If you’ve heard me speak for more than five minutes you’ve probably caught me dropping a Robert Anton Wilson reference (or several). Wilson is one of the most interesting (and underappreciated) writers I’ve ever come across — a Nostradamus for modern times.
I was delighted to sit down with
, author of the excellent biography Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. I could talk about this stuff for days, and we had a blast discussing Wilson’s ideas, influence and impact. Consider it a beginner’s guide to avoiding cosmic schmuckery.I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. As always, if you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
— Jim
Links
Our Substack is growing! Subscribe below for more brain-tickling content designed to make you go, "Hmm that’s interesting!
Highlights
Bob Wilson: the Punk Rock Philosopher
“I think that that was a great thing about Bob was that he was this kind of zany, stoner, intellectual fringe. I found most of his books at the Tower Records and not really in the bookstore too much, which all added to what made Tower Records cool. Bob was sort of this kind of rock-and-roll philosopher. He was very Dionysian. His books went with music more than stuffed shirts and long, boring dry sentences. Bob was Joe Strummer on the typewriter, on the keypad. As Strummer talked about punk rock, the point of it is to get to the heart of the matter right away, get right to it, which is what Bob did. He was so literate, so well-read.”
Writing as Distilling
“So he revered the art form. It wasn't like just throw some words together and then let's do some pictures for the book. No, the book itself, every sentence you could tell when you read it is this rich, dripping, distilled 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 dripped through the bean yet, and 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.”
Opening the Aperture of Our Minds
“And this is Wilson's jewel again. He gets right into it in Prometheus Rising 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 it's 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. And it is quite yogic, and he is pushing people in his work to push themselves to gain a deeper understanding, a better, almost more efficient way to perhaps gain more self-awareness.”
Are You a Cosmic Schmuck?
“And that's the message that Wilson is putting out there. I think he reaches for that as a writer, as a thinker. He's always trying to keep that in context, that 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. “
Books & Articles Mentioned
The Thinker and the Prover; by Jim O’Shaughnessy
Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson; by Gabriel Kennedy
Prometheus Unbound by Robert Anton Wilson
Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World by Robert Anton Wilson
The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea
Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati by Robert Anton Wilson
The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science by Robert Anton Wilson
Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson
Quantum Psychology: How Brain Software Programs You and Your World by Robert Anton Wilson
The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot
From Ritual to Romance by Jessie L. Weston
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics by Alfred Korzybski
On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen Paradox; by John S. Bell
How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser
Character Analysis by Wilhelm Reich
Man Meets Dog by Konrad Lorenz
Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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.
Gabriel Kennedy:
Thank you, Jim. Thanks for having me here.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
For the benefit of people listening and watching who don't know who Bob Wilson is, 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, 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.
Gabriel Kennedy:
Oh, 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 one of the most notorious mind-bending books of American literature, The Illuminatus! Trilogy. He is a cornerstone of the 1960s counterculture ethos, if you will, an approach to the world, the world view. But he's also an early warning radar system, being that he is a visionary artist. He's anticipating in his work trajectories and trends that are now unfolding and happening today. And one of his most useful metaphors, I guess, that he used was 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 our own imagination, but regardless, there's crazy things happening within one's environment.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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, while he was a contemporary to a lot of major writers that we all know and thinkers, so people like William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, the late Tom Robbins was actually inspired by Wilson, people like Timothy Leary, these huge names from that era, the '60s, '70s, and '80s. Wilson was there but didn't quite get the attention that he, I guess, deserve. So now we have a chance years later to pull back the frame and see Wilson in the mix, in the milieu. He was at the forefront of these generational movements. So he's a writer, he's an activist, 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.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And because of that, 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, the psyche of the human in the late 20th century. And 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 paranoia from political to personal to collective, if you will. And because of that, he's a very important voice right now.
