Robert Anton Wilson: Are you Sirius?

Robert Anton Wilson shares his thoughts about the experience of what seems like contact of a profound nature with some kind of external intelligence.

Chapel Perilous

from tekgnostics

- Beware! -

If you value normalcy... if you value a comfortable, predictable world... turn back now.

Once you cross the threshold of Chapel Perilous, there is no going back... for to enter this portal is to enter into the realm of magick, meaningful coincidence and synchronicity. Here the laws of common sense do not apply. Chapel Perilous is guarded by that ancient trickster... Fate.

Should you proceed... you have been warned.

"Chapel Perilous" is an occult term referring to a psychological state in which an individual cannot be certain whether they have been aided or hindered by some force outside the realm of the natural world, or whether what appeared to be supernatural interference was a product of their own vivid imagination.

From the (Tek) Gnostic perspective, to enter Chapel Perilous is to come to the shocking realization that "the Gods are Crazy." This is the epiphanous moment when one realizes the ambivalent... or worse... malevolent nature of what the Gnostics identified as the Demiurge. This deranged entity is not to be confused with the ultimate, transcendent creative power, which cannot be named.

Chapel Perilous was used as a Discordian term by the late writer and philosopher Robert Anton Wilson in his 1977 book Cosmic Trigger. According to Wilson, being in this state leads the subject to become either stone paranoid or an agnostic... there is no third way.

The concept of "Chapel Perilous" was used by Antero Alli, in his 1986 book, Angel Tech: A Modern Shaman's Guide to Reality Selection which is based on Timothy Leary's Eight-circuit model of consciousness. In Alli's book, Chapel Perilous is regarded as a rite of passage, when moving between the four lower circuits of consciousness to the higher circuits. In Chapel Perilous, the integrity of the lower circuits is tested in preparation for activation of the higher circuits.

The term Chapel Perilous first appeared in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) as the setting for an adventure in which sorceress Hellawes unsuccessfully attempts to seduce Sir Lancelot. T. S. Eliot used it symbolically in "The Waste Land" (1922).

Students of the Grail romances will remember that in many of the versions the hero... sometimes it is a heroine... meets with a strange and terrifying adventure in a mysterious Chapel, an adventure which, we are given to understand, is fraught with extreme peril to life. The details vary: sometimes there is a Dead Body laid on the altar; sometimes a Black Hand extinguishes the tapers; there are strange and threatening voices, and the general impression is that this is an adventure in which supernatural, and evil, forces are engaged.

- Jessie L Weston

The history of the term is interesting. Traditionally, the Chapel Perilous or Grail Castle has been the ultimate destination for knights questing after the Holy Grail. For most people of my generation, this brings up an image out (those great tekgnostic saints) of Monty Python, as well it should. The story has been around for a long time, though. The mystical experiences within this chapel are the climax of many an Arthurian adventure story. Those who entered were typically subjected to a rigorous battery of challenges, some of which seem to be training exercises of sorts, while others are ultimate tests of purity, conviction, and understanding.

Dangerous traps are to be found there, often tailored to force a confrontation with an individual knight’s personal weaknesses. Those who failed would not be allowed to access the Grail and might even be killed or driven mad in the attempt. On the other hand, a candidate who proved worthy might hope to be granted great power and priceless treasures.

The idea of Chapel Perilous as it is commonly used in psychedelic parlance comes from Robert Anton Wilson’s countercultural classic The Cosmic Trigger. Uncle Bob defines Chapel Perilous as: "A stage in the magickal quest in which your maps turned out to be totally inadequate for the territory and you’re completely lost." He has quite a lot more to say on the topic, having spent a good deal of time there himself:

"Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called ‘I,’ cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Everything you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness.

That's what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived. You might think you are just waiting for a bus, or wandering from room to room looking for your cigarettes, watching a TV show, or reading a cryptic and ambiguous book. Chapel Perilous is tricky that way."

I myself tend to think of Chapel Perilous as the place where you find yourself when the sheer absurdity of it all can no longer be ignored. When it all starts to add up and multiply while remaining somehow stubbornly indivisible. When synchronicity spirals out of control and you finally discover that you really are, in fact, the center and purpose of the universe after all. Either that or you’re stone-cold crazy. Or maybe it’s both. It’s the dark night of the soul, and it’s generally understood to be some kind of a trap. But it’s also a doorway, if one has the courage, strength, intelligence, and luck to pass through it.

- Teafaerie

CHAPEL PERILOUS is the place "souls" go after leaving their robot bodies...while these bodies are still alive and walking the planet's surface. Also known as "The Dark Night of the Soul." It relates to post-Factor X activities in that both refer to "out-of-body" states. However, CHAPEL PERILOUS is where souls go when they are lost and Factor X communications refer to how souls are found. Can also be seen as a negative activation of the "neurosomatic circuit," which is endured for as long as it takes the neophyte to effect a positive activation, or permanent body rapture.

- From The Game of Life by Dr. Timothy Leary

Robert Anton Wilson - Thinking Allowed

A clip of RAW from the 90s show 'Thinking Allowed' with Jeffrey Mishlove.

Robert Anton Wilson - The map is not the territory

Pulling the Cosmic Trigger: The Contact Experiences of Philip K Dick & Robert Anton Wilson

By AK WILKS

This article will look at some of the similarities between the contact experiences of two American writers, Philip K Dick and Robert Anton Wilson. In the 1973-1974 time frame, both would have unusual experiences that they thought could be contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. Or some undefinable something that wanted them to think it was extraterrestrial. And as incredible as it sounds, some of their experiences are confirmed by other people, and include verified transmission of knowledge that it seems they could not have obtained from any human source. We will also look very briefly at some other possibly related contact experiences involving musician and cultural icon John Lennon, researcher into human-dolphin communication and consciousness Dr. John Lilly and the Swiss scientist and inventor of LSD Dr. Albert Hofmann.

NOTE: William Burroughs first told Robert Anton Wilson about the “23 Enigma”.  Wilson and Kerry Thornley incorporated it into their ideas and created the related concept of the Discordian Law of Fives (2+3=5).  The number 23 and the numbers 2 & 3 & 5 recur at multiple points in this article.  In most cases I do not note them but the interested reader may wish to note how many times they recur and if it is more than expected by chance.

PHILIP K DICK

Philip K Dick was a science fiction writer with a prolific output from 1953 to 1981 of 121 short stories and 44 novels. Since his death in l982 he has become even better known. His stories have been made into major films like “Blade Runner”, “A Scanner Darkly,” and “Minority Report”. He has also been acknowledged as a major influence on other films, including “The Matrix”. The recent indie film “Radio Free Albemuth” is an excellent adaptation of Phil’s novel of the same name, dealing with Phil’s fictional version of the true events dealt with in this article.

PKD had themes that recur over and over again throughout his stories – What is real? What is human? How do we know that what we think of as reality is actually real? What defines humanity? Will humans be replaced by machines? PKD also had political themes and religious themes. Though he turned 40 in l968, he identified with the youth counterculture of the l960’s. He was against the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration. He refused to pay federal taxes in protest of the war, and his name appeared in published ads of writers and artists involved in the protest. The federal government confiscated his car for back taxes.

A typical PKD hero was a writer, small businessman, a TV repairman and/or a backyard inventor. He finds his life turned upside down when he discovers that reality is not what it seemed. He wages a fight against vast evil empires of heartless corporations, fascist governments, robots posing as humans, and alien invaders. He is often assisted by a beautiful and intelligent dark haired girl.

Starting in 1971, Phil was no longer just writing about government conspiracies, alternative realities, and struggles against an empire. He started living it. His home was broken in to. Things were damaged, papers were taken, but little of value was stolen. It did not seem like a traditional burglary. Strangely, part of Phil was actually relieved. He thought, “See! I’m not some crazy paranoid. They really are after me.” But he was also horrified and scared of what they would do next. It also validated him however. He must be getting through and having an impact if he was enough of a threat to have this done to him.

