Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt of The Day 7

Robert Anton Wilson was stricken by polio as a youngster. As he reached an older age he began to exhibit signs of Post-Polio Syndrome, a deteriorating disorder of the nervous system which occurs in many polio survivors. This progressed through it's many debilitating and painful stages until his death on January 11, 2007. The following excerpt is RAW's recounting of his reacion to the premature obituary for him printed in 1994.

Cosmic Trigger: Volume 3: My Life After Death

I GOT RUN OVER ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

In Which the Author Learns of His Own Death
and We Begin to Look Behind the
Masks of Art and Magick

This is not a normal world.
-- Batman

"Maybe" is a thin reed to hang your whole life on, but it's all we've got.
-- Hannah and Her Sisters

According to reliable sources, I died on February 22, 1994 -- George Washington's birthday. I felt nothing special or shocking at the time, and believed that I still sat at my word processor working on a novel called Bride of Illuminatus. At lunch-time, however, when I checked my voice mail, I found that Tim Leary and a dozen other friends had already called to ask to speak to me, or -- if they still believed in Reliable Sources -- to offer support and condolences to my grieving family. I quickly gathered that news of my tragic end had appeared on Internet, one of the most popular computer networks, in the form of an obituary from the Los Angeles Times:

"Noted science-fiction author Robert Anton Wilson was found dead in his home yesterday, apparently the victim of a heart attack. Mr. Wilson, 63, was discovered by his wife, Arlen.
"Mr Wilson was the author of numerous books....He was noted for his libertarian viewpoints, love of technology and off the wall humor. Mr Wilson is survived by his wife and two children."

This L.A. Times obit originally got on the net via somebody in Cambridge, Mass. I thought immediately of the pranksters at M.I.T. -- the Gremlins of Cyberspace, as somebody called them.

I admired the artistic verisimilitude of the Gremlin who forged that obit. He mis-identified my ouvre. (Only 6 of my 28 books could possibly get classified as science-fiction, and perhaps 3 more as science-faction.) He also, more clumsily, stated my age wrong by one year and the number of my surviving children wrong by one child. Little touches of incompetence and ignorance like that helped create the impression of a real, honest-to-Jesus L.A. Times article -- just as creaking chairs, background coughs, overlapping dialogue, scrupulously "bad" sound quality etc. make the bogus newsreels in Orson Welles's two greatest movies, Citizen Kane and F For Fake, seem "just like the real thing."

The forged L.A. Times obituary may not rank with Welles's most monumental hoaxes -- e.g. his prematurely Deconstructionist "war of the worlds" radio show, where bland music and increasingly ominous newsbreaks thoroughly confused a mass audience about the borderline between "art" and "reality." But the Times forgery, if not of Wellesian heft, certainly contained a Wellesian blend of art and magic: in retrospect, it even reminds me, a little, of the 1923 Surrealist art show, in which the audience first encountered a taxi-cab in the garden -- a cab which had rain falling inside but not outside -- and then confronted a sign telling them gnomically:

DADA IS NOT DEAD
WATCH YOUR OVERCOAT

I always think that double dip of guerilla ontology (by Dali and Breton, respectively) carried the baffled audience beyond surrealism into post-modernism, i.e. Total Agnosticism and/or terminal bewilderment. Certainly, art and life, and art and magick, have never gotten clearly disentangled again to the satisfaction of all observers. In this struggle to knock down the Iron Curtain between creativity and "reality," I tend to see the Wellesian men-from-Mars hoax as the second major step after surrealism and, ahem, I sometimes immodestly consider my own works a third step.

But the Gremlin who killed me on February 22 carried the "transformation of mind and all that resembles it" (Breton) one quantum jump further than I ever had. He caused real grief and shock, if not Wellesian mass panic.

One friend told me that the first bulletin he saw, on Compuserve, just quoted the alleged LA obit and then added, "This is as bad as learning that Zappa died. I think I'm going to meditate a bit, in his memory."

Another networker, female, keyboarded in a whole chapter of Ecclesiastes in my memory -- "For everything there is a season, a time for every matter under the sun: a time to be born, a time to die" etc. -- and then added "Now get out there and PARTY LIKE HE'D WANT YOU TO!"

One bulletin from "The House of Apostles of Eris, San Francisco" said that "attempts to contact Robert Anton Wilson have been unsuccessful" -- hmmm? -- but nevertheless reassured all that "RAW is alive and busy with religious works." I think the author of that bulletin intended to sound unconvincing, especially to the initiates of my Classic Novels (Erisian "religious works" consist of mind-fucks or "shocks " in the strict Masonic sense). He or she certainly cast contagious suspicion on the other denials being posted on the nets by various friends who had managed to contact me. Certainly, the conspiracy buffs who have followed my career ever since Iluminatus will not believe a report that includes the suspicious admission that nobody could find me .... Many contributions to the alive-or-dead controversy seemed unsure whether I had died (or hadn't died) in Los Angeles or San Francisco. The funniest one of all claimed I survived, but in Howth (County Dublin, Ireland) -- where I lived during most of the 1980s:

"Contacted at his home in Howth Castle, Wilson said 'The reports of my death have been slightly exaggerated. I can still totter about a bit and even crack a weak joke occasionally.'"

To which some wit, recognizing the Joycean jest, replied: "Shouldn't that be Howth Castle and Environs?"

The Howth legend continued to circulate from one net to another, and soon included the news that I had taken over management of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) after the death of its founder, Prof. Timothy F.X. Finnegan, of Trinity College, Dublin, and that CSICON still offers $100,000 to any "normalist" who can produce "a perfectly normal person, place or thing -- or even an ordinary sunset. Or an average day."

Of course, Finnegan and CSICON exist in some sense, like Howth Castle, as readers of my works know by now -- not quite in the sense in which the Statue of Liberty exists, but not entirely in the metaphoric sense in which the National Debt and the Holy Trinity "exist" either. But the result of all this was beginning to make me wonder if I only exist in some semiotic or metaphoric sense myself, sort of like an elderly male Madonna. I mean, like, man, do I exist the way the Howth Castle in Dublin exists, or the way the Howth Castle and Environs in Finnegans Wake exists?

I remembered a Spiritualist treatise I had once read. (I skim all sorts of weird literature, which keeps me from believing totally any of the stuff we get told as Official Truth by the major media). This ghostly tome claimed that we poor spectres often do not know we've died until some medium "contacts" us and explains why people have started treating us so rudely lately -- e.g., why even our wives and children ignore us outright unless we knock over the lamps or rap in code on the tables.

I had also read Jonathan Swift's hilarious "pamphlet war" with the astrologer Partridge about whether Partridge had or had not died on the day predicted by a rival astrologer, Isaac Bickerstaff. ("Bickerstaff" sounds a lot like Swift himself, operating behind a Mask as usual, just as Lemuel Gulliver, the scientific world traveler, also sounded curiously like Swift; we shall learn much about Reality and Masks in this enquiry.) Although Partridge insisted vehemently on his continued vitality, Swift's argument, a model of Celtic subtlety, held that just because a man claims he hasn't died and may even believe it himself, this does not logically require us to credit his unsupported testimony. This left poor Partridge floundering -- (never argue with a Dublin intellectual) -- and now I felt myself floundering a bit also.

Obviously, my testimony on the matter would not convince Swift, when he decided to play the Scientific Skeptic, and I wondered if it would convince CSICOP --the group opposing CSICON.

CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) believes that the "normal" actually exists somewhere, and not just in some Platonic spook world. They claim it exists everywhere, and that nothing else at all exists anywhere. (If you see any of the 10100 not-normal things in this world, they will claim you had a hallucination.)

As a famous bard wrote:

He thought he saw a banker's clerk descending from a bus
He looked again and saw it was a hippopotamus

I remembered a Phil Dick novel, Ubik, about a bunch of dead people who don't know they have died and think the universe has slowly started turning into shit. If that happened to me, I would not and could not know about it -- by definition.

Thoughts like that can really unsettle your mental architecture, especially if you wasted a lot of your life on epistemological philosophy, and on cannabis extracts. I, alas, have indulged both those vices on many occasions, and I fear that I have become a horrible example of Aggravated Existentialism. Worse yet: I have also heard Albert Rosenfeld, a distinguished M.D., lecturing on "clinical death," say, "We have come a long way from the day when Marshall Dillon lifts the sheet and says, 'He's dead, all right.' Now it takes a committee to decide." But these ontological doubts got pushed aside when the C.I.A. entered the Trip, playing the Wrathful Demons of this bardo. Somebody (signing her/him/itself as "Anon.") logged the following into several computer bulletin boards:

"THE C.I.A. KILLED ROBERT ANTON WILSON...

"Wilson did not die of natural causes. He was assassinated. Earlier on that day, Wilson was injected with a time-delay poison based on shellfish toxin, by agents of the CIA's special SUPER SECRET BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD, using a special microscopic needle made of a plastic which dissolves in the body without a trace. Wilson's body had immediately been taken and cremated and the usual step of an autopsy had been bypassed, BY ORDERS FROM ABOVE.

"It is clear why the power$ that be wanted Wilson dead. Wilson was a dangerous element; the government can only govern if the majority does not question the system (whoever currently "rules" does not matter.) The troublesome minority can be dealt with discreetly, by means of EXECUTIVE ACTION (assassination), which is what happened with Wilson....

"Earlier the same agencies (CIA, NRO, DEA and CFR/TLC/Bilderberger BOLSHEVIK SHADOW GOVERNMENT) had LSD advocate Timothy Leary neutralized with a neurotoxin which DESTROYS THE MIND and ARTIFICIALLY INDUCES A STATE SIMILAR TO SENILITY...