Gabriel Kennedy:
We live in an exponentially increasing time with communication technologies, computer technologies, and essentially 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, does 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, 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 Illuminatus! Trilogy in high school, and the passion for his work grew over the years.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And I met and I interviewed Wilson in 2003, and then I joined this thing called the Maybe Logical Academy in 2004, which was his remote learning asynchronous website, which is sort of 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 made it my own little mission to write something about him. And it turned into this, a biography, Chapel Perilous.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And 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 leg where Wilson is first talking about it, things like virtual reality. He wrote about that in '91, and he's like, it's a techno zen Buddhist paradise because you can shift realities. And 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 40 years ago, and now we're beginning to see it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Let's get back briefly to chapel perilous, because I always loved the term and I love 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 into liminal zones. But back when Bob was writing it, there was no such ability to do so, and they create what he calls reality tunnels and where these reality tunnels collide. And so, one of the things that I often wondered was what's his solution? I have my ideas, but I did come up with a list of things that he might recommend for making it through chapel perilous, because we all end up in there one way or another.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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 Arthurian legend, which is this exploration of the kind of magical mindset of, if you will, the "western mind." King Arthur is a Celtic king, the king of the Britons before the Anglo-Saxon tribes came in, if you will. And he's around in the legend says around in the fifth or sixth century, him and his knights are holding down England town, if you will, and how the story continues throughout European history, but mostly say through the UK and France. But this is like a connection though, and Wilson taps into this. The Arthurian legend is the magical mindset of the Western mind, if you will. It's an access point to go deeper into the magic that can exist there.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And so, Wilson takes the phrase from T.S. Eliot, his poem The Waste Land that was published in the, I think it was the '20s or the '30s. And 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 within the original telling of the tale. It comes from, the perilous chapel, chapel perilous comes from this poet, Thomas Malory, I believe, and the death of Arthur that was published in the 15th century. And this individual was just continuing the tale that was already in existence that was like an open source access point that people could just delve into this mythical mindset.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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 failed knight who got caught there before him, also along his path to find the holy grail. And when Lancelot gets this piece of clothing, of course, before he gets it, he faces all these horrors and terrible things within this perilous chapel, and he is able to heal his fellow knight when he returns with this piece of cloth. 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 your fellow intrepid traveler, your fellow Journeyer, along this path, someone else who's searching for the Holy Grail. And I think there's a lot of power in that myth, if you will, and so did Wilson and so did many other people, and as I said, Wilson probably 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, 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 because he liked to use that phrase from Crowley, "True initiation never ends."
Gabriel Kennedy:
But it is good to have goals or levels that we can reach along the way of these initiations, I guess. 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. Murphy's Law is the law of the land within chapel perilous. And for Wilson, of course, he's so interesting, he takes this and he applies it to, like I said, like a sort of psychological state of mind. For him, chapel perilous, it's a personal state where a person is undergoing a lot of personal introspection through maybe Jungian psychology, Thelemic magick 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. 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 mass amount of potentia and potential for... And he observed that these strange things that were happening to him defied the laws of known physics, if you will, remote viewing, intuitive psychic moments all in this era of the mid-'70s, and it led him to believe or question, "Are the cause of these events supernatural, or is my thinking that it's supernatural just the product of my own imagination?" And of course, Wilson approaches anything with an extremely questioning and skeptical mind, so it's a lot of fun reading his work as he explores this in himself. Is he in his own chapel perilous and what does that mean? And 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, he's a great writer, so the book is a happy ending. He exits chapel perilous in Cosmic Trigger Volume One.
Gabriel Kennedy:
But studying his life a little bit. 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 right at the exit with the hermit in the tarot deck with a light shining, helping people see their way through. He took the Bodhisattva vow that he would not enter the Nirvanic paradise until he helped his fellow humans come through. Wilson, he was very interesting when it came to his work, he was very much like a knight. All of his magic led to the development and opening of his heart and increasing his compassion and empathy for human beings and himself. So what a wonderful person to study when it comes to that then. When exploring these realms of human potential, Bob's voice is a nice one to hear. Yeah, just the way that he explored this whole concept of chapel perilous, and now 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, there's magicians everywhere.
