Cabala: the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Life

 

by quackenbush on July 23, 1981

Cabala: the Forbidden Fruit of the Tree of Life
by Robert Anton Wilson

from High Times, July 1981  (art jpg)

There’s a tale they tell at Military Intelli­gence in London, when the candles gutter low and the fog curls about the windows. It happened in 1914 (they say), whenEnglandwas losing the first world war and it seemed only a miracle could save her. There was this writer bloke (they say), name of Arthur Machen, never popu­lar or well known, a bloody Welshman in fact and a mystic to boot. Well (they say), this Welshman, this Machen, took it into his head to write a story about the kind of miracle England needed, so he imagined St. George himself leading a group of medieval archers to aid the English troops at Mons. And after the story was published in a mag­azine, some enterprising newspapers picked it up and reprinted it as fact. And (they say) the whole damned coun­try was gullible enough to believe it. It did as much for national mo­rale as the real miracle would have.
What is even weirder is the sequel -and the chaps at Military Intelli­gence only discuss this when the candles gutter quite low and the fog is very thick, of course. Soldiers at the front, inMons, began claiming that they had actually seen the phan­tom archers created out of Machen’s imagination. They insisted on it. Some of them were still insisting on it 40 years later. They said they had won the battle because of this su­pernatural assistance.
Fair gives you a turn, doesn’t it?
Stranger still: Machen, the man with the contagious imagination, was a member of a secret society inLondon. This was known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and it claimed to know the long-hidden secrets of Cabalistic magic.
There were several other mem­bers of the Golden Dawn who made a bit of a name. Florence Farr, one of the great actresses of the period, was a member, and it was she who gave Bernard Shaw the ideas about life-energy and longevity dramatized in Back to Methu­selah; those ideas are currently influencing life-extension research. Algernon Black­wood and Bram Stoker (Dracula’s creator) were members; so was the coroner of Lon­don; so was an electrical engineer named Alan Bennett who later, as Ananda Maitre­ya, played a key role in introducing Bud­dhist ideas to the West.
The egregious Aleister Crowley; who claimed to have come to earth to destroy Christianity; was a member for a while, and I know a good World War I story about him, too. It wasCrowley’s habit to give his pupils a word to meditate on every year. In 1918,Crowleygave them a number instead of a word: 11. All year his pupils meditated on 11 for at least a half hour every day. . . And the war ended on the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.
Did you feel another queer flash then?
The most famous Golden Dawn alum­nus, however, was the great Irish poet, Wil­liam Butler Yeats. In 1894 Yeats predicted that “the right pupils will be drawn to (the Golden Dawn) by dreams and visions and strange accidents . . .”
Cabala, the working philosophy be­hind the Golden Dawn, is the science of “strange accidents” – which are known as “mere coincidences” to the rationalist or “synchronicities” to Jungian psychologists.
Cabala (also spelled Qabala or Kaballah) was either taught by God to Adam in the Garden of Eden, according to its own tradi­tion’ or was invented by a group of rabbis c. A.D. 200 as a means of transmitting the esoteric inner teachings of Judaism after the fall ofJerusalemand the Dispersion. Among the prominent medieval and Re­naissance philosophers who were Cabalists one can mention Raymond Lull, Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, Dr. John Dee, Pico della Mirandola and Isaac Newton. Cabala became unfashionable in the 18th century and did not begin to make a come­back until the Brain Explosion of the 1960s -the drug culture, the consciousness movement, the importation of Oriental mind-sciences, the popularity of Jung and Leary and Castaneda.
One way to get into the Cabalistic head space is to reflect long and hard on the sin­gular fact that we could not live-could not breathe, in fact-without the trees busily pumping oxygen into the air. Yet the trees are not “thinking” about producing life-supportfor us. To the rationalist, it seems that our need for oxygen has no real con­nection with the trees’ production of that element; sheer chance (or, the more vehe­ment rationalists will anthropomorphically say, “blind chance”) happens to have pro­duced trees, through natural selection, over many aeons. The fact that we exist is, to this philosophy, a total accident, a very strange coincidence.
And, to the same rationalist, Arthur Ma­chen’s imagination has no real connection with what was happening on the battlefield atMons. The magical link between Machen’s imagination and the “collective hallucina­tion” of the soldiers is just coincidence – like the magical link between us and the trees.
To the Cabalist, the rationalist sounds like a man found in a closet by a jealous husband, who hopefully explains, “Just by coinci­dence, while you were away on business I happened to wander into this closet without my clothes on. . .”
To the Cabalist, the whole uni­verse is a network of meaningful connections. The seemingly coinci­dental is as full of meaning as anything else. To begin thinking like a Caba­list you must regard everything as being just as important as every­thing else. All that seems “acciden­tal,” “meaningless,” “chaotic,” “weird,” “nonsensical;’ et cetera is as significant as what seems lawful, orderly and comprehensible.
An elementary Cabalistic train­ing technique is to try every day to “regard every incident and event as a direct communication between God and your sou1.” Even the li­cense plates on passing cars are such communications-or can be considered as such-by the devout Cabalist.
Some will be thinking of Freud at this point; and indeed Nathan Fo­dor points out in Freud, Jung and the Occult that Freud was heavily influ­enced by a friend who was a Caba­list. The “dreams, visions and strange accidents” that Yeats thought would bring people into the ambience of the Golden Dawn are all Freudian “unconscious material.”
A more modern metaphor is to be found in current neurology; which points out that the brain is divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is where we do most of our conscious thinking, and it is linear; it breaks things down into sequences of A-causes-B, B-causes-C, and so forth. The right hemisphere, on the contrary; thinks in gestalt-meaningful wholes, comprehen­sive systems.
Cabala, like dope, is a deliberate attempt to overthrow the linear left brain and allow the contents of the holistic right brain to flood the field of consciousness. When you are walking down the street and every li­cense plate seems part of one continuous message-one endless narrative-you are thinking like a very advanced theoretical Cabalist. (Or else you’re stoned out of your gourd.) Practical Cabala (or Cabalistic magic) is the art of utilizing such holistic perception to create effects that will seem like “strange accidents” to the non-Cabalist.
A legendary example concerns an inci­dent when the king ofPolandwas being urged by his advisers to authorize a pogrom against the Jews. One old Hasidic rabbi­ and the Hasidic rabbis spend most of their time studying Cabala-sat down, on hear­ing of this, and pretended to be writing something; but he did not write. Instead, he deliberately knocked his bottle over three times. His students, who saw this, thought the old man was getting a bit funny in the head. Then, a few days later; came news from the capital: The king had tried to sign the order for the pogrom three times, and each time he had-by “strange acci­dent knocked over his ink bottle. “I can’t sign this,” the king finally exclaimed. “God is against it!”
Every Oriental culture has some equivalent to Cabala – some neuroscience of medita­tions, visualizations and yogic con­tortions calculated to shift conscious­ness, or part of consciousness, from the usually overactive left hemi­sphere to the usually underactive right hemisphere. Cabala differs from all these Oriental disciplines in being as systematic as any natu­ral science-although far weirder:
