COSMIC
TRIGGER
I
Final Secret of The Illuminati
‘Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.”
- Malaclypse the Younger, Principia Discordia
Introduction by John Higgs
Forewords by Timothy Leary, Ph.d.
Copyright © 1977 Robert Anton Wilson
All rights reserved. No part of this book, in part or in whole, may be reproduced, transmitted, or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles, books and reviews.
International Standard Book Number: 1-56184-056-4
International Standard Book Number: 1-56184-003-3
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-89428
First Edition: 1977
Second Printing 1978, And/Or Press
Third Printing 1978, Simon & Schuster
Fourth Printing 1986 (Falcon)
Fifth Printing 1987; Sixth Printing 1989
Seventh Printing 1991; Eighth Printing 1992
Ninth Printing 1993; Tenth Printing 1995
Eleventh Printing 1996; Twelfth Printing 1997
Thirteenth Printing 1998; Fourteenth Printing 1999
Fifteenth Printing 2000; Sixteenth Printing 2001
Seventeenth Printing 2002; Eighteenth Printing 2004
Nineteenth Printing 2005; Twentieth Printing 2007
Twenty-first Printing 2008; Twenty-second Printing 2009
Twenty-third Printing 2011
eBook Version 1.0 – 2016, Hilaritas Press
Cover Design by amoeba
eBook design by Pelorian Digital
Hilaritas Press, LLC.
P.O. Box 1153
Grand Junction, Colorado 81502
www.hilaritaspress.com
This book is dedicated to
Ken Campbell and the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool, England
and to
The Temple of the Hidden God, Houston, Texas
Appreciation for Light along the Way:
Alan Watts,
Timothy Leary,
Parcifal,
Malaclypse the Younger,
The New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn,
Dr. Israel Regardie
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION by John Higgs
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION by the author
FOREWORDS by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.
PROLOGUE: Thinking About the Unthinkable
PART ONE: The Sirius Connection
INTRODUCTORY FABLES
From the Sufi
From the ancient Babylonian
From the Zen tradition
The Door to Chapel Perilous
Did a leprechaun leave the Simonton pancakes?
The Kennedy Assassination and the Net
A visit to Millbrook
The Queen of Space
The 23 Enigma
The heresy hunt begins
Multiple realities
The Murder of Christ: a Re-run
Jim Garrison and the Illuminati
Operation Mindfuck
The Horrible Secrets of the Wicked Aleister Crowley
A Discordian signal from Aldous Huxley, deceased
The Net or the Network
The Lady of Guadalupe
Sirius Rising
The Holy Guardian Angel
Beings of light, talking dogs, more extraterrestrials and other weird critters
Starseed
Magick, Technology or Both?
Those mysterious Sufis
A message from Cosmic Central
Some Egyptian gods intrude on the narrative and Our Lady of Space speaks again
A visit to CMF
The prospects of immortality
Stopping the biological clock
Appearances and Disappearances
A lesson in Karma
Witchcraft
Nikola Tesla, secular shaman
Other starry signals
The footsteps of the Illuminati
Dope and divinity
The horrors begin
Ishtar’s Walk: a guided tour of Hell
Mystery Babalon
Leary emerges from darkness and Sirius rises again
The Horus Hawk and Uri Geller
The Mothman Prophecies
Doggiez from Sirius
PART TWO: Models and Metaphors
FURTHER FABLES AND ALLEGORIES
From the Sufi
From the Jewish
From the German
The Sirius Evidence
ERP and Bell’s Theorem
Tunnel-Realities and Imprints
The Octave of Energy
The law of acceleration
PART THREE: Trigger
A FINAL FABLE
From the Egyptian
Sirius Rises Again
Blood of the Gods?
The Dark Companion
Via Dolorosa
AFTERWORDS by Saul-Paul Sirag
NOTES
INDEX
Editor’s note: To avoid the pitfalls of eBook design, NOTES in this eBook are not hyperlinked, but simply left as in the print edition — note number references can be looked up in the Notes section at the end of the book. Also, to avoid a massive spaghetti-like hyperlinking chaos, the INDEX does not link back to the text. Please see the introductory explanation in the Index section.
INTRODUCTION
by John Higgs
Truly great books tend to have two things in common.
First, they are utterly of their time. They are so absorbed in their specific world that it is inconceivable that they could have come from any other time or place. They can define how we think about that period of history. Think of the work of Geoffrey Chaucer, or Jane Austen, or Charles Dickens.
