Illuminatus! vs Atlas Shrugged

I never met Robert Anton Wilson, but after reading him closely for years, I like to think I know him pretty well. When I went to college in the 1970s, I encountered Illuminatus!, and it had a greater effect upon me than anything I learned in class. It's impossible to minimize the impact the book had on inspiring a new generation of libertarians, although Wilson was hardly an orthodox libertarian. (He wasn't an orthodox anything). Once, summing up why he didn't vote for the 1980 Libertarian Party candidate, he explained, "I am not that kind of Libertarian, really; I don't hate poor people." The attitude of wonder and skepticism toward what we can know about the world in llluminatus! is at least as important as the politics.

Partly because of regret that I never got around to interviewing him or even meeting him when he was alive, I started my RAWIllumination.net a couple of years ago. Decades of heavy reading in all forms of fiction and nonfiction have convinced me that Wilson is a major American writer who has not received the attention he deserves. This crops up on all sorts of ways. Years before Dan Brown wrote his best seller, The Da Vinci Code, Wilson covered much the same ground in a much better book, The Widow's Son. With help from other Wilson fans, I have used RAWIllumination.net to make available articles by Wilson and interviews with him that were not reprinted in his books.

I did get to meet Illuminatus! co-author Robert Shea once, and I would point out that his "solo novels" also deserve attention; they are available in cheap Kindle editions and in free versions at the official Robert Shea site, maintained by his son, Mike Shea. All Things Are Lights, a fast-moving historical novel set in the time of Saint Louis, is a thematic prequel to Illuminatus! which I believe almost any reader would enjoy.

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My Dr. Martens had that darker sheen around the toes where the water had sunk into the petrol-resistant exterior. The smell of damp and of dusty books filled my nose as I prepared for another day of work at the library. It was 1995 in Seattle. The WTO had just formed, The Oklahoma bombing went down, and Grunge was slowly decaying in an acrid smoke after Kurt Cobain's suicide. It was then, on that day, Robert Anton Wilson entered my life.

I had just got in the building, which looked like a huge Viking ship, designed that way on account of all the Norwegians who took up residence in that particular part of town. I shook the rain off of my formidable, flaming red hair when, suddenly, I was vehemently tugged behind the stacks by my coworker.

He was thirty-ish, pagan, had a long blonde ponytail and a nose ring. We would often chat together about Egypt, witchy-poo stuff, and things like that.

"You should really check this book out, I think you would really like it," he said quietly as he handed me a corpulent tome. I looked down at it and saw a checkerboard cover with dolphins jumping over a pyramid with an eye on it. Oh boy, I thought to myself. Like I'm really going to read this obviously new age tedious thing that probably is filled with cheerful advice of how to align my chakras. I humored him politely, as all I wanted to do was take off my wet jacket (which was covered in Metallica patches), took the book and said "thanks, I totally will!" as I snuck past to put my coat in my cubby. Now, it's not that I was opposed to "new age" per se, but I was heavily into OCCULT material and was very snobby about it at the time. If it wasn't older than the 1800's I didn't give a snit about it.

I had just purchased the Hermetic works of Paracelsus, and all the froofy rainbow dolphin material made me cringe as I blasted my Soundgarden tapes on my Sony walkman while walking in the rain. So, I waited until my co-worker went in the back and stealthily snuck the girthy volume onto my cart of books to re-shelve whilst turning up the volume on my headphones. Upon approaching the shelf to replace the seemingly uncouth bundle back exactly in its proper Dewey decimal order, a book directly next to it caught my eye. The cover of this book looked not unlike the covers of some of my Heavy Metal comics, which I was very dedicated to at that point in my life. Prometheus Rising was written in airbrushed chrome lettering with a hermeticy looking fellow emerging from a robot. Now I was interested. I was also a huuuuuuge Frankenstein (the novel) fan, so anything with the word Prometheus in it instantly ignited me in affinity.

As I picked up the book, I noticed that it had the same author as the dolphin book I was so hastily discarding as a froofy annoyance. "Huh, that's weird," I said aloud, which caused the patron a couple of rows down from me to glance up over his rain splotched spectacles, I guess I said it pretty loud as my sense of volume was distorted from my soundtrack. I tucked the radical, roboty book down at the bottom of my cart, and finished my shelving duties. When I went to check it out to myself, I cracked open the cover to peruse the table of contents. The first thing that caught my eye, peering through my still rain wet bangs, was:

"4. The Anal Emotional Territorial Circuit"

These words, strung together like a poem, were unlike anything I had ever come across. I knew in that moment this book was somehow going to create more space inside my mind. While I puttered through my day, I kept returning to that line and couldn't stop trying to decipher what it could possibly mean, or be referring to, and my imagination came up with all manner of explanations ranging from the indecent to the sci-fi. What was he talking about? What was "Anal emotional territory"? And how could it have a circuit? Was this some THX 1138 gay porn romance novel? What WAS this book anyway? I took the number 44 bus straight home, threw off my drenched accoutrement and collapsed on my bed with RAW cradled in my hands like a kitten. It was 4am by the time I looked up, closing the book, having finished the final, smoldering message;

THE FUTURE EXISTS

FIRST IN IMAGINATION,

THEN IN WILL,

THEN IN REALITY

I lay there, listening to the rain beating on my window in the still darkness of the early morning, and I realized everything I thought about the occult was wrong. It wasn't as serious and stodgy as I had made it out to be, nor anywhere near as foreboding. After completing my first "date" with RAW, I saw that esotericism was really, really funny and dynamic, modern and evolutionary AND ALIVE. I learned the occult isn't just in the occult, it's in everything and you can play with it and experiment and like, make stuff happen in your brain. This caused a complete do-over of what I thought magic had to be in order to be acceptable and broke a GINOURMOUS taboo circuit surrounding it in my head. I kinda felt like the green dude on the cover, like I had been released from some robotic concept of perfunctory reality I had created inside my own brain. My mind was blown. He blew my Anal Emotional Territorial Circuit into existence. That ONE little book, less than 300 pages long, lit a creative spark in my neurons that burned into a huge research trail that I would spend years following, leading me to Leary, Regardie, Hubbard, Eliot, Heisenberg and others. This single work was as a Frankenstein monster, grabbing all these dead, dismembered bits and pieces of the past together and reformulating them into a whole new living thing with thoughts and feelings of its own!

I awoke after a couple hours sleep, feeling mighty Promethean, like missing a liver or something, and blearily went into work. I walked through the rain back into the Viking ship. I checked in Prometheus Rising, placed it back in Dewey decimal order, picked up the Illuminatus! Trilogy, dolphins and all, and high-fived my pagan-pony-tailed friend as this librarian learned not to judge a book by its cover.

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Someday I hope to share with you audio from an interview I conducted with Mr. Wilson, but it's entirely possible the old cassette is long gone. I'm still looking. For now, here's text:

Robert Anton Wilson was kinda more George Carlin and less Timothy Leary than he sometimes appeared. I didn't know him truly, madly, deeply and we did not eat, pray, and love together. (OK, we did eat together, now that I think of it.) I did get to hang out with him a number of times.

What surprised me most was his practicality. Bob didn't actually strike me as being all that far-out; rather, he seemed a practical guy with a very smart mind and a very wacky sense of humor. Turning on was fun, sure, and led to important and far-reaching discoveries, some directed inward, others outward. Tuning in was essential: homing in on what matters and communicating to the tribe and also, importantly, to the potential tribe, to the yahoos who hadn't gotten all enlightened 'n' shit, the people who might really *need* to have their minds blown.

But he didn't think that dropping out was an option. He was solid in the pre-old-school sense. Solidly built in physicality, solidly convinced of the efficacy of his ideas, and despite his curmudgeonly tendencies, solidly committed to making the world a better place -- or at least showing its denizens some potential for doing it themselves. Sometimes, that's exactly what we need.

As I slither down the steep slope of early middle age toward doom, I take inspiration from the older people I've known. Hyper-idealist, impractical stuff loses it appeal (other than watching adorable youngsters engage in it). Guess I've done too many oh-so-important actions and interventions and protests that simply had no effect on anything. Guess I've seen, in my dotage, how much can get done by cruising along *inside* The System and subverting elements from within, gently influencing minds and systems rather than yelling at them from behind a kerchief mask.

When I met Bob, I was the angsty and eager young gal with the shaved head and the big boots, hoping he'd tell me how to burn the whole fuckin' universe to the ground so we could start over. He was the old dude talking about how you have to be on target with regular ol' reality in order to step up and make change. It's fine to question all the realities you can find, but you still have to eat something and take a piss and sit down on a chair that you have to trust is actually a chair. And I was able to hear him. He was looking at a longer scale and more realistic form of change than I wanted to entertain. I had enough sense to admire and respect that.

At first it might've been a little disappointing, to meet Bob and find out that he wasn't a far-out, wild-haired cross between Timothy Leary, Albert Einstein, Angela Davis, Tom Waits, Philip K. Dick, William Blake, and I dunno, Jimmy Hoffa? Bob seemed more like Trickster Santa.

He'd lived near where I lived in Ireland, both of us temporarily (and at the same time as each other at one point: weird). He talked about this move not as a romantic writerly escape to the ol' homeland but as a strategy for jacking the IRS. I barely even knew anybody who owned a house, like the one where I'd visited him and Arlen, much less talked about taxes. Except maybe my dad.

This is the sort of thing that has a real impact on a young person who will eventually, tardily, morph into a grownup. I needed to see that you could be shrewd about real life and its money bullshit, outspoken about bluntly political issues, and still be the coolest guy on the planet. That stuck with me. It stuck with me even when he approached his deathbed without the financial resources to do the whole thing elegantly and comfortably. He wasn't *that* much of a straight, square, buttoned down, financially stable normie!

But there are different kinds of stability, of solidity. Of solidarity, too. People all over the world and the Internet stepped up to donate thousands of dollars. We loved him and we wanted to help. We wanted to help the guy who turned on and tuned in but never dropped out. We cheered for the man who never quit, never took the easy and glamorous route of hollering for the counterculture's cliched version of revolution. Robert Anton Wilson embodied revolution -- a revolution of mind.

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"My function is to raise the possibility, 'Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit.'" -- Robert Anton Wilson

I like to think of myself as a believing skeptic, someone who relishes in the ideas, the imagery, the arguments, the theories, and the literature of the occult and the paranormal, but accepts little of it as valid in a phenomenal sense. I love that small publishers such as Ouroboros Press and Fulgar Limited put out beautiful magical texts and that many current underground and avant garde musicians incorporate occult ideas into their work. But beyond its power as a method for art and imaging, I recognize much of the occult as woo. On the other hand, I accept that the human imagination is something magical, and very powerful and that we know little about human consciousness except how malleable it really is. It's a precarious position, however, and I often need to remind myself of smarter, more articulate thinkers who shared these views.

