Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories

By Robert Anton Wilson and D. Scott Apel

For over a decade (1987-1997), Robert Anton Wilson published a quarterly newsletter, Trajectories: The Journal of Futurism and Heresy with editorial and publishing expertise from his wife, Arlen Riley Wilson, and his friend, D. Scott Apel. Scott describes the newsletter as, "full of original articles, unpublished fiction, and outrageous

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hilaritas Press, LLC.
• Release date: Dec 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781952746284

Book preview

cover-image, Chaos and Beyond-8-27-2023

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Chaos and Beyond

The Best of Trajectories

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Chaos and Beyond

The Best of Trajectories

Mostly by

Robert Anton Wilson

with guest appearances by

Arlen Wilson

D. Scott Apel

Barbara Marx Hubbard

Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

Linus Pauling, Ph.D.

Robert Newport, M.D.

Edward Kellogg III, Ph.D.

Peter Russell

George Carlin

and Ed McMahon

Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories

Copyright © 1994 by Robert Anton Wilson

All rights reserved. No part of this book, in part or in whole, may be reproduced, transmitted or utilized, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in the form of writing from the publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles, books and reviews.

Hilaritas Press ISBN Print Edition:

978-1-952746-53-6

Hilaritas Press ISBN eBook Edition:

978-1-952746-28-4

First Edition 1994, The Permanent Press

Second Edition 2023, Hilaritas Press

Cover Design by Richard Rasa

Cover artwork by Marlis Jermutus

Book Design by Pelorian Digital

Hilaritas Press, LLC.

P.O. Box 1153

Grand Junction, Colorado 81502

www.hilaritaspress.com

Dedication

To

Robert Shea

1933 - 1994

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Contents

2023 Introduction by D. Scott Apel

Preface from the First Edition by D. Scott Apel

Introduction:

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Chaos

Chapter One

(reprinted from Trajectories #1, Summer, 1988)

• Bad News For CSICOP

• Trajectories Interview: Dr. Linus Pauling

• Mind-Body Problem Solved?

The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing by Dr. Ernest Lawrence Rossi Reviewed by Robert Anton Wilson

• Holistic Remedy

A poem by Arlen Wilson

• 1994 Update

Chapter Two

(reprinted from Trajectories #2, Autumn, 1988)

• Who Owns the Jesus Property?

by Dr. Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

• More On Vitamin C

A Letter from Dr. Robert Newport

• 1994 Update

• Our Lady of Outer Space

A poem by Arlen Wilson

Chapter Three

(reprinted from Trajectories #3, Winter, 1989)

• Blinded by What?

• The V Effect and ESP

• The Future of the Future

• Exo-Evolution

• 1994 Update

• Old Woman on the Beach

A poem by Arlen Wilson

Chapter Four

(reprinted from Trajectories #4, Spring, 1989)

• Book Review:

The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler

• Get It? by Peter Russell

• 1994 Update

• Brain Machine Debate

• Is the Body of My Enemy My Enemy?

A poem by Arlen Wilson

Chapter Five

(reprinted from Trajectories #5, Summer, 1989)

• How to Publish Heresy

by Timothy Leary

• Medard Gabel and the World Game

• Trajectories Interview: Barbara Marx Hubbard

• Just Asking by Arlen Wilson

• Quiet Lady

A poem by Arlen Wilson

• E-Prime

• 1994 Update

• Feedback

Chapter Six

(reprinted from Trajectories #6, Fall/Winter, 1989/90)

• The Global Energy Grid

• The Great Drug Debate

• H.E.A.D. Research

• Preview of Coming Attractions

• Gender and Terrorism

The Demon Lover by Robin Morgan. Reviewed by Arlen Wilson

• Conspiracy and Demonology Update

• 1994 Update

Chapter Seven

(reprinted from Trajectories #7, Spring, 1990)

• War on Drugs

• War on the Medfly

• Entering Cyberspace

• Tomorrow's News

• Read At Your Own Risk by Arlen Wilson

• Book Review:

The Grant Swinger Papers by Daniel S. Greenberg. Reviewed by Arlen Wilson

• 1994 Update

Chapter Eight

(reprinted from Trajectories #8, Autumn, 1990)

• Fire You by D. Scott Apel

• Jury Nullification

• H.E.A.D. Hardware News

• Tomorrow’s News

• Weird Times

• Sex, Satanism and Sodomized Dogs

• 1994 Update

• Piss Wars

• Save Your Breath

A poem by Arlen Wilson

Chapter Nine

(reprinted from Trajectories #9, Spring, 1991)

