Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

by Robert Anton Wilson

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...