So it is with great respect and admiration that I celebrate the life of Robert Anton Wilson during this memorial week by remembering that he was the great believing skeptic, someone for whom the collection and curating of all that is weird was his life's work, who reminded us always to question everything, while recognizing that we should never stop exploring. I sure wish RAW was alive today, especially at a time when there is something like a real Occult Revival going on, from the psychedelic explorers who see 2012 as a great trans formative event, to the huge increase in the membership of organization like the O.T.O. and Freemasonry, and by extension a whole load of conspiracy theories. RAW warned against any idea, group, or person that claims knowledge of the "Real" Universe, echoing Umberto Eco who wrote in Foucault's Pendulum we should be mindful of turning metaphysics in mechanics.

In an essay for the Journal of Cognitive Liberties, Wilson explained how it is through self-hypnosis that we create these "Real" universes, and because they are so beautifully and perfectly solipsistically rendered, we are, sadly, often incapable of having any critical, or agnostic relationship to these models. Sometimes, through meditation or the use of certain, *ahem*, psychoactive substances, we can get to what Buddhism describes as an observer state. We can see the "Real" as merely a kind of consciousness that we have deeply inherited. Wilson writes, "In the 'Real' Universe we are re-active mechanists; in the experienced world, we are creators, and The "Real" Universe is just another of our creations -- a dangerous one, with a tendency to hypnotize us."

It's troubling when the counterculture, often the only voices that rise against fundamentalism of all stripes, succumbs to the same kind of mechanistic thinking. The apocalyptic tenor that is part of the psychedelic subculture's obsession with 2012, for example, starts to sound like those evangelical Christians who use a convoluted kind of gematria to come up with specific dates and times for the rapture. Things like 2012 have the potential to function as useful metaphors for describing the need for cultural and economic transformations. When these ideas become "Real" they are incapable of producing any real call to change, or any kind of art or expression that really matters. Wilson writes, "Once again, it appears that the materialist model of mechanical consciousness covers some but not all experience, and it excludes precisely that part of experience which makes us human, esthetic, moral and responsible beings."

Agnosticism, even more than atheism or theism, is, for RAW, the authentic ethical position.

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It seems appropriate that we all should pause this week to remember Robert Anton Wilson on the 5th anniversary of his death. The world is a little less fun without RAW, and his cosmic humor/insights/insanity.

When I wrote something about his departure from this plane, a remembrance more than an obituary in 2007, I naturally called it "23 Skidoo." That's what he'd done, and there was no two ways about it.

I still think that someplace, Bucky Fuller, Timothy Leary, Charles Fort, and Robert Anton Wilson are deciding whether it's time to play supercheckers or Texas hold 'em.

I corresponded with Robert Anton Wilson (RAW as he sometimes was called) from the 1970s through the early 1990s, until his health and his in-and-out self-exiles moved him near-and-far from many people. In the waning years, like many, I kept in touch via friends of friends, as it were. Wilson had a universe of friends, as was shown by Boing Boing's pre-death appeal that snatched Wilson from falling off the cliff of poverty as he was dying. We all loved the guy. But it was the intellectual part of him that really appealed to me.

RAW's writings in the late 1970s did greatly impacted me. How much? Well, let me just mention this one piece of my private life. When I married my second wife (now ex-) in 1980, after we both read Cosmic Trigger , we mutually picked (to the strange surprise of our friends and families) a Friday.

Why?

Because we wanted to get married on May (2+3 = 5), 23rd, two 23s, in honor of Robert Anton Wilson's book or more properly, it's concepts and Fortean linkages. Back in 1980, you would have had to read Cosmic Trigger to learn why the number 23 was important. Today, as a legacy to RAW, the 23 enigma is a concept that has drifted rather significantly into popular culture. It has so much so that there appeared, soon after Wilson's death, a movie starring Jim Carrey, entitled, of course, The Number 23. (See .)

You will note the reflective factor of the number 23 rather compellingly for it really does appear in various random scenes in films, where, for example, a detective is knocking at a door and it is just happens to "Apartment 23." Or you flip a page in a book of cryptozoology accounts, and staring out at you is a report of the one and only Batsquatch sighting of April 23, 1994, by Brian Canfield, who was driving his truck in the foothills near Mt. Rainier (where, it should be noted, Kenneth Arnold saw the "first" flying saucers in 1947). Canfield described the thing he almost hit with his vehicle as a nine-foot-tall "Bigfoot-type creature," with blue-tinted fur, wings, tufted ears, bird-like claw feet, and a face like a wolf but without fangs, although its white teeth were very visible. The creature's eyes "were yellow and shaped like a piece of pie with pupils like a half- moon." You just can't make such things up.

RAW would figure the Cosmic Jokester was behind such an account, and move on to the next weird account to examine.

Of course, in my own writings, along with the late John A. Keel and others interested in Fortean matters, I have written often of the name and number games that influence our lives. The 23s, 33s, and yes, 11s, heighten our awareness of the twilight language surrounding us.

RAW decided to depart on the 11th, a number that has become over-analyzed perhaps, in the wake of 9/11, but then what are we to do with the fact that some numbers do seem significant, again and again. Eleven is one of them.

Does it mean anything? Who knows? But reading about what RAW thought about it all, where he mixed fiction and fact, kept all of us on our toes. Today, with Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, blogs, emails, texting, and more, it all sometimes seems overwhelming. We need a RAW to cut through it all and give some direction through this noise. I miss him.

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Robert Anton Wilson departed from this world on January 11, 2007 at 4:50 am. He will be missed enormously by his many loving friends and devoted fans, and his powerful impact upon the world will continue to catalyze the evolution of the human species for many years to come. Bob was one of the most brilliant and conscious people to ever grace this wayward world, and he was always a man ahead of his time. I predict that his books will be far more popular in years to come than they are today. Future generations will cherish his books with the same reverence that scholars today hold for geniuses like James Joyce and Ezra Pound.

Bob had an uncanny ability to lead his readers, unsuspectingly, into a state of mind where they are playfully tricked into "aha" experiences that cause them to question their most basic assumptions. His books are the literary equivalent of a psychedelic experience and they can be every bit as mind-expanding as a couple a good swigs of Amazonian jungle juice. Many people attribute their initial psychological "awakening" to their reading of his psychoactive books -- myself included. It was Bob's book Cosmic Trigger that not only allowed me to understand the concept of "multiple realities," but also inspired me to become a writer when I was a teenager. It was also where I first discovered many of the fascinating individuals who would later become the subjects of my interview books.

I really owe a lot to Bob. After I completed writing my first book at the age of twenty-six, I approached Bob after a lecture that he gave and asked him if he would be willing to write me a promotional blurb for the back cover of the book. He said, "maybe." and didn't really leave me with the impression that he was too eager to do it. I got the feeling that young writers bugged him all the time for back cover blurbs.

But I had my publisher send him a copy of the book anyway. You can imagine my surprise -- and total radiant delight -- when I discovered that Bob had actually written an eleven page introduction for the book (Brainchild, which was published in 1988). Words simply can not describe what a thrilling experience this was for me! In 1989 I moved to Los Angeles, where Bob and Arlen were living at the time, and I became good friends with them. (I dedicated my book Virus to Bob's wife Arlen.)

I began going to regular weekly gatherings at Bob and Arlen's home where a small group would read and discuss mind-expanding ideas together. We read virtually everything that James Joyce had written, Ezra Pound's The Cantos, each other's writings, and Bob's books. We watched Orson Wells' films and talked about quantum physics and primate politics. I felt like I was living through a powerful historical moment--that future generations will surely fantasize about -- when I got to take part in the Illuminatus! readings and discussions with Bob.

I continued going to weekly gatherings at Bob's home right up until a few weeks before he died. He remained as sharp and witty as ever right up until the end. I saw Bob on average around once a week for seventeen years, during which time he played a huge role in my writing career. He was incredibly supportive of my writing. He wrote letters to cheer me up when I was down and even sent me money when I couldn't afford to pay my rent.

I interviewed Bob for my second book, Mavericks of the Mind, in 1989, and again for my fifth book, Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, in 2004. Bob helped me to come up with the list of people that I interviewed for Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse and he even came up with some of the questions that I asked in the book. He wrote blurbs for the back covers of my other books as well, and he mentioned me in a few of his books -- which always gave me a thrill. Bob often gave me credit for coming up with the abbreviation of "B.S." for "belief system" in his books, but one of the happiest days in my writing career came a few years ago when Bob actually asked me to write a back cover blurb for his book, TSOG: The Thing That Ate the Constitution. Wow. My book, Mavericks of Medicine is dedicated to Bob.

Bob had an uncanny ability to perceive things that few people notice, and he had an incredible memory. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of many different fields -- ranging from literature and psychology, to quantum physics and neuroscience. He was unusually creative in his use of language, and he had his own unique style of humor. Despite many personal challenges over the years, Bob always maintained a strongly upbeat perspective on life, and -- regardless of the circumstances -- he never failed to make me smile every time I saw him. Everyone who met him agrees; there was something truly magical about Robert Anton Wilson. He is missed by many. Thank the stars that he left behind so much of himself -- thirty-six books -- for us to learn from and enjoy for many, many years to come.

Editor's note: Here are two additional essays by David Jay Brown about RAW: Firing the Cosmic Trigger and Quantum Sociology and Neuropolitics: David Jay Brown Interviews Robert Anton Wilson.

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-- Robert Anton Wilson

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-- Robert Anton Wilson

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Gwendal Uguen has created this terrific mindmap about Discordianism, and has kindly given us permission to run it on Boing Boing. Click it for full-size. Discordianism is a religion founded in the late 20th Century by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, and it featured prominently in RAW's books.

Interestingly, Thornley served alongside Lee Harvey Oswald in the armed forces and wrote a novel called The Idle Warriors (before Kennedy was assassinated) and the main character was based on Oswald.

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Written and first published (on my radio show) shortly after Bob’s death in 2007.

Robert Anton Wilson is dead, again, and I'm not feeling so good myself. Wilson -- or let's call him 'Bob', as he would have preferred -- was first reported dead on February 22nd, 1994. But the reports of his death turned out to be greatly exaggerated: fittingly, Bob had fallen prey to one of the first great Internet hoaxes. However, his second death, on January 11th, 2007, was all too real. Bob died at home, at 4:50 a.m., from complications due to post-polio syndrome.

