Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

Very powerful reading. Now I feel as if my days using various chemicals and psychotropics was not totally in vain.😐

Wilson takes us on a journey through a period of his life starting from when he was making good money working at Playboy magazine, through to his period as a broke, out of work writer, trying to get his 'Illuminati Trilogy" works into publication. The book then culminates in a very deep and personal tragedy that Wilson experienced, a tragedy that left me truly shocked (no spoilers). The very real tragic ending was a stark contrast to the playfulness Wilson uses around the subject matter of his book. For those who don't know, the subject matter is basically the occult/mysticism practices of reality and consciousness expansion. A central player in the book is former Harvard psychiatrist turned psychedelic-drug guru, Timothy Leary. Wilson clearly had a close friendship with Leary and we get a glimpse into Leary's extraordinary life, as Wilson and Leary exchange contact with each other. The Wilson-Leary exchange occurs while Leary both flees government authorities and battles the government authorities, in the process, occasionally finding himself in federal jails. Wilson also delves into the intellectual ideas of Leary and his theories on consciousness expansion. Some of the speculations in this book (written in 1976) now seem embarrassingly optimistic. For example, Wilson sights contentions by some thinkers at the time that by the year 2000 there will exist a pill that allows humans to live to 300-400 years of age. He sights the work of another psychedelic guru, Terrance McKenna, who suggested that in 2012 an exponential increase in creative evolution (novelty) would hit a singularity point of peak novelty. For those of you who are like me and can't even remember what you were doing in 2012, McKenna's prediction seems to have been wildly off. Personally, I found the lofty and way-off predictions of this book as adding to its charm, after all, Wilson openly declares that his speculations in the book could all just be total non-sense, and perhaps that's the point. What I like about Wilson's book, is that he treats the occult world and occult practices with both wide-eyed acceptance and deep skepticism. I know this sounds contradictory, but ironically at the heart of much of Occult philosophy (and Zen Buddhism) is embracing contradiction in nature. The human mind, faced with contradiction, often responds with laughter and Wilson (and Leary) were clearly men who wanted to be in on the joke. Wilson indulges in speculations that extraterrestrials from the star Sirius were and are in contact (possibly extra-sensory contact) with human beings, that the number 23 has a deep synchronistic resonance with his life and he embraces the Discordian principles of breaking down our models of reality and embracing conspiracy. It all seems like good fun, but what about the tragedy at the end? Was it an awful cosmic joke being played on Wilson? Did Wilson unwittingly pull some 'cosmic trigger' that led to his own personal tragedy? Or perhaps life (and death) are just a series of random events? When our sense of meaning and purpose are confronted by seemingly random tragedies, the absurdity of the world and our human condition makes us not know whether we wish to laugh or cry, or both. Welcome to the world of Discordianism.

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.)

This book had a huge influence on me when I read it in my early 20s. It was the mid-80s and things were much different than they are today (in almost every way). This man is funny, clever, and doesn't take any crap. I learned a lot about the Illuminati, the number 23, and many other esoteric topics. Love RA Wilson!

The saying goes, "never judge a book by its cover," but in this case, I would beg to differ. R A Wilson is a genius, and although I do not doubt this book is just as brilliant and witty as the rest of his works I've had the pleasure to read, I will be giving this printed version of the book 3-stars as the cover print is simply of an unacceptably poor and tasteless quality.The laminated surface is immensely glossy and lacks any subtlety of texture or embossing. Though I don't mind the actually design of the print, the cover card is of the cheapest quality possible, and given the $15 price tag, I just can't accept that the publishers would skimp out on delivering the minimum acceptable quality for a book of this kind.That being said, the inside pages are printed on typical paperback paper, and should not pose a problem for reading, though when you set this book down after a session of reading, you'll probably end up putting another book on top of it to rid your eyes of the gloss.

Told not to believe anything at the beginning of the book was an interesting start. Some nice true aphorisms as well. But then assertion after assertion about proof of telepathy etc. began to pall. Is he serious? Is he joking? And if he is joking it is a boring repeated joke. And the pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo (molecular DNA RNA modification by aliens from Sirius) gets pretty irritating very soon. Who cares? It is all fluff. Nothing to push against. And after a quarter of the book I could see that the rest would be in the same vein. The illustrations are nice though.

Two and a half stars at best.. This reads like a slightly potted reflection on 1960s/70s counterculture, written in a series of articles by a man who was obviously noodling around with the movers and shakers of the age. Very anecdotal, much of which concerns what he was reading/practicing at the time, and the coincidences/synchronicities that occurred in tandem (if you believe it all at face value). I much preferred Prometheus Rising as a treatise compared to the episodic/conversational reflections in this book. Fine as an offbeat, quirky, lightweight memoir/journal .. but never much more than that.

I first read this book in the 70s and have read it most years since. So much of it was way before it's time. I don't even mean it's all true. Only that it demanded that I think. The bit at the end about life extension bored me a bit but 90% of it is as relevent today as when it was written. This is my 9th or 10th copy. Love it.

Loved this book. Irreverent, funny scientific and a good read. A book that stays in your head for a long time and you come back to to remember how it was said or what exactly was said. RAW has huge culture and curiosity and asks the questions, without pushing any conclusions or grand theories, he just gets that niggling question/doubt into your head in his humorous way and leaves you to it. Great!

Can’t remember much of it except it got increasingly difficult to read. I enjoyedtheIllumati books though.