People - Meeting with a Remarkable Man: A Talk with Robert Anton Wilson

[Expat98]

Meeting with a Remarkable Man: A Talk with Robert Anton Wilson

by Propaganda Anonymous




Introduction

The date was July 25, 2003. I was somewhat in denial of the fact that I was about to sit down with Robert Anton Wilson, philosopher/magician/cantankerous old codger, and conduct an interview with what felt like no prep at all--just a few notes scrawled into my notebook when I found out that I got the interview two hours earlier. You see, originally I was in town only to see a documentary about him entitled Maybe Logic -- which by the way was sharp as a tack -- but then I decided to go for the gusto and see if I could sit down with the man who warped my mind like a K-hole when I read the Illuminatus! trilogy as a teenager. The reality of the situation was that I could only stay in town for three nights, as that was the maximum amount of time the International Youth Hostel of Santa Cruz would allow me to sleep there. If I wanted to stay longer, I'd be forced to pay inflated summer rates for a motel room or kick it with the hobos and homeless on the streets for a couple of nights. Or worse, I might have to head back east with nothing but the impression that Santa Cruz was a strange, strange place.

The closer I got to RAW's apartment the more it dawned on me that I was late, unprepared, and not sure if the tape recorder I just bought at Radio Shack would pick up any of our conversation. That's just how life is sometimes.

For those who don't know who RAW was, or seemed to be, perhaps the simplest way to put it is that the man was an icon for being an iconoclast. Throughout his forty some odd years writing biting social commentary with a sly psychedelic wit, he used the language of a street comedian rather than a pundit on a soapbox. Reading his books gives you the feeling that he has turned on the lights and discovered that ostentatious intellectuals have been unknowingly fondling an elephant with maladroit hands. He assessed the bullshit, or er, elephant shit, and wisely stepped aside and acted as a fair warning system to those of us venturing into the less illuminated parts of our minds. If there is one phrase that echoes in those darkened halls it must be, "Think for yourself."

I was nervous. It was trepidation mixed with a strong feeling of joy that allowed me to make it up the three flights of stairs to RAW's apartment door without being winded. To me, Bob seemed a master raconteur, at ease winding yarns around his audience's mind until you laugh yourself out of the skull cap he just knit for you with his story.

Interview

Propaganda Anonymous: I'm sitting here talking with Mr. Robert Anton Wilson. I originally came out here to see the world premiere of his documentary entitled, Maybe Logic, premiering on July 23rd, 2003.

Mr. Wilson, July 23rd, 2003 seemed like a special date on more than one instance for that night.

Robert Anton Wilson: Well, it was Monica Lewinsky's 30th birthday. I only blew the minds of a few people. She blew the minds of the whole country....or she blew something.

Prop: And along with Monica Lewinsky's 30th birthday, it was also a day that was named after you, for the city of Santa Cruz, by the Mayor.

Wilson: Yeah, a friend of mine in Massachusetts is trying to make it a national celebration among my fans, which would be called Maybe Day. He asked me to suggest rituals. I wrote back in e-mail just before you arrived. I suggested he should invite Christians, Jews, and Moslems, and have chanting of "Jesus is the only Son of God, maybe" "Hear O Israel, the Lord thy God is one, maybe" and "There's no God but Allah, maybe, and maybe Mohammed is his prophet." I think this will do a great deal to restore sanity to this planet. It depends if Jews and Moslems show up for this celebration. Maybe it'll do their heads a lot of good.

Prop: And also on that day, as mentioned in Maybe Logic, was the 30-year anniversary of when you first received communications from what seemed to be an extra-terrestrial-higher intelligence. Has there ever been any recurrences, small flashbacks, if you will, since those 30 years past?

Wilson: Oh... um, it never really stopped. But my metaphor for it changes. Now I prefer to regard it as an increase in intuition and psychic abilities, rather than a separate entity guiding me. But the experience takes different forms. Sometimes I forget about it for weeks on end. I prefer to think of it as a white rabbit from County Kerry, because there is no chance anybody will take that literally, including me.

Prop: You were involved in a protest in September 2002 concerning the issue of medical marijuana. What exactly has the federal government impinged upon in crossing the rights of citizens in California, concerning that issue?

Wilson: Well, the government kills people. Take Peter McWilliams, the best-selling author. [And I'm not a best-selling author; I'm a cult author. I have a small but passionate following. It'd be nice to write a bestseller. I admire people who have that skill. I wish I had it.] He was a best-selling author, and one of the leading gay rights advocates. And he had AIDS and Cancer. They took away his marijuana, which controlled his nausea, and a few weeks later he choked on his own vomit, and died.

Now, of course, there are thousands of people in pain all over the country, because the government won't let them have medical marijuana.

And then there was a case in Virginia. It was on 60 minutes. On CBS news! Goddamnit. The truth even gets into the corporate media sometimes.

This doctor had his license suspended for three years for giving an unnamed drug, they wouldn't name it --I think it was heroin, but I'm guessing -- to a patient who had some condition I never heard of, it's very rare. This guy was in horrible pain, all over his body, 24 hours a day. The only relief he got was from this unknown drug this doctor gave him. So the doctor's license was suspended, and this guy committed suicide. He made a video of himself, shooting himself in the head, denouncing the United States government. They showed that on CBS.

The only possible rationale that can justify the behavior of the federal government and the Tsarist bureaucracy, would be that, no sick person in the country, nor their doctor and none of their family in consultation, none of us, can judge what's best for the patient. Only the Tsar knows what's best for the patient. The only way this makes any sense is if we assume the doctrine called Mystical Tsarism, which arose in the 19th century in Russia as a defense against European rationalism.

Mystical Tsarism held that the Tsar is directly guided by God, and therefore no one can understand his decision except him and God. That's the same rationale as our government today -- the Tsar must be directed by God; how else could he know what medicine is best for every patient? He must be guided by God, so they revived mystical Tsarism, and incorporated it into the Constitutional democracy we once had in this country... and they're killing people, and they're hurting people all the time, and they're doing this for reasons nobody knows. Either they're mentally stark staring batshit crazy, and they really do believe that some "god" is gonna to run the whole system for us, or else they are so superstitious and stupid that they should really be put in remedial reading classes and start over in Kindergarten or something like that. Or they're in conspiracy with the large pharmaceutical companies to keep people from getting cheap effective medicine and force the sick people to use the expensive and rather ineffective medicine that the big drug companies keep pushing at us. "Let them eat Celebrex."

Prop: I read in a previous interview that you considered yourself an Anarchist earlier in your career.

Wilson: At one point I was calling myself an Anarchist, an Atheist, and a Witch. Then when I reached my 40's I softened that. I started to describe myself as a libertarian, a pantheist, and a neopagan. And since then I moved on to a decentralist, a pragmatist, and a proponent of maybe logic.... I got the idea from T.S. Eliot. T.S. Eliot was the most popular poet of the 1920s, and suddenly in the 1930s he announced he was a monarchist in politics, a classicist in literature, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.

It horrified most of his previous admirers, and it brought him a whole new bunch of admirers from the other side of the literary world.

Then Dylan Thomas declared himself an Anarchist in literature, a Drunkard by religion, and a Welshman in politics.

Prop: Was he drunk when he said that?

Wilson: Well he usually was. He died of drink. Damn fool. People who die of drink are all damn fools....In my judgment, I don't mean they "are" damn fools. I mean, I judge them to be damn fools, from my estimation, in my reality-tunnel.

Some of the people I admire most died of alcoholism. Malaclypse the Younger, the founder of the Discordian Society, W.C. Fields, William Faulkner, Hemingway....

Hemingway shot himself, because, as he told a friend "I can't hunt, I can't write, and I can't even fuck. What's the use of going on?" That was all because he put too much booze into his body, ruined his liver and his brain.

Prop: He did LSD. Hemingway.

Wilson: Really? I never heard about that.

Prop: Well, I wouldn't call myself an expert researcher in Hemingway, but I heard that he had done LSD once. I was hoping you might verify that.

Wilson: Nah. Maybe he didn't have the right set and setting. There's nothing magical in LSD by itself. You gotta have LSD plus the right set and the right setting for really dramatic changes. That's why I got interested in Crowley. I was reading Magick in Theory and Practice, trying to figure out what the hell it's all about. Trying to make sense of his medieval ravings and rantings. Then it suddenly struck me. This was the best way to program an LSD trip. Do a Crowley ritual -- work it up, all the steps, then keep careful records afterwards. Do the rituals, keep notes, keep notes for at least a year, then see the results you're getting, and see if you need to change the path and try a different set of rituals.

This is a science! This is as empirical as biology. This as practical as.....(laughing) no, no, erase that. This is empirical as the Stock Market anyway. You see, you try to see what works for you, you know.

I prefer Las Vegas to the Stock Market, but I never go to Las Vegas, and I never invest in Stocks. I am not inclined to gamble, though I think I'd have better luck in Las Vegas. Everybody I know who has tried to beat the Wall Street professionals has ended up losing their investment. They come around telling me how much money they made, and what a damn fool I am for not trading on the computer all day. Then I see them a year later, and they're flat on their ass broke, telling me they lost it all.

Just like Las Vegas. The more you win, the more you bet. The more you bet, the more certain you're going to lose it all eventually. Everything keeps doubling.

Like Baldy Bacon in Pound's Canto XII:

Also ran up 40,000 bones on his own

Once, but wanted to "eat up the whole'r Wall Street"

and dropped it all three weeks later

40 thousand was a lot back then when Pound wrote that. In my parent's first house they rented, the rent was 48 dollars a month. Most of my money goes to my rent. I just like living here. I love the view. I love the Buddha out on the balcony. I like to sit out on the balcony, look at the Buddha, and think of the sea.

