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For other persons named Robert Wilson, see Robert Wilson (disambiguation).
Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007), the American author of 35 influential books, became, at various times, a novelist, essayist, philosopher, futurist, polymath, psychonaut, libertarian[1] and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized as an Episkopos, Pope, and Saint of Discordianism by Discordians who care to label him as such, Wilson helped publicize the group/religion/melee through his writings, interviews, and strolls. Wilson described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth." [2] "My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."[3]
[edit] Early life
Wilson, born Robert Edward Wilson in Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New York, spent his first years in Flatbush, and moved with his family to Gerritsen Beach around the age of 4 or 5, where they stayed until he turned 13. He suffered from polio as a child, and found generally effective treatment with the Kenny Method (created by Elizabeth Kenny) which the American Medical Association repudiated at that time. Polio's effects remained with Wilson throughout his life, usually manifesting as minor muscle spasms causing him to use a cane occasionally until 2000, when he experienced a major bout with post-polio syndrome that would continue until his death. Wilson attended Catholic grammar school, most likely the school associated with Gerritsen Beach's Resurrection Church. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School to remove himself from the Catholic influence. While working as an ambulance driver Wilson attended New York University, studying engineering and mathematics. He worked as an engineering aide, salesman, a copywriter, and as associate editor of Playboy magazine from 1965 to 1971. Wilson adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Anton, for his writings, at first telling himself that he would save the "Edward" for when he wrote the Great American Novel and later finding that "Robert Anton Wilson" had become an established identity. In 1979 he received a Ph.D. in psychology from Paideia University in California,[4] an unaccredited institution that has since closed.[5] Wilson reworked his dissertation, and it found publication in 1983 as Prometheus Rising. Wilson married freelance writer and poet Arlen Riley in 1958; they had four children. Their youngest daughter Luna--beaten to death in an apparent robbery in the store where she worked in 1976 at the age of 15--became the first person to have her brain preserved by the Bay Area Cryonics Society.[6] Arlen Riley Wilson died in 1999 following a series of strokes.[7][8] [edit] The Illuminatus! TrilogyMain article: The Illuminatus! Trilogy Among Wilson's 35 books,[9] and many other works, perhaps his best-known volumes remain the cult classic series[10] The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Robert Shea. Advertised as "a fairy tale for paranoids," the three books--The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan, soon offered as a single volume--philosophically and humorously examined, among many other themes, occult and magical symbolism and history, the counterculture of the 1960s, secret societies, data concerning author H.P. Lovecraft and author and occultist Aleister Crowley, and American paranoia about conspiracies. Wilson and Shea derived much of the odder material from letters sent to Playboy magazine while they worked as the editors of the Playboy Forum.[11] The books mixed true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "guerilla ontology" which he apparently referred to as "Operation Mindfuck" in Illuminatus! The trilogy also outlined a set of libertarian and anarchist axioms known as Celine's Laws (named after Hagbard Celine, a character in Illuminatus!),concepts Wilson revisited several times in other writings. Among the many subplots of Illuminatus! one addresses biological warfare and the overriding of the United States Bill of Rights, another gives a detailed account of the John F. Kennedy assassination, in which no fewer than five snipers, all working for different causes, prepared to shoot Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, and the book's climax occurs at a rock concert where the audience collectively face the danger of becoming a mass human sacrifice. Illuminatus popularized Discordianism and the use of the term "fnord." It incorporated experimental prose styles influenced by writers such as William S. Burroughs, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.[12] Although Shea and Wilson never partnered on such a scale again, Wilson continued to expand upon the themes of the Illuminatus! books throughout his writing career. Most of his later fiction contains cross-over characters from "The Sex Magicians" (Wilson's first novel, written before the release of Illuminatus!, which includes many of his same characters) and The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Illuminatus! won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for science fiction in 1986, has many international editons, and found adaptation for the stage when Ken Campbell produced it as a ten-hour epic drama. It also appeared as a Steve Jackson role-playing card game called Illuminati and a trading-card game called Illuminati: New World Order. Eye N Apple Productions and Rip Off Press produced a comic book version of the trilogy. [edit] The Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, and Masks of the IlluminatiMain articles: Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, and Masks of the Illuminati Wilson wrote two more popular fiction series. The first, when the trilogy was published as a single volume, appeared as Schrodinger's Cat. The second, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, appeared as three books. In between publishing the two trilogies Wilson released a stand-alone novel, Masks of the Illuminati (1981), which fits into, and is related by the main character's ancestory, to The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles timeline and, while published earlier, could qualify for the fourth volume in that series. 