Gabriel Kennedy — The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson (EP.258)
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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.

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Thanks for joining us. Now, please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops. Well, hello, everyone. It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with yet another Infinite Loops. Today's guest shares a passion with me. My guest today is Gabriel Kennedy, the author of Chapel Perilous, The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson.

And I say shares a passion with me because I discovered Wilson later in life. And when I read the first book, which I think was Prometheus Unbound or Quantum Psychology, my mind literally was officially blown. And so I had to go and find everything he had ever written, went through it all, have been through it all several times,

This guy is almost a Nostradamus in that things he was writing about like 40, 50 years ago are now finally coming into better focus in today. Gabriel, welcome. Thank you, Jim. Thanks for having me here. So for the benefit of people listening and watching who don't know who Bob Wilson is, why

Why don't you take a, why don't you give us a little biographical sketch of Bob and also why the urge to write about Bob the man? Because a lot of his writing, like he's really an open kimono with a lot of his own life story. But I will tell you, I loved your book and I learned a lot of things about Bob the man that I didn't know.

For sure. Thank you, Jim. Yeah, Robert Anton Wilson was a late 21st century, into the 21st century American novelist of high satirical content and value. He's most known as being the co-author of, you know, one of the most notorious mind bending books of, you know, American literature, the Illuminatus Trilogy.

He is a cornerstone of the, you know, kind of 1960s counterculture ethos, if you will, an approach to the world, right, the worldview. But he's also sort of an early warning radar system, being that he is sort of a visionary artist. You know, he's anticipating in his work trajectories and trends that are now unfolding and happening today. Right.

And one of his most useful metaphors, I guess, that he used was a chapel perilous and this being a place where all this crazy stuff is happening. And we're not quite sure if it's the product of some supernatural event or, you know, our own imagination, but regardless, it's,

there's crazy things happening within one's environment. And collectively, I think the world is going through a chapel perilous right now. And then individually, I think people across the board are going through their own chapel perilous, especially since COVID. So Wilson during his career was, you know, while he was,

contemporary to a lot of major writers that we all know and thinkers, you know, so people like William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, the late Tom Robbins was actually inspired by Wilson and

you know, people like Timothy Leary, these huge names from that era, the 60s, 70s and 80s, you know, Wilson was there, but didn't quite get the attention that he, I guess, you know, deserves. So now we have a chance, you know, years later to kind of pull back the frame and see Wilson in the mix, in the milieu. He was, you know, at the forefront of these generational movements. So he's a writer, he's an activist, you know,

He's a teacher and all around could be the most interesting human alive or at the time or most interesting human in the last 50 years, if you will. And because of that, you know, he was a person that produced over 30 books and over a 40 year career.

Hardly ever having any institutional backing, if you will, besides a short career at Playboy magazine, Wilson, as an artist, found a way to be constantly productive and never let his circumstances get in the way of producing this art that he was so passionate about.

And his art was exploring the antipodes of the mind, if you will, you know, the psyche of the human in the late 20th century. And, you know, one of the things that human beings have encountered more and more, probably thanks to the increase of communication technologies, is the

paranoia. And Wilson is a master at exploring, you know, paranoia from political to personal to collective, if you will. And because of that, he is a very important voice right now. We have, you know, we live in an exponentially increasing time with, you know, communication technologies, computer technologies, and, you know, essentially the

you know, cameras. We see images and people see us more than ever before. But a byproduct of that, as I said, could be paranoia. And Wilson really, really does a service. I go so far to say there's a service to humanity by exploring this

shadow aspect of the human psyche in all of his work and doing so fantastically. So Wilson is just, you know, I think a very important thinker and someone who is vital to read right now and a lot of fun to read. And I was a fan of his work since I first read Illuminati's trilogy in high school. And the passion for his work, you know, grew over the years. And

And I met and I interviewed Wilson in 2003. And then I joined this thing called the Maybe Logic Academy in 2004, which was his remote learning asynchronous website, which is sort of a, you know, looks prototypical of what most colleges use today for asynchronous remote learning. And for the last three years of his life, he was involved in that. And I was a active member of that website.

And we studied a lot of his work and a lot of other writers' works. And so since he passed away, I just kind of made it my own little mission to write something about him. And it turned into this, a biography.

Chapel Perilous. Yeah. And, you know, Wilson is so prescient in so many regards that we have an in-house AI. And essentially what I did was had it dump virtually everything I have on Wilson in there. And you can map it. It's usually a 30 to a 40 year lag.

where Wilson is first talking about it, things like virtual reality. He wrote about that in 91, and he's like, it's kind of a techno-Zen Buddhist paradise because you can shift realities and, you know, that whole Buddhist idea of attachment to what you currently believe is real. You can see how easily you can switch realities in virtual reality. But he's writing this, like, 40 years ago, right?

And now we're beginning to see it. Let's get back briefly to Chapel Perilous because I always loved the term and I loved the way he used it. Obviously, he's borrowing it from the Arthurian legend where it was an actual place where knights had to go and face perilous tests of bravery and will determine their fate. For Bob, it was a psychological state as well.

where your existing beliefs when you enter Chapel Perilous

really start to unravel under the weight of paradoxes, inexplicable experiences, kind of a liminal zone. Again, a liminal zone. We use that term now and everyone understands what it means because we now have AI that is able to look in to liminal zones. But back when Bob was writing it, like there was no such ability to do so.

And they create what he calls reality tunnels and where these reality tunnels collide, right? And so one of the things that I often wondered was like, what's his solution? I have my ideas, but I did come up with a list of things that he might recommend for, you know, making it through Chapel Perilous because we all end up in there one way or another.

Oh, heck yeah. I mean, I say that that would be Wilson's another great contribution to, I guess, the canon, if you will, is this exploration of, for him, yeah, it was the state of mind, but within this mythos of, you know, Arthurian legend, you know, which is, you know, this exploration of the kind of magical mindset of the, you know, if you will, the quote-unquote Western mind, right? Like, you know, King Arthur is...

a Celtic king, you know, the king of the Bretons, you know, before the Anglo-Saxon tribes came in, if you will, right? And he's around in the, you know, legend says around in the 5th or 6th century, he's, him and his knights are

holding down England town, if you will. And, you know, how the story continues throughout European history, but, you know, mostly say through, you know, the UK and France. But this is like a connection though, you know, and Wilson taps into this, like the Arthurian legend is the magical mindset of, you know, the Western mind, if you will, right? It's an access point to go deeper into the magic that can exist there.

And so Wilson takes the phrase from T.S. Eliot, his poem The Wasteland, that was published in the 20s or the 30s. So Wilson is such a fan of modernist poetry that he recognizes this amazing metaphor that exists here, that there's this space where a person must travel through on their heroic journey

to the Holy Grail, right? Within the original telling of the tale, it comes from, you know, the Perilous Chapel. Chapel Perilous comes from this poet named Thomas Delory, I believe, and the death of Arthur that was published in the 15th century. And this individual, you know, was just continuing the tale that was already, you know, in existence that, you know,

was sort of like an open source access point that people could just delve into this mythical mindset, right? And so the Chapel Perilous is a location that everything you fear is waiting for you with slavering jaws, says Wilson. And within the legend, it's a place where Lancelot...

ventures to find a piece of cloth or clothing from a felled knight who, you know, got caught there before him also along his path to find the Holy Grail. And when Lancelot gets this, you know, piece of clothing, of course, before he gets it, he faces all these horrors and terrible things within this, you know, perilous chapel.

