Robert Anton Wilson: The Magick of Aleister Crowley

"The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill." - Robert Anton Wilson

A young Steve Buscemi in ‘Borders,’ 1989 TV doc about the philosophy of Robert Anton Wilson

via dangerous minds

In 1989 an hour-long movie called Borders about Robert Anton Wilson, author of The Illumnatus! Trilogy and the Cosmic Trigger series, was produced for public TV (WGBH Boston was one of the production companies behind it). The movie, directed by Merrill Aldighieri and Joe Tripician, is a blend of dramatic and documentary elements that also occasionally includes charmingly rudimentary computer graphics.

The first few minutes of Borders is an extended scene involving Ted, who is possibly a scientist named Ted who is doing something to subvert the company he works for—something like that. Whatever it is, his lack of integrity is enough for his girlfriend to leave the weekend house he has lined up for them. Unfortunately, we never find out what Ted’s situation was all about, because we’re never shown a second sequence to flesh out the promising start.

At first blush, the title Borders seems inapt for a documentary about a figure whose intellectual reach is as impressive as Wilson’s, but in short order its true significance becomes clear. As Wilson says, in his life he has passed through many conceptual borders—leaving the Catholic Church for Trotskyism, only to abandon that for agnosticism—and integral to his thinking is the project of detecting, decoding, and resisting the various “borders” that mankind erects for itself to keep up separated.

Early in the program Wilson expands on this idea:

Borders are a basic mammalian territorial imperative. All mammals want a territory, and they claim it by making excretions that make a topological outline, that’s the territory they claim. That’s why your dog pees on every tree when you take him for a walk. That’s the way the dog is marking his territory. Chimpanzees mark their territories with excretions too. The difference between human beings (or domesticated primates) and the other mammals is we mark our territories with ink excretions on paper—land titles, peace treaties, and so on. Every national border in the world marks a place where two gangs of domesticated primates fought until they were exhausted, and then made a territorial mark. That’s how national borders are created. We don’t throw excretions at each other like the chimpanzees, we throw chemicals and bombs and so on, but it’s basically the same mammalian process. The only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours.

Borders also includes spy novelist Brian Freemantle and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku as well as ample discussion and footage about the drug war (esp. border control from Mexico) and a topic that has since cooled quite a bit: SDI, also known as Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program.

Robert Anton Wilson: Free Your Mind

Robert Anton Wilson - Maybe Logic Exercises

Just do them.

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.

Naive realism and reality tunnels

“We think this is reality. But in philosophy, that’s called naive realism: "What I perceive is reality.” And philosophers have refuted naive realism every century for the last 2,500 years, starting with Buddha and Plato, and yet most people still act on the basis of naive realism.

Now the argument is, “Well, maybe my perceptions are inaccurate, but somewhere there is accuracy, scientists have it with their instruments. That’s how we can find out what’s really real.” But relativity, quantum mechanics, have demonstrated clearly that what you find out with instruments is true relative only to the instrument you’re using, and where that instrument is located in space-time. So there is no vantage point from which real reality can be seen.

We’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels. And when we begin to realize that we’re all looking from the point of view of our own reality tunnels, we find that it is much easier to understand where other people are coming from.

All the ones who don’t have the same reality tunnel as us do not seem ignorant, or deliberately perverse, or lying, or hypnotized by some mad ideology, they just have a different reality tunnel. And every reality tunnel might tell us something interesting about our world if we’re willing to listen.
The idea every perception is a gamble, seems to me so obviously true that I continually am astonished that I could forget it so many times during the course of 24 hours. But to the extent that I remember it, I just can’t stay angry at anybody, so it’s a thing worth keeping in mind.”

~Robert Anton Wilson

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

Science and Synchronicity

by Damon Orion

“Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that creates intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever exist.” 

-C.G. Jung, “Synchronicity”


Miller: A lot o’ people don't realize what's really goin’ on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents an’ things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: Suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly somebody'll say, like, “plate,” or “shrimp,” or “plate o' shrimp” out of the blue. No explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness.


Otto: You eat a lot of acid, Miller, back in the hippie days? 

-Repo Man


The other night I was having a “Where are they now?” attack: an uncontrollable urge to find out what’s become of old friends, ex-girlfriends, etc. My orgy of nostalgia culminated in the early hours of morning, when I decided to do a Google search for a long-lost buddy of mine that everyone used to call Chet. (Our reasons for calling him Chet were complex—suffice to say that they involved a character from a Cheetos commercial by the name of Chester Cheetah, and that everyone but Chet thought the nickname was just super.) I found a band on MySpace called Gathering Moss whose singer had Chet’s name, and there was someone on Facebook who looked like he might be the guy, but I couldn’t be sure either of these people was the Chet I was looking for. I went to bed, figuring, “Maybe some other time.”

