Final Secret of the Illuminati

by Robert Anton Wilson

  Dr. Leary: The sale, manufacture or distribution, yes.

  Kennedy: . . . You have testified. Now why do you think they should be?

  Leary: I feel that activity, particularly commercial activities involving the manufacture, sale and distribution of these substances should be controlled because you do not know about quality, you do not know about safety, you do not know what you are buying. Obviously you have to have laws, just as you have laws about the amphetamines.. .

  Kennedy: You said you do not know about the quality. What is it about the quality that you are frightened about?

  Leary: We do not want amateur or black market sale or distribution of LSD.

  Kennedy: Why not?

  Leary: Or the barbiturates or liquor. When you buy a bottle of liquor —

  Kennedy: This is not responsive. As to LSD . . . why do you not want the indiscriminate manufacture and distribution? Is it because it is dangerous?

  Leary: Because you do not know what you are getting. Kennedy: Is it because it is dangerous?23

  And so on. Leary continually tried to point out the horrible black market that would be created by across-the-board criminalization of LSD, and Kennedy continually heckled him and tried to trip him into an “incriminating” admission. The government went ahead and illegalized LSD research. The black market sprang up on a nationwide scale almost immediately. Nobody knew what they were buying, and bad trips multiplied horrendously, especially among those who had the bad fortune to be arrested during the moments of imprint vulnerability, in which case they quite naturally imprinted helplessness, terror and paranoia. The same results were obtained in the C.I.A.’s clandestine experiments, in which the subjects did not know what was being done to them. Those who began to suspect, correctly, that they were being experimented upon by persons who were lying to them also imprinted paranoia. All of this could have been prevented if Leary’s work on set, setting and dosage had been correctly understood.

  Alas, Leary’s ideas never did get across in the mass media. There, he was portrayed as a madman who wanted everybody to take LSD and, later, as the Criminal Genius behind the black market which he had tried so hard to prevent. Nor was it ever publicized that in Leary’s research with LSD there had been exactly zero bad trips, zero psychotic breaks, zero suicides.

  Multiple realities

  One of the writers in the Playboy promotion department was taking a trip every weekend, on something his black market dealer told him was LSD. (Real LSD was illegal by then.) One day, this writer, whom we shall call Joseph K., told me that he had received telepathic messages from outer space on several of his recent trips. The Materialist did not perfectly hide his instant skepticism, and Joseph K. clammed up immediately. We never heard another word from him on that subject, and he later quit Playboy and went off to try to write in Hollywood.

  At the time, I had put “all that mystical stuff” behind me and was playing the game of urbane, sophisticated, successful Playboy Editor. Weirdness was something that, like poverty, only happened to other people. I was targeted directly at Hedonic Gratification, mostly due to a new drug that had entered my life, the seductive lady known as Maria Juana, goddess of sex, rapture and doing-your-own-thing.

  By the time of the Democratic Convention Horrors of 1968, the Materialist was smoking pot fairly regularly — like everybody else in Playboy’s editorial department, and at every other magazine we knew; and throughout the communications industry.

  One night the Hedonic Materialist was happily spaced out on the weed and alone at home — the kids were asleep and Arlen (paradoxical for a Playboy editor’s wife) was out at a Women’s Liberation meeting. I abruptly made a neurological discovery. Most of the phenomena of self-hypnosis are quite easily replicable on grass, without the tedious training involved in ordinary hypnosis. 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 image.

  The Neurologician now took up yoga, quite unmystically and with hardly a grain of piety. I understood that yogic training — whatever else it might comprise — is a method of freeing the nervous system from conditioned perception. Combining pot and yoga, I quickly demonstrated to myself by direct experience that the nervous system can be freed from virtually every perception and reflex that makes up our ordinary spectrum of possibility.

  Our old friend, Alan Watts, a most skeptical theologian and experimental mystic, was doing similar research in those years, and coming to similar conclusions. During one of his visits to Chicago, he said to another Playboy editor, “But, my dear man, reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot, you know.” Alas, to those who haven’t done the research personally on a neurological level, this is hardly comprehensible; the editor remained cynical. Later Paul Krassner, editor of The Realist, put the same thought more colorfully: “Reality is silly-putty.” Those without direct experience could not understand; they quickly concluded that a certain segment of the intelligentsia was going mad . . .

  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.