And he is able to heal his fellow knight when he returns with this piece of cloth, right? So the interpretation there, if you will, is that to venture into a dark and scary place, we can receive some sort of healing power, if you will. And that power can be utilized to help, you know, your fellow intrepid traveler, your fellow, you know, journeyer along this path, you know, someone else who's searching for the Holy Grail, right? And, um,

I think there's a lot of power in that myth, if you will. And, you know, so did Wilson and so did many other people. And as I said, Wilson, you know,

probably heard the term, came across the term through T.S. Eliot. And T.S. Eliot was majorly inspired by a book called From Ritual to Romance, which came out a year before Eliot put out his book. And that book is really cool because it looks at or frames or contextualizes the Arthurian legend and especially the quest through the Chapel Perilous.

as not just an initiation, right, but an initiation to see if you're ready for the initiation. So it's a test before the initiation, which is very Wilsonian in a way, you know, because he liked to use that phrase from Crowley, you know, true initiation never ends, right? But it is good to have, you know, goals or levels that we can reach along the way of these initiations, I guess. Yeah.

So this place is a scary, terrible place. And it's a place where you could lose your mind. It's a place where everything can go wrong. You know, Murphy's Law is the law of the land within Chapel Perilous. And for Wilson, of course, he's so interested in he takes this and he applies it to, you know, like I said, like a sort of psychological state of mind. For him, Chapel Perilous is...

It's a personal state where a person is undergoing a lot of kind of personal introspection through maybe Jungian psychology, Thalemic magic, you know, or the Western esoteric tradition, Zen meditation, high doses of psychedelics, which is what Wilson was doing all at the same time in the mid 70s when he had this sort of magical breakthrough and entered what he said was a chapel perilous state.

And

when he was in this, as you could phrase it, a very sort of liminal state where liminal being that place where there's, you know, mass amount of potentia and potential for, yeah. And, and he observed that these strange things that were happening to him defied the laws of, you know, kind of known physics, if you will, remote viewing sort of intuitive psychic moments all in,

this era of the mid-70s and it led him to believe or question are these because of these events supernatural or you know is my thinking that it's supernatural just the product of my own imagination and of course Wilson approaches

anything with like an extremely questioning and skeptical mind. So it's a lot of fun reading his work as he explores this in himself, like, is he in his own chapel perilous? And what does that mean? And so, and he, you know, he encapsulates that wonderfully in his book, cosmic trigger volume one. And,

after sort of examining his life. And in the end of that book, you know, he's a great writer. So the end of the book is a happy ending. He exits Chapel Perilous in Cosmic Trigger Volume 1. But studying his life a little bit, you know, I mean, it's also a metaphor. Wilson was a beacon of light within Chapel Perilous. He was someone who stepped right outside Chapel Perilous, but hung out there at the, right at the exit with like the hermit in the tarot deck with a, you know, with

a light shining, helping people, you know, see their way through. You know, he took the Buddha Sattva vow that he would not, you know, enter the, uh, nirvanic paradise until he helped his, you know, fellow humans come through. Right. He Wilson, he, he,

He was very interesting. He, when it came to his work, he was very much like a knight. He was someone who, you know, had a, all of his magic led to the development and opening of his heart and increasing his compassion and empathy for, for human beings and himself, you know? So,

What a wonderful person to study when it comes to that then, right? When exploring these realms of human potential, Bob's voice is a nice one to hear. And so, yeah, just the way that he explored this whole concept of Chapel Perilous. And now, I mean, where we live, we've been living in this era for the last 10 years where

this seeming boundary between imagination and physical reality has seemingly gotten more and more porous where look around. I mean, there's magicians everywhere. Some might argue that, you know, the current president is a magician for how could a failed real estate developer, you know, reach the highest offices in the land, not once, but twice.

There's got to be some kind of magic going on. And of course, other presidents believed in sort of, you know, magic or positive and new thinking. So Wilson made it his mission to explore this as well. And he and he did so wonderfully. And I just wanted to you know, this is the first biography of Robert Anton Wilson. I think it's a perfect time for people to.

to learn more about this individual, those who already know his work. You know, I think that I've gotten a lot of nice feedback where they felt really good returning to, you know, his line of thinking through my book. And then the book is also accessible for people who've never really encountered Bob before, but they want to just learn about a very unique individual. And as Shane McGowan once said, a man you don't meet every day. So that was Bob Wilson.

Yeah. And the effect on people of Chapel Perilous is an interesting thing to me because Bob would say that, like, look, it can either make you incredibly anxious and paranoid or.

because it's going to manifest a chronic sense of doubt. But then he was like, or you can revel in it and revel in the insights of creative breakthroughs that it allows. He sort of talked about it as a fork in the road. You can go to become a stone-cold paranoid, right? And everything, you're going to believe everything. Or you can be a raving agnostic, which is what Bob chose, obviously.

You know, one of the things that I think is really amazing about him is his determined battle for all of his career against either or, yes, no, no.

zero 100 sort of deterministic thinking, right? You know, he certainly knew how to turn a phrase. Reality is what you can get away with. Only the madman is absolutely sure. I don't believe in anything, but I have many suspicions. You know, he was a real enemy of certitude, right? Because his notion was, if you are literally certain

that your current map of reality reflects all of reality as it really is, well, you're probably incredibly mistaken. But more importantly, you're also descending into a sort of brain death of dogma. Because if you believe that you have the absolute truth,

You're going to get really put out by people who disagree with your version of absolute truth. And, you know, you mentioned who he took a lot of his inspiration from. That was one of the first things I noticed when I started reading all of his stuff was

I already loved T.S. Eliot. I already loved quantum physics. I already loved a ton of the things Nietzsche, for example, he goes on at great length, you know, Nietzsche's observation that we are all great, greater artists than we believe or know. And what he was talking about there was essentially Nietzsche.

We create our own world to a large extent. We are co-creators of all these, you know, the millions of bits of information hitting our perception filters. We organize those and make sense of them and create our own reality tunnel.

He had that great quote where, you know, the sad man lives in a sad world. The happy man lives in a happy world. The angry man lives in an angry world. And at the end of the valley of decision, there is always a choice. Yeah, I love that. That's a great, that's a great quote. I love that, Jim. Thank you, man. Yeah. Yeah.

We are all greater artists than we realize. Yes, that was a great that Bob would source that from Nietzsche a lot, too. And yeah, I like that. You know, that was a great thing about Bob was that he was this kind of zany stoner intellectual guy.

you know, fringe. I found most of his books at the tower records and not really in the bookstore too much. Right. And which, you know, all added to what made tower records cool, you know, Bob was sort of this kind of rock and roll philosopher, right? Like he was,

very dionysian his books went with music more than stuffed shirts and you know long boring dry sentences you know bob was was joe strummer on the on the on the you know the typewriter on the keypad you know his drummer as strummer talked about punk rock you know the point of it is

to get to the heart of the matter, you know, right away, get right to it, which is what Bob did. He was so literate, so well-read. He, you know, was born in, I should have said earlier, 1932, born right during the heat of the Great Depression. His family was greatly affected. He's a second-generation American. His father's family, he came from Ireland. His mother's family came from Trieste,

You know, now I guess that's in Italy, right? And Wilson was, you know, he had no time to waste. He was born poor in the south shores of Brooklyn, you know?

