Bob Dylan Time Magazine Interview

Bob Dylan high as a kite schooling a Time Magazine reporter who has no idea wtf is going on.
(accidental repost :p)

Illuminatus! Excerpts: The Pyramid, Sons-of-Bitches, 23

"And the real symbolism of the pyramid

is alchemical, of course. The traditional code represents the three kinds of sex by a cube, a pyramid, and a sphere. The cube is that travesty we call 'normal sex, in which the two nervous systems never actually merge at the orgasm, like the two parallel sides of the cube. The pyramid is the two coming together and joining, the magical-telepathic orgasm. The sphere is the Tantric ritual, endlessly prolonged, with no orgasm at all. The alchemists used that code for over two thousand years. The Rosicrucians among the founding fathers used the pyramid as a symbol of their kind of sex magic. Aleister Crowley used that symbol the same way, more recently. The eye on the pyramid is the two minds meeting. Neurological interlock. The opening of the Eye of Shiva. Ewige Schlangekraft—the eternal serpent power. The joining of the Rose and Cross, vagina and penis, into Rose-Cross. The astral leap. Mind escaping from physiology."

---

You silly sons-of-bitches!

You silly sons-of-bitches!

You silly sons-of-bitches!

---

23. Two and Three. Duality and trinity. Every unity is a duality and a trinity.

Dillinger made contact with the mind of Richard Belz, forty-three-year-old professor of physics at Queens College, as Belz was being loaded into an ambulance to be taken to Bellevue Hospital where X rays would reveal severe skull fractures. Shit, Dillinger thought, why does somebody have to be half dead before I can reach him? Then he concentrated on his message: Two universes flowing in opposite directions. Two together form a third entity which is synergetically more than the sum of its two parts. Thus two always leads to three. Two and Three. Duality and trinity. Every unity is a duality and a trinity. A pentagon. Sheer energy, no matter involved. From the pentagon depend five more pentagons, like the petals of a flower. A white rose. Five petals and a center: six. Two times three. The flower interlocks with another flower just like it, forming a polyhedron made of pentagons. Each such polyhedron could have common surfaces with other polyhedrons, forming infinite latticework based on the pentagonal unit. They would be immortal. Self-sustaining. Not computers. Beyond computers. Gods. All space for their habitation. Infinitely complex.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

Illuminatus! Excerpt: A dictatorship that would last forever.

A dictatorship that would last forever.

"Who did you say was looting this temple?" he asked Hagbard. 
"The Illuminati. The real force behind all communist and fascist movements. Whether you're aware of it or not, they're also already in control of the United States government." 
"I thought everybody in your crowd was a right-winger—" 
"And I told you spacial metaphors are inadequate in discussing politics today," Hagbard interrupted. 
"Well, you sound like a gang of right-wingers. Up until the last minute, all I've heard from you and your people was that the Illuminati were commies, or were behind the commies. Now you say they're behind fascism and behind the current government in Washington, too." 

Hagbard laughed. "We came on like right-wing paranoids, at first, to see how you'd react. It was a test." 
"And?" 
"You passed. You didn't believe us— that was obvious— but you kept your eyes and ears open and were willing to listen. If you were a right-winger, we would have done our pro-communist rap. The idea is to find out if a new man or woman will listen, really listen, or just shut their minds at the first really shocking idea." 
"I'm listening, but not uncritically. For instance, if the Illuminati control America already, what's the purpose of the assassinations?" 
"Their grip on Washington is still pretty precarious. They've been able to socialize the economy. But if they showed their hand now and went totalitarian all the way, there would be a revolution. Middle-readers would rise up with right-wingers, and left-libertarians, and the Illuminati aren't powerful enough to withstand that kind of massive revolution. But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution." 
"What sort of tools?" 

"More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. 

Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason— or are manipulated into reasoning— that the entire populace must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted. Targets for assassination will be mavericks of left or right who are either not part of the Illuminati conspiracy or have been marked as unreliable. The Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King, for example, were capable of mobilizing a somewhat libertarian left-right-black-white populist movement. But the assassinations that have occurred so far are nothing compared to what will take place. The next wave will be carried out by the Mafia, who will be paid in Illuminati gold." 
"Not Moscow gold," said George with a smile. 

"The puppets in the Kremlin have no idea that they and the puppets in the White House are working for the same people. The Illuminati control all sorts of organizations and national governments without any of them being aware that others are also controlled. Each group thinks it is competing with the others, while actually each is playing its part in the Illuminati plan. Even the Morituri— the six-person affinity groups which splintered from the SDS Weathermen, because the Weathermen seemed too cautious— are under the control of the Illuminati. They think they're working to bring down the government, but actually they are strengthening its hand. The Black Panthers are also infiltrated. Everything is infiltrated. At present rate, within the next few years the Illuminati will have the American people under tighter surveillance than Hitler had the Germans. And the beauty of it is, the majority of the Americans will have been so frightened by Illuminati-backed terrorist incidents that they will beg to be controlled as a masochist begs for the whip." 
George shrugged. Hagbard sounded like a typical paranoid, but there was this submarine and the strange events of the past few days. "So the Illuminati are conspiring to tyrannize the world, is that it? Do you trace them back to the First International?" 

"No. They're what happened when the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century collided with German mysticism. The correct name for the organization is Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria. According to their own traditions they were founded or revived in seventeen seventy-six on May first by a man named Adam Weishaupt. Weishaupt was an unfrocked Jesuit and a Mason. He taught that religions and national governments had to be overthrown and the world ruled by an elite of scientifically-minded materialistic atheists, to be held in trust for the masses of mankind who would eventually rule themselves when enlightenment became universal. But this was only Weishaupt's 'Outer Doctrine.' There was also an 'Inner Doctrine,' which was that power is an end in itself, and that Weishaupt and his closest followers would make use of the new knowledge being developed by scientists and engineers to seize control of the world. Back in seventeen seventy-six, things were run largely by the Church and the feudal nobility, with the capitalists slowly getting a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Weishaupt declared that these groups were obsolete, and it was time for an elite with a monopoly on scientific and technological knowledge to seize power. Instead of eventually producing a democratic society, as the 'Outer Doctrine' promised, the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria would saddle mankind with a dictatorship that would last forever."

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

Illuminatus! Excerpt: Entropy

"You've refused Heaven, 
so you must travel the harder path through the halls of Hell."

Playboy bunny Virginia

---

"I wasn't disturbing the peace," I said. "I was disturbing the war." 

I stole that one-liner from

Ammon Hennacy, Catholic Anarchist

---

Entropy

A patrolman led me to the fingerprint room. This guy was a computer: "Right hand." I gave him my

right hand. "Left hand." I gave him my left hand. "Follow the officer." I followed the officer, and they took my picture. We went down some halls to the night court, and in a lonely section the patrolman suddenly hit me in the lower back with his club, the exact spot (he knew his business) to give me liver problems for a month. I grunted but refused to say anything that would set him off and get me another clout, so he spoke. "Yellow-bellied faggot," he said. 

Just like Biloxi, Mississippi: one cop is nice, another is just impersonal, a third is a mean bastard—

and it doesn't really matter. They're all part of the same machine, and what comes out the end of the gears and levers is the same product, whatever their attitude is. I'm sure Buchenwald was the same: some of the guards tried to be as humane as possible, some of them just did their job, some of them went out of their way to make it worse for the prisoners. It doesn't matter: the machine produces the effect it was designed for. 