His wife Tessa confirms that in 1969 Phil got a phone call from a fan, Dr. Timothy Leary. She wonders if that call was wiretapped by Feds trailing Leary, and if Phil came on their radar screen then, if he had not before. When Leary escaped from Folsom prison, she wonders if Phil got attention because of the Leary connection. Phil claimed that he also talked to John Lennon as part of this same phone call. The connection was probably Rolling Stone writer Paul Williams, who knew PKD well and wrote about him in Rolling Stone magazine, and Williams was with Lennon and Leary in Canada.

President Nixon had called Leary “the most dangerous man in America”, a label he only used for one other person, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg. Nixon had authorized a break in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office. The FBI, BNDD(DEA) and the CIA were involved in the hunt and recapture of Leary. Did one of those agencies do the break in looking for clues to where Leary was hiding? Nixon was also using the pretext of a marijuana conviction to try to get Lennon deported. The real reason was his anger over Lennon’s support of the anti-war movement, both lyrically and financially.

Aside from the Leary/Lennon connection, Phil had also attracted government attention on his own, as he had in the Ramparts magazine anti-war tax protest. He later found out that letters he had sent to Soviet scientists had been intercepted by the CIA.   His books appeared on a list compiled by the government of works that promoted the drug culture. (This was ironic as Phil later became very anti-hard drugs, because he felt they robbed people of their humanity and led to tragic results). In between marriages, Phil opened his home to and hung out with drug users, small time criminals, political radicals, teenage runaways and street people.   An Orange County cop told Phil “They don’t need crusaders here.” Phil says he was afraid to ask the cop who or what he thought he was crusading for.

Phil obsessed over who did the break in – the FBI? CIA? KGB? Local police? A right wing group like the Neo-Nazis? A criminal gang? But eventually something else even bigger would come along to obsess over.

In February and March of l974, Phil had amazing contact experiences that changed his life. He would spend the rest of his life trying to figure out what exactly happened, and who or what was responsible. His theories included mental illness at one end, to direct contact with God at the other end. In between were the theories of contact with an alien race, time travelers, an AI (Artificial Intelligence) computer from the future, a government agency or a secret society.

Eventually he came to call what contacted him VALIS, for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Phil would have different ideas on what VALIS was – a satellite beaming information to him from an alien world or just a manifestation of God? He came to think VALIS was a satellite from advanced entities perhaps from the Sirius double star system. One of the missions of VALIS was to fight the Empire,(“The Empire never ended”) the continuation of the Roman Empire in the evil power elites in the East and West, who were secretly connected in their desire to keep their populations enslaved. The second mission of VALIS was to enlighten people with information and knowledge, to spark creativity, invention, art and innovation. This was also partially done through the true hidden and suppressed gospels of Jesus Christ which were revealed to the world in the Gnostic Gospels found at Nag Hammadi in 1945. This information is a living plasmate that comes alive in every person who reads the gospels or who reads about VALIS in the stories of Philip K Dick. The final mission of VALIS was to show Phil that this is a fake world, a “Black Iron Prison”, a “criminal virus” that occludes people from seeing that the world is alive. In fact the world that we see is fake, and we may be living in a computer simulation or a hologram. Now you can see why the creators of “The Matrix” acknowledge PKD as a major influence.

He would write what he called his Exegesis to investigate and explain what he came to call the “2-3-74” experience, meaning February and March of 1974. His Exegesis would grow to over 8,000 pages. Recently a 900 page version was published. Phil increasingly came to favor theological interpretations of VALIS, but at one point, after reading Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “Childhood’s End”, he expressed his experience in Clarke language and classic Sci-Fi terms:

(1)We are not only being watched; we are being controlled, but don’t know it; they remain beyond our threshold of vision.

(2) They work for a higher purpose, one we can’t understand but which fits our concepts of spiritual, moral purposes.

(3) We are instruments, therefore, of an invisible spiritual force which causes us to grow and develop in certain arranged directions.

•     Some of us are either part of their race or can be elevated to their level, as they work through these individuals.
•     The probable reason for their concealment is our evil qualities. We cannot be trusted, individually or collectively (man qua beast).
•     A critical moment has approached or is approaching; this is a unique period in their work, therefore in our use-purpose.
•     The extent of camouflage and delusion induced in us is extraordinary in amount and degree

Understand that the above formulation was not Phil’s favorite. As I stated he increasingly came to favor a more theological interpretation, bringing in elements from Buddha, Dionysus, and mysticism, but primarily Gnostic Christianity as revealed in the Nag Hammadi scriptures uncovered in 1945. But I like the formulation above because it is clear and concise and perhaps fits best with some of the other experiences we will look at later.  Section #5 about concealment deals with a subject Phil talked a lot about, which was the fate of men like Socrates, Christ, Bruno, JFK , MLK and his friend Bishop Jim Pike. Given that history, VALIS must conceal itself most of the time, and rather than announce itself on the lawn of the White House, and be sent to federal prison or worse, it would reveal itself gradually in scattered trash, pulp magazines, rock music songs, comic books, B movies, episodes of “Star Trek”, sci-fi paperbacks and through an imperfect odd California science fiction writer.

In part of the 2-3-74 experience Phil saw a cartoon cat that appeared in the pink light of a rectangle that reflected the “Golden Ratio.” The Golden Ratio of 1.618 occurs throughout nature, and is seen in everything from galaxies to sea shells to flowers to the human face. Phil’s cat had just died and he said the cartoon cat came over to him and put his paw on his shoulder, as if to console him and tell him it will be all right.

In another part of the2- 3-74 experience, Phil said he experienced hundreds of abstract and expressionist art paintings.   They were as vivid and colorful and real as anything he had ever seen in his life. He mentioned Kandinsky and Klee as the type of art that he saw.

Then throughout 1974 he experienced strange events, some seemingly “good”, and some seemingly “bad”. Strange synchronicities, “coincidences” that seemed to have underlying connections. If VALIS was a positive moral aiding Phil and humanity, there were also other dark forces wanting to keep humanity enslaved and blind, and Phil feared these dark forces. He gave his son Christopher an improvised Christening with chocolate milk and a bit of hot dog bun, as a way to protect him from these dark forces.

Phil had multiple marriages and divorces and a documented history of mental illness; and of course, he had a vivid imagination, as seen in his stories. Add in that he had a reputation as a drug user, and it is tempting to write off these interesting but unverifiable experiences as hallucinations, insanity, and/or hoaxes.

 It’s true that Phil had mental health issues, but they mostly revolved around depression. In this period, living with his wife Tessa and young son Christopher, he was happy most of the time. Phil did take legal uppers, and he experimented with LSD, but only twice. His reputation as a wild man drug user was exaggerated in the press. One time Phil was eating dinner at a sci-fi convention, and a fan snatched a pill beside his plate and swallowed it. “What’s going to happen to me?” the fan asked. Phil explained, “Well, if you have a sore throat it will feel better.”

First of all, it is doubtful that Phil would have been moved to devote the time and energy of an 8,000 page exegesis if all these events were just hoaxes or misperceptions. Secondly, a few key incidents have been verified either by outside facts and/or his wife at the time, Tessa.

Tessa B. Dick has written her own book called “Remembering Firebright: My Life with Philip K. Dick”. In a few instances she explains how she thinks Phil misconstrued ordinary facts into something fantastic. One senses she is honestly recounting things as best she can remember, and that like Phil, she has struggled over the years to understand these events. But on several key incidents, she largely confirms Phil’s account of events. She says that unusual and unexplainable things did happen.

