Final Secret of the Illuminati

by Robert Anton Wilson

  * * *

  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.

  The Kennedy Assassination and the Net

  While I was conducting peyote research in Yellow Springs, Ohio, weirder business was afoot in New Orleans, Louisiana. Two young men who had served in the Marines together were “coincidentally” living in The Quarter, a few blocks apart, without meeting again. The more famous of the two was named Lee Harvey Oswald and, during the summer of 1963, while I was having my first encounters with the leprechauns, Mr. Oswald ordered a Carcano rifle through the mail. What Oswald did with that rifle is still a matter of much controversy and endless conspiracy-mongering. The other young man was named Kerry Thornley and was in the process of creating a new religion called Discordianism, which later became a central theme in the novels and plays collectively called Illuminatus. How all that happened is the oddest part of our whole narrative.

  Later that fall, Oswald’s wife separated from him and went to live with Mrs. Ruth Payne in Fort Worth. Mrs. Payne was the sister of my family doctor.

  When this connection came to light, after the enigmatic events in Dealy Plaza on November 22, the Materialist regarded it as an amusing coincidence. I hadn’t gotten heavily enough into Jung yet to call it “synchronicity.”

  (As for Kerry Thornley, I didn’t meet him until 1967, whereupon I embraced Thornley’s religion of Discordianism, and also became a close friend. And then some conspiracy buffs announced that Thornley was part of the Kennedy assassination team — that he was, in fact, the “second Oswald.” A “second Oswald” theory was suggested by Prof. Popkin in the book called The Second Oswald. But we’ll come to that later.)

  It was also in 1963 that Alan Watts, Zen philosopher-clown, came through southern Ohio, to visit his sister in Dayton, and visited our farm. Jano (Mrs. Watts) was with him, and it was probably at that time that she first used her term, “the Net,” in my hearing. The Net, according to Jano, is a web of coincidence (or synchronicity) which connects everything-in-the-universe with everything-else-in-the-universe.

  For instance, I originally introduced Alan Watts to Jano, around 1960. Their relationship became his last, longest and happiest marriage. And Alan’s middle name was Wilson, which you may have noticed is my last name.

  Many other scientists have agreed with Carl Jung’s opinion that the number of startling coincidences in “the Net” increases sharply around anybody who becomes involved in depth psychology or in any investigation that extends the perimeter of consciousness. Arthur Koestler has written about this at length, in both The Roots of Coincidence and The Challenge of Chance.15 Dr. John Lilly has whimsically suggested that consciousness research activates the agents of “Cosmic Coincidence Control Center.” Let us hope he is joking.

  In New Orleans, Oswald and Thornley went about their different lives, and in Ohio the Narrator went about his, and the Net was gradually drawing us all into what, in Illuminatus, we have called Operation Mindfuck.

  When John Fitzgerald Kennedy was blown apart by Oswald and/or persons unknown, something died in the American psyche, as Jules Feiffer among others has noticed. Kennedy was not a universally beloved President, of course — nobody ever has been, not even Washington — but he was young (or youngish), handsome, cultured, brave (everybody knows the PT-109 story) and virile. There was a commotion of primitive terrors loosed upon the national psyche by the Dealy Plaza bullets; Camelot died; the Divine King had been sacrificed; we were caught suddenly in the midst of a Frazer-Freud re-enactment of archetypal anthropological ritual. The national psyche veered dizzily toward Chapel Perilous.

  The first conspiracy surfaced, if memory is accurate, in the National Guardian, a left-wing newspaper, only weeks after the assassination. The Skeptic read it with interest, and it did not convince me.

  When the Warren Report came out finally, the Skeptic also studied that with some care. It also did not convince me.

  In fact, I was often amazed that so many people did have so many strong opinions on the subject. I began to understand why the Sufis are always attacking “opinions.” Everybody nowadays thinks they must have an “opinion” on everything, whether they know anything about it or not. Unfortunately, few people know the difference between an opinion and a proof. Worse yet, most have no knowledge at all about the difference in degree between a merely legal proof, a logical or verbal proof, a proof in the soft sciences like psychology, and a proof in the hard physical-mathematical sciences. They are full of opinions, but they have little ability to distinguish the relative degree of proof upholding all these various opinions.

  We say “seeing is believing,” but actually, as Santayana pointed out, we are all much better at believing than at seeing. In fact, we are seeing what we believe nearly all the time and only occasionally seeing what we can’t believe.

  A visit to Millbrook

  The next link in the Net was a meeting with Dr. Timothy Leary, the man who either brainwashed a whole generation with mind-warping drugs (opinion of his enemies) or discovered how to free the mind of humanity from culturally conditioned limitations (opinion of his friends).

  I met Leary through Ralph Ginzburg, who in 1964 offered me a job as Associate Editor of Fact magazine. Although I was in love with our little Ohio farm, and my children protested bitterly against going back to New York, Ralph dangled a tempting $8,000 per year, and between the farm and a job in town I was never making more than about $4,500. I bought some polite city clothes, gave away my last peyote buttons, and returned to the urban hive. The Shaman redomesticated himself, so to speak.