Judge Bushman (we slipped him AUM two years later, but that's another story, coming up on trip) gave me his famous King Kong scowl. "Here are the rules," he said. This is an arraignment. You can enter a plea or stand mute. If you enter a plea, you retain the right to change it at your trial. When I set bond, you can be released by paying ten percent to the bailiff. Cash only, no checks. If you don't have the cash, you go to jail overnight. You people have the city tied up in knots and the bail bondsmen are too busy to cover every courtroom, so by sheer bad luck you landed in a courtroom they're not covering." He turned to the bailiff. "Charge sheet," he said. He read the record of my criminal career as concocted by the arresting officer. "Five offenses in one night. You're bad medicine, aren't you, Moon? Trial set for September fifteenth. Bail will be ten thousand dollars. Do you have one thousand dollars?" 

"No," I told him wondering how many times he'd made that speech tonight. 

"Just a moment," said Hagbard, materializing out of the hallway. "I can make bail for this man." 

MR. KHARIS: Does Mr. Celine seriously suggest that the United States Government is in need of a guardian? 

MR. CELINE: I am merely offering a way out for your client. Any private individual with a record of such incessant murder and robbery would be glad to cop an insanity plea. Do you insist that your client was in full possession of its reason at Wounded Knee? At Hiroshima? At Dresden? 

JUSTICE IMMHOTEP: You become facetious, Mr. Celine. 

MR. CELINE: I have never been more serious. 

"What is your relationship to this young man?" Bushman asked angrily. He had been about to come when the cop dragged me off to jail, and he was strangling in some kind of gruesome S-M equivalent of coitus interruptus. 

"He's my wife," Hagbard said calmly. 

"What?" 

"Common-law wife," Hagbard went on. "Homosexual marriage is not recognized in Illinois. But

homosexuality per se isn't a crime in this state, either, so don't try to make waves, your honor. Let me

pay and take him home." 

It was too much. "Daddy," I said, camping like our friend the Padre. "You're so masterful." 

Judge Bushman looked like he wanted to lay Hagbard out with a gavel upside of his head, but he controlled himself. "Count the money," he told the bailiff. "Make sure he pays every penny. And then," he told us, "I want the two of you out of this courtroom as quickly as possible. I'll see you September fifteenth," he added, to me. 

MR. KHARIS: And we believe we have demonstrated the necessity of this dam. We believe we have shown that the doctrine of eminent domain is on sure constitutional grounds, and has been held to apply in numerous similar cases. We believe we have shown that the resettlement plan offered by the government will be no hardship for the plaintiffs. . . . 

"Fuckin' faggots," the cop said as we went out the door. 

"All hail Discordia," I told him cheerfully. "Let's get out of this neighborhood," I added to Hagbard.  "My car is right here," he said, pointing to a goddam Mercedes. 

"For an anarchist, you sure live a lot like a capitalist," I commented as we got into that beautiful machine crystallized out of stolen labor and surplus value. 

"I'm not a masochist," Hagbard replied. "The world makes me uncomfortable enough. I see no reason to make myself more uncomfortable. And I'm damned if I'll drive a broken-down jalopy that spends half its time in a garage being repaired merely because that would make me seem more 'dedicated' to you left-wing simpletons. Besides," he added practically, "the police never stop a Mercedes and search it. How many times a week do you get stopped and harassed, with your beard and your psychedelic Slaveswagon, you damned moralist?" 

"Often enough," I admitted, "that I'm afraid to transport dope in it." 

"This car is full of dope," he said blithely. "I'm making a big delivery to a dealer up in Evanston, on the Northwestern campus, tomorrow." 

"You're in the dope business, too?" 

"I'm in every illegal business. Every time a government declares something verboten, two groups! move in to service the black market created: the Mafia and the LDD. That stands for Lawless Delicacy Dealers." 

"I thought it stood for Little Deluded Dupes." 

He laughed. "Score one for Moon. Seriously, I'm the worst enemy governments have, and the best protection for the average person. The Mafia has no ethics, you know. If it wasn't for my group and our years and years of experience, everything on the black market, from dope to Canadian furs, would be shoddy and unreliable. We always give the customer his or her money's worth. Half the dope you sell probably has passed through my agents on its way to you. The better half." 

