Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

by Robert Anton Wilson

If you apply meaning to a thing you have made, then you have art. If you apply meaning to a person, then you have love. If you apply meaning to the universe, then you have God. Meaning is free. There is an inexhaustible supply of meaning. So what’s the fucking problem? The problem is, of course, that meaning is not fixed. It ebbs and flows like the tide. Sometimes you are drenched in the stuff, and life is self-evidently worthwhile and full of purpose and humour. And at others, it all drains away, and you are left with the horrors. In Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson shows us how to navigate these waters, both when life is too meaningful and when all meaning is gone.

just because these things were meaningful in his personal story does not mean that they should be equally meaningful in yours.

“humans live through their myths, and only endure their realities.”

and most of this mail has been unusually intelligent and open-minded. For some reason, many readers of this book think they can write to me intimately and without fear, about subjects officially Taboo in our society. I have learned a great deal from this correspondence, and have met some wonderful new friends.

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence.

The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal."

because I had a good background in scientific philosophy and was not inclined to "believe" any astounding Revelations too literally.

The only "realities" (plural) that we actually experience and can talk meaningfully about are perceived realities, experienced realities, existential realities — realities involving ourselves as editors — and they are all relative to the observer, fluctuating, evolving, capable of being magnified and enriched, moving from low resolution to hi-fi, and do not fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw into one single Reality with a capital R. Rather, they cast illumination upon one another by contrast, like the paintings in a large museum, or the different symphonic styles of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Mahler.

Alan Watts may have said it best of all: "The universe is a giant Rorschach ink-blot." Science finds one meaning in it in the 18th Century, another in the 19th, a third in the 20th; each artist finds unique meanings on other levels of abstraction; and each man and woman finds different meanings at different hours of the day, depending on the internal and external environments. This book deals with what I have called induced brain change, which Dr. John Lilly more resoundingly calls "metaprogramming the human bio-computer." In simple Basic English, as a psychologist and novelist, I set out to find how much rapid reorganization was possible in the brain functioning of one normal domesticated primate of average intelligence — the only one on whom I could ethically perform such risky research — myself.

Since I was dealing with matters outside consensus reality-tunnels, some of my metaphors are rather extraordinary. That does not bother me, since I am at least as much an artist as a psychologist, but it does bother me when people take these metaphors too literally.

our models of "reality" are very small and tidy, the universe of experience is huge and untidy, and no model can ever include all the huge untidiness perceived by uncensored consciousness.

I think, or hope, that my data also demonstrates that neurological model agnosticism — the application of the Copenhagen Interpretation beyond physics to consciousness itself — allows one to escape from certain limits of mechanical emotion and robot mentation that are inescapable as long as one remains within one dogmatic model or one imprinted reality-tunnel.

I heartily recommend all three volumes — VALIS, The Last Testament and The Sirian Experiments — to readers of this book.

There is a great deal of lyrical Utopianism in this book. I do not apologize for that, and do not regret it. 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 reality-tunnels, and try to show them how to break that bad habit, but I don't feel any masochistic duty to share their misery.

Fundamentalist Christians and Fundamentalist Materialists. The Fundamentalist

Every thing you fear is waiting with slavering jaws in Chapel Perilous, but if you are armed with the wand of intuition, the cup of sympathy, the sword of reason and the pentacle of valor, you will find there (the legends say) the Medicine of Metals, the Elixir of Life, the Philosopher’s Stone, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness. That’s what the legends always say, and the language of myth is poetically precise. For instance, if you go into that realm without the sword of reason, you will lose your mind, but at the same time, if you take only the sword of reason without the cup of sympathy, you will lose your heart. Even more remarkably, if you approach without the wand of intuition, you can stand at the door for decades never realizing you have arrived.

They were those without the pentacle of valor who stand in terror outside the door of Chapel Perilous, trembling and warning all who would enter that the Chapel is really an Insect Horror Machine programmed by Death Demons and dripping fetidly with Green Goo.