Gabriel Kennedy:
Some might argue that the current president is a magician for how could a failed real estate developer 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 magic or positive and new thinking. So Wilson made it his mission to explore this as well, and he did so wonderfully, and I just wanted to... This is the first biography of Robert Anton Wilson. I think it's a perfect time for people to learn more about this individual. Those who already know his work, I think that I've gotten a lot of nice feedback where they've felt really good returning to 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 MacGowan once said, "A man you don't meet every day." So that was Bob Wilson.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Yeah, and the effect on people of chapel perilous is an interesting thing to me because Bob would say that, "Look, it can either make you incredibly anxious and paranoid 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 and you're going to believe everything, or you can be a raving agnostic, which is what Bob chose obviously. 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, zero-100 sort of deterministic thinking, right?
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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.” He was a real enemy of certitude 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 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. I already loved T.S. Eliot. I already loved quantum physics. I already loved a ton of the things.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Nietzsche, for example, he goes on at great length. Nietzsche's observation that we are all greater artists than we believe or know. And what he was talking about there was essentially we create our own world to a large extent. We are co-creators of all 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 “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.”
Gabriel Kennedy:
Yeah, I love that. That's a great quote. I love that, Jim. Thank you, man. 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... I think that that was a great thing about Bob was that he was this kind of zany, stoner, intellectual fringe. I found most of his books at the Tower Records and not really in the bookstore too much, which all added to what made Tower Records cool. Bob was sort of this kind of rock-and-roll philosopher. He was very Dionysian. His books went with music more than stuffed shirts and long, boring dry sentences. Bob was Joe Strummer on the typewriter, on the keypad. As Strummer talked about punk rock, the point of it is to get to the heart of the matter right away, get right to it, which is what Bob did. He was so literate, so well-read.
Gabriel Kennedy:
He was born in, I should have said earlier, 1932, born during the heat of the Great Depression. His family was greatly affected. He's a second-generation American. His father's family came from Ireland, his mother's family came from Trieste, now I guess that's in Italy, right? And Wilson was... He had no time to waste. He was born poor in the South Shores of Brooklyn, and at two years old he contracted polio and then he never really received a cure from polio. He was born and got the virus before the vaccine was created. So his mother relied on an alternative medicine that offered him some form of relief for decades. But my point is that for that alternative medicine, he had to activate his muscles and constantly move, and 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. Bob still has this. He's born with this just grit, this kind of South Brooklyn grit.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And he's 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. And I say that not as a poetic metaphor, but I believe the heart is the heart is the second brain. There's 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 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 pop culture. So to be a writer was to be like that was hardcore, you're really pushing the envelope forward for the culture.
Gabriel Kennedy:
So he revered the art form. It wasn't like just throw some words together and then let's do some pictures for the book. No, the book itself, every sentence you could tell when you read it is this rich, dripping, distilled 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 dripped through the bean yet, and 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. 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 quick documentary, if you will.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And as such, being so... Hemingway was a big influence on him. T.S. Eliot years later, the modernist writers, all of them, and of course Wilson lands on Ezra Pound and James Joyce. James Joyce, especially as his main literary influence and passion to go deeper and learning about. And so just as we study Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Anton Wilson was studying James Joyce. As people wanted to read Wilson's books... 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, which was pretty funny. And then they read his stuff. And as such, James Joyce, especially in Finnegans Wake, I mean, that is the textbook for a map of a liminal zone. I'll join you here. And Finnegans Way takes place in a dream state, whereas Joseph Campbell described it, that's a non-Aristotelian state. The rules of a rational universe where A causes B, gravity, et cetera, does not exist within a dream state, and then therefore, neither does the Aristotelian logic.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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, huge influence of his, this guy named Alfred Korzybski, Count Korzybski, who wrote as you know that big giant book Science and Sanity, where Korzybski essentially wanted to use language to clarify thought a little bit more. He thought that Western culture got caught up in the sort of trap of thinking by applying Aristotle's notion of the excluded middle to our reality so often. So meaning we will say basically that a person or an object, we'll just focus on a person, say, 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.
Gabriel Kennedy:
So that's pretty major because that coincides with everything we're looking at with quantum physics today. Essentially, 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 and not anything definite, if you will, we can sort of realize that we are in a liminal state. Does this make sense right now?