"Dissemenation of this information is encouraged. MAKE 30 COPIES."

Cute as a shit-house rat, I thought, when I read this. Now, whenever Tim tells people I haven't died, that will furnish further evidence of his "senility." Of course, I also enjoyed the idea that somebody, somewhere, might consider me important enough to terrorize the C.I.A. and call out their SUPER SECRET BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD to terminate me. Since CLASSIFIED represents the rating directly below SECRET in government security manuals, I wondered how the CLASSIFIED BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD spends its time -- giving housemaid's knee or genital warts to editorial cartoonists? Others grew more eldritch:

"Maybe the government has installed a VIRTUAL RAW in his place to allay people's fears. Oh, sure, he can respond all he wants, but I know it's not the real RAW."

But my favorite contribution of the Wilson Mythos was logged by somebody using the moniker, The Green One:

"There is no toxin. There is no needle. You have not heard of a toxin. You have not heard of a needle. They were not tools of the conspiracy. There is no conspiracy. The toxin and the needle, which do not exist, played no part in the conspiracy, which does not exist. Fnord. Repeat after me. There is no toxin..."

What can I add to that bit of guerilla ontology, except to say "Fnord indeed?"

Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt Of The Day 6

This is -FUPPETS- 6th installment of the Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt Of The Day. Today's excerpt is from RAW's book Cosmic Trigger Vol II: Down To Earth. In this, he lays down his rules for dealing with BS (i.e., Belief Systems, dogmas, absolute truths, etc.), which are (1) never believe totally in someone else's BS and (2) never believe totally in your own BS.
Both of these rules are among the most important of -FUPPETS- Rules To Live By. They make it a lot easier to navigate the ever-increasing miasma of bullshit that humans claim is dead-certain true, and that you must believe too.

*****

Cosmic Trigger Volume II: Down to Earth

EVERYBODY GETS A CAR

By 1900, when my father was 8 years old, information had doubled again. The process had only taken 150 years this time.

That year Max Planck published his first paper on quantum mechanics, beginning the process by which science in this century would gradually abandon Aristotelian logic and evolve in a non-Aristotelian, almost Buddhist direction. We were learning that the "one" "objective" Aristotelian "real world" previously posited by all Western thought existed only as a concept in our linguistic structures: that the only worlds we knew were plural and created by our senses and scientific instruments, all of them uncertain to some degree and all of them given structure by the inbuilt hardware and software of our senses and instruments.

The Boer war was raging in South Africa, as the English and Dutch fought over which of them should govern and exploit the native Black population. In China, the Boxer Rebellion represented another of the countless efforts by Third World peoples to throw off dominations of any and all white conquerors, British, Dutch, whoever.

In 1900 also the king of Italy was assassinated by idealists who thought the liberation of the workers could be achieved by murdering the Masters one by one. In Russia, Lenin returned from 3 years exile in Siberia, and went on plotting to liberate the workers by organized world revolution. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union was formed in New York by those who thought the workers could be liberated by forming coalitions and bargaining collectively with the Masters.

All of this followed, inevitably, from the general increase in living standards throughout the Industrial world. In the new Second Wave civilizations, the ruling class was living maybe 100 times better than the ruling class of ancient Rome; the middle classes were living better than ever before; and the idea that even the lower order had the right to a decent life, formualated by the most radical thinkers of the 18th century, continued to reassert itself, in dozens of forms now forgotten in addition to the two forms we all know.

1. the Democratic Socialism which by learning to co-exist with free enterprise, has permanently improved life in Europe, Canada and most of the industrial world, outside the U.S.; and
2. the Totalitarian Socialism of Marx, which has recently collapsed after making a mess of all its Utopian dreams.

Also in 1900... Major Walter Reed discovered that yellow fever was not contagious by persuading volunteers to sleep with blankets taken from fever victims who had died, and then he correctly deduced and later proved that the fever was spread by a mosquito. Mendel's great essay on genetics, ignored for 35 years, was suddenly rediscovered by the scientific community. Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams.

Human life span in the U.S. had quantum-jumped to 47 years. For the first time in history, a newborn human had a good chance of living longer than 30 years.

Also in 1900.... the U.S. Navy bought its first submarine, and the Kodak company sold its first camera.

Only one U.S. home in seven had a bathtub. As Sinclair Lewis records, the Reagan-Bush mentalities of the period often said, "Why give bathtubs to the poor? They'll only put coal in them."

Brooks Adams had already published The Law of Civilization and Decay, in which the Westward movement of Capital throughout history was documented for the first time. Adams did not realize that this trajectory was, more fundamentally, a movement of information -- capital being the fruit of technology, i.e., of information that is totally accurate -- but he did see that, if the trend continued, the English Empire would collapse by about 1950 and be replaced by an American Empire.

Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt Of The Day 5

Today's ROBERT ANTON WILSON Excerpt Of The Day, (#5 if you're counting), comes from a book he wrote while he was an editor at Playboy magazine. The book is titled Sex, Drugs & Magick. The following excerpt is actually the foreword to the 2000 edition of the book.

Sex, Drugs & Magick
PREFACE TO THE 2000 EDITION

And the Beast said:
"By their pee shall ye judge them,
and by thy pee shall ye be judged.
And all will be divided by their pee.
And in the snow shall their names be written."
- The Book of Urinomics 1

This book dates from 1972-73, and the man who wrote it does not exist anymore. Even I, occupying the same body that he did, hardly remember him and quite often do not agree with his opinions at all, at all. I have therefore corrected and updated his ideas in about a hundred places because, frankly, he embarrasses me at times, especially since we share the same name as well as the same body.
Around the time he wrote this book, Robert Anton Wilson had passed the age of 40, lost the rigid right/wrong ideology he had picked up during the anti-war and anti-segregation movements of the 1960s and thought he had outgrown the dogmatic follies of his youth, achieving a middle-aged and mellow agnosticism about everything. Ten years later, as Ronald Reagan sat in the White House, Wilson reached 50 and, looking back, felt astonished at how much folly had persisted even in his 40s. As he approached 60 a few years ago, he began to realize that he still had his share of human idiocy even in his 50s. Today at 66+ (beginning to merge with him now), I can only wonder how much of the current Robert Anton Wilson literary output of palaver will embarrass me when I reach 75-80...
Nonetheless, I don't feel particularly disgraced by another printing of this book. Some of it still makes a lot of sense to me, after corrections, and I see that in the semi-fictionalized- "case histories" I have accidentally provided a son of "ideogrammic" history of the 1960s—still the most controversial decade of the century, and well worth looking at again, to learn what we can from both its wisdom and its blunders.
The major blunder I acquired from the 1960s counterculture was the notion that the Enemy (with a capital E), was ignorance and that this could be cured by education. I now feel more inclined to accept R. Buckminster Fuller's description of the four major problems confronting the world as "ignorance, fear, greed, and zoning laws." Being untypically brave (like most fools), I always underestimated the role of fear in human affairs; having simple desires, I underestimated greed; and not being an architect, I never grasped the perfidious nature of zoning laws. Above all, I failed to realize the extent to which the synergy of ignorance-fear-greed-zoning laws in maintaining the tyranny that Fuller calls MMAO (Machiavelli, Mafia, Atoms and Oil) - the banks, the mob, and the energy cartels.)
My current thinking about MMAO derives from Fuller and, in relation to the topics of this book, even more from the Sub- Genius Foundation of Dallas, TX, which refers to MMAO as "the Con."
Many think the Con is just a joke or a parody of other conspiracy theories. To such doubters, the Sub-Genius Foundation says that this is "the Time of Pee"—the time foretold, when people would be judged not by works, nor by family, nor even by looks, but by their urine.

They listen to you through your telephone without its even being off the hook, and record you through satellites that can peer down any street, anywhere...
They kick your door in any time they want to. All they have to yell is "DRUGS!" and your spouse is in jail, your kids are farmed out to the state, your car and house are suddenly theirs...
Nobody up there is a friend of yours; nobody up there wants you to have what you would call freedom. The purpose of "government" is to produce consumers and workers who will keep the cost of labor down, and the profits high for the owners...
For this has become so crooked and perverse a nation that your precious bodily fluids are no longer your own, and not even your bladder or bloodstream are private. There is no place where they may not watch.
- Church of the SubGenius