"What was that homosexual business? Just buggin' old Bushman?" 

"Entropy. Breaking the straight line into a curve ball." 

"Hagbard," I said, "what the hell is your game?" 

"Proving that government is a hallucination in the minds of governors," he said crisply. We turned onto Lake Shore Drive and sped north.

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

The Crown

I've been feeling my Chakra Crown swirl for several weeks now, I've informed myself that it means I'm progressing spiritually or consciously which is nice. At first it was only when I was doing meditation, a ritual or reading about consciousness, today it has started to swirl seemingly randomly. Before my re-engaging in spiritual practice I only felt my third eye swirl sometimes and that was always at seemingly completely random times. I found this epic related song, pay attention to the lyrics.

People of the world wherever you be
Welcome to Cosmic YOUniversity
Where life is the journey and love is the trip
And the study of them will make you hip

Illuminatus! Excerpt: Didn't seem to do much for the Nazis did it?

"The devil?" Father James Augustine Muldoon repeated. "Well, that's a very complicated story. Do you want me to go all the way back to Gnosticism?"
Saul, listening on the extension phone, nodded a vigorous affirmative.
"Go as far back as you have to," Barney said. "This is a complicated matter we're trying to untangle here."
"OK, I'll try to remember you're not in my theology class at Fordham and keep this as brief as I can."The priest's voice faded, then came back— probably he was shifting the phone as he got out of bed and moved to a chair, Saul guessed.
"There were many approaches to Gnosticism," the voice went on in a moment, "all of them centered on gnosis—direct experience of God— as distinguished from mere knowledge about God. The search for gnosis, or illumination as it was ometimes called, took many odd forms, some of them probably similar to Oriental yogas and some of them using the very same drugs that modern rebels against the slow path of orthodox religion have rediscovered. Naturally, with such a variety of paths to gnosis, different pilots would land at different ports, each insisting he had found the real New Jerusalem. Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why
the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries. But I digress.
"What you're interested in, I guess, is Cainism and Manicheanisra. The former regarded Cain as a specially holy figure because he was the first murderer. You have to be a mystic yourself to understand that kind of logic. The notion was that, by bringing murder into the world, Cain created an opportunity for people to renounce murder. But, then, other Cainites went further— paradox always seems to breed more paradox and heresy creates more heresy— and ended up glorifying murder, along with all the other sins. The credo was that you should commit every sin possible, just to give yourself a chance to win a really difficult redemption after repenting. Also, it gave God a
chance to be especially generous when He forgave you. Related ideas popped up in Tantric Buddhism about the same time, and it's a great historical mystery which group of lunatics, East or West, was influencing the other. Does any of this help you so far?"

