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Sunday, March 27, 2011

A daily meditation

I recently obtained a wonderful interview with Robert Anton Wilson, published in 1976 in the New Libertarian Notes. (Thank you Mike Gathers.) It's not available on rawilsonfans.com, and I will be sharing it with you here when I can, but today I wanted to reprint one of the questions and answers:

CRNLA: What magazines and newspapers do you read?

RAW: I read everything, including the labels on canned food. I'm a hopeless print addict, a condition alleviated only by daily meditation which breaks the linear-Aristotelian trance. (Most rationalistic libertarians would do well to try the same circuit breaker, or LSD. National Lampoon, Scientific American and Green Egg are what I read most obsessively. I also read at least one periodical every month by a political group I dislike -- to keep some sense of balance. The overwhelming stupidity of political movements is caused by the fact that political types never read anything but their own gang's agit-prop.

I love the part about reading a magazine you disagree with every month, but I also like the revelation that in 1976 RAW meditated every day. I don't know anything about his meditation routine, but I do know that ILLUMINATUS! co-author Robert Shea also meditated. When I interviewed Shea's son and literary executor, Mike Shea, I asked Mike to to tell me a few things about his father fans might want to know. One of the things he mentioned was that "He meditated every day for about fifteen minutes as well. The Zen philosophy sort of sunk into me and has even further over the years."




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