And secondly, they transcend their time. They are universal, and capture something fundamental about the human experience. They speak to all people in all places at all times. Think again of the same work by Geoffrey Chaucer, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens.
Cosmic Trigger, for all the wandering the author and his family do in the book, is about the counterculture’s mid-1970s Northern California heartland. This was when psychedelic drug culture was being overtaken by a more cocaine-dominated culture. A period of absorbing wild new ideas was giving way to egos, certainty, and falling hard for your own delusions. It was as crazy as it gets, in other words. It was the edge. Western culture may never be more Out There, wild-eyed or full of crap.
We now take a certain pleasure from how deluded this culture was. History has not been kind to many of the speculative scientists Wilson discusses here. Nearly forty years after it was written, this is a book of failed predictions and gorgeously optimistic claims. Humanity is going to become an immortal interstellar race, it promises us, probably by the mid-1990s.
So Cosmic Trigger is a book utterly of its time. That is reason to think fondly of it, but it isn’t reason enough to keep reading it. The reason why its flame still burns is that it is also a book for the ages. It is a story about becoming lost. It is about entering that psychological space where all your maps have run out, and the world refuses to make sense regardless of how you look at it. This is a universal story and its perfect setting is that extreme edge of the 1970s counterculture, because if you’re telling a story about losing your anchor you want the bewilderment, craziness and paranoia to be as extreme as possible.
I won’t spoil the book by detailing Wilson’s account of his time in the Wilderness, but hi
s refusal to fully believe the growing evidence for what part of him dearly wants to be true, and the point at the end where he finally plants his flag in the sand, are what makes this book relevant. Both for now, and for all time.
It affects people, this book. It can send your life off in strange directions. As an example, on 23 February 2014 I was in Mathew Street in Liverpool, England. I formed an ungainly attempt at a human pyramid with the writers Ian ‘Cat’ Vincent and Alistair Fruish underneath a bust of Carl Jung set about 10 feet up in the outside wall of a pub. This allowed the theatre director Daisy Eris Campbell to scramble up on our backs and place a pair of rainbow knickers on Jung’s head. A wave of cheering and approval then came from the assembled crowd of 50 or so, cheering that only increased when a poor bewildered football fan, wearing a Liverpool shirt with the number ‘23’ on his back, happened to wander past. All this probably needs a bit of explanation.
The statue and a nearby manhole cover are significant in Liverpool folklore thanks to a dream that Jung once had, it’s impact on the Liverpool poet Peter O’Halligan, and their proximity to the Cavern Club where The Beatles emerged to change the world. Campbell, who was embarking on a theatrical adaptation of Cosmic Trigger, also viewed the location, the bust and the knickers as deeply meaningful, but for her own personal reasons. I too found it significant, in part because of its connections to a book about the 90s dance band The KLF I had just written. The Scottish artist, money burner and one half of The KLF Bill Drummond had recently spent 17 hours of his 60th birthday standing on the nearby manhole cover, for reasons that were meaningful to him. My book also mentions the musician and writer Julian Cope, who had busked under this same statue a year or so before, for reasons that made sense in his personal mythology.
Pretty much everybody considered the location meaningful, in other words, they just had differing reasons as to why.
This might sound problematic. When people disagree about what is meaningful, it rarely ends well. But the people assembled in Mathew Street had read Robert Anton Wilson, and they took it as read that others see things differently. They knew that this doesn’t diminish what they find personally important. On the contrary, it reveals further pieces of the puzzle.
The many hundreds of people who were drawn to the November 2014 Cosmic Trigger play and accompanying ‘Find The Others’ festival, as cast, crew or audience, all had their own reasons for being there. They were very different people, with very different histories, prejudices, hopes and beliefs. There were new-age heads and materialist rationalists, American libertarians and British socialists, the focused and the vague, and the serious and the silly. The only thing they had in common was that they had read Robert Anton Wilson, and felt that their lives were better for his philosophy. And that was enough. That was enough for all their own personal stories to harmoniously mesh with all the others, into what we soon began calling the Ever-Thickening Mythos. The shared love of Cosmic Trigger was the grit around which a tribal pearl formed.
Cosmic Trigger is autobiographical, the story of one man. Yet it has become a glue which connects the personal mythologies of a wide network of people, all of whom add to a greater story which we only catch glimpses of.
In a short novel I wrote called The Brandy of the Damned, the characters find pages from an alternative bible. One reads:
If you apply meaning to a thing you have made, then you have art.
