A paranoid look at DMT and AI

Rod Dreher (Creative Commons, source.)

There a passage in Illuminatus! in which Barney Muldoon's brother, a Catholic priest, depicted as quite bright and reasonable, defends the Inquisition and the church's attitude toward Satanism:

"Don't mind him," Barney said softly. "He's very cynical about dogma, like most clergymen these days." 

"I heard that," the priest said. "I may be cynical but I really don't think Satanism is a joking matter. And your friend's theory is very plausible, in its way. After all, the Satanist's motive in infiltrating the church, in the old days, was to disgrace the institution thought to represent God on earth. Now that the United States government makes the same claim, well. That may be a joke or a paradox on my part, but it's the way their minds work, too. I am a professional cynic —a theologian must be, these days, if he isn't going to seem a total fool to young people with their skeptical minds— but I'm orthodox, or downright reactionary, about the Inquisitions. I've read all the rationalist historians, of course, and there was certainly an element of hysteria in the church in those days, but, still, Satanism is not any less frightening than cancer or plague. It is totally inimical to human life and, in fact, to all life. The church had good reasons to be afraid of it. Just as people who are old enough to remember have good reasons to be panicky at any hint of a revival of Hitlerism." 

I remembered that passage when Jesse Walker sent me a link to a piece by Rod Dreher called "Temptation of the Psychonauts." The subhead says, "Exploring the realm opened up by DMT is to put your soul and your sanity in grave peril." Dreher is a Christian conservative writer, an Orban fan who apparently lives in Hungary., so he has a reality tunnel that I daresay varies from most of  you. Walker commented, "Bob would have enjoyed reading this." 

Here is a quote from the Dreher piece that captures its tone:

Many of you will laugh at warnings not to do these extremely powerful drugs, for fear of opening doors to a hostile realm populated by evil intelligences that seek the destruction of humans. You shouldn't. The idea that we know so much better than primitive peoples in the world today, or sages of the past who warned sternly not to go to these places (the Bible, for example, is crystal clear about the dangers of this stuff), is utter hubris, folly born of pride.

Some of Dreher's reader mail is pretty good, too. Here's a bit from a letter from an unnamed Orthodox priest. (Dreher began as a Methodist, switched to Catholicism, and now is an Eastern Orthodox believer. Pretty sure he never went through a Unitarian phase). The priest:

It seems to me that, in addition to the ‘portal’ of psychedelics, we’re ushering in the reign of disincarnate intelligences through the development of AI as well. I could be wrong, but there’s something sinister and demonic lurking beneath the seemingly benign wonder of ChatGPT and other AI bots.

Tyler Cowen takes a more benign view of AI; he says a lot of interesting things about it in a recent interview. Here is one comment, and I've put the sentence I want to call attention to in boldface:

That's already a trend with the internet: you can customize what you read now. You'll literally be able to design your own education by speaking to your AI. Your AI can be trained on data sets that you, or the parents, want. So you'll have your own personalized “familiar” —to refer to the old world of witchcraft — and it will do things for you.

Is this analogous to the concept of the Holy Guardian Angel?

Synchronicity and finding an old friend.

An ebook I published which talks about the importance of synchronicity to tapping into higher consciousness. See this excerpt. 

I've been interested in synchronicity for much of the life of this blog. I ran into a synchronicity this week, when I tracked down an old friend I hadn't had any contact with in a long time. I don't want to invade his privacy, so I'll call him "Sam" and avoid details.

Another old friend of mine, who I'll call "Percy," and I had tried some some years to figure out what happened to Sam. We had no success. Earlier this week, my wife asked, "Did you ever figure out what happened to Sam?" It wasn't a topic we have had a conversation about in a long time. 

Then two days ago, I got a message on Facebook from Percy, asking if I ever made any progress finding Sam. It was the first time I had heard from Percy about it in nearly a year. 

