Your Psychological Jailbreak Begins Here

What if your entire personality was just software—written by parents, schools, ads, trauma, and culture? This two-part special dives deep into Robert Anton Wilson’s mind-bending manual for self-reprogramming: Prometheus Rising. Part 1 covers Circuits 1 through 4—survival, emotion, ego, and social roles—and how each one hijacked your nervous system. Watch it. Question everything.

Robert Anton Wilson - Getting High On Doing What You Love

Terence McKenna chilling with Robert Anton Wilson and Rudy Rucker (Movie Excerpt)

Out of nowhere

Look who I came across in a Japanese video lesson

Robert Anton Wilson and Karl Hess: Subversion for Fun and Profit

Hello, Fnord

I think it's funny, but also kind of sad.

Eric White after his latest arrest. (photo/Cumberland County Sheriff's Department)

Hello, Fnord 
Eric White comes clean about his two-year-plus graffiti spree

By Chris Busby

Eric White certainly isn’t the most dangerous criminal in Portland, but his crimes are among the most visible blights on this city. 

The scraggly 22-year-old from Newport, Maine, started writing the nonsense word “fnord” on buildings, signs and sidewalks around town in early 2003. He estimates there are now upwards of 1,000 such tags spray-painted and written in marker throughout Portland, and countless more in other parts of the United States, Canada and Mexico. 

According to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, the word fnord originally appeared in the Principia Discordia, a cult treatise written in 1965. The term was popularized in the Illuminatus! trilogy by sci-fi writers Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. In Shea and Wilson’s work, the word is said to appear in newspaper and magazine articles about current events, and to cause a vague sense of unease in readers who’ve been programmed not to consciously notice it. 

White’s done some of the tagging himself, but since he moved to town a few years ago, four or five others have taken up the tag, as well. One of them, 24-year-old Harry Bishop, is with White in the Cumberland County Jail. The pair were arrested on the night of Oct. 17, after a drunken fnord-scrawling spree on buildings and cars along Marginal Way. 

Last June, White was arrested, jailed for three days, and fined $150 for spray-painting the word on the Cumberland County Civic Center.

After this latest arrest, White was originally charged with a felony — aggravated criminal mischief — because the damage from the tags was estimated to cost over $2,000. That charge has since been changed to four separate counts of criminal mischief, a misdemeanor. He is being held in lieu of $5,000 cash bail, but during a recent interview, White said he expects that will be lowered to as little as $500 at the end of this month – a sum he can pay with some of the $6,000 he said he has saved in a bank account. 

In person, White is an easy-going, soft-spoken young man – a demeanor one might not expect from someone with the words “sick” and “fuck” crudely tattooed between his knuckes and finger joints. The Bollard interviewed him in jail on Oct. 21. An edited version of that interview follows. 

The Bollard: Why would you do something like this? Why write ‘fnord’ on a building?
White: I’ve read one of the books, and it just struck me as a really fascinating book. 

According to the books, ‘fnord’ is a word that people can’t consciously see. Do you think people can’t see it?
Originally I didn’t even think anybody would get the connection, besides, like, maybe one or two in a hundred people that might’ve read this book. Then thePortland Press Herald started publishing what it was.

But yeah, it is supposed to be a subliminal message. It’s supposed to cause anger, confusion, and all kinds of different stuff. And it seems to be working, ’cause it does piss a lot of people off. A lot of people around town hate me. 

Is this a form of ‘culture jamming’ [activities meant to force people to consider the negative effects of mass advertising]?
Yeah, like [culture jamming], like Ad Busters…. That’s what I would hope to get across, but I don’t think it would ever work…. I think maybe a few people may be inspired to go out and do something, but I really don’t think it’s going to affect many people at all. I don’t think society’s ready to change yet, which kind of sucks.

What angers you about society?
When I look in the newspaper and see 217 new laws passed this session in Congress. We don’t need that. The law originally started out as common law. It was basically a judge that decided whether you encroached on someone or their property. Like, ‘Did you hurt this man or did you hurt his property somehow?’ 
Just the way things are run, people – I’m at a loss of words right now. 

Do you have any other tags?
Just that.

How long have you been doing this?
When did the Iraq war start?

The invasion began in the spring of 2003.
I came to town the same day the Monument Square protests started, like the official start of the Iraq war. I’ve been doing it ever since then.

What brought you to Portland?
I was originally going to head down to Boston for a little bit because there was nothing to watch on TV. I got tired of playing games on my computer and tried turning on the TV, but there was nothing on TV, so I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll go to Boston.’ I gave up on my plans to run for [Palmyra] City Council. [A town near Newport, west of Bangor]

How many tags do you have up?
Probably close to a thousand, and it’s not just me. There’s a bunch of people that do it. There has been a bunch of people, but it’s down to about five different people actively writing it now. There’s people in Bangor doing it. It’s in Canada, it’s in Mexico, it’s from California to Maine. Every stop on the Greyhound from California to Maine has it. 

So this is an international thing?
No, the Canada thing was me, probably like five or six years ago when I was up there, before I even started doing it in Portland. Mexico would be another friend of mine. An ex-girlfriend got people started because she lives in Bangor. 

