First recorded in Chicago in 1994, this previously unreleased audio session with the renowned Robert Anton Wilson has been stored away for fifteen years…and almost lost entirely. If Bob knew how many synchronicities surround the rediscovery and release of this “lost” studio session, he would be chuckling in that half jolly, half mischievous way of his. If you believe in any kind of afterlife, maybe you can imagine him laughing right now. I like that image: Bob the laughing Buddha, still having one over on us from the great beyond.

Available from Original Falcon

Manual of Evasion was a 1994 Portugese film starring Robert Anton Wilson, Terrence McKenna, and Rudy Rucker. Above are some clips from the film.

(via Posthuman Blues)

Technoccult TV: Antero Alli pt. 2

Antero Alli returns to talk about Christopher Hyatt’s legacy, and how he met Robert Anton Wilson.

Download from archive.org (high quality MPEG or iPod ready MP4)

Antero Alli returns to talk about Dr. Christopher Hyatt’s legacy, and how he met Robert Anton Wilson.

Update: The Myspace and Archive.org versions were cut-off at the end. Here is another version, on Google Video.

Direct link to Google Video (download available there)

Update: Part 2 now available

Technoccult TV talks with Antero Alli about paratheater, his films, the 8 circuit model of consciousness, and his plans for the future.

Antero Alli is a paratheater director, filmmaker, astrologer, and the world’s leading expert on the 8 circuit model of consciousness. For more information about his work, or to purchase his DVDs, visit ParaTheatrical ReSearch and Vertical Pool Productions.

And of course, you can see him give a presentation on the 8 circuit model this October at Esozone in Portland.

Special thanks to: Chris Cloke, Bill Whitcomb, and Trevor Blake.

(Watch for more episodes of Technoccult TV, inlcluding part 2 of this interview plus interviews with Paul Laffoley, Nemo, The Red King, and many more)

More here

(via Dedroidify)

Nice long interview in Key 64:

MG: Both Leary and Wilson felt that the bottom circuits imprinted at acute, random moments in early childhood and adolescence, but I do not see the biological basis for such small windows of imprinting. Certainly birth is the primary C1 imprinting process and a universal human event, but I suspect it only accounts for roughly 30 to 80% of the C1 imprint depending on the individual and the circumstances of birth. It seems that C1 imprinting starts in the womb and continues well into the first several months of life. I suspect that C4 imprinting occurs over a period as long as several years and I find it hard to agree with Wilson’s assertion that the entire C4 imprint is taken on at the moment of first orgasm. How do you feel about these early childhood imprints?

AA: My experiences parallel Wilson’s and Leary’s here regarding the early childhood imprints of the first four circuits. Once imprinted, however, there are years and decades of affirmative conditioning that fortify and maintain those imprints, habits that can run throughout the rest of our lives and can run or rule the rest of our lives. Though C-1 imprinting does start with the infant dependency event with the mother, or surrogate mother, I think circuits two through four (especially C-4) can remain “un-imprinted” for years to come differing, of course, with each person and their circumstances.

As for the entire circuit four imprint occurring with the first orgasm, this sounds ridiculous to me. If only it were that simple and easy yet circuit four has proven to be anything but easy and simple. It’s not just me; look at the world, look at our human history of warfare, genocide and social tragedy. Other equally complex imprints such as religious upbringing, courtship rituals, woman and manhood rites of passage, pregnancy, and parenting also inhabit the web of fourth circuit realities.

Full Story: Key 64.

Don’t forget: Antero Alli will be doing a presentation on the 8 circuit model at Esozone: the Other Tomorrow this October in Portland. Buy your pre-sale ticket now for only $40 (prices go up Sunday night at midnight).

Just in time for the season premiere of Lost! Hatch 23 is an Esozone/PDX Occulture educational project seeking to uncover the occult undercurrents of the popular television series:

There’s a lot going on beneath the surface of the ABC television series Lost. Lost is sprinkled with references and allusions to the occult and esoteric secrets. Perhaps the most explicit reference is the use of the number 23. Since the release of the Jim Carrey movie,the significance of that number has become widely known.

But Lindelof and company started sprinkling the number throughout the first season, over 2 years before the movie. The number comes from Robert Anton Wilson, as Lindelof has confirmed at various times

Full Story: Hatch 23.

