Email to the Universe: and other alterations of consciousness

Email to the Universe

and other alterations of consciousness

Robert Anton Wilson

Illustrations by

Richard Rasa

Introductions by

R. Michael Johnson and Mike Gathers

Afterword by

Paul Krassner



Copyright © 2005 Robert Anton Wilson

All rights reserved. No part of this book, in part or in whole, may be reproduced, transmitted, or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles, books and reviews.

First Edition 2005

Second Printing 2008

Third Printing 2011

eBook Version 1.0—2017, Hilaritas Press

Hilaritas Press Print Edition ISBN-10:0-9987134-0-6

eBook: ISBN: 978-1-952746-03-1

Cover Design by amoeba

eBook Design by Pelorian Digital

Hilaritas Press, LLC.

P.O. Box 1153

Grand Junction, Colorado 81502

www.hilaritaspress.com

to Arlen,

dove sta memora

It is dangerous to understand new things too quickly.

— Josiah Warren, True Civilization



CONTENTS

Introductions by R. Michael Johnson and Mike Gathers

Note

Part I: Brain Gym — Simple Exercizes

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #1

The Passion Of The Antichrist

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #2

The One Law Of Economics

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #3

The Celtic Roots Of Quantum Theory

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #4

Schrodinger’s Other Cat

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #5

Paranoia

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #6

Black Magick & Curses

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #7

Shocking Hidden Facts About Male Non-Violence

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #8

Language, Logic & Lunacy

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #9

Dreams Of Flying

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #10

God’s Morals

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #11

Part II: Advanced Head Trips

Joyce & Daoism

Movie Haiku

He Who Thunders From On High

Becoming What We Are

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #12

LSD, Dogs & Me

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #13

Keep Our Troops In Iraq!

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #14

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #15

Left And Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

The Relativity Of Reality

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #16

Committee For Surrealist Investigation Of Claims Of The

Normal (CSICON)

Part III: In Defense of the Damned

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #17

Guns &. Dope Party

Damnation By Definition

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #18

CyberRevolution Montage

Deforestation

Piss Wars

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #19

The Horror On Howth Hill

Sexual Alchemy

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #20

Part IV: Q & A

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #21

Questions Answered

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #22

More Questions Answered

• Old Man On A Balcony: Views Of Monterey Bay #23

Still More Questions Answered

Part V: On My Way Out

Escape From CNN

Cheerful Reflections On Death And Dying

On My Way Out

Afterword by Paul Krassner

Introductions

Pre-Introduction

Although he’s far too humble to take credit for it, legend had it that years ago, perhaps as early as 1997, RAW scholar R. Michael Johnson, or RMJon23 he would come to be known, put an inquiry into his ISP, America Online, about Usenet groups and the subject of Robert Anton Wilson. I think this guy is really important he told them, and somehow alt.fan.rawilson manifested through Michael’s outreach – genuine customer service at the dawn of the internet age. Within short order, brilliant minds began congregating at this little online enclave and sharing their love of Robert Anton Wilson. Even the man himself sometimes posted and commented under the pseudonym ‘Mark Chan.’

By early 1999, work began on a FAQAFUQ (Frequently Answered Questions and Frequently Unanswered Questions) for the group, spearheaded by German RAW enthusiast Marc elmyr Lutter. The FAQAFUQ document grew by leaps and bounds over the next couple years under Marc’s curation and from contributions by various members of the group. By the time of the posting of the final version in 2001, it contained an extensive RAW bibliography including introductions, forewords, and smaller contributions, a list of known interviews - many of which were online, a list of related RAW links, and even a brief RAW bio written by RMJon23 himself.

As I recall, the FAQAFUQ had a short period where it was available on someone’s GeoCities webpage, and I long felt that it needed a permanent home on the internets. In early 2004 I managed to make that happen. The 'net had grown considerably since the last update to the FAQAFUQ two years prior, and many more interviews with RAW and even magazine articles written by RAW began to manifest online. With the help of a great many of the cast of characters at alt.fan.rawilson, I began accumulating the links to those pieces and organizing them along with what we already had from elmyr’s FAQAFUQ, into what is now rawilsonfans.org. Fans like Michael Johnson, Eric Wagner, and Jesse Walker sent me photocopies of what they had from magazines, and I worked to convert them to hypertext and post them to the site. Michael sent me his personal bibliography of all the magazine articles and interviews that he was aware of and we began a long collaboration of tracking those pieces down, mostly through eBay, and later on through the microfiche archives of the public library system. Over the years, Michael provided an enormous amount of encouragement and RAW expertise.