Gabriel Kennedy:
I want to touch on everything that you were just kind of speaking on and really put the jewel of what Wilson was forwarding, and that is basically we suggest 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 every step of the way, we just kind of assess where we're at and then respond as such. Yeah, and I'll just leave it at that. I hope that was somewhat clear.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Totally. Totally. And Korzybski, 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 Von Neumann's third category of maybe. 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, Painter van Gogh. They were so far ahead of their time that to use Bob's own example of the idea of being either tuned in or not tuned in. He said essentially the microscopic world was not not-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. 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 in much the same way that people didn't understand Joyce's novels because they were the first of their kind, and van Gogh, the paintings. 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 Bob did that with everything. His book, the New Inquisition, Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science. That predates a lot of what the arguments you hear happening today in terms of the materialists' worldview of science is being assaulted from virtually every kind of avenue, 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.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But he also sort of was the first to see that a lot of emotional plagues, I call them mind viruses, are always acting on us, 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. And the other thing about him that I find really interesting is you mentioned Joe down the block. That is very consistent with ancient Taoist tales. There's one where a farmer decides that the neighborhood kid is a 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.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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 and that more importantly, 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 a lot of people have come back to me and they're like, "Wow. I found that so freeing," because one friend, he did a simple thing. He realized that he just hates peas, but he felt that he always had to eat them because of his imprinting as a youth.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Bob also talked quite a bit about imprinting, and he got that from Timothy Leary, 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.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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 shining, holding a mirror to the reader's self, which is the role of great art. George Bernard Shaw, I think said that it is the role of the artist to reveal mankind onto himself or onto herself, and he applied that to theater. And the great art, 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 gain a deeper education of your own humanity. And 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 as we stand on the cusp and the precipice of, and it seems to be here, AI is not just knocking at the door, it's kicking down the door. And Wilson, to study his life and his approach to art and philosophy, I think 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 a hundred years, if you will.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And in terms of learning how the human mind and body psyche works is we have to get a full understanding of the light and the shadow, if you will. And Wilson being essentially an autodidact, he's self-taught for the most part. He did attend NYU Teachers College for a brief amount of time, he did go to college. He only left that teacher's college after he met Arlen and started his family in the late 1950s, Arlen being his wife. But he loved knowledge, the way of knowledge was his path. He was a philosopher, Philo-sophia, he was a lover of knowledge, and those people are always great to read. And so in terms of doing what he thought 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.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And for 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, at least with the approach of his work, open, like keep his heart open while he was writing all 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 a associate editor at one of the most highest paying jobs at a magazine at the time.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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 he thought that was easier said than done. Even though he knew how hard it was, he didn't realize that it would be that hard just waiting for the wheels of the industry to grind and move, because it took forever for Illuminati's Trilogy to be published, five years, and that's really what started his career in his forties, which today it's different. It's great, you're in your forties, you can kickstart things going, but in the 70s, he's a rookie at 42, but he really is a greatly discovered, former underground journalist now finally being discovered a little bit in the 70s by the heads, the counterculture heads. And now we're in this age 50 years later of it's high time to rediscover Bob and some of the other contemporaries too, especially John C. Lilly, and I think there's some confusion on the web these days about John C. Lilly.
Gabriel Kennedy:
But Robert Anton Wilson, it's high time for him to be rediscovered, because as you said, he's ahead of the curve man, and he knew that in a way, he accepted that. He swallowed that pill that it might take some time for his stuff to ultimately hit. He hoped that people would get it immediately, but sort of like Philip K. Dick, his contemporary, the irony of Philip K. Dick is he got so famous a year after he died. And then so Bob, it's taken a few more years, but the water is percolating. Orson Welles, one of Bob's favorite artists once said about Ernest Hemingway, that 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 awareness and celebration of Ernest Hemingway.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And I think the same goes for Bob. Welles said it was about a 10,15 year clip. Bob died in 2007, so it's been 17 years, I think that we're approaching a time of rediscovery of Wilson's work and insight, because is it a rediscovery or a discovery of someone who was writing 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, he's calling it Bell's Theorem, just literally calling it based off of the paper written by John S. Bell, the Irish physicist who 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.
Gabriel Kennedy:
They wrote that in the 30s, and then 1964, John S. Bell writes his amazing paper on the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen Paradox, which establishes the test now to test what they were talking about, which itself was revolutionary. And then Wilson is writing about all of this stuff in '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, it was just Bob hanging with these wild-eyed particle physicists in Berkeley, people like Saul-Paul Sirag, Jack Sarfatti, Fred Alan Wolf, Nick Herbert, a number of other physicists, and 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 Schrödinger, Einstein, and then of course John Bell's paper, which that changed everything, that changed the game.