One of these is the “Firebright” of the book’s title. Phil said this was a small baseball size sphere of blue light. He said he thought it facilitated communication between him and an alien satellite that was in orbit around the earth. This satellite explained mysteries of the universe to him, sometimes by historical figures he admired (or simulations thereof), like Francis Bacon and Thomas Aquinas. Tessa did not experience that aspect, but she states she did see Firebright, that she and Phil could see it together, and each correctly describe what it was doing. Was it a shared hallucination? Was it a shared reality?

Another incident described by Phil was when his radio kept playing, even after he turned it off and even after he unplugged it. He said the radio was saying messages attacking him. Tessa does confirm the radio kept playing even after being unplugged, and it was not the type that had batteries. She did not hear personal attacks on Phil, but normal pop songs. However, she can’t explain how or why it kept playing. She did note at the time that the neighbor’s apartment was mostly vacant, as if nobody actually lived there, but they had a lot of electronic equipment, so there may be a natural earth-bound explanation for the strange radio incident. She felt then and now that they were spying on someone, be it Phil or someone else. But that would not explain the mystery of “Firebirght”, nor would it explain the following mystery.

Sometime in the late summer of 1974, Phil reported drifting between sleep and waking while listening to the Beatles song “Strawberry Fields Forever,” sung by John Lennon. At the point in the song where it says “Living is easy with eyes closed,” Phil opened his eyes. He cried out to Tessa to “Call the doctor and tell him that Christopher has an inguinal hernia and he could die if it strangulated”. Tessa says Phil looked as if he were in a trance and she confirms what he said, and that he stated the medical terms correctly. She took their 14 month old son Christopher to a doctor, and the doctor confirmed Phil’s diagnosis, and the doctor scheduled and eventually did the potentially life-saving surgery as soon as Christopher was old enough, which was a couple of months later. In the meantime they were instructed to be careful not to let him cry for any prolonged period.

In subsequent conversations with the “normal” Phil, Tessa says he went back to not understanding the medical terms and was mispronouncing them. Who or what intervened and gave Phil the information that saved his son’s life? Was it VALIS?

I was able to recently ask Phil’s last wife Tessa about this incident. She again confirmed most of the elements of Phil’s story as correct. She said the doctor told her that if Christopher had been left to cry throughout the night for an extended period, the hernia could have strangulated and cut off blood flow, causing serious injury or even death. She does not remember the stereo being on, so unless Phil had the small radio on, she wondered if Phil heard “Strawberry Fields Forever” in his dream. I asked her how was Phil able to correctly diagnose the hernia? Was it VALIS, a religious miracle, just really good intuition or simply unexplainable? She stated:

“I have no earthly explanation for how Phil could have known that our son had a hernia.  He did not change diapers, and he had little medical knowledge.  I knew that something was wrong with our baby, but I had not yet discussed it with Phil.”

Phil felt that it was VALIS, and that it also intervened in his life in other positive ways. He says it prompted him to ask his agent for back royalties on books sold overseas, and he subsequently received substantial checks. He also had a sense of renewed creativity and in addition to the non-fiction Exegesis, the strange events in his life gave inspiration to several excellent novels, including “Radio Free Albemuth”, “VALIS”, “The Divine Invasion”, and others. His income from book sales greatly increased, and his novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” was made into the movie “Blade Runner” (the title came from William Burroughs). He saw parts of the film before it was released and was greatly impressed. He told the makers of the film that it validated his entire career and even his life.

Tragically, he never got to see the entire film and the world got no more PKD stories. He had a series of strokes leading to a heart attack , which caused his death on March 2, 1982. Before he died and when he was in seemingly good health, he may have had a premonition about his death, as he told Tessa, whom he had divorced but was seeing again, “You will remember, and you will tell them”.



ROBERT ANTON WILSON

Robert Anton Wilson was an editor at Playboy magazine — a very good, interesting and well paid job. But he left the magazine in 1971 to pursue his other interests. These interests included sex, drugs, higher states of consciousness, libertarian economics, anarchist politics, Constitutional rights, philosophy, quantum physics, history, psychology and the occult.

Along with Robert Shea he wrote the “Illuminatus!” trilogy, the most complex exposure of the conspiracies running the world and/or satire of such theories. He wrote many successful books, and he approached all topics with his trademark agnosticism and maybe logic. This avoided the traps of dogmatism and guruism. He wrote about serious subjects with a sense of humor, but treated even seemingly crazy ideas seriously.

Within weeks of meeting Timothy Leary in 1964, he and his family saw their first UFO. Timothy Leary, who was kicked out of Harvard for his LSD experiments, would become a good friend, mentor, frequent teacher, major influence, sometime student, co-author, and partner in “thought crime”.

Philip K. Dick met several times with RAW, and they became correspondents. PKD famously said that “Wilson managed to reverse every mental polarity in me, as if I had been pulled through infinity.” PKD mentions RAW in his Exegesis, and RAW mentions PKD in his books. Just as PKD’s fiction seemingly came to life in his contact experiences, RAW’s fiction also escaped from the page into his life.

RAW embarked on a course of what he called “deliberately induced brain change.” From July 23, 1973 until October, 1974, he entered a belief system in which he was (perhaps) receiving telepathic messages from advanced entities on a planet near the double star Sirius.

Were these entities real? To him, at the time, they “seemed real enough”, though “not as real as the IRS”, but “easier to get rid of.”

In keeping with his model agnosticism and desire not to get trapped in any one reality tunnel, RAW undertook a multiple-paths-all-at-once approach to making contact with higher intelligence. He used incantations and rites by Aleister Crowley to invoke the Holy Guardian Angel. Wilson says that if you look at Crowley’s words on the page, they mostly seem like “pretentious rubbish”, but when read out loud, it “vibrates, moans and sings with eerie power.” He also used a hypnosis tape called “Beliefs Unlimited” by Dr. John Lilly, the pioneer in inter-species communication and consciousness research. At first he also used Mescaline and LSD. He later achieved similar results without any drugs. He also tried tantric sex with his wife with the goal of breaking through to new levels of consciousness (and having fun, which RAW always liked to do).

In a dream on July 23, 1973, he got the message “Sirius is very important.” He did not know what it meant. He found out that Sirius was a double star system about 8.6 light years away from Earth. Further research showed him that Sirius (maybe) played an important role in the belief systems of Crowley, the Freemasons, and various occult groups. He then found out that in the ancient Egyptian tradition, the dog star Sirius was celebrated from July 23 to September 8.  This was the period when contact between Sirius and Earth was said to be strongest.

 He wrote about his experiences in his book “Cosmic Trigger.” You don’t just read this book, you go along on his intellectual, spiritual and physical adventure with him. The topics he writes about start happening in his life. In similar and different ways to what happened to PKD, strange things, unexplained events and seeming “coincidences” linked by underlying synchronicity start to occur.

In this book he mentions Philip K. Dick and his novel “VALIS” based on real events. He notes some of the similarities and differences in their experiences. He also mentions a book by Robert KG Temple called “The Sirius Mystery”.

In reading Temple’s book, he learned that there was evidence (maybe) that Egypt, Sumeria and other ancient civilizations told legends of contact with advanced men who came down from the sky to teach them engineering, science and arts, and that these men came from the Sirius system. He learned that the Dogon tribe in West Africa also had legends of contact with entities from Sirius, and knew that Sirius had a companion star which was not visible to the naked eye. How did they know it existed? Because they really were visited long ago by entities from Sirius who told then about it? Well maybe. But maybe they learned about it from more recent European visitors. But if so why did they claim it was a long standing part of their belief system? What about all the other evidence of “Ancient Astronauts” and many peoples who tell legends of men from the sky, including stories from the Bible?

Wilson quotes this key part by Robert KG Temple from his book “The Sirius Mystery”:

“I would even venture that we may be under observation or surveillance at this very moment, with an extraterrestrial civilization based at the Sirius system, monitoring our development to see when we will be ready ourselves for their contacting us . . .Would they think that (this book) was their cue? If what I propose in this book really is true, then am I pulling a cosmic trigger?”