The multi-theory approach (or, as it is called in physics, the multi-model approach) is the only way to deal adequately with all the facts. Any single-theory approach is premature and causes a truncation of our intelligence; it forces us to ignore or belittle parts of the data that might be crucial.

McLuhan has even proclaimed, in his usual apocalyptic style, that the multi-model approach is the most important, and most original, intellectual discovery of the 20th century.

It is no more spooky than the selective yogic trance of the average city-dweller, which allows him to walk in mindless indifference through incredible noise, filth, pandemonium, misery, neurosis, violence, psychosis, rape, burglary, injustice and exploitation, screening it all out and concentrating only on robot-repetition of his assigned role in the hive-economy. One can train oneself to receive or ignore a far wider variety of signals than the neurologically untrained realize.

The great and venerable Sufi sage, Mullah Nasrudin, once raced through Bagdad on his donkey, galloping as fast as the poor beast could travel. Everybody got excited and people rushed into the streets to find out why the philosopher was in such a great hurry. “What are you looking for, Mullah?” somebody shouted. “I’m looking for my donkey!” Nasrudin answered. Like most Sufi jokes this seems calculated only to annoy us, like a Marx Brothers routine that doesn’t quite succeed in being funny. Actually, Nasrudin was much given (perhaps overmuch) to acting out his parables, and he was merely dramatizing the most common error of seekers after the Cosmic Secret. We look for the Secret — the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, “God,” or whatever the final answer might be — in all directions, north, east, south, and west, and all the time it is carrying us about. It is the human nervous system itself, the marvelous instrument through which we create order out of chaos, science out of ignorance, meaning out of mystery, “Mescalito” (or a chair) out of whirling energy. Dogen Zenji, an 18th century Zen master, used to ask trainees, “Who is the Master who makes the grass green?” Again, the answer is as close as our visual cortex.

Learning to remember the invisible donkey who carries us about — the self-programmer — is the first step in awakening from conditioned, mechanical consciousness to true, objective consciousness. Whether or not there are fairies, elves and extraterrestrials hiding behind every bush, awakening reveals that the universe is full of invisible intelligence. It is very hard for us to learn to contact that intelligence without clothing it in projected humanoid forms. . . * * * In early stages of work on consciousness, the Master Who Makes The Grass Green (the Metaprogrammer) insists on converting everything into humanoid Gestalts. That’s because, at that level, it is still a human chauvinist.

During the prisoner rehabilitation project of 1961-62, for which Dr. Leary was commended by the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, Timothy refused to let any coworkers speculate on whether their cons were getting “sicker” or “better.” “Where are their bodies in space-time? What signals are they exchanging?” he would ask again and again. He had developed a seven-dimensional game model and insisted on analyzing all behavior in terms of the (1) roles being played (2) rules tacitly accepted by all players; (3) strategies for winning (or for masochistic winning-by-losing); (4) goals of the game, purpose served; (5) language of the game, and the semantic world-view implied; (6) characteristic space-time locations, and (7) characteristic movements in space-time. “If you can’t describe those seven dimensions of a group’s behavior, you don’t understand their game,” Leary told the Reporter.

Leary’s “Two Commandments for the Neurological Age,” published in several of his books and articles of the ’60s, are: “1. Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy neighbor without his or her consent. “2. Thou shalt not prevent thy neighbor from altering his or her own consciousness.”

Of course, the Vietnam war had begun to heat up by this time, and the government’s insistence on lying about everything connected with the war had begun to erode the social fabric of the U.S. Systematic lying creates what communications scientists call a “disinformation situation,” in which everybody eventually begins to distrust, demonize and diabolize everybody else.

Paul Watzlavik, among others, has performed classic experiments in which totally sane people will begin to behave with all the irrationality of hospitalized paranoids or schizophrenics — just because they have been lied to in a calculated and systematic way. This sort of “disinformation” matrix is so typical of many aspects of our society (e.g., advertising and organized religion, as well as government) that some psychiatrists, such as R.D. Laing, claim it is the principal cause of psychotic breakdowns. When the politics of lying becomes normal, paranoia and alienation become the “normality” of the day.