"A bit," Barney said.
"About this gnosis," Saul asked, "is it the orthodox theological position that the illuminations or visions were actually coming from the Devil and not from God?"
"Yes. That's where Manicheanism enters the picture," Father Muldoon said. "The Manicheans made exactly the same charge against the orthodox church. According to their way of looking at it, the God of orthodox Christianity and orthodox Judaism, was the Devil. The god they contacted through their own peculiar rites was the real god. This, of course, is still the teaching of Satanists today."
"And," Saul asked, begining to intuit what the answer would be, "what has all this to do with atomic energy?"
"With atomic energy? Nothing at all. . .at least, nothing that I can see. . . ."
"Why is Satan called the light-bringer?" Saul plunged on, convinced he was on the right track.
"The Manicheans reject the physical universe," the priest said slowly. "They say that the true god, their god, would never lower himself to mess around with matter. The God who created the world-our God, Jehovah— they call panurgia, which has the connotations of a kind of blind, stupid blundering force rather than a truly intelligent being. The realm which their god inhabits is pure spirit of pure light. Hence, he is called the light-bringer, and this universe is always called the realm of darkness. But they didn't know about atomic energy in those days— did they?" The last sentence had started as a statement and ended as a question.
"That's what I'm wondering," Saul said. "Atomic power releases a lot of light, doesn't it? And it sure would immanentize the Eschaton if enough atomic power was unleashed at once, wouldn't it?"
"Fernando Poo!" the priest exclaimed. "Is this connected with Fernando Poo?"
"I'm beginning to think so," Saul said. "I'm also beginning to think we've stayed in one place a long time, using a phone that is almost certainly tapped. We better get moving. Thanks, Father."
"You're quite welcome, although I'm sure I don't know what you're getting at," the priest said. "If you think Satanists control the United States government a few priests would agree with you, especially the Berrigan brothers, but I don't see how this can be a police matter. Does the New York Police Department now maintain a bureau of holy inquisitions?"
"Don't mind him," Barney said softly. "He's very cynical about dogma, like most clergymen these days."
"I heard that," the priest said. "I may be cynical but I really don't think Satanism is a joking matter. And your friend's theory is very plausible, in its way. After all, the Satanist's motive in infiltrating the church, in the old days, was to disgrace the institution thought to represent God on earth. Now that the United States government makes the same claim, well. That may be a joke or a paradox on my part, but it's the way their minds work, too. I am a professional cynic —a theologian must be, these days, if he isn't going to seem a total fool to young people with their skeptical minds— but I'm orthodox, or downright reactionary, about the Inquisitions. I've read all the rationalist historians, of course, and there was certainly an element of hysteria in the church in those days, but, still, Satanism is not any less frightening than cancer or plague. It is totally inimical to human life and, in fact, to all
life. The church had good reasons to be afraid of it. Just as people who are old enough to remember have good reasons to be panicky at any hint of a revival of Hitlerism."
Saul thought of the cryptic, evasive phrases in Eliphas Levy: "the monstrous gnosis of Manes . . . the cultus of material fire. . . ." And, nearly ten years ago, the hippies gathered at the Pentagon, hanging flowers on the M.P.'s rifles, chanting "Out, demon, out!" . . . Hiroshima ... the White Light of the Void. . . .

"Wait," Saul said. "Is there more to it than just ideas about killing? Isn't killing a mystical experience to the Satanists?" "Of course," the priest replied. "That's the whole point— they want gnosis, personal experience, not dogma, which is somebody else's word. Rationalists are always attacking dogma for causing fanaticism, but the worst fanatics start from gnosis. Modern psychologists are just beginning to understand some of this. You know how people in explosive group-therapy sessions talk about sudden bursts of energy occurring in the whole group at once? One can get the same effect with dancing and drum-beating; that's what is called a 'primitive' religion. Use drugs, nowadays, and
you're a hippie. Do it with sex, and you're a witch, or one of the Knights Templar. Mass participation in an animal sacrifice has the same effect. Human sacrifice has been used in many religions, including the Aztec cult everybody has heard about, as well as in Satanism. Modern psychologists say that the force released is Freud's libidinal energy. Mystics call it prajna or the Astral Light. Whatever it is, human sacrifice seems to release more of it than sex or drugs or dancing or drum-beating or any less violent method and mass human sacrifice unleashes a ton of it. Now do you understand why I fear Satanism and half apologize for the Inquisition?"
"Yes," Saul said absently, "and I'm beginning to share your fear. ..." A song he hated was pounding inside his skull: Wenn das Judenblut vom Messer spritz. . .

He realized that he was holding the phone and seeing scenes forty years ago in another country. He jerked himself back to attention as Muldoon thanked his brother again and hung up. Saul raised his eyes and the two detectives exchanged glances of mutual dread. After a long pause, Muldoon said, "We can't trust anybody with this. We can hardly even trust each other."

Before Saul could answer the phone rang. It was Danny Pricefixer at headquarters. "Bad news. There was only one girl in research at Confrontation named Pat. Patricia Walsh to be exact, and—"
"I know," Saul said wearily, "she's disappeared, too." 
"What are you going to do now? The FBI is still raising hell and demanding to know where you two are and the Commissioner is having the shits, the fits, and the blind staggers."
'Tell them," Saul said succinctly "that we've disappeared." He hung up carefully and began stuffing the memos back into the box.
"What now?" Muldoon asked.
"We go underground. And we stick to this until we crack it or it kills us."