And at two years old, he contracted polio. And then he never really received a cure from polio. He was born and got the disease virus before the vaccine was created. So his mother relied on like an alternative medicine that offered him some form of relief for decades, right? But my point is that for that alternative medicine, he had to activate his muscles and constantly move

And, you know, Bob's from Irish stock. The Irish had to learn over generations to move. They had to move from their homeland and keep it moving and make money and send money back and just keep working. You know, like Bob still has this. He's born with this, the just grit, this kind of South Brooklyn grit. And he's kind of, you know, he's got this, you know, this kind of grit.

constantly moving. He's constantly pushing himself. And part of that is he's constantly learning and he's learning to open his mind and his heart eventually more and more, you know, and I say that not as a poetic metaphor, but I believe, you know, the heart is the second muscle, excuse me, the heart is the second brain. There's, you know, many books on that today. So

Wilson learned how to speak these dual languages, the language of the mind and the language of the heart. But this is part of the education of a writer. If you want to be a really good writer, you got to learn how to write poetry, man. You got to swing with you. You got to get musical. You got to get lyrical. And Wilson was just, he comes from a generation then where his literary heroes were like rock stars in the American literature.

pop culture, you know? So he, he,

you know, to be a writer was to be like, you know, that was hardcore. You're, you're really pushing the envelope forward for culture. That's so he revered the art form. It wasn't like just throw some words together and then, you know, let's do some pictures for the book. No, he, the book itself, every sentence you could tell when you read it is this rich dripping, the distilled, fun,

fine wine of his thought. Some writers, they write just from the top of their cerebral cortex. They haven't distilled it. The coffee hasn't tripped through the bean yet. You haven't gotten the good cup of java yet. But that's like some actors. They filter the character all the way through their being. And Wilson filtered his words through his whole being when he was writing as

people who he enjoyed, like people like Henry Miller, right? That's someone who I enjoyed, I should say. But these are writers who grab hold of your attention when you're reading the book. It's not just some, you know, quick, you know, documentary, if you will. And as

And as such, you know, being so, you know, Hemingway was a big influence on him, T.S. Eliot years later, the modernist writers, all of them, you know, and of course, Wilson lands on Ezra Pound and James Joyce, James Joyce, especially as his main literary influence and like

passion to go deeper and learning about. And so just as we study, you know, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson was studying James Joyce, right? As people wanted to read Wilson's books, you know, years later in his life, he would host these reading circles and people wanted to read his books at the reading circle, but he made everyone read James Joyce, you know, which was pretty funny. And then they read his stuff. But so, you

And as such, you know, I mean, you know, James Joyce, especially in Finnegan's Wake. I mean, that is the textbook for a map of a liminal zone. I'll join you here.

And Finnegan's Wake takes place in a dream state, you know, whereas Joseph Campbell described it, that's a non-Aristotelian state. The rules of a rational universe where A causes B, gravity, etc., does not exist within a dream state. And then therefore, you know, neither does Aristotelian logic exist.

And what Wilson did was he basically, in his eyes, he saw that non-Aristotelian logic does not really hold much weight in our current day and age. He was greatly influenced by another thinker, a huge influence of his, this guy named Alfred Korzybski, Count Orszag.

Korzybski, who wrote, as you know, that big, giant book, Science and Sanity, where Korzybski essentially wanted to kind of use language to kind of clarify, you know, thought a little bit more. He thought that Western culture, you know, got caught up in the sort of trap of thinking by applying Aristotle's notion of the excluded middle technology

to, you know, our reality so often. So, so meaning we will say basically that a person or an object, most we'll just focus on a person, say, um,

Joe, Joe down the block, always mean. We think every time we see Joe, he has an essential mean quality to him. People have an essential quality to them. But in reality, that's just Joe at that time of day. We're always changing. Our natures are always changing in relation to the environment and the things within that environment that we encounter. So that's pretty major because that coincides with, you know, everything we're

looking at with quantum physics today. Essentially, we don't have an essential nature, but we have an existential nature. We have existential relationships, and these relationships is what bring out our aspects of ourselves. So we are always in a liminal state. So

In order to really move through, say, the Chapel Perilous with this state of mind, looking at the world through a flux, right, and not anything definite, ephemeral.

if you will, we can realize that, you know, we are in a liminal state. Does this make sense right now? Like I want to touch on everything that you were, you were just kind of speaking on like, and, and really put the, the jewel of what Wilson was, was forwarding. And that is basically before,

before we take a definite action based on a certitude that we think is real, but maybe fooling ourselves, we should just take a breath for a second and analyze the scene a little bit before taking a definite action. And Wilson's approach really just sort of coincides with Bayesian probability, which is that, you know, we take in every step of the way. We just kind of assess where we're at, you know,

and then respond as such. Yeah, and I'll just leave it at that. I hope that was somewhat clear.

Totally, totally. And Krabitsky, obviously famous for the map is not the territory, the menu is not the meal, pointing out these ideas that we sometimes confuse the symbol that we use or the map that we use to guide us through a certain space of reality with the actual territory. And in fact, it is not. And thus,

That gave birth to Bob's insistence on, you know, von Neumann's third category of maybe, right? Maybe it's this way, but we really need to ask questions. Another thing that I find about him that I think is really interesting is that he seems to fit in the category with authors like Philip K. Dick, James Joyce himself.

You know, painter Van Gogh, they were so far ahead of their time that, you know, to use Bob's own example of the idea of being either tuned in or not tuned in. Right. He said, you know, essentially the microscopic world was not not active.

extant before we had microscopes. It's just that we weren't tuned in. We didn't have the ability to tune in to the microscopic world. And a lot of his work, I see the same thing. And I go back to him so often because he's talking about things decades, literally decades before. And

in much the same way that like people didn't understand Joyce's novels because they were the first of their kind. And Van Gogh, the paintings, like he sold one during his own lifetime. And it took society many, many years to catch up with his vision and get tuned in, as it were. And, you know,

Bob did that with, like, everything. His book, The New Inquisition, Irrational Rationalism in the Citadel of Science. Like, that predates a lot of what the arguments you hear happening today in terms of, you know, the materialist's worldview of science is being assaulted from virtually every kind of avenue, right?

And yet they hold firm. They are like, no, the world is what you see. The world is out there. And it's all kind of slowly coming apart. But he also sort of was the first to see that a lot of emotional plagues, I call them mind viruses,

always acting on us, right? And yet the only way for people to understand that is to understand that there are these things called mind viruses and that you are being infected by them. And the only way you can understand that you're in prison and enslaved is to realize that this is happening and that most people don't want to realize that because it's too scary, right? And

The other thing about him that I find really interesting is you mentioned Joe down the block, right? That is very consistent with like ancient Taoist tales. There's one where a farmer decides that the neighborhood kid is the thief because he can't find his coin purse.