Bob was, among other things, one of the last great '60s figures. He was a friend and collaborator of Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and Buckminster Fuller, had a bit part in the JFK assassination, was a founding pope of Discordianism and the Church of the Sub Genius, coauthored the The Illuminatus! trilogy and, in his autobiography Cosmic Trigger, anticipated the sex, drugs and magick movements that started in the '60s and continue to this day. That he was also an editor at Playboy magazine for several years is a characteristic, but minor, footnote to his colorful life.

Bob was first, last and always a writer and his books, for the most part, remain in print. He wrote prolifically for his cult following and is probably best known for the the Illuminatus! trilogy, the book that made the Illuminati a feature of mass consciousness. But those of us who are, you know, in the cult are probably most affected by the first volume of his autobiography, Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati.

In Cosmic Trigger, Bob describes several decades of his experiments in what he called, "self-induced rapid brain change" -- that is, experiments with drugs, Sufism, ritual magick, yoga, meditation, tantra, quantum physics and anything else he could find that undermined that peculiar phantom known as, "the self". The results were intense: Bob experienced psychic flashes, the manifestation of a 6-foot-tall white rabbit and the peyote spirit, Illuminati contacts, guidance from the planet Sirius and all the other features of a well-lived psychedelic life. But he also raised a family, was happily married, made a good living writing, and stayed out of jail, mostly -- in other words, he was at least as sane as you and me. Actually, what am I saying... Bob was considerably saner than me.

Cosmic Trigger arrived in my life with perfect timing; I was negotiating my exit from a fundamentalist Christian cult, and his teachings helped me to do so with flair, not with the moping, clingy reluctance that I often observed in my fellow religious refugees. That I repeated many of the experiments described by Bob must go without saying, or at least without detail, but I will say that I am richer for them.

So thank you Bob, for gracing the world with your wit and wisdom these many years, for so fearlessly living a free life in a rigid society, and for setting an example of humor in the face of oppression that inspired many, and certainly changed my life for the better. Captain Clark welcomes you aboard.

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My favorite memory of Bob, hmmm. Late one night during one of many infamous Discordian Salons that Bob and Arlen hosted for their fellow writers, scientists and misfits, I found my gaze drifting to the window and out to the blackened sky beyond. There I saw a steady light hovering in the distance like some planet or star until, that is, it slowly dropped, made a ninety-degree angle turn and then, sped away at a 45 degrees angle out of view. I recall my mouth opening speechlessly thinking, "I just saw a UFO". At that moment, I looked across the room where I saw Bob looking right back at me, smiling with that Irish twinkle in his eyes. -- Antero Alli

January 11, 2012 marked the fifth anniversary of the passing of Robert Anton Wilson. January 18, 2012 also marks the 79th anniversary of Bob's birth, so this is a very good time to post this interview. For those who do not know who Bob Wilson was, he was an icon for being an iconoclast; as well as the author of over 35 books, including the Illuminatus! trilogy (Co-authored by Robert Shea).

Wilson described himself as a "model agnostic," who utilized "maybe logic." In other words, Bob was of the opinion that the maps we create -- i.e. mathematical formulas, words written down or spoken, pieces of art, etc. -- are more telling of the individual interacting with an experience, than the experience acting upon an individual. Therefore, it made very little sense to him to speak about this universal "law" or that absolute Truth. Bob believed that everyday language should and could integrate the 20th Century scientific discoveries in mathematics and physics, that it would be most wise to drop our attachments to Aristotelian either/or logic, the Euclidean "left/right" dichotomy applied to politics, and all the other medieval philosophic detritus clogging perceptions and causing confusion. Hence, a model agnostic, utilizing maybe logic.

Five years after his death, Wilson's work may now be heading towards the threshold of greater recognition. Wilson often reproduced the quote, "It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly," attributed to the 19th Century American Anarchist Josiah Warren. Perhaps these increasingly dangerous times are calling us to understand all the new things Robert Anton Wilson had to say, and to do so quickly.

I have interviewed five writers who knew both Robert Anton Wilson, the satirical philosopher, and Bob Wilson, the laid back husband and father who managed to find the time to write such mind-blowing and hilarious treatises as Prometheus Rising and Natural Law: or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy. Douglas Rushkoff, RU Sirius, David Jay Brown, Phil Farber, and Antero Alli are all accomplished thinkers in their own right, and have been kind enough to reminisce about the man they considered a mentor, teacher, and friend.

PROP: David, You once mentioned you were considering writing a book about exploring the 8-Circuit Model of Intelligence cross referenced with recent discoveries in neuroscience. How does the 8-Circuit Model stand in relation to today's neuroscience?

David Jay Brown: The material about the 8-circuit model of the brain that I've been developing, updating its relationship to modern neuroscience and cutting-edge technology, has been incorporated into my new book, Over the Edge of the Mind: Exploring the Interface of Psychedelics, Culture, and Consciousness -- which will be published by Inner Traditions this Fall. I think that the 8-circuit model has stood the test of time and that it becomes more and more relevant the more that we learn about neurochemistry, the anatomy of the brain, and the function of neural circuits. The reason that the 8-circuit of the brain model is so powerful, I think, is because it is based on the law of octaves, which describes how all energetic systems evolve in the universe. The rainbow and the musical scale are examples of how nature follows this universal law, and it was Leary's stroke of brilliance to apply this idea to the evolution of consciousness and the development of the individual. In my new book I have a section about which neuroanatomical, molecular, atomic, and quantum structures might correspond with the 8 circuits, and I suspect that this will be developed in much more sophisticated ways by others in the near future.

PROP: RU, What value does the "8 Circuit Model" hold for you? What benefits have you personally garnered from thinking about consciousness within this metaphor?

RU Sirius: I generally don't think about this model very frequently until I'm reminded of it... at which point it becomes painfully clear that the first four circuits are really pretty precise. I mean, I know they're metaphoric and I don't think there are actual smooth, definable circuits in the brain, but as a model of evolutionary psychology, they're right on target. The higher circuits are much more complicated. Even with the aid of psychedelic drugs or various techniques, I don't know that we can explore their accuracy on a fairly hostile planet as pre-posthumans. There's too much static... too much interference.

PROP: Antero, In two of your books, Angel Tech and The Eight-Circuit Brain, you have expounded and expanded upon the 8-circuit model of intelligence. What benefits have you personally gained from thinking about and working with your own consciousness within Leary and Wilson's model?

Antero Alli: Having interacted with, applied and written about this model for 30 years has pushed me well beyond Leary's and Wilson's modeling of the 8-Circuit Brain. This has been due to 30-plus years of doing para-theatre (asocial group ritual work) and the embodiment bias these processes have stamped in me. In other words, the eight circuits are no longer abstract concepts for me but a language linking to vital forces in my physical body and the energetic body and its sheath: the central nervous system. I don't really think about circuits anymore (unless I am teaching my online circuit course which I run once a year every Spring); it's all become more instinctual at this point. The benefits of learning and applying the 8-circuit model have been higher levels of discernment between differing states of consciousness and how they interact with and influence each other. Most especially in how the upper and lower circuits impact each other and can be made to work together. This discernment process has also given rise to a fluidity of self-detachment allowing more autonomy and integrity in my interactions with others. This same process has also afforded more perception into states of consciousness other people are engaging, whether they know it or not, which can be a mixed blessing -- depending on how I choose to interact with what I see and feel and, how others react to that.

PROP: Which book of Bob's has had the greatest affect on you?

David: My favorite of Bob's nonfiction works is Prometheus Rising, and my favorite fiction by Bob is The Schrödinger's Cat trilogy. But the book that undoubtedly had the most effect on my life -- out of every single book that I've ever read -- is Cosmic Trigger. It not only inspired the structure of the current book that I'm writing, Over the Edge of the Mind, it was the book that initially inspired me to become a writer. Many of the people that I later came to interview and work with, were first brought to my attention when I first read Cosmic Trigger as a wide-eyed teenager.

Douglas Rushkoff: Honestly, it was Bob the person who turned me onto his work. I ended up meeting him before really engaging with his stuff. And at that point it was Cosmic Trigger - both for the autobiographical aspects and how it teaches you how to be alive.

RU: The greatest for me is still the Illuminatus! trilogy which is the only novel series I've ever read repeatedly. It never bores. It's always dynamic and filled with interesting and strange ideas. He even explains a lot of obscure and semi-obscure political theories at the end of it all with perfect precision and clarity.

PROP: Phil, you have been a magickal practitioner for many years, and have offered your knowledge and experience in courses you've led at the Maybe Logic Academy, as well as in your new book Brain-Magick: Exercises in Meta-Magick and Invocation. When it comes to Magick, how would you rate Bob as a magician?

Phil Farber: I rate Bob up there with the best. More so than any other writer on the subject, he was able to reconcile critical thinking, modern physics and linguistics with the ancient traditions of magick. Privately, Bob was a devoted practitioner and explorer. He brought his wide-ranging intellect and his personal spark of creativity to the job of understanding and updating the techniques. He did the work, for real. In person, he was somewhat reticent to discuss his ongoing practices, but after they were, for him, history, he gave us some limited accounts in the Cosmic Trigger series and in a few other places. As a result, Bob is probably responsible for bringing more new students to magick and, specifically, to Thelema, than anyone else, perhaps Crowley included. As a writer, he brought uncommon sense to the subject and not only made magick appealing, but also understandable to the modern mind.

PROP: Antero, You have described the effect that Wilson's writing was able to elicit within you while reading such books as Cosmic Trigger. You have said, in 'The 8-Circuit Brain,' that Bob's writing 'had this unique way with words that acted on my ear-brain loop just like drugs.' Did you ever get to speak with him about how he developed such a dense and powerful style?

Antero: Bob Wilson was serious about brain change and maybe even more serious about writing. During my personal interactions with Bob and his friends, circa 1979-83, it was clear to us all that he was consciously experimenting with new ways of writing, of arranging words to trigger chemical reactions in the reader's brain. At the time, I likened this idea to the ancient arts of casting of spells to induce trance states. In his own way, I think this was how Bob embodied the Magus archetype. He was a highly skilled caster of spells with a wicked talent for breaking the very trances he created to procure a series of little awakenings in the reader's psyche. Bob told me once that the Olde English word for "magic" was grammarye. I think Bob knew what he was doing and he did it on purpose. I knew him as genuinely rebellious. He did not care as much about protesting against any abstract nemesis, like "The Man" or "The Machine" or "Society," as he did about daring others to question the authority of their own sleeping assumptions. He rebelled against his own assumptions all the time by claiming that all perceptions were gambles.

