So much for "reality" as a noun. The notion that "reality" is singular, like a hermetically sealed jar, does not jibe with scientific findings which, in this century, suggest that "reality" may better be considered as flowing and meandering, like a river, or interacting, like a dance, or evolving, like life itself.
Most philosophers have known, at least since around 500 B.C., that the world perceived by our senses is not "the real world" but a construct we create — our own private work of art. Modern science began with Galileo's demonstration that color is not "in" objects but "in" the inter-action of our senses with objects. Despite this philosophic and scientific knowledge of neurological relativity, which has been more clearly demonstrated with each major advance in instrumentation, we still, due to language, think that behind the flowing, meandering, inter-acting, evolving universe created by perception is one solid monolithic "reality" hard and crisply outlined as an iron bar.
Quantum physics has undermined that Platonic iron-bar "reality" by showing that it makes more sense scientifically to talk only of the inter-actions we actually experience (our operations in the laboratory); and perception psychology has undermined the Platonic "reality" by showing that assuming it exists leads to hopeless contradictions in explaining how we actually perceive that a hippopotamus is not a symphony orchestra.
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.
Like most people who have historically attempted such "metaprogramming," I soon found myself in metaphysical hot water. It became urgently obvious that my previous models and metaphors would not and could not account for what I was experiencing. I therefore had to create new models and metaphors as I went along. 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.
I beg you, gentle reader, to memorize the quote from Aleister Crowley at the beginning of Part One and repeat it to yourself if at any point you start thinking that I am bringing you the latest theological revelations from Cosmic Central.
What my experiments demonstrate — what all such experiments throughout history have demonstrated — is simply that 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.
Personally, I also suspect, or guess, or intuit, that the more unconventional of my models here — the ones involving Higher Intelligence, such as the Cabalistic Holy Guardian Angel or the extraterrestrial from Sirius — are necessary working tools at certain stages of the metaprogramming process.
That is, whether such entities exist anywhere outside our own imaginations, some areas of brain functioning cannot be accessed without using these "keys" to open the locks. I do not insist on this; it is just my own opinion. Some people seem to get through this area of Chapel Perilous without such personalized "Guides." I know one chap who did it by imagining a super-computer in the future that was sending information backwards in time to his brain. More clever people may find even less "metaphysical" metaphors.
Ten years after the point at which this book ends, I do not care much about such speculations. Our lonely little selves can be "illuminated" or flooded with radical science-fiction style information and cosmic perspectives, and the source of this may be those extraterrestrials who seemed to be helping me at times, or the Secret Chiefs of Sufism, or the parapsychologists and/or computers of the 23rd Century beaming data backward in time, or it may just be the previously unactivated parts of our own brains. Despite the current reign of our New Inquisition, which attempts to halt research in this area, we will learn more about that as time passes. Meanwhile, agnosticism is both honest and becomingly modest.
In this connection, I am often asked about two books by other authors which are strangely resonant with Cosmic Trigger — namely VALIS by Philip K. Dick and The Sirian Experiments by Doris Lessing. VALIS is a novel which broadly hints that it is more than a novel — that it is an actual account of Phil Dick's own experience with some form of "Higher Intelligence." In fact, VALIS is only slightly fictionalized; the actual events on which it is based are recounted in a long interview Phil gave shortly before his death (See Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament, by Gregg Rickman.) The parallels with my own experience are numerous — but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.
I met Phil Dick on two or three occasions and corresponded with him a bit. My impression was that he was worried that his experience was a temporary insanity and was trying to figure out if I was nutty, too. I'm not sure if he ever decided.
I interviewed Doris Lessing a few years ago for New Age magazine. She takes synchronicities very seriously, but was as agnostic as I am about the possibility that some of them are orchestrated by Sirians.
I heartily recommend all three volumes — VALIS, The Last Testament and The Sirian Experiments — to readers of this book. Unless you are locked into a very dogmatic reality-tunnel, you will have a few weird moments of wondering if Sirians are experimenting on us, and a few weird moments can be a liberating experience for those who aren't scared to death by them.
What is more important than such extra-mundane speculation, I think, are practical and pragmatic questions about what one does with the results of brain change experience. It is quite easy, I have discovered by meeting many New Age people, to use the techniques in this book and go stone crazy with them. Paranoid and schizophrenic cases are quite common among those who experiment in this area. Less clinical, but socially even more nefarious, are the leagues of self-proclaimed gurus and their equally deluded disciples, who have discovered, as I did, that there are many realities (plural), but have picked out one favorite non-Occidental reality-tunnel, named it Ultimate Reality or True Reality, and established new fanaticisms, snobberies, dogmas and cults around these delusions.
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 incura
ble.
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.
This book does not claim that "you create your own reality" in the sense of total (but mysteriously unconscious) psychokinesis. If a car hits you and puts you in the hospital, I do not believe this is because you "really wanted" to be hit by a car, or that you "needed" to be hit by a car, as two popular New Age bromides have it. The theory of transactional psychology, which is the source of my favorite models and metaphors, merely says that, once you have been hit by a car, the meaning of the experience depends entirely on you and the results depend partly on you (and partly on your doctors). If it is medically possible for you to live — and sometimes even if the doctors think it is medically impossible — you ultimately decide whether to get out of the hospital in a hurry or to lie around suffering and complaining.
