Over at the Oz Mix, Oz Fritz has done a series of excellent posts (three, so far) on Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson's S.M.I.2L.E.formula. The first post is here.
A taste:
A piece of common senses advice from Dr. Tim I personally benefited from - if you want to learn something, hang out with people who seem smarter than you at the subject you wish to learn. This relates, in a gentler way, to P.D. Ouspenky's stern dogmatic pronouncement that transformation is absolutely impossible unless one finds a School. At a stage in my life when I took Ouspensky way too seriously, I attended a workshop given by RAW and got a chance to ask him what he thought about Ouspensky's statement. RAW simply said, "I think it's a good idea," and bypassed commenting on Ouspenky's insistence, who, by the way, has doubt surrounding whether he followed his own advice.
This kind of a "School", sometimes called an Esoteric or Mystery School can sometimes exist very briefly, informally, and nondoctrinaire. Any group working together for the purpose of Invocation makes for the broadest definition of this type of School, but it could just as easily read: any group gathered together for the purpose of Intelligence Increase. They don't necessarily have to work closely together in physical Space or simultaneous Time to function as a School. Some extraordinary online courses I've attended operationally existed as this kind of a School, in my opinion and experience. The community of musicians around Bill Laswell comprise an informal, nondoctrinaire School that has greatly increased the transmission of Musical Intelligence over the years.
Could the community of RAW fans who interact on the Internet constitute a "School," or am I taking the metaphor too far? I'm going to lean toward a "yes" -- I think we learn from folks like Oz Fritz.
3 comments:
Once there are enough of us, interlinked, intertwined, with mutually reciprocal emotional exchanges you have something like an "affinity group," which RAW reminds us is benign from within, but if substantive enough will be seen as a "goddamned conspiracy" from without.
Let's try for the Con!
Thanks again, Tom. Coincidentally, I've begun my next blog in the series linking to the "I Robot" essay you published the other day.
Oz, I too was struck by the coincidence that I posted the "I Robot" piece, where RAW talks about Leary's ideas, and then discovered your excellent posts.
Michael, I love the way we educate each other. I think I'm following Leary's advice of learning from people who appear to be smarter than me.
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