Some Illuminati alumni ran courses during the winter, but the MLA has gone into limbo for a while. Sumbunall of us have migrated to a Ning site, set up by Minja, both to carry on, and sometimes to recapitulate…

I have started to make a habit out of writing some long piece in November.  All part of the NaNoWriMo challenge.

This year I have stayed at least slightly in front of the necessary word count, just for those days that you might not find yourself able to write a word.

This came from Word’s AutoSummary:

People strolled by, and glanced into his room, but kept going.  Lionel sighed.

“Feel free,” said Lionel.

“Sure,” said Lionel.

Lionel nodded.

“Sebastian,” he said.

“Not so much a drawing room, as a withdrawing room,” he said.

Lionel left the building.

Lionel paid attention again.

“Lionel is bringing to life a room with a future as just one room in an art gallery. “Art?”

Sebastian being oblique.

“If we can find the right room,” added Sebastian.

George’s little soirees seemed catalytic for many people.  Sorry if that sounds superstitious.”

“Wow, again,” said Lionel.

Sculpture has presence in a room.

A room where I can remember other galleries, other rooms. The world already has enough rooms. We can’t all visit all the rooms.

It may happen that the Maybe crew start collaborating on some more writing and stuff.

One place this could occur - an old WikiSpace that didn’t get used last time around.

You can never tell with these things, but I popped in to give the place a dust, and everything seems ready to go…

More on this as details emerge, but you can always check out current bits on OM (Only Maybe).   As well as those teasers, it might help to know that:

 RAW never finished his last book – even though it appears on Amazon - although check out ‘email to the universe’.

RAW ran an online course to help develop the material – and the course material is still available from the MLA as a  10 week ‘self-directed course’.

Bobby has included some TOTT in his @gnosis! comic

INTERLUDE 03: A SUN PLAY OF THE AGES. 

 (includes amazing classic comic book artwork by Marcelino)

Bobby has also worked on the piece we collaborated on – Falling On Deaf Ears – which relates to the Vico model of time/history as cyclic

DJ Fly you might call a wordsmith – he has got into Finnegans Wake, rapping, mixing, etc.  He’s using reference texts like  Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic, and some more visuals may appear from Chu.  His online bonanza of cut-ups may go public soon.

Derived from Robert Anton Wilson’s landmark MLA courses ‘The Ideogrammic Method’ and ‘Tale of the Tribe,’ this self-directed course bridges the political, the social and the psychological in a mix only Wilson conjure. Starring Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, Alfred Korzybski, James Joyce and Buckminster Fuller — the nucleus of the extraordinary minds that have helped shape the information age of 21st century and the mindscape of Robert Anton Wilson. Follow RAW through the labyrinths of Joyce and Pound as we learn to perceive/conceive in non-Aristotelian categories and join the Global Village. All course material was either written or assigned by Robert Anton Wilson. Praise Bob indeed!

Vid 1

Vid 2 – End of Week 1

Vid 3 – 50k words in two and a half weeks!

I completed  “Infinite Monkeys” in good time, but took other people’s advice to put it away for a while before coming back to re-write.  I guess the time has arrived.

I got distracted by another alter ego (my day job in a library) and put a blog online for Anon the Librarian - he also appears in Facebook now, and so on.

OM has felt revitalised by contributions from a wider range of people (since the magazine went into hibernation).

Life goes on.

I would dispute that, even if we share a respect for his work, a love of his jokes, and some sense of community.

Bob had blind spots that intensely annoyed me (although any provocation might well have been intentional).  Two examples spring to mind.

He considered vegetarianism sentimental, and uses a trivial straw dog argument – “if vegetarians don’t want to take life the should eat rocks”.   Well, this is just nonsense – setting up a position (that someone doesn’t actually hold) before knocking it down.