Then those damn idiots next door put up an American Flag. I gotta think about that now too. I can't just think of the Buddha and the ocean.... All these domesticated primates who used to charge into battle, waving the king's umbilical cord; then they discovered the umbilical cord wore out, so they used a colored piece of cloth, then they started putting designs on the colored pieces of cloth, now they've got them hanging out their windows to keep the terrorists away...or something. .... It's more likely to attract the attention of the terrorists. If I had to travel [thank god I don't] I would've learned to do a good Irish dialect. I can't do an English accent no matter how hard I try. I can almost barely do an Irish one, at least if I'm not in Ireland. I wouldn't want anybody to know I'm an American.

I'm sort of a half-time Harry Browne fan. You know him? He's the Libertarian candidate for president last term. He has a weekly column he sends out on e-mails. Well, I agree with him on half and disagree with him on half. Like most libertarians, we never agree with one another totally. The greatest thing he ever wrote was in a recent e-mail, "America fears most of the world and most of the world fears America." Everybody's afraid of America, with good cause. In America you're afraid of everybody else, with good cause. I get more reactionary all the time. Jefferson and Adams and Washington, Madison, that whole group seems so much smarter than the people who are running the government today. Back in the 18th century we had people smarter than me. Now we've got Bozo. See: every rebel becomes a reactionary.

Prop: In the Foreword of Quantum Psychology, you write about a handful of philosophies. Two of which are Operationalism and Existentialism. As an example, in academia, someone who is heavily into Existentialism won't really think about looking at phenomena in Operational terms. Could you explain?

Wilson: Oh, yeah. The point is that Operationalism and Existentialism have more in common than they realize. The only reason they don't realize how much they have in common is because of this goddamn psychological warfare going on between the Humanities department and the Science department. If they would stop waving their dicks around yelling "Mine is bigger than yours" and sit down and talk, essentially they'll realize existentialism and operationalism are basically the same method applied to two different areas.

Operationalism is your experience with instruments. Existentialism is your experience without instruments. They're both dealing with your experience; they're throwing out all the traditional abstractions of the Western mind. They have more in common than they realize.

Prop: In the documentary, Maybe Logic, the subject of Giordono Bruno came up, and how in his time mysticism and science were studied in conjunction, both at the opposite end of the spectrum as religion. It seemed as if Quantum Psychology might be doing that as well. Do you feel that Quantum Psychology put mysticism and science on the same playing field?

Wilson: Yeah, I guess I was trying to do that. I did that in several of my books. I think. Yeah, Bruno is a really key figure. Frances Yates, who wrote a couple of books, Giordono Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, made a pretty good argument that Bruno and John Dee and Johann Kepler and a few others were all in communication with one another and were plotting this scientific mystical overthrow of the Theological systems in Europe.

This became the Rosicrucian Brotherhood, and later became Freemasonry. It's a very plausible theory. And whether it's true or not, it is certainly true that Bruno was burned on 18 counts, not just for teaching Copernican astronomy, but also for practicing cabalistic magic and teaching a mystical system of improving your memory. And, oh yeah, planning secret societies to plot against the Vatican.

With him there was no difference between science and mysticism. They were both ways to find out what's going on, and both of them were in opposition to the bureaucrats of the Catholic Church who had their own dogma, and who insisted that you agree with them or keep your mouth shut. Even if you keep your mouth shut, you might be accused of sick salacious thoughts if they found the wrong books in your house.

Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600. And 1766 or 1765, there was a guy who was beheaded in France for having Voltaire's books in his house. And he was also suspected of throwing shit on the altar of the local church, but they couldn't prove that. All they could prove was that he had Voltaire's books.

Prop: Speaking of shit, could you talk about this in relation to the 2nd circuit?

Wilson: Well, when you take your dog for a walk, your dog pees in not one place but several places. The dog is marking her territory. There's lots of evidence in the last 30 years by animal researchers that human beings, like other animals, have territories. Just walk around and see all the "no trespassing" signs around your area of the country.

Humans are very territorial animals. That's why Timothy Leary said, "The only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours." Politics is all about territorial squabbles. Who's in charge around this habitat? Who is the alpha-male or female? Elephants are the only mammals I know that have Alpha females, but most insects do.

With most mammals it's the Alpha males who are in charge. And who's the Alpha Male? Who gives the orders? Another question is could we hold this territory? Or would it be better and expand it and knock off the next tribe and take their territory too?

And this is an Evolutionary Relative Success. Except that as technology advances it's getting more and more dangerous for all of us. So I believe the higher circuits should be evoked now at this point in history because it's becoming, as Bucky Fuller used to say, Omni-lethal. I don't know how many more world wars we can tolerate. There's going to become a point where we're going to wipe the human race out if we don't stop war before that happens.

So we got to learn to do something else with the territorial squabbling. Well, we can squabble over ideological territories. Let's make a deal we're not going to shoot each other over this, we're going have a place like the UN, where everybody can say "We have the best political system in the world, and the rest of you guys suck. You don't know shit about politics." Just so long as they're not shooting one another.

A lot of people get off on that, like New York intellectuals. They spend all their time insulting one another. This is known as witty conversation. ...What it comes down to is who can dominate the territory with the best verbalisms. New York intellectuals are the most backward people in the country, outside of Congress, so if they can learn it, then I think Congress and diplomats at the UN can learn it. Just sit and argue and insult each other. And if they learn to use Maybe Logic -- that might take 100 years or so -- they might even make more progress. Instead of just arguing they might even come to some agreements. As long as they just agree to stop shooting at everybody. The rest of us are just innocent bystanders -- Don't shoot at us.

Prop: It seems that this level of communication is prevalent in much of our culture.

Wilson: I detest the cruelty of most literary criticism. And this is not, believe it or not, a personal vendetta. I have gotten, I would say, about 90 good reviews for every 10 bad ones. Probably even better than that. I got a lot of rave reviews on all my books and advertisements and so on. And some of them from prestigious places like New Scientist even.

So I'm not complaining for myself. When I read these bitchy, male and females intellectuals, and the males are bitchier than the females....when I read them denouncing one another, in such nasty terms it reminds me of a bunch of nasty kids in the schoolyard. I think, jeez, I gave that up when I was about 12 years old. What's the matter with these people who are still doing it?

I kind of like Norman Mailer for punching Gore Vidal. At least Mailer brought it down to the level where he made it visible where it all comes from. It's all macho aggression. I think they should punch one another more often, and spend less time being bitchy.

Prop: You've listed Mailer as an influence on your writing style, in his long sentences -- which are phenomenal, the way that he does it and the way you do it, as well..

Wilson: Well, both Mailer and I learned a lot from Faulkner, and Faulkner learned a lot from Joseph Conrad, so let's give everybody credit... I'm not putting Norman down. Norman learned a lot from Faulkner, I learned a lot from both Faulkner and Norman Mailer. I then, very late in life, discovered Joseph Conrad, who was doing that type of word experiments with long sentences back around the end of the last century, early this century.

Joseph Conrad was born speaking Polish, he learned English very late in life. He wrote all his novels in English. And They're so beautifully written you can't believe this guy was using English as a second language. And he was. So was Arthur Koestler, come to think of it. He's not as great a writer as Conrad, but still Arthur Koestler was damned eloquent.

It amazes me. I know bits and dabs of several languages. I never learned any of them well enough to carry on an intelligent conversation, much less write a goddamned book in it. People who can do that, they really leave me flabbergasted. Like people who can play the Apassionata on the piano. I think that they must have some gene, I don't even have a cousin of that gene. I have an ear to listen to it, but I can't envision myself actually being able to perform it.

Prop: Speaking of writing, in the Illuminatus trilogy you once described that novel as a journey from paranoia to metanoia, where you first believe everything is connected but it's in a bad way. And at the end of the book, you believe that everything is connected, but it's joyous, like Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

I, for one, after reading that book as a teenager..I kind of felt that journey from somewhat paranoia to metanoia. But it was hypnotizing -- the prose. And I came across one of your interviews on the Internet, where you had once said that you meant for that to happen. You wrote the book for that particular purpose, to kind of hypnotize. I know that most writers try to do that, but it seemed that the blueprint you set out to do was very successful.

Wilson: Yeah, I feel pretty happy with the results. There was a woman in North Carolina who wrote for a science fiction fan zine, who kept criticizing me on the grounds that Illuminatus! drove several of her friends to commit suicide. She claimed that it was not a journey from paranoia to metanoia, but that it was a journey into further paranoia and absolute insanity. I never did figure out what to say about that. Except that somebody had committed a bunch of murders after reading Thomas Wolfe's, The Web and the Rock.

His name was Harold Unrah. He lived in New Jersey. He was reading The Web and the Rock , and he came out with a gun and shot everybody he met on the street until the police got him. He was the first of the modern spree killers, as they call it. As distinguished from serial killers who pace themselves between victims, thinking they are going to get away, the spree killers are going to kill as many as they can, knowing they are going to get killed themselves. You can't do a spree killing and expect to walk away from it.

So, even if I did have a bad affect on some of them, it's not my fault, any more than it was Thomas Wolfe's fault. And besides, most serial killers when asked to name their favorite book, all say the Book of Revelations. Not all of them, but that's the most popular book with serial killers. You can see why. You read that stuff... Just try getting stoned and reading the Book of Revelations. You'll have the most paranoid delusions and hallucinations. No. Don't try it out. Don't try it out until you are over 60; otherwise you might really flip out entirely. It's not in the Lutheran Bible, you know. Martin Luther considered it dangerous lunacy, or something like that; he cut it out of the Holy Scripture. He thought the Church in Rome wrote it to drive the suckers crazy.... In spite of that woman in Carolina, I do think Illuminatus! has helped most of its readers. I get so much positive feedback, .......of course those that did commit suicide have no time to write back and ask why you drove us to suicide. Let's hope they're really very few and far between. Let's hope she really just had a grudge against me, and made it all up. Let's hope....