So I decided to go to work, running searches on the Internet and contacting people. One of them was one of Sam's few surviving blood relatives, a niece, who told me that for the first time in a long time, she and her mother (Sam's sister) had just talked about whatever happened to Sam, and wondered if he was still alive. 

Eventually I found Sam and I actually got him on the phone Wednesday and talked to him. 

My wife assumed that I had found Sam because of her remark, and I explained that no, I'd been prompted by Percy and I mentioned what Sam's niece said. "I guess it was in the air," my wife said. 

Click on the "synchronicities" label on this post for more synchronicities.

Spud Murphy on Robert Anton Wilson's meditation techniques

A fellow in Poland who creates wood art and who writes as Spud Murphy has a new blog post up, "Robert Anton Wilson Meditation Experiment," which talks about a couple of meditation techniques Wilson talked about in a lecture. (Murphy is amused that Wilson takes credit for the "paying attention" meditation, an old Buddhism technique.)

"It revealed to me that our default operating system is that of labeling; almost all of our thoughts are in word form but by doing the second meditation we gain a great insight, we see that, actually, there’s something else going on beneath the surface level of our thoughts and that there’s another kind of consciousness that doesn’t work in words and it’s far more fundamental to what’s actually going on in our minds. It’s very deep, it’s very ancient, it’s very primordial and it’s wiser, far, far wiser than the idiot talking all the time."

I clicked on the "Robert Anton Wilson" label for the blog post and found only the one, but other topics Murphy writes about may interest RAW fans. "You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who’s into the kinda stuff I’m into who isn’t a fan of old Bob."

He's on Twitter. 

Follow Dr. Richard Waterloo on Twitter

 

If you are on Twitter and you like to see images connected with the writings of Robert Anton Wilson, I would suggest giving Dr. Richard Waterloo a follow. Above is an image he spotted from Illuminated Brew Works (a real beer company, apparently) in Chicago. (Yesterday's image was created by Waterloo and also posted on Twitter). Pretty sure I've mentioned Dr Richard Waterloo's Twitter before, but he's really stepped up the images. 

Jesse Walker also has a daily "Your morning image" feature on Twitter. 

Natural Law reading group, Week 7, 'The Compleat Skeptic' and two others

"Who is the master that makes the grass green?" Posted on Twitter by Dr Richard Waterloo. Source. Waterloo says it was created with MidJourney, an image generating prompt tool.

The essay that I had announced for this week, "The Compleat Skeptic," is a very short column published in New Libertarian, and is the first part of a three-part series of short columns, including "Skepticism and Solipsism" and "Neurological Relativism." Robert Anton Wilson concludes the first column by "hanging on" to an "ontological cliff" until the next column, but I think it might be easier on us to leave the cliff and consider all three columns together.

It seems to me that many of Robert Anton Wilson's ideas  are included in the three brief pieces. 

I have been reading Rasa's RAW Memes book. Here is a section (from "Neurological Relativism") that I could see Rasa turning into a meme:

"I deal with the world 'very carefully' because I respect its mystery, whereas those who hold fixed ideas deal with the world (and each other) in blind and brutal ways that each of them can see how mad all the others are but none can see that his/her own fixed ideas are equally mad."

Wilson says (in the same piece) that under a system of neurological relativism, "one recognizes each belief system as a gamble, 'my latest best guess,' and does not confuse it with Truth, Reality, or any other variety of eternal verity." 

A couple of paragraphs later, he lists some of his opinions, in libertarianism, the scientific method, in yoga, Space Migration, Life Extension and "dozens of other things" but says he can "suspend any of these beliefs at will, or all of them."

Does this attitude explain why RAW's political views seemed to shift around over the years, as he adapted  his opinions to new evidence? At times he sounds like a social democrat, and at times he sounds like a libertarian.

