years. His music proves it; and that is what the Marxist cannot tolerate about him: that one man should believe himself so important, and what's worse, that he should demonstrate that he was so important.
J. W. N. Sullivan, a mathematician and therefore accustomed to precision, defined in one word the deepest response we all have to Ludwig: "reverence." But it is reverence primarily for Ludwig's mind, which could contain so much in such sweet precision, and then for Mind in general, of which he was only one human or superhuman transceiver.
Maynard Solomon has described the typ-ical Beethoven structure as combining "irresistible motion and intolerable strain." But that is the formula for all creativity (it could even describe orgasm or childbirth); and it is also the formula of Illumination, of which the Sufis assure us mere are three stages, which any listener can hear in the late Beethoven compositions:
1.
Lord, use me.
2.
Lord, use me but don't break me.
3.
Lord, I don't care if you break me.
It is hackneyed, of course, to describe the Fifth as a meditation on Fate; Ludwig started that line of interpretation himself, saying the opening theme represents "Fate knocking at the door." Sullivan was hardly exaggerating when he said the major resolution of the theme is Beethoven "taking Fate
|Japcra
by the throat." Sullivan may or may not be right in his further scanning that Fate chiefly represents Beethoven's growing deafness and the triumphant finale (so bitterly attained) symbolizes Ludwig's realization that he could still compose even when he could no longer hear. It is more likely that the Fifth summarizes everything Beethoven knew about all his struggles, including but not limited to the social problems and artistic fears when the deafness was recognized as incurable and progressive; that is why it reflects all my struggles and yours, all the battles we have won and all we have lost, and what we learned in winning and losing.
Nobody but Shakespeare or a damned fool would make an iambic pentameter line out of "never" repeated five times; but Shakespeare does it, and where and when he does it, he produces one of his most powerful tragic effects. And nobody but Beethoven or a damned fool would represent the unity of thesis and antithesis (or the individual Will and implacable Fate) by progressing from the third to the fourth movement without the traditional pause; but Beethoven does it and makes it work. Genius is the capacity to conceive the inconceivable, as Alekhine checkmates with a pawn, while his opponent and every witness was wondering what his knights or queen might be about to do.
There is one moment in literature that is like the end of the Fifth. It is at the climax of Moby Dick, when Ahab finally realizes that it was, indeed, "God's will" that the whale should attack its attackers, but that also, in that cosmic context, it must be "God's will" also that he cannot rest until he fights the whale again. "I am the Fates' Lieutenant," Ahab says, and that is what Beethoven had learned in all his struggles against Fate. "I am that which was, and is,
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and shall be," a quote from an Egyptian prayer, in hieroglyphic and in his own handwriting, was kept under glass on the desk where he composed the late works.
Perhaps some mystics have achieved higher levels of consciousness than Beet-hoven (perhaps!), but if so, we cannot know of it. Aleister Crowley once astonished me by writing that the artist is greater than the mystic, an odd remark from a man who was only a mediocre artist himself (although a great mystic). Listening to Ludwig, I have come to understand what Crowley meant. The mystic, unless he or she is also an artist, cannot communicate the higher states of awareness achieved by the fully turned-on brain; but the great artist can. Listening to Beethoven, one shares, somewhat, in his expanded perceptions; and the more one listens, the more one shares. Finally, one is able to believe his promise: if one listens to that music enough, one will never again be unhappy.
Ludwig himself? He ended his days as a (relatively) poor, distinctly shabby old man; deaf and lonely; shuffling around Vienna "humming and howling" in an off-key voice as he constructed the music he couldn't hear; furtively sneaking off to brothels because he had accepted, finally, that the Romantic Love he yearned for was not part of his Fate. Some of his neighbors said he was crazy. But what was going on in his head was the creation of the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, and the late quartets, the greatest artistic expressions in
Beethoven said "Anyone who understands my music will never be unhappy again."
The mystic cannot communicate, but the artist can.
all history of the DNA script of evolution from unicellular dance to the struggles and sufferings of complex organisms to the extraterrestrial perspective of the Cosmic Immortals we are becoming.
JUSTIN CASE is music critic for Con-frontation magazine and won the Congres-sional Medal of Honor for bravery while serving with the US Army in Vietnam. He prefers his Martinis with vodka instead of gin, hasn't voted since 1972 ("It only encourages them"), and says that anybody who prefers Bach to Beethoven should have their head candled. Mr. Case informs us that he vigorously disapproves of Wagner, Brahms, Democrats, Rock, Soul, Republicans, the Ayatollah Kho-meini, and people who put sugar on grapefruit, in approximately that order. In the microscopic list of things he likes (besides Beethoven) are Mozart, Vivaldi, Zelenka, all porn movies featuring Annette Haven, and Bach "when nobody is comparing him to Beethoven."