The system of Cabala is contained in a kind of ontological periodic ta­ble of elements (see illustration). The purpose of this diagram has been nicely defined by the eminent contemporary Cabalist (and Jungian psychologist) Dr. Israel Regardie, who describes it as “a mnemonic system of psychology. . . to train the Will and Imagination.”
The tree, as you can see, is made up of ten circles, called lights, and 22 paths connecting the lights. Each light represents a separate lev­el of consciousness, and hence a separate level of “reality:’ That is, to the Cabalist, each perceived reality is a function of the level of consciousness which perceives it, and how much reality you can absorb de­pends on how rich your consciousness is.
The paths, which are more technical than the lights, are techniques for getting from one light (one level of awareness) to another: ‘
The aim of the Cabala is to always know which “light” you are in, which is the level of consciousness that is creating what you are perceiving; and then to know the paths, or tricks, to get from one light (perceived re­ality) to another.
Dion Fortune, a Cabalist who also prac­ticed psychoanalysis under her birth name, Violet Wirth, sums it all up by saying Caba­la is “the art of causing change in conscious­ness by act of will”
The Tree of Life may be regarded as a map of those parts of consciousness which (a) are active in everybody-the lower parts of the tree; and (b) those which are only ac­tive in various orders of adepts-the higher parts of the tree.
The pragmatic theory of Cabala is that each action creates a new “universe,” each experiment creates a new experimenter, each dance creates a new dancer. We are growing and evolving all the time, without noticing it usually; but a_ certain crucial points we can make a mental quantum jump to a level of awareness that puts us in a new reality we have never noticed before. Each of the lights on the Tree of Life repre­sents such a quantum jump.
Concretely, we all start out in Malkuth, at the bottom of the tree, which represents the lowest level of awareness. This is what Freud called the oral stage: We simply drift and wait to be fed. Alcoholics, opiate addicts and most of the people on welfare for “psycho­logical” reasons represent this state in its pure form, but we all contain it and relapse into it under sufficient stress. “I can’t cope; somebody come help me:’ Hear the infant’s shrill cry. “Maaa-Maaa!” and you know what Malkuth is all about.
Above this is Yesod, the area of strong ego-awareness and what Gurdjieff called conscious suffering. This is where you struggle to be a real mensch, to be honor­able, responsible, and self-sufficient. If you never get beyond this, you become what doctors called Type A and are a good bet for an early heart attack.
There are two ways to transcend Yesod’s struggles. One takes you to Hod, which can be called the tactic _of the rationalist (Dr: Carl Sagan will serve as a model for this), and the other to Netzach, which is the strat­egy of the ordinary religionist (Jerry Fal­well, say).
According to Cabala, both the rationalist and the vulgar religionist are unbalanced; in modern neurological language, the ra­tionalist leans too much on the left brain and the religionist too much on the right brain. The synthesis, or balancing, brings you to the Middle Pillar and is represented by the light called Tiphareth-which charm­ingly enough means “beauty” in English.
Looking at the tree, you can see that the rationalist has a different path to Tiphareth from that of the religionist. The rationalist must go the path of nun (“fish”) and the reli­gionist the path of ayin (“eye”). Any book on Cabala will tell you what nun and ayin im­ply in terms of the psychological transformation involved. Fortu­nately, the tarot cards were either created or revised by a Cabalist and the meanings of nun and ayin are vividly conveyed to the uncon­scious by the two cards called, re­spectively. Death and the Devil. Anybody with even a rudimentary knowledge of psychology can grasp part of what is meant here-the ra­tionalist must “make friends with” Death and the religionist with the Devil. This is what Jung means when he says each man must face his own shadow.
(Every path on the tree has a tarot card illustrating it, and the quickest way to make the tree clear to your unconscious is to layout the cards representing the paths’ between each light. The next step is to re­design the cards in terms of your own understanding. Some Caba­lists redesign the tarot every two or three years, as their understanding grows.)
Tiphareth, the balanced center between and above both rationalism and religion, means beauty, as we said above. It is the first light that does not appear in normal, statistically av­erage consciousness, and is identified with everything we mean by rebirth or awaken­ing. It is dhyana in the Hindu system, “Bud­dha-mind” in Buddhism, the “New Adam” inSt. Paul’s epistles, Cosmic Christ Con­sciousness to Christian Cabalists. It repre­sents a total reorganization of the psyche for a higher level of functioning than most hu­mans ever attain. When Dr. Timothy Leary says gnomically that “the nervous system sees no color, feels no pain;’ he means that the nervous system on this level sees no col­or; feels no pain. You are floating, and this is the first light on the tree that really feels like a light. Acidheads will know.
Above Tiphareth are two more unbal­anced lights called Geburah and Chesed. Roughly; Geburah is the stage of Nietzsche’s superman: he who is much more conscious than ordinary people and knows it. In George Lucas’s symbolism, Geburah means “being seduced by the dark side of the Force:’ It needs to be balanced by Che­sed, which is humility in the deepest, more ego-destroying sense. In Castaneda’s lingo, Geburah is “taking responsibility” and Chesed is doing so while always remem­bering that “you are no more important than the coyote.”
Geburah says “I am God”; Chesed says, “And so is everybody else – and everything else!”
There are three more lights on the tree. These are known as the supernals and are much further from ordinary human con­sciousness than Tiphareth, Geburah or Chesed. Many Cabalists say that you can­not reach the supernals without the direct help of the Almighty. Even with such divine aid, reaching the supernals is known as “crossing the abyss” and is regarded as fraught with peril.
The first two supernals are Chok­mah and Binah. You will note on the diagram that they are both unbalanced – off the Middle Pillar. Basically; Chokmah is direct contact with the masculine aspect of “God” and corresponds to whatever you asso­ciate with Jehovah, Jupiter; Brah­ma, Zeus, et cetera. Binah is direct contact with the female side of divin­ity and corresponds to Venus, Ishtar, Kali or the White Goddess that Rob­ert Graves is always writing about. Cabala says that each of these Close Encounters has to be “balanced.” That is, you have to get beyond both Big Daddy and Big Mommy to ar­rive at the ultimate light, Kether, the balanced center of all conscious­ness, which is beyond gender, be­yond space, beyond time, beyond words and beyond all categories. In short, Kether is exactly what all the Oriental mystics are seeking: pure consciousness without a blemish of emotion, idea or image, and there­fore infinite and formless.
Cabala is very complicated and very; very intricate; the above sketch is no more than a hint of what the Tree of Life contains, on about the level of a discussion of chemistry that tells you there are eight families of elements but does not go on to list the elements in each family. To discuss Cabala fully requires many books; and indeed there is one good-sized book, Liber 777, by Aleister Crowley; which consists only of listing the elements in each light and path of the tree, and Liber 777 consists of 155 pages with four columns on each page.
The purpose of such lists is to design ritu­als, and the purpose of rituals is to program your own experience as you navigate from one light to another. As Tim Leary once said, “Ritual is to the inner sciences what experiment is to the outer sciences.” Caba­lists agree.
For instance, suppose you have had a very powerful experience of the Punishing Father aspect of God, such as John Calvin once had. Within the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition, you might take this lit­erally and proceed, as Calvin did, to estab­lish a new religion. As a Cabalist, you will recognize it as a Chokmah experience and know that it needs to be balanced by a Bi­nah experience.