'Schrodinger's Cat is made up of The Universe Next Door, The Trick Top Hat, and The Homing Pigeons. Each volume could stand alone as a book, but when taken together the reader sees, due to Wilson's use of setting the three volumes in differing alternative universes that most of the characters in the books are the same yet may have slightly different names and different careers and background stories. The books cover the fields of quantum mechanics and the varied philosophies and explanations that exist within the science. The single volume describes itself as a magical initiation, and implies that some people have gone slightly insane just by reading it. The single-volume edition omits many entire pages and has many other ommissions when compared with the original three separate books. The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, composed of The Earth Will Shake (1982), The Widow's Son (1985), and Nature's God (1991), follows the timelines of several characters through different generations, time periods, and countries. One topic the books cover is the history, legacy, and rituals of the Illuminati and related groups. [edit] Other Books, Essays, Plays and ScreenplaysWilson wrote a play called Wilhelm Reich in Hell (1987), later performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin. He wrote and published two screenplays, not yet produced: Reality Is What You Can Get Away With: an Illustrated Screenplay (1992) and The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1997). In the nonfiction and partly autobiographical Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) and its two sequels, as well as in many other works, Wilson examined Freemasons, Discordianism, Sufism, the Illuminati, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, Jack Parsons, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, Yoga, and many other esoteric or counterculture philosophies, personalities, and occurrences. Wilson advocated Timothy Leary's eight circuit model of consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he wrote about in many books including Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and again in 1990 with Quantum Psychology (which contain practical techniques intended to help one break free of one's "reality tunnels"). With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension, which they combined to form the word symbol SMI²LE. Wilson's 1986 book, The New Inquisition, argues that whatever reality consists of it actually would seem much weirder than we commonly imagine. It cites, among other sources,Bell's theorem and Alain Aspect's experimental proof of Bell's to suggest that mainstream science has a strong materialist bias, and that in fact modern physics may have already disproved materialist metaphysics. Wilson also supported the work and utopian theories of Buckminster Fuller and examined the theories of Charles Fort. He and Loren Coleman became friends,[13] as he did with media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler, with whom he taught workshops. He also admired James Joyce, and wrote extensive commentaries on the author and on two of Joyce's novels, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, in his 1988 book Coincidance.[14] Ironically, although Wilson often lampooned and criticized some but not all New Age beliefs, bookstores specializing in New Age material often sell his books. Wilson, a well-known author in occult and Neo-Pagan circles, used Aleister Crowley as a main character in his 1981 novel Masks of the Illuminati, included some elements of H. P. Lovecraft's work in his novels, and at times claimed to have perceived encounters with magical "entities" (when asked whether these entities seemed "real", he answered they seemed "real enough," although "not as real as the IRS" since they were "easier to get rid of", and later decided that his experiences may have emerged from "just my right brain hemisphere talking to my left").[citation needed]). He warned against beginners using occult practice, since to rush into such practices and the resulting "energies" they unleash could lead people to "go totally nuts." [15] Wilson also criticized scientific types with overly rigid belief systems, equating them with religious fundamentalists in their fanaticism. In a 1988 interview, when asked about his newly-published book The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, Wilson commented: "I coined the term irrational rationalism because those people claim to be rationalists, but they're governed by such a heavy body of taboos. They're so fearful, and so hostile, and so narrow, and frightened, and uptight and dogmatic... I wrote this book because I got tired satirizing fundamentalist Christianity... I decided to satirize fundamentalist materialism for a change, because the two are equally comical... The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they're rational! ...They're never skeptical about anything except the things they have a prejudice against. None of them ever says anything skeptical about the AMA, or about anything in establishment science or any entrenched dogma. They're only skeptical about new ideas that frighten them. They're actually dogmatically committed to what they were taught when they were in college..."[16] [edit] Maybe LogicIn a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, Wilson described himself as a "Model Agnostic" which he says "consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory."[17] More simply, Wilson claimed "not to believe anything", since "belief is the death of intelligence."