  The Murder of Christ: a Re-run

  Along about this point in my career as an amateur yogi, Tim Leary came to Chicago with his “Death of the Mind” road show and I must admit I did not find him nearly as impressive as earlier. He walked on stage barefoot, burned incense, did a lecture on Buddha illustrated with psychedelic slides and weird lighting effects, and more or less came on like an Oriental Billy Graham. It seemed that a brilliant scientist had turned himself into a second-rate messiah, but a day or so later I met Tim on the street outside the Playboy building and we lunched together again. Tim was more turned-on, vibrant, joyous and grandiose than ever, but he also had even more sense of humor than previously and kept poking fun at his own Guru act. Neither of us said it aloud, but it was understood that much of Tim’s current persona was just agitprop for the one cause he really believed in: the possibility that LSD, wisely used by professionals, could reprogram enough nervous systems to accelerate consciousness and intelligence before we laid ourselves and our planet waste.

  Somehow, we got talking about Dr. Wilhelm Reich, and I compared Tim’s growing legal problems with Reich’s. Dr. Reich had been the first Freudian to take Freud’s discoveries literally and say explicitly that most neuroses are caused by Judaeo-Christian sex-repression. Worse, Reich had insisted that these neuroses are direct causes of racism, sexism, rape, violence and warfare. Sexual repression, he concluded, is Public Health Problem Number One and should be fought as vigorously as polio or cancer. Reich began promulgating this heresy back in the 1920s. He also began actual research on couples having sexual intercourse in the 1930s (
30 years before Masters and Johnson). For these and other radical stances, Dr. Reich was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Society, thrown out of the Communist and Socialist Parties in Austria, driven from Germany by the Nazis, smeared by the press in Sweden to the extent that he could no longer work in that country, defamed by the American Medical Association after coming here and finally died in Federal prison in 1957. All this had convinced many persons, including me, that scientific freedom was no more secure in the 20th Century than in the Dark Ages, if a scientist became too revolutionary in his thinking.

  The Reich case did not frighten Timothy.

  “I’m in great health in all respects,” he self-diagnosed, with the wide and genuine Leary grin. “I fully expect to live past the hysteria and persecution, till everything I’ve claimed is confirmed and accepted, till it’s used every day in every clinic in the world, till it becomes dull truism.” Then he grinned even more broadly. “But then I’ll be espousing some new heresy, I hope, and be in hot water again.

  This may prove to be an accurate forecast.

  It is rather peculiar to look back, in 1977, at a book like David Solomon’s anthology, LSD24, published in 1964-only 13 years ago. Here we find scientists such as Dr. Humphrey Osmund, Dr. James Terrill, Dr. Charles Savage, Dr. Donald Jackson, Dr. Sanford Unger (whose willingness to hug patients is mentioned above). Dr. Jonathan Cole, Dr. Martin Katz, Dr. Eric Kast, etc., reporting beneficial and interesting changes in consciousness (and behavior) induced by LSD in a proper set and setting. Here we find philosophers like Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts contemplating the potentials of these chemicals with optimism and hope. We also find Dr. Leary writing the introduction to the volume and treated as a much-respected colleague by most of the scientific contributors. In short, the whole volume seems to have fallen out of a time-warp from another universe.

  Was all this published only 13 years ago? Weren’t all the contributors thrown in jail at once? What kind of world was it back then, when LSD could be discussed scientifically, objectively, rationally?

  As Dr. Leary writes in The Curse of the Oval Room,

  Very few Americans, even in these post-Watergate days, understand how Nixon set up his very own Special Secret elite police. Under the guise of “drug control” this Orwellian coup was accomplished with the approval of middle-aged liberals. It was so simple. The Narc budget jumped from 22 million to 140 million . . . Constitutional rights were suspended and martial law (no-knock, stop-and-frisk, curfew, etc.) was imposed selectively on one easily identifiable segment of the population . . . Fear descended on the land. The spokesmen for the counter-culture were arrested, harassed, silenced. The press cooperated completely . . .25

  In the course of the terroristic campaign described by Leary, he himself was repeatedly arrested, convicted of owning two joints of marijuana (he claimed it was a frame-up, but the liberals weren’t interested in his claims, since the cops are the new gods of corporate liberaldom), was sentenced to 30 years, had the highest bail in U.S. history ($5,000,000), was kidnapped in Afghanistan in violation of 148 court rulings holding such body-snatchings illegal where extradition treaties are not in force, was put in chains for a while and then kept in solitary confinement for 19 months, and was held incommunicado for 10 months with none of his friends allowed to send messages to him or receive messages from him.

  All this happened in broad daylight, with the liberals and the ACLU unable to recognize that the Constitution was being mauled and mangled in a fashion similar to the famous “Red Terror” of the early 1950s.