Here’s to you, Bob…

I had an interest in the occult at a very young age. But picking up a book called “Cosmic Trigger” kicked it into high gear. So many of us were influenced by this man. So, let do our best to keep the lasagna flying!

I GOT RUN OVER ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

“According to reliable sources, I died on February 22, 1994 — George Washington’s birthday. I felt nothing special or shocking at the time, and believed that I still sat at my word processor working on a novel called Bride of Illuminatus. At lunch-time, however, when I checked my voice mail, I found that Tim Leary and a dozen other friends had already called to ask to speak to me, or — if they still believed in Reliable Sources — to offer support and condolences to my grieving family. I quickly gathered that news of my tragic end had appeared on Internet, one of the most popular computer networks, in the form of an obituary from the Los Angeles Times:

“Noted science-fiction author Robert Anton Wilson was found dead in his home yesterday, apparently the victim of a heart attack. Mr. Wilson, 63, was discovered by his wife, Arlen. “Mr Wilson was the author of numerous books….He was noted for his libertarian viewpoints, love of technology and off the wall humor. Mr Wilson is survived by his wife and two children.”

This L.A. Times obit originally got on the net via somebody in Cambridge, Mass. I thought immediately of the pranksters at M.I.T. — the Gremlins of Cyberspace, as somebody called them. I admired the artistic versimilitude of the Gremlin who forged that obit. He mis-identified my ouvre. (Only 6 of my 28 books could possibly get classified as science-fiction, and perhaps 3 more as science-faction.) He also, more clumsily, stated my age wrong by one year and the number of my surviving children wrong by one child. Little touches of incompetence and ignorance like that helped create the impression of a real, honest-to-Jesus LA Times article — just as creeking chairs, background coughs, overlapping dialogue, scrupulously “bad” sound quality etc. make the bogus newsreels in Orson Welles’s two greatest movies, Citizen Kane and F For Fake, seem “just like the real thing.” The forged LA. Times obituary may not rank with Welles’s most monumental hoaxes — e.g. his prematurely Deconstructionist “war of the worlds” radio show, where bland music and increasingly ominous newsbreaks thoroughly confused a mass audience about the borderline between “art” and “reality.” But the Times forgery, if not of Wellesian heft, certainly contained a Wellesian blend of art and magic: in retrospect, it even reminds me, a little, of the 1923 Surrealist art show, in which the audience first encountered a taxi-cab in the garden — a cab which had rain falling inside but not outside — and then confronted a sign telling them gnomically:”

DADA IS NOT DEAD
WATCH YOUR OVERCOAT

(more excerpts from Cosmic Trigger III- My Life After Death)

(RAW’s main site)

For all we knew, Robert Anton Wilson and I were related. On an intuitive basis-i.e., after several rounds of Jameson’s and Guinness-we decided we were cousins. Subsequently we came to believe ourselves connected to the Wilsons who play so murky a role in the ‘Montauk Mysteries’ (Aleister Crowley, UFOs and Nazis in Long Island, time travel experiments gone awry, etc.). Our plan to co-edit a family anthology (including Colin, S. Clay, and Anthony Burgess, whose real name was Wilson) never materialized-although we did collaborate in editing Semiotext(e) SF, together with Rudy Rucker.

There’s no doubt Bob was some sort of anarchist. His earliest interests and experiences (the School of Living, for example) involved connections with old-time American Philosophical or Individualist Anarchism of the Spooner/Tucker variety, and, in fact, this shared background firmed the basis of our friendship.

Full Story: Arthur Magazine.

Before The Open Source Party. Before The Guns and Dope Party. Before The Revolution Party. In 1969, Timothy Leary ran for governor of California against Ronald Reagan. The motto was “Come together – join the party” and John Lennon originally wrote the song “Come Together” for Leary.

According to a letter from Leary published in Mondo 2000 # 6 in 1992, this was Leary’s platform:

1. the basic function of government is to protect individuals against organized gangs and groups.

2. Decentralization: California secedes from the USSA.

3. Another basic function of govt. is to entertain/educate.

4. The government makes a profit. Instead of paying taxes, the citizen received dividends.

5. The profits derived from licensing pleasures: Marijuana license like an auto license/registration, hard liquor, gambling; prostitutes were professionals like dentists or lawyers; LSD, etc., used in state parks or theme parks; Entry taxes – California would be like an amusement park – entrance fees and daily residence fees; Education – California specializes in education – non-Californians paid substantial fees.