Prop: Timothy Leary was in jail with Charles Manson, or so he wrote in a few of his books; and their cells were actually adjoining, only a wall between them. Do you know of his impressions of Charles Manson?

Wilson: I don't know if this is one of his books, but he told me that, "Charlie was the shortest guy in the prison." He wasn't a midget, but he was 5'2 or 5 foot or something, very short. At some point in his career -- he was in and out of prison all his life, you know, -- at some point in his career he realized, that the only way he could survive with that much disadvantage in lethal combat was to make everybody think you're so damn crazy they wouldn't want to mess with you. You had to be so crazy, you were terrifying. So Manson developed that talent to an extraordinary degree.

I was staying at a really nice hotel in Los Angeles a few years ago. I was a guest speaker at a Neuro-Linguistic Programming workshop. I invited Paul Krassner and his wife over and have lunch on me, in my room. Room service at my expense. And, oh wow man. Putting on the dog. Paul used to pay me $15 an article when the Realist was first started. And, anyway, Paul told me that hotel was strange cause Charlie Manson worked as a pimp in the lobby for a couple of years in between his various prison terms. It made the whole hotel seem darker and more sinister. And the hotel was supposedly haunted by the ghost of Clifton Webb.

Prop: Did you ever harbor any thoughts about maybe becoming an actor?

Wilson: No, but I've often thought I became an actor without intending to. All my life I've had this fantasy of directing a movie. The fantasy is stronger now than it used to be.

I never thought of myself as an actor until I saw a video of a stand-up comedy act I did at a nightclub in San Francisco. And I thought, "Hey, I'm an actor." Every comedian is an actor in a sense. That's a role I put on to keep the audience laughing. So I'm being an actor without even working at it. I don't know if I can do another role.

Like Woody Allen: he's one of the most innovative people around as a director and as a writer, but as an actor, he's afraid to play any role except for the role he played the first time out, but it was a success. Why is he so afraid to experiment as an actor? When he's so experimental as a writer and director? I don't know.

The only role I play is Robert Anton Wilson, the comic philosopher.

Prop: You once said that the law is based on precedents and the past. With technology rapidly increasing, there seems to be no real map for the territory that is coming upon us. If there is going to be some kind of change, socially, how do you think it is going to occur?

Wilson: I don't know how change is going to occur. In a rational world there would be enough politicians on this planet, in each country, that, two or three of them would eventually stumble upon the World Game Center in Philadelphia, founded by Buckminster Fuller, and they would study it intelligently, or assign a team to study it intelligently, and they would take out a few suggestions that seems useful to them. If this happened often enough, the world would keep changing in a way that would be satisfactory to everybody on the planet and hurt nobody.

Somehow or other we are going to stagger blindly until we reach that point. I just feel that.... Just yesterday, my son sent me a clipping from Space News about life that lives in rocks and eats rocks. I've often used that as an argument against Vegetarians, "If you don't want to kill anything, then eat rocks," but there are organisms that eat rocks it seems. I heard on t.v., about two years ago, on the science channel, they found life in the volcanic ash in the ocean in Krakatoa which is not based on DNA, it is entirely different form of life, which apparently arose after the eruption of Krakatoa.

As for the DNA form of life, it has gotten to the top of the Himalyas, it has gotten to the South Pole, it's all over the tropics, it's swarming, it takes so many forms. One day I saw, on the sidewalk in Chicago, a leave of grass poking up between a crack in the concrete. And, I had acid the night before, so I was especially sensitive. That leaf of grass suddenly said to me, "Life is Unconquerable." We always find a way.

And I just feel, somehow or other, life finds a way. I'll quote Bucky Fuller one more time, "People always do the most intelligent thing, after they've tried every stupid alternatives and none of them have worked." That's the cause of my optimism.

Nothing will work except an intelligent program. So eventually, somehow or other, even people like George Bush -- not George Bush...Well yeah, even George Bush -- might eventually, if they appoint him to a second term, or if he wins an election fairly, and has a second term, even George Bush might -- by 2008 -- he may be forced to have an original thought. Some of his closest advisors may force him to consider an original thought. I mean, it could happen.

In Ezra Pound's Cantos, Canto 85 or 86, somewhere around there, Pound has the line: "Ike driven to the edge almost of a thought"

If Eisenhower was driven almost to the edge of a thought, maybe George Bush can be driven there too.

Now this whole thing about being ruled by precedents, I don't agree. Many flaws in this country come from the fact that we've got more lawyers in Congress than any other professional group. We'd be better with a Congress mostly of dentists. All these dentists read the latest dentistry. They're up to date in at least one science. I think the whole damn Congress should be made up entirely of engineers and researchers. But I don't expect anybody to accept that idea very soon.

We have a government run almost entirely by lawyers. What do lawyers do? They look up precedent. That means the government is always governed by the past, never by the present, much less the possibilities of the future. They're always looking backwards. A government made up of lawyers is by definition reactionary. Looking backwards, all the time looking backwards. So I think we should shoot a couple hundred lawyers every year. Whittle off the population of lawyers, so that Congress will have to recruit from other areas or professions.

A couple of astronauts have gotten into Congress. They'll have to recruit a couple of physicists, a couple of engineers, a couple of economists who know something..... there are a few economists who actually know something.... a biologist or two might be very useful. But as long as we're governed by lawyers....

Every July 4th I invite a bunch of friends over and show them 1776. This time, I dug out my edition of the Letters and Writings of John Adams and John Quincy Adams to read them a few selections. Towards the end of their correspondence, just before they died, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson, "The problem, as I see it, is how to prevent freedom from allowing intelligence and ambition to accumulate great wealth. And how to keep great wealth from corrupting Congress." Nobody has solved that. Great wealth has corrupted the Congress since about the 1890s. It's corrupted the whole goddamned government by now.

Prop: What was it about the 1890's that caused the change?

Wilson: I think it was the 1890s with the Spanish/American War. It was the beginning of the American Empire. And also it was in the 1890s that the Supreme Court ruled a rebuttal in the jury nullification case. The jury did have the right to nullify, but the judge had the right to prevent the jury from knowing that they could nullify. The judge had the right to lie to the jury if he wanted to. And the judge could even prevent the defense counsel from telling them they could nullify.

This was in the case involving somebody whom committed the heinous crime of forming a labor union, which was illegal in those days. You know, most people don't realize where jury nullification comes from. That's how they started modifying it, by saying the judge could hide it from the jury that they had the right to nullify, it was over labor unions.

The biggest case in this country was the Peter Zenger case. 30 Years before the American Revolution Zenger committed the crime of criticizing the government. It was a crime then. And the jury nullified the law, and let him go. And in England in 1692, William Penn committed the unspeakable atrocious blasphemous obscene crime of preaching a religion not that of the Anglican Church, which was then against the law in England. The ancestors of our Protestant Fundamentalists in this country were called dissidents then. The Anglicans didn't want any of the dissidents or the Roman Catholics preaching in public. William Penn disobeyed that law, and the jury nullified. That's where religious freedom starts in the modern world.

Jury nullification has done so much good. And it's getting more and more on television, on all legal shows. The more and more they keep bringing the topic up. The more people who know about it the better, because if you don't know about it going into court, you're not going to find out about it when you're in court.

Prop: On your website you have a links page, and one of the links was for a site called The Molecular Biology of Paradise. That site definitely goes into the realm of neuroscience and biotechnology. Do you know any good introductions, besides your books, for people who want to learn about themselves in the molecular sense?

Wilson: Well, I'm no expert in that field, but the best book I can think of to get an overview of, say, understanding how the basic principles of the so called "mind" and the so called "body" interrelate is Ernest Lawerence Rossi's Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing. He doesn't go into the chemistry, but he goes into the names of the chemicals anyway, and neuropeptides and so on.

Peptides are fascinating. They're just like particles in quantum mechanics, which act like waves part of the time. Peptides act like neurotransmitters part of the time, and like hormones part of the time. That's why they affect both the so-called "mind" and the so-called "body." Yeah, Rossi's book and the references in that book make a very good place to start.

Prop: Cool. In your book The New Inquisition, you considered matter as a metaphor. If you could just kind of elaborate on that, that would be great.

Wilson: Well in the first place, as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out -- Alfred North Fucking Whitehead, one of our most prestigious philosophers in the last century, and a great mathematician too -- he pointed out that you couldn't give anybody a piece of matter. Just like you can't give them a piece of time or a piece of space. All you can give them is a piece of matter on a certain time at a certain space. So space-time-matter can't be split up into parts.

Korzybski incorporated that into Science and Sanity . Obviously, you can't leave mind out either, because how do you know the space-time-matter are there at all unless there is a mind to observe them. So space-time-matter and mind make up the four parts of any transaction. So where does that get us?

Prop: It's good for me.

Wilson: Oh, yeah also, I object to Fundamentalist Materialism. Although, in some ways I lean very closely to what I'd call a liberal materialism as a working hypothesis that's safe most of the time. As long as you're not directed into a goddamn dogma or an idol. The Fundamentalist Materialists is what I call these people, this mindset, that takes the materialist model and revere it as passionately as a religious conviction. Like some these goddamn Darwinians I see on television. To me, they're as embarrassing as the Fundamentalist Christians they're arguing with. All these Fundamentalist Christians are yelling, "God created the world in six days." All the Fundamentalist Materialists as yelling back, "Evolution is not a theory, it's a proven fact." Well, it's not a proven fact. It's a hypothesis. It's a very plausible hypothesis, seems to me the most plausible hypothesis. But you can't confuse it with a fact. In the first place it can't be tested in the laboratory, so it can't be refuted.

According to Karl Popper, any theory that can't be refuted is not part of science. I think evolution did occur. I mean I "believe" in it. But, jesus, some of these people are so fanatical about it they sound just like the Christians. It's like the same guy arguing with his own reflection in the mirror. Or her own reflection.