Where have you been living here in town? Do you have an apartment?
I was living with my ex-girlfriend at the time. Kind of. On and off. When I came in [to jail], I was actually working on getting an apartment. I’ve got like $6,000 in the bank and I get close to $600 a month, so I figured I could go in with a friend, but then the friend I went in with wrote a statement [to the police]. I don’t really blame her that much. She’s kind of slow in the head. 

How do you choose where to write ‘fnord’?
It depends on how drunk I am. That’s the only time I’ve been caught for it. This is my third time being caught.

What happened the first time?
I faked a seizure and went to the hospital. They treated me for an overdose that I didn’t have. I just started pretending to foam at the mouth, shaking all over the back of the cop car. I dropped some vitamins on his floor. 

I went to the hospital. They gave me a ticket. I went to court. I got like a $90 or $150 fine or something. 

The second time I got, I think, a $250 fine [it was $150]. But now they’re not offering me restitution or anything. I tried getting the lawyer to talk to the D.A. and say, ‘Hey, [White] can pay restitution.’ I can do whatever – clean up the tags. A lot of people are going around the city for community service cleaning up tags. They’re refusing to let me either do community service or pay fines. They just want me to do straight jail time.

I’m sure that’s what the victims would want – either me out doing community service or paying for their stuff to get cleaned up.

Do you target businesses owned by large corporations rather than mom-and-pop operations? 
Yeah, normally I do city and state property only, unless I’m really drunk.

Have you been working here in town?
I’m on disability right now, for lack of a want to work.

So what’s your disability?
Ergo phobia, fear of work. A bunch of mental stuff, basically.

Are you getting treatment?
I don’t really need treatment. It’s just not wanting to work. I have no problem with working if I’m working for myself. I’ve been considering running an ad in the newspaper for computer repair. I’d probably be less motivated to be walking around drinking five liters of wine everyday and writing on things. 

Did you graduate from high school up north?
Yeah, I got a G.E.D. and I’m gonna be starting college, hopefully the next semester or the one after.

Where?
SMCC [Southern Maine Community College] or wherever.

What do you want to study?
Chemistry and philosophy.

I think most of the public thinks the people who write graffiti tags are just idiots, but you’re not stupid, you’re preparing for college. Is the public’s perception true?
Depending on the people. It’s just like anything else. I’ve met really stupid people that do it and I’ve met some other people that do it. But a couple people are pretty smart and some of them do have, like, a message. Like there’s somebody named Learn.

Yeah, I’ve seen that around. Learn’s still around, huh?
[No answer]

Maybe?
He did part of the legal wall behind the Asylum. 

Have you ever hooked up with those kind of graffiti artists?
Nah, I really don’t have much skill. I don’t even really call it tagging.

What do you call it? 
Mindless vandalism.

Are you sorry for this latest spree?
Yeah. Like I said, I normally don’t tag private businesses, unless I’ve got a reason to, like I don’t like something they’re doing, or whatever. 

Whatever the result of these latest charges, will you stop doing this when you’re free again?
I’ll just leave my markers at home when I’m drinking. Cause this time and the last time I got caught I was drinking, and I’m pretty sure the one before it, too.

After you got caught the last time, did you just go right back at it?
Yeah.

Is there anything the city can do to stop this?
To stop me, money would probably be the best thing to take away from me. I don’t have much of it. But they are smartening up some to stop graffiti. All the articles in the Portland Press Herald get read a lot, and people start complaining about it.

They’re also, after they clean off a tag on heavily tagged things – those traffic-control boxes get tagged a lot – they spray this stuff over it that makes it easier to clean off with water and soap or whatever.

Hopefully taggers will just get more creative. Like, when I was arrested, they caught me with a bottle of hydrochloric acid. If you dump that on cement, it bubbles up green and smokes a little bit, but as soon as it rains, that one spot where you dumped it will be bleached white.

Chemistry.
Or hydrofluoric acid will etch into glass.

I saw a tag like that on the new bus shelter on Congress and Center streets.
I think they used glass cutters, ’cause I’ve seen a bunch of those around. Starbucks [the one on the corner of Middle and Exchange streets] is covered with ‘em. I heard those are like $900 windows. 

Was there a chase before this latest arrest?
Me and my friends were going into Arby’s to get something to eat, and as soon as we turned the corner around Arby’s there was a cop there, and then two other ones pulled up.

Do you think the cops are getting any better at catching people like you? 
No. They’re not that smart. [Reading from the police report]: ‘In most cases the males used the tag “fnord.” In one place, they wrote: “fuck yo cat.”‘ I don’t think either one of us wrote [that]. 

You didn’t write that? 
[Laughing.] No…. 

I know down in Boston, it’s a felony if you get caught. Somebody was arrested for it down there, got out on bail; a couple days later, just left the state. I believe he’s actually in here right now. I’m not sure if he’s been sent to rehab yet or somethin’. An ex-friend of mine.

Have you seen any tags here, in the jail?
Normally, yeah, there is usually one in whatever cell I go in.

Have you ever put yourself in life-threatening situations, climbing high building and such to do this?
I’ve climbed up ladders before, scaffolding. 