You then look on the Tree of Life for a path from Chokmah to Binah. That turns out to be daleth (“door”), which corresponds to the Empress card in the tarot. If you look at the Empress you will immediately note that she happens to be a pregnant woman sitting in a field surrounded by veg­etation. That should tell your unconscious what the path of daleth means. (By a “strange accident” or “mere coincidence” the Empress card, in most tarot decks, con­tains the women’s-liberation symbol and always has, long before there was a femi­nist movement. That should help jar your consciousness. )
If the Empress card doesn’t tell you enough, you look up daleth in any Cabalis­tic textbook, such asCrowley’s 777. You will find that daleth is “in correspondence with” such things as the planet Venus, the color emerald green, the swan, the rose, sandal­wood incense, the heptagram (seven-sided polygon), et cetera, and is most powerful on Friday. Thus, to get from Chokmah to Binah, you construct a ritual-a dramatized rnind­change operation-to be performed within a heptagram, on Friday evening as Venus is rising, using emerald green decorations, roses, swan feathers and sandalwood in­cense. If you follow all these correspon­dences, and know how to write rituals, and have had enough experiences with Cabala to have developed a powerful will and im­agination, you should achieve Binah, the vision of the All-Loving Mother.
Similarly, there are favorable days, and perfumes, and geometric figures, and other accessories, for every type of brain change operation. Sunday is best for Tiphareth (Christ consciousness), Monday for Yesod (building a stronger ego), Tuesday for Ge­burah (accumulating powers), Wednesday for Hod (wisdom). Thursday for Netzsch (moral strength), Friday for Binah and Sat­urday for Chokmah.
This is only the skeleton of Cabala, how­ever. Real Cabalistic practice consists of so familiarizing yourself with all the corres­pondences on the Tree of Life that every­thing you experience is filed and in­dexed by your brain as a Cabalistic “message.” Thus, if you walk out the door and see a palm tree, you imme­diately (by self-conditioning with Cabala) think of Venus and Hermes – because door is daleth is Venus, and palm is beth is Hermes. If you see a license plate with 333 on it, you re­member that that is the number of egotism and deception, and you must ask what egotism and decep­tion remains in yourself. In short, nothing is trivial; nothing is insig­nificant; nothing is meaningless. The whole universe, asCrowleysays, becomes a continuous ritual of initiation.
A Zen Master was once asked, “What is Zen?” “Attention,” he replied. “Is that all?” asked the inquirer. “Attention,” the Zen Master repeated. “Won’t you say anything else?” per­sisted the questioner. “Attention,” said the Master, one more time.
Cabala creates attention by using the Tree of Life to “key” every possible impression to one of the lights or paths and hence to a stage in the evolution of consciousness. The world becomes – as it was to Plato and Mary Baker Eddy and Sir Humph­rey Davy when he tried nitrous oxide – nothing but ideas.
Theoretical Cabala is much concerned with words and numbers, and indeed insists that every word is a number. This is literally true in Hebrew, because all Hebrew letters are numbers, and the num­ber of a word is the number obtained by adding its separate letters together. Cabala claims that any words having the same number are in some sense identical or “in correspondence with” each other.
For instance, achad (I am writing the He­brew as if it were English, for simplicity’s sake) has the value of 13. So does ahebah. What does this mean? Well, achad trans­lates as “unity” and ahebah as “love,” so by the mathematical theorem that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other; the Cabalist calculates that love (ahe­beh) equals 13 and unity (achad) equals 13 and therefore love equals unity. And, of course, when you love somebody you are in union with them: You are happy when they are happy; you suffer when they suffer.
Better still, it works backwards, too, ac­cording to some Cabalists: 31 is 13 back­wards and therefore 31 is mystically the same as 13. And AI, the oldest name of God in Hebrew; has the value 31. Therefore, God equals love equals unity.
Which is all very nice and cheerful, and it’s pleasant to have our first lesson in theo­retical Cabala coming up with such pleas­ant information.
Unfortunately; la (nothing) also equals 31. Is God therefore nothing? Or is it unity that is nothing? or love?
The theoretical Cabalist is not abashed. God is nothing, he says firmly – no-thing. And in this he is in agreement with the Buddhists and Hindus and, indeed, the most advanced mystics of all traditions. It only sounds queer to those primitives down at the bottom of the Tree of Life in Hod (ra­tionalism) or Netzach (conventional reli­gion); if you persist in Cabala long enough, the divine no-thing will make perfect sense to you.
Unfortunately; before you arrive at Ke­ther – “the Head without a Head,” the divine nothing – you will be sure to encounter even worse shocks in theoretical Cabala. Thus, neschek, the serpent in Genesis, the devil himself, has the value 358. You don’t have to look far to find another Hebrew word with the value 358. It jumps up at you, as soon as you start studying Cabala. It is messiah.
In what sense is the devil the messiah? Some Cabalists have gone quite batty work­ing on that one.
The charm of Cabala is that the universe adjusts-or in your excited and overstimu­lated state, appears to adjust-in ways that heighten such perplexities. When I first dis­covered the 358-equals-devil-equals-messi­ah paradox, I had to go toLos Angeleson business. Arriving at my hotel I found I had been given room 358. That’s the sort of “strange accident” that Yeats was talking about, as one of the portals to Cabala. . .
For several years English biologist Lyall Watson has been collecting the products of Jung’s “collective unconsciousness” – dreams, hypnotic states, mediumistic phe­nomena, automatic writing, et cetera. In his book, Lifetide, Watson offers a tentative summary of the data: “… there is a same­ness in the tone, the word structure, the feeling, and the delivery of almost all the material. It has a dreamlike quality; and my feeling is that the vast majority of all the evi­dence I am looking at is a series produced by one prodigious dreamer” (italics added).
William Butler Yeats, trying to justify his interest in Cabalastic magic to rationalistic friends, came up with the same metaphor: “The borders of our minds are ever shifting, and many minds can flow into one another; as it were, and create or reveal a single mind. . . our memories are part of one great memory; the memory of Nature herself.”
This “one great dreamer” or “one great memory” can be accessed by Cabalistic practices, or by Zen meditation, or by LSD, or by a dozen other gimmicks. It has the quality of oneness in that it is the same no matter who accesses it or when-whether they are in India 500 B.G orFlorenceA.D. 1300 or in New York Citytoday. It seems to be “timeless” or unconnected to our con­scious notions of sequential time, as even so materialistic an observer as Freud noticed. One of the benefits of the psychological in­vestigations of our times-from Freud and Jung to the LSD research of the ’60s and the human-potential movement-has been to make most of us aware again, for the first time since the 17th century; that this level of the psyche exists in all of us and cannot safely be repressed or ignored.
The Cabalist, scorned by the 19th century as a crank or a charlatan, seems to be having the last laugh after all. There may be only one person in 10,000 – or in 100,000 – who seri­ously studies Cabala, but the avant-garde third of the population understands Cabalis­tic logic very well. If you show them the Tree of Life, and explain it, they might say that it is an alternative map of the charkas – if they are into Oriental mind-science; or an anato­my of the collective unconscious- if they’re into Jung; or the circuits of the nervous sys­tem-if Tim Leary is their bag; but one way or another they will recognize it. It looked like gibberish to Yeats’s contemporaries.
Military Intelligence never could figure out how the “angelic archers” escaped from Arthur Machen’s imagination to the percep­tions of the soldiers atMons. But the readers of this magazine understand. Don’t you?