And every time he sees the kid, he sees the thief. He sees it in his eyes. He sees it in the way he skulks away. He sees it in all of these things. And then his wife finds the purse behind a bureau and he sees the neighbor's son as just a little boy again.

And these types of observations, he just did a fabulous job in bringing them to life in terms of helping people understand that they exist. Right. And that more importantly, that there's a way out. You can reframe things. I did a thread on Twitter called The Thinker and the Prover, which was inspired by Bob and

And a lot of people have come back to me and they're like, wow, you know, I found that so freeing because like one friend, he did a simple thing like he realized that he just hates peas, but he felt that he always had to eat them because of his imprinting as a youth. Bob also talked quite a bit about imprinting and he got that from Timothy Leary and

And basically he would, now this will show you how old the language is.

He said, before you even have the ability to consent to being imprinted, you are imprinted by your parents, by your siblings, by your friends. And two of the immediate imprints in early life are you're either imprinted as a top dog or a bottom dog or a winning script or a loser's script.

Talk a bit about how Bob helped people, A, realize that, and then some of his suggestions for getting free of it.

For sure. Yeah, Jim, great points you just raised, especially I love that story too, with the story of the supposed thief and the farmer sees the kid. I think I remember encountering that in Quantum Psychology. Wilson tells that story and he's illustrating the role of self-fulfilling prophecies. And I think that his work is so great for

Kind of, you know, shining you holding a mirror to the reader self, you know, which is the role of great art, you know, George Bernard Shaw, I think, said that, you know, it is the role of the artist to reveal mankind on to himself or on to herself and.

you know, he applied that to theater and the great art, you know, how actors are able to reflect the emotional states of other humans. And then for people to see other human beings emoting like that, they actually learn more of what it's like to be human. And, you know, you gain a deeper education of your own humanity. And, you know, I really sought to frame my book, Chapel Perilous, The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, within this

long view of a story of humanity, you know, as we stand on the cusp and the precipice of

And it seems to be here. The AI is not just knocking at the door, it's kicking down the door, right? And Wilson, to study his life and his approach to art and philosophy, I think is, it's a vital book to read. It's vital to read him. It's vital to read my book about him to gain an understanding of how we got here in the last hundred years, if you will. And

In terms of learning how the human mind and body psyche works is we have to get a full understanding of the, you know, the,

the light and the shadow, if you will. And, you know, Wilson being essentially an autodidact, you know, he's self-taught for the most part. I mean, he did attend NYU Teachers College for a brief amount of time. I mean, he did go to college. He definitely, you know, he only left that Teachers College after he met Arlen and started his family in the late 1950s, Arlen, you know, being his wife.

But, you know, he loved knowledge, right? The way of knowledge was his path. He was a philosopher, you know, philosophy. He was a lover of knowledge, right? And those people are always great to read. So,

In terms of doing what he thought, right, was his job as a philosopher, it's to have the readers come to a realization and preferably a self-realization. It's always easier to see the shadow in other people, but to see it in oneself is way more difficult. And for him,

artists to lead people closer to themselves. Again, I think they're doing their job, but not every artist is doing that job. And Bob was one of those artists that did that job. Hence, I think making him such a vital personality to learn about how he was able to stay dedicated to this kind of transcendent path as an artist.

and keep, you know, at least with the approach of his work open, like keep his heart open while he was writing all this, as he was going through this,

He didn't receive much financial success throughout his writing career. When he left Playboy in 1971, after working there for five years as an associate editor at one of the most highest paying jobs at a magazine at the time, one of the reasons why he left, I discuss this in my book, is he wanted to pursue the life of a freelance writer in America.

And, um, and he thought that was, you know, easier said than done, even though he knew what was, how hard it was, he didn't realize that it would be that hard, you know, just waiting for the wheels of the industry to grind and move. Cause, uh,

it took forever for Illuminati's trilogy to be published, five years. And that's really what started his career in his 40s, right? Which today it's different. It's great. In your 40s, you kickstart things going. But in the 70s, he's a rookie at 42, but he really is...

uh, a greatly discovered former underground journalist now finally being discovered a little bit in the seventies by the, the heads, the counterculture heads. And now we're in this age, 50 years later of, uh,

it's high time to rediscover Bob. Right. And some of the other contemporaries too, especially John C. Lilly. I think there's some confusion in, in, on the web these days about John C. Lilly. Um, and, uh, but Robert Anton Wilson, you know, um,

you know, and one of the, it's high time for him to be rediscovered. Cause as you said, he's ahead of the curve, man. And, um, and, and that's his, he, he knew that in a way he, he, he accepted that, uh, uh, he swallowed that pill that, um,

It might take some time for his stuff to ultimately hit. He, he hoped that people would get it immediately. Um, and, uh, but you know, sort of like Philip K. Dick, his contemporary, uh, you know, the irony with Philip K. Dick is he got, uh,

so famous like a year after he died you know and then so bob it's taken a few more years but you know the water is percolating uh orson welles his favorite uh you know

One of his favorite artists once said, one of Bob's favorite artists once said about Ernest Hemingway that, you know, no one knew about, everyone completely forgot about Hemingway for about 10 years after he died. He was completely out of the conversation. But then he noticed after 10 years, there was this explosion of, you know, awareness and celebration of Ernest Hemingway.

And I think the same goes for Bob. You know, Wells said it was about a 10, 15 year clip. So it's been Bob died in 2007. So it's been 17 years. I think that we're approaching a time of, you know, re rediscovery of, you know, Wilson's work and insight, because is it a rediscovery or a discovery of someone who was writing a

you know, as an early warning radar system 50 years ago. So for instance, he's talking about quantum entanglement throughout most of his work, but he's not calling it quantum entanglement. That's not the popular phrase yet. You know, he's calling it Bell's theorem, you know, based just literally calling it, you know, based off of the paper written by John S. Bell, the Irish physicist who, you know, successfully challenged,

The EPR Paradox paper that was published by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, this huge, awesome physics paper that said that the uncertainty in quantum physics is impossible. And then they wrote that in the 30s. And then 1964, John S. Bell writes his amazing paper on the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox paper.

which establishes the test now to test what they were talking about, which itself was revolutionary, right? And then Wilson is writing about all of this stuff in, you know, 74, 75, 76, 10 years after John Bell's paper, as David Kaiser writes in his book, How the Hippies Saved Physics.

Nobody was talking about quantum entanglement in the 1970s, right? It was just Bob hanging with these wild-eyed particle physicists in Berkeley who people like Saul Paul Sarrog, Jacques Sarfati, Fred Allen Wolfe, Nick Herbert, a number of other physicists.