Last winter, someone stray-painted ‘fnord’ in big letters, with white paint, on the bricks in front of Longfellow’s statue. Did you do that?
Allegedly that was me. 

photo/The Fuge

Last year, someone wrote ‘fnord’ on a stop sign on Lewis Street, right by where I live, so it said ‘Stop Fnord.’ Do you remember that one? 
No, but for a while I was making stickers that said ‘stop writing,’ in tiny letters, then ‘fnord,’ in big letters. Occasionally I’ve written ‘ford.’ I’m guessing people either get the joke or think I’m an idiot.

I saw one on a candidate’s sign recently.
I was pulling those up for a little bit and bringing them up to my girlfriend’s; turning the signs around, the paper ones, and writing weird things like, ‘Vote Jesus for Savior.’ I really don’t think I can get into trouble for that, unless they’ve got some sort of permit to put those there. It’s basically the equivalent of littering.

Do you think having these arrests on your record will hurt your ability to find work in the future?
I don’t really want to work. I just want to go to college to learn. I’m not really looking for a career… I might be self-employed.

Do you want to be an artist, or a writer?
Art. I’m not really good at writing. Art, computers, chemistry, that’s my only interests.

You mentioned philosophy. What sort of philosophers are you into?
Nietzsche, random stuff.

Do you have any other charges on your record?
I got probably 20 charges, but they’re all really nothing. I got a disorderly conduct at the Monument Square protests, and I got a couple of thefts, drinking in public, carrying a concealed weapon – even though I don’t really think a flare gun’s a weapon.

A flare gun?
Me and my friends walked around town shooting off flare guns, probably about a year ago – just shooting them up into the air.

The police report says ‘fnord’ is like your religion.
Fnord isn’t a religion, but it comes from the Principia Discordia, which is a religion based around discord. It’s pretty interesting. 

It’s mainly a stupid religion. It’s not really something you take seriously-seriously, but it’s fun to take it semi-seriously. There’s only five rules: every Discordian must eat a hot dog, sans bun, on a Friday. That comes from like a variety of different religions… The last rule is a Discordian is prohibited from believing what he reads. You just get done reading these five rules that are supposed to be the things you run your life by, and you’re like, huh?

When will you stop doing this? Will you be 30, 40, 60 years old and still at it? 
I don’t know. I haven’t grown up much in my life. Probably someday it’ll stop. I’ll probably be 30 years old, still getting picked up for disorderly conduct, criminal mischief or something. 

Are you worried about that? 
Just as long as I keep my charges like nothing serious. I’m a pacifist actually. Never even had a violent crime.

Source: The Bollard

Guest Blog - General Semantics by Conor O'Higgins

Korzybski's Structural differential

Alfred Korzybski developed a system he called General Semantics. It was one of the biggest influences on Robert Anton Wilson, NLP and cognitive psychology. It's fallen out of popularity recently, maybe because Korzybski never was much good as communicating it to popular audiences. This article is part of an attempt to jazz up General Semantics a bit.

The diagram below is one of the key tools in General Semantics. Korzybski called it the “structural differential”, which shows Saint Alfred's knack for picking ugly terminology. (In this article, I use my own chosen terminology for most things, not Korzybski's.)
The structural differential is a simple map of different levels of Being. Students of General Semantics study this diagram over and over again until they stop muddling the levels.

(open the image in a new window)

Studying this diagram helps you become conscious of which level you're talking about. You don't stop abstracting; you just become aware of when you're doing it. It's ok to read a menu. Eating a menu is not such a good idea.

The map is not the territory, and the map always deletes information from the territory:

• Only one 25-quintillionth of the electromagnetic waves that exist at WIGO get picked up by the senses.
  (see comments)
• At the Perceivable level, visual images are comparable to two 576 megapixel cameras shooting video at 100 frames per second. Two layers down, at the Label level, nothing remains but: “I saw a cat. It was black.”
  

The map is not the territory, and the map adds to, generalizes and distorts the territory:

• A 590nm wave at the WIGO level gets turned into “orange”. “Orange” does not exist at the WIGO level.
  
• At Level 2.0, there's a blind spot where the optic nerve enters the retina. Somewhere in 2.5, the brain makes up some fictional content and puts it in there instead.
  
• Also in 2.5, traits get added in, so that the things that show up at 3.0 are sexy, frightening, gorgeous, stinky etc. (The Impressionist painters were obsessed with getting this point across.)
  

This is not illustrated in the diagram, but higher levels influence lower levels too. Influence runs in both directions. Words influence behavior, which is a level 1.0 thing. Interestingly, the labels and language we use at level 4.0 change the brain so much that the settings on the filters at 2.5 change. (There's a ton of psychology studies making this point, such as ow.ly/pLmIu and ow.ly/pLmRm.) Words can change your BS. Change your BS and you change your reality-tunnel. 

It's not uncommon to get up into really high levels of meta-meta-meta-comments. For example, this article is at least level 8.0; it is an article about a response to criticism about a book.

