UPDATED: CHROMOSOME DAMAGE! A RANDOM CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT ANTON WILSON

Courtesy of The Frogweb:

JN: In your second volume of autobiography, Cosmic Trigger II, there is a hint of resignation. You say that you would like to be shot into space and listen to Scarlatti. Have you given up on mankind?

RAW: The book was an attempt to present different sides of my personality as they’ve developed in time, and so you get the past mixed up with the present. The past does not always unfold chronologically. It’s the same with ideas – some I held for a long time, some I held for just one afternoon. The book’s an attempt to show that there is no consistent ego. It’s a Buddhist book. So the resignation was just a mood that George Bush Senior put me in around the time of the Gulf War.

Everybody has an area of belief and an area of scepticism –

CSICOP’s dogmas are as rigid as anyone else’s

A Democracy…

Here is a followup to last year’s post.

A democracy should not give credence to the military ambition of the corporate interests

A democracy would not advocate the burning of books

A democracy could not seriously consider chaining the accused after freeing their ancestors from the same bondage

A democracy does not actively conspire to murder its citizens especially without a trial

A democracy will not abrogate the promised privacy of its citizens by sending tax paid spies to infiltrate and misinform them

A democracy can not conduct medical experiments targeting any group whether it’s based on ethnicity or belief system or otherwise

A democracy may not conduct experiments that alter the mental faculties of its citizens especially in the development of weapons

A democracy definitely must not conduct clandestine military operations to set up dummy governments on foreign soil and most definitely not with the unknowing dollars of its tay paying citizens

A democracy is not supposed to fund and train the above activities under the auspices of philanthropy

A democracy which does not sell or even advocate the retail of dangerous substances such as narcotics should never do so on foreign soil especially to barter for weapons

A democracy would never use a tax paid military to attack its civilians especially minors, pets, and pregnant women with unannounced lethal force

A democracy could never use a tax paid military to attack its citizens who non-violently exercise their right to speech with deadly force

A democracy can never control and block media from informing the news to its citizens especially news of its tampering of evidence in cases of their wrong doing

A democracy may never ever detain its citizens exercising their free speech peacefully without trial by jury especially in hazardous inhumane insanitary environs

A democracy must never betray those who defend its freedom and compromise national security especially as a petty act of revenge

Note to U.S. Drug War: Netherlands to Close Prisons for Lack of Criminals

The 40th Anniversary of the Democratic Convention of ’68: Activism Then and Now

TiamatsVision of TechnOccult wrote:

Someone sent me a link to a site that is promoting a re-enactment of the protests at the Democratic Convention of 1968. While some of my older activist friends and I kinda like the idea of a ritual in remembrance of this day, the first question that popped in our heads was “What’s the point?” Their mission statement says:

“40 years ago this August, the streets of Chicago became a bloody open forum on the politics of power and resistance, as the Democratic National Convention lapsed into chaos and protesters in the streets were met with the gas and bayonets of Law and Order. The ghosts of this unresolved history haunt us to this day. We meet on August 28 in Grant Park to peacefully purge these ghosts and to make sense of our past through ritual reenactment, a living history lesson for the city of Chicago which asks, where were we then?, and where are we now?”

Although it may be an interesting and memorable history lesson, these are very different times, and re-enacting a violent day in history will do nothing to change the status quo. But the questions are being asked in order to gain some perspective. This led me to question how activism has changed during the past 40 years, and to wonder where it will go from here.

Read more.

(Also: the documentary “1968″)

Peter Lamborn Wilson’s obituary for Robert Anton Wilson

Thanks to Klintron on Technoccult

Courtesy of Arthur Magazine:

For all we knew, Robert Anton Wilson and I were related. On an intuitive basis—i.e., after several rounds of Jameson’s and Guinness—we decided we were cousins. Subsequently we came to believe ourselves connected to the Wilsons who play so murky a role in the “Montauk Mysteries” (Aleister Crowley, UFOs and Nazis in Long Island, time travel experiments gone awry, etc.). Our plan to co-edit a family anthology (including Colin, S. Clay, and Anthony Burgess, whose real name was Wilson) never materialized—although we did collaborate in editing Semiotext(e) SF, together with Rudy Rucker.

There’s no doubt Bob was some sort of anarchist. His earliest interests and experiences (the School of Living, for example) involved connections with old-time American Philosophical or Individualist Anarchism of the Spooner/Tucker variety, and, in fact, this shared background firmed the basis of our friendship.

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Out There! Episode 35: Farewell Robert Anton Wilson

courtesy of: Joe McFall and Raymond Wiley Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:37:15 EST

Noted countercultural icon Robert Anton Wilson passed away on January 11, 2007. This episode is a tribute to this American genius. We discuss RAW’s life, work and words, with audio clips from the Maybe Logic documentary, including interviews about the man with Paul Krassner, Rev. Ivan Stang, and Tom Robbins.

