Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati
by Robert Anton Wilson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert Anton WilsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-01-01
ISBN: 1561840033
Number of pages: 269
Publisher: New Falcon Publications
Book Reviews of Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati
Book Review: worth a read, with fairly high highs (but low lows)
Summary: 3 Stars
I enjoy conspiracy stories and mystical concepts, and in that context, this was a good read. Wilson has an agile, broad and deep mind, and it comes through in this book. There are points I found interesting or at least fun; on the other hand, there were things that I disagreed with to the point of almost giving up on the book.
On the plus side, he does a fair (but not super) job of backing up his suppositions regarding certain "synchronicities", and again, the spiritual and extra-terrestrial life aspects are interesting.
On the minus side, the book endorses, but does not, thankfully, provide explicit instruction, for the use of powerful, mind-altering drugs. At one point he describes a number of steps in spiritual enlightenment and promoting human evolution through the uses of certain drugs, from alcohol to marijuana to assorted halucinogens like LSD, in a manner analgous to Kabbalists listing the Sephirot "steps" from Malkhut up to Keter, toward successively higher/lighter planes of existence. That's just plain naive. Wilson is a product of his era, and was caught up in the "partying" spirit of his times. I think people should have more fun than they do, but I like to think we can have fun without getting baked, and that to an even greater extent we may ascend human development without bending (if not breaking) our perceptual antennae/receiver with drugs. For everyone who manages to tap into useful perceptions and thoughts pharmaceutically, there are numbers of people who get trapped/fried, regardless of their intentions.
Also among minuses, Wilson's friends, influences and heroes include Tim Leary and Aleister Crowley. Leary was interesting but naive to perhaps an even greater extent than Wilson. From all I can gather, Crowley was just plain irresponsible, if not downright misanthropic.
Further with minuses, he wasted a bunch of lines picking on Nixon, as if he had anything to do with anything in the realm of spiritual and extra-terrestrial exploration. Wilson was a Liberal and a product of his time, so I guess I should be glad he did not waste more pages on it. Of all the things to condemn Nixon for, his knee-jerk reaction to increasing crime (imprisoning drug dealers and users) was more a benefit than a mis-deed. The brief material about RMN wasn't worth the print.
Getting on to the pluses, again, we have Wilson's well-written exposition of a number of coincidences or synchronicities, with minimal degrees of separation, that was fun reading. And again, he does manage to back some of it up.
The last pages dealing with the death of his daughter somehow vindicated the pro-drug propaganda for me. It was very human, and I could see him emotionally working through the loss as he wrote, even if I did not agree with his conclusions.
If I had to define an overarching theme for this book, it is Wilson's explanation of alternate/multiple realities. You should read the book to find this, because it is useful. He does a good job of expressing that everything may be in YOUR head, and at the same time be equally objective for the experience of all other individuals, with each "I" possessing (or being possessed by) his/her reality. Wilson alludes to all of the individual's perception and existence being in the individual's physical body (purely empirical/non-spiritual/atheistic); and also, at the same time, noncorporeal; and these are opposite states, mutually exclusive, occuring at the same time. Wilson expresses a human capacity to move across belief systems, and change one's life with those paradigm shifts. He, like Crowley, recommends doing this randomly, but I believe outside a mindset geared toward "being good" and "doing good", this paradigmatic promiscuity is sophomoric at best.
So again, overall, I manage to recommend reading this book to broaden the way you see your world, but don't bother using this as a primer or launching point into proscribed existence, because it's been done before many times, never too well, and the fools who did it just ended up dying like all flesh does anyway. (Jesus got it right. Love your neighbor as yourself. After that, it's all just about passing time.)
Summary of Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati
Cosmic Trigger deals with a process of deliberately induced brain change. 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. The main thing I learned in my experiments is that 'reality' is always plural and mutable. -- From the PrefaceBiographies & Memoirs Books
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