“Some other time” came sooner than I’d expected. When I woke up in the morning, I found two emails waiting for me: one from the band Gathering Moss, and another from the Chet whose Facebook profile I’d just found. My astonishment quickly gave way to anger—clearly, there was spyware attached to my computer, and I was being sent junk mail based on recent Internet activity. Wrong. Both of these emails were from the man himself, my long-lost buddy Chet. Incredible, but true: After going more than 15 years without communicating, we’d both picked the same night to look each other up online.

It gets weirder: Impressed by this freaky alignment of circumstances, I flashed on the last time I’d spoken with Chet, which I believe was in 1993: I’d just returned to Santa Cruz after living in L.A. for about a year and a half, and I’d dropped by The Poet and the Patriot on a hunch that I’d run into an old friend there—probably Chet. Nothing was happening, so I gulped down my last few drops of beer, turned to the friend I was with and said, “Screw it. Let’s go to Taco Bell.” (I’ve learned a thing or two about diet since then, by the way.) As I was getting up from my seat, Chet walked in the door and immediately spied me. Standing there with Taco Bell bag in hand, he gaped at me in obvious disbelief, blurting out, “Dude! I just had a dream about you last night!”

Occurrences like these are examples of what Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung named “synchronicity”: “the simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events.” For some people, such happenings are treasured confirmations that life is more than a disjointed mural of birthdays, board meetings and bee stings that keep our senses occupied as we trudge toward the coffin. For others, they’re simply twin lemons on the cosmic slot machine—amusing anomalies that the random event generator spits out from time to time.

The rationalist will explain this kind of thing, quite reasonably, as follows: If 500 different people think of Mickey Mouse at 2:45 today, the law of averages says that with all the Disney propaganda floating around the globe, at least one of those people will see a picture or replica of Mickey Mouse and think it “eerie.” In other words, there’s an awful lot happening on this planet, so it’s inevitable that some events from Column A are going to match up with events from Column B in weird ways. You call that supernatural? Go hump a gnome, star child.

If you’ve ever experienced a truly uncanny synchronicity yourself, though—or several in rapid succession, as is sometimes the case—then perhaps you’ve found that the issue isn’t quite so simple. Once in a while something happens that’s so unlikely, so patently absurd, that it leaves you with the unshakeable feeling that you’ve just gotten a prank call from the Other Side. I’m not talking about minor synchronicities, where, say, you’re dressed as The Devil on Halloween, and you make a purchase that leaves you with $6.66 in change; I’m talking about when on top of that, the cashier is dressed as an angel, and at the same time that she hands you your $6.66, you hear a line about “giving The Devil his due” in the song playing over the PA.

Right now some of you are rolling your eyes and grumbling to yourselves about what a mush-brained, dandelion-smoking Mork from Ork I am for suggesting that an oogah-boogah notion like synchronicity could possibly have any validity. Well … good. Not so very long ago, people were being hunted down, tortured and murdered for promoting the heretical notion that the Earth revolved around the sun, and I salute skeptics like yourself for fighting the kinds of superstitious belief systems that gave rise to that sad situation. Now, however, we find ourselves at yet another turning point, and as certain sacred dogmas of science are replaced by demonstrably more accurate models of reality, those who cling to the old mechanistic worldview risk becoming the new fundamentalists.

Consider the fact that no less of a scientific genius than Albert Einstein once dismissed nonlocality, the strange phenomenon in which one object has a direct influence on another object without being anywhere near that object or even exerting any physical force (now a widely accepted, though mysterious, aspect of quantum physics), as “spooky action at a distance.” Like synchronicity, such activity doesn’t fit our present models of How It All Is … but there it is, right before the researchers’ eyes.

{mosimage}Permit yourself the heresy of supposing, for a moment, that not all claims of synchronistic events are products of selective perception, the law of averages and/or outright delusion, but that some are eyewitness accounts of a particularly vexing form of “spooky action at a distance” that may one day be re-shelved from “metaphysics” to “physics.”

That Synching Feeling

At age 19 (back in the early ’90s, when Chet and I were the best of friends), I was introduced to the ideas of philosopher Robert Anton Wilson by way of his book “Prometheus Rising.” One passage from the book struck me as especially intriguing: At the end of a chapter about archetypes, Wilson wrote, “Contemplating these issues usually triggers Jungian synchronicities. See how long after reading this chapter you encounter an amazing coincidence.”