I coined the term spokesentities, because I was in a restaurant in Boulder, and they gave me a card, to evaluate the food, the service, this that and the other, and they asked me to evaluate the waitperson. And it asks for comments. So I wrote in the comments, I wrote, "Waitperson stinks of human chauvinism. Change it to waitentity at once!" And I signed it "animal lover."

And then I started using that, then, and my wife, Arlen, changed it to waitcritter.. Waitcritter, Congresscritter; clergycritter... I wouldn't want a clergy-critter getting into my house. And it changes the whole abortion debate. Now all they can argue about is what point after the penetration of the ovum by the sperm does the resultant become a critter? And when does it attain critterhood?

Prop: Your comment about the suggestion that you left for the restaurant in Bolder reminded me of a character in a few of your books called Markoff Chaney. And the way he messed around with the signs of stores, in his little Anarchist sprees. How did you come up with that character?

Wilson: Well, believe it or not, the first sign that appeared in the Illuminatus! is the sign that Simon Moon sees in a second-hand clothing store. Not second hand, a bargain, wait, I don't know what the hell kind of clothing...anyway a cheap clothing store in North Clark Street, Chicago. And the sign said, "No employee may punch the time clock of any other employee. Any deviation will result in termination. The MGT."

And I really saw that sign. And I liked the line, "Any deviation can result in termination" Made me think, you can make a song out of that. "I got the any deviation can result in termination blues....Baaa-By" And, somehow the midget began to appear more and more real in my imagination. Then he got the name Markoff Chaney, because for years I have been fascinated by Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication, and the mathematical function called the Markoff Chain, which played a very crucial role in his equations. So somehow Markoff Chain became Markoff Chaney, and I started thinking of Lon Chaney and Lon Chaney Jr., so Markoff Chaney emerged out of my memories of Lon Chaney, Lon Chaney Jr., and the Markoff Chain.

Prop: I heard in a previous interview of yours called "In Defense of Anarchism," in which you spoke of how Cybernetics will be the technology, when applied to Industry, that will bring about the ideas that Anarchists cherish.

Wilson: Most people think Anarchism means throwing bombs at people you don't like. That's one school of European Anarchism. There are a dozen other types of Anarchist thought. And, it seems to me, the most intelligent type of Anarchism is based upon the idea that Control and Communication should be decentralized as much as possible.

So imagine my excitement when I read the first book on Cybernetics by Norbert Weiner, a mathematician at MIT. It was called Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. And the whole book adds up to: the more control and communication are decentralized, the more intelligent the thing will behave whether it's a machine, an animal, a herd of animals or a society of human beings.

I regard that as the mathematical proof of Anarchist Theory. I see us heading there more and more, in spite of the fact that we seem to be going more and more towards fascism as a system, as a state. I think as a society, the Internet is pushing us more and more towards Anarchy with control and communication getting more and more decentralized. When Internet covers the whole planet, and everybody is in not in six-degrees of separation, but is one degree separated from everybody else on this planet by cyberspace, I think then we will begin to act intelligently as a species, but as long as we got these damn hierarchies where communication comes from the top-down, never goes up again, we're going to continue to act like the Frankenstein monster, staggering around killing people by accident.

You know the nicest thing my wife ever said to me?

Prop: No.

Wilson: "If all men were like you, there would be no need for Feminism." Every time I think of that, I feel such a warm glow. She knew me pretty well. She had to, after 42 years.

Prop: That's quite a complement.

Wilson: The greatest complement I've ever received.

Prop: Well what are your views on Feminism these days?

Wilson: Well, there was a point where the most widely publicized of the feminists was the nut fringe, and they were talking about men the way Hitler talked about Jews. I was not at all reticent or shy about expressing that opinion, and continually pointing out the similarity there.

They're still around, but they're not as influential as they used to be. I've always supported Feminism, except for what the mass media projected in the 60s, 70s.

My wife was a feminist, her mother was a feminist, her grandmother was a feminist, we raised our daughters to be feminists. I am a feminist, as far as anybody with a willy can consider himself a feminist. I enthusiastically support all the goals of Feminism, except for that dingbat wing who really does want to get rid of men entirely. They don't bother me anymore, because the world's going to get rid of me pretty soon anyway, so I don't care.

But I do think men have certain qualities that should be preserved. In zoos at least.

Prop: You made an album with a punk group back in the 80's...

Wilson: Two punk groups. One in Ireland, one in Germany. The one in Ireland was called the Golden Horde; the one Germany was called The Klingons.

Prop: Did you ever listen to them before you recorded with them?

Wilson: Yeah. I just listened to a CD a week or so ago that somebody sent me; to write a jacket blurb for, and I think it was punk rock. I don't know, I don't know all these... maybe it was trash rock, they have all these different sub-divisions. I didn't like it much, but I liked parts of it. I gave them a good review anyway for their jacket. I know how hard it is for young artists. It's a hard enough struggle, you help where you can.

Prop: Do you ever listen to Hip-hop?

Wilson: Well, some of it is amusing, but I don't think much of it as music. But as poetry, some of it is pretty good. I like the lyrics to some of it. Especially the deliberate irregularity of the meter, I like that. There is nothing more boring than Tennyson walking up and down 5 steps this way, 5 steps back, 5 steps this way and 5 steps back. Oh my God, stop it man, do something different for once.

Prop: Speaking about being unconventional by choice, or marginalized by a center. Your books, most of your books, it seems, have been published by a small publisher, New Falcon. And somewhat outside of the academic and mainstream publishing. What are your views on the publishing Industry?

Wilson: (small titter...Long silence) That's the longest pause you've produced so far. Shall I say what I really think? WHY NOT? I Don't know, I just feel. If I say what I really think, I feel I'm violating my Buddhist principles. Well, let me put it this way, at the age of 70, I'm 71 now, I decided I was not submitting anymore of my books to the major publishers. All my books now go to New Falcon, despite the fact that the the major publishers give me bigger advances, they give me more promotion, I can get bigger pay earnings -- but they insist on rewriting my books, and they insist on five different editors each, each having a hand in it.

"An editor," Gene Fowler said, "is a person who is convinced the soup doesn't taste right until they've personally pissed in it."

And I just don't want to go through that again. And I don't have to. Between what I make from my New York publishers, on my previous works, and what I make from New Falcon I can survive. I don't have a family to support anymore. I've only got to support myself, and pay the rent on this place. Why should I put up with that crap anymore?

Everything goes to New Falcon, because they print it just the way I wrote it. If they find a mistake they send me an e-mail and say this looks like a mistake. And if it is a mistake, I say, yeah, let's change that. They don't try to improve my prose. You see I'm a fanatic, I'm an obsessive-compulsive, about my writing. Everything goes through several drafts, and I put so much time and attention into it. And to have some person, whom I consider a bumbling amateur come in with like a butchers cleaver and start chopping things up to suit their weird tastes. I can't stand it. I won't put up with it. I don't have to put up with it, so I won't put up with it. That's a simple answer without animosity in it, I don't mean any animosity.

If you want to make a lot of money, you gotta learn to write how the New York publishers want, which means committee writing. You gotta learn to do it. If you want to be a writer in Hollywood you gotta learn to work with a committee. I don't work well with committees. Besides, I spent 20 years of my life working for corporations to support a large family. A large family by American standards, a wife, four kids, 9 dogs, I forget how many cats, you know, and 25 chickens and a pony at one point.

And I had enough of working in a hierarchy. I like my relationship with New Falcon. I like the books they publish, and that's all there is to it.

And then there's the lawyers. You know what I think of lawyers. You heard me on the subject of lawyers already. Before Everything is Under Control was published, I spent 3 days on the phone -- not 24 hours a day, but 3, 5 hour phone conferences with their lawyers. And it took me most of the third day to understand that they were not interested in winning libel suits. They were interested in preventing libel suits. Which would mean that everything that can possibly be construed as lible would have to come out. For a book about conspiracy theory's it instills kind of a bland flavor to it. Conspiracy theories don't make sense unless you mention somebody's name. It's like John Adams says in 1776, "We're having a revolution, goddamnit. We got to offend somebody." You can't write a book about conspiracy theories, published by a New York publisher, if you are going to offend somebody.

Anyway, I don't mean to complain. I'm making enough money out of that book that it was worth the time and effort. If I get my energy up, after finishing my current book I'd like to do a book on conspiracy theories for New Falcon, in which I wouldn't have to worry about that.

Prop: What book are you working on right now?

Wilson: The Tale of the Tribe. It's about how Joyce and Pound anticipated Internet. And it's also about how Fenollosa's theory's about the Chinese language influenced Pound and made him a prophet of the Internet. And how Vico's theory about the Latin language influenced Joyce and made him a prophet of the Internet. And Marshall Mcluhan, who knew Pound and read Joyce like a maniac. How Marshall Mcluhan almost brought it all together.

There's no mystery about the Cantos, they are the tale of the tribe. And the tribe is the whole globe. It's even more true in Finnegans Wake. Pound only covers the high lights from the low points. Joyce tries to cover goddamn near everything. He has a sense of infinity that beats Escher.

Prop: Have you read Charles Bukowski? What are your impressions of Charles Bukowski both as a poet and a writer?

Wilson: No I have not read Charles Bukowski.

Prop: Never came across any of his books?

Wilson: No. I have lived 71 years, in which there are 365 days in each year, and only 24 hours in each day. My areas of ignorance are absolutely staggering. And I'm more and more aware of that, because my knowledge of most of the subjects I've written about is either 5 years or 20 years out of date now. So if I ever did another lecture tour, I'd have to spend a month before the tour doing research on-line to try to figure out what is scientific matter that is still accepted.

Prop: Bukowski seems to have a large influence on younger generations. Being a writer from LA, and writing a movie called Barfly, he seems to be, what some people would call the voice of LA. But you may have a different opinion than that.