Instead of being an unplanned voyage into unexpected sensory thrills, pot became a deliberate program of sensory enrichment. One could turn music into colors, into caresses, into tastes; one could grow to gigantic size, or shrink down inside one’s own cells and molecules; one could tune one’s nervous system like a combination microscope-TV set. Several extraordinary months of experiment soon revealed that one could do much of this without pot (although it remained easier with pot, of course), and the shaken Materialist began at long last to understand what Freud meant by projection and Buddha by maya. It became clear as vodka that whatever “reality” means philosophically, our everyday experience (the common-sense definition of “reality”) is almost entirely self-programmed. This cinematic editing occurs so rapidly that we are normally not aware of doing it, thus we add many things that aren’t there at all (Freud’s projection) and leave out millions of things that are there (Freud’s censorship). Confusing the finished product with an accurate reflection of externality is exactly what Buddha meant when he said normal consciousness is delusion (maya). One soon discovered that pot could be a tool by which one might adjust the nervous system as casually as one adjusts the picture on a TV set. I had achieved what the semanticist Korzybski calls “consciousness of abstracting,” awareness of the usually-unconscious mechanism by which each of us makes the world over in his/her own im...

This is why pot-heads develop a certain inevitable alienation from society. They begin to feel like one-eyed men in the Kingdom of the Blind.

a “Manual for Discordian Evangelists” which Thornley wrote: “The SOCRATIC APPROACH is most successful when confronting the ignorant. The Socratic approach is what you call starting an argument by asking questions. You approach the innocent and simply ask, ‘Did you know that God’s name is ERIS, and that He is a girl?’ If he should answer ‘Yes,’ then he is probably a fellow Erisian and so you can forget it. If he says ‘No,’ then quickly proceed to: “THE BLIND ASSERTION and say, ‘Well, He is a girl, and His name is ERIS!’ Shrewdly observe if the subject is convinced. If he is, swear him into the Legion of Dynamic Discord before he changes his mind. If he does not appear convinced, then proceed to: “THE FAITH BIT: ‘But you must have faith! All is lost without faith! I sure feel sorry for you if you don’t have Faith.’ And then add: “THE ARGUMENT BY FEAR and in an ominous voice ask, ‘Do you know what happens to those who deny Goddess?’ If he hesitates, don’t tell him that he will surely be reincarnated as a precious Mao Button and distributed to the poor in the Region of Thud (which would be a mean thing to say), just shake your head sadly and, while wiping a tear from your eye, go to: “THE FIRST CLAUSE PLOY wherein you point to all of the discord and confusion in the world and explain ‘Well who the hell do you think did all of this, wise guy?’ If he says, ‘Nobody, just impersonal forces,’ then quickly respond with: “THE ARGUMENT BY SEMANTICAL GYMNASTICS and say that he is absol...

Out of the hundred million buzzing, bright, busy signals received every minute, the human brain ignores most and organizes the rest in conformity with whatever belief system it currently holds.

In the seminars on Exo-Psychology which I teach these days, I dramatize this point by having the entire class visualize the hall they came through in entering the seminar room. Then I ask how many people visualize five distinct items, ten, fifteen . . . When we find the person with the largest number of distinct signals in memory storage, we list the elements of that person’s hall on the blackboard. We call this number X. Then we collect all the signals from the rest of the class that were not on the list, X. The new list is always higher than 2X. That is, if the memory champ of that class had 14 signals in the hall, the total class had 28 or more. This illustrates that one way to double your practical intelligence (awareness of detail) is to try to receive as many signals as possible from other humans, however wrong-headed their reality-map may seem, however dumb or boring they might sound at first. Our usual habit of screening out all human signals not immediately compatible with our own favorite reality-map is the mechanism which keeps us all far stupider than we should be.

the first law of Discordianism: “Convictions cause convicts.” Whatever you believe imprisons you.

guerrilla ontology.