The 1973 author of this book never could have imagined a State so crazily totalitarian, or a population so brainwashed into sheep-like submissiveness, that such absurdities could occur. But then, only Kafka and Orwell in their most eerie satires on bureaucracy-gone-bonkers could imagine an obscenity like our Piss Police. The State in which we live can only accurately be called Urine Nation.
How can this happen in a once-free Republic where searches of the person are forbidden except by court order after probable cause has been shown? Urine Nation, posing as the representatives of you and me, is engaged in an alleged "War on Drugs." That justifies trashing the Constitution.
Now this is, on the face of it, absurd.
1. Wars on drugs or other insensible things (objects, sub-stances) can only be carried on by lunatics. The Con cannot be accused of insanity: of ignorance, yes, and of fear, greed and zoning laws, but not of being batshit crazy. They are not making war on chemicals—or on the laws of physics, or anything of that sort. They are making war on the American people—on all of us, although only a few of us know that yet.
For instance, as you may read in Pissing Away the American Dream (Pissing Away the American Dream, edited by David Ross, Digit Press), on January 1989 the Minneapolis police smashed down the door of the home of an elderly Black couple, using "flash bang" grenades which accidentally set the house on fire and killed both old people.
The cops were looking for "drugs," but never found any. The chief of police justified the murders of two innocent citizens (and the total violation of the Fourth Amendment) by saying, "This is war."
The war is being waged against people, not chemicals, and it is people who get killed.
2. Even within the off-kilter logic of its own rhetoric, the "War on Drugs" is nonsense.
If you go out your door and drive a few blocks, they say, you will find at least one store boldly declaring that they sell DRUGS, although some say PHARMACY, which can only be deciphered by those who know Greek roots; and in these stores, hundreds of drugs are available. Nearby is a supermarket where you can buy cigarettes, containing nicotine, a drug more addictive than heroin according to former Surgeon General Koop. Next door is a BAR where you can buy dozens of varieties of C2H30H, a heavily addictive substance, statistically linked to wife and child battering, divorce and violent crime.
Urine Nation, thus, is not making war on all drugs, or drug- users, but only on some. The government asserts that the drugs on their taboo list are the worst ones; skeptics like me say they are merely the ones that are either (a) cheap and effective, like herbal medicines, and/or (b) not easy to monopolize, like marijuana or (c) better than the higher priced drugs manufactured by the large pharmaceutical corporations that financially support both political parties.
The only people literally "at war" with drugs—all drugs—are the Christian Scientists. Eight of them are currently appealing their convictions for refusing to give their children the drugs ordained from on high by the Con/MMAO.
As Count Bismarck once said, "Laws are like sausages: you have much more respect for them if you haven't actually seen how they're made."
Many of the chemicals and herbs forbidden by the Con are not only harmless, but are widely believed to be beneficial. The war against the users of these substances is just as vicious as the wars against all other substances on the taboo list.
Over the past 10 years, the Food and Drug Administration has engaged in raids on alternative health companies - companies operating openly and, they thought, legally - that more and more tend toward the violence of DEA raids on suspected crack dealers. In every case, the companies were selling vitamins and herbs that a growing minority of the medical profession approves but which MMAO and the FDA do not approve.
For instance, in 1990, the FDA raided the offices of Dr. Jonathan Wright, a fully qualified physician with an M.D. from the University of Michigan Medical School, terrorized the staff with drawn guns, and seized all the vitamins and herbs they could find. They never did file criminal charges against Dr. Wright for the heresy of giving his patients cheap medicines instead of expensive ones, but this raid was only one of hundreds of similar Gestapo-style operations, creating what libertarians call "a chilling effect" on scientific freedom.
As the Life Extension Foundation wrote:

. . . The FDA's strong-arm tactics are used to intimidate and terrorize Americans into toeing their police state party line on healthcare and medicine. The FDA's purpose is not just to destroy the business and lives of their targets, but also to spread fear and terror throughout the land so that others who may be tempted to rebel against the agency will remain meek and submissive.

In the 1980s, a Fundamentalist couple named Randy and Vicki Weaver fled to a mountain top in Idaho, to get as far as possible from the U.S. government, which they considered a Zionist conspiracy. However goofy that idea was, it was the only "offense" of which the Weavers were guilty. They didn't annoy their neighbors and they didn't plot an insurrection against the government: they just tried to avoid and evade it. This alone was too much for the Feds. They sent in an informant to make friends with Randy and eventually entrap him into selling a shotgun. With that excuse, the FBI and ATF made war on the Weaver family, killing Vicki while she stood holding her baby in her arms, killing the older son, and even killing the family dog.
The Weavers sure had a lot of nutty ideas; nobody but another Fundamentalist would deny that. But maybe their idea of the nature of the current U.S. government, and its attitude toward its serfs and subjects, was a hell of a lot more accurate than the ideas you read in liberal journals.

Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt Of The Day 4

In honor of -FUPPETS- reaching 40,000 hits, here is another excerpt from one of -FUPPETS- Favorites, Robert Anton Wilson. This excerpt is from his work titled MASKS OF THE ILLUMINATI, another in the historical mindfuck novels which RAW has written to shake our consciousness foundations and allow us to see that THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY.

Masks of the Illuminati

Sir John picked out a Crowley volume entitled, with Brazen effrontery, The Book of Lies.
Opening it, he found the title page:

THE BOOK OF LIES
WHICH IS ALSO FALSELY CALLED
BREAKS
THE WANDERINGS OR FALSIFICATIONS
OF THE ONE THOUGHT OF
FRATER PERDURABO
WHICH THOUGHT IS ITSELF
UNTRUE

Despite himself, Sir John grinned. This was a variation on the Empedoclean paradox in logic, which consists of the question: "Empedocles, the Cretan, says that everything Cretans say is a
lie; is Empedocles telling the truth?" Of course, if Empedocles is telling the truth, then -- since his statement "everything Cretans say is a lie" is the truth -- he must also be lying. On the other hand, if Empedocles is lying, then everything Cretans say is not a lie, and he might be telling the truth.
Crowley's title page was even more deliberately perverse: if the book is "also falsely called Breaks," then (because of the "also") the original title is false, too, and it is not a book of lies at all. But, on the other hand, since it is the "falsifications. . . of the one thought. . . which is itself untrue," it is the negation of the untrue and, therefore, true. Or was it?

Sir John turned to the first chapter and found it consisted of a single symbol, the question
mark:

?

Well, compared with the title, that was at least brief. Sir John turned the page to the second
chapter and found equal brevity:

!

What kind of a joke was this? Sir John turned to Chapter 3, and his head spun:

Nothing is.
Nothing becomes.
Nothing is not.

The first two statements were the ultimate in nihilism; but the third sentence, carrying
nihilism one step further, brought in the Empedoclean paradox again, for it contradicted itself. If
"nothing is not," then something is. . . .

What else was in this remarkable tome? Sir John started flipping pages and abruptly found
himself facing, at Chapter 77, a photograph of Lola Levine. It was captioned "L.A.Y.L.A.H." The
photo and the caption made up the entire chapter. Lola was seen from the waist up and was
shamelessly naked, although as a concession to English morality her hair hung down to cover most of her breasts.

Sir John, on a hunch, counted cabalistically. Lamed was 30, plus Aleph is 1, plus Yod is 10,
plus second Lamed is 30, plus second Aleph is 1 again, plus He is 5; total, 77, the number of the
chapter. And Laylah was not just a loose transliteration of Lola; it was the Arabic word for "night."
And 77 was the value of the curious Hebrew word which meant either "courage" or "goat": Oz. The simple photo and caption were saying, to the skilled Cabalist, that Lola was the priestess incarnating the Night of Pan, the dissolution of the ego into void. . .

Sir John decided to buy The Book of Lies; it would be interesting, and perhaps profitable, to
gain further insight into the mind of the Enemy, however paradoxical and perverse might be its
expressions. He approached the counter, and found with discomfort that the clerk seated there was Lola Levine herself. Since he had just been looking at a photo of her, naked from the waist up, he blushed and stammered as he said, "I'd like to buy this."

"One pound six, sir," Lola said, with no more flicker of expression than any other clerk. Sir
John realized that it had been nearly three years since the one occasion on which they had met on the Earth-plane; she had no reason to remember him. Then, was it possible that all the astral visions in which she tormented and attempted to seduce him were the product of his own impure imagination? Or were those visions as real as they seemed, and was she merely a consummate actress and hypocrite? It was the metaphysical equivalent of the Empedoclean paradox.

A stout, elderly woman with a Cornish accent asked Lola, "I'm planning to stay for the
lecture. Is it pronounced Crouly or Crowley?"

"It is pronounced Crowly," said a voice from the door. "To remind you that I'm holy. But my
enemies say Crouly, in wish to treat me foully."

Sir John turned and saw Aleister Crowley, bowing politely to the Cornish woman as he
completed his jingle. Crowley was a man of medium height, dressed in a conservative pinstripe suit jarringly offset by a gaudy blue scarf in place of the tie and with a green Borsalino hat worn at a rakish angle. It was the outfit an artist on the Left Bank might wear, to show that he had become successful; it was definitely eccentric for London.

The Cornish woman stared. "Are you really the Great Magician, as people say?"

"No," said Crowley at once. "I am the most dedicated enemy of the Great Magician." And he
swept past imperiously.

The Cornish lady gasped. "What did he mean by that?" she asked nobody in particular.

Sir John understood, but wasted no time trying to explain. Crowley was heading for the
lecture room and Sir John followed him closely, wanting a seat up front where he could observe the Master of the M.M.M. most closely. The paradox had been typical of Crowley's style: he referred, obviously, to the Gnostic teaching that the sensory universe was a delusion, created by the Devil, to prevent humanity from seeing the Undivided Light of Divinity itself. A strange joke to come from a Satanist; but, of course, some Gnostics had taught that Jehovah, creator of the material universe, was the Devil, the Great Magician. The Bible begins with Beth, according to this teaching, because Beth is the letter of the Magician in the Tarot, the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations. . .

The lecture room was filling rapidly and Sir John scampered into a front-row seat. He
noticed that Crowley had lowered his head and closed his eyes, obviously preparing himself for the lecture by some method of invocation or meditation. Behind him on the wall was a large silver star with an eye in its center, a symbol associated (Sir John knew) with both the goddess Isis and the Dog Star, Sirius.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," Crowley intoned suddenly, without
raising his head. Then he looked about the room whimsically.