PROP: RU, One major theme in your 2004 book Counterculture through the Ages was that Counterculture is "the tradition of breaking with tradition," Bob Wilson's work showed an affinity for the heretic, as it were. If you were to play Sigmund sawed-off fucking Freud here, what aspect of Bob's personality do think attracted him to being a champion of such outlaw luminaries as Dr. Timothy Leary, Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, etc? And where would you place Wilson's work within this historical spectrum you so thoroughly lay out?

RU: I'd like to think that anyone of such great intelligence would be attracted to outsider ideas, although that's seemingly not the case. But maybe Bob really was just a heck of a lot smarter than many better known, more critically praised intellectuals. Anyone who understands Joyce's books inside out and upside down is operating at a level that can turn linguistic flow into a puzzle and vice versa. That's pretty incredible.

Personality-wise, Bob always struck me as more contrarian than maybe even he liked to believe. I mean, you wouldn't hang out with him and think... "well, here's a new age guy." He had this very wry incisive satiric wit that would be naturally impatient with received wisdom. I don't know. Maybe it's just because he was a New Yorker...with polio.

PROP: Douglas, you once told me that you thought Bob was next generation heroic. Could you elaborate on that statement?

Douglas: He didn't act like a hero. He was a regular person. He behaved without ego, and didn't try to get people to believe in him or what he believed. He would have been a good Occupier.

PROP: Phil, You lead seminars for learning Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Wilson was an avid practitioner of NLP. Why do you think Bob was attracted to Neuro-Linguistic Programming?

Phil: I think Bob and NLP were a natural combo. One of the roots of NLP was General Semantics, a field that Bob was heavily involved with over many years. Bob, prior to his involvement in NLP, was also very interested in Ericksonian hypnosis, another of NLP's antecedents. NLP also incorporates a form of model agnosticism - that our linguistic creations provide useful maps rather than objective "truth" - that would have been appealing to Bob. I also think that there was healthy friendship between Bob and some prominent NLPers, including Richard Bandler and the LaValles, who run the Society of NLP. Richard was a big fan of Bob's work and generally treated Bob like royalty when they worked together.

PROP: What is the most useful thing you have learned from Bob?

Antero: There were several "most useful things". His concept of "reality selection" stimulated my imagination and deflated my false certitudes (dogmas), allowing a freedom of thought I had not known before, a freedom based on entertaining multiple perspectives as a unique perspective unto itself. His down-to-earth attitude about all things mystical resonated strongly with me as a very useful outlook for my life's path. Perhaps the most useful thing I learned was how he managed to transform the tragic death of his daughter Luna through compassion, meditation, and yoga. This lesson was not truly learned until I lost my own daughter, Zoe, to sudden death some ten years later. This miraculous conversion of tragic into magic, as I called it, continues to this day as that kind of gift that keeps on giving.

Phil: Tough question. I learned so many useful things from Bob. How to find quarters (and, later on, twenties) on the ground was pretty useful. The eight circuit brain model has been a useful component of much of what I do. Some of Bob's story-telling style and technique was very educational for me.

One evening in the early '90s, my wife and I were driving Bob to a speaking gig at an area college that we had set up for him. We were running late and I was getting pretty nervous about getting to the lecture hall in time to see that things went off smoothly. As we neared the college, though, Bob spotted a pizza parlor and asked to stop for some slices. I protested that we were already late -- but Bob just chuckled and said, "It can't start without me." It may seem like a small thing, but that incident totally changed my attitude about my own speaking appearances. To this day, if I start to get nervous about it, I hear Bob's voice in my head saying "It can't start without me" and I become much more relaxed.

David: I learned more from Bob than probably any other single human being, so it's pretty hard to narrow it all down to the "most useful thing." But one of the most important things that I learned from Bob was how to write with cannabis, by alternating the states of mind the one edits from. In other words, if you write stoned, then edit straight; and if you write straight, then edit stoned. Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson, John Lilly, and Terence McKenna all taught me that the most important research in the world isn't being conducted in university laboratories, but rather, among the brave psychonauts who are exploring the frontiers of consciousness with an ever-increasing range of psychedelic drugs and shamanic plants.

PROP: Last question, What is your favorite memory of Bob?

Douglas: Probably when he came to my first talk for my first book. It was at Capitola Book Cafe, and he was there sitting next to Ralph Abraham and Nina Graboi. Then he walked me back to his house for a drink with his wife. Like Uncle Bob and Aunt Arlen.

Phil: Favorite memories are mostly personal -- sitting in a diner, listening to his stories over Irish coffee; rescuing him from the vegetarian kitchen of a new age center and taking him out for steak and seafood; hanging around our apartment after a gig and shooting the shit well into the night. It was also fun to watch the way he handled audiences. You could watch faces go from total confusion to "aha!" in the space of an hour or so. I always got a blast from seeing him do that. That's my kind of magick trick.

RU: I don't really have a colorful anecdote to tell about Bob so I can really only say that my favorite memory was of really connecting with him for a long conversation at the Disinformation Conference in New York City in 1999. He was pissed off and discombobulated because they'd screwed up his pick up at the airport and he'd had a miserable day and he was expected to talk in another 4 or 5 hours after assuming he would have a full day to settle in. And I knew what that was like. And somehow I got him engaged in relaxed chatter about anything and everything... dealing with miserable book companies, his wife and family, how Europe is so much more civilized than the US and so on and I'm sure I made him laugh a couple of times. We probably hung out like that for about an hour -- each of us nursing a beer -- and I could tell that when we were done, he'd forgotten about being pissed off and burned out from the traveling debacle. So nothing particularly magical or psychedelic or revolutionary, just a chance to play a friend, I guess...

The other thing that is a fond memory isn't even a direct interaction. Just an email that he really liked my book of quotes: "The Revolution" (which became the Little Red Book) and that he was excited to endorse it. I could tell he'd really read it and he was enthusiastic. That felt very special.

Antero: My favorite memory of Bob, hmmm. Late one night during one of many infamous Discordian Salons that Bob and Arlen hosted for their fellow writers, scientists and misfits, I found my gaze drifting to the window and out to the blackened sky beyond. There I saw a steady light hovering in the distance like some planet or star until, that is, it slowly dropped, made a ninety-degree angle turn and then, sped away at a 45 degrees angle out of view. I recall my mouth opening speechlessly thinking, "I just saw a UFO". At that moment, I looked across the room where I saw Bob looking right back at me, smiling with that Irish twinkle in his eyes.

David: After I completed writing my first book, Brainchild, at the age of twenty-six, I approached Bob after a lecture that he gave and asked him if he would be willing to write me a promotional blurb for the back cover of the book. This was the first contact that I ever had with him. He said, "maybe," and didn't really leave me with the impression that he was too eager to do it. I got the feeling that young writers bugged him all the time for back cover blurbs. But I had my publisher send him a copy of the book anyway. You can imagine my surprise -- and total radiant delight -- when I discovered that Bob had actually written an eleven page introduction for the book! Words simply can not describe what a thrilling experience this was for me!

In 1989, I moved to Los Angeles, where Bob and his wife Arlen were living at the time, and I became good friends with them. I began going to regular weekly gatherings at Bob and Arlen's home where a small group would read and discuss mind-expanding ideas together. We read virtually everything that James Joyce had written, Ezra Pound's The Cantos, each other's writings, and Bob's books. We watched Orson Wells' films and talked about quantum physics and primate politics. I felt like I was living through a powerful historical moment--that future generations will surely fantasize about -- when I got to take part in the Illuminatus! readings and discussions with Bob. I continued going to weekly gatherings at Bob's home right up until a few weeks before he died. He remained as sharp and witty as ever right up until the end. I saw Bob on average around once a week for seventeen years, during which time he played a huge role in my writing career. He was incredibly supportive of my writing. He wrote letters to cheer me up when I was down and even sent me money when I couldn't afford to pay my rent.

Bob often gave me credit for coming up with the abbreviation of "B.S." for "belief system" in his books, but one of the happiest days in my writing career came when Bob actually asked me to write a back cover blurb for his book, TSOG: The Thing That Ate the Constitution. My book Mavericks of Medicine is dedicated to Bob.

Bob had an uncanny ability to perceive things that few people notice, and he had an incredible memory. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of many different fields -- ranging from literature and psychology, to quantum physics and neuroscience. He was unusually creative in his use of language, and he had his own unique style of humor. Despite many personal challenges over the years, Bob always maintained a strongly upbeat perspective on life, and - -regardless of the circumstances -- he never failed to make me smile every time I saw him. Everyone who met him agrees; there was something truly magical about Robert Anton Wilson. Along with so many other people, I miss him dearly. Thank the stars that he left behind so much of himself -- thirty-six books -- for us to learn from and enjoy for many, many years to come.

PROP: I'd like to include my own favorite memory of Bob. It was 2003, at the premiere of the movie about Bob called 'Maybe Logic,' where I met David Jay Brown and he was able to hook up an interview with Bob, which I conducted a day later at Bob's Santa Cruz apartment.

During the tail end of the interview Bob let out what George Carlin so aptly titled a "one cheek sneak." Bob kinda powerhoused it, and I heard the fart from across the room. I looked at him with a bit of surprise in my eyes, to which he met my baffled stare very nonchalantly and said, "Oh, ya heard that?" The shock quickly wore off with some laughter on my part. Having been raised in a fart-friendly family myself, I had long ago become accustom to the exuberant humor which sometimes arises from a perfectly placed moment of flatulence.

This fart lead to another turn of the interview where we spoke about famous writers and thinkers who also were not afraid of flatulence. I asked Bob if he read Benjamin Franklin's book Fart Proudly (which he just did) and he said he had. And Bob told me of story written by Mark Twain, entitled, 1601 about a group of writers from the Elizabethan period of England all attending a fancy event thrown by Queen Elizabeth. The party is interrupted when somebody lets loose a whooping fart, and the rest of the tale consumes itself with a conversation describing the fart and who may have laid it. At this point in the interview, I thought "Jeezus, is there nothing this man cannot flip into something enlightening and hilarious." There are many amazing things that I have learned from the works of Robert Anton Wilson, but to me, the old man farting in his apartment was like a lesson from a wise Zen master. "Like what you like, enjoy what you enjoy, and don't take crap from anybody." And I heard it, loud and clear.

Thanks Phil Farber, David Jay Brown, Douglas Rushkoff, Antero Alli, and RU Sirius for taking part in this interview.

Post Script: Hail Eris!

FNORD!!

Mark Dery: You’re best known as the co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, which seemingly interweaves every known conspiracy theory. What do you think makes this moment in history such a breeding ground for paranoid visions of government cover-ups of alien autopsies, black helicopters over America and so forth. Is millennial culture out of control?