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Robert Anton Wilson

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For other people named Robert Wilson, see Robert Wilson (disambiguation).

Robert Anton Wilson
At the National Theatre, London, for the 10-hour stage version of Illuminatus! in 1977
Born	Robert Edward Wilson (1932-01-18)January 18, 1932 Brooklyn, New York
Died	January 11, 2007(2007-01-11) (aged 74) Capitola, California
Spouse(s)	Arlen Riley Wilson (1958–1999) (her death) 4 children
Influences[show] Aleister Crowley · Buckminster Fuller · George Gurdjieff · James Joyce · Alfred Korzybski · Friedrich Nietzsche · Ezra Pound · Wilhelm Reich · Erwin Schrödinger · Lysander Spooner · Benjamin Tucker · Ludwig Wittgenstein ·

Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007), known to friends as "Bob", was an American author and polymath who became at various times a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian^[1] and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized as an episkopos, pope, and saint of Discordianism, Wilson helped publicize the group through his writings, interviews, and strolls.^{[clarification needed]}
Wilson described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth".^[2] His goal being "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything" (cf. solipsism, acatalepsia, Pyrrhonism).^[3]

Contents  [hide]  1 Early life 2 The Illuminatus! Trilogy 2.1 On the Illuminati 3 Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, and Masks of the Illuminati 4 Plays and screenplays 5 The Cosmic Trigger series and other books 6 Probability reliance 7 Economic thought 8 Other activities 9 Death 10 Works 10.1 Bibliography 10.1.1 Fiction 10.1.2 Autobiographical and philosophical trilogy 10.1.3 Plays and screenplays 10.1.4 Non-fiction 10.1.5 Essay collections 10.1.6 Editor 10.2 Discography 10.3 Filmography 10.3.1 Actor 10.3.2 Writer 10.3.3 Himself 10.4 Documentary 11 See also 12 References 13 External links

[edit] Early life

"Is", "is." "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment.