The only other info I could find about the platform:

Revealing part of his guber-natorial platform for the first time, Leary pledged solutions to California’s 10 major political problems.

He leaked out only a few of those solutions, but what did emerge was unique — to say the least.

“I’m going to legalize marijuana and charge a $1,000 a year permit fee for those who want to make it,” he said.

“Given the size of California population, that will generate a huge amount of additional revenue each year.

“Then I’ll turn that money over to the police and the forces of the right wing to keep them happy and off people’s backs,” Leary explained.

Wouldn’t that be discriminating against the poor who can’t afford $1,000 a year for the privilege of turning on? he was asked.

“That’s not really a problem,” he explained, “because it’s only a short-term situation — in five years I’ll eliminate all money from Californian society and return to a barter system.”

(Source)

I’d love to get some feedback from Klint’s wonderful community and readership here, especially those who happen to have experience in design, marketing, and business. After some discussions with fellow designer, Coe, who himself has an esoteric streak, I’ve been considering some issues that might be keeping the contemporary spiritual movement that is the occult subculture (and its legion of niche cultures and interests) from reaching its potential in North America (and possibly Europe).

First to address is whether being different is something that the members of the occult community thrives on, in and of itself. Personally, I’ve noticed differences between the persons I know involved in the esoteric arts. I’ll call them the Few for brevity’s sake. There are the goth shops that stock the books on magic that I’ll visit if I’m too eager to wait for an Amazon shipment. While the books and knowledge are the factors that draw me to their locale, the people and artefacts that are sold there are of no interest to me and, in fact, sell a stereotype that I find repugnant. (Sadly, the books in my section are the cultural accessories to the majority of wares they huck: clothing, hair dye, witchcraft gobbledygook, incense, shoddy pewter jewellery, and punky goth paraphernalia.)

There’s also the New Age shops that huck their own brand, though with a more aligned focus to the ultimate goal of spiritual exploration: crystals, incense, oils, lame calendars with ooh-ahh paintings on them, CDs, cheesy T-shirts, et cetera.

So all this material would be the halo effect, as it’s referred to in marketing. Unfortunately, goth and witch cultures seem to have let the accessories take the focus away from the core cultural values that spawned them in the first place. Which leads me to wonder what state does the North American occult community find itself.

Now, keep in mind that I’ve worked in design for a number of years and now currently work as a brand consultant. What most people don’t understand about brands is that they are what the people say they are, not what the companies wish to define them as.

This is an interesting point to get across because persons that decide to hate a particular brand are projecting their own form of identity by hating on the brands that rub them the wrong way. The little mental boxes in your mind that you used to define that brand is neurologically linked to other elements that you associate with in your life that you use to define what you’re not. Sadly, by choosing one’s enemies, like I see in these books and posts about “occult warfare,” fans of this thinking do themselves the disservice of filling in all the boxes they dislike. The mental boxes (or mental white space) that remains moulds personal self-identification with the cultural or experiential leftovers that haven’t been already commandeered by others.

Rarely do I see popular subculture movements hijack and infiltrate the mainstream in order to spread their art among the masses. The Few that become self-inflicted prisoners, bound by the things they refuse, begin to wrap these leftover ideas into its own mishmash subculture. Then they get mad when the mainstream adopts and makes it their own. Think of punk culture adopting military garb as their own, or the Barbie girls out there that seem to be standardised with a back-ass tattoo and pierced bellybutton and tongue.

This brings up the universal archetype known as the Elixir. In Joseph Campbell’s monomyth one of the necessary traits of a Hero is to enter the underworld and return to the masses with a so-called Elixir. The Elixir is wisdom. And I define wisdom as knowledge + experience.

“It is important that art is produced, but it also has to be consumed. The dynamics of producers and consumers is the motor of art.” Turkish caricaturist Ercan Akyol said that, and it remains true in all elements of life (unless you’re pursuing a Zen-like knowledge of the self, in some cave somewhere, by choice.) But think of art in this case as a the Elixir of wisdom, this knowledge and experience that is being hoarded by one group or the next, but rarely shared across borders. Borders who’re really only being defined by these little, semantic boxes we build in our heads: aka brands.