  I had observed with horror the destruction of Dr. Reich by the forces of bureaucracy and bigotry in the 1950s. It was a kind of Awakening experience, the first dawn of the apprehension that our government, like any other, is more bad than good. To others, this awakening came through the Vietnam War, or through working with blacks and Indians in the civil rights struggle and discovering that the misery of these minorities is not just a dramatic political “issue” but a very painful reality. To some, it only came with Watergate. To some, it hasn’t come yet. To me, as a Libertarian, it came when agents of the Food and Drug Administration dumped all of Dr. Reich’s books — 30 years of scientific research — into the Vansivoort Street incinerator in New York City, in 1957, and burned them.

  Book-burning was a scene out of Nazi Germany, the horror of all the anti-Nazi movies the Libertarian had seen as a child, coming alive in his own country, in his own time.

  The Libertarian wrote many defenses of Reich in those years, for small oddball political and occult journals — the only ones who were willing to print articles claiming that the U.S. government might possibly have played the Holy Inquisition role to a new Galileo. The only effect of all this earnest writing was that I got to meet quite a few Reichians, and found them a dreary lot — emotionally addicted to paranoid, dogmatic and intolerant head trips (an imitation, unconscious but brilliantly accurate, of all the stress symptoms Reich himself had developed after seven years of hounding and harassment by Washington).

  Now, as the 1960s moved past, I began to see the same kill-the-heretic script emerging again, with Tim Leary typecast for the starring role. It was all as rote and repetitious as the yearly sacrifice of the virgin to the corn-crops. Reich had called this bloody ritual “the murder of Christ” and said it would be played over and over again as long as humanity remained “muscularly armored” against the free play of love and sexuality. One began to think he might have been right about that . . .

  In 1966-67 I had a few articles of subversive intent published in a little magazine called The New Libertarian, and struck up a friendship (by mail) with the editor, Kerry Thornley. We began writing quite long letters to each other (Thornley being in Los Angeles and I in Chicago), astonished at how totally our political philosophies agreed — we were both opposed to every form of violence or coercion against individuals, whether practiced by governments or by people who claimed to be revolutionaries. We were equally disenchanted with the organized Right and the organized Left while still remaining Utopians, without a visible Utopia to believe in. At times we discussed free-floating libertarian communes in international waters, which in my case gave birth to the anarchist submarine fantasy in Illuminatus, and, later, to enthusiastic support of the Space Migration plans of Leary and Prof. Gerard O’Neill.

  Thornley mentioned in a letter that he had served in the Marines with Lee Harvey Oswald and that they had been buddies. I mentioned that Oswald’s wife had been living with my doctor’s sister at the time of the assassination. We were amused and intrigued by the coincidence and didn’t (yet) call it synchronicity.

  Eventually, through Thornley and other California libertarians, I got initiated into the mysteries of Discordianism, the first true “true religion,” which Thornley and Gregory Hill had invented in 1958. Discordianism is based on worship of the Greek goddess of chaos and confusion, Eris, also called Discordia in Latin. Since readers of Illuminatus already know a great deal about this sublime faith, we will give only an abbreviated summary here, quoting 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 wh
o 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 absolutely right, and that those impersonal forces are female and that Her name is ERIS. If he, wonder of wonders, still remains obstinate, then finally resort to:

  “THE FIGURATIVE SYMBOLISM DODGE and confide that sophisticated people like himself recognize that Eris is a Figurative Symbol for an Ineffable Metaphysical Reality and that the Erisian Movement is really more like a poem than like a science and that he is liable to be turned into a Precious Mao Button and Distributed to The Poor in The Region of Thud if he does not get hip. Then put him on your mailing list.”

  The graphic above is a page from the now-legendary Principia Discordia. The Aneristic illusion is that order is real; the Eristic illusion is that disorder, or chaos, is real; Illumination is the realization that it depends on the perceiver.

  Discordian atheology got more and more complicated as it was worked over and developed by Thornley, Greg Hill, and various others who were drawn into it — Bob Shea, another editor at Playboy; Camden Benares (author of Zen Without Zen Masters); poet Judith Abrahms; Dr. Robert Newport, a psychiatrist; and quite a few similarly whimsical souls. Eventually, Greg Hill produced a Discordian Bible called Principia Discordia. None of this was merely a parody of religion per se. It was an exercise in guerrilla ontology — an attempt to make Nasrudin’s Donkey visible. A Marx Brothers version of Zen. Operation Mindfuck, we called it.