And doesn't his neurological relativism also fit with his libertarianism? At its heart, libertarianism is a philosophy of live and let live. Quoting Neuropolitics, written by Timothy Leary and himself, Wilson writes, "People are vegetarians or nudists or Communists or snake worshippers for the same reasons that other people are Catholics or Republicans or liberals or Nazis." If that's the case, wouldn't it follow that it's wrong for a government to impose one belief system on everyone else?

Here is one other Wilson quote, from "The Compleat Skeptic," but I have changed "in social life" to "on social media."

"I also maintain that people who are perpetually muddled, baffled, frustrated, angry, resentful and act as general nuisances and bring-downs on social media are that way, and cause themselves to continue being that way, only because they lack philosophical skepticism."

Next week: "A New Writer: F.W. Nietzsche."

My reading plans for the next few months

This is downloaded to my Kindle app. Looks interesting, don't you think?

I recently read Tyler Cowen's Jan. 4 blog post, "My reading program for the half-year to come."  I thought reading Tyler's post was a lot of fun, so I thought I would try a similar blog post. (Note that one of Tyler's plans is "Reading or rereading through the works of Jonathan Swift," which I believe RAW also did at one point).

1. I am a judge on the nominating committee for the Prometheus Awards, so for the next couple of months I will be busy reading science fiction novels. I am currently reading Babel by R.F. Kuang and soon I will be reading Widowland by C.J. Carey.  I'm also going to read Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng. 

2. I am currently slowly reading RAW Memes by Robert Anton Wilson and Rasa, a couple of pages a day or so, and I am re-reading Natural Law, or Don’t Put a Rubber on Your Willy for the online discussion group, see you here tomorrow.  The Hilaritas Press publication schedule shows that the next three republished Robert Anton Wilson books are TSOG, The Walls Came Tumbling Down and Reality Is What You Can Get Away With. I am not so sure about TSOG, it's not my favorite RAW book, but the other two I actually have not read, I will buy them and read them as soon as they are released.

3. I like  history and I have particular interests that I usually pursue every year. So I'll likely read at least a couple of titles on the later Roman Empire/the Dark Ages/Late Antiquity and very likely at least one book about World War II, and quite possibly something involving aviation history. Does anyone else sometimes look at the bibliography first when reading nonfiction? 

4. I don't get review copies as often as Tyler, but it occasionally happens, both because of being a Prometheus judge and because of this blog, so we'll see what arrives in the mail. Alec Nevala-Lee is a RAW fan, and he kindly sent me his excellent new biography of Buckminster Fuller, one of the few well-reviewed books of 2022 that I read and that Tyler missed. 

5. I gave a friend of mine copies of some favorite novels by Richard Powers and Leonard Richardson, if he decides to read them, I will re-read them so he can discuss them with me. (Powers, The Gold Bug Variations, Richardson, Situation Normal.)

6. My habit for decades has been to try to get caught up with a few favorite authors. Jane Austen and Jack Vance aren't coming out with anything new, so anything from them will be a re-read, but there are still a few Vladimir Nabokov novels I haven't read and a few Sinclair Lewis titles I either haven't read, or haven't read for more than 40 years. I am closing in on Robert Shea but still need to read his first two solo novels. And there are a few authors I read whenever anything new comes out. Neal Stephenson may not show up again the next year or two and Elinor Lipman has a new one out, but Tom Perrotta just issued Tracy Flick Can't Win so he'll probably be silent in 2023. 

7. I read book reviews in publications such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and I read blogs and Twitter accounts from people who read a lot, so I'm sure I'll read a few titles that sound like something I would like. The NYT and Tyler both gave Babel a good review.

I recently listed what I read in 2022 and for several years I've come out with a similar list each year. I am on Goodreads and I track my reading there, look for Tomj. 

What are you going to read? 

Oregon begins legal use of psychedelic mushrooms

Psilocybe mexicana. Creative Commons photo by Alan Rockefeller. 