Gabriel Kennedy:
So today, John Bell's paper and quantum entanglement is, according to Kaiser, one of the most referenced scientific papers of all time. So Bob is hip, Bob was there at the jump, bob was with quantum physics before it was cool, man, you know what I mean? And so this is what is so valuable about him. And of course the way he writes is so funny and fun, and he may not be for everybody, his tone, and his mood, and the way he writes, but if you like that sort of thing, he's like, George Carlin on the keys, right? He's 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 gaining awareness of your own emotional plague or like you said, mind virus, I like that metaphor too.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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, the late 50s, 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 Bob is part of a generation that discovers the work of Wilhelm Reich. There are other writers that were hugely influenced by Reich or enthused by his ideas, Norman Mailer, of course, and a whole generation.
Gabriel Kennedy:
Reich's notion is two main metaphors, the character armor, which is this notion that we have armored spaces on our body because we're not aware of that part of our body anymore, we're actually kind of shut off, if you will. And to gain access to this part of our body, we could heal parts of our mind. That was Reich's approach in a way, that our subconscious existed within our physical body, so if you could heal that, you could heal parts of your subconscious, if you will. And he's got a great book, I think it's called, Character Analysis, that's the book, so about one's body armor, but then also this notion of the emotional plague, which is that people are all armored up, we have this body armor, character armor all around because the armor forms through trauma. We are traumatized through life, even from birth trauma on.
Gabriel Kennedy:
Human beings, we like to think we're very tough and whatnot, but we're really fragile, hurt little beings out here in this big world in a way. Within this way of looking at things, and it's popular today, everyone is traumatized. And of course, if you're reading Bob, that's one way of looking at it. He called it the Wooden Leg Syndrome, in a way, or The Walking Wounded. And we all have wounds, even just from birth. And so to, I guess look at your own stuff without, to cast a colder eye, to not get too wrapped up in the narrative of how hard it is, and just observe 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 just looking at yourself a little bit, utilizing a little introspection with compassion, I think that's a major part of Bob's work with humor.
Gabriel Kennedy:
He called it the Cosmic Schmuck, realizing when you yourself are a cosmic schmuck. But that's not to say that this is not, as you mentioned, a winner script and a loser script. Wilson considered himself having a winner script. This coming from the transactional psychology movement, this idea that we could walk around with interior dialogue all day saying, a loser script is, "I suck, they suck, she sucks, we suck." And the winner script is like, "I'm good, they're good, we're good, we could work this out." And when you are aware of your awareness, you see how powerful it is. And many people report having psychedelic experiences where they become very aware of how their concentration and focus shapes the moment that they're in. Just like when you're a little kid, you see pictures all the time or videos. Little kids fall flat on their face, I remember this, but you get up and you look around and if people feel some compassion, but if you laugh, little kids laugh too.