[18] He described his approach as "Maybe Logic." Wilson wrote about this and other topics in articles for the seminal cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000.[19] While he primarily published under the name Robert Anton Wilson, he also used various pen names associated with the Bavarian Illuminati, which he allegedly revived in the 1960s.[citation needed] In one interview, when asked what the first thing he would do if he became President of The United States of America, Robert Anton Wilson gave the simple and curt answer "Resign!" [edit] Other activitiesRobert Anton Wilson and his wife Arlen Riley Wilson founded the Institute for the Study of the Human Future in 1975. In 1976 Robert Anton Wilson founded the Starflight Network[citation needed], a society to propagate the philosophy of Dr. Timothy Leary. The group met at Wilson's home in Berkeley, California[citation needed]. John Draper became a member of the group[citation needed]. Discussions at the group centered on how to practically implement the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI²LE)--the three central concepts of Leary's philosophy[citation needed]. One of the activities of the group: setting up and manning tables to sell Timothy Leary's and Robert Anton Wilson's books at Star Trek conventions[citation needed]. They also distributed a chart called The Periodic Table of Evolution (by Timothy Leary) and a diagram by Wilson called "The Octave of Energy", both summaries of the eight circuit model of consciousness[citation needed]. [20] From 1982 until his death, Wilson had a business relationship with the Association for Consciousness Exploration, which hosted his first on-stage dialogue with his long-time friend Timothy Leary.[21] entitled The Inner Frontier.[22][23][24] Wilson dedicated his book The New Inquisition to A.C.E.'s co-directors, Jeff Rosenbaum and Joseph Rothenberg. Wilson also joined the Church of the SubGenius, who referred to him as Pope Bob.[25] He contributed to their literature, including the book Three-Fisted Tales of "Bob", and shared a stage with their founder, Rev. Ivan Stang, on several occasions. Wilson also founded the Guns and Dope Party and its corresponding Burning Man theme camp. As a member of the Board of Advisors of the Fully Informed Jury Association, Wilson worked to inform the public about jury nullification, the right of jurors to nullify a law they deem unjust.[26] He supported and wrote about E-Prime, a form of English lacking all "be" verbs (words such as "is", "are", "was", "were" etc.), and preferred the term "maybe logic".[27] Wilson coined a new word, sombunall (some but not all),[28] which caught on quite well to sumbuneverybody. In response, he coined another word, mosbunall (as in "mosbunall humans wouldn't know an awesome new word if it bit them in the ass.").[citation needed] This word caught on even less. A decades-long researcher into drugs and a strong opponent of what he called "the war on some drugs", Wilson participated in the weeklong 1999 Annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam,[29] and used and often promoted the use of medical marijuana.[30] Wilson co-founded and became the primary instructor of the Maybe Logic Academy, named for his agnostic approach to all knowledge. Fellow instructors include Patricia Monaghan, Rev. Ivan Stang, Philip H. Farber, Antero Alli, Peter J. Carroll, Starhawk, R. U. Sirius, Douglas Rushkoff, Lon Milo Duquette, and David Jay Brown. [edit] DeathOn June 22, 2006, Huffington Post blogger Paul Krassner reported that Robert A. Wilson was under hospice care at home with friends and family.[31] On October 2, 2006 Douglas Rushkoff reported that Wilson was in severe financial trouble.[32] Slashdot, Boing Boing, and the Church of the SubGenius also picked up on the story, linking to Rushkoff's appeal.[33][34] As his webpage reported on October 10, these efforts succeeded beyond expectation and raised a sum which would have supported him for at least 6 months. Obviously touched by the great outpouring of support, on October 5, 2006, Wilson left the following comment on his personal website, expressing his gratitude:
On January 6, he wrote on his blog that according to several medical authorities, he would likely only have between two days and two months left to live[36]. He closed this message with "I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd." He passed on peacefully five days later, on January 11 at 4:50 a.m. Pacific time.[37] After his cremation on January 18, and his family-held memorial service on February 18, 2007, his family scattered most of his ashes at the same spot as his wife's - off the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California. [38][39] A tribute show to Wilson, organized by Coldcut and Mixmaster Morris and performed in London as a part of the "Ether 07 Festival" held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on March 18, 2007, also included Ken Campbell, Bill Drummond and Alan Moore.[40] [edit] Works by Robert Anton Wilson[edit] Bibliography[edit] Fiction
[edit] Autobiographical and Philosophical trilogy
[edit] Plays and Screenplays
[edit] Non-Fiction
[edit] Editor
[edit] Discography
[edit] Filmography[edit] Actor
[edit] Writer
[edit] Appearing as himself
[edit] Documentary
[edit] Inspired works
[edit] See also[edit] References
[edit] External links
Categories: Discordianism | 1932 births | 2007 deaths | American agnostics | American anarchists | American essayists | American libertarians | American memoirists | American novelists | American occult writers | American philosophers | American science fiction writers | American SubGenii | Chaos magicians | Consciousness researchers and theorists | Discordians | Futurologists | Irish Americans | Literary collaborators | People from Brooklyn | Philosophers of mind | Prometheus Award winning authors | Psychedelic drug advocates | Religious naturalists | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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