The distinguished poet Ed Sanders, author of Fuck God Up The Ass and other immortal works,

“That reminds me,” Alan said. “The best book I’ve read in years is called The Eye in the Triangle. It’s about Aleister Crowley.” He went on to recommend the book highly.

In one experiment, I banned the use of the word “I” from my conversation for one week. Mad Aleister recommends what Skinner later called “negative reinforcement” in cases of relapse; he violently slashed his arm with a razor every time he slipped and said “I.” Your less hardy narrator substituted a less heroic control: I bit my thumb, hard, at each slip. By about the fourth day, I had a very sore thumb and an even more painful ego. The subjectivity and self-centeredness of normal human consciousness was hideously obvious to me. By the seventh day I had entered an altered state of consciousness and regarded ego as something of an inconvenient fiction.

Meanwhile, I became alert to all sorts of signals previously invisible; my empathy with others was becoming intensified. I also learned a great deal about how easy it is to deceive those who want to believe; and this showed how easily I might be deceived if I wanted to believe.

Crowley always insisted that nobody should try his more advanced techniques without (a) being in excellent health, (b) being competent in at least one athletic skill, (c) being able to conduct experiments accurately in at least one science, (d) having a general knowledge of several sciences, (e) being able to pass an examination in formal logic and (f) being able to pass an examination in the history of philosophy, including Idealism, Materialism, Rationalism, Spiritualism, Comparative Theology, etc. Without that kind of general knowledge and the self-confidence and independence of thought produced by such study, magick investigation will merely blow your mind. 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 first results of the author’s Crowleyan experiments were a vast increase in his already abundant skepticism — to the point where he was skeptical at last even of skepticism itself — and an ability to achieve ecstasy and contact mysterious “entities” without psychedelic drugs.

Aldous Huxley’s first book on psychedelics, through conservative historian Russell Kirk’s review of it, originally got me interested in chemical neuro-programming. Aldous was a personal friend of Jano and Alan Watts, and of Tim Leary. Aldous died on the same day as John F. Kennedy. Kerry Thornley, widely believed among Garrisonite conspiracy buffs to be “the second Oswald,” named his son Aldous Wilson Thornley — after Aldous and me. And Aldous had originally been turned on to peyote by Aleister Crowley in 1929.29

In 1971, I quit my job at Playboy because doing the same thing, every day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, is a damned bore, no matter how interesting the work intrinsically is. After five years, even at $20,000 per, you will become a zombie if you don’t seek adventure and change. 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.

Jacques Vallee

Timothy justified his “youth-culture” image by an athletic climb across a fifty-foot cable over the prison wall to freedom. He left behind a pious note to the prison staff: In the name of the Father and the Mother and the Holy Ghost — Oh, Guards — I leave now for freedom. I pray that you will free yourselves. To hold man captive is a crime against humanity and a sin against God. Oh, guards, you are criminals and sinners. Cut it loose. Be free. Amen.

It was necessary to conduct some experiments to determine that one was still able to communicate effectively with the hive — with those locked into what Blake called “single Vision and Newton’s sleep.” When it was established that such communication had not broken down, the Shaman and the Skeptic conferred at length, decided we were not actually going mad, and continued occult experimentation.

They live happiest who have forgiven most.

To paraphrase Charles Fort, we all like to think of ourselves as skeptical and hard to bamboozle, but if we contemplate a few more talking-dog and astral-pancake stories, the reader will find it hard to resist taking at least one peek around the room to see what Damned Thing might have gotten in during the last few minutes.

Tim took a chair and answered the interviewer’s questions in a serious and thoughtful manner, explaining that he wasn’t interested in drugs any more since they had only been “microscopes” to him: tools to reveal the focus and re-focus possibilities of the nervous system.

Grand Master Kenneth Grant’s new book, Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God:

A man without God is like a fish without a bicycle. – Found on the men’s room wall, Larry Blake’s Pub, Berkeley, 1977