They were part of this whole crew called the Fundamental Physics Group. And then that group had all these other groups. But this was a whole generation of physicists in Berkeley in the mid-70s who were finally questioning the ontological implications of all these quantum discoveries that were made in the 30s by the greats like Schrodinger, Einstein. And then, of course, John Bell's paper, which that changed everything.

everything that changed the game. So today, John Bell's paper and quantum entanglement is, according to Kaiser, like the most reference, one of the most referenced scientific papers of all time, you know, so Bob is hip, right? Bob was there at the jump. Bob was with quantum physics before it was cool, man. You know what I mean? Like, and, and so this is what is so valuable about him. And, and of course the way he writes is so funny and,

fun. And it's like, if you're, you know, he may not be for everybody, his tone and his mood and the way he writes. But if, if you are like, if you like that sort of thing, he's, he's like George Carlin on the, on the keys, right? He's a, he's, you know, fabulously inexhaustibly funny. You're always finding jokes, but within those jokes, you're finding real philosophical jewels. Like for instance, that whole notion of, um,

you know, gaining awareness of your own emotional plague, or like you said, mind virus. I like that metaphor too. And of course, the metaphor of the emotional plague is so powerful. And Wilson was majorly impacted or influenced by the work of Wilhelm Reich. I think one reason was because in 1959, Wilhelm Reich

had a late 50s, yeah, I think it was 59. He had all of his books and scientific equipment destroyed because the FDA said that he broke the law by sending equipment through the mail that said that it could heal cancer.

So they put him in jail and Wilhelm Reich died in jail of a heart attack and his books were banned for a while. And this added this real sort of rebel appeal for Bob to check out this guy, Wilhelm Reich.

And, you know, Bob is part of a generation that discovers the work of Wilhelm Reich. You know, there are other writers that were hugely influenced by Reich, you know, or enthused by his ideas. Norman Mailer, of course, and a whole generation. I mean, Reich's

notion is two main uh metaphors you know the character uh the character armor right uh which is um this notion that we have armored spaces on our body because our we're not aware of of that that part of our body anymore we're actually kind of shut off if you will and um and to gain access to this part of our body we could you know heal parts of our mind uh there was a great book um

Well, you know, that was Reich's approach in a way that like our subconscious existed within our physical body. So if you could heal that, you can heal parts of your subconscious, if you will. And, you know, he's got a great book about the, I think it's called Character Analysis. That's the book. So about the, you know, one's body armor, but then also this notion of the emotional plague, which is that people...

People are all armored up. We have this body armor, character armor all around because the armor obvious, you know, forms through trauma. You know, we have we have we're traumatized through life, you know, even from birth trauma on where, you know, human beings, we like to think we're very tough and whatnot, but we're really fragile, you know, hurt little people.

like beings out here in this big world in a way, right? Like, like the, within this way of looking at things, like, and it's popular today, everyone is traumatized. Right. And of course, if you're reading Bob, that's one way of looking at it. Like he called it the wooden leg syndrome in a way, like, or the walking wounded, like, and yeah, we all have wounds even just from birth. Right. And so to, to,

Like, I guess, look at your own stuff, right? Without a, to cast a colder eye, right? To, to not get too wrapped up in the narrative of how hard it is, but in just observe, you

everything like a scientist, which is what I think Bob was seeking to bring to a reader's awareness of observing your own, I guess, shadow or emotional plagues or areas where you're stuck or your mind viruses or, you know, just looking at yourself a little bit, utilizing a little introspection with compassion, right? I think that's pretty a major part of Bob's work, you know, with humor and

He called it the cosmic schmuck, realizing when you yourself are a cosmic schmuck.

Um, but that's not to say that it's, this is not, you know, as you mentioned a winner script and a, and a, and a loser script, you know, Wilson considered himself having like a winner script, right? This coming from the transactional psychology movement, this idea that we could walk around with interior dialogue all day saying like, you know, a loser script is I suck. They suck. She sucks. We suck. You know, and the winner script is like, I'm good. They're good. We're good. We could work this out. And, um, you know, we're,

when you are aware of your awareness, right, you see how powerful it is. And, you know, many people report having psychedelic experiences where they become very aware of how they're, you know, the, the, how they're,

concentration and focus shapes the moment that they're in. Just like when you're a little kid, you little, you see pictures all the time or like videos, little kids fall flat on their face. I remember this, but you get up and you look around and if, you know, if people feel some compassion, but if you're not like, if you laugh, little kids laugh too. Like you, you can easily just sort of, uh,

it's your approach to life. You're, you're the, the choice that you make at, as you say, you know, at the end of the sentence, right. And this is powerful American existential, uh, existentialism, you know, Jean-Paul Sartre, that, that was a major part of his work is that, you know, it all comes down to freedom and responsibility, right. Uh, make a choice. Uh, we, we live in a liminal state. Sure. Things are always in potential. Um, but we, we also, you know, uh, um,

you know, exist in this low physical location where you have to make choices, right? You could stand in the middle of the road all day looking up at the great sky. But as a bus comes thwarting, jettisoning down the, down the block, you have to make a choice. You're either going to stay in the street or you're going to move.

And, uh, Wilson, I think, you know, he's very clear. He's asking people to develop a more nuanced state of mind, but you're not going to get caught in the gobbledygook. You're going to gain more attunement. You're going to gain more awareness of, um,

how your own perceptual grid works. If you are, I'd say, you know, moving beyond a naive Wilsonian approach, because some criticisms of Wilson, I've come across, I don't quite know how people could come to this conclusion, but when they're just throwing it out there, it's like, oh yeah, maybe logic. And that's a, you read, you read a Prometheus rising and whatnot. And it's, you're just supposed to get to this kind of middle state and you're not going to do anything.

And it's like, no, that's completely not what it's about. You know, it's about gaining way more specific understanding of the detail and nuances. You know, it's like if you look at a Van Gogh painting, if you look at it from 20 feet away or you get closer up and you look at the finer detail of Van Gogh's paint strokes and you see you could gain a deeper understanding of, you know, the whole painting if you're able to see it. Right. I mean, this was I wonder how true this is, but I think this was even in that

It was in a movie. It could have been The Secret. But this idea, this notion that when the conquistadors first came over to America, you know, the Native Americans, some of them didn't even see the ships. I've heard this before. I don't know how true the story is, right? But only some of them could literally see the ships because they'd never seen a ship before. And so this is seemingly impossible. How could this thing exist?

And so if that story is true, isn't that amazing that our own, you know, perceptual, an individual's perceptual grid could literally block out the stimuli of an approaching ship, right? And this is Wilson's jewel again. He gets right into it in Prometheus Rising right at the very beginning. And that is...

The stimuli that we receive all the time is stupendous. It's tremendous, the amount of information we're always taking in. But the human biological mechanism seems to be all about closing the aperture. We can't let in that much light. It's just too much. And so Wilson's role then is to teach people to just let in a little bit more and more light, a little more and more awareness, a yogic approach to

And it is quite yogic, right? And he is pushing people in his work to push themselves to gain a deeper understanding, a better, almost more efficient way to understand

perhaps gain more self-awareness. The emotional plague, again, is one of those areas, that metaphor. Another one is to understand, yeah, self-fulfilling prophecies, which is essentially how our preconception, how our map of something could then lead to a false conclusion or false positive, right? So

We see that punk ass kid walking down the street with a skateboard and a backwards hat. Of course he stole my newspaper, that jerk. And I bet he's been doing it every fricking day for a year, you know, but little did we know it's the cute little poodle or pooch Jermaine.

from next door that just likes to play with you and steal your newspaper, but we don't, you know, and so when you see that kid, he's a punk ass, you know, but little do we know this kid is helping his grandma stay alive, you know, in that house, et cetera, et cetera. And, um, isn't it wonderful when we learn more things about people that actually makes them, um,

you know, better, you know, nicer, awesome, more awesome people when we learn this about each other. And, and, uh, I think Wilson's too, I didn't touch on the imprinting yet. Uh, but tying that in, say to the notion of imprinting, um,

Yeah, we, an imprint is essentially, according to Wilson and Leary, like this moment in a person's life. And of course, between the ages of like zero and six, when our brains are most malleable and, you know, for instance, like children can learn second or third languages at that age way better than any other adult could ever learn. Right. Because there's something going on with the neuroplasticity of the brain at that age. Right.