RAW: Yes. Most people don’t know why the world is changing so fast and in so many weird directions, so they look for somebody to blame; it just depends on their belief systems, whether they’re going to blame the Elders of Zion, the Bavarian Illuminati, the Freemasons, Swiss bankers, or whoever. People just can’t understand that some things are dynamic structural factors of the whole sociology, the whole technological environment in which we live; they want to find a bloc-like entity to explain everything. It’s primitive, but very prevalent. I’m currently working on a book called The Encyclopedia of Conspiracies; it’s an attempt to keep the irony subdued and do a scholarly treatment of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories fascinate me because they’re a good testing ground for non-Aristotelian logic. Most people either accept them in whole or reject them in whole; I try to apply fuzzy logic, asking “How much of this can really be proven and how much of it is just blind assertion?” It’s interesting to look at them without an either/or but simply in terms of how probable various parts of the theory are. Either/or seems so crude and primitive to me, and yet most people are still hung up on it. Korzybski had a major influence on my thinking in this regard.

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Illuminatus! was a touchstone for freethinking weirdos of that era, one of the rare books that even attempted to make sense of being born into an ever increasingly surreal world still reeling from things like the JFK/MLK/RFK assassinations, Watergate and the Vietnam war and where Ronald Reagan, a bad actor who once worked with a chimpanzee, had just become President.

It was also an interesting experiment in mass occult initiation -- sold at shopping malls across America -- that satirically tore away the veils of the modern world and (actively, not passively) imprinted a skeptical worldview on the reader. Read those books from cover to cover and there was virtually not a chance in hell that you'd be a normal person ever again. The Illuminatus! trilogy really made quite an impression, let's just say.

Wilson's non-fiction work, Cosmic Trigger, was of even greater interest to me with its cheerful speculations on Timothy Leary's channeled communications from "holy guardian angels," psychedelic drugs and Aleister Crowley. The so-called "23 enigma," I was familiar with already because of The Third Mind by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, but it was explained in greater depth in Cosmic Trigger. It was the first place I'd read of Robert K. Temple's book The Sirius Mystery and it was also the first time I heard the name Terence McKenna. I can't tell you how many weird and wonderful things that book exposed me to.

It was instrumental in forming my worldview. Simply put, it's in my DNA. Cosmic Trigger is one of the UR-documents of my life (and career!).

The first time I met up with Bob Wilson, in the flesh, was at a day-long event called "Millennial Madness" that took place in the Scottish Rites Masonic Temple on Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles. It must have been around 1993. He was speaking at the event on a bill with Timothy Leary, medical marijuana guru Jack Herer and Paul Krassner. RAW was outside having a cigarette and I nervously offered him some of the spliff I was smoking, which he happily accepted and we chatted for a moment.

Wilson would be in town from time to time throughout the '90s giving lectures in New Age bookstores like The Phoenix in Santa Monica, a place that sold incense, candles and tarot card decks alongside of conspiracy theory 'zines, black magic grimoires and Ron Paul's newsletters. It was that sort of store. Of course, I was always right there in the front row. Wilson would usually hang about for a pretty long time afterwards, normally in the parking lot, talking, accepting weird offerings, and smoking cigarettes and joints, which always seemed to be around (Not that Bob was "holding," it would be offered to him by devoted fanboys like me and he wouldn't turn it down). Sometimes he would appear with Tim Leary at the Phoenix and they'd do a sort of double act.

So I kind of knew him from the time I was about 26 or 27, but even if he knew my face, I doubt that he knew my name. The first time I ever interviewed Bob was over the telephone from New York, in early 1997, back when my Pseudo.com talkshow, "Infinity Factory," was still an audio-only affair. Most of the questions I had for him related to his occult "contact" experiences as recounted in the first Cosmic Trigger volume.

I was still quite new at the "live on air" interviewer thing at the time and I think I over-prepared in a big way with seventeen pages pages of neatly typed questions prepared for a one-hour interview. It's a good thing I did overdo it because it became immediately apparent during the first few moments that he was simply in no mood to talk about something he'd written nearly 25-years earlier. During the first commercial break, I went into the control room and picked up the phone in a panic, informing Bob that -- yikes -- nearly ALL of my prepared questions had to do with Cosmic Trigger and specifically the parts about Timothy Leary's so-called Starseed Transmissions and what Wilson made of it after Leary's recent passing. It never occurred to me that he would be so annoyed by informed questions relating to one of his most famous books!

Bob's reply -- although not what I wanted to hear at that particular moment -- was revelatory and I've never forgotten it: It wasn't just that he had moved on from his 1975 thoughts on some mystical/occult/New Age matter, it was that he didn't want to spoil the fun of that book for future readers. "My current reality tunnel is quite different from the reality tunnel I had in 1975, but I'd rather let my readers come to their own conclusions, like I eventually did about this mystical-occult stuff and not do it for them."

"Hey, whatever, it was the Seventies..." has always been a pretty good excuse, I think you'll agree...

Somehow I got through it. Although, it hardly rose to the level of "traumatizing," I've never been able to bring myself to listen to that interview (It's on a cassette tape in a shoebox out in the garage. I found it just the other day along with a micro-cassette recording of Grant Morrison only moments after his first DMT trip in my Greenwich Village apartment in 1997).

After the interview, Bob put me on his list of his email friends, an informal electronic bullshitting cadre comprised of around 35 super-smart people that went on all day long with articles, mostly, but not always, passed on to Bob first, vetted by him, and then sent to the rest of the "Group Mind," as he called us. Bob sent tons of interesting stuff our way, I'd estimate as many as 20-30 articles per day. It gave you a very good idea of what he was thinking about for the entire day and what information sources he prized most highly (Science publications, in case you are wondering. Things about medical marijuana. Conspiracies. Old man jokes. He loved stuff about idiot Republicans, too).

If you'd have told the 14-year-old me that the 30-something me would be getting a few dozen daily messages (on a "personal computer"??? In my own home???) from the mysterious co-author of the Illuminatus! Trilogy, I would have been totally stoked, believe you me!

Later that year, on November 7, 1997, I had the chance to interview Bob again, this time on camera, at Pseudo, where they had recently upgraded the "radio studio" to a "TV studio" with those old webcams that looked like a pack of cards on a pivot. Mindful of how poorly the last interview had gone, and wondering if Bob was going to be grumpy again, I asked Genesis P-Orridge to co-host the interview with me as my "wingman." Although both of them had contributed dual introductions to a Crowley reader titled Portable Darkness -- and were two of the most high profile "23 enigma" proponents, as well, let's not forget -- they had never met before (I'm imagining that my copy of that book might be the sole copy signed by both of them. I'm not certain that Bob made the connection of who Gen was until after the interview was over and I presented the book to both of them to sign).

The show was live and due to traffic, Bob turned up at the very, very last possible minute to the Pseudo studios on the corner of Broadway and Houston. He was in New York to give The Institute of General Semantics's "Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture" that night at the Harvard Club, but his hotel was in New Jersey for some reason. This time the interview went a lot better, but for the first part of it (and you can kind of see this in the video), Wilson kept looking warily at Genesis, like he didn't really know what to make of him! Bob became more relaxed after I whipped out a joint during one of the commercial breaks which he and I huffed down in record speed.

You can't see him on camera, but there was a fourth chair in the room where this kid sat, clicking absentmindedly from camera to camera with a low-tech Radio Shack A-B-C video thumb switch! I mean this was LOW tech, but also pretty high tech, too, considering that this was live streaming Internet video eight years before anyone ever heard of YouTube. It may have been a 28.8 modem world still at that point, and the video might have looked closer to a flickery slide show the size of a postage stamp than actual "video," but it was still a lot of fun to be there that day.

Someone videotaped it off Manhattan Cable (where "Infinity Factory" could be accidentally discovered by viewers of "E.R" who channel-surfed just one click away on the cable box in New York City from 1997-1999!) and posted it up YouTube in six parts.

Later that night, Douglas Rushkoff, Genesis, Parker Posey and I went to Bob's lecture and he was on good form, speaking to a sold-out crowd at the Harvard Club. The subjects he spoke about that night were virtually identical to what he said during the interview, as if it was a dry run of the speech, but only Gen and I would have known this, of course.

After this, every time I found myself in San Francisco - -and I mean every single time -- I would make the drive to Capitola to spend some time with Bob. He always made me feel like he was very happy to see me. He picked my brain as much as I picked his, which is one of the best compliments someone you revere can ever pay to you.

It was Genesis who had passed along something to me that Brion Gysin had said to him about how "wisdom" is transmitted: That you had to "touch hands." What Gysin meant, in the mundane sense, was that you had to physically spend time hanging out with one of your heroes, there was no other way, to really learn what they were all about and to discover what it was that they knew that you wanted to know....

Where books alone would simply not suffice, it's quite a bit of fun -- and yes, a great learning experience -- to be able to open the refrigerator door of someone you admire, see what their coffee mugs say on them and check out their bookshelves. (For the record, Bob's mug had J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, messiah of the Church of the SubGenius on it (Bob was a SubGenius Pope). He didn't actually have a lot of books in his apartment, but he had tons of VHS videotapes. Lots of Clint Eastwood and Orson Welles movies. Bob was definitely not a "stuff" person.)

Whenever I visited Bob, I always had herb on me (shocking, I know), and we would sit on his little porch area outside overlooking the ocean and smoke and talk for a few hours. I can't recall how many times I visited him at his home in Capitola, less than ten, probably, but it was always a lot of fun and I always learned something new.

If you asked me to quantify what exactly it was that I learned from knowing Robert Anton Wilson personally, in that "touching hands" (or "getting stoned with") kind of way, and I had to separate that from his books, I'd answer, without much hesitation, that he really and truly was what he claimed to be, an "irrational rationalist." There was nothing superstitious -- and I mean nothing whatsoever -- about Bob Wilson. True, he had always been interested in "occult" things, but he himself was no "occultist," rather he was an observer of "occultism" (like an anthropologist would be). He never dismissed anomalist information -- he loved it -- but assumed (correctly, like both Aleister Crowley and Count Korzybski did) that even the most far out things will ultimately get scientific explanations.

The same was true of "conspiracy theories." He was fascinated by them and by the people who believed in them, but knew fully well what he was dealing with. I used to be fond of saying "I'm not a conspiracy theorist, I just play one on TV." RAW was pretty much the same in this regard. There are historically documented facts and criminal conspiracies (Watergate, Iran Contra, the P2 organization in Italy) and then there are "conspiracy theories" ("The Montauk Project," David Icke's reptoid Royals, Lyndon LaRouche) and Wilson did not confuse the two, I can assure you.