Some people mostly ignore levels 1-3, and live in a labyrinth of labels. An organism generates a description, another organism reads it and responds to it, another responds to that - this can go on for a lifetime, and there's sometimes pretty good money in it. There's no need for facts, for the body, for mindfulness, sensation, or the real world. You can get lost in symbols and call yourself an intellectual, but you'll get paid more if you call yourself a lawyer. Korzybski had a technical term for it; he called it 'bla-bla'.

Pragmatism saves us from bla-bla. Pragmatism means always judging Beliefs (which are Level 4.0 things) by whether they can successfully affect and predict happenings at levels 1, 2 and 3. Kaos Magick is also called Results Magick; it doesn't judge Beliefs by whether they are good Beliefs; it judges them by whether they get Results.

This is known as Keepin' It Real.

I have taken a vow to Keep It Real; I only write about things that get results. I am writing about General Semantics because it gets great results. It uses books, diagrams etc. (Level 4.0 things) to reprogram the filters at Level 2.5 to create a calmer, clearer, less confused, less unrealistic, saner, happier reality-tunnel at Level 3.0
Reprogram your filters, before they reprogram them for you!

By Conor O'Higgins (Thanks very much Conor!)

Tom Robbins on Robert Anton Wilson - Not believing in anything is the hallmark of a truly free man

via RAW fans

Robert Anton Wilson on Cabala - Tasting the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Life

There's a tale they tell at Military Intelligence in London, when the candles gutter low and the fog curls about the windows. It happened in 1914 (they say), when England was losing the first world war and it seemed only a miracle could save her. There was this writer bloke (they say), name of Arthur Machen, never popular or well known, a bloody Welshman in fact and a mystic to boot. Well (they say), this Welshman, this Machen, took it into his head to write a story about the kind of miracle England needed, so he imagined St. George himself leading a group of medieval archers to aid the English troops at Mons. And after the story was published in a magazine, some enterprising newspapers picked it up and reprinted it as fact. And (they say) the whole damned country was gullible enough to believe it. It did as much for national morale as the real miracle would have.

What is even weirder is the sequel -and the chaps at Military Intelligence only discuss this when the candles gutter quite low and the fog is very thick, of course. Soldiers at the front, in Mons, began claiming that they had actually seen the phantom archers created out of Machen's imagination. They insisted on it. Some of them were still insisting on it 40 years later. They said they had won the battle because of this supernatural assistance.

Fair gives you a turn, doesn't it?

Stranger still: Machen, the man with the contagious imagination, was a member of a secret society in London. This was known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and it claimed to know the long-hidden secrets of Cabalistic magic.

There were several other members of the Golden Dawn who made a bit of a name. Florence Farr, one of the great actresses of the period, was a member, and it was she who gave Bernard Shaw the ideas about life-energy and longevity dramatized in Back to Methuselah; those ideas are currently influencing life-extension research. Algernon Blackwood and Bram Stoker (Dracula's creator) were members; so was the coroner of London; so was an electrical engineer named Alan Bennett who later, as Ananda Maitreya, played a key role in introducing Buddhist ideas to the West.

The egregious Aleister Crowley; who claimed to have come to earth to destroy Christianity; was a member for a while, and I know a good World War I story about him, too. It was Crowley's habit to give his pupils a word to meditate on every year. In 1918, Crowley gave them a number instead of a word: 11. All year his pupils meditated on 11 for at least a half hour every day. . . And the war ended on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

Did you feel another queer flash then?

The most famous Golden Dawn alumnus, however, was the great Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. In 1894 Yeats predicted that "the right pupils will be drawn to (the Golden Dawn) by dreams and visions and strange accidents . . .”

Cabala, the working philosophy behind the Golden Dawn, is the science of "strange accidents” – which are known as "mere coincidences" to the rationalist or "synchronicities" to Jungian psychologists.

Cabala (also spelled Qabala or Kaballah) was either taught by God to Adam in the Garden of Eden, according to its own tradition' or was invented by a group of rabbis c. A.D. 200 as a means of transmitting the esoteric inner teachings of Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem and the Dispersion. Among the prominent medieval and Renaissance philosophers who were Cabalists one can mention Raymond Lull, Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, Dr. John Dee, Pico della Mirandola and Isaac Newton. Cabala became unfashionable in the 18th century and did not begin to make a comeback until the Brain Explosion of the 1960s -the drug culture, the consciousness movement, the importation of Oriental mind-sciences, the popularity of Jung and Leary and Castaneda.

One way to get into the Cabalistic head space is to reflect long and hard on the singular fact that we could not live-could not breathe, in fact-without the trees busily pumping oxygen into the air. Yet the trees are not "thinking" about producing life-support for us. To the rationalist, it seems that our need for oxygen has no real connection with the trees' production of that element; sheer chance (or, the more vehement rationalists will anthropomorphically say, "blind chance") happens to have produced trees, through natural selection, over many aeons. The fact that we exist is, to this philosophy, a total accident, a very strange coincidence.

And, to the same rationalist, Arthur Machen's imagination has no real connection with what was happening on the battlefield at Mons. The magical link between Machen's imagination and the "collective hallucination" of the soldiers is just coincidence – like the magical link between us and the trees.