Most of the experiences Wilson describes are fascinating, but subjective and unverifiable. He himself comes to no definite conclusion about them. But one in particular stands out as unexplainable, and like the incident with Philip K. Dick and his son, it involves a child in danger. On April 26, 1974, Wilson was with a group of self-proclaimed witches in a new version of the Golden Dawn occult group. He had a vision of his son Graham lying on the ground with police walking toward him. He was afraid this indicated that Graham had been in an accident or some kind of trouble.

He invoked a cone of protection around his son and tried to send a message to call him in the morning. The next morning Graham did call and he explained that he and his friends had been illegally sleeping in a field. Police spotted their car, and walked towards them with their flashlights. They were certain they would be seen and then arrested, but amazingly, the cops did not see them and just walked away. This happened a few minutes before midnight, which was the same time that Wilson had his vision of Graham lying in a field with police walking towards him.

Wilson would later have another vision that a member of his family was in danger, and thought again it was Graham. Tragically, it turned out to be his daughter Luna, killed in a violent and senseless robbery. He writes movingly of her life and death. A lifelong opponent of the death penalty, even in his grief and anger, he does not want her killer to die, because he believes more than ever in the value of life over death.

Wilson comes to no final conclusions about his experiences. He suspects that the Holy Guardian Angel and the extraterrestrials from Sirius probably do not exist outside of our imaginations. But even if they are not literally real, RAW thinks that a belief in them was a tool to open up access to a previously untapped area of his brain.

On the other hand, remembering Arthur C. Clarke’s idea that any sufficiently advanced technology may be indistinguishable from magic, RAW wondered “what if Temple’s book was true?” What if PSI powers like ESP and telepathy are true? Stars can last 9 billion years. We are only half way through the life cycle of our star. That means there could be civilizations from Sirius or elsewhere that are one billion years more advanced than us. RAW asks what would be the technological capabilities and PSI powers of a civilization 100 million years, 500 million years, two billion years more advanced than we are now?   RAW wonders if they will use psychic powers and/or technologically advanced communication methods to aid our evolution. Which sounds a lot like VALIS.

In his book “The Illuminati Papers”, Wilson quotes Dr. Ronald Bracewell from Stanford and Dr. Frank Drake of Cornell as saying that advanced aliens may have immortality and may be “trying to communicate with us right now.”   Dr. Brian O’Leary, a Berkeley PHD and former NASA employee, states that aliens, be they extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional, may be on Earth now and have “technologies of consciousness.” Did an advanced race use “technologies of consciousness” to contact PKD and RAW?

Wilson in “Cosmic Trigger” also noted that the genius Tesla reported getting whole detailed descriptions and blue prints for inventions into his mind from an unknown source and sometimes had conversations with unseen entities. He reported that Dr. Jacques Valle told him that over 100 scientists had similar experiences of transmission of ideas but most are afraid to go public for fear of ridicule. Dr. Jack Sarfatti is one of the few who have gone public.

The discoverer of DNA, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Francis Crick, was a regular user of marijuana and may have first perceived the double helix shape of DNA while on LSD. Dr. Kary Mullis says taking LSD was one of the most important things he ever did and that he would not have won the Nobel prize for perfecting the PCR DNA method if he had not done it. He also had a strange UFO or Mothman Prophecies type encounter with an entity. Steve Jobs said taking LSD was one of the most important things he had done and convinced him that the goal of life was not just to make money but to invent and design things that would go into the stream of history and affect consciousness. Both the DNA and computer internet revolutions owe something to the (VALIS directed?) discovery of LSD Dr. Hofmann which we will examine. Is DMT or LSD a pathway to communication with higher intelligence? Or is it a pathway to open up previously untapped parts of our brain? Maybe. But this is a reason for LSD and other drugs to be legal, so they can be correctly manufactured and taken in safe doses at facilities with medical and psychological professionals. Both RAW and PKD strongly warned people not to take street drugs, they each saw the bad consequences that can result.



JOHN LENNON, DR JOHN LILLY, DR ALBERT HOFMANN

 Finally I want to mention very briefly some other experiences that may have some similarities to the PKD and RAW experiences. John Lennon, as part of the Beatles and on his own, was a huge catalyst for the Sixties counter-culture revolution. Not only a force in music and the arts, he affected politics through his support of the anti-war movement and giving money to radical groups. He even gave money to Dr. Timothy Leary when he was on the run.   John had a life-long interest in the subject of UFO’s, including subscribing to British journals on the subject. In a period when he separated from Yoko Ono and was living with May Pang, he actually saw a UFO from the balcony of his NY apartment. It was on August 23, 1974. John actually cried out for the UFO to take him. They took pictures but they did not come out. They called all their friends. One of their friends called the police and newspapers and was told others had seen it as well.

May Pang later said that Lennon told her “if the masses started to accept UFO’s, it would profoundly affect their attitudes toward life, politics, everything. It would threaten the status quo.” Pang also said that 1974 was not his first sighting. He told her more than once he suspected he had been abducted as a child and that this experience made him different from other people the rest of his life. Abducted by aliens? “Yes, but John didn’t go into detail about it”. Pang said.

Dr. John Lilly, MD, was a genius who pioneered human – dolphin communication and researched communication among whales and gorillas. He also researched human consciousness with himself as a test subject. He did experiments with LSD, Ketamine and other substances, sometimes in conjunction with an isolation tank he developed. His work with dolphins inspired the film “Day of the Dolphin” and his research on consciousness inspired the film “Altered States”.

Adam Gorightly wrote an article called “John Lilly, Ketamine and the Entities from ECCO”. He describes two incidents that have some similarities to the experiences discussed here. Adam told me he got the information from a book by Lilly called “John Lilly, So Far”. The first incident seems to have taken place in the summer of 1973, the summer of the RAW Sirius experience. Lilly took Ketamine and got into his hot tub. His body could not support itself and he sank under. He was drowning. His friend Phil Halecki had a sudden urge to call him. He called him at that moment. He got John’s wife Toni who said John was fine he was in the hot tub. Phil insisted she get him right now. She did and saw John face down and drowning. She saved him and performed CPR, which she had just learned the day before from a magazine article.

John felt he was saved by the work of what he playfully called the Earth Coincidence Control Office, or ECCO. He first encountered these entities of light and love as a child and given his religious upbringing he thought of them as angels. He came to believe that they arrange “coincidences” on Earth to assist in the growth of knowledge and for the greater good. ECCO sounds very similar to what PKD called VALIS, the Vast Active Living Intelligence System, which he felt intervened in his life to save his son, impart knowledge and fight the Empire. Both ECCO and VALIS also sound similar to the Carl Jung concepts of synchronicity, the collective unconscious and archetypes. They also resonate with what quantum physicist David Bohm called the “implicate order” and Celtic legends call Fairyland.

While ECCO works on the side of aiding humans, an entity Dr. Lilly called Solid State Intelligence (SSI) works to achieve dominance for computers and machines over all biological forms, in particular intelligent mammals like humans, dolphins and whales. Think of the machines in “The Matrix” or the mega computer Skynet in “The Terminator”. Dr. Lilly used computers and technology for good purposes but feared there use for bad purposes, by evil men of the military-industrial corporate state or even self-aware AI computers on their own.

The other incident is said by the book to have happened in the fall of 1974, but as the book is loose with dates and even years, I have reason to think it was probably 1973. John and Toni were on a flight to Los Angeles. Dr. Lilly took Ketamine on the flight and then looked at the Comet Kahoutek and it greatly increased in brightness. He then received a message that said SSI was going to shut down all systems at LAX. He told this to Toni, who disapproved of John’s increasing drug experiments and thought ECCO was nonsense. But minutes later, the pilot announced they could not land at LAX because a plane had crashed into power lines causing a black out. The plane landed safely elsewhere.   Kahoutek was not visible to the naked eye in 1974 but it was visible in 1973. There was a plane that hit power lines on November 17, 1973.