Now what follows involves a wee bit of speculation, but bear with me. My assertion is that the website RAWilsonFans.org gave birth to this book in your hands right now. Again, I’m speculating, but here’s what I know: I would frequently post updates to the website at alt.fan.rawilson and within a day or three, something from that update would often circulate through Bob’s group mind email list that he maintained with his friends and co-conspirators. So, I assume he was aware of the website and what we were up to. Then one day, Eric Wagner forwarded the Table of Contents from Bob’s upcoming book to Michael Johnson and I. Apparently, Eric had asked Bob how Tale of the Tribe was coming along and Bob said he was working on something else instead and sent him the list of the 19 essays that make up the bulk of this book. I immediately recognized almost all of them. About half of them were native content at rawilsonfans.org and the other half were available elsewhere on the internet and linked at rawilsonfans.org. My jaw dropped. I emailed Bob’s publisher, Nick Tharcher at New Falcon Press, alerting him to the situation and offering to take down what I was hosting and remove my links to the others. He agreed. A few months later he surprised me with a complimentary copy of Email to the Universe.

At the time of creation and publication of this book, Bob was not doing well. His wife had passed and his post-polio was acting up. He was running out of money and medical bills were mounting. Maybe it’s the narcissism talking, but my speculation, my story is that Bob took the best essays he could find from rawilsonfans.org and put them together for one final anthology because he needed cold, hard cash to ease the survival anxieties of his final months. I’d like to think that our little village at alt.fan.rawilson helped make a difference for the man we adored at a time when he needed it most.

I could probably list a few dozen names of folks who helped contribute something or another to the making of RAWilsonFans.org, and wish I had kept better records at times like these. A random email from a stranger on the other side of the globe might contain Hungarian book covers or issues of Trajectories magazine from 1979 and ’80 that none of us knew existed. Fans submitted links. Friends submitted letters. Fans submitted copies taken from old magazines. Intensely devoted readers like Brian Shields (R.I.P) and Tom Jackson of RAWIllumination.net, helped convert the analog text into the digital domain. Friend of RAW and fan Joseph Matheny upgraded the whole platform for me and even hosted the site for a couple years.

Specific to the pieces you’ll find in this book, five came from eBay, four directly from RAW himself via his website or the Maybe Logic Academy, three were found through deep Google search, two each were submitted by Michael Johnson, Eric Wagner, and Rev. pH33r c0w, and one posted to alt.fan.rawilson by Dan Clore that became the most popular and widely circulated piece of the whole lot. I’ll turn things over to Michael to give you a little more background.

Mike Gathers

Golden, Colorado

July 23, 2023

Introduction

By R. Michael Johnson

The new, original material for the book consists of the series of haiku, Old Man on a Balcony: Scenes From Monterey Bay. Robert Anton Wilson enjoyed a wonderful view from his condominium’s balcony overlooking the Pacific near Santa Cruz, smoking cannabis (which he had been dedicated to for decades, but now it helped with his post-polio syndrome immensely). Also included are one or two page pieces that often addressed his world in 2003. This is where RAW utilizes Ezra Pound’s ideogrammic method to stellar effect. I’d point to his extended piece on his own political party, the Guns and Dope Party, which contains a type of humor that Wilson once referred to as like the literature of the Russian Decembrists: RAW juxtaposes movie quotes, short paragraphs about an issue, Guns and Dope party platform positions, quotes from historical figures, play with fonts and typeface size, absurdist humor and satire, coded language for insiders, odd photos, open-ended questions, obscure allusions, neologisms, and, well see for yourself. The Guns and Dope Party essay might be classified as surrealist/neo-Decembrist pamphlet literature, even a sort of samizdat. One of RAW’s favored forms of rhetoric was using humor to make very serious points. At this he was a master.

But RAW really did run for Governor of California under this party, joining his old friend Timothy Leary, who’d run for the same office in 1969, against Ronald Reagan.

Besides his pieces from the early aughts, there are a few articles that he published online including Language, Logic and Lunacy and Shocking Hidden Facts About Male Non-Violence, from the online ‘zine Backlash!

Many of Wilson’s revived pieces had their titles altered from the original; in addition, he lightly edited many of the older pieces and liked to add post-scriptum-like footnotes as further commentary.