To the Cabalist, the rationalist sounds like a man found in a closet by a jealous husband, who hopefully explains, "Just by coincidence, while you were away on business I happened to wander into this closet without my clothes on. . .”

To the Cabalist, the whole universe is a network of meaningful connections. The seemingly coincidental is as full of meaning as anything else. To begin thinking like a Cabalist you must regard everything as being just as important as everything else. All that seems "accidental," "meaningless," "chaotic," "weird," "nonsensical;' et cetera is as significant as what seems lawful, orderly and comprehensible.

An elementary Cabalistic training technique is to try every day to "regard every incident and event as a direct communication between God and your sou1." Even the license plates on passing cars are such communications-or can be considered as such-by the devout Cabalist.
Some will be thinking of Freud at this point; and indeed Nathan Fodor points out in Freud, Jung and the Occult that Freud was heavily influenced by a friend who was a Cabalist. The "dreams, visions and strange accidents" that Yeats thought would bring people into the ambience of the Golden Dawn are all Freudian "unconscious material.”

A more modern metaphor is to be found in current neurology; which points out that the brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is where we do most of our conscious thinking, and it is linear; it breaks things down into sequences of A-causes-B, B-causes-C, and so forth. The right hemisphere, on the contrary; thinks in gestalt-meaningful wholes, comprehensive systems.

Cabala, like dope, is a deliberate attempt to overthrow the linear left brain and allow the contents of the holistic right brain to flood the field of consciousness. When you are walking down the street and every license plate seems part of one continuous message-one endless narrative-you are thinking like a very advanced theoretical Cabalist. (Or else you're stoned out of your gourd.) Practical Cabala (or Cabalistic magic) is the art of utilizing such holistic perception to create effects that will seem like "strange accidents" to the non-Cabalist.
A legendary example concerns an incident when the king of Poland was being urged by his advisers to authorize a pogrom against the Jews. One old Hasidic rabbi and the Hasidic rabbis spend most of their time studying Cabala-sat down, on hearing of this, and pretended to be writing something; but he did not write. Instead, he deliberately knocked his bottle over three times. His students, who saw this, thought the old man was getting a bit funny in the head. Then, a few days later; came news from the capital: The king had tried to sign the order for the pogrom three times, and each time he had-by "strange accident knocked over his ink bottle. "I can't sign this," the king finally exclaimed. "God is against it!"

Every Oriental culture has some equivalent to Cabala – some neuroscience of meditations, visualizations and yogic contortions calculated to shift consciousness, or part of consciousness, from the usually overactive left hemisphere to the usually underactive right hemisphere. Cabala differs from all these Oriental disciplines in being as systematic as any natural science-although far weirder:

The system of Cabala is contained in a kind of ontological periodic table of elements (see illustration). The purpose of this diagram has been nicely defined by the eminent contemporary Cabalist (and Jungian psychologist) Dr. Israel Regardie, who describes it as "a mnemonic system of psychology. . . to train the Will and Imagination."

The tree, as you can see, is made up of ten circles, called lights, and 22 paths connecting the lights. Each light represents a separate level of consciousness, and hence a separate level of "reality:' That is, to the Cabalist, each perceived reality is a function of the level of consciousness which perceives it, and how much reality you can absorb depends on how rich your consciousness is.
The paths, which are more technical than the lights, are techniques for getting from one light (one level of awareness) to another: '
The aim of the Cabala is to always know which "light" you are in, which is the level of consciousness that is creating what you are perceiving; and then to know the paths, or tricks, to get from one light (perceived reality) to another.

Dion Fortune, a Cabalist who also practiced psychoanalysis under her birth name, Violet Wirth, sums it all up by saying Cabala is "the art of causing change in consciousness by act of will"

The Tree of Life may be regarded as a map of those parts of consciousness which (a) are active in everybody-the lower parts of the tree; and (b) those which are only active in various orders of adepts-the higher parts of the tree.

The pragmatic theory of Cabala is that each action creates a new "universe," each experiment creates a new experimenter, each dance creates a new dancer. We are growing and evolving all the time, without noticing it usually; but a_ certain crucial points we can make a mental quantum jump to a level of awareness that puts us in a new reality we have never noticed before. Each of the lights on the Tree of Life represents such a quantum jump.

Concretely, we all start out in Malkuth, at the bottom of the tree, which represents the lowest level of awareness. This is what Freud called the oral stage: We simply drift and wait to be fed. Alcoholics, opiate addicts and most of the people on welfare for "psychological" reasons represent this state in its pure form, but we all contain it and relapse into it under sufficient stress. "I can't cope; somebody come help me:' Hear the infant's shrill cry. "Maaa-Maaa!" and you know what Malkuth is all about.

Above this is Yesod, the area of strong ego-awareness and what Gurdjieff called conscious suffering. This is where you struggle to be a real mensch, to be honorable, responsible, and self-sufficient. If you never get beyond this, you become what doctors called Type A and are a good bet for an early heart attack.

There are two ways to transcend Yesod's struggles. One takes you to Hod, which can be called the tactic _of the rationalist (Dr: Carl Sagan will serve as a model for this), and the other to Netzach, which is the strategy of the ordinary religionist (Jerry Falwell, say).