"It is traditional in the great Order which I humbly represent," he went on, "to begin all
ceremonies and lectures with that phrase. Like Shakespeare's Ducdame, it is a great banishing ritual against fools, most of whom leave the room at once on hearing it uttered. Observing no stampede to the doors I can only wonder if a miracle is occurring tonight and I am speaking, for once, to an English audience that does not consist mostly of fools."

Sir John smiled in spite of himself.

"My topic tonight," Crowley went on, "is the soldier and the hunchback. Those are poetic
terms I regularly employ to designate the two most interesting punctuation marks in general use throughout Europe -- the exclamation point and the question mark. Please do not look for
profundities at this point. I call the exclamation point 'the soldier' only out of poetic whimsy,
because it stands there, erect, like a soldier on guard duty. The question mark I call the 'hunchback,' similarly, only because of its shape. I repeat again: there is no profundity intended, yet."

Sir John found himself thinking of the first two chapters of The Book of Lies, which said
only "?" and "!"

The question mark or hunchback, Crowley went on, appeared in all the basic philosophical
problems that haunt mankind: Why are we here? Who or what put us here? What if anything can we do about it? How do we get started? Where shall wisdom be found? Why was I born? Who am I?
"Unless you are confronted with immediate survival problems, due to poverty or to the deliberate choice of an adventurous life, these hunchbacks will arise in your mind several times in an ordinary hour," Crowley said. "They are generally pacified or banished by reciting the official answers of the tribe into which you were born, or simply deciding that they are unanswerable." Some however, Crowley went on, cannot rest in either blind tradition or resigned agnosticism, and must seek answers for themselves, based on experience. Ordinary people, he said, are in a sense totally asleep and do not even know it; those who persist in asking the questions can be described as struggling toward wakefulness.

The soldier, or exclamation point, he continued, represents the moment of insight or intuition
in which a question is answered, as in the expressions "Aha!" or "Eureka!"

"I now present you, gratis, two of the nastiest hunchbacks I know," Crowley said, smiling
wickedly. "These two are presented to every candidate who comes to our Order seeking the Light. Here they are:

"Number One: Why, of all the mystical and occult teachers in the world, did you come to
me?

"Number Two: Why, of all the days in your life, on this particular day?

"That is all you need to know," Crowley said. "I might as well leave the platform now, since,
if you can answer those questions, you are already Illuminated; and if you cannot, you are such
dunces that further words are wasted on you. But I will take mercy on you and give you the rest of the lecture, anyway."

Crowley went on to define the state of modern philosophy (post-David Hume) as "an
assembly of hunchbacks." Everything has been called into question; every axiom has been
challenged -- "including Euclid's geometry among modern mathematicians"; nothing is certain
anymore. On all sides, Crowley said, we see only more hunchbacks -- questions, questions,
questions.

Traditional mysticism, Crowley continued, is a regiment of soldiers. The mystic, he said,
having attained an "Aha!" or "Eureka!" experience -- a sudden intuitive insight into the invisible
reality behind the subjective deceptions of the senses -- is apt to be so delighted with himself that he never asks another question and stops thinking entirely. Out of this error, Crowley warned, flows dogmatic religion, "a force almost as dangerous to true mysticism as it is to scientific or political freedom."

The path of true Illumination, Crowley proceeded, walking to a blackboard at the right of the
room, does not consist of one intuitive insight after another. It is not a parade of soldiers, "like this," he said, writing on the board:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

"Anybody in that state is an imbecile or a catatonic, however blissful his lunacy may be,"
Crowley said sternly.

The true path of the Illuminati, Crowley stated more emphatically, is a series of soldiers and
hunchbacks in ever-accelerating series, which he sketched as:

?. . . . !. . . .?. . . !. . . ?. . !. . ?. !. ?
!?!?!?!?!?!?!?! etc.

"To rest at any point, either in intuitive certainty or doubtful questioning," he said flatly, "is
to stagnate. Always seek the higher vision, whatever states of ecstatic insight you may have reached. Always ask the next harder question, whatever questions you may have answered. The Light you are seeking is quite correctly called ain soph auer in Cabala -- the limitless light -- and it has, quite literally, the characteristics mathematicians such as Cantor have demonstrated belong to Infinity. As the Upanishads say, 'You can empty infinity from it, and infinity still remains.' However deep your union with the Light, it can become deeper, whether you call it Christ or Buddha or Brahm or Pan. Since I am, thank God," he said the last two words with great piety, "an Atheist, I prefer to call it Nothing -- since anything we say about it is finite and limited, whereas it is infinite and unlimited."

Crowley proceeded to discourse on the infinite with great detail, summarizing mathematical
theories on the subject with remarkable erudition and felicity. "But all this," he ended, "is not the true infinite. It is only what our little monkey-minds have been able to comprehend so far. Ask the next question. Seek the higher vision. That is the path that unites mysticism and rationalism, and transcends both of them. As a great Poet has written:

We place no reliance
On Virgin or Pigeon;
Our method is Science,
Our aim is Religion.

Those blessed words!" he said raptly. "Holy be the name of the sage who wrote them!"

At this point Sir John was far from sure whether he had been listening to the highest wisdom
or the most pretentious mumbo jumbo he had ever heard. The Divine No-Thing was much like
certain concepts in Buddhism and Taoism, but it was also a nice way of seeming to utter
profundities while actually talking nonsense. But then, of course, Crowley's whole point had been
that anything said about infinity was itself Nothing in comparison with infinity itself. . .

With a start, Sir John realized that the lecture was over. The audience was applauding,
somewhat tentatively, most of them as confused by what they had heard as Sir John himself.

"You may now," Crowley said carelessly, "unburden yourselves of the thoughts with which
you passed the time while pretending to listen attentively to me; but in accord with English decorum and the rituals of the public lecture, you must phrase these remarks in the form of questions."

There was a nervous laugh.

"What about Christ?" The speaker was a redfaced man with a walrus mustache; he seemed
more irritated by what he had heard than the rest of the audience. "You didn't say nuthin' about
Christ," he added aggrievedly.

"A lamentable oversight," Crowley said unctuously. "What about Christ, indeed? Personally,
I hold the man blameless for the religion that has been foisted upon him posthumously. Next
question -- the lady in the back row?"

"Is socialism inevitable?"

Sir John found himself wondering when Crowley would become aware of the Talisman and
attempt to cajole him into surrendering it. With horror he realized that such overwhelming of his mind was possible: Crowley did possess charm, magnetism and charisma, like many servants of the Demon. What was it Pope had written about Vice? A creature of such hideous mein/That to be hated needs but be seen/But something something something/We first pity, then endure, then embrace. . .
"Many things are inevitable," Crowley was saying. "The tides. The seasons. The fact that the
questions after a lecture seldom have anything to do with the content of the lecture. . ." What do you seek? The Light. The limitless light: ain soph auer. And the darkness knew it not. . .

"What about the Magick Will?" Sir John asked suddenly, during a pause.

"Ah," Crowley said. "That is a Significant Question." Somehow he conveyed the mocking
capitals by his intonation. "Such questions deserve to be answered with demonstrations, not with mere windy words. Laylah," he called to the back of the room. "Could you bring the
psychoboulometer?"

Lola approached the podium with something that looked hideously like a medieval thumb-
screw.

"There is firstly conscious will," Crowley was saying, looking directly at Sir John. "We all
attempt to exercise this every day. 'I will give up smoking.' 'I will be true to my wife.' Ninety-nine times out of a hundred such resolutions fail, because they are in conflict with the force that really controls us, Unconscious Will, which can not be frustrated. Indeed, even the profane psychologists have rediscovered what the mystics always knew: Unconscious Will, if prevented from acting, returns in the night to haunt our dreams. And sometimes it returns in the daytime, too, in the form of irrational behaviors which we cannot understand. Magick Will should not be confused with either of these, because it includes both and is greater than both. To perform an act of Magick Will is to achieve the Great Work, I might say. The holiest of all holy books says in this connection, 'Thou hast no right but to do thy will.' Alas, if you think you are doing your true Will, without magickal training, you are almost always deluding yourself. . . But I am engaging in the windy verbiage I promised to avoid, and here is the implement of demonstration. Would anybody care to give us an exhibit of what they can accomplish by conscious Will?"

"I think I shall give it a try," Sir John said, wondering at his own daring. "That's only fair
since I asked the question," he added, feeling inane.

"Well, then, good! Come up here, sir," Crowley said with a grin that was beginning to look a
bit sinister to Sir John. "We have here," he went on, holding the ugly thumb-screw so that everybody could get a good view, "one of the implements once used by the Dominican Order to enforce the religion which, as I said, has been foisted on Christ." He set the torture device on the podium. "They used it as an instrument of torture, but we shall use it as a measure of Will."

Sir John was now standing beside Crowley, looking uneasily at the thumb-screw. "Just insert
your thumb, sir," Crowley said easily.

"What???" Sir John could hardly believe his ears.

"Just insert your thumb, down here," Crowley went on blandly, "and then turn the handle
which tightens the vise. The needle on the boulometer -- my own addition to this toy -- will register how far you are able to withstand pain by sheer Will; 10 is a good score, and 0 means you are a mere jellyfish. How far do you think you can go?"

Sir John felt every eye in the room upon him. He wanted to cry, "I am not such a fool as to
torture myself for your amusement," but -- he was even more afraid of appearing a public coward. Is that why people go into armies? he asked himself grimly. . . "Very well," he said coldly, inserting his thumb.

And Abraham rose up early in the morning, and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son, and clave the wood for the burnt offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.

And it was about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.

And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.

And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.

And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit; and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.