Given the author’s playful style, it was difficult to discern whether he literally meant that thinking about these sorts of issues would cause synchronistic events to happen, or that it would simply lead us to notice coincidences. The key point of the book, after all, was “What the thinker thinks, the prover proves”—that is, we tend to find whatever it is we look for. If you have it in your head that you’re going to find quarters wherever you go, you’ll notice quarters on the ground all over the place. If you think the number 23 has special significance, you’ll notice the number 23 everywhere. Conversely, if you’re convinced that synchronicity is a family-sized bucket of bull, you’ll collect data to help convince yourself of this.

Either way, Wilson’s statement checked out: Mere hours after I’d read that passage, a friend of mine dropped by my house and casually asked if I’d be interested in going to a conference in Palo Alto where some of the world’s foremost psychedelic philosophers would be speaking … including that “Prometheus Rising” guy, Robert Anton Wilson. This in itself made me do a double-take, but the clincher came at the conference the following day (Hell yes, I accepted my friend’s offer), when, by chance—or something—I found myself walking side-by-side with Wilson in a hallway at Stanford University. (Mind you, there were thousands of people at this conference, and Wilson sightings at this event were few and far between, so at the very least, we can say this was a fluky thing to happen.) Seizing the opportunity, I quickly introduced myself to Wilson and got right down to business: “So, I’ve been reading ‘Prometheus Rising,’ and I have some questions for you.” Thus began a half-hour conversation that ended on a pair of couches in the building’s lobby, where I picked the brain of the author whose book had just told me to be on the lookout for amazing coincidences. (Later that night, I’d also have a memorable dialog with Timothy Leary, but that’s a whole other cube of sugar.)
Wilson has written exhaustively on the subject of synchronicity, but the idea of his that’s most relevant to our discussion is a point he made about quantum physics in the documentary film Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, released four years before his death in 2007. Here, he recounts an event that befell him and his wife in the early ’90s after they’d moved from Los Angeles to what they thought was Santa Cruz: “We had something stolen from our car, and we called the police, and it turned out we didn’t live in Santa Cruz—we lived in a town called Capitola. The post office thought we lived in Santa Cruz, but the police thought we lived in Capitola. I started investigating this, and a reporter at the local newspaper told me we didn’t live in either Santa Cruz or Capitola; we lived in a unincorporated area called Live Oak. Now, quantum mechanics is just like that, except that in the case of Santa Cruz, Capitola and Live Oak, we don’t get too confused, because we remember we invented the lines on the map. But quantum physics seems confusing because a lot of people think we didn’t invent the lines, so it seems hard to understand how a particle can be in three places at the same time without being anywhere at all.”

Quantum Metaphysics?

As Wilson stated, the fabric of the universe doesn’t play by human rules—even scientific ones. To understand just how strange things can get in the quantum realm, we need to take a look at Bell’s Theorem, often referred to as the Pandora’s box of modern physics. As long as Wilson has gotten us into this mess, let’s let him do the explaining (again from “Prometheus Rising”): “Bell’s Theorem is highly technical, but in ordinary language it amounts to something like this: There are no isolated systems; every particle in the universe is in ‘instantaneous’ (faster-than-light) communication with every other particle. The Whole System, even the parts that are separated by cosmic distances, functions as a Whole System.”

While it might sound like a bliss ninny’s wishful thinking to say there’s a scientific case for the idea that all things are connected, this is, in fact, exactly what Bell’s Theorem implies. Described by physicist Henry Stapp as “the most profound discovery of science” in 1975, Bell’s Theorem points to a conundrum known as entanglement, in which two physically related particles are linked in such a way that anything that happens to one of these particles is instantaneously communicated to the other, regardless of distance. According to quantum mechanics, any two things that have ever interacted are entangled in this way forevermore.

Bruce Rosenblum, professor of physics at UCSC and coauthor of the book “Quantum Enigma,” notes that although the present record distance for this kind of communication between particles is 144 km. (89 miles), “physicists don’t really doubt that it would also work from Moscow to Manhattan. According to quantum theory, this should happen across the universe.”

Rosenblum, who claims to have met Einstein in the 1950s and John Bell in the late ’80s, adds, “What quantum mechanics is saying is that there’s an interconnectedness to the universe. For big things, it’s not demonstrable: It’s too complicated, too messy. But in principle, it’s there.”