According to Cabala, both the rationalist and the vulgar religionist are unbalanced; in modern neurological language, the rationalist leans too much on the left brain and the religionist too much on the right brain. The synthesis, or balancing, brings you to the Middle Pillar and is represented by the light called Tiphareth-which charmingly enough means "beauty" in English.

Looking at the tree, you can see that the rationalist has a different path to Tiphareth from that of the religionist. The rationalist must go the path of nun ("fish") and the religionist the path of ayin ("eye"). Any book on Cabala will tell you what nun and ayin imply in terms of the psychological transformation involved. Fortunately, the tarot cards were either created or revised by a Cabalist and the meanings of nun and ayin are vividly conveyed to the unconscious by the two cards called, respectively. Death and the Devil. Anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of psychology can grasp part of what is meant here-the rationalist must "make friends with" Death and the religionist with the Devil. This is what Jung means when he says each man must face his own shadow.

(Every path on the tree has a tarot card illustrating it, and the quickest way to make the tree clear to your unconscious is to layout the cards representing the paths' between each light. The next step is to redesign the cards in terms of your own understanding. Some Cabalists redesign the tarot every two or three years, as their understanding grows.)

Tiphareth, the balanced center between and above both rationalism and religion, means beauty, as we said above. It is the first light that does not appear in normal, statistically average consciousness, and is identified with everything we mean by rebirth or awakening. It is dhyana in the Hindu system, "Buddha-mind" in Buddhism, the "New Adam" in St. Paul's epistles, Cosmic Christ Consciousness to Christian Cabalists. It represents a total reorganization of the psyche for a higher level of functioning than most humans ever attain. When Dr. Timothy Leary says gnomically that "the nervous system sees no color, feels no pain;' he means that the nervous system on this level sees no color; feels no pain. You are floating, and this is the first light on the tree that really feels like a light. Acidheads will know.
Above Tiphareth are two more unbalanced lights called Geburah and Chesed. Roughly; Geburah is the stage of Nietzsche's superman: he who is much more conscious than ordinary people and knows it. In George Lucas's symbolism, Geburah means "being seduced by the dark side of the Force:' It needs to be balanced by Chesed, which is humility in the deepest, more ego-destroying sense. In Castaneda's lingo, Geburah is "taking responsibility" and Chesed is doing so while always remembering that "you are no more important than the coyote.”

Geburah says "I am God"; Chesed says, “And so is everybody else – and everything else!"

There are three more lights on the tree. These are known as the supernals and are much further from ordinary human consciousness than Tiphareth, Geburah or Chesed. Many Cabalists say that you cannot reach the supernals without the direct help of the Almighty. Even with such divine aid, reaching the supernals is known as "crossing the abyss" and is regarded as fraught with peril.

The first two supernals are Chokmah and Binah. You will note on the diagram that they are both unbalanced – off the Middle Pillar. Basically; Chokmah is direct contact with the masculine aspect of "God" and corresponds to whatever you associate with Jehovah, Jupiter; Brahma, Zeus, et cetera. Binah is direct contact with the female side of divinity and corresponds to Venus, Ishtar, Kali or the White Goddess that Robert Graves is always writing about. Cabala says that each of these Close Encounters has to be "balanced." That is, you have to get beyond both Big Daddy and Big Mommy to arrive at the ultimate light, Kether, the balanced center of all consciousness, which is beyond gender, beyond space, beyond time, beyond words and beyond all categories. In short, Kether is exactly what all the Oriental mystics are seeking: pure consciousness without a blemish of emotion, idea or image, and therefore infinite and formless.

Cabala is very complicated and very; very intricate; the above sketch is no more than a hint of what the Tree of Life contains, on about the level of a discussion of chemistry that tells you there are eight families of elements but does not go on to list the elements in each family. To discuss Cabala fully requires many books; and indeed there is one good-sized book, Liber 777, by Aleister Crowley; which consists only of listing the elements in each light and path of the tree, and Liber 777 consists of 155 pages with four columns on each page.
The purpose of such lists is to design rituals, and the purpose of rituals is to program your own experience as you navigate from one light to another. As Tim Leary once said, "Ritual is to the inner sciences what experiment is to the outer sciences.” Cabalists agree.
For instance, suppose you have had a very powerful experience of the Punishing Father aspect of God, such as John Calvin once had. Within the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition, you might take this literally and proceed, as Calvin did, to establish a new religion. As a Cabalist, you will recognize it as a Chokmah experience and know that it needs to be balanced by a Binah experience.