"You've only reached two in the boulometer," Crowley said. "The audience will think you're
not trying, sir."

"Damn you!" Sir John whispered, perspiration cold on his back. "I am done with this cruel
joke. Let us see how much better your Magick Will can do!"

"Certainly," Crowley said calmly. He inserted his thumb into the cruel mechanism, and
began turning the vise with slow deliberation. Not a muscle moved in his face. (Sir John suspected that he had gone into a trance.) The needle on the boulometer crept slowly, accompanied by gasps from the audience, all the way to 10.

"That," said Crowley gently, "might pass for an elementary demonstration of Magick Will."

There was a burst of spontaneous applause.

"It will also do," Crowley said, "as an illustration of our thesis about the soldier and the
hunchback. The first rule of our Magick is: never believe anything you hear and doubt most of what you see." He turned the "psycho-boulometer" around, revealing that he had disengaged the screw and had been turning the handle without actually tightening the vise. There was an angry gasp.

"Oh," Crowley said, "are you feeling cheated? Remember this, then: you are cheated the
same way every time emotional turmoil or fixed ideas distort your perception of what is actually
before your eyes. And remember to look for the hunchback behind every soldier."

The audience began to file out, muttering and chattering as excitedly as a group of
chimpanzees who had just found a mirror.

And then Sir John realized that Crowley had descended from the podium and was
approaching him.

"Sir John Babcock," Crowley said warmly, "did you ever hear the story of the man with a
mongoose in his basket?"

At least, unlike Lola, Crowley wasn't pretending not to recognize Sir John. "What
mongoose?" Babcock asked carefully.

"It was on a train," Crowley said. "This chap had a basket under his seat and another passenger asked him what was in it. 'A mongoose,' he said. 'A mongoose!' said the other. 'What on earth do you want with a mongoose?' 'Well,' said our hero, 'my brother drinks a great deal more than
is good for him, and sometimes he sees snakes. So I turn the mongoose on them.' The other
passenger was baffled by this logic. 'But those are imaginary snakes!' he exclaimed. 'Aha!' said our hero. 'Do you think I don't know that? But this is an imaginary mongoose!'

Sir John laughed nervously.

"That's the way it is with talismans," Crowley said. "When a phantom climbs, the ghost of a
ladder serves him. But do keep that pentacle in your vest if it makes you feel better. I must go now. We shall meet again."

And Sir John stared as Crowley made his way to the back of the room, where he greeted
Lola with a kiss. He whispered something; they both turned and looked back at Sir John; they waved cheerfully. And then they were gone.

Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt of The Day 3

Oh, great one! Oh, master of the absurd and the enlightened. Robert Anton Wilson is deeply missed by those whose lives were affected by his mind. -FUPPETS- is pround to stand with them. Today's RAW Excerpt of The Day comes from one of his most disseminated works, Cosmic Trigger, specifically the first volume of the three-part series. Cosmic Trigger is not a work of fiction. It is instead an exploration of the world of human consciousness. This is a long one people, so settle in for the duration.

Cosmic Trigger Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

Preface to the Falcon Press Edition, 1986

Cosmic Trigger was originally published by And/Or Press about ten years ago, and by Pocket Books shortly thereafter. Although some of my novels have sold far better, in two dimensions at least it is my most "successful" book in human terms.

1. From the date of the first printing to the present, I have received more mail about Cosmic Trigger than about anything else I ever wrote, and most of this mail has been unusuallly intelligent and open-minded. For some reason, many readers of this book think they can write to me intimately and without fear, about subjects officially Taboo in our society. I have learned a great deal from the correspondence, and have met some wonderful new friends.

2. On lecture tours, I am always asked more questions about this book than about all my other works together.

This new edition presents an opportunity to answer the most frequent questions and to correct the most persistent misunderstandings.

It should be obvious to all intelligent readers (but curiously is not obvious to many) that my viewpoint in this book is one of agnosticism. The word "agnostic" appears explicitly in the prologue and the agnostic attitude is revealed again and again in the text, but many people still think I "believe" some of the metaphors and models employed here. I therefore want to make it even clearer than ever before that

I DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING

This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist magazine, in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers. It seems to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must "believe" something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.

My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physics as "the Copenhagen Interpretation," because it was formulated in Copenhagen by Dr. Niels Bohr and his co-workers c. 1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal."

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.

Cosmic Trigger deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change through which I put myself in the years 1962-1976. This process is called "initiation" or "vision quest" in many traditional societies and can loosely be considered some dangerous variety of self-psychotherapy in modern terminology. I do not recommend it for everybody, and I think I obtained more good results than bad ones chiefly because I had been through two varieties of ordinary psychotherapy before I started my own adventures and because I had a good background in scientific philosophy and was not inclined to "believe" any astounding Revelations too literally.

Briefly, the main thing I learned in my experiments is that "reality" is always plural and mutable.

Since most of Cosmic Trigger is devoted to explaining and illustrating this, and since I still encounter people who have read all my writings on this subject and still do not understand what I am getting at, I will try again in this new Preface to explain it ONE MORE TIME, perhaps more clearly than before.

"Reality" is a word in the English language which happens to be (a) a noun and (b) singular. Thinking in the English language (and in cognate Indo-European languages) therefore subliminally programs us to conceptualize "reality" as one block-like entity, sort of like a huge New York skyscraper, in which every part is just another "room" within the same building. This linguistic program is so pervasive that most people cannot "think" outside it at all, and when one tries to offer a different perspective they imagine one is talking gibberish.

The notion that "reality" is a noun, a solid thing like a brick or a baseball bat, derives from the evolutionary fact that our nervous systems normally organize the dance of energy into such block-like "things," probably as instant bio-survival cues. Such "things," however, dissolve back into energy dances -- processes or verbs -- when the nervous system is synergized with certain drugs or transmuted by yogic or shamanic exercises or aided by scientific instruments. In both mysticism and physics, there is general agreement that "things" are constructed by our nervous systems and that "realities" (plural) are better described as systems or bundles of energy functions.

So much for "reality" as a noun. The notion that "reality" is singular, like a hermetically sealed jar, does not jibe with current scientific findings which, in this century, suggest that "reality" may better be considered as flowing and meandering, like a river, or interacting, like a dance or evolving, like life itself.

Most philsophers have known, at least since around 500 B.C., that the world perceived by our senses is not "the real world" but a construct we create -- our own private work of art. Modern science began with Galileo's demonstration that color is not "in" objects but "in" the interaction of our senses with objects. Despite this philosophic and scientific knowledge of neurological relativity, which has been more clearly demonstrated with each major advance in instrumentation, we still, due to language, think that behind the flowing, meandering, inter-acting, evolving universe created by perception is one solid monolithic "reality" hard and crisply outlined as an iron bar.

Quantum physics has undermined that Platonic iron-bar "reality" by showing that it makes more sense scientifically to talk only of the inter-actions we actually experience (our operations in the laboratory) ; and perception psychology has undermined the Platonic "reality" by showing that assuming it exists leads to hopeless contradictions in explaining how we actually perceive that a hippopotamus is not a symphony orchestra.

The only "realities" (plural) that we actually experience and can talk meaningfully about are perceived realities, experienced realities, existential realities -- realities involving ourselves as editors -- and they are all relative to the observer, fluctuating, evolving, capable of being magnified and enriched, moving from low resolution to hi-fi, and do not fit together like the pieces of a jig-saw into one single Reality with a capital R. Rather, they cast illumination upon one another by contrast, like the paintings in a large museum, or the different symphonic styles of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler.

Alan Watts may have said it best of all: "The universe is a giant Rorschach ink-blot." Science finds one meaning in it in the 18th Century, another in the 19th, a third in the 20th; each artist finds unique meanings on other levels of abstraction; and each man and woman finds different meanings at different hours of the day, depending on the internal and external environments.

This book deals with what I have called induced brain change, which Dr. John Lilly more resoundingly calls "metaprogramming the human bio-computer." In simple Basic English, as a psychologist and novelist, I set out to find how much rapid re-organization was possible in the brain functioning of one normal domesticated primate of average intelligence -- the only one on whom I could ethically perform such risky research -- myself.

Like most people who have historically attempted such "metaprogramming," I soon found myself in metaphysical hot water. It became urgently obvious that my previous models and metaphors would not and could not account for what I was experiencing. I therefore had to create new models and metaphors as I went along. Since I was dealing with matters outside consensus reality-tunnels, some of my metaphors are rather extraordinary. That does not bother me, since I am at least as much an artist as a psychologist, but it does bother me when people take these metaphors too literally.

I beg you, gentle reader, to memorize the quote from Aleister Crowley at the beginning of Part One and repeat it to yourself if at any point you start thinking that I am bringing you the latest theological revelations from Cosmic Central.

What my experiments demonstrate -- what all such experiments throughout history have demonstrated -- is simply that our models of "reality" are very small and tidy, the universe of experience is huge and untidy, and no model can ever include all the huge untidiness perceived by uncensored consciousness.

I think, or hope, that my data also demonstrates that neurological model agnosticism -- the application of the Copenhagen Interpretation beyond physics to consciousness itself -- allows one to escape from certain limits of mechanical emotion and robot mentation that are inescapable as longa s one remains within one dogmatic model or one imprinted reality tunnel.

Personally I also suspect, or guess, or intuit, that the more unconventional of my models here -- the ones involving Higher Intelligence, such as the Cabalistic Holy Guardian Angel or the extraterrestrial from Sirius -- are necessary working tools at certain stages of the metaprogramming process.