— Robert Anton Wilson, The Historical Illuminatus, as spoken by Sigismundo Celine.

Wilson, born Robert Edward Wilson in Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New York, spent his first years in Flatbush, and moved with his family to Gerritsen Beach around the age of 4 or 5, where they stayed until he turned 13. He suffered from polio as a child, and found generally effective treatment with the Kenny Method (created by Elizabeth Kenny) which the American Medical Association repudiated at that time. Polio's effects remained with Wilson throughout his life, usually manifesting as minor muscle spasms causing him to use a cane occasionally until 2000, when he experienced a major bout with post-polio syndrome that would continue until his death.
Wilson attended Catholic grammar school, most likely the school associated with Gerritsen Beach's Resurrection Church^{[citation needed]}. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School to remove himself from the Catholic influence. While working as an ambulance driver Wilson attended New York University, studying engineering and mathematics. He lectured at the Free University of New York on 'Anarchist and Synergetic Politics' when it was founded in 1965.^[4]
He worked as an engineering aide, a salesman, a copywriter, and as associate editor of Playboy magazine from 1965 to 1971. Wilson adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Anton, for his writings, at first telling himself that he would save the "Edward" for when he wrote the Great American Novel and later finding that "Robert Anton Wilson" had become an established identity.
In 1979 he received a Ph.D. in psychology from Paideia University in California,^[5] an unaccredited institution that has since closed.^[6][7] Wilson reworked his dissertation, and it found publication in 1983 as Prometheus Rising.
Wilson married freelance writer and poet Arlen Riley in 1958; they had four children. Their youngest daughter Luna—beaten to death in an apparent robbery in the store where she worked in 1976 at the age of 15—became the first person to have her brain preserved by the Bay Area Cryonics Society.^[8] Arlen Riley Wilson died in 1999 following a series of strokes.^[9][10]

[edit] The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Main article: The Illuminatus! Trilogy

The Eye in the Pyramid, first volume of the first edition of Illuminatus!, 1975

Among Wilson's 35 books,^[11] and many other works, perhaps his best-known volumes remain the cult classic series^[12] The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Robert Shea. Advertised as "a fairy tale for paranoids," the three books--The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan, soon offered as a single volume—philosophically and humorously examined, among many other themes, occult and magical symbolism and history, the counterculture of the 1960s, secret societies, data concerning author H.P. Lovecraft and author and occultist Aleister Crowley, and American paranoia about conspiracies and conspiracy theories.
Wilson and Shea derived much of the odder material from letters sent to Playboy magazine while they worked as the editors of the Playboy Forum.^[13] The books mixed true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "guerrilla ontology" which he apparently referred to as "Operation Mindfuck" in Illuminatus! The trilogy also outlined a set of libertarian and anarchist axioms known as Celine's Laws (named after Hagbard Celine, a character in Illuminatus!), concepts Wilson revisited several times in other writings.
Among the many subplots of Illuminatus! one addresses biological warfare and the overriding of the United States Bill of Rights, another gives a detailed account of the John F. Kennedy assassination, in which no fewer than five snipers, all working for different causes, prepared to shoot Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, and the book's climax occurs at a rock concert where the audience collectively face the danger of becoming a mass human sacrifice.
Illuminatus! popularized Discordianism and the use of the term "fnord". It incorporates experimental prose styles influenced by writers such as William S. Burroughs, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.^[14] Although Shea and Wilson never partnered on such a scale again, Wilson continued to expand upon the themes of the Illuminatus! books throughout his writing career. Most of his later fiction contains cross-over characters from "The Sex Magicians" (Wilson's first novel, written before the release of Illuminatus!, which includes many of his same characters) and The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
Illuminatus! won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for science fiction in 1986, has many international editions, and found adaptation for the stage when Ken Campbell produced it as a ten-hour epic drama. It also appeared as a Steve Jackson role-playing card game called Illuminati and a trading-card game called Illuminati: New World Order. Eye N Apple Productions and Rip Off Press produced a comic book version of the trilogy.

[edit] On the Illuminati

Near the end of his life, Richard Metzger interviewed Robert Anton Wilson and asked him about the Illuminati. His answer was:

Richard Metzger: You have studied the Illuminati for years. Have you come to any conclusion about their aims?

Robert Anton Wilson: Usually when people ask me that question, I give them some kind of a put-on, but I can't think of a good and original put-on that I haven't done several times before. So I'll tell you the truth, for once. After investigating the Illuminati and their critics for the last 30 years, I think the Illuminati was a short lived society of free thinkers and democratic reformers that formed a secret society within Freemasonry, using Freemasonry as a cover so they could plot to overthrow all the kings in Europe and the Pope. I'm very happy that they succeeded in overthrowing all the kings, I just wish that they had completed the job and gotten rid of the Royal family in England too, but they did pretty well on the continent. I'm sorry they haven't finished off the Pope yet, either, but I think they're still working on the project and I wish them luck.

— Disinformation: the interviews. By Richard Metzger.^[15]

[edit] Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, and Masks of the Illuminati

Main articles: Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, and Masks of the Illuminati

Wilson wrote two more popular fiction series. The first, a trilogy later published as a single volume, was Schrödinger's Cat. The second, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, appeared as three books. In-between publishing the two trilogies Wilson released a stand-alone novel, Masks of the Illuminati (1981), which fits into, due to the main character's ancestry, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles' timeline and, while published earlier, could qualify for the fourth volume in that series.
Schrödinger's Cat consists of three volumes: The Universe Next Door, The Trick Top Hat, and The Homing Pigeons. Wilson set the three books in differing alternative universes, and most of the characters remain almost the same but may have slightly different names and different careers and background stories. The books cover the fields of quantum mechanics and the varied philosophies and explanations that exist within the science. The single volume describes itself as a magical textbook and a type of initiation. The single-volume edition omits many entire pages and has many other omissions when compared with the original separate books.
The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, composed of The Earth Will Shake (1982), The Widow's Son (1985), and Nature's God (1991), follows the timelines of several characters through different generations, time periods, and countries. The books cover, among many other topics, the history, legacy, and rituals of the Illuminati and related groups.
Masks of the Illuminati, featuring historical characters in a fictionized setting, contains a great deal of occult data. Intermixing Albert Einstein, James Joyce, Aleister Crowley, Sigmund Freud and others, the book focuses on Pan and other occult icons, ideas, and practices.