I don’t know ANY vegetarians or vegans who would say they don’t want to ‘take life’.  It’s totally, radiantly clear that we don’t want to take ANIMAL life.  Indeed, far from sentimentality about killing things, I actually eat most of them alive! That’s the whole point of bean sprouts, carrots, raw vegetables in general - they are still alive at the moment of eating!  It’s the meat-eaters (who don’t kill their own meat) who seem sentimental (and hypocritical) to me.  If they bit the heads off live chickens like a fox then I would call them carnivores, but actually most meat-eating humans are carrion-eaters (consuming things killed a while ago by others).  It doesn’t sound so macho, does it – scavenger?

Another straw dog (quite a common one, but based on a false assumption) was Bob’s dismissal of astrology.  The idea that ‘influences’ come from planets, or that there are only 12 Sun-signs to discriminate between billions of people are silly points to raise in argument against it. A few astrologers might defend those positions, but not many.   Antero Alli runs Astrologik courses at the MLA which are not based on mysterious and unscientific ’influences’, or simplistic psychological stereotypes.  He points out that he uses it as a language because it works.   It has a deep tradition as a mythological model of the human psyche, and as a calendar and clock of cyclic events in the lives of humans and nature and civilizations.  To dismiss such an evocative and poetic model out of hand seems shallow.

So I never did agree with RAW about everything.  Still, he provoked thought, and stimulated experimentation, and never claimed guruhood – almost always admitting to his own flaws and the possibility of tunnel-vision, prejudice, or false certainty about any particular position.

MEANWHILE – this year we have not only had another meet-up of some Maybe crew. 8 people met up in Paris, and some went to the Traces of the Sacred exhibition of art at the Pompidou, while others went to see piles of bones in the catacombs, and a good time was had by all. Stories in OM.

We have also produced and distributed world-wide a hard copy version of what used to be only an online magazine.  Maybe Quarterly (link to OM posts about it all)

For this and most other such news the one-stop-shop I use (and contribute to) remains the original Only Maybe blog (a smaller cousin seems to be emerging from within the campus.

How about Francis Bacon’s Four Idols (no, not the painter guy, brilliant though I consider him, but the man who maybe also helped write ‘Shakepeare’s plays’).

 ‘Idols’ is a term which Bacon used figuratively for fallacies which block or distort men’s perception of reality and their pursuit of truth. They are psychological barriers – prepossessions, prejudices, and delusions, emotional and sentimental biases. In short, they include all the imaginings which prevent men from seeing the object ‘as it really is’.

My brief summary of his theory appeared here, with links to better qualified sites.

Idols of the Tribe: (Human Chauvinism – sensory limits – bodymind?)

A person’s education:
The books a person reads:
The people a person admires: (try not to end up with their bad habits, too)
A person’s experiences:
Our need to seek more and more regularity in the world than there really is: (23s and The Law of Fives?)
Our tendency to seek out evidence of that which we already believe to be true: (self-fulfilling prophecy, The Prover proves what the Thinker thinks)
Our tendency to see personal truths as universal: (opinion disguised with isness)
Our belief in empirical data: (only part of the spectrum)
Our tendency to let emotions rule reason: (faith-based vs experiment-based)

Idols of the Cave: (Personal reality-tunnels)

People see things in light of their own special knowledge and opinions:
Some of us are governed by similarities, others by differences:
Those who love the past and those who love the possibilities of the future obscure the knowledge of the present:
Some of us see only the details and others see only the global:
Bacon advised students to hold in suspicion any idea which particularly appealed to them

Idols of the Marketplace: (General Semantics and NLP)  (Hi Ben!)
Words are misused or misunderstood:
Words have a true and a vulgar meaning: (slang and jargon)
Words cannot be defined because we need words to define them:
Names of things which do not exist confuse our understanding: (nominalizations)
‘Idols of the Market Place are the most troublesome of all’
‘It is not possible to divorce ourselves from these fallacies and false appearances, because they are so inseparable from our nature and condition of life’

Idols of the Theatre: (The State – true believers – ready-made fictions)
Dogma:
Religion:
Political systems (democracy, communism, etc.):
Education:
Political parties:

Ring any bells?

