Robert Anton Wilson - Cosmic Trigger III: My Life After Death

Future events like these will affect you in the future!

Plan 9 From Outer Space

There are many arguments to the contrary,
but you wouldn't understand them.

The Trial

I did not write this book entirely to vex those unfortunate librarians who will soon have the irksome duty of trying to fit it into the Dewey Decimal System. I have other, more subversive amusements in mind. (You have had warning.)

This book revels in mysteries, wallows in puzzles and ambiguities. We will, so to speak, peer at wiggling things that look like rattlesnakes from one side and look much more like the middle of next week from a different but equally plausible angle of view. Those with tired or rigidly dogmatic minds will find these perceptual relativities distressing. True Believers of all sorts should certainly avoid this book as the Devil flees holy water. I warn you. You have had warning. Dont complain later if this book seems like a bloody abattoir for your own favorite Sacred Cows and you get a bit uneasy about things that formerly looked simple and honest.

Those bold bad folk who pass that warning will soon read, for instance, about a mysterious Hungarian who may have produced a large number of the canonical classics of modern painting, and another most extraordinary artist crawling about the jungles of Uganda, intent upon dressing gorillas in clown suits. We will explore the rantings of Femigoguery to study the decline and fall of Shakespeare, and the sexual horror hidden in Beethovens music, with comments on other amazing innovations of the Politically Correct.

I will also reveal my life after death, and discuss the real/ surreal paradoxes of the 18.5 camera lens. We will study a secret society that may have superhuman origins, a group of intelligent Europeans who regularly receive instructions from an alleged extraterrestrial correspondence school named UMMO, and the latest scoop on the infamous Illuminati of Bavaria. We will wander in the murk of Aristotles excluded middle and fuzzy logic. Youll learn of an unsuccessful effort to find the normal or average, and see multi-culturalist Heresy invading the calendar. We will even examine a mathematician who produced more important theorems than anyone of our time, and did it all without the necessity of even having a body

Our paradigm: One day in 1986, I browsed, reverently, through the Long Room at Trinity College Library, in Dublin, where they keep their precious first editions. I felt eerie, mystical, trans-time sensations looking at such items as the first printings of works by Locke, Hume, Newton, Buffon, Tom Paine; even more weird feelings stirred as I looked at The Book of Kells, hand-printed and hand-illustrated in the 8th Century. But nothing moved me so strangely and deeply as the book called Travels in Remote Parts of the World, published in 1726 by one Lemuel Gulliver of Nottinghamshire. Journeying in my Poetic Imagination (another name for the Divine, according to Blake) I shared what the first readers must have felt, as they turned those plausible pages...

My present audience may even, at times, feel like 1726 fans of travel books (a fad at the time) who rushed out to buy Mr. Gullivers volume and suffered increasing bouts of perplexity and Heisenbergs Syndrome terminal Uncertainty as they read about dwarfs smaller than any in Europe, giants bigger than any in Europe and intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic floating above them in a space-city. (The publisher could not alleviate readers doubts: the manuscript had arrived in the middle of the night, amid deliberate mystification). The Travels veracity soon became as much a matter of debate as anything in post-modernist art, or even post-modernist criticism. Some 1720s readers experienced painful, proto-Foucoultian doubts about Mr. Gulliver, a scientific modern observer who described every fabulous kingdom with finicky detail and exact mathematics. It didnt really aid puzzled readers to note that Mr. Gulliver also tried to write like an intelligent horse, because he had learned to love horses better than people.

The artist, Aristotle says, imitates Nature. The trickster, practical joker and counterfeiter also imitate Nature, if you think about it. Certain insects imitate Nature so successfully that they become invisible, except to those who look at all things with suspicious eyes; and Philip K. Dick has memorably suggested that we may share space-time with Zebra, a hypothetical giant intelligence that we cant see because it disguises itself as the whole environment. Lemuel Gulliver merely imitated the Royal Scientific Society, but some of the people we will meet in this book seem to imitate all sorts of things, in Nature and beyond Nature.

Who, except the card-carrying paranoid, looks closely enough to see all the masks that hide well, whatever masks hide?... But we dont want to become paranoids. We merely want to look at certain masks that shed light on those urgent problems of the real and the counterfeit that currently bedevil, not just the mentally ill, but those who pass as linguistic philosophers, art/literature critics, and earnest students of Controversial Science (called Pseudo-Science by those panicky souls who wish to end the controversy in a hurry.) And although I cant promise to tie all this mystery and mummery into one neat bundle, I will include in the new, improved Big Picture many elements left unclear in the first two volumes of this trilogy.

I would like to acknowledge the Usual Sources, who here, as in earlier books, have vastly influenced my perceptions/conceptions R. Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leary, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Alfred Korzybski, Marshall McLuhan. I would also like to acknowledge specially a few who played a major role in shaping and inspiring the present work Moses Horowtiz, Orson Welles, James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Harold Garfinkle and the man who called himself Elmyr.