One of my favourite things that Grant Morrison says during his well-known Disinfo talk has nothing to do with sigils or his writing. It’s that he’s wearing a Donna Karan suit. Then he spills his drink on it and cheerfully laughs, “Fuck it!” The suit is a beautiful piece, and it serves its purpose. It’s Morrison’s mask magic at work. He doesn’t avoid fashion as a vice of contemporary life, but embraces it and uses it as a magical tool in his everyday life-experiencing what a fine garment can elicit in others, and how that attention can be embraced.

Rollo May says, in Man’s Search for Himself, “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice… it is conformity.” Whom among us have conformed to our particular set of friends? Their expectations of us, our subcultures’, or our families’? Why? Like Morrison, laugh out loud, “Fuck ‘em!” I want everyone reading this right now to say to themselves, three times, Fuck occultism, fuck conspiracies, fuck the little boxes in my head that keep me from exploring the things I simply believe I hate.

And on that, as I digress from my initial hope to encourage some feedback to better a conversation I am having with Coe and sometimes with Rev Max, I leave you with two quotes to encourage some thought on this matter. But remember, they apply when you embrace the lifestyle of a Hero yourself. The archetypal Underworld in many a case might just be the very mainstream that so many so-called “occultists” tend to avoid and dismay. It is that very nightmare I encourage you to embrace! Learn to flirt, learn to dress up as much as you might desire to dress down, and truly put Robert Anton Wilson’s and Ramsey Duke’s ideas to work:

“It’s amazing how much panic one honest man can spread among a multitude of hypocrites.”
-Thomas Sowell

“A few harmless flakes working together can unleash an avalanche of destruction.”
-unknown

So, what made Mondo 2000 so special? It was, in my opinion, the best alternative culture magazine that America ever had. They wrote about smart drugs, brain implants, virtual reality, cyberpunk, Cthulhupunk and cryogenics. They covered Laibach and Lydia Lunch in the same issue. The pantheon of writers was a force to be reckoned with: Bruce Sterling, Robert Anton Wilson, and William Gibson all lent their talents, and there was even a Burroughs vs. Leary interview face-off. Then there was the famous U2-Negativland interview, in which Negativland, disguised as reporters, interviewed U2 into a corner to reveal the band’s hypocrisy over their lawsuit against Negativland over sampling. All in all, the magazine took risks. ‘The good dream for me and Mondo,’ said editor R.U. Sirius in an interview with Purple Prose, ‘is overcoming the limits of biology without necessarily leaving sensuality or sexuality behind.’ Issue after issue, Mondo 2000 threw a sexy dystopian bash and invited the decade’s best thinkers.

Full Story: Coilhouse. And be sure to read Joshua Ellis’s comment!

See also: My 2002 interview with R.U. Sirius.

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, March 2007

(via Only Maybe Blog).

The Laboratorian:

A great deal of blather about the practices of Raja Yoga exist, and a great way to fuck someone up at worst, or impede their progress at best, is to provide them a gate into a dangerous territory then give them a sloppy map. Much of it, sadly, can be traced back to Crowley’s histrionic rubies-in-the-shit approach to writing. Look at Robert Anton Wilson’s Prometheus Rising, and the confusion leaps out at anyone with experience. Wilson claims that counting the breath, a technique to aid concentration in novices, is a watered-down form of pranayama, which according to him is the real means to achieve these lofty states. He asserts that mantra, a form of concentration, is a device used for achieving pratyahara. While I respect some of Wilson’s acid-drenched project, and realize that he often claimed to have both provided disinformation and hidden messages in his texts to spurn further research (like any Joyce scholar would), I also believe that at times he simply hid his sloppiness (New Falcon was his publisher, for christ’s sake) behind these conceits. I also disagree intensely with publishing a mass-market book with disinformation-it is one thing to send a student on fool’s errands, it is another to knowingly deceive thousands with whom one has no relationship. To provide my personal example, after reading Prometheus Rising I began practicing pranayama with a mantra for ninety minutes a day, getting up at four thirty in the morning to get in the time, then hoping in the shower and going to work. I had no clue that focusing on a mantra would induce all manner of altered states, because I always assumed it was, per Wilson, the pranayama that did that. Likewise, reading a sloppy account of the actual territory of the altered states like the one Crowley offers in Book 4 helps little. The fact that a real madman, Austin Osman Spare, provides clearer instruction in doing this type of thing with his coded passages on the Death Posture-which is really just advice in what Daniel Ingram outlines as ‘Buddhist Magick 101′-should say something about just how clear the advice that the Post-Theosophist crew offer is.