You then look on the Tree of Life for a path from Chokmah to Binah. That turns out to be daleth ("door"), which corresponds to the Empress card in the tarot. If you look at the Empress you will immediately note that she happens to be a pregnant woman sitting in a field surrounded by vegetation. That should tell your unconscious what the path of daleth means. (By a "strange accident" or "mere coincidence" the Empress card, in most tarot decks, contains the women's-liberation symbol and always has, long before there was a feminist movement. That should help jar your consciousness. )

If the Empress card doesn't tell you enough, you look up daleth in any Cabalistic textbook, such as Crowley's 777. You will find that daleth is "in correspondence with" such things as the planet Venus, the color emerald green, the swan, the rose, sandalwood incense, the heptagram (seven-sided polygon), et cetera, and is most powerful on Friday. Thus, to get from Chokmah to Binah, you construct a ritual-a dramatized rnindchange operation-to be performed within a heptagram, on Friday evening as Venus is rising, using emerald green decorations, roses, swan feathers and sandalwood incense. If you follow all these correspondences, and know how to write rituals, and have had enough experiences with Cabala to have developed a powerful will and imagination, you should achieve Binah, the vision of the All-Loving Mother.

Similarly, there are favorable days, and perfumes, and geometric figures, and other accessories, for every type of brain change operation. Sunday is best for Tiphareth (Christ consciousness), Monday for Yesod (building a stronger ego), Tuesday for Geburah (accumulating powers), Wednesday for Hod (wisdom). Thursday for Netzsch (moral strength), Friday for Binah and Saturday for Chokmah.

This is only the skeleton of Cabala, however. Real Cabalistic practice consists of so familiarizing yourself with all the correspondences on the Tree of Life that everything you experience is filed and indexed by your brain as a Cabalistic "message.” Thus, if you walk out the door and see a palm tree, you immediately (by self-conditioning with Cabala) think of Venus and Hermes – because door is daleth is Venus, and palm is beth is Hermes. If you see a license plate with 333 on it, you remember that that is the number of egotism and deception, and you must ask what egotism and deception remains in yourself. In short, nothing is trivial; nothing is insignificant; nothing is meaningless. The whole universe, as Crowley says, becomes a continuous ritual of initiation.

A Zen Master was once asked, "What is Zen?" “Attention,” he replied. "Is that all?" asked the inquirer. "Attention,” the Zen Master repeated. "Won't you say anything else?" persisted the questioner. “Attention,” said the Master, one more time.

Cabala creates attention by using the Tree of Life to "key" every possible impression to one of the lights or paths and hence to a stage in the evolution of consciousness. The world becomes – as it was to Plato and Mary Baker Eddy and Sir Humphrey Davy when he tried nitrous oxide – nothing but ideas.

Theoretical Cabala is much concerned with words and numbers, and indeed insists that every word is a number. This is literally true in Hebrew, because all Hebrew letters are numbers, and the number of a word is the number obtained by adding its separate letters together. Cabala claims that any words having the same number are in some sense identical or "in correspondence with" each other.
For instance, achad (I am writing the Hebrew as if it were English, for simplicity's sake) has the value of 13. So does ahebah. What does this mean? Well, achad translates as "unity" and ahebah as "love,” so by the mathematical theorem that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other; the Cabalist calculates that love (ahebeh) equals 13 and unity (achad) equals 13 and therefore love equals unity. And, of course, when you love somebody you are in union with them: You are happy when they are happy; you suffer when they suffer.
Better still, it works backwards, too, according to some Cabalists: 31 is 13 backwards and therefore 31 is mystically the same as 13. And AI, the oldest name of God in Hebrew; has the value 31. Therefore, God equals love equals unity.

Which is all very nice and cheerful, and it's pleasant to have our first lesson in theorhetical Cabala coming up with such pleasant information.

Unfortunately; la (nothing) also equals 31. Is God therefore nothing? Or is it unity that is nothing? or love?

The theoretical Cabalist is not abashed. God is nothing, he says firmly – no-thing. And in this he is in agreement with the Buddhists and Hindus and, indeed, the most advanced mystics of all traditions. It only sounds queer to those primitives down at the bottom of the Tree of Life in Hod (rationalism) or Netzach (conventional religion); if you persist in Cabala long enough, the divine no-thing will make perfect sense to you.

Unfortunately; before you arrive at Kether – "the Head without a Head," the divine nothing – you will be sure to encounter even worse shocks in theoretical Cabala. Thus, neschek, the serpent in Genesis, the devil himself, has the value 358. You don't have to look far to find another Hebrew word with the value 358. It jumps up at you, as soon as you start studying Cabala. It is messiah.

In what sense is the devil the messiah? Some Cabalists have gone quite batty working on that one.

The charm of Cabala is that the universe adjusts-or in your excited and overstimulated state, appears to adjust-in ways that heighten such perplexities. When I first discovered the 358-equals-devil-equals-messiah paradox, I had to go to Los Angeles on business. Arriving at my hotel I found I had been given room 358. That's the sort of "strange accident" that Yeats was talking about, as one of the portals to Cabala. . .

For several years English biologist Lyall Watson has been collecting the products of Jung's "collective unconsciousness" – dreams, hypnotic states, mediumistic phenomena, automatic writing, et cetera. In his book, Lifetide, Watson offers a tentative summary of the data: "... there is a sameness in the tone, the word structure, the feeling, and the delivery of almost all the material. It has a dreamlike quality; and my feeling is that the vast majority of all the evidence I am looking at is a series produced by one prodigious dreamer" (italics added).

William Butler Yeats, trying to justify his interest in Cabalastic magic to rationalistic friends, came up with the same metaphor: "The borders of our minds are ever shifting, and many minds can flow into one another; as it were, and create or reveal a single mind. . . our memories are part of one great memory; the memory of Nature herself.”

