Robert Anton Wilson R.I.P.
The American writer, humorist, philosopher, psychologist and futurologist Robert Anton Wilson finally passed last Thursday. I say "finally" because he has suffered for some time with post-polio syndrome that caused a bad fall last year. Since then he had required continuous medical care.
I never met him, but felt that I got to know him in the thirty some years since I first picked up a copy of The Illuminatus! Trilogy which he co-authored with Robert Shea. Advertised as "a fairy tale for paranoids," it was very funny in parts, using humor to examine American paranoia about conspiracies. Since then I read more than twenty of his books and there is no doubt that some of his ideas influenced not just me, but a generation of people who were interested in thinking outside that famous box.
Even thirty years later, one of his best and most influential books was Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati in which he examined everything from The 23 Enigma (the number 23 appears more often in "random" number series than any other and is said to have hundreds of odd correlations, from the number of human chromosome pairs to the Bible), leprechauns, Mr. Spock’s ears, Discordianism, Sufism, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, the Illuminati and Freemasons, Yoga, and other esoteric or counterculture philosophies. He also advocated Timothy Leary’s eight circuit model of consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic programming.
"RAW" as he was affectionally known, also introduced millions of people to the idea that consciousness can affect the material world.
Some people found some of his writing difficult, simply because he was always trying to force people to make new associations and to see things differently. And few people would agree with absolutely everything that he said. Because he did not want them to: he wanted to make people think and to develop their intuition.
I shall always be grateful for RAW’s influence, and I hope that he enjoys the next stage of his journey.
Dr. Richard G. Petty, MD is a world-renowned authority on the brain, and his revolutionary work on human energy systems has been acclaimed around the globe.
He is also an accredited specialist in internal and metabolic medicine, endocrinology, psychiatry, acupuncture and homeopathy. He has been an innovator and leader of the human potential movement for over thirty years and is also an active researcher, teacher, writer, professional speaker and broadcaster. He is the author of five books, including the groundbreaking and best selling CD series Healing, Meaning and Purpose. He has taught in over 45 countries and 48 states in the last ten years, but spends as much time as possible on his horse farm in Georgia.