Wilson: Well, when I lived in Dublin, I thought, "This is great. This is a James Joyce theme park." When I moved to Los Angeles, I began to feel it was a Raymond Chandler theme park. I never read Bukowski, but if I read Bukowski I might start thinking of it as a Bukowski theme park. Right now LA is still, in my head, a Raymond Chandelier theme park. And everything from Boston to Providence is a George V. Higgins theme park. Have you ever read any of George V. Higgins?

Prop: No.

Wilson: You should.

Prop: What's one of his books?

Wilson: The best one to start with is Outlaws . It's about revolutionaries, the CIA, cops, lawyers, prosecutors, and he does them all very well. He, himself, was for 15 years a prosecutor on the staff of the Attorney General of Massachusetts. Then he spent 15 years as a criminal defense attorney. He spent 15 years putting them away, then 15 years trying to keep the state from putting them away. He knows it from all angles. And he knows a lot about Massachusetts politics, and New England politics. And a lot about the Banking Industry. He is not only a very funny writer, with the greatest ear for dialogue of any American writer I've ever read, but he's also...he's a better critic of corporatism than Noam Chomsky. He brings it down to the daily life level, you know.

Prop: Speaking about a great mind, switch gears to Fuller. He invented the World Game. Suppose he said that, the knowledge is the most important thing about our resources, and that you can starve in a cornfield. If you don't know how to use the corn.

Wilson: He said that? He certainly said things like that. I know I've said that. I thought I invented phrasing it that way, maybe I was quoting Fuller and didn't even realize it. That happens sometimes.

Every time one of my books came out, my wife would get slightly indignant on reading and finding phrases of hers in there without credit. Sometimes I forget where I hear things, you know.

Prop: For myself, just to clarify what Fuller spoke of in terms of utilizing natural resources, Fuller said both Marxism and Capitalism was based on the theory of economics put forth by Malthus. How does Fuller get beyond that viewpoint of economics?

Wilson: Well it's very simple. Malthus assumed -- he was an employee of the British East India Company -- he observed that population was increasing faster than known resources. So he assumed that there would be perpetual warfare over the resources, and most of the population would perish by starvation or other means, because they weren't smart enough or cunning enough or ruthless enough to get their share or more than their share. Then Fuller pointed out that resources do not exist apart from us. Resources exist when the human mind sees how to use something. Resources accepted by statisticians and the economists have increased steadily since the time of Malthus. Resources are increasing faster than population actually. This fact is hidden from us by the goddamn banking system, which has inserted a bookkeeping system into the process, whereby every exchange has a interest charge on it, whether you know it or not. And most of the profits are going to the banks, where as they should be going to the whole population at large, because the credit is not created by the banks, it is created by everybody who's working.

Even me -- even people who are just working at putting words on paper are creating value. And banks aren't creating a damn thing. They're just charging usury at every step of the way.

Fuller agreed a lot with Ezra Pound A lot of people think Pound was an Anti-Semitic fascist, period, and that sums up Ezra Pound, but it doesn't. That's one cranky part of Ezra Pound, part time. There's a lot more to Pound than that.

Prop: Virtual Reality. In one of your interviews that I read, you mentioned how the possibility for Virtual Reality to experience non-Euclidean space. Do you recommend any books on the subject, in terms of becoming more acquainted with Virtual Reality?

Wilson: The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil



The interview was winding down. Wilson had expressed earlier that he had company coming over, and he wanted to rest up before they arrived. I was satisfied with what I had, and was ready, but not completely willing wrap it up. Bob had worked his magic yet again. In the course of two hours I'd sat and listened to a man who has truly attained deep wisdom about life and all of us circus freaks in it. Many times throughout our chat, I was convinced that this is the smartest man in America. His thread of logical discourse was just as adroit as anything I had heard in any college philosophy course. The only difference was that this guy was as funny as George Carlin. I was beginning to think to myself that I was in the presence of a sage.

I was sitting across from someone like Confucius or Lao Tzu, when not so suddenly, Bob leans disproportionately on one side of his couch cushion and performs what Carlin termed "the one-cheek sneak". I'm not sure if he thought, some other object in his apartment might have momentarily distracted me, allowing him to believe that he could let one by without my noticing. Or whether he just didn't care if I might be offended by this organic punctuation mark endowed within our bodies by Nature's God. Either way he seemed slightly bemused when I looked over at him after his fart.

"Oh, You heard that?" the old man said to me.

Coming from a fart friendly family myself, I tend not to get squeamish by such expulsions of methane from another's buttcheeks, occasionally I find it hilarious. Especially, when the dealer of the contaminated air molecules is able to play it off with wry dry surprise or feigned innocence. So I was not offended, it actually sparked a new conversation. He told a joke about a man farting in a doctor's office, which reminded me of a book Benjamin Franklin wrote called Fart Proudly. Being that he just did, Wilson commented that he read the book.

He continued," Mark Twain wrote a book about farting too, called 1602 or 1600, I forget which date. It was about a bunch of Elizabethan writers having a meeting and one of them farts. Then they all start arguing about who let that fart? And they all describe it in terms of their own vocabulary. Twain has a great skill at imitating styles. Shakespeare sounds like Shakespeare. Bacon sounds like Bacon. Raleigh sounds like Raleigh. It's really very funny."

---

http://www.realitysandwich.com/meeti...remarkable_man

Reputation Comments on this post:

great article, thanks for posting

[enquirewithin]

I missed this post but just read it on the original site. Great interview. George Carlin would have been amused.

[dyingtomorrow]

SWIM just stumbled across this thread while looking up safety info for IVing crack rocks, and SWIM has to say Robert Anton Wilson ROCKS (no pun intended).

Illuminatus Trilogy! is one of the best books ever written.

[Venusia]

I sure am sad he never did find the way to live forever, though I was certain if anyone could, he would be it. Hell, for a while there, it seemed he just might hang on forever.

Prometheus Rising warped my head all around at the peak of her Erisian kick at age 20. I still want to get around to Ishtar Rising one of these days. Maybe I'll have to have my hotdog on a white bun this Friday, just for RAW.

Thanks for posting the article.

[enquirewithin]

Firing the Cosmic Trigger
with Robert Anton Wilson

interviewed by David Jay Brown (from Mavericks of the Mind) http://www.mavericksofthemind.com/raw-int.htm

RobertAnton Wilson earned his doctorate in psychology from Hawthorn University. From 1966-1971 he was Associate Editor of Playboy, and since then he has written over 26 popular books. He is perhaps best known for Illuminatus! a classic science fiction trilogy which he co-authored with Robert Shea. His Schroedinger's Cat trilogy was called "the most scientific of all science-fiction novels " by New Scientist, and has been reprinted in many languages. In the area of social philosophy Bob wrote such books as Cosmic Trigger, Prometheus Rising, and The New Inquisition He also wrote the introduction to my first book Brainchild. Bob has appeared as a stand-up comic at many clubs around the world, and regularly teaches seminars at New Age centers such as the Esalen Institute. Bob 's poetry has been widely published and in 1 986 he was a guest of the Norwegian government at the Oslo International Poetry Festival.

Bob has also starred in collaboration with the Golden Horde on a Punk Rock record entitled The Chocolate Biscuit Conspiracy, and a comedy record called Secrets of Power. Bob's play Wilhelm Reich in Hell was performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin in 1986, and many other theatres. H epresently lives in Santa Cruz, where he continues to write, and co-edit the futurist journal Trajectories

with his wife Arlen. We interviewed Bob on the evening of June 18th, 1989, at his previous home in West Los Angeles. A sharp-witted imp with a Brooklyn accent and a twinkle in his eye, Bob never fails to have a joke up his sleeve. He is a jolly prankster with an alchemical talent for blending cultural mythos. Bob spoke with us about the Illuminati conspiracy, brain machines, synchronicity, mysticism and science, nanotechnology, ecology, extraterrestrials, and the mysterious mythic connection between Satan and Santa Claus.DJB

RMN: What was it that first sparked your interest in consciousness enhancement?

ROBERT: Korzybski's Science and Sanity. I was in engineering school and I picked up the book in the Brooklyn Public Library. He talked about different levels of organization in the brain-animal circuits, human circuits and so on. And he talked a lot about getting back to the non-verbal level and being able to perceive without talking to yourself while you're perceiving.

It was 1957. I was very interested in jazz at that time, and I told a black friend about some of Korzybski's exercises to get to the non-verbal level, and he said, "Oh, I do that every time I smoke pot." I got interested. I said, "Could I buy one of these marijuana cigarettes from you?" He said, "Oh hell, I'11 give it to you free." And so I smoked it.

I found myself looking at a quarter I found in my pocket and realizing I hadn't looked at a quarter in twenty years or so, the way a child looks at a quarter. So I decided marijuana was doing pretty much the same thing Korzybski was trying to do with his training devices. Then shortly after that I heard a lecture by Alan Watts, and I realized that Zen, marijuana and Korzybski were all relating the same transformations of consciousness. That was the beginning.

DJB: Many of your books deal with a secret society called the Illuminati. How did your fascination with this organization begin?

ROBERT: It was Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley who founded the Discordian Society, which is based on the worship of Eris, the Goddess of Chaos, discord, confusion, bureaucracy and international relations. They have no dogmas, but one catma. The catma is that everything in the universe relates to the number 5, one way or another, given enough ingenuity on the part of the interpreter. I found the Discordian Society to be the most satisfactory religion I had ever encountered up until that point, so I became a Discordian Pope. This is done by excommunicating all the Discordian Popes you can find and setting up your own Discordian Church. This is based on Greg's teaching that we Discordians must stick apart.