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Addendum
byMordecai the Foul, High Priest, Head Temple, A.I.S.B.
Ever since it was announced in Illuminaius! that Ludwig was a member of the Illumi-nati, we at Weishaupt Cabal have been repeatedly asked whether that particular claim was true or just another of the put-ons with which Shea and Wilson salted that trilogy as a Head Test for me readers.
The fact is that Ludwig Van Beethoven was a member of our Order, as were Mozart and Wagner.*
Since it is widely suspected that the Illu-minati are primarily put-on artists, allow me to quote some circumstantial evidence from the latest and most scholarly Beethoven biography, Beethoven, by Maynard Solomon (Schirmer Books, New York, 1977).
Pages 26-27: Christian Neefe, Beethoven's first music teacher (after his father
* For Mozart, see Will Durant, Rousseau and Revolu-tion, page 408. For Wagner, see Magick, Liber Aleph, and Book ofTholh by Aleister Crowley, in which many clues will be found by the discerning.
and grandfather), was the leader of the Illuminati lodge in Bonn.
Pages 27-28: Neefe was the strongest intellectual influence on Beethoven during Ludwig's adolescence, the most impres-sionable years of anyone's life.
Page 36: The Emperor Joseph cantata, Beethoven's first major work, was direcdy commissioned by the Lese-Geselhchaft, which, as Solomon makes clear elsewhere, and as Robison documents in Proofs of a Conspiracy, was the "front" for the Illuminati in Bavaria after we were illegalized in 1785.
Pages 61,65: Karl Lichnowsky, Beetho-ven's "foremost patron" in the early Vienna years, was a Freemason. Beethoven had arrived in Vienna with a letter of introduction from the head of the Illuminati lodge in Bonn, Herr Neefe; the Freemasonic lodges in Vienna were all, according to Robison, under Illuminati influence.
These bits of evidence are, as we admitted, circumstantial. The real proof is in the Ninth Symphony, for those who can hear it, and who can understand why the joyous finale is both a political and a mystical statement.
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Science Fiction Review
Interview 2
Science Fiction Review: Could you tell us something about the authors and ideas that have influenced you? Are you a long-time science-fiction/fantasy fan? A neopagan or occultist?
Wilson: My style derives directly from Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Raymond Chandler, H. L. Mencken, William S. Burroughs, Benjamin Tucker, and Elephant Doody Comix, in approximately that order of importance. Chandler has also influenced my way of telling stories; all my fiction tends to follow the Chandler mythos of the skeptical Knight seeking Truth in a world of false fronts and manipulated deceptions. (Of course, this is also my biography, or that of any shaman.) The writers who have most influenced my philosophy are Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Alfred Korzybski, and Karl R. Popper. Korzybski and Popper (and a few logical positivists) are absolutely necessary for epistemological clarity, especially when
you get to the growing edge of science, where the hot debates are going on, and even more if you wander into the occult. Sci-fi and fantasy are my favorite forms of fiction; I think the so-called "naturalists" and "social realists" have committed high treason against humanity by selling tiieir gloomy perspective as the "real" reality. A book that lacks the element of heroism is a crime against the young and impressionable, in my opinion. A book full of anger and self-pity is another crime. Needless to say, as a libertarian I don't mean literally that these are crimes to be punished in court. The only final answer to a bad, sad book is to write a good, funny book. (I love debate and hate censorship. Accuracy of signal and free flow of information define sanity in my epistemology. I should have included Norbert Wiener among the primary influences on my thinking.)
As for neopaganism and the occult: I'm an initiated witch, an ordained minister in four churches (or cults), and have various other "credentials" to impress the gullible. My philosophy remains Transcendental Agnosticism. There are realities and intel-ligences greater than conditioned normal consciousness recognizes, but it is premature to dogmatize about them at this primitive stage of our evolution. We've hardly begun to crawl off die surface of the cradle-planet.
The most advanced shamanic tech-niques— such as Tibetan Tantra or Crowley's system in the west—work by alternating faith and skepticism until you get beyond the ordinary limits of both. With such systems, one learns how arbitrary are the reality maps that can be coded into laryngeal grunts by hominids or visualized by a mammalian nervous system. We can't even visualize the size of the local galaxy except in special high states. Most
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people are trapped in one static reality map imprinted on their neurons when they were naive children, as Dr. Leary keeps reminding us. Alas, most so-called "adepts" or "gurus" are similarly trapped in the first postrapture reality map imprinted after their initial Illumination, as Leary also realizes. The point of systems like Tantra, Crowleyanity, and Leary's Neurologic is to detach from all maps—which gives you the freedom to use any map where it works and drop it where it doesn't work. As Dogen Zenji said, "Time is three eyes and eight elbows."