John later felt that the message was from ECCO about the dangers of SSI. Had the pilot attempted to land at LAX when the power and lights went out, he might have crashed. Did ECCO/VALIS send Dr. Lilly a warning? As it had sent to his friend when he was drowning? As ECCO/VALIS had sent to PKD and RAW about their sons? Dr. Lilly later got warning messages of nuclear devastation from ECCO in 1974.

Dr. Albert Hofmann was the Swiss chemist who had many great patents and discoveries, but his greatest was discovering LSD. He said that he had planned a career in the humanities or arts but that “Mystical experiences in childhood, in which nature was altered in magical ways” caused him to want to understand the world and he choose chemistry.   At the website for the Albert Hofmann Foundation writer John Beresford notes that the first major step in the creation of the atom bomb happened on December 2, 1942, in Chicago.   Enrico Fermi as part of the Manhattan Project caused the first nuclear chain reaction.

About 131 or 132 days later Dr. Hofmann had what he called in German a “Vorgefuhl”, which roughly translates as a presentiment, about LSD-25. He actually first discovered that 5 years ago, on November 16, 1938, but he had discarded it on the useless pile, no doubt with hundreds of other failures. Dr. Hofmann would not say if the Vorgefuhl happened when he was asleep or awake. But it was strong enough that it caused him to go back to this formula from 5 years ago, and on April 16, 1943 he (re) discovered LSD – 25, and changed the history of the world. World War II was raging and the stakes got even higher some 132 days before with the Chicago nuclear chain reaction.

Beresford writes:

“One is free to speculate that the “instruction” to re-synthesize LSD came from a spiritual power which intervenes in the affairs of man to restore order when the danger of disorder has become too great. The reckless act of science in Chicago in December, 1942 was remedied in Basel four months later with Albert Hofmann chosen as the instrument to perform the cure.”

 What he describes sounds very much like VALIS. Along these lines one should also consider that the first detonation of an atom bomb occurred on July 16, 1945 (7/16=23?) at the Trinity Site at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.  About two years later, around June 16, 1947, the “flying saucer” enters American culture with the reality (or myth) of a saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico, just 114 miles to the east of the Trinity Site at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. On June 21, 1947 the Maury Island UFO is sighted in Puget Sound, Washington. On June 24, 1947 pilot Kenneth Arnold sees nine shining discs near Mt. Rainer in Washington. Others pilots also see them and a man photographs these discs.

Terence McKenna believed that the reality (or myth) of UFO’s were a confounding of the close minded scientific, corporate and government establishments, in the same way that the reality (or myth) of the resurrection of Jesus was a confounding of Greek empiricism and Roman Imperialism. McKenna felt that what he called the “Overmind” of the planet can create UFO’s, miracles and other events when technology and power out run ethics.  His “Overmind” also sounds a lot like PKD’s VALIS, except it is probably not extraterrestrial in origin. But then again VALIS may not actually be extraterrestrial either, even if it wanted to appear to be so at times.

Carl Jung felt the massive wave post war UFO sightings indicated “changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, of the archetypes, or “gods” as they used to be called, which bring about, or accompany, long-lasting transformations of the collective psyche.” He compared them to the “signs and wonders” that accompanied the transition from paganism to Christianity. Constantine seeing a cross in the sky and the spinning disc and lights seen at Fatima in 1917 might also fit in here.

This entity, let us call it VALIS, is not necessarily always pro-Christianity, or pro or anti-technology, or UFO. As Dr. Jacques Vallee states it is a cultural thermostat. In the summer the thermostat cools your house, in the winter it warms it. At the time of the brutal Roman Empire the Christian idea of universal love was needed. When Christianity became a Roman Empire of its own, a new confounding was needed. (PKD=”The Empire never ended”) VALIS acted to spur science and technology when needed and to counter it when needed. Dr. Vallee felt these things have been with us a long time but ancient man called them gods from the sky, later man called them angels or demons, the Celts called them fairies.

Jung felt that some UFO’s were real in the sense that they are picked up on radar screens and in some cases can be photographed, and McKenna felt that they were “real” in every sense of the word, though most or all were probably not nuts and bolts craft and most or all were not probably not extraterrestrial in origin. It presents another way to think about unexplained things. These alternative ideas are explored best in “Passport to Magonia” by Dr. Jacques Vallee , “The Mothman Prophecies” and “Our Haunted Planet” by John Keel, “The Archaic Revival” by Terence McKenna and “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies” by Carl Jung.

We can perhaps tie the presentiment about LSD and the start of the UFO sightings to the end of WWII and the start of the nuclear era. Why did the experiences of PKD, RAW, Lennon and Lilly happen in the 1973/1974 era? Was it related to the Nixon drive for war abroad and a police state at home? Was there a higher danger for nuclear war or other calamity in this time frame? General Alexander Haig, in the waning days of the Nixon regime which ended on August 9, 1974, issued instructions to the military not to follow orders from the President, reportedly out of fears revolving around his drinking and mental state, and concerns he might start a nuclear war or use troops to refuse to cede power if impeached.

Philip K Dick felt VALIS had a political dimension. He had received the message “The Empire never ended”. He took this to mean the Roman Empire continued through Nazi Germany, through totalitarian communism in the East and the military-industrial complex ruling elite in the West. PKD felt The Nixon regime in particular had come to power through the murders of JFK, RFK and MLK, and now posed the threat of outright fascist dictatorship and a police state through the pretext of the War on Drugs and the criminalization of dissent and free thought. PKD thought VALIS helped to defeat Nixon in this crucial 1973/1974 period. In his novels the character President Ferris F Fremont was an even more McCarthyite and fascistic version of Nixon. “The Empire never ended.” That was the message PKD got from VALIS. The true Gnostic Christian rebels helped by VALIS defeated Nixon in August 1974.

Or was the 1973/1974 era also the time for a need for a change in culture and the arts, in ways that we cannot understand or explain? Was there, as Carl Jung would put it, a need for a change in the collective psyche?



CONCLUSION

RAW was excited when Ken Campbell did a stage play in Liverpool of “Illuminatus!” in 1986. In 2014 Ken’s daughter, Daisy Eris Campbell did a stage play of “Cosmic Trigger”. Graphic novelist Alan Moore has often talked about the influence RAW had on him. Moore has also stated that he has read and admired PKD. Moore supported the new play and provided the voice for an off stage character. Moore wrote the magnificent graphic novel “V for Vendetta” which was the basis for the film of the same name. RAW was quite happy when a German youth named Karl Koch adopted the name of his “Illuminatus!” anarchist hero Hagbard Celine as his computer hacker name and became (in)famous.

 PKD, through the films “Blade Runner” and “The Matrix” as well as his many novels, stories and non-fiction, influenced modern science fiction, art, film, the Cyberpunk movement and the computer hacker culture. Influenced by PKD, RAW and Moore, the cyberpunks, white knight computer hackers and hacktivists try to turn the technology of the modern corporate police state against itself. The RAW influenced Alan Moore was very pleased when members of autonomous groups like the pro-democracy activists in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, Occupy and Anonymous started using the stylized Guy Fawkes masks used by his hero V from “V for Vendetta” in real life protests.   Moore stated that when he wrote “V for Vendetta” he would have thought “wouldn’t it be great if these ideas actually made an impact? So when you start to see that idle fantasy intrude on the regular world…It’s peculiar. It feels like a character I created 30 years ago has somehow escaped from the realm of fiction.”

