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The decade that has passed since the first edition has not altered my basic commitment to the game-rule that holds that an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable. Since we all create our habitual reality-tunnels, either consciously and intelligently or unconsciously and mechanically, I prefer to create for each hour the happiest, funniest and most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with the signals my brain apprehends. I feel sorry for the people who persistently organize experience into sad, dreary and hopeless
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When I write of creating a better and more optimistic reality-tunnel, of transcending ego games, and of similar matters, it is not because I have lived in an ivory tower. It is because I have learned a few practical techniques for dealing with the brutal conditions on this primitive planet.
The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have the demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share the same crusading zeal and the same total lack of humor. charity and common human decency. These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.
Intelligence on this planet has evolved in metamorphic stages — long periods of quiescent preparation, then sudden, slam-bang flashes of change.
ontology recapitulates phylogeny
Dr. Leary prefers the forms SHe (she or he) and Hir (his or her) to the traditional habit of referring to the general human being as masculine.
We now understand the mystery and the paradox of the great alchemists, philosophers, mystics, sages. They pre-capitulate. They prospectively live out in their own nervous systems the future of evolution, the stages which await in the future of the species. Their nervous systems get into communication (via reverse transcriptase) with DNA. They learn how to decode the genetic blueprint. They experience what is to happen in the future. This, surely, is the royal road to wisdom, the highway of evolution — the two-way traffic between the Central Nervous System (CNS) and the DNA archives, via RNA
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This book, Cosmic Trigger, and its author, Robert Anton Wilson, can best be understood as modern links in this unbroken chain of alchemical philosophers and Intelligence Agents who have systematically learned how to dial and tune their own nervous systems and (via internal biochemical auto-experiments) learned how to converse, via RNA, with their own DNA, decipher the genetic Rosetta Stone and get direct experiential knowledge of the evolutionary process. Wilson describes 30 years of experimentation on and with his own brain. Most important, he recounts his attempts to correlate inner,
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solve et coagule
Everything you know is wrong.
Chapel Perilous, like the mysterious entity called “I,” cannot be located in the space-time continuum; it is weightless, odorless, tasteless and undetectable by ordinary instruments. Indeed, like the Ego, it is even possible to deny that it is there. And yet, even more like the Ego, once you are inside it, there doesn’t seem to be any way to ever get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought. Every thing you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition,
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That’s what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived. You might think you are just waiting for a bus, or wandering from room to room looking for your cigarettes, watching a TV show, or reading a cryptic and ambiguous
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Chapel Perilous, as I said before, is tricky that way. When you think you’re out of it, you’re just in another hall of illusions painted to look like the safe forest outside; and when you think you’re inside again, you’ll suddenly discover you’re actually walking on the road back home. As the traditional Zen saying sums it up: First there is a mountain, Then there is no mountain, Then there is.
It is not all done by our nervous systems. As we advance toward Higher Intelligence, our brains can increasingly contact other Higher Intelligences. By Bell’s quantum monism, this includes contact with advanced adepts who are both human and inhuman terrestrial and extraterrestrial, and located temporally throughout what we call past, present and future.
One can train oneself to receive or ignore a far wider variety of signals than the neurologically untrained realize.
As Brad Steiger has said, the lunatic asylums are full of people who naively set out to study the occult before they had any real competence in dealing with the ordinary.
The only reason most people remain in the same jobs, the same towns, the same belief-systems, year after year, decade after decade, is, of course, that cultural conditioning, in every tribe, is a process of gradually narrowing your tunnel-reality. The way to stay young (comparatively; until the longevity Pill is discovered) is to make a quantum jump every so often and land yourself in a new reality-matrix.
They live happiest who have forgiven most.
I could not help but be grateful to it, whatever the hell it was.
“Getting stoned on dope,” Spann adds thoughtfully, “is a defense-mechanism against global insanity. And yet, marijuana, hashish, acid and the consciousness-expanding drugs have opened the way to the Immortal state of consciousness: Samadhi, satori, alpha and theta states, the whole enlightenment trip that provides an escape from Mortal man’s tight little illusions of himself.”54
got rid of my own fears in the ’60s, but now I have no fear of other people’s fears. Truth. Truth. Truth. That’s the highest circuit of all .
“Traits are not naturally selected only for individual survival, as Darwin thought,” Paul insists. “Some are selected for species survival.
(Whatever you believe imprisons you.)
There almost seems to be a neurotic-psionic law: whatever you fear most will eventually come after you. The shaman, of course, lives through this process on more levels than the ordinary paranoid, because the shaman is determined to confront every terror and conquer it.
“Perfect love casteth out fear.”
the Author who writes is always watching the human who lives,
“nobody is truly sane until he feels gratitude to the whole universe,”
If I still remember that all realities are neurological constructs and relative to the observer, I am nonetheless committed now to one reality above all alternatives: the reality of Jesus and Buddha, in which reverence for life is the supreme imperative.