Anyway, in 1968 Jim Garrison, the D.A. of New Orleans--the jolly green Frankenstein monster, as Kerry later called him--accused Kerry at a press conference of being one of the conspirators in the Kennedy assassination. Garrison never indicted him--he didn't have enough evidence for an indictment-so Kerry never stood trial, but he brooded over it for years. Then he entered an altered state of consciousness. I'm trying to be objective about this. Kerry, who served in the same platoon as Oswald, became convinced that he was involved in the assassination and that when he was in the Marine Corps, Naval Intelligence had brainwashed him.

Kerry decided Naval Intelligence had also brainwashed Oswald and several others, and had been manipulating them for years, like the Manchurian Candidate. He couldn't remember what had happened, but he had a lot of suspicions. Then he became convinced that I was a CIA baby-sitter and we sort of lost touch with each other. It's hard to communicate with somebody when he thinks you're a diabolical mind-control agent and you're convinced that he's a little bit paranoid.

Somewhere along the line, Kerry decided to confuse Garrison by sending out all sorts of announcements that he was an agent of the Bavarian Illuminati. That got me interested in the Illuminati, and the more I read about it, the more interested I got. So eventually we incorporated the Illuminati into the Discordian Society. Since the Discordian Society is devoted to promoting chaos, we decided that the Illuminati is devoted to imposing totalitarianism. After all, a Discordian Society, to be truly discordant, should have it's own totalitarian branch that's working against the rest of the Society.

Pope John XXIV threw out six hundred saints on the grounds that they never existed. They threw out Santa Claus and a whole bunch of these Irish saints. The Discordian Society accepted them on the grounds that we don't care whether these saints are real or not. If we like them, we'll accept them. And since these saints were without a home, being thrown out of the Catholic church, we accepted them. In the same way we accepted the Illuminati, too, since nobody else wants them.

Then, I appointed myself the head of the Illuminati, which led to a lot of interesting correspondences with other heads of the Illuminati in various parts of the world. One of them threatened to sue me. I told him to resubmit his letter in FORTRAN, because my computer wouldn't accept it in English and I never heard from him again. I think that confused him.

RMN: Who do you think the Illuminati really were--or are?

ROBERT: The Illuminati has been the label used by many groups throughout history. The Illuminati that is believed in by right-wing paranoids is a hypothesis that leading intellectuals of the eighteenth century were all members of the Bavarian Illuminati which was working to overthrow Christianity. I don't think that's quite accurate; I think there's a lot of exaggeration in that view. I don't think that Jefferson was a member of the Illuminati; he just had similar goals. Beethoven was probably a member, but Mozart probably wasn't. Voltaire probably wasn't, although he was a Freemason. Anyway, to the extent that the Illuminati conspired to overthrow Christianity and to establish democracy, I'm in favor of it.
DJB: What were the Illuminati out to achieve?

ROBERT: The historical Illuminati of the eighteenth century, as distinguished from all other Illuminati of previous centuries, had as it's main goals, overthrowing the Vatican, overthrowing monarchies, establishing democratic republics and giving a scientific education to every boy and girl. Most of these goals have more or less begun to be achieved. Compared to what things were like in the eighteenth century they've largely succeeded, and I think that's all to the good.

RMN: Many formerly held secrets known only to a select group of initiates, perhaps like the Bavarian Illuminati, are now available at the local metaphysical bookstore. What do you think are the sociological implications of such information exchange?

ROBERT: Oh, I think it's wonderful. I believe very much that secrecy is the main cause of most social evils. I think information is the most precious commodity in the world. As a matter of fact, I think that information is the source of all wealth. The classical economic theory is that wealth is created by land, labor and capital. But if you have a piece of land, and you've got capital, and you hire labor, and you drill for oil, and there's no oil there--you won't get rich. What makes somebody rich is drilling for oil where there is oil, and that's based on having correct information. I'm just paraphrasing Buckminster Fuller here. All wealth is information. So therefore, all attempts to impede the transfer, the rapid transmission of information, are making us all poorer.

DJB: Why do you think it is then, that it took so long for occult knowledge to come out of secrecy and into the open?

ROBERT: Well, that's largely because of the Catholic church. Anybody who spoke too frankly for many centuries was burned at the stake. So the alchemists, hermeticists, Illuminati and other groups learned to speak in codes.

DJB: So you think it was the fear of persecution, rather than a feeling that most people weren't "ready" for the information quite yet?
ROBERT: Well, I think that's a rationalization, You can't find out who's ready, except by distributing the information. Then you find out who's ready.

RMN: The wars in the Middle East and the rising fundamentalism in the West have been seen by some as the death screams of organized religion. Both Islam and Christianity, however, have survived many "Holy Wars." What do you think the fate of organized religion will be?

ROBERT: I would like to think that organized religion is on it's way out, but I've been doing a lot of research on the eighteenth century for my historical novels. Voltaire thought that the Catholic church would be gone in twenty years, and it's hung around for two hundred years since then. When the Pope disbanded the Jesuits, Voltaire said that's the end, the Catholic church is falling apart. Well, a few years later they reorganized the Jesuits. The Knights of Malta are running the CIA apparently, and the Catholic church just refuses to die. Fundamentalism has staged a comeback. It's fantastic.

I'm a big fan of H.L. Menken. He was a very funny social critic of the 1920's. His books went out of print for a while, because the things he was making fun of didn't exist anymore. Now his books are coming back into print because all those things exist again. He was making fun of the same type of thing that Jerry Falwell, Jim Bakker, and that whole crowd stand for. It's astonishing the way that this seemingly dead historical institution came back, like the Frankenstein monster. Every time you think it's dead, it rises up again to afflict us. The Ayatollah. The Grey Wolves. The Grey Wolves are the biggest heroin dealers in the Mid-East because they believe Allah wants them to kill Jews and they can't get enough money to buy guns without selling heroin. That makes about as much sense as most of the Christian theology I've heard.

I'm a mystical agnostic, or an agnostic mystic. That phrase was coined by Olaf Stapledon, my favorite science fiction writer. When I first read it, it didn't mean anything to me, but over the years I've gradually realized that "agnostic mystic" describes me better than any words I have found any where else.

DJB: How about "transcendental agnostic"?

ROBERT: Yeah. The word agnostic has gained the association of somebody who's just denying, but what I mean is something more like the ancient Greek concept of the zetetic. I find the universe so staggering that I just don't have any faith in my ability to grasp it. I don't think the human stomach can eat everything, and I'm not quite sure my mind can understand everything, so I don't pretend that it can.

RMN: In Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade, she proposes that there has been a cultural transformation from a cooperation between the sexes to the dominion of male over female. She says that we're now at a stage when men should be learning from women. What do you think about this?

ROBERT: Curiously, 1 was an early advocate of the theory of the primordial matriarchy. I got turned onto that by Robert Graves when I was in high school. I read The White Goddess, and then I happened to read a little-known book by a Scottish psychiatrist named Ian Suttie called The Origin of Love and Hate, in which he used the model of history evolving from matriarchy to patriarchy and back to matriarchy. Some of these ideas have been around my head for about forty years.

Currently I tend to agree with Eisler. There's no evidence of a matriarchy at all. There's evidence of a partnership society. It's been coming back for the last two hundred years. Arlen calls it "stone-age feedback." As European civilization conquered and exploited the Third World, ideas from these places came drifting back to Europe. Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau, the whole enlightenment was influenced by the ideas of these "primitives" having a more natural and happier way of life than we do. Democracy, socialism, anarchism, and all the radical ideas of the last two hundred years were inspired by studying stone-age cultures from the first proto-anthropologica1 reports.

I've been an advocate for a partnership society for years, before Eisler used that term. The term I used was "voluntary association" which comes out of the American Anarchist tradition. This was a school of philosophical anarchists in New England in the nineteenth century who are very little known. I got fascinated by them in the sixties and read most of their books. The idea of voluntary association migrated to Europe and became syndicalism, only the syndicalists added to it the idea of overthrowing the existing system by violence, so the whole idea developed a bad reputation. I think the basic idea of voluntary association, or partnership, is the one towards which we should aspire. It's the most human, just, fair, decent and intelligent form of society.

RMN: Do you have hope that we can achieve it?

ROBERT: Yes, I do, in spite of the evidence we see on all sides of stupidity, ignorance, bigotry and the seemingly inexhaustible lust of the masses to be trampled on by Fuhrer figures and father figures. I see the last two hundred years as a staggering, groping, fumbling toward a partnership society.

RMN: Riane Eisler doesn't address the masculinity of the Devil-the fact that in this society, the dark side as well as the light side of spiritual power is depicted as male. Do you have any ideas about that?

ROBERT: They do have some shadowy feminine counterparts. There's the Lilith, the female Devil, and buried in Judaism there's the Shekinah, the female aspect of God. I'm more interested in the way that the Devil infiltrated Christianity disguised as Santa Claus. Very few people realize the archetypes are the same. It's the old pagan fertility god. Satan is the caricature that the Christian church created, but the fertility god came back as Santa, and he wears the same red suit as the Devil. The name Satan and Santa are made up of the same letters; you just move one and you've changed Santa into Satan.

RMN: That's interesting. The Devil and sexuality are correlated in many people's minds. Religious and political authorities have consistently attempted to control human sexuality and nip individual freedom in the bud. How do you see the role of sexuality evolving into the future?

ROBERT: I was just reading Jean Shinoda Bolen's book Gods in Everyman yesterday, and I found some of myself in Hades, though that's the younger me back in my adolescence and early twenties. I also see parts of myself in Hermes, but I see a great deal of Dionysus. My mystical feelings and my sexual feelings are so close together that I find it hard to understand how Western society ever separated them. But that just goes to show that I'm a Dionysian type. Our society is run by Zeus types and Apollo types to whom the separation is perfectly natural.

RMN: Do you think society is evolving towards a more Dionysian character?