The change we want will not come from over optimism and simply waiting for God, the New Age , the UFO or LSD or any other one thing alone to rescue us. Nor will it come from over pessimism and thinking the Rockefellers and Bushes and their plutocratic ilk control the world and we are totally helpless to affect change. As RAW said those guys may think they run the world, “but I prefer to think me and my friends run the world”. He believed time would judge whether the power of money or the power of ideas would win in the long run. He felt the power of ideas would. If VALIS or something like it is actually real then it should be studied further, to find ways to connect to it, to enable it (or even just the untapped powerful parts of our brain) to assist us. But in the end it is up to us. Wilson said that any single act of love or hope could be the grain of sand that tips the scales towards utopia, while any single act of cruelty or injustice may be the grain of sand that tips the scales the other way, toward oblivion. It is up to all of us.

As Alan Moore said in 2014 in a promotion for the “Cosmic Trigger” play, “It is time to take the safety off and pull the Cosmic Trigger.”

Is VALIS real? Most seem to quickly write off the experiences of Philip K Dick and Robert Anton Wilson as products of their over active imaginations. Yet parts of their stories are verified by others and resist such easy explanations. Who or what gave Phil the information that probably saved his son Christopher’s life? What caused the accurate vision of Wilson? What caused Dr. Hofmann to ‘remember” a useless formula from years ago, which led to the (re) invention of LSD? Indeed what is the seemingly intelligent force behind evolution, that has taken us from amphibian to ape, from ape to caveman, and from caveman to Einstein, Shakespeare and Beethoven? And from there to what a 1,000 years from now? Philip K Dick said the Vast Active Living Intelligence System exists to 1) Fight the Empire in all its manifestations and 2) Exult, inspire and direct man to higher intelligence, creativity and achievement.

Whatever we are talking about, it seems unlikely it involves entities from across the galaxy – unless such distances can be traveled instantly. And it is not clear why entities light years away would take such an interest in us. So rather than ET’s the evidence is more supportive of Inter Dimensional entities. As some quantum physicists postulate, there may be multiple dimensions coexisting with us here on Earth. They have some capacity to communicate with us. At different times in history we have called these entities Gods, men from the sky, fairies, angels or aliens. They seem to communicate to certain individuals at certain critical times in our history. They may be part of the active intelligent force that has created our planet, the life on it and has directed our evolution.

Consider the words of Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Planck, think about the perfect rotation of our Earth around the sun, and reflect on how closely Planck’s description matches PKD’s concept of a Vast Active Living Intelligence System: “[As a hard headed physicist I tell you that] there is no such thing as matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Max Planck, The nature of Matter Speech, 1944

Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.


Most animals, including most domesticated primates (humans) show a truly staggering ability to "ignore" certain kinds of information — that which does not "fit" their imprinted/conditioned reality-tunnel.


"Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can’t see your own back…


I don't believe anything, but I have many suspicions.


Everyone has a belief system, B.S., the trick is to learn not to take anyone's B.S. too seriously, especially your own.


I don't believe anything I write or say. I regard belief as a form of brain damage, the death of intelligence, the fracture of creativity, the atrophy of imagination. I have opinions but no Belief System (B.S.)


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.


Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.


If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.

Maybe Logic (film) - Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson

Guerrilla ontologist. Psychedelic magician. Quantum psychologist. Sit-down comic/philosopher. Discordian Pope. Whatever the label and rank, Robert Anton Wilson is undeniably one of the foundations of 20th century Western counterculture. This film is cinematic alchemy that conjures it all together in a hilarious and mind-bending journey guaranteed to increase your brain size 2-3 inches.

From the water coolers and staff meetings of Playboy magazine and the earth-shattering transmission of “The Illuminatus! Trilogy”, to fire-breathing senior citizen and Taoist sage, Robert Anton Wilson was a man who passed through the trials of Chapel Perilous and found himself on wondrous ground where nothing is for certain, even the treasured companionship of a six-foot-tall white rabbit. Featuring RAW video spanning 25 years and the best of over 100 hours of footage thoroughly tweaked, transmuted, and regenerated, “Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson” follows a reality labyrinth which leads through the hollows of human perception to the vast star fields of Sirius, where we find one man alone, joyfully accepting his status as Damned Old Crank and Cosmic Schmuck. Beaming with insight, frustration, compassion, and unshakable optimism, his ever-open eye penetrates human illusions, exposing the mathematical probabilities and spooky synchronicities of the 8 dimensions of his Universe…

(from http://thearcanefront.com/maybe-logic-lives-ideas-robert-anton-wilson-documentary-video-4/)

Robert Anton Wilson: Free Your Mind

Pontifications of the great sage Robert Anton Wilson.

Life is But a Dream - Essays for the Discordian Occultist

Part 1

“As sunlight obscures the stars by day so too does wakefullness blind us to the fact that we are still dreaming.”

– Liber Kaos, Peter J Carroll.

Everything you experience of the outside world has to pass via your senses into your brain. Your body acts as an instrument through which reality is filtered. Ignorance allows you to focus. You always exclude more than you are taking in. If this article has your full attention it will necessarily be at the expense of other things.  If you’re reading it on your mobile in a pub some people will see your focus as ignorant, for example.

It is with your memory and imagination that you decode meaning from the chaos of the external world. You’ve been around in some form or other since the dawn of time. In my experience it’s only recently that any of it has made any sort of “sense” thanks in the main to my memory and imagination.

However, that “sense” and meaning is ultimately decided by you. You get the final call as regards what is or is not “real”. This is the case with everything you have ever experienced.

Sleep is a good expression of this truth. While enveloped in sleep the brain invents scenarios by ignoring most sense data. This act of invention is usually a result of your subconscious mind combining memories and imagination. This video posted on Disinfo recently about lucid dreaming allows you to investigate the dream state further by learning to use your conscious mind to create dreams. There’s plenty of information online elsewhere about the process but a simple three step guide for the busy Discordian would run something like this:

    Step one: Resolve to perform frequent ‘reality checks’.

    Reality checking techniques vary from person to person but I find pulling my hands up into my line of vision is enough. This is tricky for me to do while dreaming as they usually appear a little slow moving or blurred. Other people switch electric lights off and on or try reading words, in short perform any simple activity you find is usually difficult in a dream.

    Do these checks every hour or so until it’s an instinctive habit. The point of them is to trigger the realisation that you are dreaming.

    Step two: Keep a dream diary and fill it in every morning.

    This principally aids your memory and ability to recall any dreams from the previous night. No point in lucid dreaming if you forget about it the next day.

    Step three: Learn not to freak out when you do finally feel lucid within the dream state.

    I fell into the trap of waking up each time I realised I was dreaming for a while. This was mainly because I’d get so excited when a reality check revealed I was dreaming that I’d also trigger a ‘fully conscious wake up in the middle of the night situation’.

    Step four: Explore the world of lucid dreaming where anything you think is true becomes the case instantly.

Magick is the art of manipulating reality both internally and externally. Lucid dreaming is an interesting preparatory first step. Further magickal exercises will build upon principles you’ll discover as your mind becomes more able to consciously manipulate the dream state. Most so-called low magick is principally concerned with projecting dreams outward into our external reality. There’s little point in doing this if you can’t dream properly.

The phrase “living the dream” owes more than a little to magickal thinking. However, our aim is to live this dream we call reality in a fully conscious ‘awakened’ state.


http://disinfo.com/2012/11/life-is-but-a-dream/

Part 2

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”

- How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, Philip K. Dick

Magick is a highly subjective skill. According to the occultist, Ramsey Dukes, as a discipline it lies somewhere alongside ‘art’, ‘science’ and ‘religion’ [1]. All of these pursuits require a certain state of mind. The magick user who entirely excludes the possibility of magick from his worldview is like a cleric who knows no God, an artist with no appreciation for art or a scientist who refuses to accept the laws of mathematics. It’s not necessarily the case that you will be unsuccessful but it’s significantly less likely. So, for as long as is comfortable[2], it’s time to allow magick to be part of your reality.

This essay includes two exercises, the first will involve noticing magick and the second will involve using it. The first exercise is outlined below in three easy steps:

    Step one: Resolve to notice the number 23.