Yes, even big things like human beings. According to Rosenblum, if two people meet and shake hands, they are forever entangled, but this entanglement is so complicated that it can’t be observed. After all, those two people have also interacted with the floor, with the air, etc., etc., etc.
{mosimage}When you consider the fact that human beings are composed of subatomic particles that are constantly sending and receiving information, it seems worth asking whether the kind of complex entanglement Rosenblum describes might be what’s going on backstage during certain types of synchronistic events. If so, we probably needn’t bother trying to figure out what that event “means” or “why” it happened—we’re dealing with a system of connections so vast and elaborate that trying to understand this individual occurrence would be like trying to follow the path of a single thread in a ball of string the size of Jupiter.

A 1978 experiment led by Dr. Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (later replicated by neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick of London) provided what may have been a demonstration of quantum entanglement on the macroscopic level: Two test subjects were put in individual electromagnetically isolated rooms, and each subject’s brain was hooked up to an electroencephalograph. One test subject was then shown a series of strobe light flashes, which produced a unique brainwave pattern on the EEG. Strangely, the same pattern appeared on the other test subject’s EEG, although he was not shown the flashes. When the first test subject was given no stimulus, this correlation of brainwave patterns did not occur, nor did increases in distance affect the reproducibility of the experiment. In reference to this experiment, theoretical nuclear physicist Amit Goswami, PhD has written, “I am convinced that the transferred potential can be interpreted as the effect of quantum nonlocal interaction effect between correlated brains.”

As noted in books by the likes of Brian Clegg, Fritjof Capra and Gary Zukav (as well as in the regrettably New Age-y film What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?), the findings of quantum mechanics more and more frequently confirm notions previously associated exclusively with mysticism. One of the latest enthusiasts of such discoveries to come into public consciousness is French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, who was announced as the winner of the $1.4 million 2009 Templeton Prize, the world’s largest annual award to an individual, on March 16. According to the award’s organizers, d’Espagnat’s work in quantum mechanics affirms a spiritual dimension of existence: Mysteries such as entanglement have led the scientist to perceive an interconnectedness and wholeness to the universe and a “veiled reality” underlying space, energy and matter.

Rosenblum, too, has had his paradigm remodeled by the “quantum enigma.” “To me there’s no question: It changes your worldview,” he states. “Even if you don’t know it, the worldview that everybody, including physicists, lives with is Newtonian: It’s the real world; everything has a cause. Oh, yes, there’s some randomness, of course, but basically, things separate, and one thing doesn’t influence the other. Hey, we know the Newtonian worldview works, but ultimately, we know it’s flawed. Does that affect you spiritually? Some people say yes.”

Meta-Metaphysics

Strike a mounted tuning fork that produces the pitch of A, and its oscillations will cause another mounted A tuning fork in the same room to vibrate “in sympathy.” Though this probably would have seemed magical to pre-scientific societies, physics tells us that these forks are connected by the air particles that surround them, and that one responds to the other because of a shared overtone. That doesn’t mean that such activity isn’t amazing—it simply means that there’s an explanation for it. Similarly, if someone who had never been exposed to television saw the same program coming through two different TV sets, he or she might be baffled as to how information could “travel” so quickly from one television to the next, never suspecting much there was a bigger picture.
Perhaps enigmas like entanglement and synchronicity will eventually be demystified in this way, and we’ll find that they only seem weird to us because of our somewhat primitive perspectives (“primitive,” of course, being relative to what lies ahead). For now, when we encounter such mysteries, it might be useful to think of ourselves as third-century folks confounded by the riddle of the tuning forks. These tuning forks don’t have some mutual destiny or some message for each other, and there’s no specific “meaning” to the fact that one causes the other to vibrate; rather, we’re face-to-face with some kind of connection we don’t yet understand.

As I hammer these last words into my laptop at a coffee shop, the sight of a man walking through the front doorway is jolting the three women at the table behind me from their discussion of the archetypes that Wagner’s music evokes. “What an amazing coincidence!” one of them shouts to the man, who, it turns out, has some kind of profound connection to Wagner. “Were your ears burning?”
I could speculate here about people’s brainwaves entraining at a distance, about these people resonating in sympathy with each other by way of a “shared overtone” (the thought of Wagner) or some such “spooky” thing, or I could simply categorize this as yet another coincidence (one of many that have intersected with my awareness since I began writing this piece). Instead, I think I’ll follow my own advice and leave such questions to be answered in the future, when scientists and mystics alike are ready to abandon certain dearly cherished beliefs, and humanity is ready to see beyond boundaries that, as Wilson pointed out, exist solely in our minds.