The website for Maybe Logic: The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson (kindly provided audio for this episode)

The official Robert Anton Wilson website

Wikipedia entry for Robert Anton Wilson

Wilson, Robert Anton and Robert Shea. (1975). This Illuminatus! Trilogy. Dell Publishing.
Wilson, Robert Anton. (1977). Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati. New Falcon.
Wilson, Robert Anton. (1983). Prometheus Rising. New Falcon.

Download Episode

Online conference with Dr. Robert Anton Wilson (April 1986)

Deep Leaf Production presents from 14 April 1986:

(Sysop Jim) OK, quiet peoples. I present Dr. Robert Anton Wilson.

(Bob Wilson) Cocaine is natures way of telling you the Vatican Bank needs your money more than you do.

(Ben Rowe) Bob, since magick, and the cabala play such a role in your books, I’m curious to know just what you attitude towards such things are, here in the real(?) world. Could you state your feelings briefly?

(Bob Wilson) I regard magick and cabala as doorways to archeological levels of the human brain.

(Ben Rowe) Do you practice any form of it yourself?

(Bob Wilson) Yes.

(Ben Rowe) Care to say what kind?

(Bob Wilson) Ritual invocation, gematria.

(Avatar) To follow up on Ben’s question, are you presently a member of any secret societies or occult orders and could you tell us the names and your grade within them?

(Bob Wilson) That would be telling. Ippsissimus maximus of the Illuminati
and toenail of the Head Temple of the High Priesthood of Eris Esoteric.

(Avatar) Amusing to the last.

(Peter da Silva) I’m not sure what book this was in, I think maybe Right Where you are Sitting Now–you were talking about the possible future of human sexuality. I thought that the sorts of things you were talking about were rather pedestrian. Were you…

(Bob Wilson) Define pedestrian?

(Peter DA Silva) Well, you only considered two sexes, to begin with.

(Bob Wilson) Oh.

(Sysop Jim) A major oversight, no doubt.

(Rodney) When will the next volume of THE HISTORICAL ILLUMINATUS be out and will there be more to follow?

(Bob Wilson) It will be finished a year after I finish writing it. There will be five volumes in this series, of course.

(peter) do you think machines will ever be smarter than people?

(Bob Wilson) they’re already smarter than some people.

(Sysop Georgia) true!

(Peter DA Silva) Can I be obnoxious some more?

(Bob Wilson) Yes.

Read more.

Dope and Divinity by R.A.W.

From an excerpt of Cosmic Trigger,

The cumulative evidence in such books as Dr. Andrija Puharich’s The Sacred Mushroom, John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, R. Gordon Wasson’s Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, Robert Graves’ revised fourth edition of The White Goddess, Professor Peter Furst’s Flesh of the Gods, Dr. Weston LaBarre’s The Peyote Cult and Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion, Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult of Western Europe, etc., leaves little doubt that the beginnings of religion (awareness of, or at least belief in, Higher Intelligences) is intimately linked with the fact that shamans – in Europe, Asia, in the Americas, in Africa – have been dosing their nervous systems with metaprogramming drugs since at least 30,000 B.C.

The pattern is the same, among our cave-dwelling ancestors and American Indians, at the Eleusinian feasts in Athens and among pre-Vedic Hindus, in tribes scattered from pole to pole and in the contemporary research summarized by Dr. Walter Huston Clark in his Chemical Ecstacy: people take these metaprogramming substances and they soon assert contact with Higher Intelligences.

According the LaBarre’s Ghost Dance, the shamans of North and South America used over 2,000 different metaprogramming chemicals; those of Europe and Asia curiously, only used about 250. Amanita muscaria (the “fly agaric” mushroom) was the most widely used sacred drug in the Old World, and the peyote cactus in the New. Over the past 30-to-40,000 years countless shamans have been trained by older shamans (as anthropologist Carlos Castaneda is trained by brujo – witch-man – Don Juan Matus in the famous books) to use these chemicals, as Dr. Leary and Dr. Lilly have used them, to metaprogram the nervous system and bring in some of the signals usually not scanned. (On the visual spectrum alone ,it has been well known since Newton that we normally perceive less than 0.5 (one-half of one) per cent of all known pulsations.) It can safely be generalized that the link between such sensitive new scannings and personal belief in Higher Intelligences is the most probable explaination of the origins of religion.

Read more.

Robert Anton Wilson Day ~!!

The Good Times‘ Laurel Chesky reported on July 31, 2003:

Mayor declares a special day to honor local author/philosopher

The date of July 23 has special significance for Robert Anton Wilson. It was on July 23, 1973 that Wilson received a message from an extraterrestrial from the planet Sirius. Or maybe, he says, it was a 6-foot-tall white rabbit in County Kerry, Ireland. Or maybe he was just tripping on acid. (Wilson also notes that on July 23, 1973, Monica Lewinsky was born.)