• California’s Suppressed Drug Report

• High Weirdness: A UFO Update

• 1994 Update

• Tomorrow’s News

• Book Review:

The Rebirth of Nature by Rupert Sheldrake Reviewed by Arlen Wilson

• To The Persian Gulf: Thanks

A poem by Arlen Wilson

Chapter Ten

(reprinted from Trajectories #10, Autumn, 1991)

• Special Book Review Section

• Tomorrow's News

• Alvin and Heidi Tofller in Praise of our Kinder, Gentler War Machine

• Weaponry and Livingry

• Zine Review

• Weirdness Updates

• 1994 Update

Outroduction

• Notes on our Contributors

• Production Information

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All writings by Robert Anton Wilson

unless otherwise noted.

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2023 Introduction

By D. Scott Apel

Mayor Johnson: "Goddamn it, I said Order!"

Howard Johnson: Y’know, Nietzsche says, out of chaos comes order.

Olson Johnson: Ah, blow it out your ass, Howard.

— Blazing Saddles (1974)



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I met Robert Anton Wilson in January 1976. The previous year I’d read the Illuminatus! trilogy, and encouraged my friend Keven C. Briggs — both of us aspiring writers — to read it as well. We were blown away by the humor, the intricacy of the picaresque plot, and the esoteric lessons folded into the epic adventure. And when we discovered that the publisher had forced Wilson and Shea to cut some 500 pages, including additional mystical wisdom, we determined to track down this Wilson guy and suggest he allow us to read these apocryphal pages. At gunpoint, if necessary.

Both Briggs and I were living in Silicon Valley, and when we discovered that he and Arlen were living in Berkeley we called and asked if we could come up and talk. He agreed. Luckily for all of us, no guns or threats or violence were necessary. Our initial meetings with RAW quickly evolved into weekly excursions to spend an evening with our famous and brilliant new friend. I have to assume he enjoyed our company and our discussions as well, since he never suggested we not show up again, or moved without leaving a forwarding address.

It took me ten years to realize that a decade had passed. In early 1987, Bob — now living in Ireland — embarked on an American lecture tour, and I drove him and Arlen from the Bay Area to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, where he was doing a weekend workshop. As we sat relaxing in the natural splendor of the central California coast, I approached him with the idea of producing a newsletter. I knew he’d had one in the early ’70s, and pointed out that reviving it using recent innovations in desktop publishing could supplement his income by nearly as much as the minimal advances he was getting for his books. Only a handful of people in America make their living as novelists . . . and freelance writing was never a route to riches for anyone. I knew the Wilsons were always hurting for money, and I was determined to find a way to make them some.

Arlen was immediately enthusiastic, and in May of ’87 Bob wrote from Ireland that he was very seriously interested in working with you on a newsletter. Bob dubbed the venture Trajectories, after his earlier publication (and later added the subtitle The Journal of Futurism and Heresy). We quickly hashed out the business details, which boiled down to the three of us — Bob, Arlen, and me — being the board of directors, and signed a contract to that effect in July. We agreed to split the profits three ways; that way, the Wilsons would get two-thirds of the proceeds. (Which, now I think about it a billion years later, could easily have made Arlen Riley Wilson one of the highest-paid poets in the business.)

The premiere issue of Trajectories ran 12 pages and is dated Summer 1988, although we worked on the details for months before its release. In my editorial, I stated that the newsletter was dedicated to sane futurism, and was for people more interested in creating the future than in worrying about it. For this first issue, we were fortunate enough to land an interview with Dr. Linus Pauling, one of only two people ever to win the Nobel Prize in two different categories (Chemistry and Peace), who was working in Palo Alto at the time. Bob was thrilled at the prospect of including Dr. Pauling in Trajectories, but since he was still living in Ireland, he was not able to perform the interview and asked me to do it in his stead. It was my pleasure — and honor — to do so. Dr. Pauling, in his late 80s at the time, proved a genial and gracious host, as well as a font of intelligence. (I even got him to autograph a bottle of Vitamin C for me: The first time anyone’s ever asked me for that, he chuckled.) This first issue also included Bob’s take on some science news items and a poem by Arlen; both features would become Trajectories staples.