This "one great dreamer" or "one great memory" can be accessed by Cabalistic practices, or by Zen meditation, or by LSD, or by a dozen other gimmicks. It has the quality of oneness in that it is the same no matter who accesses it or when-whether they are in India 500 B.G or Florence A.D. 1300 or in New York City today. It seems to be "timeless" or unconnected to our conscious notions of sequential time, as even so materialistic an observer as Freud noticed. One of the benefits of the psychological investigations of our times-from Freud and Jung to the LSD research of the '60s and the human-potential movement-has been to make most of us aware again, for the first time since the 17th century; that this level of the psyche exists in all of us and cannot safely be repressed or ignored.

The Cabalist, scorned by the 19th century as a crank or a charlatan, seems to be having the last laugh after all. There may be only one person in 10,000 – or in 100,000 – who seriously studies Cabala, but the avant-garde third of the population understands Cabalistic logic very well. If you show them the Tree of Life, and explain it, they might say that it is an alternative map of the charkas – if they are into Oriental mind-science; or an anatomy of the collective unconscious- if they're into Jung; or the circuits of the nervous system-if Tim Leary is their bag; but one way or another they will recognize it. It looked like gibberish to Yeats's contemporaries.

Military Intelligence never could figure out how the "angelic archers" escaped from Arthur Machen's imagination to the perceptions of the soldiers at Mons. But the readers of this magazine understand.

Don't you? 

from High Times, July 1981 - via the official rawilson.com

Politicians, Peptides, and Stupidity: An Evening with Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson was the author (along with Robert Shea) of the popular Illuminatus! trilogy, which won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for science fiction in 1986. His other books have found great acclaim as well, many of them achieving "cult classic" status. Wilson has been described at various times throughout his life as a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and agnostic mystic.

In this video from the Libertarian Party's Presidential Nominating Convention in 1987, Wilson treats the audience to a humorous and irreverent talk about everything from the state of world politics to a discussion on metaphysics, chemistry, and the nature of reality.

Timothy Leary and RAW - Lecture/Q & A (1990)

"In this video of footage of a lecture in New York City for a conference called Sense8 in 1990, Leary discusses emerging technologies and the Cyber World along with audience Q & A with Leary and Robert Anton Wilson."

RAW - Religion for the Hell of it & the Disinfo talk

This is the talk from Disinfo Con 2000, watch it while it's still up. All the Disinfo Con talks keep getting removed from Youtube, I really wish they'd stop doing that.

More RAW goodies tomorrow, don't wanna overload you all at once! BTW if anyone knows a site that actually succeeds at downloading a youtube video please share. I tried eight that didn't work so far... update: Thanks to David for letting me know about the Firefox extension downloadhelper for anyone who wants to save vids too.

Robert Anton Wilson (come down from Sirius) by Benny Zen

Blink

Blink while watching this

A few of these via Astral Double

via RAW Fans, #2323 - much of his stuff was sold on eBay to pay for his medical bill, even this card...

 hax0rz :p

You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you

art by http://wedgewenis.deviantart.com

RAW 360

RAW 360

This is awesome.

Robert Anton Wilson - A Positive Future

Can never post too much RAW here.

Go forth and be a force of awesome

Check out the butthurt at imgur over this image haha

Probably not the right translation :p

 that's a slippery slope towards a new society though...

Sombunall via Relaxed Focus

These are a few of my favorite books

Robert Anton Wilson - Prometheus Rising: awesome manual on how to deprogram & reprogram.

Robert Anton Wilson - Cosmic Trigger: fascinating biography

Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea - Illuminatus! Trilogy: Funny and intriguing conspiracy story featuring Hagbard Celine and his golden submarine (the Leif Ericson) vs the Illuminati.

Philip K. Dick - Valis & The Divine Invasion: PKD wrote "revelation" disguised as sci-fi, he didn't really understand what was going on in his head, a quote by him: "After all if you're a buddha, you should be able to figure it out for yourself."

Terence McKenna - True Hallucinations: my favorite orator goes into the Amazon with his brother to trip on psychedelics and things get weird. (The audiobook has great production, music and sound effects that really add to the experience.)

Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking glass for the wonderful lifehacks. (Lesser imaginative conspiracy theorists, this obviously means I am a mind controlled puppet of the illuminati.)

Rick Strassman - DMT The Spirit Molecule: fascinating musings and reports of his experiments on test subjects with the psychedelic DMT, specifically the weird alien encounters.

Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf: visit the Magic Theatre!

Lon Milo DuQuette - Low Magick It's All in Your Head You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is: my favorite occult author, great humor and explanations.

John Lilly - Simulations of God: Great exposition of different reality tunnels and human motivations.

Anything from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series: Hilarious fantasy humor, only read a handful so far but enjoyed each one, reading "Guards! Guards!" now. Small Gods is my favorite so far, I'm still wondering if Terry Pratchett is in fact a master magician in real life or just really clever at life.

Favorite Comic Books are The Invisibles by Grant Morrison and Promethea by Alan Moore.