Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

by Robert Anton Wilson

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.