[edit] Plays and screenplays

A play by Wilson, Wilhelm Reich in Hell (published as a book in 1987 and first performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin, in San Francisco, and in Los Angeles) included many factual and fictional characters, including Marilyn Monroe, Uncle Sam, and Wilhelm Reich himself. Wilson also wrote and published as books two screenplays, not yet produced: Reality Is What You Can Get Away With: an Illustrated Screenplay (1992) and The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1997).

[edit] The Cosmic Trigger series and other books

In the nonfiction and partly autobiographical Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) and its two sequels, as well as in many other works, Wilson examined Freemasons, Discordianism, Sufism, the Illuminati, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, Jack Parsons, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, Yoga, and many other esoteric or counterculture philosophies, personalities, and occurrences.

Wilson advocated Timothy Leary's eight circuit model of consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he wrote about in many books including Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and again in 1990 with Quantum Psychology (which contain practical techniques intended to help one break free of one's "reality tunnels"). With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension, which they combined to form the word symbol SMI²LE.
Wilson's 1986 book, The New Inquisition, argues that whatever reality consists of it actually would seem much weirder than we commonly imagine. It cites, among other sources, Bell's theorem and Alain Aspect's experimental proof of Bell's to suggest that mainstream science has a strong materialist bias, and that in fact modern physics may have already disproved materialist metaphysics.
Wilson also supported the work and utopian theories of Buckminster Fuller and examined the theories of Charles Fort. He and Loren Coleman became friends,^[16] as he did with media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler, with whom he taught workshops. He also admired James Joyce, and wrote extensive commentaries on the author and on two of Joyce's novels, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, in his 1988 book Coincidance: A Head Test.^[17]
Although Wilson often lampooned and criticized some New Age beliefs, bookstores specializing in New Age material often sell his books. Wilson, a well-known author in occult and Neo-Pagan circles, used Aleister Crowley as a main character in his 1981 novel Masks of the Illuminati, included some elements of H. P. Lovecraft's work in his novels, and at times claimed to have perceived encounters with magical "entities" (when asked whether these entities seemed "real", he answered they seemed "real enough," although "not as real as the IRS" but "easier to get rid of", and later decided that his experiences may have emerged from "just my right brain hemisphere talking to my left").^[18] He warned against beginners using occult practice, since to rush into such practices and the resulting "energies" they unleash could lead people to "go totally nuts".^[19]
Wilson also criticized scientific types with overly rigid belief systems, equating them with religious fundamentalists in their fanaticism. In a 1988 interview, when asked about his newly-published book The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, Wilson commented: "I coined the term irrational rationalism because those people claim to be rationalists, but they're governed by such a heavy body of taboos. They're so fearful, and so hostile, and so narrow, and frightened, and uptight and dogmatic... I wrote this book because I got tired satirizing fundamentalist Christianity... I decided to satirize fundamentalist materialism for a change, because the two are equally comical... The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they're rational! ...They're never skeptical about anything except the things they have a prejudice against. None of them ever says anything skeptical about the AMA, or about anything in establishment science or any entrenched dogma. They're only skeptical about new ideas that frighten them. They're actually dogmatically committed to what they were taught when they were in college..."^[20]

[edit] Probability reliance

In a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, Wilson described himself as "model-agnostic" which he said "consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory".^[21]
Wilson claimed in Cosmic Trigger: Volume 1 "not to believe anything", since "belief is the death of intelligence".^[22] He described this approach as "Maybe Logic."
Wilson wrote about this and other topics in articles for the cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000.^[23]

[edit] Economic thought

Robert Anton Wilson favored a form of Basic Income Guarantee; synthesizing several ideas under the acronym RICH. His ideas are set forth in the essay "The RICH Economy" found in The Illuminati Papers.^[24]

[edit] Other activities

Robert Anton Wilson and his wife Arlen Riley Wilson founded the Institute for the Study of the Human Future in 1975.
From 1982 until his death, Wilson had a business relationship with the Association for Consciousness Exploration, which hosted his first on-stage dialogue with his long-time friend Timothy Leary^[25] entitled The Inner Frontier.^[26][27][28] Wilson dedicated his book The New Inquisition to A.C.E.'s co-directors, Jeff Rosenbaum and Joseph Rothenberg.

Wilson speaking at the Phenomicon

Wilson also joined the Church of the SubGenius, who referred to him as Pope Bob.^[29] He contributed to their literature, including the book Three-Fisted Tales of "Bob", and shared a stage with their founder, Rev. Ivan Stang, on several occasions. Wilson also founded the Guns and Dope Party^[30] and its corresponding Burning Man theme camp.^{[citation needed]}
As a member of the Board of Advisors of the Fully Informed Jury Association, Wilson worked to inform the public about jury nullification, the right of jurors to nullify a law they deem unjust.^[31] He supported and wrote about E-Prime, a form of English lacking all "be" verbs (words such as "is", "are", "was", "were" etc.), and preferred the term "maybe logic".^[32]
A decades-long researcher into drugs and a strong opponent of what he called "the war on some drugs", Wilson participated as a Special Guest in the week-long 1999 Annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam,^[33] and used and often promoted the use of medical marijuana.^[34]