Issue #2 (Autumn 1988) ran 16 pages — and was stapled! It featured an original piece by Dr. Timothy Leary, an interview I’d done with science fiction author Norman Spinrad, and a letters column that included praise from physicist Nick Herbert and author Tom Robbins. Issue #3 (Back to the Future — Special Futurism Issue) featured a RAW article, The Future of the Future, and a piece by me about Walt Disney as a forgotten futurist, along with the usual features, including a poem by Arlen.

And so on. Over the next few years, thanks to Bob’s celebrity friends, Trajectories would publish original pieces by Dr. Leary, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Peter Russell, and other counter-culture notables. We were thrilled to count George Carlin and Lily Tomlin among our subscribers.

The division of labor was very simple: Bob would supply the content, and I’d do everything else — editing, formatting, printing, mailing, banking, advertising, etc. Bob would hand over a floppy disk containing the contents; I’d lay out the newsletter and run a sample by him and Arlen; then we’d print and mail it. One of Bob’s other functions was as an evangelist, tasked to take flyers to his lectures and spread the word about the newsletter. As the editor/publisher, I tried to upgrade each issue as I improved my own computer and desktop publishing skills. We added photos, played with fonts, and printed on increasingly better quality paper. Ultimately, I’d like to think that the final issues of Trajectories were more a magazine than a humble newsletter or one of the ubiquitous amateur zines of the ’90s. Then again, I have often been accused of being delusional — occasionally by people who actually exist!

Our typical production process was that Bob would spend a few months collecting news items he felt worthy of attention and write some comments about them, and would also write a major article or two for each issue. Within a couple of weeks of my (gentle) reminder of our (entirely loosey-goosey) production schedule, Bob would hand me a floppy disk (we both used Macs) containing his contributions. I’d format them, lay out the next issue, and fill the gaps with ads from friends and supporters with whom we traded ad space and my own material (an editorial; an essay; an occasional humor piece, all subject to Bob’s approval). The rest of my involvement is even more boring: I’d deal with a printer, schlep boxes of finished product back to my house, and spend a weekend updating subscriber address spreadsheets, printing out mailing labels, stuffing issues into envelopes and sealing them, then organizing the mass mailing according to the Post Office’s bizarre, labyrinthine and arcane bulk mailing requirements. (I often felt like I must have been absent on Career Day when they informed kids that being a publisher involved an enormous amount of heavy lifting.)

Collecting the best content from the first ten issues of Trajectories into a book was my idea, I’m proud to say, although RAW coined the title Chaos and Beyond. (Chaos theory was a hot topic in those days, and fit right into Bob’s reality tunnel.) Bob personally selected the material for this 1994 anthology and wrote updates to many of his articles. He dedicated the book to Robert Shea, who’d passed away just months earlier, in March 1994.

From the start, neither Bob nor I considered Chaos and Beyond a big RAW work of the caliber of Illuminatus! or Cosmic Trigger. But it was a way to ensure that this massive amount of material did not simply disappear, and to leverage this existing material into a bit of extra cash for the Wilsons without extensive effort on their part. Chaos and Beyond was always aimed at hardcore Wilson fans rather than newbies, so we expected minor sales. The book was reprinted twice, however, with 1,000 copies in each printing, so with 3,000 copies in circulation, it did better than either of us ever expected — far better, given the current reissue. Way to go, Wilson!

On the other hand . . . During one of my first evenings as the host of Science Fiction Night on Silicon Valley’s PBS station in the early ’90s, I gave a savage review of an episode of The Outer Limits we’d just aired. My producer was livid. You are NOT going to tell our viewers they’ve just wasted an hour of their lives! he howled. I learned a lesson that day, which makes me reluctant to write the following sentence: Sadly, I’m not sure the contents of Chaos and Beyond have much relevance anymore except to RAW completists; much of the material is contemporary to its time — 1988-1994 — which is fine for a newsletter but feels dated now, post-9/11, post-Trumpsterfire, post-Covid. (Hopefully, that Unholy Trinity will also feel obsolete three decades from now.) It’s not likely that anyone wants to read about California’s medfly problem, for example, or reviews of brain training machines as relevant today as a TRS-80 or a Commodore 64. Or Pong.