And during that time, uh, we, uh, for instance, you know, we imprint a, uh, what he called a neophobic or a, uh, uh, a neo, uh, was it phylic, you know, uh, approach to the world, you know, uh, you know, one where we want to explore the world or one where we want to retreat back to, to, to mommy or whatnot. And, um,

And then, of course, then that's the first circuit. Then this is activated at, you know, in during infancy in the second circuit where you get the top dog, bottom dog phenomenon going on. This is the emotional territorial circuit, which I guess, according to Wilson and Leary, forms at about the age of two. Right. So they're putting together sort of a very loose, interesting map of development, you know, individual and then maybe community.

collective, right? But, um, uh, it's, it's a model and they're very clear on that. And Wilson expected that science would one day, you know, supersede the model that they laid out. And, you know, coming from 50 years ago, uh, the fact that they were, uh, Wilson and Leary were, were speaking about this stuff and, and, and zeroing in on this, uh, notion of imprinting, um,

You know, imprinting is kind of accepted today as this is what happens in developmental psychology. Only they don't use the word imprinting today. They use the term critical activation period. Imprinting is associated with Conrad Lorenz, who was the, you know, the etiologist or the biologist, some kind of ologist who studied, you know, geese and

and animals, these awesome little creatures. And basically he, he discovered how a baby goose would attach itself to a human as if the human were his or her mother when the mother wasn't around. So there was an imprinting period going on. And, but Lorenz, I think he won a Nobel prize, but he,

And of course, his discoveries were all coming out in the 70s. So this is why Leary attached...

He used that term. But since then, I think things came out about he might have been involved with the Nazi party or something like that. So he's not popular, Conrad Lorenz, today, nor is his terminology. And so the term now is critical activation period. And of course, it's more nuanced than the way Leary and Wilson break it down.

But when you're encountering a Leary and Wilson book at the back of Tower Records after maybe, maybe not smoking some weed in the parking lot and going in and reading this stuff,

You know, like next to the rock and roll magazines, right? You're gaining a very good education in contemporary science. And that was something that was great about Wilson and Leary, if you will. And the new Falcon publications was that these books were found in

in places like record stores, you know, like today it's different, everything's online, you know, but at that time and, you know, that, you know, his Wilson's cosmic trigger volume one was first sold by, uh, the, the, or, or folly brothers who, you know, they started out as a head shop in, in Berkeley, like,

you know, this was all part of a wider culture, you know, and, and the counterculture education, which was a cooler understanding of things. And, and Wilson wasn't just blowing proverbial smoke. I mean, this guy could hold his own with, uh, major thinkers of his day. Um,

And, and one of the things, reasons why people still poo poo him today was like, well, well, who was he? No one knew who he was. He must not have been that smart. You know, it's like, yeah, cool. Like cool. You could say that about how many other geniuses that we now know today, you know? And so I think it's such a great period, a great time to discover Wilson's work, all of his work, the new inquisition you mentioned. I mean, geez, that's, that's such a great read. And of course,

you know, Wilson gets some things wrong. And of course the eight circuit model of intelligence. I mean, he doesn't even call it the eight circuit model by the end of his life, but, but,

Of course there are things that are wrong, right? Like you're not going to... Leary, you love to use the baseball metaphor. A hitter is a great hitter when he bats over 300. I mean, you're only getting three to four hits out of every 10 times you're up at bat. You're going to strike out a lot, man. But even...

I'll paraphrase, not quite sure who said this, but the notion we must always reach beyond our grasp. We must always strive for something that exceeds our reach. It's not in getting it that's powerful. It's the fact that we are reaching for it, that we are going for it. That's the most important thing. And Wilson was able to document that. He was able to be a voice for that. At least I get that from him. I'm sure you get that from him. He's an inspiring voice for

to get you going in the chapel perilous, right? He's very clear, you know, like as, as, uh, uh, Gurdjieff used to say, um, you know, the, uh, what is it? The, the Gurdjieff call it the terror of the situation. You know, Wilson flipped and call it the horror of the situation. You know, we, as Buddhists, uh, monks used to say it, you know, when it comes to meditating, like you live in a burning house, uh,

We're not, this isn't a calm, placid island of existence that we live on and life isn't that we're in a constant flux and flow. We're like on a little sinking rock on, on magma on a volcano. That's that just spewed forth, you know, great, terrible existence, you know, existence that can burn you alive, but it's creating the earth at the same time.

We are in a myth. We live in a myth. You are a myth, you know, in the mythic hero. We are the most powerful, you know, beings that we could think of. And we're also totally fragile, small, little like leaves of grass. And we are both so strong and so fragile at the same time. And Wilson is constantly aware of this paradox. That's why he is an agnostic Gnostic.

Uh, that's why he is a, you know, an ultra skeptic and like an open eyed believer in, you know, the most positive, uh, projection of humanity. I mean, he, he, he liked to explore all the rooms of his mind, if you will. You know, he opened a lot of doors and his value is in his ability to, um,

document all of his interior travels, if you will. And the way that he's able to document, say, again, his exploration of quantum entanglement and quantum physics, and even his criticisms of scientific materialism, that's the value, you know, because he had his own unique

fun, funny way of, of, of writing about these things. And, uh, truly, uh, you know, a philosophical comedian or a comedic philosopher, you know, like him and George Carlin hand in hand, you know? So, um, yeah, there, there's so much to discover, uh, with, with Bob so much to tune in, if you will. Right. And, uh, and, um, I really sought to, um,

get it all in there, you know, get as much as I could about his life and his work into my book, uh, and, and to, to present it, you know, in the vein of, of Wilson and, you know, which is like to be as erudite and as imagistically, uh, uh, uh, you know, focused as possible, you know, get to the point with every, every sentence, every line, um, and, and try to elucidate

these really sort of far out vistas and, and, and philosophies that Wilson explored. But he already did such a great job himself of say, taking like highly jargonized material, say science and sanity, that Korzybski book, which is just filled with these wild calculus equations and hyphenated words, you know, organism as a whole interacting with environment. And, and,

You know, Wilson said he read that giant book, an 800 page book in a weekend at the age of 16 when he took it from the New York Public Library. That's really impressive. Right. If we're to believe that. And then he said that he read it every year since. Right. Just as like a tune up.

um that's a guy that i'm going to read some more right this is he's he has he said he had a very analytical mind said wilson right like uh my mind was more artistically inclined wilson's mind is like an engineer and uh that's why he's like well so before i go much further uh to to to just kind of you know put a a cherry on the top of this um

I think that's the great thing about Bob is, um,

discovering his influences and he's so open about it he'll tell you who who influenced this line of his thinking and then in that regard he's a he's a great teacher because he introduces you to so many great minds from joyce to buckminster fuller to alfred korzybski even ilia progosian like holy never heard of that person before dissipative structures you know you're reading about dissipative structures again in the back of tower records and

You're doing something right, you know, so. Wow. So, yeah, that is quite a tour de force of all of the various influences from Bell with his quantum entanglement. Now, of course, they're testing actual quantum physicists are testing whether something they call retro causality is possible. In other words, can the future influence the past?