That is, whether such entities exist anywhere outside our own imaginations, some areas of brain functioning cannot be accessed without using these "keys" to open the locks. I do not insist on this; it is just my own opinion. Some people seem to get through this area of Chapel Perilous without such personalized "Guides." I know of one chap who did it by imagining a super-computer in the future that was sending information backwards in time to his brain. More clever people may find even less "metaphysical" metaphors.

Ten years after the point at which this book ends, I do not care much about such speculations. Our lonely little selves can be "illuminated" or flooded with radical science-fiction style information and cosmic perspectives, and the source of this may be those extraterrestrials who seemed to be helping me at times, or the Secret Chiefs of Sufism, or the parapsychologists and/or computers of the 23rd Century beaming data backward in time, or it may just be the previously unactivated parts of our own brains. Despite the current reign of our New Inquisition, which attempts to halt research in this area, we will learn more about that as time passes. Meanwhile, agnosticism is both honest and becomingly modest....

In this connection, I am often asked about two books by other authors which are strangely resonant with Cosmic Trigger -- namely VALIS by Philip K. Dick and The Sirian Experiment by Doris Lessing. VALIS is a novel which broadly hints that it is more than a novel -- that it is an actual account of Phil Dick's own experience with some form of "Higher Intelligence." In fact, VALIS is only slightly fictionalized; the actual events on which it is based are recounted in a long interview Phil gave shortly before his death (see Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament, by Gregg Rickman.) The parallels with my own experience are numerous -- but so are the differences. If the same source was beaming ideas to both Phil and me, the messages got our individual flavors mixed into them as we decoded the signals.

I met Phil Dick on two or three occasions and corresponded with him a bit. My impression was that he was worried that his experience was a temporary insanity and was trying to figure out if I was nutty, too. I'm not sure if he ever decided.

I interviewed Doris Lessing a few years ago for New Age magazine. She takes synchronicities very seriously, but was as agnostic as I am about the possibility that some of them are orchestrated by Sirians.

I heartily recommend all three volumes -- VALIS, The Last Testament and The Sirian Experiments -- to readers of this book. Unless you are locked into a very dogmatic reality-tunnel, you will have a few weird moments of wondering if Sirians are experimenting on us, and a few weird moments can be a liberating experience for those who aren't scared to death by them.

What is more important than such extra-mundane speculation, I think, are practical and pragmatic questions about what one does with the results of brain change experience. It is quite easy, I have discovered by meeting many New Age people, to use the techniques in this book and go stone crazy with them. Paranoid and schizophrenic cases are quite common among those who experiment in this area. Less clinical, but socially even more nefarious, are the leagues of self-proclaimed gurus and their equally deluded disciples, who have discovered, as I did, that there are many realities (plural), but have picked out one favorite non-Occidental reality-tunnel, named it Ultimate Reality or True Reality, and established new fanaticisms, snobberies, dogmas and cults around these delusions.

There is a great deal of lyrical Utopianism in this book. I do not apologize for that, and do not regret it. The decade that has passed since the first edition has not altered my basic commitment to the game-rule that holds that an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.

Since we all create our habitual reality-tunnels, either consciously and intelligently or unconsciously and mechanically, I prefer to create for each hour the happiest, funniest, and most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with the signals my brain apprehends. I feel sorry for people who persistently organize experience into sad, dreary and hopeless reality tunnels, and try to show them how to break the bad habit, but I don't feel any masochistic duty to share their misery.

This book does not claim that you "create your own reality" in the sense of total (but mysteriously unconscious) psychokinesis. If a car hits you and puts you in the hospital, I do not believe this is because you "really wanted" to be hit by a car, or that you "needed" to be hit by a car, as two popular New Age bromides have it. The theory of transactional psychology, which is the source of my favorite models and metaphors, merely says that, once you have been hit by a car, the meaning of the experience depends entirely on you and the results depend partly on you (and partly on your doctors). If it is medically possible for you to live -- and sometimes even if the doctors think it is medically impossible -- you ultimately decide whether to get out of the hospital in a hurry or to lie around suffering and complaining.

Most of the time, this kind of "decision" is unconscious and mechanical, but with the techniques described in this book, such decisions can become conscious and intelligent.

The last part of this book deals with the worst tragedy of my life. I want to say, without self-pity (a vice I despise) that my years on this planet have included many other terrible and punishing experiences, starting with two bouts of polio when I was a child and including dozens of other things I don't want to complain about in public. When I write of creating a better and more optimistic reality-tunnel, of transcending ego-games, and of similar matters, it is not because I have lived in an ivory tower. It is because I have learned a few practical techniques for dealing with the brutal conditions on this primitive planet.

People at my lectures and seminars usually ask me if I am still optimistic about civilian space programs and life extension. I am more optimistic than ever. Despite the seemingly terminal case of rigidicus bureaucraticus at NASA, I have reason to believe certain European countries will soon jointly launch the kind of space migration effort advocated here; and Reagan's SDI, for all its jingoism, means that more money will be spent on basic research than at any previous time in history.

On the life extension front, there have been several best-sellers on the subject since this book first appeared; there is interest even in the most intellectually backward part of U.S. society (namely, the Congress); and scientiests in the longevity field whom I have met recently all cheerfully say they are getting more money for research than in the 70s. The breakthrough cannot be far away.

Finally as a matter of some entertainment value, not all the mail I have received about this book has been intelligent and thoughtful. I have recieved several quite nutty and unintentionally funny poison-pen letters from two groups of dogmatists -- Fundamentalist Christians and Fundamentalist Materialists.

The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have the demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, a charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share in the same crusading zeal and the same total lack of humor, charity, and common human decency.

These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogmas enter the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

- Dublin 1986

-FUPPETS- For Readers XLIV

Ahhh, the written word. It has maintained society and culture for millenia. The written word is such a powerful thing that the powers-that-be, whether religious or governmental, have always had a very deep interest in controlling the reading habits of their followers. Reading is knowledge dissemination. Knowledge is power. Understand this, and your life will be much better for it. You are what you eat (physical body) and you are what your brain takes in. Take in the good stuff every once in a while.

CLASSICAL MUSIC'S NEW GOLDEN AGE: Thanks to period-music evangelists, breathtaking virtuosity, and millions of listeners, the art form remains vibrant. - ( Heather MacDonald - City Journal )

PENN & TELLER INTERVIEW: Illusionists Penn and Teller barely communicate outside work – but after 35 years together they still create the most beautiful shows on earth. - ( Benjamin Secher - Telegraph UK )

THE ART OF SLOW READING: Has endlessly skimming short texts on the internet made us stupider? An increasing number of experts think so - and say it's time to slow down . . . - ( Patrick Kingsley - The Guardian UK )

DREAM LOGIC, THE INTERNET, AND ARTIFICIAL THOUGHT: Will computers be able to think again? And what Sigmund Freud would have to do with cyberspace? Internet pioneer David Gelernter predicts the next stage of development of artificial intelligence. - ( David Gelernter - The Edge )

NOVEL APPROACH: Reading courses as an alternative to prison. - ( Anna Barker - Guardian UK )

ALL RIGHTS UNRESERVED?: What if you could "copy" and "print" anything? - ( Frank J. Oteri - New Music Box )

FRAMING THE STORY: Illustrating for Harvey pekar, the comics genius who could not draw. - ( S.I. Rosenbaum - Obit magazine )

Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt of the Day 2

Previously, -FUPPETS- brought you an excerpt of Robert Anton Wilson's (RAW) book NATURE'S GOD. Many of RAW's books are fictional tales, but many are collections of essays on various subjects that RAW found interesting enough to think and write about, even if they all blend together, for fact comes from fiction, and fiction is based on facts.
Today's Excerpt Of The Day is from his massive meta-novel collaboration with fellow writer and Playboy magazine editor Robert Shea. That work is THE ILLUMINATUS TRILOGY. In this book, the writers sought to create a story that included each and every single conspiracy theory ever postulated to them by the readers of Playboy who sent in rambling, incoherent, fear-ridden letters detailing every nefarious plot and occult conspiracy known to man, and many unknown to man. The book is a true mindfuck in all respects. This passage concerns one of the many characters in the Trilogy, a little person/midget by the name of Markoff Chaney.

The Midget versus the Digits

The Midget, whose name was Markoff Chaney, was no relative of the famous Chaneys of Hollywood, but people did keep making jokes about that. It was bad enough to be, by the standards of the gigantic and stupid majority, a freak; how much worse to be so named as to remind these big oversized clods of the cinema's two most famous portrayers of monstro-freaks; by the time the Midget was fifteen, he had built up a detestation for ordinary mankind that dwarfed (he hated that word) the relative misanthropies of Paul of Tarsus, Clement of Alexandria, Swift of Dublin and even Robert Putney Drake. Revenge, for sure, he would have. He would have revenge...

Damn the science of mathematics itself, the line, the square, the average, the whole measurable world that pronounced him a bizarre random factor. Once and for all, beyond fantasy, in the depth of his soul he declared war on the "statuatory ape," on law and order, on predictability, on negative entropy. He would be a random factor in every equation; from this day forward, unto death, it would be civil war: the Midget versus the Digits....

His first overt act began in Dayton the following Saturday. He was in Norton's Emporium, a glorified 5 & 10 ¢ store, when he saw the sign:

NO SALESPERSON
MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR
WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION
OF A SUPERIOR.
THE MGT.