But even at the time, RAW was aware of this limitation; he ends his Introduction thus: Needless to say, most of what you shall read here almost certainly will appear ridiculously old-fashioned in about five years, i.e., 1999 — so you can perhaps get some sense of how ridiculously old-fashioned the material might seem today. The book served its purpose then, however, and does, I believe, contain some timeless material (Arlen’s poems, a couple of pieces by Dr. Leary, Bob’s extensive Future of the Future essay and certainly his Introduction). If you want a laugh or three about how drastically computers — and publishing — have changed since the early ’90s, check out the Production Information at the end of the book, which Hilaritas agreed to leave intact in order to reprint this volume just as it appeared in 1994.

Finally, a word or two about working with RAW for a decade on this artisanal publication. One of the highest compliments I’ve ever received was from my editor at the San Jose Mercury News, where I was the video columnist for ten-plus years and wrote monthly feature pieces. He once told me that my writing rarely needed editing, since your stuff comes in clean. I’m pleased to pass that insight and compliment along to Robert Anton Wilson. Bob was a total professional, and his stuff always came in clean. I rarely had to edit his material, except perhaps to fix a typo or correct the occasional misspelled word. I never cut his material and never altered it. Trajectories was his forum, and I wanted to make sure he knew he had the freedom to say whatever he wanted, in whatever way he wanted, and that I would publish it exactly as he intended. It was his sole censorship-free forum, and I’m proud that I was able to provide him with this platform.

When I think back on the Trajectories experience, I have nothing but fond memories. RAW was a perfect partner: professional, agreeable, intelligent, and enthusiastic. We never once exchanged a cross word over production (or at any time during our 30-plus year relationship, for that matter), and it always delighted me to write him a check every quarter for his share of the profits from the newsletter and later, the audio and videotapes we produced together.

Ultimately, Trajectories published 23 issues. We produced it on an irregular basis until RAW was just too busy with more important issues, like being Arlen’s caregiver. Following that, his own health began to fail and he simply had no time for Trajectories anymore. But during its run, we published some great stuff by Bob, much of it included in Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories and the sequel volume, Beyond Chaos and Beyond, in the hopes of preserving it for the ever-growing legion of enlightened and curious people who discover the genius of Robert Anton Wilson.

Enjoy!

D. Scott Apel (aka Ralph Weirdo Emerson)

Pahoa, Hawaii

September 2023

D. Scott Apel (1951-1995; 1997-present) is the editor of Philip K. Dick: The Dream Connection and Science Fiction: An Oral History, and author of Exemplary Lives of Impossible Men, the Killer B’s movie guides, Mein Summer Kampf, and the Alec Smart comic mystery series, among other frustratingly-close-to-genius works of fiction and non-fiction. Someone please stop him.

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Preface from the First Edition

Owner's Manual

by D. Scott Apel

Hello! And congratulations on your purchase of Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories™ anthology, Version 1.0. We're sure you won't regret your choice of Trajectories™ brand futurism and heresy (with the secret miracle ingredient RAW). In order to enhance your enjoyment of Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories™ (Version 1.0), we recommend you read this Owner's Manual before attempting to operate this volume.

SPECIAL FEATURES OF

Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories™ Version 1.0

• The best features from the first five years of Robert Anton Wilson's Trajectories Newsletter

• New-to-this-volume 1994 Updates

WRITING CREDITS

• All uncredited pieces were written by Robert Anton Wilson

• All notes in parentheses and italics which begin with

(Note:and end with – Ed.) were written by D. Scott Apel

TRAJECTORIES: THE NEWSLETTER

• Robert Anton Wilson and the Permanent Press publish a quarterly newsletter from which the contents of this volume were drawn. A subscription form for Robert Anton Wilson's Trajectories Newsletter can be found at the back of this book.

WARRANTY

• The manufacturers of Chaos and Beyond: The Best of Trajectories™ (Version 1.0) take no responsibility for any incidental or consequential mind-bending (or spoon-bending), whether express or implied, resulting from the use, misuse, abuse, accident, neglect, mishandling, misapplication, alteration, modification, proselytization or commercial use of this product, or damage that is attributable to acts of any Deity, Sub-Deity, Anti-Deity, Professed Deity, or Force With Which Man Was Not Meant To Tamper.

Reading this Warranty invalidates this Warranty.

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Introduction

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Chaos

By

Robert Anton Wilson

Sometime in my late 'teens – i.e., in the early Paleolithic age, around 1948 or '49 – I found a book called Science and Sanity in the Brooklyn Public Library. The book has nearly a thousand pages, much of it containing heavy mathematics, and I had never heard of the author, Count Alfred Korzybski. Nonetheless, gazing over the text, reading a paragraph here, a chapter title there, I gradually got hooked on what seemed to me, and still seems to me, one of the most radical books of the 20th Century. I may not have felt exactly like Keats on first looking into Chapman's Homer, or even like Balboa on the peak in Darien, but I felt the whole universe shift into a new perspective around me.

