Yonatan Zunger (zunger) wrote,
Yonatan Zunger
zunger

Sigh.

The story is going around the blogs that Robert Anton Wilson passed away. For those who haven't heard of him, he was a writer who wrote some truly bizarre shit, as well as some philosophy and so on which turned out to be surprisingly deep. Hell of a sense of humor. Real impact on me when I was younger. Probably still to this day.

Anyway, this just makes me think of the time about ten years ago when a rumor started going around that he was dead; he even had obits showing up in newspapers. It took years to get it fully straightened out that no, in fact, he was still alive. So there's part of me that secretly wonders if he's going to come back from the dead this time, too. Another part of me realizes that this is pretty Messianic thinking... but if this world is going to get hit with a messiah, I suppose it could do a hell of a lot worse.

(The part of me that's a good Jew is wondering about why other parts of me describe the coming of the messiah as something that the world could get hit by, rather than something that "I look forward to... with perfect faith, though he may tarry." The part of me that knows history thinks that "inflict" is a pretty good verb to use with "messiah." The part of me that's watching this many parts of me yell at each other thinks that RAW would find that pretty appropriate.)
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  • 6 comments

woody77

January 11 2007, 21:53:23 UTC 8 years ago

He's been terminally ill for a while, so this isn't too much of a surprise. And I'm not reading a bunch of friends' journals anymore that would actually know better than I if he had passed away.

woody77

January 11 2007, 22:02:50 UTC 8 years ago

wikipedia had a link to this:
http://robertantonwilson.blogspot.com/2007/01/raw-essence.html

Unfortunately, I didn't find RAW until well after those early formative years where his writing could have blown my head apart. More it was just some amazing stuff to read.

And I definitely think that RAW would find that kind of internal tumult appropriate, and perhaps the way in which one should always be, seeing the complexities of everything, and the sheer amount of apparently self-contradictoryness in the world that isn't, if you look deeply enough.

fineline179

January 12 2007, 05:48:03 UTC 8 years ago

what philosophy of his do you think was surprisingly deep?

zunger

January 12 2007, 07:03:46 UTC 8 years ago

It's a bit hard for me to answer that since it's been a long time since I re-read his books. Some ideas still stick with me, though: the idea of reality-tunnels and the art of intentionally seeing the world through other ones, the idea of self-programming by various means, and a lot of the ideas about the simple ridiculousness of most of existence.

Maybe I should go back and see if those books really did say that, or if time has distorted my memory. Or if the person who I am now focuses on certain aspects of things in my memory of a very different set of things that I read back then, which were important to me at that moment.

Did you ever read any of his books?

fineline179

January 12 2007, 08:12:57 UTC 8 years ago

That second statement is a little confusing and self-referential to me. Your 'memory of a very different set of things..' contains things? And you focus on them? What sort of things are these?

a strange sense of vertigo makes me think aleph-null right now..

I'M POURIN A FOTY ON THR SIDEWALK FOR MY HOMIE RTW THIS SUNDAY.

And I only really got all the way through Illumnatus!!!1111two_o, but I touched on Prometheus Rising and Schrodinger's whatever.

It all makes me want to stick to my meditation practice a whole lot more.

I just used this Psychoacoustic Brainwave meditation sound thing today and it is awesome. It's the Acoustic Brain Research - Transformation Now! CD. It slows down your breathing and you go through these cool mind states. Um it's a torrent.

Oh the point of that was that Robert Anton Wilson totally endorsed that CD. He was all (in a quote on their page) "yeah it did more for me than 7 years of yoga" so check it out.

zunger

January 12 2007, 08:59:36 UTC 8 years ago

Illuminatus! was fairly hard to read, and it got stranger as it went on; there were a lot of drugs involved in writing it, and acid makes no man a better writer. (Except, maybe, for Hunter S. Thompson) I seem to remember other books of his, though; both fiction like the Schrodinger's Cat books and nonfiction things like "Cosmic Trigger" and "Quantum Psychology." It's been long enough since I've read those, though, that I don't actually remember which were good.