Wilson - Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secrets of the Illuminati

INTRODUCTORY FABLES

(Lets stretch those mental muscles a bit, fellers.)

From the Sufi:

Mullah Nasrudin once entered a store and asked the proprietor, Have you ever seen me before?

No, was the prompt answer.

Then, cried Nasrudin, how do you know it is me?

From the ancient Babylonian:

It was the sad time after the death of the fair young god of spring, Tammuz. The beautiful goddess, Ishtar, who loved Tammuz dearly, followed him to the halls of Eternity, defying the demons who guard the Gates of Time.

But at the first Gate, the guardian demon forced Ishtar to surrender her sandals, which the wise men say symbolizes giving up the Will. And at the second Gate, Ishtar had to surrender her jeweled anklets, which the wise say means giving up Ego. And at the third Gate, she surrendered her robe, which is the hardest of all because it is giving up Mind itself. And at the fourth Gate, she surrendered her golden breast-cups, which is giving up Sex Role. And at the fifth Gate, she surrendered her necklace, which is giving up the rapture of Illumination. And at the sixth Gate, she surrendered her earrings, which is giving up Magick. And finally, at the seventh Gate, Ishtar surrendered her thousand-petaled crown, which is giving up Godhood.

It was only thus, naked, that Ishtar could enter Eternity.

From the Zen tradition:

A monk who had meditated long in search of Illumination finally received a great flash of insight. Rushing to his roshi (Zen Master), the monk cried out, I have it! I have it! That rock there is inside my head.

You must have a big head, the Master replied, to hold a rock that size.

The Door to Chapel Perilous

I was born into a working-class Irish Catholic family in Brooklyn at the brutal bottom of the Great Depression. As a child I seem to have had no odd psychic abilities and I remember no weird experiences. The only religious event of my childhood my first Holy Communion was a total failure; I experienced none of the rapture and contact with God which the nuns had promised me.

At 14 I became an atheist, and in college I majored originally in Electrical Engineering, switching later to Mathematics when I realized my basic temperament was analytical rather than practical. In my twenties I underwent three forms of psychotherapy in order to clear up the remaining conflicts between my atheistic hedonism and the Catholic indoctrination of my childhood.

Once at the age of 18 I had a strange experience of coming unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim in Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five . Again, at 24, I had a kind of spontaneous Satori, a sudden awakening to the immanent divinity of all things. I had regarded both of these experiences as hallucinatory and was so ashamed of them that I never discussed them with any of my three psychotherapists.

Then in 1962, at the age of 30, I began to experiment with mind-altering drugs. This area is only a little less controversial than nuclear power plants, to put it mildly, but let us remember that there are three schools of scientific thought about those chemicals.

I. Some regard these potions as psychotomimetic : that is, the altered consciousness they produce is considered an imitation (mime) of psychosis.

II. Some regard them as hallucinogens : that is, the new mental state created by ingestion is considered a hallucinatory experience, but not quite a psychosis.

III. Some regard them as psychedelics (a word coined by Humphrey Osmond, M.D.) or as metaprogramming substances (coined by John Lilly, M.D.); that is, the new state is considered one in which we can reorganize or re-imprint our nervous system for higher functioning.

Science will eventually determine which interpretation is most correct through future research . This decision will unfortunately not be reached by any amount of verbal debate or throwing the dissenters into jails, no matter how loud the denunciations or how many heretics are imprisoned. This is very inconvenient for the government, which always wants to settle every issue by outlawing disagreement, but that is not how science works.

I originally got interested in mind-altering drugs due to an article in the most conservative magazine in the U.S.A., the National Review , edited by Roman Catholic millionaire William Buckley, Jr. Later, of course, Buckley and his magazine would attack drug experiments with neo-Inquisitorial fury, but back in innocent 60 or 61, they naively printed an article, by conservative historian Russell Kirk, reviewing Aldous Huxleys The Doors of Perception , in which Huxley recounted how he had transcended time and space and experienced Heaven.

Huxley did it under the influence of mescaline, a drug derived from the sacred cactus, peyote, used in American Indian rituals. Russell Kirk thought this was good scientific evidence to support religiosity in general against the liberal humanists, whom he regards as the prime villains in history. Kirk said, among other things, that only the most dogmatic old-fangled materialist would reject Huxleys report a priori without duplicating the experiment. Being a dogmatic old-fangled materialist at the time, I resented this and argued about it a lot inside my head over a period of months. It seemed that, as a materialist, I had to accept one aspect of Huxleys book that Kirk had not noted: the strong implication that consciousness is chemical in nature and changes as its chemistry changes . That was provocative.

The Materialist had his first drug trip on December 28, 1962, in an old slave-cabin in the woods outside Yellow Springs, Ohio. With my wife, Arlen, and our four small children, I had rented the cabin from Antioch College for $30 per month and had an acre of cleared land to grow food on, 30 acres of woods to seek Mystery in. Farming was only partly supporting us; I was working as Assistant Sales Manager for a microscopic business, the Antioch Bookplate Company in Yellow Springs. But we had found (we thought) a way to escape the regimented urban hive without starving to death.

Before eating the first peyote button, the Materialist asked his supplier (a black jazz musician), Is this stuff dangerous at all?

The fuck, he said. The Indians been eating it every full moon for thousands of years.

Oh, yeah, thats right, the Materialist said, remembering also Huxleys glowing description of his first trip. I quickly ate seven buttons and for the next 12 hours whirled through an unrehearsed and incoherent tour of the vestibule of Chapel Perilous a most educational and transcendental experience.

A few years later, it would have been different, of course. The Materialist would have said, But the newspapers claim that people sometimes go crazy on this stuff and flip out for months.

And the Supplier would have said, The newspapers also say our troops are in Vietnam to help the Vietnamese. Man, dont believe any of the crap they say.

And, being of a curious and experimental nature, I would have gone ahead anyway, but with a lot of doubt, and that could easily have turned into anxiety or outright panic. We later saw exactly that happen to others, after the press really got into gear on this story and built up the hysteria to fever-pitch.