If you apply meaning to a person, then you have love.
If you apply meaning to the universe, then you have God.
Meaning is free.
There is an inexhaustible supply of meaning.
So what’s the fucking problem?
The problem is, of course, that meaning is not fixed. It ebbs and flows like the tide. Sometimes you are drenched in the stuff, and life is self-evidently worthwhile and full of purpose and humour. And at others, it all drains away, and you are left with the horrors. In Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson shows us how to navigate these waters, both when life is too meaningful and when all meaning is gone.
Wilson’s own personal mythology, and what was meaningful to him, is great fun. What grey-faced soul does not enjoy a yarn about giant invisible rabbit spirits, the number 23 and 6000-year-old communications with the Dog Star Sirius? But, as Wilson would be the first to insist, just because these things were meaningful in his personal story does not mean that they should be equally meaningful in yours. Your own personal mythos will be equally idiosyncratic and peculiar, and it will always be more sustaining, rewarding and funny than anyone else’s. And as Wilson once said, “humans live through their myths, and only endure their realities.”
Wilson’s refusal to insist that his reality tunnel has more validity than that of his readers is, I think, the great gift of this book. That is why it has become so loved: you can see your own potential in its pages. That is why it is one of the great books of the 1970s. And that why it is one of the great books of all time.
PREFACE
By the author, originally called Preface to the New Edition, but it was not a new edition — merely a new publisher. – Ed.
Cosmic Trigger was originally published by And/Or Press about ten years ago, and by Pocket Books shortly thereafter. Although some of my novels have sold far better, in two dimensions at least it is my most "successful" book in human terms.
1. From the date of first printing to the present, I have received more mail about Cosmic Trigger than about anything else I ever wrote, and most of this mail has been unusually intelligent and open-minded. For some reason, many readers of this book think they can write to me intimately and without fear, about subjects officially Taboo in our society. I have learned a great deal from this correspondence, and have met some wonderful new friends.
2. On lecture tours, I am always asked more questions about this book than about all my other works together.
This new edition presents an opportunity to answer the most frequent questions and to correct the most persistent misunderstandings.
It should be obvious to all intelligent readers (but curiously is not obvious to many) that my viewpoint in this book is one of agnosticism. The word "agnostic" appears explicitly in the Prologue and the agnostic attitude is restated again and again in the text, but many people still think I "believe" some of the metaphors and models employed here. I therefore want to make it even clearer than ever before that
I DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING
This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist magazine, in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers. It seems to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must "believe" something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.
My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where the absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.
My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physics as "the Copenhagen Interpretation," because it was formulated in Copenhagen by Dr. Niels Bohr and his co-workers c. 1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented ex
egete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal."
Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" — or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel — "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and of knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.
Cosmic Trigger deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change through which I put myself in the years 1962-76. This process is called "initiation" or "vision quest" in many traditional societies and can loosely be considered some dangerous variety of self-psychotherapy in modern terminology. I do not recommend it for everybody, and I think I obtained more good results than bad ones chiefly because I had been through two varieties of ordinary psychotherapy before I started my own adventures and because I had a good background in scientific philosophy and was not inclined to "believe" any astounding Revelations too literally.
Briefly, the main thing I learned in my experiments is that "reality" is always plural and mutable.
Since most of Cosmic Trigger is devoted to explaining and illustrating this, and since I have tried to explain it again in other books, and since I still encounter people who have read all my writings on this subject and still do not understand what I am getting at, I will try again in this new Preface to explain it ONE MORE TIME, perhaps more clearly than before.
"Reality" is a word in the English language which happens to be (a) a noun and (b) singular. Thinking in the English language (and in cognate Indo-European languages) therefore subliminally programs us to conceptualize "reality" as one block-like entity, sort of like a huge New York skyscraper, in which every part is just another "room" within the same building. This linguistic program is so pervasive that most people cannot "think" outside it at all, and when one tries to offer a different perspective they imagine one is talking gibberish.
The notion that "reality" is a noun, a solid thing like a brick or a baseball bat, derives from the evolutionary fact that our nervous systems normally organize the dance of energy into such block-like "things," probably as instant bio-survival cues. Such "things," however, dissolve back into energy dances — processes, or verbs — when the nervous system is synergized with certain drugs or transmuted by yogic or shamanic exercises or aided by scientific instruments. In both mysticism and physics, there is general agreement that "things" are constructed by our nervous systems and that "realities" (plural) are better described as systems or bundles of energy-functions.
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