Much of the writings of Robert Anton Wilson were inspired by Timothy Leary's writings on psychedelics. And RAW's suggestion that psychedelics could have positive uses, by helping people reimprint, seems to have been confirmed by recent news.

See the New York Times article, "Legal Use of Hallucinogenic Mushrooms Begins in Oregon."

Excerpt: "Although scientists are still working to understand their therapeutic dynamics, psilocybin and other psychedelics are thought to promote neuroplasticity, a rewiring of the brain that gives patients fresh perspectives on longstanding psychiatric problems.

"One recent study on alcohol-use disorder, for example, found that two doses of psilocybin paired with talk therapy led to an 83 percent decline in heavy drinking among participants, and that nearly half of them had stopped drinking entirely by the end of the eight-month trial."

More on the 'Periodic Table of Energy'

Bobby Campbell's cover for the third edition of the New Falcon third edition of Timothy Leary's The Game of Life, which has contributions by Robert Anton Wilson. Confusingly, Amazon has another edition from a different publisher. 

 In a recent post, I described The Periodic Table of Energy as a "lost" book that is coauthored by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson. The manuscript was offered for auction in 2012; I don't know who bought it. 

Just for added confusion, the book sometimes is listed as The Periodic Table of Evolution. It remains something of a mystery how the books it with Leary's and Wilson's bibliography, although in discussion on Facebook, Prop Anon said that he believes The Game of Life, another Leary-Wilson collaboration, has chunks of Periodical Table inserted into it. 

I got two comments in my original post. Lvx15 wrote, "Sounds like the book they released together called The Game of Life." An unidentified commenting person wrote, "A listing in Exo Psychology shows "Periodic Table of Evolution", separate book from "The Game of Life."

When I did a posting at the Robert Anton Wilson Legacy group on Facebook which linked to my Periodica Table post, Donald Peter Dulchinos posted a screen shot showing the book list from Exo Psychology and other people joined the discussion. You can read the whole back and forth, but here is one of the comments from Prop: "I looked through the Leary Archives at NYPL during the writing of my book Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of RAW. I was under the impression that I saw Leary's manuscript for the PTOE when researching the files. I saw Leary's typed words with RAW's notes on all over the page. RAW helped Leary edit the book. Now there is a chance that it was not PTOE that I saw but The Game of Life. However, I believe the Game of Life has whole sections from PTOE inserted into it. As far as who bought the PTOE manuscript, I do not know. If they were Kool they would put the PTOE manuscript in a proper Library."

If Prop is correct, there could be a situation analogous to The Starseed Signals by Robert Anton Wilson. Starseed remained unpublished during RAW's lifetime and was brought out by Hilaritas; sections of Starseed later were included in the first Cosmic Trigger book. 

I have The Game of Life on my Kindle, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. 

Alan Moore book at the Internet Archive

Something for the Alan Moore completists out there: Brought to Light: Thirty Years of Drug Smuggling, Arms Deals, and Covert Action, an out-of-print Alan Moore book (with Bill Sienkiewicz) is available for download from the Internet Archive. 

Here is discussion on Twitter. 

Prop Anon posts two more RAW pieces

Prop Anon has been very active in posting Robert Anton Wilson pieces and he has now posted two more at his Chapel Perilous website.

"Truth Comes on Swift Wings" is a piece on magick based on Egyptian hieroglyphs, which Prop notes was published both in the Berkeley Barb and Samuel Konkin's magazine, New Libertarian. Prop posts the Barb version; I ran a PDF from the Konkin publication back in 2012. As usual, Prop offers commentary: "This article is interesting too because it appears proto-chaos magic to me. Wilson relaying a magic ritual that involves watching television and utilizing one's imagination or Krassner's suggestion that everybody flush their toilets during Nixon's inauguration suggests that Magical rituals are more improvisational than the Golden Dawn ever conceived!"

