'Which One of Your Body Parts Needs More Amour?'

"Nick Herbert contemplates his 108 chakras."

From Nick Herbert, everyone's favorite "hippie physicist."

"Quantum Tantra represents an as yet unrealized new kind of physics that hopes to connect with Nature in a direct and more intimate way than merely "physicists making measurements". Quantum tantrikas seek a new way of knowing the "inanimate world" analogous to the mysterious way we presently experience our own bodies. Systematically experiencing our own bodies could be good practice for some day experiencing the physical world in a brand new (quantum) way.

"To that end, Nick Herbert has been developing an original system of body chakras to aid in exploring this great corporal gift we've been given, both for its own sake and in preparation for a new (possibly quantum) way of enjoying our own body and the physical world."

More here. 

Leftist Ayn Rand and the right wing New York Times

On Twitter, Jesse Walker publicizes the oddball chart published by Samuel Konkin in 1980, depicting what Konkin saw as the political spectrum from left to right. If you look at it, you'll see that Konkin (a libertarian activist and publisher whose periodicals ran many Robert Anton Wilson pieces) sees the "left" as libertarian and the "right" as statist, a point of view endorsed by other libertarians, such as  the late Jeff Riggenbach, defined as a "Kochtopus leftist" in Konkin's scheme. The furthest left in Konkin's analysis is reserved for Konkin's own Agorist faction in the libertarian movement. Jesse describes the chart as "gloriously eccentric." 

According to Jesse, Konkin coined the term "Kochtopus" to describe libertarians funded by the Koch brothers. It was meant as a derogatory term disparaging the influence of the Kochs, but to tell you the truth describes most of the libertarians I like, including the Reason magazine gang, the Cato Institute, the George Mason University bloggers such as Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Bryan Caplan, etc.)  

Here is how Jesse explains the Konkin political spectrum "Here's the key to deciphering the chart: Konkin puts anarchism on the left and puts Actually Existing States on the right, judges people by how much they concede to the latter, then flattens it all to one dimension. Presto: PLO and NR, side by side." Read Jesse's Twitter thread. 

Note that in Konkin's chart, Discordians such as "Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Shea, Arthur Hlavaty etc." are listed as being on the extreme end of the ultra left. Since 1980, Arthur has moved "right" according to Konkin's scheme but has moved "left" according to the usual notions of the political spectrum.

Wednesday links

 

Part of the New York Times crossword for Tuesday. Most of you should be able to get 35 across, four letters, "Greek goddess of discord." Thanks to the person who shared this with me. 

Aleister Crowley's family brew labels. 

Emperor Norton abolishes Congress.

Beethoven biographer Jan Swafford on the artificial intelligence version of Beethoven's Tenth Symphony.

 "Pretty sure they just want Internet censorship." 

New comics from Bobby Campbell

 

New cartoon from Bobby Campbell. And here is a Tweet from Bobby, quoted a Robert Anton Wilson assignment from a Quantum Psychology course which inspired the cartoon. 

Here is another recent comic from Bobby, one of my favorites from him. And here is a news story I read shortly after reading the comic. 

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Week 53 (start of Chapter 8)

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara 

By Eric Wagner
Special guest blogger

Bob alters Crowely’s attributions of the tarot, attributing the Knights to earth and the Princesses to fire where Crowley attributes the Knights to fire and the Princesses to earth. Many people have tinkered with the attributions of the tarot for various reasons. Bob also consistently reversed the order of the High Priestess and Empress trumps. He and Leary did that in The Game of Life, and Bob also used that ordering in a Finnegans Wake workshop I attended in Dallas in 1987.  

It seems clear that my two strongest imprints fall on the first and third circuits. I have wondered whether I fall more in the Prince of Discs category or in the Knight of Swords category as described in this chapter. I always wanted to fall in the Knight of Swords category (“sometimes the artist”), but I suspect I fall in the Prince of Discs category (if not the Knight of Discs category). My wife has frequently told me I should have become a lawyer. 