You see, you mentioned Lorenz, Man Meets Dog was a classic book that I read when I was a kid.

One of the other things that I also love about Wilson is the introduction to a tremendous number of thinkers that I might have been marginally aware of, but then after reading him extensively, went and actually read them as well. And so it really opens your perception filter. You know, you mentioned the probably apocryphal story about the natives not seeing the ship's

coming. And Bob wrote something along the lines of, you know, we say that seeing is believing, but actually it's the reverse. We very seldomly see what we don't already believe.

And he was really clear on our beliefs determine what we see, which is sort of the lead-in to the idea of the thinker and the prover, right? Where, you know, you're free to think any thoughts you want. You can be like the Mad Queen in Alice in Wonderland and have six impossible thoughts before breakfast. And, you know,

But then he points out, once you've decided, right, on something, this is a sad world or a bad world or a good world, you stop thinking and you kick it over to what's called the prover. And the prover's job is much more simple. The prover's job is to...

prove to you that whatever belief you have, no matter how crazy it is, is the correct belief, right? So what does the prover do? It screens out all information that is opposed to this particular belief of yours. You know, classic example with the flat earth folks, right? You can even take them up in a balloon and they will just simply reinforce the

Oh, this is just an op. This is my mind playing a trick on me. And the thing that I find so refreshing about his thinker prover idea is there is a way out. Right. And and that the way out is to.

intentionally turn your prover off, intentionally look at information that might conflict with what you currently believe. And really, I sort of believe, right, that your mental models should make predictions, right? That's what they do. We are prediction machines, we human beings.

And why would you want a better mental model? Well, you would want a better mental model to make better predictions. And if you're making better predictions, like the truth ought to be predictive, right? So the closer the outcome matches to your predicted outcome, the better calibrated your mental models are.

And one of the things I learned very much from Wilson and others is you've got to forever challenge what your current mix of mental models are because most of them are probably wrong.

And if you can get comfortable with that, it opens your aperture to a point where you can relearn, you can rethink. And the way you approach it is on that idea. Okay, well, you mentioned the cosmic schmuck line. I love that line. I think the quote was, if you occasionally think to yourself, I wonder if I'm just a cosmic schmuck,

You have, if only for a moment, made yourself a little less of a cosmic schmuck. In other words, you have to constantly remind yourself that you're probably wrong.

And it doesn't hurt for you to constantly challenge your beliefs because you really – they create what you can see, right? And they hypnotize you in a way that they make seeing that ship on the horizon impossible if you can't conceive of what a ship –

on the horizon happens to be. Of all the thinkers that you mentioned, who do you think influenced Bob Wilson the most? Ooh, that's kind of a tough question. It's tough because

Wilson was so great at taking what he wanted and leaving the rest, if you will. And, you know, he wasn't afraid to. So say take, for instance, Ezra Pound. Right. Ezra Pound, you know, recognized as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. Right. But Ezra Pound is also a fascist. Right. Like and I mean, he was fascist.

probably to the day he died, you know, uh, a fascist, maybe not though, but I'm guessing, yes. Um, not a good look. Uh, however, uh, and then also an anti-Semite, you know, during many, many years of his career that needs to be said. And, um,

But, you know, Wilson was very clear, like, you know, and he wrote about it as well. You know, he was like, I think that Ezra Pound's poetry is absolutely amazing. And it struck me so well. I've learned so much from it. But I think his political views as a fascist and anti-Semite are absolutely disgusting and horrible. We don't live in an age like that right now, right? We live in this constant age of gotcha and you suck and you piece of shit.

you know, like, you know, take, take, it could be anybody, you know, your favorite pop singer from the eighties. It turns out to also be a anti-Semite or fascist or whatever. And, or even worse, you take Diddy, right. Someone who created such funny, fun music, dancing around like a goofball on stage and,

Little did you know he was having these ditty parties and, you know, really taking advantage of people. And, you know, and Picasso, et cetera, et cetera. What do you do with that? What do you do with these these terrible aspects of people? And are you able to, you know,

take a jewel that they offer and then, you know, kind of see the truth in it and, and digest it through your own, your own reality tunnel, if you will. And, and Wilson did that with Ezra pound, um,

I don't think Ezra Pound is the biggest influence on Wilson, but my point is that he was able to take the good parts from Ezra Pound and make it part of his voice and vision. To borrow a phrase from martial arts, Wilson created, he had a bushido. He created his own style.

And I think that's what's so great about his work, too, is that that shines through. And I think he inspires readers. He inspired me anyway to create your own style, you know, where your influences on your sleeve, you know, present yourself.

an homage and it might be ironic for some people to hear me say that because many of his novels were kind of pastiche and uh you know homages to other writers and and and uh novelists and whatnot

But my argument is that even when he was like doing a James Joyce impression, if you will, or a Flann O'Brien, you know, homage, you know, it was still Wilsonian. You know, there was still the Wilsonian flavor. Right. And so so there's a long list of influences. But if I had to just zero in and just right now, I guess like the largest influence is

I mean, I'm tempted to say Joyce, but I think Korzybski. Yeah, I think Alfred Korzybski. I think General Semantics, I don't know.

had a major influence on Wilson's philosophical approach to life, you know, uh, general semantics, uh, and what, what they propose is, I guess would get kind of categorized today as a, you know, linguistic determinism, right? So that the, you know, the thoughts, as you said, you know, seldom do we, and this has been from Bob, right? Seldom do we see the things that we don't, uh,

already believe right um and the power of our own perception and that's wilson's power as a writer and of course there are other writers and you know more and more today i mean this was a huge market probably in the aughts right where you know from eckhart tolle down the line you know the power of the moment the power of perception and the power of your perception in the moment um you know

again it's just the way that wilson writes is so appealing to me um you know and the way that he's able to you know the thinker and the prover uh it's not even a metaphor because i i'm listening to you describe it as wilson describes it and it's like yeah of course that's amazing like i it's i don't ever want to forget this right and i've been reminded so many times that what wilson is drawing attention to and he even borrows that phrase from somebody else you know it was like a

it's in, it's in, uh, Prometheus rise and, uh, you know, but he, he's, he's like a DJ, right? He's, he's sampling, but he's attributing because it's sad, but there are many writers who will basically plagiarize the, you know, their, their friends and like, act like that's their voice. Right. And they, when they could easily just attribute someone and Bob follows a rule that is, uh,

Rule for today and he's doing it prehensively Which is always a tribute right?

and especially now more and more because, you know, where are we getting these ideas from? You know, we're, we're, we're open channels, man. And there's more and more communication channels than ever before. There's, we're receiving more and more, uh, um, signal to noise, uh, than ever before. You know, I don't want to call it all noise, right? Cause there's information within, you know, we're receiving more stimuli than ever before, uh, through communication technologies, you know, and, um, uh,

So Wilson is a DJ that's, you know, to use that metaphor, attributing people as he's writing, but then making it his own because what he does with the thinker and the prover is just brilliant because he's able to kind of elucidate this aspect of the human mind that, and this is what's nice about him, is that you can see that he's working towards something in most of his nonfiction work. And that's him saying like, look,

we might be able to do these things. We might be able to have ESP that could be potentially within us. What I'm saying is, is we don't have scientific metaphors yet. We don't have scientific theories for this, for these actions that we're observing, you know, a nice contemporary of his in that regard is, you know, Rupert Sheldrake, who I believe you've interviewed. Yeah. And you spoke with, and, you know, he left a great impression on Wilson with the notion of the morphic fields and,

And, you know, where does, you know, causality come from, you know, if you will. And just the idea that we are able to constantly prove a preconception is seems like that shouldn't be that revolutionary.