---

Jung Einstein

Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity has been entangled with quantum physics from day one. As revealed in Jung’s “Letters, Vol. 2,” it was a series of dinner conversations with Albert Einstein in Zurich between 1909 and 1913 that first got the psychiatrist “thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their psychic conditionality. More than thirty years later, this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor W. Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity.”
Jung met Pauli shortly after the idea of synchronicity began to take solid form in Jung’s mind. Pauli, who, at age 21, wrote a book-length critique of Einstein’s theory of relativity that Einstein praised as accurate, insightful and thorough, was instrumental in establishing the foundations of quantum mechanics. One of his major contributions to science is the exclusion principle, which physicist F. David Peat describes in his book “Synchronicity: The Bridge between Matter and Mind” as the “discovery of an abstract pattern that lies hidden beneath the surface of atomic matter and determines its behavior in a non-causal way.” The influence of such concepts on Jung’s theory of synchronicity is unmistakable.

In 1934, after having Jung analyze several of his dreams, Pauli had a dream in which a man who looked like Einstein told him that quantum physics was only a one-dimensional part of a deeper reality. The following year, Einstein and physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen presented a paper that inadvertently illustrated a mysterious, acausal connectedness between particles. This EPR (Einstein/Podolsky/Rosen) paper lodged three complaints against quantum mechanics, one of them being the implausibility of nonlocality: the direct influence of one object on another object from far away. (Einstein famously scorned such activity as “spooky action at a distance.”)

{mosimage}In the mid-’60s, physicist John Bell responded to the EPR paper by proving a theorem that provided a way of testing the validity of these “spooky actions.” The experiments that followed produced empirical evidence of nonlocality. Thus, Einstein inadvertently opened the gates to the study of two different kinds of “spooky action at a distance”—synchronicity and quantum entanglement (the latter of whose implications he ironically found disconcerting)—and Pauli deliberately helped bring these ideas into focus.

---

In Synch

All over the globe, we see a tendency of organisms and even inanimate objects to synchronize with each other. One of the most intriguing examples of this principle is entrainment, which is believed to be nature’s way of conserving energy. Entrainment was discovered in 1665 by Dutch scientist Christian Huygens, who found that if you put several grandfather clocks whose pendulums are swinging out of synch with one another in the same room, their pendulums will be moving in time with each other within a day or two.

Entrainment exists within the animal world as well: Through the phenomenon of collective motion, groups of organisms such as flocks of birds, schools of fish, swarms of insects and colonies of bacteria move as a single body. In a more romantic vein, there are multiple instances of synchronized courtships, such as when groups of male fireflies in Southeastern Asia flash their lights on and off in perfect synchronization to attract females, or when frogs or crickets “serenade” potential mates in unison. Recent research at Cornell University has also revealed that while mating, mosquitoes synchronize the frequencies of the beats of their wings (400 Hz for the female and 600 Hz for the male) into a “male/female” harmonic of 1200 Hz.

In human biology, we see the principle of synchrony at work in both the locking menstrual cycles of women who live together and in the activity of pacemaker cells (the cells that control a person’s heart rate): When two pacemaker cells are in close proximity to each other, they quickly fall into rhythm with one another, building and releasing charges in unison.

{mosimage}By analyzing a film of children on a playground at lunchtime, a graduate student working under the supervision of anthropologist Edward T. Hall found another example of synchrony in the human realm: Kids all over the playground were unknowingly moving in rhythm with each other, as if dancing to the beat of a song. Similarly, by analyzing films of people in conversation, Boston University School of Medicine psychologist William S. Condon noticed that the listeners’ bodily gestures were in perfect synchrony with the speakers’ voices. Stranger still, when he hooked up pairs of people in conversation to separate electroencephalographs, he found that the brainwaves of people engaged in “good” conversation oscillated “in harmony” with each other. Similar experiments have revealed that the brainwaves of attendees of church sermons and students listening to lectures generally oscillated in synch with those of the speaker, and that only when this kind of brainwave entrainment occurred was the class or church service perceived as “good.” Such data convinced Condon that human beings are not “isolated entities sending discrete messages to one another,” but rather are participants within “shared organizational forms."

---

The Mystical Perspective

“Since psyche and matter are contained in one and the same world, and moreover are in continuous contact with one another and ultimately rest on irreprehensible, transcendental factors, it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing. The synchronicity phenomena point, it seems to me, in this direction, for they show that the nonpsychic can behave like the psychic, and vice versa, without there being any causal connection between them.”