SFR: Would I be right in saying you probably lean more toward the rightwing form of anarchism than the classical leftist variety?
Wilson: My trajectory is perpendicular to the left-right axis of terrestrial politics. I put some of my deepest idealism into both the Left anarchism of Simon Moon and the Right anarchism of Hagbard Celine in Illu-minatus!, but I am detached from both on another level.
Politics consists of demands, disguised or rationalized by dubious philosophy (ideol-ogies). The disguise is an absurdity and should be removed. Make your demands explicit. My emphasis is on whatever will make extraterrestrial migration possible in this generation. The bureaucratic state, whether American, Russian, or Chinese, has all the clout on this planet for the foreseeable future. The individualist must fulfil his or her genetic predisposition to be a pioneer, and the only way one can do that today is by moving into space faster than anyone else. I think the maverick Seed is
included in the DNA scenario to serve that function in each epoch. I'm leaving Earth for the same reason my ancestors left Europe: freedom is found on the expanding, pioneering perimeter, never inside the centralized state. To quote another Zen koan, "Where is the Tao?" "Move on!"
SFR: You're involved in an organization called the DNA Society which is interested in biological engineering and immortality, the creation and exploitation of higher forms of consciousness. How serious are you about this? How close are we to achieving this on a broad scale?
Wilson: Let me refer the reader to The Prospect of Immortality and Man into Super-man by Ettinger, The Biological Time Bomb by Taylor, The Immortality Factor by Seger-berg, Terra II by Dr. Leary and Wayne Benner, and the writings of John Lilly and Buckminster Fuller.
With that documentation, I assert that the basic longevity breakthrough will occur before 1990. Segall, Bjorksten, or Froimo-vich, among others, may be very close to it already. The basic principles of reimprint-ing or metaprogramming the nervous system, as discovered by Leary and Lilly, will be accepted and used in daily practice by around 1985. A neurogenetic quantum jump in life expectancy, intellectual efficiency, and emotional equilibrium (or, as Leary calls it, hedonic engineering) will be revolutionizing human life before the twenty-first century. Some of us will be alive when the Immortality Pill is found.
Interview with Robert Anton Wilson copyright © 1976 Richard E. Gets, for Science Fiction Review No. 17, May, 1976.
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FILM DEPT.
Mammalian Politics
Thackeray via Kubrick
by Justin Case tanley Kubrick's new film, Barry Lyndon, has received unprecedentedly enthusiastic praise from the Illiterati, that band of vehement and ignorant individuals who write the movie reviews in our daily press. These nosegays of flattery are almost certainly hypocritical, and merely indicate that the Illiterati are afraid to denounce Kubrick at this stage of his career. After all, they mostly rejected 200/ and Clockwork Orange, and some of them even downed Strangelove; and, despite their carping, all three of those films went on to become box-office dynamite, and got elevated to High Art by the more prestigious critics on the slick quarterlies.
Afraid to denounce Barry Lyndon, the Illiterati have instead praised it for all the wrong reasons. It is "beautiful," they say, it is "sumptuous"; it is even "gorgeous"; one would think they were reviewing a three-hour painting by Monet.
Barry Lyndon indeed swarms and bulges with exuberant, almost baroque loveliness, both visually and aurally. (Kubrick has drenched it in even more first-rate music than Clockwork Orange, and with more ironic effect.) But the overwhelming tone of
the film is not beautiful but tragic, mordant, even moralistic. It is primarily a study in what Dr. Timothy Leary calls "mammalian politics," the most primitive circuits in the human nervous system, concerned with power, status, and emotional game-playing. In ethological language, the subject is territorial behavior among a domesticated primate species.
Barry Lyndon is a precise neurological dissection of the robot imprints that underlie predatory politics.
The dominant image of the film is the duel. The opening sequence is a pistol duel, which kills the hero's father and reduces the family to poverty. The dramatic pivot of the opening third is a second pistol duel, which sends Barry into exile. And the climax of the entire film is another pistol duel, one of the most shattering and emotion-churning sequences Kubrick has ever given us.