If there had been points in his life when he was more of a "believer," he had most certainly long ago moved on from that mindset by the time I met him. Bob "believed" in nothing, and could hold five competing theories in his head to explain something, adhering to none of them dogmatically. There's some confusion about what his political philosophy was like. Wilson is always claimed by the Libertarians because he was against people being arrested for victimless crimes, but the Libertarians won't tell you that RAW also was a strong proponent of the "basic income guarantee" which would make him more of a Socialist than Libertarian, of course, but really he was neither. He wasn't deluded by any political system is perhaps the best way to put it).

On one visit I showed up with a small TV crew and shot an interview with Bob for my late-night British TV show. This was in 1999. I actually don't even have a copy of this myself:

Part 1 (above) | Part 2

I also caught up with Bob in New York, when he was the headliner of an event I organized, the DisinfoCon, which was one of his last major public appearances, in February of 2000, and in Palm Springs where he was doing a New Age lecture on a group bill and invited me to drive out from LA to hang out.

[Video Link] Robert Anton Wilson at the DisinfoCon, February 19, 2000 at Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City.

The RAW fans contingent in Palm Springs were totally distinct from everyone else present (goths and cyberpunk vs New Agey senior citizens who wanted to hear about Pleiadian prophecy and 2012 Mayan stuff, which Bob just hated). Bob got really ripped on hard alcohol before his talk and swore like a sailor, which seemed to deeply offend the organizers of the event. We ended up hanging out in his hotel suite smoking pot. A young guy had given him a bag of these black psilocybin mushrooms which he'd managed to smuggle into America from Ireland, which Bob didn't really seem to want and gave to me (my god were they strong). It was in Palm Springs that I got to see firsthand how bad his post-polio syndrome had gotten. He was getting pretty wobbly on his feet, but this did not seem to dampen his enthusiasm in the least for copious amounts of Marlboro reds, whiskey and weed.

Mentally he was certainly as sharp as ever, that never changed, but his health seemed to go downhill quite fast in the years I knew him. The aforementioned "enthusiasms" were often consumed with rapacious gusto for a man of his age and he once revealed to me that since nearly everyone who he had ever loved in his life was already dead, he was going to smoke as many cigarettes and pound back as much Scotch as he damn well pleased. Bob's your uncle!

If I am making him sound a little bit cranky, he was a little bit cranky at times. But no worse than any other older man (I had 93-year-old Brother Theodore to compare Bob to). Once, after he'd gone though a litany of his aches and pains, he caught himself and asked me comically: "I'm not one of those old farts always complaining about their aches and pains all the time, am I?" I lied and told him that he wasn't "too bad" and he seemed relieved to hear this.

The last time I saw Bob, it must've been 2005, right after I got married, as I was leaving, he wheeled himself to the door, took my hand, looked me squarely in the eye and said "I'm very glad you made it down here to visit me, Richard. I was really hoping I would get to see you again before I died."

I'd never had someone say something so incredibly stark to me before, but I knew what he meant and he was looking very, very frail by this point. I probably wouldn't see him again.

I held his hand and kept his gaze and smiled at him for a moment, and then, realizing that he'd just said something "heavy," Bob laughed and told me to "Keep the lasagna flying!" and shut the door.

Fnord

Joining me in the interview is Carla Sinclair, who cofounded the print edition of bOING bOING with me back in 1988!

We'd like to give a special thanks to EdgeCast Networks, our bandwidth provider and sponsor!

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-- Robert Anton Wilson

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RAW (seated) and Rev. Ivan Stang (left)

If Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea had not written the Illuminatus! trilogy, there might still be a Church of the SubGenius, but we probably wouldn't get it.

All SubGeniuses, Dr. Philo Drummond and myself in particular, owe Pope Bob big time, and we've never made any bones about that. He and Shea gave us the broad view of conspiracy theories that is required for any understanding of what we call The Conspiracy. RAW's seemingly countless other books also served to remind us that while we are indeed crazy, the so-called "normal" people are even crazier.

In the late 1970s, I felt compelled to get Pope Bob's attention somehow, mainly so that I would have an excuse to send him our first SubGenius Pamphlet. He had once mentioned an oddball Texas UFO-related cult called The Silver Shirts, so I decided to write him with questions about them. At the end of his informative response, which I was amazed to receive, he told me, "If you get any deeper into UFOs, remember to keep your sense of humor!" His timing was perfect -- I was about to lose my sense of humor about UFOs -- and I took his advice to heart.

Later, in the 1980s, I had the honor of opening for him, or at least introducing him, when he lectured in Austin or Dallas, so I got to meet him in person and even have a few dinners with him. I busted ass writing up a proper introductory rant about this fellow that I regarded almost as a god, and I expanded on it each time. It was a series of lines like, "...he is the James Joyce of swingset instruction manuals... the Lenny Bruce of children's books..." I have been gratified that not only have others swiped that intro to describe other artists, but that Pope Bob himself used parts of it to describe himself.

He was always extremely supportive of the SubGenius projects, contributing to our books for practically no pay, and frequently mentioning the Church of the SubGenius as well as his close personal friend, J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, in his writings and talks. While I was still a wet-behind-the-ears baby radio DJ, he guested on my radio show, "The Hour of Slack," and to this day I regret not simply letting him talk the whole time.

A video clip from that ancient show:

When we started abusing Usenet in the early 1990s, Pope Bob, using the nym "The Mgt.," frequently trolled the old former SubGenius newsgroup, alt.slack (now abandoned for a more private forum). I think I was the only participant who knew it was the great RAW who was posting these outrageous statements. "The Mgt." constantly infuriated the SubGenii of those days by posing as an ultra-extreme misogynist, or a crazy far-right-winger, or simply as an idiot; proof of his trolling skill is the fact that so many SubGenii -- who themselves tend to specialize in a kind of long-term troll -- took him seriously. I never let on what I knew -- UNTIL NOW!

At a short-lived annual weirdo convention called Phenomicon in Atlanta, Pope Bob and I ended up together on a discussion panel that also included arch-skeptic Bob Sheaffer, several little old New Age ladies and the late conspiracy theorist and all-around kook, William Cooper of Behold a Pale Horse fame. Sheaffer, the skeptic, was friendly to me but tried to run down RAW as some kind of charlatan. I think RAW might have been a little over Sheaffer's head as a put-on artist. Pope Bob certainly took Sheaffer's weird accusations gracefully. But it was William Cooper who really tried to lambast both of us. "There are some on this panel," he declared, meaning Wilson and me, "who have done nothing but trivialize and make light of the most serious issues facing us today, and they are worthy only of our disdain." (I paraphrase.) An audience member stood up and said, "The only reason most of us are here at all is because these two guys have written, in entertaining but sensible ways, how fringe extremists like you might be worth listening to." That got a standing ovation from most of the audience, which took some of the hot wind from Cooper's sails.

I later became involved with the Association for Consciousness Exploration ("A.C.E.") in Cleveland. Pope Bob and I were frequent speakers at their Starwood and Winterstar festivals. One of my fondest memories of A.C.E. events is one night during a Winterstar when I got to sit in a cabin with both Wilson and Robert Shea listening to the two old chums discuss their favorite subject: MOVIES. Those two could sling movie trivia like nobody's business.

The last time I saw Pope Bob, it was again at Winterstar, and although his old polio problems had him in a wheelchair and probably in a lot of pain, he was as cheerful, scrappy and mischievous as ever. He was an enthusiastic Hannibal Lecter fan and expressed to me his disgust that the grisly shock ending of the novel Hannibal had been grossly changed and softened for the movie adaptation.

Because I had videotaped many of RAW's lectures in Texas and Ohio, I was able to contribute footage to the RAW bio film Maybe Logic. The film's producer later started the online Maybe Logic Academy, and I was invited to teach courses on SubGenius history and how to run a home-made cult. Ironically, my first class started on the day Pope Bob died. I quickly assembled a gallery of all the digital photos and video frame grabs I had relating to him, which can be seen here.

I have one and only one negative thing to say about Pope Bob. He was not microphone-friendly. I've lost count of the times I, as amateur sound technician, had to creep up onto a stage and push that mic just a little closer to his lips. He would NOT raise his voice nor lean into the mic. That just meant that his listeners had to sit closer and be quiet to hear what he had to say. It is a testament to the content of his speech that so many people stayed so silent and sat so close to him in order to hear that incredibly wise and whimsical Brooklyn monotone.

One last important historical point. Despite what the San Jose newspaper said, the SubGenius guru and cult founder J. R. "Bob" Dobbs is not based on Robert Anton Wilson or anybody else. He is simply "Bob." Wilson himself described getting drunk with "Bob." It would be more accurate to say that we might ourselves all be based, however loosely, on "Bob," but that without RAW we would be unable to entertain that very thought.

My very favorite RAW quote is: "Maybe if we all said 'maybe' more often, the world might be a nicer place." He said that a hundred different ways, and each time I heard him say it, it rang very true. He gave us the gift of DOUBT.

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― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger

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It didn't help that I spent the summer reading Aleister Crowley, Phil Dick, the Principia Discordia, and Robert Anton Wilson, especially the Illuminatus! Trilogy, Prometheus Rising, and Cosmic Trigger. Or maybe this was the only stuff that actually did help -- and especially RAW, who taught me, as he taught so many others, to nimbly dodge the gravity wells that threaten to suck us down the various informational reality tunnels that make a Swiss cheese of our consensus trance. A year ago I traded a bunch of books to a Russian teenager who sent me a couple of samizdat copies of my book Techgnosis, translated into Russian. He liked Terence McKenna and wanted me to send him more books that would tug the silly putty of his world with humor and verve. He was about the same age I was when I had my Weirdest Summer Ever. And so RAW -- and especially the two indispensable nonfiction books listed above -- topped the list. He appreciated them.

I got to see RAW give a few talks and workshops, but didn't meet the man until a year or so before his death. Every Wednesday a group of friends and supporters, including some utterly charming female care-givers, would gather at his Santa Cruz apartment and read through Joyce's Finnegans Wake -- which basically meant reading half a paragraph and then watching RAW unpack it with extraordinary finesse, humor, and erudition, revealing the text to be a palimpsest of possibilities dependent on the mind of the reader to unfurl. (This was one thing that linked him to McKenna.) Before the group bull session began, as the sun slipped into the Pacific, I hung out with RAW on his balcony. Deep in my own investigations into the history of California esoterica, I pressed him on biographical information, especially about the early-70s East Bay psychedelic and occult underground that forms the invisible backdrop of Cosmic Trigger. But he avoided my questions and invitations to stroll (or sneak) down memory lane; instead, he stuck to more-or-less familiar ideas about general semantics, cognitive filters, and mind viruses. His personal life lay in a galaxy far, far away.