ROBERT: Yeah. We have been since the sixties. Woodstock was a Dionysian festival--it was the rebirth of Dionysus--and right away the lid came down. My God Dionysus is loose! King Pentheus immediately called out the cops. The Dionysian religion had entered his kingdom and he tried to crush it, but he was torn apart by his own mother. That's a warning of what happens when you try to suppress Dionysus; it's one of the classic Greek myths. Look what happened to Nixon--he got torn apart. The only president to be forced to resign. Reagan escaped unscathed but I still have an intuition that he's going to be repudiated. I think the people are going to be as disgusted with Reagan as they were with Nixon--eventually. I even had high hopes that George Bush was going to be impeached. Of course, he picked Quayle as impeachment insurance, but I just have a strong suspicion, based on Confucius, that the general decline of morals and manners in this country, the general increase in the sleaze factor in American life and the general corruption and crookedness, are all due to the fact that people like Nixon and Agnew get away scot-free. They had television pictures of DeLorean peddling cocaine. When I heard about this I said, "A man with that much money isn't going to be convicted, even if they have him on television." And he wasn't.

Once everybody becomes aware that the rich can commit any crime in the book and get away with it, then the general attitude is, "Well, why don't we do the same?" The whole sociobiology of Confucius is when the ruling class are decent, honorable, gentlemen scholars, the people will be well disposed; when the government is a bunch of thieving rascals, the people will become thieving rascals.

We've seen so much of that, and the only hope I can see is that some of the malefactors in high places get punished so that a sense of justice and order is reestablished in this country. I'm not a vengeful person and I have a great deal of compassion, even for Nixon and Reagan, but I think some of those people have to go to jail to restore the idea that there is justice in the universe.

RMN: The whirlwind ecstasies of the sixties have, for many, settled down into a gentle breeze. What do you feel were the fleeting and lasting effects of this cultural phenomena, and how have your attitudes developed since that time?

ROBERT: Well, we were just talking about that this morning. What survives of the sixties? What survives in different forms? I think Bucky Fuller hit the nail on the head. He said that around 1972, the brighter people realized that there are more effective ways of challenging the system than going out in the streets and running their heads against policemen's clubs. So they got more subtle. People are working on different levels and in different ways, and it's become less confrontational, but I do believe there are still a lot of people working for the ideals of the sixties.

DJB: You mean like in the movie industry?

ROBERT: Yeah, and in television, in computers, in banking, all over the place.

DJB: Really, in banking?

ROBERT: Yeah. I've met a couple of bankers who are really very hip people.

DJB: Timothy Leary and Aleister Crowley both played similar roles in history and both had a significant influence on your evolving belief systems. Tell us about the effect these two people have had on your understanding of consciousness.

ROBERT: Well Crowley was such a complicated individual that everybody who reads Crowley has a different Crowley in his head. There's a million Aleister Crowleys depending on what part of him people are able to understand and integrate. Crowley, as the leader of the Illuminati and the Argentum Astrum the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), was continuing the project of overthrowing Christianity and added his own twist of reviving Paganism (which goes back to Giordano Bruno who wanted to do the same thing). Crowley is an interesting figure and has had a bigger historical impact than most people realize. The NeoPagan movement is bigger than anybody knows, except the Fundamentalists, who think it's a Satanic movement -- which from their point of view, I guess it is.

The Crowley who interests me is the scientific Crowley. He traveled all over the world, got initiated into every secret society he could, studied every occult system, studied Sufism in North Africa, Taoism in China, Buddhism in Ceylon and he tried to understand them all in terms of organic chemistry and physiology. He laid the groundwork for the scientific study of mysticism and altered consciousness. That's the Crowley I'm fascinated by--Crowley the scientist, who co-existed with Crowley the mystic, Crowley the poet, Crowley the adventurer and Crowley the Great Beast.

RMN: The Golden Dawn from which Crowley got much of his inspiration was a mystical school which is still lively today. Have you found this system able to remain flexible enough to adapt to the cultural and psychological revisions that have occurred since the Order was first established?

ROBERT: There are several Golden Dawns around, like there are several OTO's and several Illuminatis and so on. All of these things are fractionated, and of course, everybody with a power drive involved in these things claims to be the leader of the real and authentic Secret Chiefs. The Golden Dawn which I find most interesting is the one of which Christopher Hyatt is the Outer Head. He's a fully qualified clinical psychologist with a good background in Jungian and Reichian therapy and a great deal of theoretical knowledge of general psychology. He was trained in the Golden Dawn system by Israel Regardie who was also a psychologist as well as a mystic. I think Hyatt knows what he's doing; I think he's got his head on right. He doesn't have delusions of grandeur. He's not a prima donna and he's free of most of the deviant and aberrant behavior that's chronic in the occult world. What are the goals of the Golden Dawn? Unleashing the full positive potential of human beings.

RMN: What are the methods involved?

ROBERT: The original Golden Dawn in the 1880's used Kabbalistic magic. Crowley revised it to include Kabbalistic magic and yoga and a bit of Sufism. Regardie revised it to include a great deal of Reichian bodywork, and an insistence that anybody who enters the Order should go through psychotherapy first. He became aware that people who get into Kabbalistic-type work, especially in the Golden Dawn tradition, who haven't had psychotherapy, are likely to flip out or scare themselves silly. Regardie also insisted that they should know General Semantics, which is interesting since it was General Semantics which got me interested in the study of alternative consciousness.

RMN: Why did Regardie want this to be included?

ROBERT: General Semantics is a system that is very useful in clarifying your thinking. If you understand the rules of General Semantics, you're more or less immune to most of the errors that are chronic at this stage of civilization. One of the rules of General Semantics is avoid the is of identity, which is a rule I just broke when I said "General Semantics is..." It's very hard to avoid the is of identity in speech. We all use it all the time. I'm getting pretty good at avoiding it in my writing. Whenever you're trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with my thinking? Why can't I get to the bottom of this? Why am I confused about this problem? Write it down and take out every "is" and reformulate it in some other way. You'll find that your thinking has been tremendously clarified.

It's like the celebrated problem in quantum physics in the 1920's. The electron is a wave. The electron is a particle. Those two things contradict each other totally, which led to a lot of physicists saying that the universe doesn't make sense, the universe is irrational and so on. If you reformulate it without the "is" of identity, there's no paradox at all. The electron appears as a wave when we measure it in certain ways. The electron appears as a particle when we measure it in other ways. There's no contradiction. There are a lot of other ideas in general semantics that are equally useful in clarifying thought.

DJB: That's one of the claims of the recent technology of brain machines. What experiences have you had with them, which ones do you find the most promising and what kind of potential do you think they hold for the future?

ROBERT: The most outstanding experience I've had with a brain machine was with the first one, the Pulstar. I had an out-of-body experience which registered as flat brain waves on the EEG, and that fascinated me. That was the first objective sign I had ever seen that something was going on in out-of-body experiences besides heightened imagination. I don't see much difference between a lot of the brain machines around. Some are demonstrably inferior, and out of charity I won't mention their names. Some claim to be very superior to all the others, but as far as I can see, most of them function pretty much the same.

At present, I'm more interested in the light and sound machines than I am in the electro-magnetic machines, because there is some legitimate cause for concern that sending electro-magnetism into your brain too often may not be good for you. The whole field is growing very fast. There's a bunch of tapes put out by Acoustic Brain Research in North Carolina. They use only sound, but they combine it with subliminals and Ericksonian hypnosis in a way that I find very effective. They're using sound at the same frequencies that you find in the electro-magnetic machines, or the light and sound machines.

The Graham Potentializer does seem a little more powerful than any of the other machines, but I wouldn't guarantee it because I haven't had enough experience with it yet. What T want to see is more controlled, double-blind studies of these machines, because everybody has their own anecdotal impressions, but we don't really know yet which are the best. Which wave forms are the best? We don't know that yet. Why do some people respond better to one than to others? We don't know why. There's a lot mure to be learned and I'm very eager to see more research.

RMN: Do you think that the use of brain machines requires an accompanying discipline?

ROBERT: I suspect so. One manufacturer told me that the return rate is about fifteen percent. I think these machines are much easier than the biofeedback machines, but they still require some discipline. I think they require some previous experience with Yoga, or Zen, or some consciousness-altering work. You need some kind of previous experience or you just won't know how to use the machine. I don't think the machine really works as an entrainer unless you practice between sessions, trying to revive the state without the machine. A lot of people can't do that, they just assume that the machine will do all the work for them, which is kind of like thinking that you just get in the car and it'll take you where you want to go.

DJB: The potential of nanotechnology seems far more vast. How do you think it's development will affect human consciousness in the future?

ROBERT: I haven't thought much about that. That's an interesting question. It's going to change everything. Nanotechnology is a much bigger jump than anything else on the horizon. It's bigger than space colonization, bigger than longevity. It's a million times bigger than the industrial revolution. It's going to change things so much that I can't begin to conceive how much; but everything's going to get dirt cheap. The ozone layer will get repaired rapidly. We could create redwoods as fast and as many as we want, and then there's star-flight. I don't know; it's just a whole new ballgame, and it leads directly into immortalism.

DJB: How about new ways to alter the brain?

ROBERT: Oh, of course. Eric Drexler, in his book on the subject, talks about constructing micro-replicators that, if you let them loose in the body, they run all over the place, inspecting every cell. If it's not functioning properly they go back, get information from the main computer and repair it. You can obviously do the same thing with brain circuits. It'll probably replace psychiatry. Nanotechnology is so staggering, we can't think about it without hyperbole, and it's coming along rapidly. The Japanese are spending fantastic amounts on that kind of research.

RMN: What do you think about the idea than many inventions are actually rediscoveries of technologies that have already existed in the past?

ROBERT: That's always seemed very implausible to me. There are some cases--the steam engine was discovered in Greece and forgotten until Watt rediscovered it--but I doubt that there are many. Most things weren't discovered until they could be discovered, until there was the time-binding heritage, or until the information accumulation had reached the necessary level. This is why you have so many cases of parallel discovery in science, where in five years three people patent the same thing in different countries. As Charles Fort said, "It's steam engines when it comes steam engine time."