[edit] Death

On June 22, 2006, Huffington Post blogger Paul Krassner reported that Robert Anton Wilson was under hospice care at home with friends and family.^[35] On October 2, 2006 Douglas Rushkoff reported that Wilson was in severe financial trouble.^[36] Slashdot, Boing Boing, and the Church of the SubGenius also picked up on the story, linking to Rushkoff's appeal.^[37][38] As his webpage reported on October 10, these efforts succeeded beyond expectation and raised a sum which would have supported him for at least six months. Obviously touched by the great outpouring of support, on October 5, 2006, Wilson left the following comment on his personal website, expressing his gratitude:

Dear Friends, my God, what can I say. I am dumbfounded, flabbergasted, and totally stunned by the charity and compassion that has poured in here the last three days. To steal from Jack Benny, "I do not deserve this, but I also have severe leg problems and I don't deserve them either."
Because he was a kind man as well as a funny one, Benny was beloved. I find it hard to believe that I am equally beloved and especially that I deserve such love.
Whoever you are, wherever you are, know that my love is with you.
You have all reminded me that despite George W. Bush and all his cohorts, there is still a lot of beautiful kindness in the world.
Blessings,
Robert Anton Wilson

—^[39]

On January 6, Wilson wrote on his blog that according to several medical authorities, he would likely only have between two days and two months left to live.^[40] He closed this message with "I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd." He died peacefully five days later, on January 11 at 4:50 a.m. Pacific time.^[41] After his cremation on January 18, and his family-held memorial service on February 18, 2007, his family scattered most of his ashes at the same spot as his wife's—off the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California.^[42][43]
A tribute show to Wilson, organized by Coldcut and Mixmaster Morris and performed in London as a part of the "Ether 07 Festival" held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on March 18, 2007, also included Ken Campbell, Bill Drummond and Alan Moore.^[44]

[edit] Works

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Fiction

• The Sex Magicians (1973)
• The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) (with Robert Shea)
  • The Eye in the Pyramid
  • The Golden Apple
  • Leviathan
• Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy (1979–1981)
  • The Universe Next Door
  • The Trick Top Hat
  • The Homing Pigeons
• Masks of the Illuminati (1981)
• The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles
  • The Earth Will Shake (1982)
  • The Widow's Son (1985)
  • Nature's God (1988)

[edit] Autobiographical and philosophical trilogy

• Cosmic Trigger Trilogy
  • Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977)
  • Cosmic Trigger II: Down to Earth (1992)
  • Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death (1995)

[edit] Plays and screenplays

• Wilhelm Reich in Hell (1987)
• Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (1992; revised edition—new introduction added—1996)
• The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1997)

[edit] Non-fiction

• Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words (1972)
• Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits (1973)
• The Book of the Breast (1974)
• Neuropolitics (1978) (with Timothy Leary and George Koopman)
• The Game of Life (1979) (with Timothy Leary)
• Prometheus Rising (1983)

• The New Inquisition (1986)
• Natural Law, or Don't Put a Rubber on Your Willy (1987)

• Neuropolitique (1988) (with Timothy Leary & George Koopman) revision of Neuropolitics
• Sex, Drugs and Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits (1988) revision, with new introduction, of Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits
• Ishtar Rising (1989) revision of The Book of the Breast
• Quantum Psychology (1990)
• Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults and Cover-ups (1998) (with Miriam Joan Hill)
• TSOG: The Thing That Ate the Constitution (2002)

[edit] Essay collections

• Email to the universe and other alterations of consciousness (2005) collection of essays and new material
• Coincidance: A Head Test (1988) essays and new material
• The Illuminati Papers (1980) collection of essays and new material
• Right Where You Are Sitting Now (1983) collection of essays and new material

[edit] Editor

• Semiotext(e) SF (1989) (anthology, editor, with Rudy Rucker and Peter Lamborn Wilson)
• Chaos and Beyond (1994) (editor and primary author)

[edit] Discography

• A Meeting with Robert Anton Wilson (ACE) cassette
• Religion for the Hell of It (ACE) cassette
• H.O.M.E.s on LaGrange (ACE) cassette
• The New Inquisition (ACE) cassette
• The H.E.A.D. Revolution (ACE) cassette and CD
• Prometheus Rising (ACE) cassette
• The Inner Frontier (with Timothy Leary) (ACE) cassette
• The Magickal Movement: Present & Future (with Margot Adler, Isaac Bonewits & Selena Fox) (ACE) Panel Discussion – cassette
• Magick Changing the World, the World Changing Magick (ACE) Panel Discussion – cassette
• The Self in Transformation (ACE) Panel Discussion – cassette
• The Once & Future Legend (with Ivan Stang, Robert Shea and others) (ACE) Panel Discussion – cassette
• What IS the Conspiracy, Anyway? (ACE) Panel Discussion – cassette
• The Chocolate-Biscuit Conspiracy album with The Golden Horde (1984)
• Twelve Eggs in a Basket CD
• Robert Anton Wilson On Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell (interview by Faustin Bray and Brian Wallace) (1988) 2 CD Set Sound Photosynthesis
• Acceleration of Knowledge (1991) cassette
• Secrets of Power comedy cassette
• Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything: or Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance (July 30, 2005) Sounds True ISBN 1-59179-375-0, ISBN 978-1-59179-375-5

[edit] Filmography

[edit] Actor

• Túneis da Realidade, Os (a.k.a. Who Is the Master Who Makes the Grass Green?) (1996) Edgar Pêra (Portugal)
• Manual de Evasão (September 16, 1994) Edgar Pêra (Portugal)

[edit] Writer

• Wilhelm Reich in Hell (2005) (Video) Deepleaf Productions

[edit] Himself

• Children of the Revolution: Tune Back In (2005) Revolutionary Child Productions
• The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick (2001) TKO Productions
• 23 (1998) (23 – Nichts ist so wie es scheint) Claussen & Wöbke Filmproduktion GmbH (Germany)
• Arise! The SubGenius Video (1992) (V) (a.k.a. Arise! SubGenius Recruitment Film #16) The SubGenius Foundation (USA)
• Borders (1989) Co-Directions Inc. (TV documentary)
• Fear In The Night: Demons, Incest and UFOs (1993) Video – Trajectories
• Twelve Eggs in a Box: Myth, Ritual and the Jury System (1994) Video – Trajectories
• Everything Is Under Control: Robert Anton Wilson in Interview (1998) Video – Trajectories