The second piece is "UN Habitat Conference: Doom-Sayers, Yea-Sayers Converge," also from the Barb, criticizes environmentalism based on limits to growth and argues for Gerard O'Neill style space colonies. Perhaps when O'Neill proposed them, they were too expensive; have ventures like SpaceX made them a more realistic choice? 

Two new conspiracy theory books

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jordan S. Carroll reviews two new books on conspiracy theories, Operation Mindfuck: QAnon and the Cult of Donald Trump by Robert Guffey and Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of QAnon by Mia Bloom. 

Excerpt: "Guffey sees the QAnon adherents as bad readers. They have a hard time distinguishing between fantasy and reality. When Hunter S. Thompson fictionalizes adrenochrome as a potent psychedelic that must be harvested from living human beings, the QAnon crowd not only believes him but also imagines a whole mythology surrounding the extraction and consumption of this fictive substance. Guffey argues that the right has figured out how to exploit this credulity, using media manipulation techniques modeled on Shea and Wilson’s Operation Mindfuck and similar left-libertarian pranks from the 1960s and 1970s."

Natural Law reading group, week six, 'Don't Be Afraid of Black Magick'

Meher Baba in 1945 (public domain photo)

This week's essay originally was published in Gnostica magazine in 1977. After Mike Gathers sent me the hard copy of the piece, I ran it as a blog post on April 13, 2011. 

I am always a bit nervous in discussions about the occult and magick, as those are topics I would not claim to know much about.

However, the essay fits with what Chad says is a theme connecting the pieces in the book, that of Wilson's concept of model agnosticism. When I interviewed Chad about the book when it first came out, he remarked that he originally envisioned the book as a political book, and assembled 20 Wilson essays touching on politics. But then, "we shelved several of the more overtly political tracts and focused exclusively on Wilson's writings on model agnosticism. The project really became fun when we made that pivot explicit. Wilson scholars know how much model agnosticism underlies his worldview, so the idea that there would be a newly published book of essays and interviews spanning five decades where we get to see him riff on that theme very directly, over and over again, in a variety of different ways, was one of the coolest moments for me."

Wilson writes, in the essay we are talking about this week, "The Biggest Lie in the World is the idea that there is one 'true' reality. That is the lie that keeps the conditioned citizen trapped in the one static reality imprinted by parents and schools in childhood." 

A couple of notes:

When I posted this piece back in 2011, Eric Wagner remarked, "Great stuff. I find it interesting how Bob uses Beethoven as a touchstone." And indeed, this piece is yet another of the many RAW pieces that mention Beethoven. Not only that, but there is yet another mention of the Ninth Symphony.

The end of the essay quotes Meher Baba, an Indian religious figure who died in 1969. I  know pretty much nothing about Baba, but I recognized the name because Peter Townsend of The Who was a follower of Meher Baba back in the day and would mention Baba in interviews. 

The Wikipedia bio of Baba has this bit: "In the mid-1960s Baba became concerned with the drug culture in the West and began correspondences with several Western academics, including Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, in which he discouraged the use of hallucinogenic drugs for spiritual purposes. In 1966 Baba's responses to questions on drugs were published in a pamphlet titled God in a Pill? Meher Baba stated that drug use was spiritually damaging and that if enlightenment were possible through drugs then 'God is not worthy of being God'. Meher Baba instructed his young Western disciples to spread this message; in doing so, they increased awareness of Meher Baba's teachings. In an interview with Frederick Chapman, a Harvard graduate and Fulbright scholar who met Baba during a year of study in India, Baba described LSD as 'harmful physically, mentally, and spiritually" and warned that "[its continued use] leads to madness or death'."

Books read during 2022

As this is a blog which be definition would mainly be of interest to readers, every new year I have had a tradition that I list the books I read the previous year. This year I managed 54 titles, up from 47 in 2021. 