Gabriel Kennedy:
You can easily just sort of, your approach to life, the choice that you make, as you say, at the end of the sentence. And this is powerful American existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, that was a major part of his work, is that it all comes down to freedom and responsibility, make a choice. We live in a liminal state, sure, things are always in potential, but we also exist in this physical location where you have to make choices. You could stand in the middle of the road all day looking up at the great sky, but as a bus comes jettisoning 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 Wilson, I think 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 how your own perceptual grid works if you are, I'd say, moving beyond a naive Wilsonian approach.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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 you read a Prometheus Rising and whatnot, and 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. It's about gaining way more specific understanding of the detail and nuances. 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 the whole painting if you're able to see it.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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, the Native Americans, some of them didn't even see the ships. I've heard this before, I don't know how true this story is, but only some of them could literally see the ships, because they 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 an individual's perceptual grid could literally block out the stimuli of an approaching ship? And this is Wilson's jewel again. He gets right into it in Prometheus Rising 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 it's too much.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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. And it is quite yogic, and he is pushing people in his work to push themselves to gain a deeper understanding, a better, almost more efficient way to 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, a false negative, or a false positive. So we see that punk-ass kid walking down the street with skateboard and a backwards hat. "Of course, he stole my newspaper, that jerk, and I bet he's been doing it every freaking day for a year." But little do we know, it's the cute little poodle or pooch from next door that just likes to play with you and steal your newspaper. And so when you see that kid, he's a punk-ass, but little do we know this kid is helping his grandma stay alive in that house, et cetera, et cetera. And isn't it wonderful when we learn more things about people and it actually makes them better, nicer, awesome, more awesome people when we learn this about each other? And I think Wilson, I didn't touch on the imprinting yet, but tying that insight to the notion of imprinting, yeah, an imprint is essentially, according to Wilson and Leary, like this moment in person's life, and of course between the ages of zero and six, when our brains are most malleable, and for instance, children can learn second or third languages at that age way better than any other adult could ever learn because there's something going on with the neuroplasticity of the brain at that age.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And during that time, for instance, we imprint what he called a neophobic or a, what was it, neophilic, approach to the world. One where we want to explore the world or one where we want to retreat back to mommy or whatnot. And then of course, then that's the first circuit, then this is activated during infancy. And 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. So they're putting together sort of a very loose, interesting map of development, individual and then maybe collective, but it's a model, and they're very clear on that. And Wilson expected that science would one day supersede the model that they laid out. And coming from 50 years ago, the fact that Wilson and Leary were speaking about this stuff and zeroing in on this notion of imprinting.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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 Konrad Lorenz, who was the ethologist or the biologist, some kind of oligist who studied geese and animals, these awesome little creatures. And basically, 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. But Lorenz, I think he won a Nobel Prize, and of course, his discoveries were all coming out in the 70s, so this is why Leary, he used that term. But since then, I think things came out about he might've been involved with the Nazi party or something like that, so he's not popular, Konrad Lorenz today, nor is his terminology.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And so the term now is critical activation period, and of course it's a 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 next to the rock and roll magazines, 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 places like record stores. Today, it's different, everything's online. But at that time, and Wilson's Cosmic Trigger: Volume One was first sold by the [inaudible 01:14:53] brothers, who they started out as a head shop in Berkeley. This was all part of a wider culture and the counterculture education, which was a cooler understanding of things.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And Wilson wasn't just blowing proverbial smoke, this guy could hold his own with major thinkers of his day. And one of the reasons why people still poo-poo him today was like, "Well, who was he? No one knew who he was. He must not have been that smart." It's like, yeah, cool, you could say that about how many other geniuses that we now know today. 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 such a great read. And of course, Wilson gets some things wrong, and of course, the Eighth Circuit Model of Intelligence, I mean, he doesn't even call it the Eighth Circuit Model by the end of his life.
Gabriel Kennedy:
But of course, there are things that are wrong. Leary loved to use the baseball metaphor, "A hitter is a great hitter when he bats over 300." 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 much 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're going for it, that's the most important thing. And Wilson was able to document that, and 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 to get you going in the chapel perilous. He's very clear, as Gurdžiev used to say, what is it? Gurdžiev called it The Terror of The Situation. Wilson flipped it and called it The Horror of The Situation.
Gabriel Kennedy:
As Buddhists monks used to say when it comes to meditating, you live in a burning house. 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 magma on a volcano that just spewed forth great terrible existence. 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. In the mythic hero, we are the most powerful 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, that's why he is an ultra skeptic, and an open- eyed believer in the most positive projection of humanity. I mean, he liked to explore all the rooms of his mind, if you will. He opened a lot of doors, and his value is in his ability to 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, because he had his own unique, fun, funny way of writing about these things. And truly a philosophical comedian or a comedic philosopher, like him and George Carlin hand in hand.
Gabriel Kennedy:
So yeah, there's so much to discover with Bob, so much to tune in, if you will, right? And I really sought to get it all in there, get as much as I could about his life and his work into my book, and to present it in the vein of Wilson, which is like to be as erudite, as imagistically focused as possible, get to the point with every sentence, every line, and try to elucidate these really sort of far out vistas and philosophies that Wilson explored. But he already did such a great job himself of, say, taking highly jargonized material, say Science and Sanity, that Korzybski book, which is just filled with these wild calculus equations and hyphenated words, organism as a whole, interacting with environment. And 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 if we were to believe that. And then he said that he read it every year since just as a tune up.