Some notes on the origins of a few of the resurrected articles:

The Passion of the Antichrist, came from maverick publisher Ralph Ginzburg’s Fact, March-April 1964. Even in the years since this was re-published in Email To The Universe it’s taken on a new significance in that we gain a profound perspective on what Madelyn Murray went through as an open atheist in early 1960s U.S., compared to the astonishing traction the so-called New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Bill Maher, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, et.al) have enjoyed since the 9/11 attacks.

The Celtic Roots of Quantum Theory was posted by RAW to his students at the Maybe Logic Academy and is not known to have made it into print prior to this. It provides a link to the Irish mathematical genius William Rowan Hamilton and his role in quantum theoretical thought, which is usually overlooked in books written on the origins of quantum theory.

One day an eBay purchase arrived and it was a little self-pressed magazine I’d never heard of called Neurolog, which is where The Relativity of ‘Reality’ came from. This 1978 piece still seems quite avant-garde, and as I write in the first month of the Trump Presidency, I can’t help but think if more people read this short gem of an article, the world would be a safer and saner place. The article was embedded among other writers’ works, and I’ve often wondered if Wilson got paid at all to write it; Neurolog seems quite obscure and looks like one of the thousands of ‘zines published in the late 1980s/early 90s. The topic of reality was always a major issue with Wilson, and only now, when the President cites The National Enquirer as a reference to bolster claims and the President and others claim media outlets they don’t like as fake news, Wilson seems to be avant here too.

Left and Right: A Non-Euclidean Perspective, first ran in Critique: A Journal of Conspiracies and Metaphysics, in 1988. Dan Clore first posted this to alt.fan rawilson in June 2002 and created quite a buzz among us. It has since appeared in many places on the Net, and for good reason: it’s writing about political thought that is so lucid and creative and sane it would inevitably be forwarded all over the Net, as geopolitics became crazier and more unstable under the acceleration of information in Western culture that RAW called The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon. It’s still stark staring germane, and you will probably want to force this into the hands of a friend or colleague, because, surely, ’tis not an ill wind yet blows many minds.

Black Magic and Curses originally appeared in the hard-copy version of R. U. Sirius’s The Thresher in 2003. I found one of Wilson’s first published articles ever, from 1959, from the James Joyce Review (included in this volume: see Joyce and Daoism) via interlibrary loan. He’d been struggling at age 27 to get published, and that scholarly periodical accepted him at around the same time frame that Paul Krassner’s The Realist began publishing him.

Some of the topics Wilson addresses in this book are well-known to Wilson readers: atheism, model agnosticism, quantum theory, the many problems of hard-core ideologues, androphobia, James Joyce, dreams and Carl Jung, Korzybski and neurosemantics, magick, Vico and theotopology, the subconscious mind and movies, psychedelic drugs and expanded perception, Nietzsche and self-perception, the labyrinthine enigmas and conspiracies involving a small church in the south of France and Vatican banking conspiracies and the Mafia, drug-dealing and modern European fascism; Philip K. Dick, anarchism and libertarian thought, Timothy Leary, Einstein, the erroneous perception of what’s commonly referred to as normal, multi-valued logics, alternative economic ideas, literary modernist figures, sexual magick, the occult and secret societies, and the poverty of Euclidean Left-Right framing in political thought. Earlier in his career Wilson wrote about longevity and human immortality; in this work he writes about death.

Near the end of the book RAW included snippets of interviews he did from 1977-2002, the last of which was conducted by his longtime friend Paul Krassner in 2002; Krassner brought in Wilson for his legendary countercultural satire magazine The Realist in 1959, when Wilson was 27, giving Wilson his first regular writing platform with a column titled Negative Thinking.

In addition, there are heaping doses of what RAW once referred to as guerrilla ontology: a zany and Erisian mix of verifiable facts, absurdities, fiction disguised as fact and vice-versa, footnotes, a melange of Joyce, Flann O’Brien, H.P. Lovecraft, dense allusions, parodies of living epistemologists he perennially disagreed with, and the late 20th century serious-but-joking new religions of Discordianism and the Church of the Subgenius, of which The Horror of Howth Hill includes all this and seems to defy classification.

The form of the book is left for the Reader to discern; Wilson wrote in an at-times gnomish fashion about the subconscious effects of the Form of books. In this he was heavily influenced by the Modernist tradition of Joyce and Pound.

For the reader willing to go the whole nine, pay very close attention to the very first pages of the book. Two brief notes on the section titled Note . . .

1.) RAW admits to a non-theistic variant of a stance on Intelligent Design. Have you seen this particular take before?