  I wanted to interview the controversial Dr. Leary for Fact, but Ralph, with that strange prescience which marks his career, said that the psychedelic drug excitement was all over (1964) and nobody was interested any more (1964) and Timothy Leary would soon be forgotten (1964). Still, I wanted to meet Dr. Leary, I finally finagled a free-lance assignment from Paul Krassner of The Realist and made the journey (soon to be repeated by countless psychologists, clergymen, rock stars, Oriental gurus and young seekers-after-Wonder) up the Hudson to the Millbrook Ashram.

  This was still early on in the history of what Charles Slack later called “the Madness of the Sixties.” Timothy Leary, although already an arch-heretic fired from Harvard for original research and poor usage of the First Amendment, was not yet into his Oriental trip; he was studying the Tibetan Book of the Dead that summer, but he was otherwise still heavy into Scientific Clinical Psychology. Not once during the day the Reporter spent with Dr. Leary did Tim say “when I used to be a psychologist,” as he was occasionally given to saying later on in the frantic ’60s.

  So many accounts have been written of the Millbrook Ashram that we won’t go into all the incredible details. There was a black guy standing on the roof of the Main Building, playing beautiful jazz trumpet all by himself, as we drove up, and the famous psychedelic collages were hanging on walls in virtually every room, but by and large it was much like any place where scholars hold learned seminars. If G. Gordon Liddy was already hiding in the bushes, peeking through his binoculars for Sex Orgies and other heinous crimes, he must have been very bored that particular day.

  Tim seemed, on first meeting, a typical middle-aged academic type, although more athletic than most. We mention this because he looked much younger in later years. When we discuss metaprogramming theory later, and Paul Segall’s investigations of amino acids related to psychedelics and aging, we will find some evidence that Dr. Leary’s youthful image may have a biochemical explanation.

  Besides being an athletic young-middle-aged man, Tim was singularly free of the space-time compulsions of normal Americans. He sometimes stands as close as a Mexican when he talks to you, and he is apt to look straight at you without the usual American eye-shifting. If this makes you nervous, he backs off and allows you to relax; but, basicall
y, he is most comfortable himself within the intimate relationship. And, of course, the famous Leary grin was already part of him.

  “The best results come when you fuck someone you really love, during the acid trip,” he said that day. “That’s when the nervous system is most open, most unconditioned, and ready to take a completely new imprint.”

  Tim was delighted that the Reporter understood enough psychology to translate terms like “zero-sum game,” “reinforcement,” “transaction,” etc., and he was especially pleased that, unlike any other interviewer he had ever met, this Reporter was familiar with his book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, and wanted to question him about how the space-time transformations of the psychedelic voyage correlate with his space-time definitions of personality types in that work.

  “LSD takes you out of the normal space-time ego,” he said concisely. “I always go through a process in which the space game comes to an end, the time game comes to an end, and then the Timothy Leary game comes to an end. This is the peak, and at this point a new neurological imprint can be made, because all the old imprints are suspended for a while then.”

  The Reporter asked about the impression that he had encountered on peyote and others had encountered on LSD, that one is actually out of the body at that crucial moment.

  “Until I can design an experiment to really test that one out,” Timothy said, “I just don’t know. It’s merely subjective at this point.”

  Indeed, the Reporter’s most persistent impression throughout the day was that Timothy Leary was a man who hated, loathed and despised anyone who would commit the epistemological sin of “speculating beyond the data.” Every question asked him was answered either with a summary of experimental results or with a promise that he hoped to find a way to check it experimentally as the work proceeded.

  Leary emphasized, as he did to all reporters, that the psychedelic drug experience is a synergetic product of three non-additive factors: (1) the dosage of the chemical used; (2) the set — the subject’s expectations, emotional status games, personality profile, etc.; and (3) the setting — the actual events in space-time. This Reporter understood him perfectly and quoted him accurately; we have often wondered why other reporters understood him so poorly and misquoted him so outrageously. The synergetic theory of “dosage, set and setting” may be Dr. Leary’s outstanding contribution to the science of psycho-pharmacology (we will talk later about his contributions to other sciences), but journalists in general understood him about as well as one who might write that Einstein discovered e = something-or-other.

  Mostly, we talked about game theory that day. Timothy had, indeed, been playing baseball on the Millbrook lawn when we arrived, and baseball thereupon haunted our conversation on the metaphoric level. He had thrown out the concepts of “psychologist” and “patient” back in ’57, replacing them with “research team,” because he was convinced that the hierarchy implied in “psychologist” (top dog) and “patient” (bottom dog) predetermined certain conclusions. Now he wanted to examine all interpersonal relations in terms of the Morgenstern-von Neumann game model.

  (According to economist Oscar Morgenstern and mathematician John von Neumann, in their epochal Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, most human transactions can be analyzed mathematically by treating them as if they were games. Leary had written his Ph.D. on group therapy — at a time when one of his faculty advisors indignantly told him, “Young man, group therapy is a contradiction in terms!” — and had analyzed personality as a group process defined by rules of interpersonal politics; more simply, he refers to these stereotyped group processes of reality-definition as games.)