Gabriel Kennedy:
That's a guy that I'm going to read some more, right? He said he had a very analytical mind, said Wilson, right? My mind was more artistically inclined. Wilson's mind is like an engineer, and that's why he's like... Well, so before I go much further to just kind of put a cherry on the top of this, I think that's the great thing about Bob is discovering his influences. And he's so open about it. He'll tell you who influenced this line of his thinking. And then in that regard, he's a great teacher, because he introduces you to so many great minds from Joyce to Buckminster Fuller, to Alfred Kurzybski, even Ilya Prigogine. Never heard of that person before. Dissipative structures. You're reading about dissipative structures again in the back of Tower Records, you're doing something right.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
Wow. So yeah, that is quite a tour force of all of the various influences, from Bell with his quantum entanglement. Now, of course, actual quantum physicists are testing whether something they call retro causality is possible. In other words, can the future influence the past? You mentioned Lorenz. Man Meets Dog was a classic book that I read when I was a kid. And 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.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You mentioned the probably apocryphal story about the natives not seeing the ships coming. And Bob wrote something along the lines of “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 into the idea, the thinker and the prover, where 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.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
But then he points out, once you've decided 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. Classic example with the flat earth folks, right? You can even take them up in a balloon, and they will just simply reinforce, "Oh, this is my mind playing a trick on me."
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
And the thing that I find so refreshing about his thinker-prover idea is there is a way out, right? And 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 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, the truth ought to be predictive, right? So, the closer the outcome matches to your predicted outcome, the better calibrated your mental models.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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, what... You mentioned the cosmic schmuck line. I love that line.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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 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?
Gabriel Kennedy:
That's a tough question. It's tough because Wilson was so great at taking what he wanted and leaving the rest, if you will, and he wasn't afraid to... So, say, take for instance Ezra Pound, right? Ezra Pound, recognized as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, right? But Ezra Pound is also a fascist, right? I mean, he was probably, to the day he died, a fascist. Maybe not, though, but I'm guessing yes. Not a good look. And also an anti-Semite during many, many years of his career. That needs to be said. But Wilson was very clear, and he wrote about it as well. 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."
Gabriel Kennedy:
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!" It could be anybody. Your favorite pop singer from the '80s turns out to also be an anti-Semite or fascist or whatever. Or even worse, you take Diddy, someone who created such funny, fun music, dancing around like a goofball on stage. Little did you know he was having these Diddy parties and really taking advantage of people. And Picasso, et cetera, et cetera. What do you do with that? What do you do with these terrible aspects of people? And are you able to take a jewel that they offer and then kind of see the truth in it and digest it through your own reality tunnel, if you will?
Gabriel Kennedy:
And Wilson did that with Ezra Pound. 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 create it, make it part of his voice and vision. To borrow a phrase from the 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, wear your influences on your sleeve, present an homage.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And it might be ironic for some people to hear me say that because many of his novels were kind of pastiche and homages to other writers and novelists and whatnot. But my argument is that even when he was doing a James Joyce impression, if you will, or a Flann O'Brien homage, it was still Wilsonian. There was still the Wilsonian flavor, right? And so there's a long list of influences, but if I had to just zero in, and just right now I guess the largest influence, I mean, I'm tempted to say Joyce, but I think Korzybski. Yeah, I think Alfred Korzybski. I think general semantics had a major influence on Wilson's philosophical approach to life.
Gabriel Kennedy:
General semantics and what they propose I guess would get categorized today as linguistic determinism, right? So that the thoughts, as you said... Seldom do we, and this is being from Bob, seldom do we see the things that we don't already believe, right? And the power of our own perception. And that's power as a writer. And of course there are other writers and more and more today. I mean, this was a huge market probably in the aughts where from Eckhart Tolle down the line, the power of the moment, the power of perception, and the power of your perception in the moment. Again, it's just the way that Wilson writes is so appealing to me, and the way that he's able to... The thinker and the prover, it's not even a metaphor because listening to you describe it as Wilson describes it, and it's like, yeah, of course. That's amazing. 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. It's in Prometheus Rising.