What! he thought, are the poor girls supposed to pee in their panties if they can't find a superior? Years of school came back to him ("Please, may I leave the room, sir?") and rituals which had appeared nonsensical suddenly made sense in a sinister way. They were trying to reduce us all to predictable units, robots. Hah!...The following Wednesday, the Midget was back at Norton's and hiding in a coffee urn when the staff left and locked up. A few moments later, the sign was down and a subtly different one was in its place:

NO SALESPERSON
MAY LEAVE THE FLOOR
OR GO TO THE DOOR
WITHOUT THE AUTHORIZATION
OF A SUPERIOR.
THE MGT.

He came back several times in the next few weeks, and the sign remained. It was as he suspected: in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below. It was the chains of communication, not the means of production, that determined a social process.. Nothing signed "THE MGT." would ever be challenged; the Midget could always pass himself off as the Management.

Robert Anton Wilson's Excerpt Of The Day 1

Oh, how -FUPPETS- adores the mindfucks provided by the late, great Robert Anton Wilson (abbreviated as RAW). He really brings the brainscrambler when he writes. Today's Robert Anton Wilson Excerpt Of The Day is from his book NATURE'S GOD, which is available at Amazon, and takes the form of a diary entry by one Sigismundo Celine. This part of Nature's God describes the time spent by Mr. Celine in the wilderness that was the American frontier in the late 18th century. As always, RAW mixes the whole of human thought into one narrative. From discussions of humanity to ideas about god to the connectivity of living things, it is all wrapped up in RAW's trademark humor. -FUPPETS- misses you, Robert Anton Wilson.

The Wilderness Diary of Sigismundo Celine
Ohio 1776-78

A universe without a monarch or a parliament

Intellectual passions are more bewitching than love affairs, which is
why they last longer. A man can adore a woman until she changes or grows surly, but he can be madly infatuated with a Theory all his life.

When the Pope sits on the chamber pot to shit, does he believe in his own infallibility? Does not every imposter occasionally recognize his own hairy, homely humanity? Perhaps not; worn long enough, sometimes the Mask of Authority becomes the man. Even looking in a mirror, he will see the sacred Mask and not his own ordinary human face.

N. B. It is not only the mighty who wear Masks. To be born in Napoli is to form a Neapolitan Mask before age six, I estimate. Similarly, those who grew up in Paris and London never cease to wear the Masks of the
Parisian and the Londoner.

The study of psychology should be a history of the metamorphoses of men and women into their habitual Masks.

The Catholic wears a Catholic Mask at all times; just look at the Neapolitan whores with crucifixes around their necks. The Protestant also cannot remove the Protestant Mask. Etc. Most comic of all; the Rationalist tries to wear the Mask of Reason even when everybody else can see he is in the grip of a furious passion.

There is no complete theory of anything. The damnable habit of giving children examinations in which every question has a "true" or "false"
answer has conditioned us to think everything in the universe is "true" or "false." In experience, most things emerge out of Chaos, confuse and muddle us for a while, and vanish into uncertainty again before we know what they were or if they're coming back. The world is a phalanx of maybes in which a handful of trues and falses can occasionally be found.
We create our Masks, as God allegedly made the world, out of nothing. In both cases, the nothingness sometimes shows through.

It is quite easy to make friends with the wolves, contrary to popular lore. Respect their territory, and they will respect yours. It is impossible to negotiate similarly with the fleas: that appears to be a fight to the death.
Today, suddenly, I encountered a quite large brownish bear in the woods. I was careful not to do anything threatening (I had my rifle, but did not want to be forced to shoot so noble a beast). Some ancient
instinct told me not to run away. I pretended to ignore the huge animal, as if I had more important affairs on my mind. Then I saw out of the corner of my eye that the bear was doing exactly the same pantomime: he was using identical body signals - the same body "language," I might even say - to signify that I was not of any concern to a bear of his royal stature. We moved off, in opposite directions, all the time signaling that we were too busy to be bothered with lesser creatures. I would call this a case of Mask as body language.

Only later did I realize that I have seen dogs use that body language
when they do not wish to fight. The implications of this simple experience are so staggering that I can scarcely formulate my own thoughts clearly. What it seems to suggest is that if dogs, bears, humans, and some other creatures have a common preverbal "language," then we also have a common ancestor.

The thought of the unity of life will not leave me. The wolves have a "king," just like the Neapolitans or French, etc., and His Lupine Majesty wears the Mask of authority in all that he does. I communicate well enough with the wolves that they come around more and more often to beg food. I communicated very eloquently with that bear, and he with me. All those statues I saw in North Africa of men or gods with animal heads suggest that some people have had this insight long before me - the human in the animal, the animal in the human. Buffon toys with
this thought in this Natural History, and speaks of the possible evolution of life from a common source, but then he dismisses the idea as improbable. Did his great analytic mind really reject such a stupendous concept so myopically or did he just remember two unscientific facts: (a) the Inquisitors would read his words later and (b) he was not fireproof?

There is no governor anywhere and we are all relatives. Whenever I smoke the medicine herbs with Miskasquamic I can communicate with trees and that is not "hallucination." Animal and vegetable are cousins! Take off the Mask of humanity, as St. Francis did, and even rodents and roses talk to you, and you to them, in a language older than words.

Am I on the edge of a great discovery or am I going cracked from living alone too long? At times like this it is best to forget philosophy for a
while and turn my mind back to music. Logic claims to know - it is the bastard son of priestcraft - but art, thank God, only aspires to share an experience.

Melody, harmony, counterpoint: I do not regret the years I spent
learning these disciplines, but they are fundamentally irrelevant. If music ceases to be wonderful nonsense, it will not console the tormented heart.

The function of law and theology are the same: to keep the poor from
taking back by violence what the rich have stolen by cunning.

The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth. Yes, yes, yes: I am not going cracked, I am merely leaving human Masks behind. The wilderness is where truth is naked and hypocrisy has not been invented.

-FUPPETS- For Readers XLII

-FUPPETS- would like to share a couple of online resources for those who love to read. The first is a well-known site called Project Gutenberg. It aims to collect as many books and pieces of writing in the public domain as it can, and it succeeds quite admirably. There are so many old books, many of them out of print and very rare, available as text files, as word documents, or as a variety of E-Books, downloadable to whatever E-Book reader you may have. It is quite exhaustive and awesome. The other site -FUPPETS- wants you to check out is Knowledge Files. If you have a taste for the esoteric, the occult, the mysteries, etc., then you owe yourself a visit to this site, where rare books are available for download. The site also provides a forum on which one can discuss the books and ideas contained therein. Mr. MIMIC: The extraordinary gifts and fleeting legacy of Sammy Davis Jr. - ( John H. McWhorter - City Journal ) WORLD'S OLDEST LEATHER SHOE FOUND IN ARMENIA - ( Science Daily ) THE DUSTBIN OF ART HISTORY: Why is so much contemporary art awful? We’re living through the death throes of the modernist project — and this isn’t the first time that greatness has collapsed into decadence - ( Ben Lewis - Prospect Magazine ) HOLY TERROR: The Rise of the Order of Assassins - ( Jefferson Grey - HistoryNet.com ) GLOOM MERCHANT: To be truly happy we must be pessimistic. - ( Roger Scruton - New Humanist ) SLOW DOWN, ROBERT JOHNSON!: Have we been hearing him at the wrong speed? - ( Soundcheck - WNYC.org )

HUNTER S. THOMPSON & HOUSTON, TX (Part 13)

So, Super Bowl VIII in Houston TX has finished, with the Miami Dolphins defeating the Minnesota Vikings, and all that is left for the good Doctor is to collect on his bets and get out of town.

***

I stayed in Houston for two days after the game, but even with things calmed down I had no luck in finding the people who'd caused me all my trouble. Both Tom Keating and Al LoCasale were rumored to be in the vicinity, but - according to some of the New York sportswriters who'd seen them - neither one was eager to either see or be seen with me.
When I finally fled Houston it was a cold Tuesday afternoon with big lakes of standing water on the road to the airport. I almost missed my plane to Denver because of a hassle with Jimmy The Greek about who was going to drive us to the airport and another hassle with the hotel garage-man about who was going to pay for eight days of tending my bogus "Official Super Bowl Car" in the hotel garage. . . and I probably wouldn't have made it at all if I hadn't run into an NFL publicity man who gave me enough speed to jerk me awake and lash the little white Mercury Cougar out along the Dallas freeway [I-45] to the airport in time to abandon it in the "Departures/Taxis Only" area and hire a man for five dollars to rush my bags and sound equipment up to the Continental Airlines desk just in time to make the flight.
Twenty-four hours later I was back in Woody Creek and finally, by sheer accident, making contact with that twisted bastard Keating - who bent my balance a bit by calmly admitting his role in my Problem and explaining it with one of the highest left-handed compliments anybody ever aimed at me. . .
"I got nothing personal against Thompson," he told another NFL player who happened to be skiing in Aspen at the time: "But let's face it, we've got nothing to gain by talking to him. I've read all his stuff and I know how he is; he's a goddamn lunatic - and you've got to be careful with a bastard like that, because no matter how hard he tries, he just can't help but tell the truth."
When I heard that I just sort of slumped on my bar-stool and stared at myself in the mirror . . . wishing, on one level, that Keating's harsh judgement was right . . .but knowing, on another, that the treacherous realities of the worlds I especially work in forced me to abandon that purist stance a long time ago. If I'd written all the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people - including me - would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON & HOUSTON, TX (Part 12)

After a lengthy dissertation on the subtleties of betting on football and accounting for the various injuries that players may or may not have, the Good Doctor wonders why he is cursed to have such pristine clairvoyance when it comes to the eventual Super Bowl VIII winner, in Houston TX.