What impressed me most about the evening was not RAW's scintillating Joyce readings or his continued devotion to the broad and fertile set of ideas he explored in his many books. Instead it was his attitude towards his own physical infirmity. In addition to whatever unspoken indignities he was forced to endure and had the good grace to leave unmentioned in the gathering, he had a terribly difficult time moving his body forward once he had settled himself back into the sofa. The simple act of leaning forward took him minutes to perform, but perform it he did, without aid. He may have just been stubborn, but he seemed rather to simply be manifesting his own amused and bemused attitude toward the absurdities of life, his own struggle with the cornball mystery.

RAW has long been a fiercely independent thinker and writer, and he performed that independence for us and himself as he took those excruciating moments to eek his body forward from the sofa. Of course, you pay a cost for fierce independence. Indeed, when I came to understand RAW's precarious financial situation, I was struck with the realities of what a life on the cognitive fringe can leave you materially in your dotage. At the same time, the evening was also a testament to the community of care that had "anarchically" formed around him, a local crew of cannabis activists, alternative thinkers, and very friendly freaks that RAW himself had unknowingly helped seed through his books and ideas. This particular feedback loop was deeply moving.

In October of 2006, Douglas Rushkoff, another mind permanently marked by RAW's unique semantic hieroglyphs, helped raise a good deal of cash for the man's hospice care in a web-driven campaign that anticipated the crowdfunding logic of Kickstarter by several years. Other networks that helped spread the word that year included Slashdot, innumerable weirdo listservs, and, of course, Boing Boing -- old-school nethead cultural nodes that were and are deeply marked by RAW's canny and skeptical mytho-logic, his data-dense cultural enthusiasm, and his wry and libertarian embrace of indeterminacy.

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Like, I'm sure, tens of thousands of others, I snapped up the Illuminatus! trilogy when Dell first published it in 1975, reading each volume as it came out, awed by the erudition, the chutzpa, and the sheer lunacy of it. Who were these guys? I reviewed the trilogy in Tales from Texas, a fanzine I edited at the time with my friend Bob Wayne, and talked it up for years. As a result, Austin zine publisher Rick Shannon thought of me when he scored the chance to interview Wilson in April of 1988.

It was a strange evening. Wilson insisted that we conduct the interview over dinner at his hotel. He knew that Rick had virtually no budget, but he insisted that Rick pick up the check and ordered from the top of the menu -- steak and lobster, with wine, if memory serves. He didn't seem fully present to me -- I had the feeling at the time that he wasn't really listening to our questions, that he was talking over us, and delivering set pieces from his repertoire.

But when I sat down with the tape to transcribe it, I had a completely different reaction. The Wilson on the tape seemed compassionate and engaged, prescient and wise. It was like an alternate version of the evening. And when I subsequently approached Wilson to write an original short story for my anti-war anthology, When the Music's Over, he was quite friendly and accommodating.

The interview is on the internet now, thanks to Wilson scholar Tom Jackson, who calls it "one of the best interviews with Robert Anton Wilson I've ever read"

So, apparently, he was not just covering old ground. He was a real character, definitely one of a kind.

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The books were Part One and Part Three of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy. The center was missing! The book was such a total buzz that it hardly mattered.

Illuminatus! was unusual in its time because, in some ways, there seemed to be a sort of unspoken embargo against any novelist who wanted to be considered intellectually credible writing something this directly tied in to hardcore psychedelic freak culture.

If you were a countercultural person, you probably had read Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest; you read some Vonnegut; you read Heller's Catch 22; maybe some Marge Piercy. If you were into SF, you read some of Philip K. Dick's funny, gloomy, strange loopy multiple reality stories. In 1974, everybody read Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein and Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleister Crowley. You might have been catching up on Burroughs' cut up trilogy, which sat in my bathroom and seemed conducive to picking up at random, particularly while stoned and crapping. Some of the characters in some of these books were hipsters or alternative in their ways, but you weren't going to get direct references to SDS and Yippies and tantric sex and groovy hashish meditations on the nature of reality in the language of the "kids" of the time. Besides being a dense, brilliant, philosophic, multileveled yarn, Wilson and Shea tapped on my brain and said "Hello, fellow tripper."

After finishing Part One, I headed back to the store and requested Part Two. The owner ordered it, but I wasn't going to sit around waiting and lose the buzz. I dived right into Part Three. One morning, with a good 100 pages or so left to read, I snorted a nice sharp line of speed (I was no speed freak, but on the occasions when I did take some, I loved to read and read and read... and read some more. I read most of Gravity's Rainbow that way) and I spent the day sitting in a local park devouring the rest of the book in its entirety.

It was just getting dark when I finished and started my brief walk home. But as I passed by the first house on the corner upon exiting the park this actual speed freak -- bearded, hair spilling in all directions, rough looking and wild eyed rushed out of his door shaking bodily and glared at me."You've been watching us but we've been watching you. Who are you with?" Now, I was in the Illuminatus! Trilogy. "Kenny Goffman. I know who you are. Who are you with?" I noticed other characters peering out of the house from behind the blinds -- speed freaks having a major paranoid episode, all because I'd sat out in the park right near their house all fucking day no doubt pretending to read a book. A quick sputtering of words including "rip off" and "bust" expressed the strung out man's concern that I was advance man either for some druggies bent on robbery or some narcs that were coming to get them that very day.

I waved the book in front of him."No, I was just reading this." He grabbed the book out of my hand, looked at the cover, flipped through a few of the pages and the tension instantly dissolved. Obviously, this was no fake. This was a book that someone who liked to get high would spend the entire day reading. "Where did you find this?" he asked -- as though examining a rare artifact (which it was) before sending me on my merry way.

Upon arriving home, a group of friends and housemates told me that I'd arrived just in time. They were going to see The Man Who Fell To Earth, just recently released, and they knew that I would have been inconsolable if I found out I had missed them. They'd waited until the last possible minute.

Something about the mix -- the Illuminatus! Trilogy, the Bowie-Roeg collaboration, the speed -- put me in the most radically altered state I'd experienced up until that moment. That night, back home, I had my own sort of VALIS experience (the book had not been published yet) -- the feeling that all the information in the universe had suddenly been mainlined right through my pineal (I would later describe the DMT experience that way, but this was without psychedelics) and I flipped between a state of agape and dread far into the night.

Eventually, after finally reading Part Two of Illuminatus! and many more books and essays by Robert Anton Wilson -- including one in Oui called "10 Reasons To Get Out Of Bed In The Morning" that, broadly speaking, had its intended effect, I would meet the man in person.

In 1984, after publishing the first edition of High Frontiers (it would eventually become Mondo 2000), we were offered the opportunity to sponsor a Bob Wilson talk for $500. We arranged to have an event on the Vallejo, more colloquially known as "the Alan Watts Houseboat," in Sausalito. We called it a High Frontiers fundraiser, limited the crowd to 60 people and charged $40 per head, serving gourmet food cooked up by our own Mark Frost (aka Somerset Mau Mau). It was a rainy day and Wilson showed up in dress clothes. There was a massive puddle between he and the boat. He stood in front of that puddle for many moments, looking unhappy and -- at one point -- seemed to turn to leave. But then, he bucked up. He took off his shoes, rolled up his pants and crossed Puddle Perilous.

Wilson in person was different from Wilson in print. For the most part, Learyesque 8-circuitry was pushed to the margins; techno-optimism was also little to be heard. What we got (and this held true for most of the other times I'd see him speak) was a coruscating dryly humorous exploration of philosophy and the current state of humanity and the world that was, in some ways, reminiscent of George Carlin (or maybe "reminiscent" of Carlin in the future). It left us all transfixed and delighted.

I had various interactions with Bob over the years, only really feeling like I connected with him a couple of times. Once was at a SF convention when our private conversation turned to the predations of the mainstream book industry and we continued for a long hour over lunch. And another time; at the Disinformation Conference in Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC where he showed up backstage seriously upset that his airport pickup had been screwed up and that he hadn't had a chance to unwind from the flight before being rushed to the hall where he had to speak to a fairly large audience in just a couple of hours. And somehow, as we both nursed beers, I distracted him from his misery (partly, perhaps, because I was dressed in drag) with conversation about -- again -- book companies; and I also got him talking about Europe, which he loved and where he had just spent some time. Nothing cosmic, just your basic bipeds exchanging symbols of commonality. But I was happy to -- in a small way -- do for him what he had done for me for over two decades; pull him out of a bad emotional mind loop so that he could perform his assigned task.

Addendum: It occurs to me that commentators will quibble with my assertion that Illuminatus! was the first worthwhile novel that directly expressed and reflected the world of psychedelic freak culture and this will probably provoke lists of other books that some feel filled the bill before that (Actually, that would be fun). I'll just say that it was the first one that I came across that seemed to... and I haunted bookstores frequently, both in Binghamton NY... and in NYC whenever I had the chance. There were a couple of "Yippie" novels in the early '70s... but as much as I liked the authors, they weren't good.

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It wasn't until ten years later, in the fall of 1998, that he agreed to appear in Gnosis again, this time in an interview for our 50th issue. Little did we know then that #50 would be the next-to-last issue of the magazine. An unauthorized, OCR'd version of the interview is online, with all the little glitches that often creep in through OCR. Still, Wilson's voice comes through loud and clear, amused and bemused by the perennial question: what is reality?

[Note: Copies of the back issue of Gnosis #50, in which RAW's interview appeared, are available from Fields Books]

Here's a link to the unauthorized version of the interview.

― Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, The Eye in the Pyramid, 1975

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[Video Link] Our friend, author Douglas Rushkoff, fills the late Robert Anton Wilson in on what he's missed since passing away on February 11, 2007.

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The Summer of 1979; Berkeley California. The back story of how I got here is far and away too convoluted to explain but here I am sitting on a couch in Robert Anton Wilson's living room, dumbfounded by the rapid-fire laughter and brain power of the intelligentsia bouncing off the walls around me. At 26, I was clearly the youngest person in the room, the baby of this illuminati of scientists, authors, mathematicians, magicians, and discordians. The person who stood out beyond all the other lights in the room was Bob’s wife, Arlen, a wizened red-haired, full-bodied woman with a bawdy sense of humor and an astonishing literary intellect. There was something about Arlen that was simultaneously severe and merciful, critically observant yet very kind. Arlen was also clearly Bob's muse.