Gabriel Kennedy:
But he's like a DJ, right? He's sampling, but he's attributing, because it's sad, but there are many writers who will basically plagiarize their friends and act like that's their voice, when they could easily just attribute someone. And Bob follows a rule that is a rule for today, and he's doing it prehensively, which is always a tribute, right? And especially now more and more, because where are we getting these ideas from? We're open channels, man. And there's more and more communication channels than ever before. We're receiving more and more signal to noise than ever before. I don't want to call it all noise, because there's information within... We're receiving more stimuli than ever before through communication technologies.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And so Wilson is a DJ that's, 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 could see that he's working towards something in most of his nonfiction work. And that's him saying, "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 we don't have scientific metaphors yet. We don't have scientific theories for these actions that we're observing."
Gabriel Kennedy:
A nice contemporary of his in that regard is Rupert Sheldrake, who I believe you've interviewed and you spoke with, and he left a great impression on Wilson with the notion of the morphic fields, and where does causality come from, if you will? And just the idea that we are able to constantly prove a preconception 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. We're map making creatures. We're pattern recognizing creatures. This is just the way our makeup works.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And so in doing that, in seeking to find patterns, we always want to make predictions, right? Again, Wilson is clear, we're constantly evolving. 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 sapien 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.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And I really make a point to present this in the book, is that Wilson's whole philosophy is a really nice process philosophy, right? He's just drawing constant attention to the fact that we're constantly in flux and we're always moving, but how important it is to never lose sight of context. 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 so you could get to the point of discussing quantum physics without sounding like a new age like fool. Because there's a real discussion going on, and to learn that is essential, right?
Gabriel Kennedy:
And I think Wilson inspires. He can inspire people more, as all good artists, than he was able to accomplish in his own life too, because Wilson points people in the direction of probability, and 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. When you told me that you were a fan of Bob and you already had this huge career in finance, and that's all predictive Bayesian sort of probability. So, it makes total sense, right?
Gabriel Kennedy:
And this is another great endorsement for reading Wilson. It's like you can see the importance of constantly appraising where you're at and recreating the map. I mean, 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 at Wilson is Quantum Psychology, because he really is in the groove at that moment. He's really, really presenting his philosophy really well. And it's that we are in this flux. We need to come up and recognize patterns, it's just part of this world that we're in, but recognize that we're part of a larger thing that's in flux, right?
Gabriel Kennedy:
And so, we are cosmic schmucks, but understanding 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 walking the way of the fellow who started Aikido, in a way. I can't remember his name. It's hard to pronounce. But his whole path, the guy who started Aikido, was he was a deadly martial artist, but then he came to the realization that 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 good of it all.
Gabriel Kennedy:
And that's the message that Wilson is putting out there. I think he reaches for that as a writer, as a thinker. He's always trying to keep that in context, that 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 highly attuned and have a good understanding and knowledge that the map is not the territory, and that everyone's voice on the ship is important. And to realize, "You're at the hull. What do you see? You're up there. What do you see?"
Gabriel Kennedy:
Because we're in this together. We're on Spaceship Planet Earth, to borrow the phrase from Buckminster Fuller, and 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 change agents, if you will. We're the ones that are going to make things better." So, it's all about understanding context. And I think Wilson's work really does a good job at helping people to stay present in every sort of situation, location, and moment that they're in.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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 time flies when you're talking about things that you love. Gabriel, I love the book. Where can people find it and buy it?
Gabriel Kennedy:
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 could find the book on Amazon. com and also on Lulu Press. And yeah, again, it's the Chapel Perilous: The Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. And also you could check out my Substack, which is gabrielpatrickkennedy.substack.com, and that's where you will find most of the news about the book.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
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 re-education 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 are going to incept all eight 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, " 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?
Gabriel Kennedy:
That's a heavy subject. It's a heavy question. Two words.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
It doesn't have to be words. It could be two sentences.
Gabriel Kennedy:
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.
Jim O’Shaughnessy:
You'll leave it at that? I love that last one. Yeah. 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.
Gabriel Kennedy:
Thank you, Jim.
Share this post