RMN: What if there were times when the information had accumulated but not the political or social climate necessary to appreciate it? Libraries have been burned and knowledge chased underground by authoritarian forces.

ROBERT: Well, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should remain silent."

RMN: A lot of people feel that technology is at odds with their ecological thinking. What do you think is the evolving role of the science of Ecology.

ROBERT: The first book I ever read on ecology was way back in the forties. It was called The Road to Survival. I've always been fascinated by ecology because I'm fascinated by whole systems. That's why Bucky Fuller fascinates me. He always starts with the biggest whole system and works his way down. I've written a lot of satirical things about pop ecology because I think a lot of people have got on the ecology bandwagon who don't know their ass from their elbow about science, and it's turned into a kind of late Christian heresy like Marxism. It's become a new blame game, where people go around laying guilt trips on other people. Guilt is very fashionable in Western civilization.

Albert Ellis said the most popular game in Western civilization is finding and denouncing no-good shits. I found that so impressive I've incorporated it into a couple of my own books. Every generation picks out a group of no-good shits. In the Victorian age it was adolescent boys who masturbated, and now it's cigarette smokers. There's always got to be some no-good shits for people to denounce and persecute, and to the extent that ecology has degenerated into that, it arouses my satirical instinct. But of course the science of Ecology itself is tremendously important, and the more people who know about it, the better.
RMN: The methods of science and art are beginning to achieve some wonderful things together. What do you think created such a chasm between the two disciplines in the first place, and why do you think they are now merging?

ROBERT: Science and art. Now what created such a chasm between them? Why the hell did that happen? I think I'm going to go back and blame the Inquisition. Science had to fight an uphill battle against the Inquisition and this created a historical hangover in which scientists had acute hostility to every form of mysticism, not just to the Catholic church which had been persecuting them. I think that rubs off onto art, because there's something mystical about art no matter how much you try to rationalize it. If you get a bunch of artists together talking about where they got their creativity from, they sound like a bunch of mystics.

Then there was the rise of capitalism. I'm inclined to agree with Karl Marx about that, that every previous form of society has had different values, a hierarchy of values. Capitalism does tend to reduce everything to just one value--what can you sell it for? And as Oscar Wilde said, "All art is quite useless." The value of art depends on who's manipulating the marketplace at the time. It's spooky. Art is the Schrodinger's cat of economics.

All of a sudden, an Andy Warhol is worth a million, and nobody knows how that happened. Then it's somebody else the next year. Picasso never paid for anything in the last twenty years of his life. He just wrote checks which never came back to his bank. People saved them because they knew that the signature was worth more than the sum of the check. They knew it would be worth even more in twenty years, and so on.

Somebody asked a Zen master, "What's the most valuable thing in the world?" and he said, "The head of a dead cat." The querent asked "Why?" and the Zen master said, "Tell me it's exact value." That's a good exercise if you're into creative writing. Write a short story where the hero's life is saved by the fact that he could find the value of the head of a dead cat. It could happen. Everything has a fluctuating value.

In capitalism, everything gets reduced to it's immediate cash value. Citizen Kane, to take one egregious example, is generally considered one of the best films ever made. It lost money in it's first year, so Orson Welles had extreme difficulty for the rest of his life getting enough money to make other movies. Yet Citizen Kane made more money than any other movie made in 1941, if you count up to the present, because it gets revived more than any other movie. But the bankers who own the studios aren't interested in profit in twenty years, they want profit next June. They want Indiana Jones not Citizen Kane.

RMN: So, if the areas of science and art are merging it indicates a move away from the capitalist perspective.

ROBERT: Yes. I think information theory has probably done a great deal to bring science and art back together again. Norbert Weiner invented the basic equation for information at the same time Claude Shannon did. That's another example of things happening when they're ready to happen. Weiner explained information by saying that a great poem carries more information than a political speech. Information is the unpredictable. As we come to realize the value of the unpredictable, the value of art has become clearer.

You go through a museum and you look at a Leonardo, a Botticelli, a Rembrandt, a Van Gogh, a Cezanne, a Picasso, a Klee, a Jackson Pollock, and it's obvious the value of each of them is that they weren't copying one another. If Van Gogh were copying Rembrandt nobody would give a damn for Van Gogh. He had the chutzpah to paint his own vision. Somebody having their own vision instead of just repeating an earlier one in a different style--that's information. Information is the new and unpredictable, and information theory led to the computers which fascinate artists. Computers have opened up whole new areas of art.

DJB: Information is the unpredictability of a signal, but it's not quite chaos or randomness. It carries a message.

ROBERT: Yeah. When unpredictability gets too high, information turns into noise. That part of Shannon's theory involves very complicated mathematics and I'm not sure I fully understand it; I just more or less intuitively follow it. There has to be an information redundancy ratio where the highest grade of information is diluted with repetition.

DJB: Because it's so unpredictable one can't relate it to anything.

ROBERT: Yeah. Originality frequently looks like chaos until we learn how to deal with it, until we find the redundancy in it.

DJB: Have you had any experiences with lucid or conscious dreaming?

ROBERT: I've had a lot of lucid dreams, but I can't think of anything that's particularly worth discussing. I'd like to learn more about it. It happens spontaneously sometimes. I have a very rich hypnagogic and hypnopompic life, like Philip K. Dick. William Burroughs told me that his characters all manifest as voices in hypnopompic reverie before they have bodies, or names, or anything else. Robert Shea, an old friend of mine who's a scientific materialist of the most rigid sort, really blew my mind by admitting he hears his characters talking. I suspect all writers do. I think the difference between a writer and a channeler is that the channeler has found a way to make more money out of it than most writers ever do.

DJB: Synchronicity is a major theme that runs through most, if not all, of your books. What model do you use at present for interpreting this mysterious phenomenon?

ROBERT: I never have one model. I always have at least seven models for anything.

DJB: Which one is your favorite?

ROBERT: Bell's Theorem combined with an idea I got from Barbara Honegger, a parapsychologist who worked for Reagan. She wrote a book denouncing Reagan, Ollie North and the whole crowd, giving inside dirt about what she discovered while she was at the White House. Long before Barbara became a controversial political figure, she gave me the idea that the right brain is constantly trying to communicate with the left. If you don't listen to what it's trying to say, it gives you more and more vivid dreams and if you still won't listen, it leads to Freudian slips. If you still don't pay attention, the right brain will get you to the place in space-time where synchronicity will occur. Then the left brain has to pay attention. "Whaaaat!?"

DJB: What do you think happens to consciousness after physical death?

ROBERT: Somebody asked a Zen master, "What happens after death?" He replied, "I don't know." And the querent said, "But you're a Zen master!" He said, "Yes, but I'm not a dead Zen master." Somebody asked Master Eckart, the great German mystic, "Where do you think you'il go after death?" He said, "I don't plan to go anywhere." Those are the best answers I've heard so far. My hunch is that consciousness is a non-local function of the universe as a whole, and our brains are only local transceivers. As a matter of fact, it's a very strong hunch, but I'm not going to dogmatize about it.

DJB: Could you share with us any experiences you might have had communicating with what you thought to be extraterrestrial or non-human entities?

ROBERT: I've had a lot of experiences with what could be interpreted as extraterrestrial communications. They could also be interpreted as ESP, or as accessing parts of my brain that are normally not available, or as contacting a non-local consciousness that permeates everything. There are a lot of different models for this type of experience. I got fascinated by the extraterrestrial model at one stage in the early seventies, and still, every now and then, it makes more sense to me than any of the others.

Other times the non-local model makes more sense, which is a development of Bell's Theorem. This was stated most clearly by Edwin Harris Walker in a paper called The Complete Quantum Anthropologist. He developed a mathematical theory of a non-local mind, to which we can gain access at times. It's a complete quantum mechanical, mathematical model to explain everything that happens in mystical and occult experience. That makes a great deal of sense to me, especially when I found that Joyce was using the same model in Finnigan 's Wake. I think it also underlies the I Ching. I explain this at length in my book Coincidance.

DJB: How do you see consciousness evolving into the twenty-first century?

ROBERT: It staggers my imagination. I get about as far as 2012 in my future projections, then I can't imagine beyond that. So much is going to change by then.

DJB: What do you see coming along up to 2012?

ROBERT: In Leary's terms, I think about one-third of the West now understands the neuro-somatic circuit, and some techniques for activating it. I think that's going to reach fifty to fifty-one percent pretty soon--and that will be a major cultural change. I think more and more understanding of the neuro-genetic and meta-programming circuits are coming along.

It's very obvious that quantum physics, parapsychology and all the work they're doing attaching brain scanners to Yogis and Zen masters means we're going to learn a great deal about the non-local quantum circuit. I think the history of mysticism has been sort of like a bunch of firecrackers with two or three going off every century. With the LSD revolution it became two or three every month and now it's moving up to two or three every week. I see a real acceleration in consciousness, just like in technology.

DJB: Soon it'll be fireworks every day. One final question, Bob. Tell us about any current projects on which you're presently working.

ROBERT: I've just finished a book called Quantum Psychology subtitled: How Brain Software Programs Your Self and Your World. I'm working on a movie, tentatively titled The Curtain, which may or may not ever get produced. I've been paid enough so that I'm not wasting my time, which is a good thing to know in Hollywood. There are all sorts of people around Hollywood who'll get you involved in projects without ever paying you a penny, if you're dumb enough to do that.

If the movie does get produced it'll have a tremendous impact. I'm also working on two possible television shows and I'm continuing my historical novels. I'm doing more lectures in more places than ever before, with workshops here and there, which involves a lot of traveling. Altogether, I'm very excited about what the next ten years will bring into my life.

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Another RAW interview can be read here.