Bob was in fine form that night reading excerpts from his as of yet unpublished book, The Trick Top Hat, from his Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy. I sat there astonished by the highly compact, information-rich writing style he had developed. It was as if every other word triggered a different chemical in my brain. Bob had this unique way with words that acted on my ear-brain loop just like drugs. I remember thinking to myself, "This is what writing is all about! Writing is all about magick." Certain books can change your life and Bob’s masterpiece, The Cosmic Trigger, changed mine. Though it was not the first book to blur the lines between "reality" and "fantasy", it was the first one to suggest that no such lines existed beyond my beliefs in those lines. It was the first book to challenge my beliefs about beliefs, period. Cosmic Trigger was also where I first discovered Timothy Leary’s Eight Circuit Brain, a stunning revelation that would eventually drive me to write two books of my own, Angel Tech (Original Falcon, 1986) and The Eight-Circuit Brain (Vertical Pool, 2009).

The Bob Wilson I came to know (circa 1979-86) was at the peak of his game. As far as I could tell, this game was initiating his readers -- in books and in person during his many worldwide lectures -- to the most operational Einsteinian language possible and he did this in the most entertaining ways his epic imagination could conjure. I remain bewildered by just how he was able to contextualize quantum physics through the interactions of his fictitious characters and labyrinthian plot designs in the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy and Masks of the Illuminati. Though Bob was clearly a master of this game, I never saw him treat actual living people as characters, or their interactions as games. He knew the difference and took the time to show others that he knew. Bob was very soulful that way. He seemed to simultaneously belong to two generations; the Caregivers of the World War Two era and the Hedonic Seekers of the Sixties. I suddenly saw Bob as a psychedelic mensch with a genius IQ, which for me was as hilarious as it rang true. Beyond all his extraterrestrial communiqués with the Sirius star system, his Pookaville of invisible rabbits, and his byzantine conspiracy theories, Bob consistently struck me as one of the most genuinely and clinically sane people I have ever met.

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“Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.”

― Robert Anton Wilson

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I always liked getting letters from Robert Anton Wilson. He enjoyed playing with the fonts on his Mac. In this letter, he thanked me for sending him a copy of my self-published comic book, Toilet Devil (which was the name that Koko the Talking Ape called people she was upset with).

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“It's not true unless it makes you laugh, but you don't understand it until it makes you weep.” -- Illuminatus!

I first discovered Robert Anton Wilson when I was 18 years old. I'd just moved to a commune in the tobacco fields of central Virginia and was working for the magazine that the community published. Wilson and Bob Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy had just been published and I sent off for a review copy on the magazine's letterhead. I was shocked when Dell actually sent me the books. I had no idea what Illuminatus! was; I thought I was getting some free trash sci-fi to kill time down on the farm.

The first few chapters in and I knew I wasn't reading sci-fi, not any kind I recognized, anyway. Reading the first book, The Eye in the Pyramid, then the second, The Golden Apple, and then the third, Leviathan, was like going on an extended acid trip, complete with that phasing delirium of humor and the absurd, flashes of diamond clarity and numerous a-ha moments, awkward sexual arousal, plenty of cartoonery, fear, paranoia, and maybe a little out-and-out terror. (It's no coincidence these books are divided up into ten “Trips.”) There is so much to Illuminatus!, an almost fractal density, that you have to unhinge your mind (like a serpent would its jaw) to fit it all in. I read the trilogy, and then read it again. (When my late-wife and I hooked up, we read them out loud to each other, and after Bob died, I read them for a fourth time.)

There are few works of art or pieces of media that have altered my nervous system to the extent that Illuminatus! has. In 1976, I was this awkward, alienated Wiccan teen, a restless seeker. But I was also a science and space nerd. I could never reconcile these two and constantly switched between them, rejecting one for the other, at least for a time. But here was a world where these points of view were not mutually exclusive, a playfully plastic world where open curiosity, creativity, absurdity, and skepticism leavened all explorations, whether religious/mystical/artistic or scientific. It was Robert Anton Wilson who turned me onto the concept of “hilaritas” (what he described as being “profoundly good natured”). These books (and all of RAW's oeuvre) are steeped in that spirit.

Illuminatus!, and all of the Robert Anton Wilson books that I read after that (which is all of them), have formed an amazingly steady through-line in my life. I've gone through many intense changes since that 18 year old kid scammed free reading material, and my belief systems (or “BS” as RAW called them) have oscillated wildly, but most of my takeaways from Wilson have remained. His basic approach of being “open to anything, skeptical of everything” is how I've tried to live my life. This allowed me to finally embrace both parts of myself, the part that wanted to be open to magick and spirit and the part of me that needs extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims.

In recent past, I'd somewhat fallen out of touch with RAW's unique brand of “guerrilla ontology” until a few years before he died. Some friends were on their honeymoon, traveling through the deserts of Utah. They found the 5-volume set of audio interviews that Bob had done called Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything: Or Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance, in the bargain bin of a truck stop. They aren't particularly into this sort of thing, but more based on my interest, they bought the set. They listened to it on their honeymoon and enjoyed it so much, they bought me a copy. I now listen to it regularly and can't recommend it highly enough.

At one point in Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything, the interviewer asks Bob why he's so into conspiracy theories. He'd spent the better part of his life studying them, writing about them, but he doesn't seem to actually believe any of them. So, why the intense interest? Bob thinks about it for a moment and replies: “It keeps the mind supple.”

Thank you, Mr. Wilson, for pulling an uptight, overthinking teen out of his constrictive reality tunnels and for a lifetime of “keeping the mind supple.”

Bonus Bob!: There are many threads and themes shot through Illuminatus!: Puzzles, parodies, bad puns, conspiracy theories, synchronicities, Burroughsian cut-ups, libertarian politics, occultism, sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. One of these themes is pranking, part of what Wilson and Shea dubbed “Operation Mindfuck” (or OM); what they describe as the only serious conspiracy in the book (of which the book is the principle manifestation). OM is the art of confusing consensus reality with plenty of pranks, misinformation, and mindfucks. In the appendices, a rubber stamp is described that reads “See Mental Health Records.” On any bills, junk, or other mail that one of the Discordian characters didn't like, he'd use this stamp on the envelope and return to sender. After reading about this, I had a stamp made up that read: “This is Not Art” (a statement from the Fluxus movement). For years, I stamped this on tax returns and business envelopes, on the backs of endorsed checks, on much of my daily correspondence. I loved imagining what the various worker bees who processed my paperwork made of this puzzling statement.

So, give the world's sad sonambulism a wakeup call. Put some OM (whether “trivial or colossal”) in your day. Bob would have wanted it that way.

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Most likely your daily newspaper didn't acknowledge the death of Robert Anton Wilson on January 11, 2007. He was 74. The prolific author and countercultural icon had been suffering from post-polio syndrome. Caregivers read all of his late wife Arlen's poetry to him at his bedside and e-mailed me that "He was quite cheered up by the time we left. He definitely needed to die. His body was turning on him in ways that would not allow him to rest."

In his final blog entry on January 6, Wilson wrote: "I don't see how to take death seriously. I look forward without dogmatic optimism, but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying." Actually, it was expected that he would die seven months earlier. On June 19, 2006, he sent this haiku (with one syllable missing) to his electronic cabal:

Well what do you know?
Another day has passed
and I'm still not not.

We originally became friends in 1959, when his first published article graced the cover of The Realist. It was titled "The Semantics of God," and he suggested that "The Believer had better face himself and ask squarely: Do I literally believe that 'God' has a penis? If the answer is no, then it seems only logical to drop the ridiculous practice of referring to 'God' as 'he.'" Wilson then began writing a regular column, "Negative Thinking."

In 1964, I ran another front-cover story by him, "Timothy Leary and His Psychological H-Bomb," which began: "The future may decide that the two greatest thinkers of the 20th Century were Albert Einstein, who showed how to create atomic fission in the physical world, and Timothy Leary, who showed how to create atomic fission in the psychological world. The latter discovery may be more important than the former; there are some reasons for thinking that it was made necessary by the former. Leary may have shown how our habits of thought can be changed."

Wilson took that notion as his personal marching orders, altering the consciousness of countless grateful readers of his 35 books -- from Sex, Drugs & Magick to Everything Is Under Control: An Encyclopedia of Conspiracy Theories -- all written with the aid of that good old creative fuel, marijuana. He once told me about his creative process: "It's rather obsessive-compulsive, I think. I write the first draft straight, then rewrite stoned, then rewrite straight again, then rewrite stoned again, and so on, until I'm absolutely delighted with every sentence, or irate editors start reminding me about deadlines -- whichever comes first."

He became a pothead in 1955, but a few years before his death he told the audience at a Prophets Conference, "I haven't smoked pot in about twelve... hours, and I want you to know it's great to be clean." He enjoyed peppering his presentations at such distinguished New Age events with "motherfuckers" and "cocksuckers," and was disinvited from participating in future Prophet Conferences because, said the organizers, "What we feel to be important to your insights are being lost to the audience when packaged in hard and harsh language."

Maybe Logic: a documentary about Robert Anton Wilson

Wilson once described his writings as "intellectual comedy." He told an Internet database, Contemporary Authors: "If my books do what I intend, they should leave the reader feeling that the universe is capable of doing something totally shocking and unexpected in the next five minutes. I am trying to show that life without certainty can be exhilarating, liberating, a great adventure." He called his philosophy "Maybe Logic," which became the title of a documentary about him (above).

Stephen Gaskin, founder of The Farm commune, writes, "I had the good fortune to visit with Robert at his house and meet his wife. When I saw the beautiful relationship between them, I understood why the sex scenes in his books are so nicely written that they stand out above everyone else's sex scenes that I've read. One of my next encounters with him was standing on the sidewalk of a cold November day in Amsterdam waiting for a taxi.

"He didn't have enough of a coat, and he was standing in the cold with his collar turned up and his hands stuck in his pockets. It was a while after his wife had died and he looked quite forlorn. We collected him up, put a warm coat on him, and put a joint in his mouth. It was a real hoot to get to be friends with one of my very favorite writers. His book, Illuminatus, is a benchmark in science-fiction and contemporary paranoia."

Wilson wrote his own obituary in an autobiography, Cosmic Trigger, Volume 3:

"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 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 the news of my tragic end had appeared on the Internet: 'Noted science-fiction author Robert Anton Wilson was found dead in his home yesterday, apparently the victim of a heart attack. [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.'"

R. U. Sirius, co-author of Counterculture Through the Ages, writes, "Robert Anton Wilson enjoyed his first death so much, he decided to try it again. As the result of medical expenses and problems with the IRS, he found himself in a financial squeeze towards the end of his life. Word went out and the Internet community responded by sending him $68,000 within the first couple of days.

"This allowed him to die with the comfort, grace and dignity that he deserved. He taught us all that 'the universe contains a maybe.' So maybe there is an afterlife, and maybe Bob's consciousness is hovering around all of us who were touched by his words and his presence all these years. And if that's the case, I'm sure he'd like to see you do something strange and irreverent -- and yet beautiful -- in his honor."

Fnord