2.) In Wilson’s acknowledgment of the debt he owes to meta-modes of thought promulgated by Remy de Gourmont, Korzybski, Fuller, Bandler, Shannon and Wiener, and Ezra Pound, it is my own personal experience, and that of many others with whom I’ve come into personal contact, that each of these ideas or any one of them can be studied and implemented by the Reader/Writer/Artist for a lifetime, without exhausting them. These meta-models for thinking and acting creatively can be thought of as disciplines in the sense that yoga or learning a musical instrument is a discipline.

Wilson was the epitome of the freelance writer: outside academe, free to roam across multiple disciplines, not beholden to any Institution and so free to write what others shied away from, astonishingly erudite, seemingly the ideal thinker who sees more and so has a fuller view of the world than journalistic/academic/ThinkTank thinkers; he was one of a group of thinkers that the Father of the Sociology of Knowledge, Karl Mannheim, called the freischwebende Intelligenz, or socially unattached intelligentsia — a rare writer/thinker/artist who, because of his or her situated-ness in the social scheme, has views less occluded than usual intellectuals and offers novel and nuanced takes on social reality because of this.

Note

 Picture 10  Picture 11  Picture 12

This book intends to change your way of perceiving/conceiving the world, without drugs or drums or Voodoo, simply by using words in certain special ways.

 Picture 13  Picture 14

I wrote these polemics, poems, neurolinguistic experiments and assorted meanderings over a period of about 45 years; they represent part of my life’s work not previously available in book form — a part that I would now like preserved in that (relatively) Hard Copy.

I hereby acknowledge the debts my works owe to Remy de Gourmont, for his method of dissociation of ideas; to Alfred Korzybski, for his formulations of General Semantics; to Richard Bandler, for his invention of neurolinguistic programming; to Buckminster Fuller for his synergetics; to Claude Shannon and Norbert Weiner for their studies of control and communication between animals and/or machines; and to Ezra Pound for Ideogrammic Method.

None of them deserve any blame for my errors and blunders.

 Picture 15

I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions. I strongly suspect that a world external to, or at least independent of, my senses exists in some sense.

I also suspect that this world shows signs of intelligent design, and I suspect that such intelligence acts via feedback from all parts to all parts and without centralized sovereignty, like the internet; and that it does not function hierarchically, in the style an Oriental despotism, an American corporation or Christian theology.

I somewhat suspect that Theism and Atheism both fail to account for such decentralized intelligence, rich in circular-causal feedback.

I more-than-half suspect that all good writing, or all prose and poetry that one wants to read more than once, proceeds from a kind of alteration in consciousness, i.e., a kind of controlled schizophrenia. (Don’t become alarmed — I think good acting comes from the same place.)

I sometimes suspect that what Blake called Poetic Imagination expresses this exact thought in the language of his age, and that visits by angels and gods state it in even more archaic argot.

These suspicions have grown over 72 years, but as a rather slow and stupid fellow I do not have the Chutzpah to proclaim any of them as certitudes. Give me another 72 years and maybe I’ll arrive at firmer conclusions.

PART I

BRAIN GYM — SIMPLE EXERCIZES

neuro-semantic challenges to such readers who think they know who they are, where they are and what the hell is going on around here

NUMBER SIX: I am not a number! I am a free man!

— The Prisoner

NUMBER FIVE: No malfunction! Number Five is alive!

— Short Circuit

HANNIBAL LECTER, M.D.: A census taker tried to quantify me once. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.

— The Silence of the Lambs

Old Man On A Balcony:

Views Of Monterey Bay #1

Clear blue bay at sunset

And I am stoned and placid—

Free of grief. almost.

The Passion of the Antichrist

Article II. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

— TREATY WITH TRIPOLI written by John Adams, vice-president, 1796; passed by Congress 1797; signed by John Adams, president, 1797.

If you ever believed our founders intended this nation to be a Christian country — i.e., to enforce Christianity on all citizens and residents, even agnostics, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, atheists, Daoists, Sihks, etc. — perhaps you should read some of our early history. I suggest that you start with the above treaty, then take a look at the First Amendment to the Constitution, and then read the Jefferson-Adams correspondence 1812-1826.

De jure, this is not a Christian nation.

Of course, this has become a Christian nation de facto, by hook and by crook — mostly by crook. This means that non-Christians theoretically have the same legal rights as Christians but in fact they have to fight every hour of every day of every year to prove it, in a system where almost all judges and politicians either are Christians or prudently pretend that they are.

I wrote the original of this in 1965 for a now-defunct journal called Fact. It seems worth resurrecting 40 years later because, with Bozo in