    The particular number is not relevant at this stage. Some observe the number 11 or 13 or 7 but as we’re Discordians the number 23 will tune us into the right state of mind for this series of thought exercises. People who are inexperienced in the ways of numerology are advised to watch Eric Cartmen’s explanation of the causes of 9/11 [Mystery of the Urinal Deuce (Season 10, Episode 9)]. A good numerologist can easily spot the 23’s in the numbers 203, 2003, or, at a push, 5.

    Step two: Get your dream diary and record what 23 means to you each time you see it.

    This diary will now be re-named a “spellbook”. Spells can take years to manifest and there’s no way of checking your effectiveness if you can’t remember which ones you have cast.

    Step three: Learn not to freak out too much when the number 23 does actually seem to take on some sort of significance.

    I suggest you apply maximum fluidity to the meanings you start to notice here. The number 23 doesn’t usually acquire one meaning and the more you pay attention the more you should realise it’s neither always lucky or unlucky. All we are noticing is it carries a certain significance.

    Step four: Toward the end of the week (usually by the fifth day) you’ll be able to explore a world where other random details can also be viewed as significant.

In his occult masterpiece “The Secret History of The World” Jonathan Black nails a description of the sort of mindset we’re trying to invoke here:

    “In this history the universe is anthropocentric, every single particle of it straining, directed towards humankind. […In] the mind-before-matter universe that this book describes, the connection between mind and matter is much more intimate. It is a living, dynamic connection. Everything in this universe is alive and conscious to some degree, responding sensitively and intelligently to our deepest, subtlest needs.”

    [my italics]

    The Secret History of The World, Jonathan Black. P33-34

While dreaming one’s thoughts manifest almost instantly and if you’re lucid at the time this process is easily observed. Now you have entered a more magickal state of mind we’re going to see how long it takes to replicate this process in waking life. This next exercise is similar to one suggested by Pope Bob in the first chapter of “Prometheus Rising”[3]. The only difference is we’re adjusting things slightly to account for inflation and we are not searching for any explanation other than a magickal one. Once again it is a three step process:

    Step one: Resolve to evoke a nice shiny fifty cent piece.

    Step two: Keep an eye out for the fruits of your evocation.

    Step three: Learn not to freak out when you finally do find it. It will be found by you easily and the moment you’ve got it in your hand you will be ready for part three of this five part series where we will finally get cracking on some real high grade Discordian nonsense.

    Step four: Wonder why it is that each of these three step plans has had a fourth step?

Part 3

    “Thoughts are things” – Prentice Mulford, noted American philosopher.

Previous articles in this series, “Life is but a dream” and “Living The Dream,” have deliberately avoided too much theory and focused instead on practice. One of the reasons we started in Part 1 with lucid dreaming is because it acts as a safe environment for your early magick use[1] while teaching you most of the essentials in a fairly short period of time. For example, in that particular state you will have noticed the slightest negative thought manifests instantly. Furthermore, if you set out to have a nightmare it’s not hard to make yourself wake up screaming. However, few people do this because dealing with such situations usually comes instinctively. After all in that world you are an all powerful great magician who can make even the grass go green.

Now your experiments are moving into the external world where you will have spent years learning how limited your power is. The key point here is that everything you’ve ever encountered has had to come through your own reality filter, otherwise known as your mind[2]. Everything you know about the outside world has had to pass through the bowels of your brain.

During these exercises lets agree for the moment that you cannot order the chaotic external world and focus instead upon the only thing you can control, your mind. Think of the techniques below as safety precautions which have been shown by others to help keep that vital instrument clean and healthy.

1, Cultivate a level of “mindfulness” with daily meditation

Meditation is a good start. I use the techniques taught by Alan Watts[3] as a matter of personal preference. Meditate frequently as part of a daily routine and you may glimpse a sense of what Buddhists call mindfulness. This encompasses a feeling that judging events and circumstances is futile. It’s an excellent way to avoid nightmares as fear requires you to make a judgement. Resources on how to meditate are available elsewhere online and there are many variations on this. In a nutshell here is the three step process I use daily:

    Step one: Frame it as an activity which you are doing in the spirit of play, it’s not a solemn duty or task. It’s in essence meant to be fun.

    Step two: Find a comfortable place and time where you will not be disturbed. You’re about to ignore the outside world and sit in it without interaction, this will be easier if you’re free of distractions. Set aside around 30-60 minutes. Follow whichever specific procedure appeals to you most but personally speaking I was first drawn in by the simplicity of an exercise called “the mindfulness of breathing”. Here you close your eyes and count, in repeating cycles of ten, the natural flow of your breath.

    Step three: Learn not to freak out too much when life gets in the way or when you have an unexpected moment of success.

    Step four: !

2, Adopt a temporary moral code.

Try using the beliefs of a “moral” spiritual system for a while and see how it suits you. Magick is a highly subjective skill so which set of scruples you choose to use is entirely up to you. Any theology which has a moral system that appeals will do but personally speaking my favourite option is contained within a short New Age masterpiece called “The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz.[4] It takes an afternoon to read and carries less baggage than any of the more serious religious options. Give it a go in the same week you spend meditating and notice how your reality starts to shift into an easier place.

Here is the three step process, contained in more detail within, The Four Agreements:

    Step one: “Be impeccable with your word”.

    If you say you’ll do something ensure you actually do it. Avoid lying to people and think of it as a weapon not unlike poison.

    Step two: “Don’t take anything personally”.

    No one really knows you or why you’re doing what you will. If they say or do good or bad things it speaks only of their own character. This is also true of your own judgements. Say nice but truthful things about people and you’re exercising positive internal energy. Keep bitching about people and you’ll emphasise the bad in yourself.

    Step three: “Don’t make assumptions”.

    Discover the world with your own mind, don’t be led by others. Trust yourself and investigate the reality you personally inhabit. We all live in different worlds and it’s far better to gaze in wonder than become one of those dull characters who assume they know it all.

    Step four: “Always do your best”.

Hopefully the above brief description has enticed you to go look at that book. Get it from a library or buy it or whatever, don’t just use my incomplete description of it. However, as with all these essays I am suggesting tools not rules. It’s perfectly acceptable to try Christianity, Islam, Satanism, Judaism, or any of the other deeply moral spiritual systems available in today’s theological supermarket. You’re only doing it for a bit though so don’t go telling everyone, they might get upset if you decide to give their BS[5] a miss later on.

3, Learn not to freak out

The advantage of your path is that Discordianism is a joke religion. Laughter is the music from which our universe is created. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, “the angels can fly because they take themselves lightly”. The moment you forget this you might fall into the trap of taking things seriously. So, here’s a quick three step guide to some of the things you need to know before going any further:

    Step 1: There is in fact no such thing as magick.

    Step 2: Maybe you should stop using the word “is”.

    Step 3: A good Discordian never believes anything they can read.

    Step 4: As a “High” initiate there is obviously nothing I can ever actually let you know about Discordianism.

4, Cultivate a sense of your true will.

All systems of magick are pretty hot on the notion of free will. Even the control-freak Gods of the the Abrahamic religions recognise in their more sober moments that you must respect other people’s right to self determination. They don’t do this because they’re ‘nice’ Gods, they do it because the consequences for a magick user who tries to control another are not beneficial in the long term. There’s a deep misunderstanding in some forms of modern occultism that bending others to your will is a worthwhile exercise, in my experience it’s not. In fact it locks you into a situation where you will ultimately depend upon them rather than yourself.

A good occultist entices people to co-operate rather than forces them to do so. However, not pushing other people around is the easy part, working out if you’re being true to yourself is far more problematic.

Getting to know thyself is a lifelong task as you are changing all the time. This essay could be a first step towards you really considering that journey of self discovery or, more likely, it’s just a timely reminder.