Most of the time, this kind of "decision" is unconscious and mechanical, but with the techniques described in this book, such decisions can become conscious and intelligent.
The last part of this book deals with the worst tragedy of my life. I want to say, without self-pity (a vice I despise) that my years on this planet have included many other terrible and punishing experiences, starting with two bouts of polio when I was a child and including dozens of other things I don't want to complain about in public. 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.
People at my lectures and seminars usually ask me if I am still optimistic about civilian space programs and life extension. I am more optimistic than ever. Despite the seemingly terminal case of rigidicus bureaucraticus at NASA, I have reason to believe certain European countries will soon jointly launch the kind of space migration effort advocated here; and Reagan's SDI, for all its jingoism, means that more money will be spent on basic research than at any previous time in history.
On the life extension front, there have been several best sellers on the subject since this book first appeared; there is interest even in the most intellectually backward part of U.S. society (namely, the Congress); and scientists in the longevity field whom I have met recently all cheerfully say they are getting more money for research than in the 1970s. The breakthrough cannot be far away.
Finally, as a matter of some entertainment value, not all the mail I have received about this book has been intelligent and thoughtful. I have received several quite nutty and unintentionally funny poison-pen letters from two groups of dogmatists — Fundamentalist Christians and Fundamentalist Materialists.
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.
Robert Anton Wilson
Dublin 1986
FOREWORDS
by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.
Robert Anton Wilson is a man whose time has come.
It is true of all good things — they are a long time coming.
Intelligence on this planet has evolved in metamorphic stages — long periods of quiescent preparation, then sudden, slam-bang flashes of change.
The personal evolution of Robert Anton Wilson has followed the same rhythm. It’s always like that with sages, evolutionary operatives, Intelligence Agents.
It has been axiomatic since Haeckel that ontology recapitulates phylogeny — that the individual in Hir* development repeats, step-by-step, the evolution of the species.
~•~
*Editor’s note: 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 messenger molecules.
Consider Lao-tse. In the 6th Century B.C., SHe realizes Einsteinian relativity, senses that all is flow and evolutionary change; anticipates (in the I Ching) what computer designers will understand 2,500 years later — that energy comes in the binary code of yin-yang (off-on); forecasts (in the Ching trigrams) what micro-geneticists will discover 2,500 years later — the triplicate function of amino-acid binding.
Now reflect on the poignant destiny of Lao-tse. SHe knows that SHe will not be around in biological form when Watson and Crick decipher the DNA code. The time-lag problem is solved by transtime neurogenetic signalry. Symbolism. The Intelligence Agent called Lao-tse teaches the I Ching codes to domesticated primates, injects some fortune-telling hocus-pocus and thus sends down the 2,500-year CNS-RNA-DNA teletype channel this basic code. SHe knows that the Confucians will distort the signal with Boy Scout moralisms (dutifully preserved in the inane Baynes-Wilhelm commentaries), knows that countless charlatans will peddle vulgar I Ching fortunes for a nickel in Oriental bazaars. But SHe knows, also, that when external technology catches up, 20th Century Intelligence Agents will receive the dot-dash trigram message and realize that binary codes and triplicate trigrams are genetic guide posts explaining the direction and molecular structure of evolution, from the terrestrial, earth,
to the extraterrestrial, heaven.
Now consider the Buddha.
Also in the 6th Century B.C., SHe realizes that consciousness creates reality; that all is maya, i.e. an internal dance of neurons, an external dance of protons. SHe advises detachment from tribal imprints (local reality-tunnels), announces the octave nature of evolution (again knowing it will be corrupted by moralists into the 8-fold path of domesticated virtue and marketed eventually as the 8 x 8 chessboard). SHe knows that Mendeleyev and the octave division of quarks await 100 generations in the future.
We are awed by this unbroken chain of generational signalry. In each of the 100 generations since Buddha, a few Intelligence Agents are born and spend their brief lives, detached from the hive, poring over the octaves. In response, we assume, to some RNA suggestion about the sequence of the eight periods of evolution-from heavy to light, from slow to fast, from water to fire, from terrestrial to post-terrestrial, from Kun
to Chien,
from earth metals to noble gases.
Next, consider the plight of G.I. Gurdjieff, who, 40 years before the Apollo Lunar Landings and 50 years before the space shuttle, writes Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, predicting the post-terrestrial future of the species.
Recall the last lines of Aleister Crowley’s Confessions, where he sadly recognizes that scientific experiments of the next generation will manifest precisely what his magical rituals could only internalize and ceremonially anticipate.
This book, Cosmic Trigger, and its author, Robert Anton Wilson, can best be understood as mo
dern 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, subjective vision with the external, objective language of the energy sciences.
And here is the issue, the classic challenge of philosophy: to expand inner neurological reality and to link it with the outer realities measured by scientists. Intelligence evolves when the occult and magical become the objective-scientific.
I recall clearly my first conversation with Robert Anton Wilson in 1964. He was the first and lonely journalist who had actually read my writings and understood the steady development of my own research — from interpersonal psychology to interstellar neurogenetics.
Wilson’s ability to open himself up and receive signals both from within his own expanding neurology and from the broadcasts of scientists defines him as one of the key personalities of modern neurological philosophy. He is becoming a major literary figure.
There are two words which always define a great writer-philosopher:
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