Thirty years later, a giddy Mayor Emily Reilly officially declared July 23, 2003 as “Robert Anton Wilson Day” in the city of Santa Cruz.

The mayor read her proclamation before a packed house at the Rio Theatre on Soquel Avenue. A crowd had gathered there to see the world premiere of the documentary film, Maybe Logic – The Lives and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson. The film, produced by deepleaf productions, is a retrospective of Wilson’s career as an author, conspiracy theorist, quantum physics philosopher and counterculture icon. Wilson lives in Capitola (or Live Oak or Santa Cruz, depending on your “reality tunnel,” as Wilson would say.)

One of the more humorous passages of the mayor’s proclamation reads: “Whereas Robert Anton Wilson employs wit and humor spanning five decades to resist the imperial schemes of national politicos, through such actions as daily e-mails to Attorney General John Ashcroft detailing his personal activities, thereby sparing government expense and trouble of keeping him under surveillance…”

After the mayor’s presentation, Wilson, in classic form, quipped: “I don’t deserve this. Then again, I have post polio, and I don’t deserve that either. So on with the show.”

Wilson suffers from post-polio syndrome, a disease that can strike polio survivors decades after they’ve recovered from polio. After contracting polio as a child, Wilson, 70, recovered from the disease and remained vibrant and able-bodied throughout his adulthood. Post-polio syndrome hit him a few years ago, and he is now mostly confined to a wheelchair.

Wilson eats pot brownies to relieve the pain in his legs. He was a client of the Wo/Man’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM), before the Drug Enforcement Agency raided the collective’s farm near Davenport last September.

At a WAMM demonstration in October, where medical marijuana was given out on the steps of Santa Cruz City Hall, Wilson lambasted the feds for ignoring the Bill of Rights.

Read more.

Bored Cops Put Queens NY Nightclub Under

Radley Balko wrote for the blog Reason:

Last year, New York police officers were seen dancing in the streets just before arresting four men in a city nightclub on charges of selling $100 worth of cocaine. It took six months and the men’s life savings, but their names were finally cleared when prosecutors took the unusual step of announcing in court that the men had committed no crime.

That’s because club surveillance video shows that the undercover cops had no contact with the accused men in the two hours they were in the club.

Now, club owner Eduardo Espinoza says the police are retaliating against him.

Espinoza said he thinks police are retaliating against him because of a strange phone call he received shortly before the harassment began.

A man who identified himself as the officer who made the drug arrest in his club demanded to know if Espinoza had taped the events of that night.

“I said I already gave it to the defendants,” Espinoza said, “He said, ‘Oh s–t.’ He hung up.”

Espinoza had received just two summonses in the two-and-a-half years he owned the club prior to turning over the videotapes. He has received more than a dozen since.

“I been harassed so much, I’m selling my business,” said Espinoza, owner of Delicias de Mi Tierra on 91st Place in Elmhurst.

“Every two to three weeks, there’s cops in here, searching the bar. If there’s no violation, they’ll make it up. I lost all my clients – everybody’s scared to come in my place right now.”

The officers implicated by the surveillance tapes are being investigated, but still on duty.

More here.

Banned ‘Shrooms Making Life Wholesome One Year at a Time

Thanks to Gary Baddeley at Disinfo

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor for Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The “spiritual” effects of psilocybin from so-called sacred mushrooms last for more than a year and may offer a way to help patients with fatal diseases or addictions, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

The researchers also said their findings show there are safe ways to test psychoactive drugs on willing volunteers, if guidelines are followed.

In 2006, Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and colleagues gave psilocybin to 36 volunteers and asked them how it felt. Most reported having a “mystical” or “spiritual” experience and rated it positively.

More than a year later, most still said the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction, Griffiths and colleagues report in the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

“This is a truly remarkable finding,” Griffiths said in a statement. “Rarely in psychological research do we see such persistently positive reports from a single event in the laboratory.”

The findings may offer a way to help treat extremely anxious and depressed patients, or people with addictions, said Griffiths, whose work was funded by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.

“This gives credence to the claims that the mystical-type experiences some people have during hallucinogen sessions may help patients suffering from cancer-related anxiety or depression and may serve as a potential treatment for drug dependence,” Griffiths said.

Read more.

Some Proof that Marijuana is a Powerful Medicine

Aaron Rowe wrote for WIRED’s online science blog:

Marijuana contains an amazing chemical, beta-caryophyllene, and scientists have thoroughly proven that it could be used to treat pain, inflammation, atherosclerosis, and osteoporosis.

Jürg Gertsch, of ETH Zürich, and his collaborators from three other universities learned that the natural molecule can activate a protein called cannabinoid receptor type 2. When that biological button is pushed, it soothes the immune system, increases bone mass, and blocks pain signals — without causing euphoria or interfering with the central nervous system.

Gertsch and his team published their findings on June 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.They focused on the anti-inflammatory properties of the impressive substance — testing it on immune cells called monocytes and also in mice.

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