Full Story: From the Lab.

From Frequency 23:

Robert Anton Wilson’s death signifies the dawn of a new generation of alternative philosophers/seekers – it’s with this in mind we are attempting to centralize his data for their consumption and benefit Download Raw Pack I + The Illuminati Papers Torrent Link for RAW pack II

RAW Pack I
contains Text of:

Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy
Prometheus rising
Quantum Psychology
The Sex Magicians
Illuminatus Trilogy
Mask of the Illuminati
Principia Discordia
Excerpts and interviews
Also Download: The Illuminati Papers

RAW Pack II (is a torrent) which Contains Audio of:
Audio Interview on Disinfonation
Nova Connection 16 – Burroughs, Gysin, Leary and Wilson
Language and Reality
Namu Amida Buddha
Quantum Psychology
Secrets of Power
Techniqeus for Conciousness change
The Acceleration of Knowledge
The Leary Grid
Timothy Leary’s Death
On Conspiracy Theories
On The Church of the Subgenius

Also of course Check his video lecture The I in triangle Pt. I & II.

Uploaded Kindly by Greylodge.

These are RARed files, use the program over @ www.rarlabs.com to
extract them, the text varies from .pdf, .rtf, .html and so forth. You
will need a torrent client to hop on downloading the RARed audio in
packII

care of http://stealthisknowledge.liber.us

The Realist Archive Project.

Negative Thinking by Robert Anton Wilson.

(via Robot Wisdom).

Some notes about the book on Tribe.

Direct PDF download.

Text file.

(via Hit and Run).

There exists, even among long term practitioners, gross misunderstandings of magical principles. Even after the lessons of chaos magic theory (CMT) regarding belief as tool rather than operating system, some magicians still cling to the delusion that (for example) tracing five lines into a shape human minds recognize as the pentagram is by itself magically efficacious. Long-time practicing magicians (those who should most know better) are not immune to this phenomenon. Indeed, a tendency exists to imprint one’s own tradition as the operating system of reality, lending their system an objective belief Robert Anton Wilson described as “the death of thought.” Most modern magicians show at least a passing intellectual understanding of a principle outlined succinctly by Uncle Al several decades before CMT made it creed:

“In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth, and the Paths, of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.” (Liber 0 I:2).

Full Story: Future Hi.

Jesse Walker’s wonderful obit for Robert Anton Wilson at Reason.

Also, here’s a post to Reason’s blog about Wilson’s influence in libertarian thinking. I chime in in the comments with some quotes by RAW about socialism, not so much to refute the idea that he was a libertarian, but to show the nuance of his political thinking.

R.U. Sirius’s Revolution Party platform was a great attempt at creating a reasonable fusion of libertarian and left-wing political thinking, though I think it was ultimately too heavy on goals and too short on solutions (Note: I once tried to found an official Washington State Revolution Party based on R.U.’s platform).

RAW’s diverse literary legacy includes the likes of Grant Morrison, James Curcio, and Damon Lindelof… but what about his political legacy? I’ve been impressed with the balanced thought of a lot of people at Reason Magazine (especially Walker), and I think Abe Burmeister is one of the most insightful commentators around (I’ve plugged his Nomad Economics book before). And of course, Ken Macleod. Any other “non-Euclidean” political thinkers I’m forgetting?

RU Sirius Show: Zen Monkeys Talk About 10 Zen Monkeys.

NeoFiles Show: On Probability Beach with Richard Kadrey.

And, not a podcast but also from the MondoGlobo Network, A Selection of Obscure Robert Anton Wilson Essays.

Ulysses Lazarus Benway shares his ode to Robert Anton Wilson, “O Captain! My Captain!”

Irreality Forums.

RAW died at 4:50 AM this morning. He will be sorely missed.

Robert Anton Wilson’s blog. Nuff said.

RU Sirius Show: Robert Anton Wilson Lives!. The gang talks to RAW biographers Lance Bauscher and Eric Wagner.

NeoFiles Show: The Wonderful Wizardry of Woz.

Plus: Mondology Volume 1.

(and don’t forget: Occulterati).