Everything I have written, however improved or disimproved by my own wisdom or idiocy, begins from the shock of taking a book off a library shelf and encountering the world of Alfred Korzybski.

Science and Sanity, in fact, although published in 1933, upsets conventional Occidental ideas so thoroughly that even though many of its concepts have directly or indirectly influenced virtually every branch of social science, it still remains, in 1994, somewhat controversial – and painfully confusing (unreadable) to many specialists.

Perhaps I found Korzybski easier to navigate than many learned persons because I had not yet specialized in anything when I read him – and even at 62 I still haven't specialized in anything. I suspect that perhaps I suffer from intellectual Don Juanism. I love too many reality-tunnels to give my heart entirely to any one of them. I agree with Korzybski's friend, R. Buckminster Fuller, who once said, If nature wanted us to be specialists, we'd be born with one eye and a jeweler's lens attached.

Or perhaps I found Korzybski congenial because I read his book over and over, perhaps two dozen times in the first ten years after discovering it, many times under the influence of marijuana, a herb which makes it easy to understand Korzybski's major thesis, which holds that our seemingly-immediate perceptions of a seemingly external reality contain as much guess-work, abstraction, induction, deduction, outright gamble etc. as any of our slower, more conscious ideologies, belief systems, religions, sciences etc. All science and philosophy that follows its own method logically will eventually end with relativity, uncertainty, and zeteticism because the sense-data from which we start remains wobbly and unsure.

The same year Korzybski published this Agnostic Manifesto, 1933, John von Neumann published a more technical proof, known as von Neumann's Catastrophe of the Infinite Regress, demonstrating that even if we add infinite instruments correcting instruments that correct instruments . . . etc . . . that correct our raw sense-data, we still have some remaining instrumental uncertainty. Korzybski merely drove the last nail in the coffin of Certitude by showing how the same uncertainty infests every act of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting etc. Whether you look at a Picasso, a UFO or a member of the opposite sex, your perceptions contain your whole world-view.

Korzybski demonstrated that each individual act of human perception contains that individual human's whole biography and, so to speak, the history of their family and tribe, back to the dawn of humanity, because our language habits (neurolinguistic reflexes) shape and give form and meaning to the raw data received when electrons, photons and other energies impact upon our brains. We each co-create the reality-tunnel we experience.

Loyal readers who have battled their way through five or more of my books know well that this perspective – learned from Korzybski and confirmed by marijuana – appears in both the form and the content of all I write. It shapes my fiction and explains the deliberately annoying * assaults on all dogmatism that appear in my nonfiction.

~•~

* I forgot who first used this term for my prose, but it delighted me. When one reader feels seriously annoyed, it means I have provoked him or her almost to the edge of a thought, which suggests that my books have actually driven others all the way into the experience of actually thinking.

~•~

I owe an even greater debt to Korzybski for his theory of time-binding. This metaphor holds that a sharp break – a quantum jump – exists between humans and other animals. This sounds alarmingly non-Darwinian to many, but Korzybski did not embrace Creationism. Far from it, he fervently espoused evolution. But he believed that the development of the linguistic centers of the human brain placed us in a different umwelt or reality-tunnel from that of any other primate – a semantic environment which, growing and changing, causes us to grow and change in ways impossible to nonlinguistic animals, thus creating what we once loosely called progress.

In Count Korzybski's odd terminology* he classifies plants as chemistry-binders, because they bind-up chemical energy from the sun, air, earth, etc.; prehuman animals as space-binders, because they move about to seek prey and play, sex and food, etc. by searching in space; and humans as time-binders, because language allows us to communicate across generations. (I can receive signals sent by Thales of Miletus over 80 generations ago.)

~•~

* He grew up in a castle where people spoke Polish, Russian, German and French every day, and then in his forties wrote his major works in English, a language new to him . . .

~•~

About the same time I discovered Korzybski's Science and Sanity, I also stumbled upon Shannon and Weaver's Mathematical Theory of Communication. This introduced me to a concept much more precise and measurable than Korzybski's time-binding – Shannon's mathematical definition of information. For our purposes here, without the math, we can say that information consists of that part of a message which