It is strange how Robert Anton Wilson has slipped through the net a little. He has written some really powerful stuff. I love ‘Prometheus rising’ and ‘The Cosmic trigger’. I read them many moons ago as a youngster and seeing your post has spurred me to a re-read.
He seems to start from the right place:
“It should be obvious to all intelligent readers (but curiously is not obvious to many) that my viewpoint in this book of one of agnosticism. The word “agonstic” appears explicitly in the Prologue and the agnostic attitude is restated again and again in the text, but many people still think I “believe” some of the metaphors and models employed here. I therefore want to make it even clearer than ever before that
I D O N O T BELIEVE ANYTHING
My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where the absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.”
He goes on to state in the preface to cosmic trigger:
Briefly, the main thing I learned in my experiments is that
“reality” is always plural and mutable.
Since most of Cosmic Trigger is devoted to explaining and illustrating this, and since I have tried to explain it again in other books, and since I still encounter people who have read all my writings on this subject and still do not understand what I am getting at, I will try again in this new Preface to explain it ONE MORE TIME, perhaps more clearly than before.
In my opinion you can’t get a better starting point than this. When reality is mutable; a dialogue of toing and froing, then all becomes labyrinthine. Belief is an end to the adventure. The seeker rests by the road for a while. He builds a fire, then a house, then a country, then an empire!
Once you set your attention on the actual mechanics of reality then things necessarily get weird. It’s not ‘designed’ to be ‘viewed’ that way. It is meant to be a seamless, dream-like narrative. (The dream, making perfect sense to the dreamer)
I don’t think we should get too caught up in the specifics of Wilson’s adventure. It’s all about the flavour. The ‘territory’ is the same but we each clothe it according to our own predilections.
These kind of authors are great for shaking our complacency. If we take the description too literally though, we can go the way of the conspiracy ravers. (which are cut from exactly the same cloth as religious zealots and militant atheists.)
The authors i found that really connected were: Philip K Dick, Carlos Castaneda, Robert Monroe, G I Gurdjieff and of course R A Wilson.
Got to take it with a pinch of salt though. It’s all about our own experience. Worth having a few maps at various resolutions though. :-)