Many of the books I read are in connection with serving as a judge for the Prometheus Award. While I read pretty widely, I also tend to read in several concentrated interests: Robert Anton Wilson and the writers Wilson has influenced; history with a concentration on ancient history and late antiquity; favorite mystery writers, and reading books by particular authors who are favorites of mine, e.g. in the past year, that would include Neal Stephenson, Tom Perrotta and Vladimir Nabokov. I have been reading Nabokov for most of my life, reading another title every couple of years or so. 

Some recommendations: Termination Shock is a really good Stephenson novel about an engineered solution to global warming. The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison is a fine fantasy novel. The Great Air Race by John Lancaster is the best book about aviation I've ever read. Purgatory Mount by Adam Roberts, The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan, Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove and Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir are all good science fiction novels. I liked the Ada Palmer novel, too, but it won't make much sense unless you've read the previous novels in the series. If you've never tried Too Like the Lighning, the first book in Palmer's Terra Ignota series, you should consider giving it a try. 

1. Termination Shock, Neal Stephenson.
2. Rich Man's Sky, Wil McCarthy.
3. Road Kill, R.J. Norgard
4. Purgatory Mount, Adam Roberts.

5. Man in the Middle, Steve Wire.
6. Titan, Robert Kroese.
7. White Hat, Steve Wire.
8. Between Home and Ruin, Karl Gallagher.
9. Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir.
10. Seize What's Held Dear, Karl Gallagher.
11. Sainthood in Sixty Seconds, Dr. Insensitive Jerk.
12. How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World, Harry Browne.
13. Dmitry Shostakovich, Pauline Fairclough.
14. The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, Bryan Ward-Perkins.
15. Perhaps the Stars, Ada Palmer.
16. Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO Disinformation in the Age of Aquarius, Adam Gorightly.
17. Patricians and Emperors: The Last Rulers of the Roman Empire, Ian Hughes.
18. Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, Alec Nevala-Lee.
19. Stalingrad, the Fateful Siege, 1942-1943, Anthony Beevor.
20. Wilhelm Reich in Hell, Robert Anton Wilson.
21. The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling, Lawrence Block.
22. The End of Roman Britain, Michael E. Jones.
23. Tracy Flick Can't Win, Tom Perrotta.
24. The Death of Mrs. Westaway, Ruth Ware.
25. Something New, P.G. Wodehouse.
26. Around the World in 80 Books, David Damrosch.
27. Sunset Blues, Bob Adamov.
28. The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison.
29. Vikings in America, Graeme Davis.
30. Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov.
31. Big White Ghetto: Dead Broke, Stone-Cold Stupid, and High on Rage in the Dank Woolly Wilds of the "Real America", Kevin Williamson.
32. The Future Starts Here: Adventures in the Twenty-First Century, John Higgs.
33. Robert Heinlein's Expanded Universe, Volume One, Robert Heinlein.
34. Robert Heinlein's Expanded Universe, Volume Two, Robert Heinlein.
35. Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson.
36. Travis, Texas, Gary Harmon.
37. Weird Comix #2, Bobby Campbell.
38. The School for Good Mothers, Jessamine Chan.
39. Nine Lives, Peter Swanson.
40. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard.
41. The Truth (Discworld #25), Terry Pratchett.
42. Watchmen, Alan Moore.
43. Captain Trader Helmsman Spy, Karl Gallagher.
44. Every Vow You Break, Peter Swanson.
45. The Three Apostles of Russian Music: The Soviet Avant-Garde, Gregor Tassie.
46. Openings: Book 1 of the Hayek Chronicles, James Peet.
47. The Great Air Race: Glory, Tragedy, and the Dawn of American Aviation, John Lancaster. 
48. Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases, Paul A. Offitt. 
49. Three Miles Down, Harry Turtledove.
50. Pan Am, Florida, Lynn M. Homan.
51. Let Us Tell You Again, Mackey Chandler.
52. Constantius III: Rome's Lost Hope, Ian Hughes.
53. The Crossing, Kevin Ikenberry.
54. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.