A lost RAW text due for publication by Hilaritas

"Starseed Signals: Link Between Worlds" will appear soon.

Read about it at Adam Gorightly's site "Historia Discordia" - you can read his Foreword here.

You can find more about it at RAWIllumination.net:  here  and here and here

First make a distinction...

I find myself working with a reading group, currently “The Widow’s Son” (the second of the Historical Illuminatus trilogy).  Buy the new edition from Hilaritas Press, or work from an old one, if you wish.  We have reached maybe halfway.

In the process of looking closely at the text, a fleeting reference came up to “The Laws of  Form” by G Spencer Brown.  We have a couple of posts in the past of this blog, about this text, which you can find with the tags at the end of this post.  They also contain quite a lot of links to other related material…

I decided to follow up, a little (I love spin-offs) and discovered a recording of GSB’s voice, when he presented some talks at the AUM Conference (1973). Fascinating, as ever, to hear the voice of a writer.

As well as the recording of the first part of the first session, you can find slightly erratic transcripts of four sessions online.  Comparing the sound recording to the transcript of session one suggests that the transcripts of the other three sessions might prove incomplete or inaccurate.  Hard to tell.

It becomes obvious why RAW found him interesting, as the basis of his investigation lies in engineering (logic circuits for transistors), not abstract thinking (formal logic).

Here's audio of the last 30 minutes, before GSB left.  You will find the text in the transcripts above.

email to the Universe in paperback.

In the UK I found it easier to use Amazon - and make sure you get the new edition (2017) from Hilaritas Press, as the old edition from 2005 still appears as available.   Use this link for UK.

use this Amazon link for USA.

For more details, visit the Hilaritas Press site.

Just an email to the universe

Hilaritas Press continues publishing wonderful new editions of many of Bob's books.

The latest one is "email to the universe" - a newly proofread edition, with an added Intro, an Afterword by Paul Krassner, new illustrations, a new cover.    Read more about it, or buy the ebook, here.

IMPortant note:   Only the Kindle edition is available, at the moment, so any offers of paperback copies you see on Amazon will be the old edition from New Falcon.   Best to wait, if you want a paperback copy of this smart new edition from Hilaritas.

New release from Hilaritas Press - Prometheus Rising

You can now find an eBook version of Prometheus Rising (featuring a New Afterword by Richard Rasa), available on the Hilaritas Press website, here.   A print edition will follow.

Also on the website, you can find my memories of the Maybe Logic Academy.

New Edition of "Email to the Universe" by Robert Anton Wilson

Another new edition, featuring my artwork, coming down the pike this week! As it stands, this is the last book released by RAW, and it was what he was working on when I first came into contact w/ him. It's an anthology of essays, which rather spectacularly runs the gamut of the Robert Anton Wilson oeuvre.

"This book intends to change your way of perceiving/conceiving the world, without drugs or drums or Voodoo, simply by using words in certain special ways."

Available from New Falcon Publications & Amazon.com

Black Magick and Curses

I don't seem to have re-read much of Bob's since he died. Of course, he had pointed students off in all directions (apart from his own work) so many of us found ourselves becoming Joyceans and researchers of Ezra, and suchlike.

Anyway, I started browsing through Email to the Universe last night. When it came out I rushed through it, feeling (like many completists) that much of it was familiar material - perhaps a compilation from his publishers because he had not completed the promised Tale of the Tribe - which we had all anticipated so much, before he fell ill. Actually, I love the haiku in that book (which you may also find elsewhere).

One chapter that grabbed me last night, however, was called

Black Magick and Curses
SECRETS OF YE DARK ARTE CALL'D DUCDAME

and I immediately remembered that Bob had set it as a text on his Quantum Psychology course. I wanted to find it online for you to read, but feel sad to say that I can only see it posted at the American Buddha site, which I cannot recommend. Apart from their awful taste in colours, their peculiar attitude to copyright, and their downright disrepectful treatment of their Buddhist teacher (oh, do yer own research!) I just get a bad vibe from the site. But I digress.

I could post the complete text myself (I have it in the book, anyway, and also as the original course material) but I don't want to upset the RAW estate. I might pass it to the official RAWilson Fans site, who seem to have established a right to compile RAW material as a research resource.

Or you could just go buy the book! Fellow researchers could always email me for a copy - for personal use only.

The essay itself seems to me a fine example of Bob's amusing, thought-provoking, challenging style. It rapidly ranges through General Semantics, NLP (the meta-model of precise language and verifiability, and the Milton model of ambiguity and projection), magick, placebos and curses, and a whole host of other fascinating subjects - lucidly and tantalizingly and briefly.

It seems like compressed and dense material that rewards a bit of unpacking, and further research.

I'll come back later (gotta clean the pond and walk the dog) and maybe offer some quotes at least... Here's a teaser:

In other words, the distinction between "magick" and "communication" exists only in our traditional ways of thinking. The uncanny Egyptians attributed both inventions to a single deity, Thoth, god of speech and other illusions.

In the existential world -- in the sensory-sensual continuum -- Thoth still reigns and language still has magick. All communication contains sorcery and/or hypnosis, because humans use howls, snarls, yaps, purrs, gargles, gurgles etc. -- noises of many sorts -- to create a neuro-semantic "grid" projected upon all incidents and events. We generally call these grids languages.

We literally "see" incidents and events only as they register upon that grid.

If I use certain words that cause you to have certain predictible neuro-somatic reactions, I have cast a spell upon you. I have enchanted you. I may even have cursed you.

[Sure you want to know more about this?]


And it ends:


Whosoever speaks in any tongue gives birth to blessings and curses.

& if the uncanny Egyptians made Thoth the father of both language and magick, the canny Greeks made Hermes, their version of Thoth, the god of both language and fraud.