In fact, the truth proves a litle odder. While studying with Robert Anton Wilson at the Maybe Logic Academy I realised I had to accept the fact that Uncle Bob had certainly involved himself in some Crowleyian exercises/experiments at one time. RAW didn’t have a lot of respect for astrology (which Crowley seems to have studied quite intensively), and didn’t seem to have ever joined a Crowleyian group, but insisted on respect for intelligence (whatever the person’s public reputation – think Timothy Leary, or Ezra Pound).

So in those forums I intended to show a certain intelligent curiosity, but found myself confronted by (and here they’ll hate me) what seemed like Crowleyians, Crowleyites, believers in Crowleyanity, or whatever.  It turned out later that at least some of them had a sense of humour, and tolerance for other’s viewpoints - but not many of them!

So I got a little belligerent (only in a debating sense) and pointed out that Madame Blavatsky (my dad had had a long Theosophical phase) published her Magnum Opus (two volumes of The Secret Doctrine)  when Crowley was about ten years old, and Gurdjieff about twenty. I dislike ignorance, mostly. As though Crowley (like the supposed Jesus) doesn’t grow up around cultural influences, or steal ideas, or have human failings. He seemed fairly ambiguous about the ‘worship’ thing, although he exploited it at times, with few scruples.

I pointed out her profound influence on all the New Age stuff of that period (end of the Nineteenth Century), including The Golden Dawn – AND her warnings against practical magick, the dangers of siddhis, etc.

I knew full well that the Theosophical Society probably looks a bit flaky to men into Magick.  I only intended it as a put-on (in the trickster tradition) which I did not mean to accelerate into a flame war.

It amused me, in that situation, that I found myself arguing the parallels and differences between magic (with its shamanistic roots) and ritual magick (I won’t reiterate my case here but you might enjoy an imaginary meeting between Houdini and Crowley – Magical Means) – and playing the sceptic (trying to explain to Americans about the British class system, and how the arrogance of privileged people who studied at Cambridge, and never worked a day in their life, tends to put my hackles up).

They wouldn’t have it. They seemed to either mistake me for a sceptical materialist in denial, or a judgemental moralistic type (how wrong can you be) or something.

So it always secretly amused me that I had stolen my avatar name from Lawrence Sutin’s sympathetic and enlightening biog of Crowley, which I had simply read for my course work! You can see the section online here

He boots up his iMac to review the Akashic Record.

Magister: Read the charges.

iMac: Edward Alexander Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) stands accused of the standard crimes – Satanism, murder, reefer madness, hi-jacking the Rituals of the Golden Dawn, riding the Scarlet Women to death, whipping a minor poet with nettles, inspiring Black Metal cultists, abandoning his comrades to the snow demons of the Himalayas, failing to settle his bills at the Cafe Royal, and being a British gentlemen who should have known better than to become a bogus magus perpetrating bombast and buggery -

Magister: (wearily) We have heard all this before. Mr. John Symonds and his King of the Shadow Realm, Mr. Colin Wilson and his Nature of the Beast, Mr Alexander Hutchison’s The Beast Demystified, and all these ancient scandal sheets and psychedelphic papyri…is there any new evidence?

iMac: Our learned friend Professor Lawrence Sutin, an expert in jurisprudence, has prepared an appeal.

Magister: Very well. I suppose Mr Crowley had better materialise for us…Magister Templi draws a pentagram on his screen and slowly intones the Cry of the Tenth Aethyr. His garbled syllables of Enochian reverberate down the corridors mingling with the cries of the Court Ushers: “Bring Forth the Beast!” A great wind fills the Court. Through a vortex of whirling dust and sand Crowley rises from the well of the dock. He is sallow, flabby and priapically naked except for a bedraggled frock-coat and top hat. He coughs and curses as the hat slips off, revealing the familiar phallic dome of his skull.

heh heh