- Carl Jung, “On the Nature of the Psyche”

“Synchronicity is the love underlying the happenings of the time. Love brings everything together. Now, there is a resonating field. There is a field that tries for everything to come together, because we live in this unified field, and love is always trying to pull us into being unified. As we become more and more conscious, we enter that unified field of love, and then we have synchronistic experiences. Love is not a feeling—it’s pure reason. As we interact with each other, as we become more and more aware, as we have our desires placed out there, everything on the planet tries to bring it forth.”

- Risa D’Angeles, founder and director of the Esoteric & Astrological Studies & Research Institute

“I have spent much of my adult life trying to understand these events, and although I believe their true origin is beyond human comprehension, it has much to do with the spiritual concept that time is an illusion, and events can be orchestrated by entities in spirit form (including our higher selves) which are designed to keep us on our true path.”

-Mystic Life, editor of SynchronicityTimes.com

“Synchronicity, along with déjà vu, is a phenomenon that people too easily take for granted. People regularly toss off this everyday minor miracle with a ‘Wow! What a weird coincidence,’ not really thinking about it again. We should pay closer attention in these moments, ‘smell the rose of synchronicity,’ if you will, as there is probably something important happening if we look a little closer. I think of synchronicity as experiential proof of the interconnectedness of all things and the existence of a higher power. I think that if one could somehow empirically measure the countless individual synchronistic events across the globe at any given moment and simultaneously show all of them to the people of the world, it would go a long way to bind us together … or maybe that would just make us like The Borg … Either way, resistance is futile.”

-Chet (now married, a father of three, and working as a retail manager in Chicago)

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/)

Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal

     Dublin, 1986.

I had given a talk to the Irish Science-Fiction Society and the question period began.

"Do you believe in UFOs?" somebody asked.

"Yes, of course," I answered.

The questioner, who looked quite young, then burst into a long speech, "proving" at least to his own satisfaction that all UFOs "really are" sun-dogs or heat inversions. When he finally ran down I simply replied,

"Well, we both agree that UFOs exist. Our only difference is that you think you know what they are and I'm still puzzled."

An elderly gentleman with blonde-white hair and a florid complexion cried out in great enthusiasm, "By God, sir, you're right. I myself am still puzzled about everything!"

And thus I met Timothy F.X. Finnegan, Dean of the Royal Sir Myles na gCopaleen Astro-Anomalistic Society, Dalkey, sometime lecturer at Trinity College, Dublin, and founder of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal.

In fact, Prof. Finnegan signed me up as a member of CSICON that very night, in the Plough and Stars pub over our ninth or tenth pint of Ireland's most glorious product, linn dubh, known as Guiness to the ungodly.

Now I hear that Prof. Finnegan has died, or at least they took the liberty of burying him, and I feel that the world has lost a great man.

The Commitee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) , however, lives on and deserves more attention than it has received hitherto. Prof. Finnegan always asserted that the idea for CSICON derived from a remark passed by an old Dalkey character named Sean Murphy, in the Goat and Compasses pub shortly before closing time on 23 July 1973.

Actually, it started with two old codgers named O'Brian and Nolan discussing the weather. "Terrible rain and wind for this time of year," O'Brian ventured.

"Ah, faith," Nolan replied, "I do not believe it is this time of year at all, at all."

At this, Murphy spoke up. "Ah, Jaysus," he said, "I've never seen a boogerin' normal day." He paused to set down his pint, then added thoughtfully, "And I never met a fookin' average man neither"

(About Sean Murphy nothing else appears in the record except a remark gleaned by Prof. LaPuta from one Nora Dolan, a housewife of the vicinity: "Sure, that Murphy lad never did any hard work except for getting up off the floor and navigating himself back onto the bar-stool, after he fell off, and he only did that twice a night.")

But Murphy's simple words lit a fire in the subtle and intricate brain of Timothy F.X. Finnegan, who had just finished his own fourteenth pint (de Selby says his fifteenth pint). The next day the aging Finnegan wrote the first two-page outline of the new science he called patapsychology, a term coined in salute to Alfred Jarry's invention of pataphysics.

Finnegan's paper began with the electrifying sentence, "The average Canadian has one testicle, just like Adolph Hitler -- or, more precisely, the average Canadian has 0.96 testicles, an even sadder plight than Hitler's, if the average Anything actually existed." He then went on to demonstrate that the normal or average human lives in substandard housing in Asia, has 1.04 vaginas, cannot read or write, suffers from malnutrition and never heard of Silken Thomas Fitzgerald or Brian Boru. "The normal," he concluded "consists of a null set which nobody and nothing really fits."

