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Robert Anton Wilson

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Robert Anton Wilson
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Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson or RAW was born January 18, 1932, in Methodist hospital, downtown Brooklyn, New York and spent his first years in Flatbush, moving with family to Gerrison Beach around the age of 4 or 5, where they stayed till he turned 13. He is known for his work as a novelist, essayist, philosopher, psychologist, futurist, anarchist, and conspiracy researcher.

His best-known work—The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Robert Shea—humorously examined American paranoia about conspiracies. These books mix true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "Operation Mindfuck". (Much of the odder material derived from letters sent to Playboy magazine while Shea and Wilson worked as editors of the Playboy Forum.) It was advertised as "A fairy tale for paranoids." Although Shea and Wilson never partnered on such a scale again, Wilson has continued to expand upon the themes of the Illuminatus! books throughout his writing career. A set of libertarian and anarchist axioms known as Celine's Laws are outlined in the trilogy, a set of concepts Wilson revisits several times in other writings.

In (1977) and other works, he made Discordianism, Sufism, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley, the Illuminati and other esoteric or counter-culture philosophies accessible to larger audiences. He is also a proponent of Timothy Leary's eight circuit model of consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he writes about in Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and Quantum Psychology (1990), books of practical techniques to break free of one's "reality tunnels". With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of Space Migration, Intelligence Increase (enhancement), and Life Extension (SMI2LE); he is arguably a more cogent and persuasive exponent of Leary's "imprinting circuit" theory of psychological development than Leary himself. Wilson was an advocate of many of the utopianistic theories of Buckminster Fuller, as well as those of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler with whom he has co-taught workshops. Wilson has also been a proponent of life extension and the use of smart drugs. He is also an admirer of James Joyce and has written commentary on Finnegans Wake.

Ironically, considering Wilson has long lampooned and criticized new age beliefs, his books can often be found in bookstores specializing in new age material. He has claimed to have had encounters with magical 'entities,' and when asked whether these entities were 'real,' he answered they were 'real enough,' although 'not as real as the IRS' since they were 'easier to get rid of.' He warned against beginners using occult practice, since to rush into such practices and the resulting 'energies' they unleash can lead people to go 'quite nuts.' Instead, he recommends beginners start with NLP, Zen Buddhism, basic meditation, etc., before progressing to more potentially disturbing activities.

In a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, RAW described himself as a "Model Agnostic" which he says "consists of never regarding any model or map of Universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory." More simply, he claims 'not to believe anything,' since 'belief is the death of thought.' He has described his approach as 'Maybe Logic.' Wilson wrote articles for seminal cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000.

While he has primarily published material under the name Robert Anton Wilson, he has also used the pennames Mordecai Malignatus, Mordecai the Foul, Reverend Loveshade, and other names associated with the Bavarian Illuminati, which he allegedly revived in the 1960s.

RAW holds the post of American director of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) and has appeared at Disinformation events. He has summed up his attitude towards life as one of optimism, cheerfulness, love, and good humor.

Wilson is featured in the documentary Maybe Logic: The Lives and Loves of Robert Anton Wilson, which was released on DVD in North America on May 30, 2006.

On June 22, 2006, Huffington Post blogger Paul Krassner reported that Robert A. Wilson is currently under hospice care at home with friends and family. [link]

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