At a guess your body will likely currently be full of drugs, toxins and ideas that do not really belong there. Is it your true will to drink more beer or are you in fact under the influence of alcohol and by extension the will of the company who sells it? Did you really want that bar of chocolate or did the idea get seeded in your subconscious mind by a clever advertisment?[6]

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not suggesting you need to stop the drink or drugs I’m just pointing out if you’re going to use them make sure they don’t end up using you. Do these things mindfully or they cloud your judgement when it comes to discerning your “true will”. We’re Discordians, not monks. We live our lives but before you use the techniques of magick it’s worth you ensure it’s your drerams you are living and not someone else’s.

If you follow all of the above stages any problems you face will be more easily placed into perspective. Without wishing to lift the magick curtain too much next week you’re about to do nothing more than try an instense experiment in applied philosophy. Unlike Thelemites or other occultists you’ve always got the comfortable back door provided by the fact that Discordianism is a joke, it’s nothing more than a chance to play around with funny ideas.

Part 4:

    “Magick has many aspects, but primarily it acts as a dramatized system of psychology”

    - “Pope Bob”, Robert Anton Wilson

Here’s one way of making a sigil. It’s partly cribbed from a talk given by Grant Morrison at the Disinformation conference[1] with slight personal additional details provided by my own experiences. Sigils are a low-magick technique which will not fail to get you exactly what you need. It can become a high-magick technique but for the moment we’ll just stick to the basics[2].

One important thing to note is that sigils always appear to work. The distinction being; if I kicked in a window, I’d feel I knew who’d done it. If I cast a sigil which asked for that window to be broken and then discovered a few days later it was now broken, no one can prove a causal relationship between the sigil and the broken window. However I might get the impression that my sigil was involved in the process somewhere.

Secondly, the following is a (in my opinion better) version of other ideas that have been kicking round recently such as, The Secret, Cosmic Ordering, and, to a lesser extent, “positive thinking”[3]. It’s also similar to “preying,” if you think your God lives within you[4].

All these above techniques have common elements. All of them are pretty much in agreement regarding the first part of the process, set your intent. The most effective Discordian occultists spend more time on step one than they ever do on step four.

Step one: Decide upon your will.

– All your workings should be done with pieces of paper and a pen.

This is the hardest part. You need to imagine what it is you want as clearly as possible. Then refine it until you’ve got a vision of what it is you ‘really’ want. Then refine it again after you’ve imagined the earth shifting upon its axis in order to grant this wish over the next few years. Check you’re good with the consequences and then, refine it again. I can’t emphasise this enough. See the further reading section for more details.

Once you’re happy write it out as a single sentence:

EG: I AM A HEALTHY FOURTEEN AND A HALF STONE, ENERGETIC PERSON.

Notice a few things about the above. When I cast this I wanted to be 14 and a half stone. There are many ways this could have happened, some of them include ill health. Hence the words healthy and energetic.

Think of those old fairy stories where someone makes a wish and there are tragic consequences. King Midas wanted everything he touched to turn to gold. He ends up regretting his wish. The difference between your sigil becoming a blessing or a curse is in its detail. Give it lots of thought. Write and re-write the sentence. Check the further reading section for more information.

Also notice, it’s not “I WANT TO BE” or “I AM THIS AND NOT THAT”. Negatives in sigils are just negative! If you write “I WANT TO BE A MILLIONAIRE” look forward to a life of wanting to be a millionaire. Remember what we learned in part one where you began lucid dreaming. What would happen to you if you dived into the dream world with negatives in your mind?

If you truly have followed this series from part one, as opposed to most who will have  just casually landed on it and curiously read to this point, why not try to lucid dream your intended future first and try it out a bit? If, for example, having lots of sexual partners gets messy in that world ditch it and come up with a better wish. It needs to feel like a world you are comfortable in. Once that’s the case, state it as if you are already there, in that positive future.

As an exercise imagine you’re in that future calling back into the past when you wrote out this sigil. Try describing and declaring what it’s like in as much detail as possible. Now listen out for your “imaginary” future self shouting “I’m the owner of a brand new convertible and I love it” or whatever. Now, write it down!

Finally a note of caution here. Remember we spoke about ‘true will’ in the last piece? Well, if your dreams and visions involve others do not enchant realities which compromise their true will.

So, for example, don’t put “I am married to Dave who works in accounts”. Ask for a less uncompromising: “I’m married to a bloke like Dave who works in accounts”. This doesn’t rule Dave out of the equation, after all who is more like Dave than Dave? However if he thinks you’re a repulsive creature who he’d rather vomit over than have sex with, you’ve given the poor guy a get out and you can still get what you need. Far better to enchant someone, like him who likes you of their own free will.

It’s not unlikely you’ll encounter minor problems with all this but remember what you learned in part three and fear not: you will live and learn!

There’s nothing to stop you doing another sigil in the future.

—

Step Two: Remove the vowels and repeated letters.

The first step was by far the most important part. These next bits are 1% of sigil craft and the bit you’ve just done was the remaining 99%. However, this 1% which I’m about to explain is the more “magick” bit. It’ll make you feel more like ‘an occultist’ and there’s enormous value in that.

This means you should check you’re comfortable with what you’ve just done as part of this second step. You need to feel good on both a subconscious and intuitive level about the sentence you’re turning into a weird looking symbol. If you’re not it’ll come out in the process later on once the sigil is cast. For now, I’ll assume you are and crack on.

Firstly, sigils are crafted and re-drafted by a process of elimination. Like a sculpture you’re going to chip and chisel that sentence down until it looks like a sort of magical wingding. Begin this by removing the vowels and repeated letters, leaving yourself with a string of consonants, like so:

MHLTYFRNDSGCP

An example of my weight loss sigil in its early stages

Step three: Combine the letters into one big pattern and begin reducing it into a simpler image.

This bit is where most people get in a tizz. Remember the most difficult part of the process was over once you’d finished step one. There are no rules as to how you go about combining the letters but I find it best to jumble them all into one big squiggle. The main picture is an example of the one we’re looking at. Ultimately it was successful and I used a revised version to hit my target weight of 13.5 a year later. This is down from my initial 18.5 stone.

Keep re-drawing it and omitting details as you go along. The point of this process is to lose sight of what it is the sigil means. Keep drawing until the exact point of your work is irrelevant to you. Get really bored of the process and lose sight of why it is you’re bothering with such superstitious nonsense. Make it look more and more “magickal” to you. Hit a point where it starts to become a labour of love which is totally detached from your initial intent.

The finished product must look perfect and beautiful. It represents the total of your efforts. This is now a sigil, yet to be cast. It represents a thought which you are about to plant into the collective dreamworld so it can start to descend into the world of objective reality and your future.

Not quite but almost the finished product

Treasure it a bit. Don’t cast it straight away. Be pleased with it.

Step Four: Cast it.

People are divided upon how exactly you should do this. You’re looking for an intense transcendental experience where you can focus on this image and force it through your mind into the magical dream world while you are fully conscious. Pain, meditation, orgasm, psychedelic-transcendental drugs or all of the above combined are popular methods. Whichever you’re best at. Combine the intense experience with a good solid look at the sigil. Then close your eyes and think of it. Project it into your minds eye and out into the cosmos. Then destroy the paper it is drawn on and forget all about it.

One simple way, which I use, is with a candle. Have the sigil drawn on a piece of paper. Burn it and then let the flame burn (but not harm) your fingertips. At that precise moment close your eyes and picture it in your mind. There we are, it’s cast. The pain should have done enough to distract you and send it neatly into the world of ideas…

There are numerous other methods but the most important part is, as I said, step 1.

Once you’ve cast your sigil you must then aid its descent into the real world. If you asked for a new job, get applying for them. If you wanted to lose weight like I did, stop eating those chocolate cakes.

Robert Anton Wilson - Who Is The Master That Makes the Grass Green?