I find it humbling that I had forgotten that Bob mentions Scarlett O’Hara on page 117. I spent a lot over the last year thinking about Scarlett for the exercises for chapter five of Prometheus Rising, and I totally forgot that Bob mentions her in chapter 8. I sometimes arrogantly think I know this book backwards and forwards, but the space-time event of the actual book contains more than my memory of the book. (Part of me could become lost just rereading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time over and over again, since the actual novel contains so much more than my memory of that novel about memory.) 

I love Johann Sebastian Bach’s music, but I do not think he wrote “the sexiest music in history.” Bob Wilson radically affected my taste in music, but I think the thirty years that separate our births led me to my having a very different musical fourth circuit imprint than he did. 

Did the U.S. crackdown on drugs harm the economy and science?

Robert Anton Wilson used to write about the research inspired by LSD and other hallucinogens and argue that the banning of research was a major attack on science. You may have thought his claims were a little too much, but it's hard to disagree that repression isn't very good for innovation. 

There's now a very interesting essay, Higher than the Shoulders of Giants; Or, a Scientist’s History of Drugs, at a blog called Slime Mold Time Mold, which argues that passage of the Controlled Substances Act and the creation of the DEA (the Drug Enforcement Administration) caused the well-known stagnation in the economy and technology since the 1970s. 

The thesis may seem kind of out there, but the essay demonstrates that  coffee helped fuel the rise of science in England and that cocaine helped generate important science in Germany and the U.S. It also documents the well-known influence of LSD on music (i.e., the Beatles, but also the Grateful Dead and many others) and Silicon Valley (I'm sure many readers of this blog have heard about Steve Jobs and LSD, and the popularity of the drug among people involved in the computer revolution in California.)

Via Sam Enright, who writes, "A very intriguing argument that the slowdown in growth post-1970 is due to the Controlled Substances Act, and that cultures tend to see periods of artistic and intellectual flourishing after the introduction of new drugs. An excellent post."

I can't find any credits for who writes Slime Mold, but it seems very interesting. Lots of science writing. And in case, it seems very likely to me RAW would have been interested in Higher Than the Shoulders of Giants. 

The art of Leosaysays

One of the things I was struck by when I read New Trajectories 2, the big zine put out by Bobby Campbell for Maybe Day this year (still available for download here) was the high quality of the art, including the art of Leosaysays.

Leosaysays has now updated the portfolio of his official website, and invites you to check out more of striking art. 

Halloween event announced in London for reissued RAW book

 The new Mycellium Newsletter written by Michelle Olley announces a big Halloween event in London to promote the Hilaritas Press edition of Robert Anton Wilson's Sex, Drugs & Magick: A Journey Beyond Limits. 

For details, news about more interesting events in England and other news, please see the newsletter. 

William Shatner's SMI2LE experience

 

William Shatner moved to tears after his Blue Origin trip to space. (Blue Origin photo)

On Twitter, RAW Semantics writes, "Easy to be cynical, of course, but the experience he describes: S.M.I².L.E. encapsulated in many ways."

Steve 'Fly' Pratt on the Pandora Papers

The leak of the Pandora Papers inspires Steve Pratt to think about how the revelations link to what Robert Anton Wilson wrote about the banking industry:

"Today, 23 years after RAW published Everything Is Under Control, the latest findings from the Pandora Papers seem to confirm aspects of these pre-existing banking and finance conspiracies, operating in the present day (2021)."

On Twitter, RAW Semantics comments, "I also sometimes wonder what RAW would make of the reportedly increasingly used new-generation online data-warfare technology in a conspiracy/finance/gov context (SCT/FB/algorithm stuff etc)."

Everything Is Under Control is one of the few RAW titles I haven't read; it's nice to have something to look forward to.

Fly is at pains to explain he isn't "banker bashing." See the whole post. 

News from Valerie D'Orazio

 

Valerie D'Orazio has often written about Robert Anton Wilson, as chronicled on this blog; here are a couple of updates.