Thus began the science of Patapsychology, Prof. Finnegan's most enduring, and endearing, contribution to the world -- aside from the computer-enhanced photos of the Face on Mars with which he endeavored to prove that the Face depicted Moishe Horwitz, his lifelong mentor and idol. This, of course, remains highly controversial, especially among disciples of Richard Hoagland, who believe the Face looks more like the Sphinx, those who insist it looks like Elvis to them, and the dullards who only see it as a bunch of rocks.

Nobody should confuse Patapsychology with parapsychology, although this precise misunderstanding evidently inspired the long and venomous diatribes against Finnegan by Prof. Sheissenhosen of Heidelberg. (We need not credit the allegations of Herr Doktor Hamburger that Sheissenhosen also dispatched the three separate letter-bombs sent to Finnegan in 1982, '83 and '87. Even in the most heated academic debate some limits of decorem should remain, one would hope.)

Sheissenhosen evidently believed that "parapsychology" represented an unprovoked attack on his language and thought, and that Finnegan often leaped from shadows; he even suspected the Dalkey sage of slinking and of hiding behind a belly laugh, although the latter seems physiologically impossible. (I tried it once and found it made me more visible, not less.) In fact, Sheissenhosen never did correct his original error of misreading patapsycholgy as parapsychology. You will find more about the Sheissenhosen-Finnegan-LaPuta-Hamburger controversy in deSelby's Finnegan: Enigma of the Occident, Tourneur's Finnegan: Homme ou Dieu? and/or Sheissenhosen's own Finneganismus und Dummheit (6 volumes).

Patapsychology begins from Murphy's Law, as Finnegan called the First Axiom, adopted from Sean Murphy. This says,and I quote,"The normal does not exist. The average does not exist. We know only a very large but probably finite phalanx of discrete space-time events encountered and endured." In less technical language, the Board of the College of Patapsychology offers one million Irish punds [around $700,000 American] to any "normalist" who can exhibit "a normal sunset, an average Beethoven sonata, an ordinary Playmate of the Month, or any thing or event in space-time that qualifies as normal, average or ordinary."

In a world where no two fingerprints appear identical, and no two brains appear identical, and an electron does not even seem identical to itself from one nanosecond to another, patapsychology seems on safe ground here.

No normalist has yet produced even a totally normal dog, an average cat, or even an ordinary chickadee. Attempts to find an average Bird of Paradise, an ordinary haiku or even a normal cardiologist have floundered pathetically. The normal, the average, the ordinary, even the typical, exist only in statistics, i.e. the human mathematical mindscape. They never appear in external space-time, which consists only and always of nonnormal events in nonnormal series.

Thus, unless you're an illiterate and malnourished Asian with exactly 1.04 vaginas and 0.96 testicles, living in substandard housing, you do not qualify as normal but as abnormal, subnormal, supernormal, paranormal or some variety of nonnormal.

The canny will detect here the usual Celtic impulse to make hash out of everything that seems obvious and incontrovertable to Saxons, grocers and other Fundamentalist Materialists. Patapsychology follows in the great tradition of Swift, who once proved with a horoscope that an astrologer named Partridge had died, even though Partridge continued to deny this in print; Bishop Berkeley, who proved that the universe doesn't exist but God has a persistent delusion that it does; William Rowan Hamilton, who invented the noncommutative algebra in which p times q does not equal q times p; Wilde, who asked if the academic commentators on Hamlet had really gone mad or only pretended to have gone mad; John S. Bell, who proved mathematically that if any universe corresponds to the equations of quantum mathematics that universe must have nonlocal correlations similar to Jungian synchronicities; etc.

In the patapsychological model, the normal having vanished, most generalizations, especially about nonmathematical groups, disappear along with it. The monorchoid Mr. Hitler, for instance, could not generalize about "the Jews" within the patapsychological model, because first he would have to find a normal or average Jew, which appears as intracible to demonstration as exhibitting the Ideal Platonic Jew (or the Ideal Platonic Chicken Farm complete with Ideal Platonic Chickenshit.)