Other forms of the duel recur emblematically throughout. Card games, usually dishonest, play a repetitious role in the 68
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protagonist's rise from Redmond Barry, impoverished exile, to Barry Lyndon, rich nobleman. Duels with the sword become his method of collecting bad gambling debts. To capture the beautiful woman he wants (for her money and status), Barry must first duel psychologically with her inconvenient husband; when the husband is done in and the lady captured, a second emotional duel, with her son, dominates the second half of the film and escalates with slow deadliness to the final pistol duel.
In all of these second-circuit contests (as Leary would call them), the motives are the classic mammalian drives: passion, status, territory (property). Barry is simply another primate, struggling to achieve the one-up position in a typical hominid tribe. Everybody else is struggling also for a one-up position, and each of these higher vertebrates accordingly is simultaneously pushing every other vertebrate one-down. These violent struggles (always inflated by mammalian heroic passions and the mysterious primate sense of "honor") eventually resolve into grubby hustling for money. This is one of Kubrick's prime ironies, but not really either an advance upon or a perversion from mammalian norms. Recent research shows that even chimpanzees can learn to compete for money. Cash is, as ethologists know, symbolic territory.
The naturalistic view of humanity has always been a Kubrick specialty, most notably in the grim parallels between the australopithecines and the astronauts in 2001. Even in Spartacus, burdened by a typically romantic Dal ton Trumbo script, Kubrick's Darwinian irony appeared in the cross-cuts between die Roman and slave armies, in which die totems of both the reactionary and the revolutionary forces were suspiciously tribalistic. The Killing, Kubrick's early heist film, portrays cops
and crooks as rival predator bands. You can't forget, in watching Kubrick, that few of our ancestors were ladies and gendemen; the majority of them, indeed, didn't achieve the status of mammalhood, and had the morals and courtesy of Gila monsters.
But Barry Lyndon is as much Thackeray's work as Kubrick's—Thackeray, the least praised and (one suspects) least read of the great Victorians. Nobody is better qualified to resurrect William Makepeace Thackeray tlian Stanley Kubrick: the two fit each other as snugly as a key in a lock. I once claimed diat Joyce invented the "alienation effect" before Brecht; but Thackeray had it even before Joyce. Botli Barry Lyndon and Vanity Fair are classic examples of Brechtian-Joycean artistic judo, constantly moving tlie reader into highly charged emotional-political situations and deftly defusing audience identification at the most crucial points.
Bernard Shaw attempted something of this sort in his Saint Joan, explaining in the preface that he was writing tragedy, not melodrama, and defining the difference elegantly: "Melodrama deals with the conflict of good and evil, tragedy with the conflict of good and good." Not quite; it would be better to define tragedy as the conflict of ambiguity and ambiguity. Here Thackeray and Kubrick excel and mutually reinforce each other. The magnificent, almost Euripidean complexity of the final duel in Barry Lyndon is such that, on the emotional-reflex level, one has been manipulated to sympathize widi both parties and with neither of them. The alienation effect of the multiple shocks in that scene—the "turn of the screw," Henry James called it—quite obliterates any emotional identification. One can neither rejoice with the victor nor hate him; nor can one too easily pity the loser. One has been raised above
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the mammalian politics of the antagonists, cannot take sides any longer, and can only see with objective clarity the idiocy of the whole value system that made the tragedy as predictable as a cycle in astronomy.
But one could write a symposium, rather than a single review, about this singularly intelligent film. The handling of the Rev-erend Runt, for instance, is perfect Thackeray: a caricature worthy of Dickens, but so much more human and complex than any of Dickens' Hypocrites. The parallels with Oedipus and Hamlet are worth a whole essay in themselves (Barry Lyndon is almost Ham-let retold from Claudius's point of view). Enough. Barry Lyndon is beautiful, yes, but it is much more than that. It is a philosophical Strangelove: a precise neurological and ethological dissection of the robot imprints that underlie war and predatory politics.
JUSTIN CASE is film critic for Confron-tation magazine and author of the highly praised hisiory of cinema, From Caligari to Vlad. He has a Ph.D. from Yale and a D.D. from the US Army. Dr. Case insists that, although he has written a book, he has never read one, since literature is obsolete. "Only the electronic media are worthy of serious consid-eration as synergetic cultural signals in the emerging nonlinear postindustrial omniinter-faced global village," he told our interviewer, adding acidly that "the printing press is going the way of the bronwsaurus, the dodo, the eohippus and the Vatican: from archaism, to quaintness, to Camp, to extinction." He is usually quite stoned.
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,Our,article,on,Brainwashing,in,Neuropolitics,explains,how,mind,programming,works,and,how,to,outwit,it
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