Val recently completed a mini art-journal of art pieces; above see a couple of pages, and see this thread for more. 

She also has posted an archive at her Fantasy Merchant blog, linking to much of her previous work. Look at the Go Ask Valis and the Butterfly Merchant blogs for material on Robert Anton Wilson, Philip K. Dick, the "Daily Eris" etc. 

Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Week 52

A 1636 portrait of Galileo. 

I have been trying to work on some of the exercises for Chapter 7.

The first exercise asks us to compare Greece in the Fourth Century BCE, Rome in the First Century CE, Southern Europe at the beginning of the Renaissance, England 1600-1900, New York 1900-1950 and California today.

All of those could be described as times when the arts flourished, when much of the literature we still read was produced and when wealth was accumulated. 

The Fourth Century B.C. was the time of Plato (about 428 BC to about 347 BC), Aristotle (384-322 BC) and (my favorite) Epicurus (341-270 BC). It was the century that Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire, greatly extending the geographical area reached by Greek culture and the Greek language.

I guess one way of comparing the various periods is to note that each time and place included people who extended what was allowed to be thought. New York during the period cited by RAW was a center of modernism and modern California was a home to heretics such as Timothy Leary and RAW.  By and large, the periods/places  cited by RAW were periods of free thought, or as RAW puts it in the exercises, "relatively Open Societies." They have been times and places when religion did not have total sway on society. 

Epicurus in his time was quite a radical figure. His school included women and slaves as students, not just men. He taught that the gods were not to be feared, that nature ultimately consisted of atoms and the void and that there was no afterlife. Epicurus taught at his private home and garden and said it was best to "live in obscurity," i.e. not get much notice from the powers that be. 

RAW's third exercise suggests "reading the denunciations of Galileo by the orthodox of his time." I ran out of time to do research at the library by the time this blog post had to be written, but the Wikipedia article about Galileo  has quite a bit of information about Galileo's troubles with the Catholic Church, and it links to related articles that give more detail, such as Galileo's Letter to Benedetto Castelli defending Galileo's opinion that the planets revolve around the sun and arguing that the church should not be allowed to decide scientific matters; Wikipedia says, 

"Likewise, Galileo accepted that the Bible was infallible in matters of doctrine, but he agreed with Cardinal Baronius's observation that it was "intended to teach us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." He also pointed out that both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas had taught that scripture had not been written to teach a system of astronomy, citing St. Augustine's comment that "One does not read in the Gospel that the Lord said: I will send you the Paraclete who will teach you about the course of the sun and moon. For He willed to make them Christians, not mathematicians."

In another exercise, RAW asks us to "Read the denunciations of Beethoven, of Picasso, or Joyce by those who knew in advance what music, painting and novels should be." 

One of my favorite Beethoven anecdotes concerns his "Razumovsky" quartets,  middle period quartets which to my ear do not sound terrible radical, but which did move the art of the string quartet forward. An Italian violinist named Felix Radicati asked Beethoven if the pieces could really be considered music, and Beethoven replied, “Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age!”

Robert Anton Wilson was not a best selling author during his lifetime, but he has retained a loyal following years after his death. Should we think that perhaps his writings will come into vogue at a later age? And was he fortunate because he managed for the most part of "live in obscurity?" 

New documentary about the KLF

There's a new documentary about the KLF, Who Killed The KLF? The Hollywood Reporter has a review, penned by John DeFore.  Here is the lead paragraph:

"A decades-long art prank the world briefly mistook for a pop band, The KLF were far more interesting than they might’ve seemed to music lovers who avoided rave culture like a drug of dubious origin. The British duo had world-conquering hits, staged some colorful happenings, and then disappeared, leaving bemused onlookers to wonder, as Chris Atkins’ doc puts it, Who Killed The KLF? While the bandmates themselves don’t deign to participate here, Atkins has obtained enough previously unheard audio interviews to make sense of their story. It’s quite a ride, even for viewers who don’t know the difference between 'What Time Is Love?' and the contemporaneous Haddaway anthem without 'Time' in its title."