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

"A professor is a policeman of the intellect."

"A professor is a policeman of the intellect." 

 Hagbard Celine

Illuminatus! Trilogy

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. 

Illuminatus! The excerpts continue! Hail Eris!

Simon, in fact, had what can only be called a funky education. I mean, man, when your parents are both anarchists the Chicago public school system is going to do your head absolutely no good at all. Feature me in a 1956 classroom with Eisenhower's Moby Dick face on one wall and Nixon's Captain

Ahab glare on the other, and in between, standing in front of the inevitable American rag, Miss Doris Day or her older sister telling the class to take home a leaflet explaining to their parents why it's important for them to vote. 

"My parents don't vote," I say. 

"Well, this leaflet will explain to them why they should," she tells me with the real authentic Doris Day sunshine and Kansas cornball smile. It's early in the term and she hasn't heard about me from the last-semester teacher. 

"I really don't think so," I say politely. "They don't think it makes any difference whether Eisenhower or Stevenson is in the White House. They say the orders will still come from Wall Street." 

It's like a thundercloud. All the sunshine goes away. They never prepared her for this in the school where they turn out all these Doris Day replicas. The wisdom of the Fathers is being questioned. She opens her mouth and closes it and opens and closes it and finally takes such a deep breath that every boy in the room (we're all on the cusp of puberty) gets a hard-on from watching her breasts heave up

and slide down again. I mean, they're all praying (except me, I'm an atheist, of course) that they won't get called on to stand up; if it wouldn't attract attention, they'd be clubbing their dicks down with their geography books. "That's the wonderful thing about this country," she finally gets out, "even people with opinions like that can say what they want without going to jail." 

"You must be nuts," I say. "My dad's been in and out of jail so many times they should put in a special revolving door just for him: My mom, too. You oughta go out with subversive leaflets in this town and see what happens." 

Then, of course, after school, a gang of patriots, with the odds around seven-to-one, beat the shit out of me and make me kiss their red-white-and-blue totem. It's no better at home. Mom's an anarcho-pacifist, Tolstoy and all that, and she wants me to say I didn't fight back. Dad's a Wobbly and wants to be sure that I hurt some of them at least as bad as they hurt me. After they yell at me for a half hour, they yell at each other for two. Bakunin said this and Kropotkin said that and Gandhi said the other and Martin Luther King is the savior of America and Martin Luther King is a bloody fool selling his people an opium Utopia and all that jive. Go down to Wobbly Hall or Solidarity Bookstore and you'll still hear the same debate, doubled, redoubled, in spades, and vulnerable.

---

(While the most obscure, seemingly trivial part of the whole puzzle appeared in a department store in

Houston. It was a sign that said: 

NO SMOKING. NO SPITTING. 

THE MGT. 

This replaced an earlier sign that had hung on the main showroom wall for many years, saying only 

NO SMOKING 

THE MGT. 

The change, although small, had subtle repercussions. The store catered only to the very wealthy,

and this clientele did not object to being told that they could not smoke. The fire hazard, after all, was obvious. On the other hand, that bit about spitting was somehow a touch offensive; they most certainly were not the sort of people who would spit on somebody's floor-or, at least, none of them had done such a thing at any time since about one month or at most one year after they became wealthy. Yes, the sign was definitely bad diplomacy. 

Resentment festered. Sales fell off. And membership in the Houston branch of God's Lightning increased. Wealthy, powerful membership. 

(The odd thing was that the Management had nothing at all to do with the sign.)

[Sorry for the initial formatting, but blogger editing and copy pasting from PDF is a pain in the 3rd eye :p]

The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. 

Titans of Yoga

Ringos Bank