[edit] Documentary

• Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, a documentary featuring selections from over 25 years of Wilson footage, released on DVD in North America on May 30, 2006.^[45]

[edit] See also

23 Enigma 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness Chaos magic General semantics List of American philosophers List of Discordian works

List of occult writers Max Stirner Non-Aristotelian logic Smart drugs (Nootropics) Trajectories

[edit] References

1. ^ [1] [2] [3]
2. ^ Patricia Monaghan: "Robert Anton Wilson". Booklist, May 15, 1999 v95 i18 p1680
3. ^ "Robert Anton Wilson". Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007
4. ^ Berke, Jospeh (29 October 1965), "The Free University of New York", Peace News: 6–7 as reproduced in Jakobsen, Jakob (2012), Anti-University of Londin–Antihistory Tabloid, London: MayDay Rooms, pp. 6–7, http://maydayrooms.org/room-3-research/
5. ^ "Robert Anton Wilson." St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, 4th ed. St. James Press, 1996. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Michigan.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
6. ^ Martin van der Werf: "Lawsuit U." The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 4, 2006
7. ^ Prometheus Rising Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising on the credibility of the previously existing Paideia University
8. ^ Patricia Luna Wilson at cryonics.org
9. ^ Robert Anton Wilson obituary mentioning Arlen's death
10. ^ The Beltane Celebration
11. ^ "The author of 35 books on subjects like extrasensory perception, mental telepathy, metaphysics, paranormal experiences, conspiracy theory, sex, drugs and what he called quantum psychology..." New York Times obituary.
12. ^ "...an author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy—a mind-twisting science-fiction series about a secret global society that has been a cult classic for more than 30 years..." from "Robert Anton Wilson, 74; Wrote Mind-Twisting Novels"; [Obituary (Obit)] Dennis Hevesi. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Jan 13, 2007. pg. A.16
13. ^ "The Illuminatus saga stumbles along" by Robert Anton Wilson
14. ^ Conspiracy Digest Interviews printed in Illuminatus Papers, 1980
15. ^ Disinformation: the interviews. By Richard Metzger. Accessed 26 July 2011.
16. ^ 23 Skidoo Cryptomundo
17. ^ Bray, Faustin / Wallace, Brian (interviewers)/ Wilson, Robert Anton (speaker) (1988). Robert Anton Wilson On Finnegans Wake and Joseph Campbell (Audio CD). Mill Valley: Sound Photosynthesis. ISBN 1-56964-801-8.
18. ^ Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson
19. ^ "Robert Anton Wilson". Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything. 2000
20. ^ 1988 interview
21. ^ Krassner, Paul. A Paul Krassner Interview With R. A. W – High Times, March 2003 issue.
22. ^ Wilson, Robert Anton. Cosmic Trigger: Volume I. Tempe, Arizona. New Falcon Publications. 1977. pg ii.
23. ^ "CybeRevolution Montage", Mondo 2000 no. 7, 1989
24. ^ The RICH Economy by Robert Anton Wilson from The Illuminati Papers
25. ^ Lesie, Michele (1989) "High Priest of LSD To Drop In", The Plain Dealer
26. ^ Local Group Hosts Dr. Timothy Leary by Will Allison (The Observer Fri. Sept. 29th, 1989)
27. ^ Two 60s Cult Heroes, on the Eve of the 80s by James Neff (Cleveland Plain Dealer October 30, 1979)
28. ^ Timothy Leary: An LSD Cowboy Turns Cosmic Comic by Frank Kuznik (Cleveland Magazine November 1979)
29. ^ Winterstar 2001
30. ^ Nocenti, Annie; Baldwin, Ruth (2004). The High Times Reader. Nation Books. p. 472. ISBN 978-1-56025-624-3.
31. ^ Interview of Robert Anton Wilson, (conducted August 1997) Paradigm Shift, Vol. 1 No. 1 (July 1998). Retrieved January 11, 2007.
32. ^ Andrea Shapiro: "Taking the High Road". Santa Fe New Mexican, December 5, 2003
33. ^ Paul Krassner: "The High Life", LA Weekly, December 17, 1999
34. ^ "In Santa Cruz, an Official Handout of Medicinal Pot." Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2002.
35. ^ Robert Anton Wilson The Huffington Post
36. ^ Robert Anton Wilson Needs Our Help
37. ^ Illumninatus! Author Needs Our Help Slashdot
38. ^ Robert Anton Wilson needs our Help BoingBoing
39. ^ Robert Anton Wilson Home Page
40. ^ Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night
41. ^ RAW Essence
42. ^ RAW Data: Robert Anton Wilson Cosmic Meme-Orial
43. ^ YouTube – Robert Anton Wilson Meme-orial Procession
44. ^ Coldcut, Mixmaster Morris, Ken Campbell, Bill Drummond and Alan Moore (March 18, 2007). Robert Anton Wilson tribute show. Queen Elizabeth Hall, London: Mixmaster Morris. http://www.dailymotion.com/tag/illuminatus/video/x366w1_robert-anton-wilson-1-ken-campbell_fun. Retrieved August 28, 2009.
45. ^ Maybe Logic

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Robert Anton Wilson

• Official website , now maintained by his family
• RAW Data 2.0, Wilson's blog, now maintained by his daughter, Christina
• RAW Data, Wilson's first blog
• Guns and Dope Party, Political party created by Wilson and Olga Struthio
• Maybe Logic – The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson
• Right Where You Are Sitting Now Podcast Extensive two-hour Robert Anton Wilson tribute podcast, featuring audio clips, and interviews with friends of Wilson.
• A collection of RAW audio/video from his publisher A collection of RAW audio/video from his publisher
• Robert Anton Wilson at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

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