It is hard to say, even now, exactly why I was so certain of an easy Dolphin victory. The only reason I didn't get extremely rich on the game was my inability to overcome the logistical problems of betting heavily, on credit, by means of frantic long-distance phone calls from a hotel room in Houston. None of the people I met in that violent, water-logged town were inclined to introduce me to a reliable book-maker - and the people I called on both coasts, several hours before the game on Sunday morning, seemed unnaturally nervous when I asked them to use their own credit to guarantee my bets with their local bookies.
Looking back on it now, after talking with some of these people and cursing them savagely, I see that the problem had something to do with my frenzied speech-pattern that morning. I was still in the grip of whatever fiery syndrome had caused me to deliver that sermon off the balcony a few hours earlier - and the hint of mad tremor in my voice, despite my attempts to disguise it, was apparently communicated very clearly to all those I spoke with on the long-distance telephone.
How long, O lord, how long? This is the second year in a row that I have gone to the Super Bowl and been absolutely certain - at least 48 hours before gametime - of the outcome. It is also the second year in a row that I have failed to capitalize, financially, on this certainty. Last year, betting mainly with wealthy cocaine addicts, I switched all my bets from Washington to Miami on Friday night - and in the resulting confusion my net winnings were almost entirely canceled by widespread rancor and personal bitterness.

This year, in order to side-step that problem, I waited until the last moment to make my bets - despite the fact that I knew the Vikings were doomed after watching them perform for the press at their star-crossed practice field on Monday afternoon before the game. It was clear, even then, that they were spooked and very uncertain about what they were getting into - but it was not until I drove about 20 miles around the beltway to the other side of town for a look at the Dolphins that I knew, for sure, how to bet.
There area lot of factors intrinsic to the nature of the Super Bowl that make it far more predictable that regular season games, or even playoffs - but they are not the kind of factors that can be sensed or understood at a distance of 2000 or even 20 miles, on the basis of any wisdom or information that filters out from the site through the rose-colored, booze-bent media-filter that passes for "world-wide overage" at these spectacles.
There is a progression of understanding vis-a-vis pro football that varies drastically with the factor of distance - physical, emotional, intellectual, and every other way . . . Which is exactly the way it should be, in the eyes of the amazingly small number of people who own and control the game, because it is this finely managed distance factor that accounts for the high-profit mystique that blew the sacred institution of baseball off it's "national pastime" pedestal in less than 15 years.
There were other reasons for baseball's precipitous loss of popularity among everybody except old men and middle-aged sportswriters between 1959 and now - just as there will be a variety of reasons to explain the certain decline of pro football between now and 1984 - but if sporting historians ever look back on all this and try to explain it, there will be no avoiding the argument that pro football's meteoric success in the 1960's was directly attributable to it's early marriage with network TV and a huge, coast-to-coast audience of armchair fans who "grew up" - in terms of their personal relationships to The Game - with the idea that pro football was something that happened every Sunday on the tube. The notion of driving eight miles along a crowded freeway and then paying $3 to park the car in order to pay another $10 to watch the game from the vantage point of a damp redwood bench 55 rows above the 19-yard line in a crowd of noisy drunks was repugnant to them.
And they were absolutely right. After ten years of trying it both ways - and especially after watching this last wretched Super Bowl game from a choice seat in the "press section" very high above the 50-yard line - I hope to christ I never again succumb to whatever kind of weakness or madness it is that causes a person to endure the incoherent hell that comes with going out to a cold and rainy stadium for three hours on a Sunday afternoon and trying to get involved with whatever seems to be happening down there on that far-below field.
At the Super Bowl I had the benefit of my usual game-day aids: powerful binoculars, a tiny portable radio for the blizzard of audio-details that nobody ever thinks to mention on TV, and a seat on the good left arm of my friend, Mr. Natural . . . But even with all these aids and a seat on the 50-yard line, I would rather have stayed in my hotel room and watched the goddamn thing on TV; or maybe in some howling-drunk bar full of heavy bettors - the kind of people who like to bet on every play: pass or run, three to one against a first down, twenty to one on a turnover . . .
This is a very fast and active style of betting, because you have to make a decision about every 25 seconds. The only thing more intense is betting yes or no on the next shot in something like a pro basketball game between the Celtics and the Knicks, where you might get five or six shots every 24 seconds . . . or maybe only one, but in any case the betting is almost as exhausting as being out there on the floor.

HUNTER S. THOMPSON & HOUSTON, TX (Part 11)

When we last visited with Gonzo-King himself, Hunter S. Thompson, he regaled -FUPPETS- with the truth about sportswriters covering Super Bowl VIII, held at the Rice University Stadium in Houston, Texas. Let's see what he is up to now, as the big game approaches.

The bus ride to the stadium for the game on Sunday took more than an hour, due to heavy traffic. I had made the same six-mile drive the night before in just under five minutes . . . but that was under very different circumstances; Rice Stadium is on South Main Street, along the same route that led from the Hyatt Regency to the Dolphin headquarters at the Marriott, and also to the Blue Fox.
There was not much to do on the bus except drink, smoke and maintain a keen ear on the babble of conversations behind me for any talk that might signal the presence of some late-blooming Vikings fan with money to waste. It is hard to stay calm and casual in a crowd of potential bettors when you feel absolutely certain of wining any bet you can make. At that point, anybody with even a hint of partisan enthusiasm in his voice becomes a possible mark - a doomed and ignorant creature to be lured, as carefully as possible, into some disastrous last-minute wager that could cost him every dollar he owns.
There is no room for mercy or the milk of human kindness in football vetting - at least not when you're prepared to get up on the edge with every dollar you own. One-on-one betting is a lot more interesting than dealing with bookies, because it involves it involves strong elements of personality and psychic leverage. Betting against the point spread is a relatively mechanical trip, but betting against another individual can be very complex, if you're serious about it - because you want to know, for starters, whether you're betting against a fool or a wizard, or maybe against somebody who's just playing the fool.
Making a large bet on a bus full of sportswriters on the way to the Super Bowl, for instance, can be a very dangerous thing: because you might be dealing with somebody who was in the same fraternity at Penn State with one of the team doctors, and who learned the night before - while drinking heavily with his old buddy - that the quarterback you're basing your bet on has four cracked ribs and can barely raise his passing arm to shoulder level.
Situations like these are not common. Unreported injuries can lead to heavy fines against any team that fails to report one - especially in a Super Bowl - but what is a $10,000 fine, compared to the amount of money that kind of crucial knowledge is worth against a big-time bookie?
The other side of that coin is a situation where a shrewd coach turns the League's "report all injuries" rule into a psychological advantage for his own team - and coincidentally for any bettor who knows what's happening - by scrupulously reporting an injury to a star player just before a big game, then calling a press-conference to explain that the just-reported injury is of such a nature - a pulled muscle, for instance - that it might or might not heal entirely by game time.
This was what happened in Houston with the Dolphin's Paul Warfield, widely regarded as "the most dangerous pass receiver in pro football." Warfield is a game-breaker, a man who commands double-coverage at all times because of his antelope running style, twin magnets for hands, and a weird kind of adrenaline instinct that feeds on tension and high pressure. There is no more beautiful sight in football that watching Paul Warfield float out of the backfield in a sort of angle-streak pattern right into the heart of a "perfect" zone defense and take a softly thrown pass on his hip, without even seeming to notice the arrival of the ball, and then float another 60 yards into the end zone, with none of the frustrated defensive backs ever touching him.
There is an eerie kind of certainty about Warfield's style that is far more demoralizing than just another six points on the scoreboard. About half the time he looks bored and lazy - but even the best pass defenders in the league know, in some nervous corner of their hearts, that when the deal goes down Warfield is capable of streaking right past them like they didn't exist . . .
Unless he's hurt; playing with some kind of injury that might or might not be serious enough to either slow him down or gimp the fiendish concentration that makes him so dangerous . . . and this was the possibility that Dolphin coach Don Shula raised on Wednesday when he announced hat Warfield had pulled a leg muscle in practice that afternoon and might not play on Sunday.
This news caused instant action in gambling circles. Even big-time bookies, whose underground information on these things is usually as good as Pete Rozelle's, took Shula's announcement seriously enough to cut the spread down from seven to six - a decision worth many millions of betting dollars if the game turned out to be close.
Even the rumor of an injury to Warfield was worth one point (and even two, with some bookies I was never able to locate) . . . and if Shula had announced on Saturday that Paul was definitely not going to play, the spread would probably have dropped to four, or even three . . . Because the guaranteed absence of Warfield would have taken a great psychological load off the minds of Minnesota's defensive backs.
Without the ever-present likelihood of a game-breaking "bomb" at any moment, they could focus down much tighter on stopping Miami's brutal running game - which eventually destroyed them, just as it had destroyed Oakland's nut-cutting defense two weeks earlier, and one of the main reasons why the Vikings failed to stop the Dolphins on the ground was the constant presence of Paul Warfield in his customary wide-receiver's spot.
He played almost the whole game, never showing any sign of injury; and although he caught only one pass, he neutralized two Minnesota defensive backs on every play . . . and two extra tacklers on the line of scrimmage might have made a hell of a difference in that embarrassingly decisive first quarter when Miami twice drove what might as well have been the whole length of the field to score 14 quick points and crack the Vikings' confidence just as harshly as they had cracked the Redskins out in Los Angeles a year earlier.