That shouldn't be that revolutionary of a concept, yet it is because what Wilson's drawing attention to, I guess much like the Buddha, if you will, is that we have this capacity to constantly fool ourselves, to constantly mistake a map for the territory where we're map-making ourselves.

You know, we're pattern recognizing creatures. This is just the way our makeup works. And so in doing that and seeking to find patterns, we always want to make predictions. Right. And and we're, you know, again, Wilson is clear, like we're constantly evolving, you know, homo sapien sapien.

This fact always amazes me that our brains, the gray matter that we have, especially the lower brain, not the neocortex, the lower brain is older than Homo sapiens sapiens. We are the carriers of this gray matter material that is older than our evolutionary form right now. We're on a planet that is constantly changing, in a galaxy that is constantly changing, in a human form that we call human, which is

going to change. And Wilson is, and I really make a point to present this in the book, is that, you know, Wilson's whole philosophy is a really nice, you know, process philosophy, right? He's just drawing constant attention to the fact that we're constantly in flux and we're always moving, you know, but he's

how important it is to never lose sight of context, you know? And, and in order to do that, your mind needs to be sharp and you need to, as much as possible, understand as many sciences as possible and understand how science works, you know? So you could get to the point of discussing, you know, quantum physics without sounding like a new age, like,

You know, like because there's a real, you know, discussion going on and to learn that is essential. Right. And and I think Wilson inspires he can inspire people more than he as as all good artists.

than he was able to accomplish, right, in his own life too. Because, you know, Wilson points people in the direction of probability and like even Bayesian probability, though he never mentions Bayesian probability, though that's a lot of what he's doing. You can, I mean, I never thought of it, but it makes total sense. Like when you told me that you were a fan of Bob and you already had this huge career in finance and, you know, that's all predictive stuff.

you know, Baynesian sort of probability. So it makes total sense, right? Like, and this is another great endorsement for, for reading Wilson. You know, it's like, you can see the importance of constantly appraising where you're at and like recreating the map. And I mean, you know,

Not everyone reads Wilson in that regard. And that's the way I love reading Wilson. I think it makes sense if the first encounter with Wilson is quantum psychology, because he really is in the groove at that moment. You know, he's really, really presenting his philosophy really well, you know, and it's that we are in this flux. We need to come up and recognize patterns. It's just part of

this, you know, world that we're in, but recognize that we're part of a larger thing that's in flux, right? And so we are cosmic schmucks, but

understand in context, it's not wise or healthy for you to walk around thinking that you're a cosmic schmuck all day, especially when you're encountering some real schmucks who can't even realize that they're cosmic schmucks. And part of being a schmuck sometimes or a jerk is to make other people feel like schmucks. So you don't have to look at your own schmuckiness. And Bob is not a wimp. Bob is actually, you know, like the, the, you know, walk in the way of, uh,

the fellow who started Aikido in a way, you know, the, the, I can't remember his name. It's hard to pronounce, but you know, his whole path was the guy who started Aikido was he was a deadly, uh, uh, you know, martial artist. Uh, but then he came to the realization that like the best fighting is no fighting at all. Right. And so he's not fighting, not because he's a wimp, but he's not fighting because he understands the greater, the greater good of it all. And,

that's the message that Wilson is putting out there. I think he, he reaches for that as, as a writer, as a thinker, he's always trying to keep that in context that, you know, uh,

Great men look at themselves. Great women, great people look at themselves. You have to examine yourself. You have to realize when you are a cosmic schmuck. But when you go out there in the world, that makes you stronger. That makes you more of a leader to be able to check yourself. So you're not going to be some indecisive wimp in the corner, unless you're going through that phase. But most likely, you're going to be a leader.

you're going to be highly attuned and you know have a good understanding and knowledge that the map is not the territory and that everyone's voice on the ship is important you know and to realize like you're at the hull what do you see you're up there what do you see because we're in this together we're on spaceship planet earth to you know borrow the phrase from buckminster fuller and you

How's it looking right now? It doesn't look very good. It looks like the people who are steering the ship are careening it towards a fast exit for the rest of us. That's, of course...

When I realized that I am putting out a perception, right? That's one way to describe what's going on in this world. Another way is how Bob said it. He's like, I look at me and my friends as we are the, you know, the change agents, if you will, we're the ones that are going to make things better. So it's all about understanding, you know, context, you know, and I think Wilson's work kind of really does a good job at, at helping people,

to stay present, right? In every sort of situation, location and moment that they're in, you know? Well, I could talk about him and your book all day long and my producers are now hitting up my, they have a little rake that they pull me off air with because like time flies when you're talking about things that you love. Gabriel, I love the book. Where can people find it and buy it?

Thanks, Jim. Yeah. So right now the book, Chapel Perilous, The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson, you could go directly to my website, which is chapelperilous.us.

And on there are just some links. You know, you can find the book on amazon.com and also on Lulu Press. And yeah, again, it's the, you know, Chapel Perilous, The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. And also you can check out my sub stack, which is gabrielpatrickkennedy.substack.com. And that's where you will find most of the news about the book.

Fantastic book. I loved it. And Gabriel, if you've heard the podcast before, you know that our final question is not really a question. It is we are going to wave a magic wand and we're going to make you the emperor of the world. You can't kill anyone. You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp. But what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can say two things into it.

And you're going to incept all 8 billion people on the planet with what the two things you say are. They're going to wake up whenever their morning is and they're going to say, you know, I just had two of the best ideas. And unlike all of the other times, I'm actually going to act on both of these ideas. What two things are you going to incept in the world's population?

That's a heavy, that's a heavy subject. It's a heavy question. Two words. That doesn't have to be words. It can be two sentences. I love it. I don't know. Make everyone a billionaire. Free AI robots for everyone. Yeah. I mean, I guess take a breath, try to be more kind to others and yourself.

I'll leave it at that. You leave it at that. I love the last one. If we could all really internalize that one, the world might be a much, much better place. Well, Gabriel, this has been super fun for me. Congratulations on the book. As I said, I loved it. I hope everyone listening and watching will get a copy and read it because Bob is a fascinating, fascinating thinker and writer. Thanks so much for joining me, Gabriel. Thank you, Jim.

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