  “What are the players actually doing in space-time?”

  Leary asked rhetorically that day. “Who’s at bat? Who’s pitching? What are the rules of the game? How many strikes before you’re out? Who makes the rules? Who can change the rules? These are the important questions. Anybody around here caught talking about ‘sickness’ or ‘neurosis’ or ‘ego’ or ‘instinct’ or ‘maturity’ or any of that metaphysical jabberwocky gets thrown the hell out.”

  Leary went on to reject virtually all psychological terminology as pre-scientific and vague. “We’ve got a contract among ourselves,” he said, “that we’re going to talk sense, and that means specifying where the bodies are in space-time and what sort of signals they’re exchanging.”

  This was the basic methodological position of post-Einstein physics but Leary was carrying it as far as it could be taken. Nobody was “sane” or “insane,” “right” or “wrong,” “hallucinating” or “not-hallucinating”; all those words were value-judgments, relative to the observer’s prejudices. What was happening in interpersonal relations, described objectively and relativistically, was various parties or coalitions bargaining for control of neuro-muscular space (ethnological territory) or the right to define the game for all other players (ideological territory).

  Leary’s arch-rival at Harvard, Dr. B.F. Skinner, had been a pioneer of the Behaviorist approach, which rejected the intuitive and poetic psychologies of Freudians and Jungians as unscientific. While Leary agreed with this, he felt that Skinner himself had taken an equally wrong turn, using as model the push-pull (action-reaction) mechanisms of Newtonian physics. “Psychology doesn’t become scientific by copying the physics of past centuries,” Leary said to me. “We’ve got to learn to use the best models in the physics of this century.” Such models, he felt, would be relativistic, describing differing reality-coordinates experienced by different bodies as they exchanged signals in space-time.

  So many people were bemused or bewildered by Leary the Guru in the next few years that this background of his work was never fully understood.

  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. “Most so-called ‘neurosis’ is best analyzed as somebody programmed to play football wandering around in a baseball field. If he thinks football is the only game in the universe, the other players will seem perverse or crazy to him; if they think baseball is the only game, he’ll seem crazy to them.”

  The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Leary added, was “the manual for one type of consciousness-altering game.” It was useful for LSD-reprogramming sessions because LSD “suspends imprinted neurological games” and allows us to “imprint new games.”

  (Roubecek, a Czechoslovakian psychiatrist, had proposed in 1957 that “LSD suspends conditioned reflexes.” Leary was the first to suggest that LSD acts below the conditioning level and directly changes basic imprints, i.e., neurogenetic limits usually not changed by either conditioning or counterconditioning.)

  “You’re really talking about using these drugs to change the whole personality,” the Reporter said at one point. “Ego and mind and emotions and all . . .”

  “Yes,” Tim said. “That’s the whole point. LSD with the right set and setting can change anything we consider ourselves. Therefore, it’s the most potent brainwashing agent in the world. That’s what my Two Commandments are all about.” 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.r />
  “2. Thou shalt not prevent thy neighbor from altering his or her own consciousness.”

  Leary wanted psychedelics regulated and controlled by medical and psychological clinicians, according to a professional code of ethics which would protect the subjects (In fact, he didn’t even like the word “subjects,” and preferred, in egalitarian fashion, to call the trippers in each experiment “research associates”). He was convinced that the drugs would be abused and misused if control were placed in the hands of the government. Some of the recent revelations about C.I.A. research dramatize what Leary fears.

  An ideal re-imprinting clinic, as Leary visualized it, would work like this. Assume you have a personality problem that you want to change. Maybe you’re a foot fetishist, or you drink too much, or you feel you can’t learn mathematics, or you’re incompetent with tools, or whatever. You go to the clinic and discuss the problem with a Behavior Change expert. S/He explains the theory behind psychedelic imprinting and gives you a batch of literature, clearly stating the pros and cons of the theory (i.e., including articles by those who claim it doesn’t work or is too dangerous). You think it over for a week. If you decide the theory looks good, you make another appointment and, if the staff has decided you are a safe subject (not pre-psychotic or otherwise vulnerable), the program for the trip is worked out jointly between you and the Behavior Change expert assigned to your treatment. The program will probably include music and ritual — but may be as simple as just relaxing your tense muscles one by one. At the peak, the imprint is made. You emerge with a new reality: what was invisible or impossible before is now part of your self and your perceptual field.

  Leary used this technique with the prisoners in the convict rehabilitation project and claims to have cut the recidivism (new crime) rate by 80 per cent.16 Leary had defined success or failure in terms of where the bodies were in space-time two years after release from prison. At that time, he noted gladly, over 80% of them were still outside prison, whereas the majority of released convicts are back inside prison within two years. Dr. Walter Huston Clark, in 1976, noted that the bodies of most of Leary’s convicts known to him were still outside prison in space-time after 15 years.17