RAW From Beyond

I got to have it all.

Too much of each and I won't want it at all.

I love a little bit of everything,

Like some sun mixed in with the rain.

It's the least I need to deal with your games,

to deal with the pain.

I love a little bit of everything,

Like some sun mixed in with the rain.

Not much of just one,

I like it that way.

And I'll always have Mary Jane.

"If I make you smile and say Oh Thank God,

well then I've done my job."

Robert Anton Wilson, I read your work for the first time at about age 15, having tracked down a copy of Cosmic Trigger that I saw mentioned in the bibliography of the rulebook for the old Illuminati game. Malaclypse the Younger said, "'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds." Well, my young, then devoutly Catholic mind was duly blown. I gather I'm not alone in this -- not by a long shot.

The subsequent years of my own life were filled with searching. You turned me on to Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Aleister Crowley, Wilhelm Reich and Alfred Korzybski, to name a few. But I always came back to your work until I completed reading the entirety of your published books. I ran a study group for Quantum Mechanics, and yes, I even did the exercises in Prometheus Rising (and not just the quarters).

I finally ended up finding that door to Chapel Perilous and I've never looked back. After your death (the second one), I celebrated your life with a memorial rite, and at the moment of climax, there was nothing but fnord.

The Robert Anton Wilson that I think of now is only a simulation, carefully constructed by my neurons in an electrochemical dance. Did you ever exist? Haven't you always been a simulation? All I have seen (if my memory is to be trusted) are your words (are they really "yours"?), and the image of your person (again?) projected on a display.

Everything I know about you was, is now, and will always be nothing more and nothing less than an integral part of my inner experience. So welcome to my life Bob, and thanks for living yours.

Mr. Wilson helped those who came to his works to grok the liberating knowledge that we create the world anew every time we open our eyes, that we are the ultimate artists...universal localities.

•  
  Herein was set into motion the Eristic pattern, which would repeat itself Five times over Seventy-three times, after which nothing would happen.
Peter Stanislaw, agnostic mystic

Certain books can change your life and Cosmic Trigger changed mine. Though it was not the first book to blur the lines between "reality" and "fantasy", it was the first one to suggest that no such lines existed beyond my beliefs in those lines. It was the first book to challenge my beliefs about beliefs, period. Bob's way with words acted like drugs on my brain and reading this book set off a chain reaction of time-release psychic explosions lasting many years to come. Cosmic Trigger was also where I first discovered Timothy Leary’s Eight Circuit Brain model which my first book, "Angel Tech" is based on.

The Bob Wilson I came to know (circa 1979-86) was at the peak of his game. As far as I could tell, this game was initiating his readers -- in books and in person during his many worldwide lectures -- to the most operational Einsteinian language possible and to do this in the most entertaining ways his imagination could conjure. I was, and still am, bewildered by how he was able to recontextualize quantum physics through the interactions of his fictitious characters and labyrinthian plot designs in “The Shroedinger’s Cat Trilogy” and “Masks of the Illuminati”. Though Bob was clearly a master of this game, I never saw him treat actual living people as characters, or their interactions as games. He knew the difference and took the time to show others that he knew. Bob was very soulful that way. He seemed to simultaneously belong to two generations; the Caregivers of the World War Two era and the Hedonic Seekers of the Sixties.

I suddenly saw Bob as a psychedelic mensch with a genius IQ, which for me was as hilarious as it rang true. As I continued attending Bob and Arlen's Discordian salons, now at their new home in a San Francisco condo, I began to notice a change in my attitude. Though my presence remained one of a gleeful fly on the wall who occasionally buzzed agreement, I also began to see important differences distinguishing Bob's views from my own. I did not voice these at first for dread of appearing arrogant or stupid but I did not disregard them either. One of the down sides of being in the personal presence of people with more brains and heart than yourself is a kind of gorgeous oppression that took the form, for me, of wanting to be just like Bob or wanting to write just like Bob. At the next salon Bob announced, "Disciples are assholes looking for a human being to attach themselves to". That was the moment I knew there would be no guru worship at Bob’s house and that Bob would never wish that kind of oppression on anyone. That he never encouraged or accepted these projections enabled me to eventually release them and observe him closer, as he was, with little or no emotional investment. What I saw was a man fully inhabiting a world of his own creation -- a sophisticated, entertaining and byzantine network of reality tunnels where his consciousness traversed and cross-referenced with astonishing artistry and humor. Despite all his so-called extraterrestrial communiqués with the Sirius star system and his own Pookaville of invisible rabbits, Bob consistently struck me as one of the most genuinely sane people I had ever met.