As Korzybski the semanticist said, all we can ever find in space-time consists of Jew-1, Jew-2, Jew-3 etc. to Jew-n. (For the nonmathematical, that means a list comprising Abraham, Sarah, Moses, Ruth, Jesus, Woody Allen, Richard Bandler, Felix Mendelsohn, Sigmund Freud, Paulette Goddard, Betty Grable, Noam Chomsky, Bernard Baruch, Paul Newman, the Virgin Mary, Albert Einstein, Lillian Hellman, Baron Rothschild, Ayn Rand, Max Epstein, Emma Goldman, Saul Bellow, etc. etc. etc. to the final enumeration of all Jews alive or dead.) Each of these, on inspection, will have different fingerprints, different brains, different neuro-immunological systems, different eyes, ears, noses etc. different life histories, different conditioning and learning etc. and different personalities, hobbies, passions etc... and none will serve as a norm or Ideal Form for all the others.

To say it otherwise, world Jewish population stood at about 10 million when Hitler formed his generalizations. He could not possibly have known more than at maximum about 500 of them well enough to generalize about them; considering his early prejudices, he probably knew a lot less than that. But taking 500 as a high estimate, we find he generalized about 10 million individual persons on the basis of knowledge limited to around 1/20,000 or 0.00005 % of them.

It seems, then, that Naziism could not have existed, if Hitler knew the difference between norms or averages (internal estimates, subject to error due to incomplete research or personal prejudice) and the phalanx of discrete nonnormal events and things (including persons) that we find in the sensory space-time continuum outside.

Similarly, the male human population currently stands at 3 billion 3 million 129 thousand, more or less (3, 004, 129, 976, the last time I checked the World Game Website a while ago). Of these 3 billion+ discrete individuals, Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin and other Radical Feminists probably have not known more than about 500 to generalize from. This means that Rad Fem dogma consists of propositions about 3 billion critters based on examination of less than 0.00000001 per cent of them. This ammounts to a much more reckless use of generalization than Hitler's thoughts on Judaism. You can no more find the male norm from Gandhi, Gen George Custer, Buddha, Bill Clinton, Louis Pasteur, Kung fu tzu, Bruno, Father Damien, Ted Bundy etc. than you can find the Jewish norm from Emma Goldman, Harpo Marx, Felix Mendelsohn, Spinoza, Barbra Streisand, Nathaniel Branden, Emma Lazarus, Jerry Seinfeld etc.

Now you know how the word "feminazi" got into the language. The two ideologies have a strong isomorphism. They both confuse the theoretical norm with a vast array of different individuals -- and they both have no idea how to create even a tolerably scientific norm (which will still differ in many respects from the actual series of individuals the norm allegedly covers).

CSICON applies the same Deconstructive logic all across the board.

For instance, to return to our starting point, whatever your idea of the "normal" UFO -- whether you consider it a spaceship, a secret US government weapon, a hoax, or a hallucination etc. -- such a general idea will render you incapable of forming a truly objective view of the next UFO that comes along. The only way to cancel such pre-judgement lies in patapsychology (and in general semantics). You must remember the difference between the individual and unpredictible event that gets called a UFO and your past generalizations about "the UFO" or the "normal" UFO."

Otherwise you will only note how this UFO fits your Ideal UFO and will unconciously ignore how it differs therefrom. This mechanical reflex will please your ego, if you like to feel you know more than most people, but it will prove hazardous to your ability to observe and think carefully.

People who think they know all about Jews or males or UFOs never see a real Jew or male or UFO. They see the generalized norm that exists only in their own brains. We never know "all" -- we only know what I call sombunall, some-but-not-all. This applies also to dogs (the patapsychologist will not say "I love them," "I hate them," "I fear them" etc.), and to plumbers, bosses, right-wingers, left-wingers, cats, lizards, sitcoms, houses, nails, Senators, waterfalls and all other miscellaneous sets or groups.

Personally, I see two or three UFOs every week. This does not astonish me, or convince me of the spaceship theory, because I also see about 2 or 3 UNFOs every week -- Unidentified Non-Flying Objects. These remain unidentified (by me) because they go by too fast or look so weird that I never know whether to classify them as hedgehogs, hobgoblins or helicopters -- or as stars or satellites or spaceships -- or as pookahs or pizza-trucks or probability waves. Of course, I also see things that I feel fairly safe in identifying as hedgehogs or stars or pizza trucks, but the world contains more and more events that I cannot identify fully and dogmatically with any norm or generalization. I live in a spectrum of probabilities, uncertainties and wonderments.

Perhaps I got this way by studying Finnegan's work. Or maybe I just drank too much linn dubh during my years in Ireland.

O rare, Tim Finnegan!

- R A Wilson, http://www.rawilson.com/csicon.html