A friend of mine asked if I'd mention some of the ways that Robert Anton Wilson has been an influence on my thinking. That stirred up a bunch of thoughts, more about the way I tend to view things, which was certainly inspired by, and most likely consonant with, RAW's perspective. However, the very first thought I had was that the most important thing RAW taught me is that I'm the Outer Head of the Order.

(And so are you!)

We each live in a universe (for lack of a better term) which is circumscribed, in an apparently iron-clad sort of way, by our own experience. We are, per force, solipsists. The only thing one seems to be certain of is that one exists, and it is this certainty (which turns out, on closer inspection, to be not quite as certain as it seems) that informs and dictates our understanding of What's Going On.

I was first exposed to Wilson through a chance encounter; I happened to pick up a book called The Eye in the Triangle, the first volume of the Illuminatus! trilogy.

Illuminatus! is, on the surface, all about conspiracies: every conspiracy you ever imagined or heard about is true. Kennedy was shot by the CIA. And by the Mafia. Marilyn Monroe really is a Goddess. H.P Lovecraft's writings should be shelved under "non-fiction". The world is run by a secretive cabal which has existed from the dawn of time.

Conspiracies

There is a subtext in here, however. Everything is a conspiracy, but the ultimate conspiracy is the one wherein you conspire against yourself. We wander around imagining, in a thoughtless sort of way, that there's some concrete, ongoing and adamantine entity that I (in my particular case) call "me".

In fact, there's no more going on there than a lengthy monologue, apparently emanating from a vacuum, that tells this ongoing story about this fictitious character called "me". The story is beginningless and endless; it's the music that fills the astral ears that "I" think of as "mine", and "I" somehow mistake this continuous one-sided Greek chorus for a concrete being that is "having" "my" "experiences".

There are no facts; there is only evidence. I am a fictional character. And so are you.

Fiction

Not only does this voice create the illusion that there is a discrete "I" (which is "me"), but the voice conspires with my senses in a thoroughly non-obvious way to frame the "input" "I" "receive" from "Out There" to match certain apparently hidden expectations.

Does the voice have low self-esteem? When the visual and aural input that winds up being interpreted as a couple of people glancing in my direction, looking away and laughing, the voice pipes up (perhaps in the voice of Piper Laurie) "They're laughing at me!"

Some of the stories the voice tells are based on "memories", our own little internal Livejournal. That journal, however—and numerous psychological studies confirm this—is largely a fictional work, written on dissolving paper with invisible ink. We forget more than we remember, and clearly much of what we remember is things that never, ever happened. We are constantly fabricating ourselves. Wilson talks a lot about reality tunnels. John Lilly points out that our nervous systems appear to be machines for taking essentially random sensory input and imposing "pattern" onto it. Our "reality tunnels" dictate the "patterns" we pull out of the seething quantum madness that physicists tell us is Really Going On. Our patterns are our realities. We have no other place to go... Or do we?

Magick

Magick, Crowley informs us, is the Art and Science of Creating Change in Conformity to Will, as good a definition as I've ever found. If we change our reality tunnel, we change our reality. Usually, we do this is subtle and small ways, so incremental as to be almost unnoticeable. We can, at least potentially, make larger changes than that. A friend of mine slows down and speeds up time. I retrieve objects from a distance. It's all in the reality tunnel you look out of, the one—on some deep and difficult-to-grasp level—you choose to look out of.

Magick is a way in which we can "trick ourselves" into making different choices. And there are, as it turns out, an infinite number of potential choices out there. As J.B.S. Haldane observed, the universe in not only stranger than we imagine, it's stranger than we can imagine. And like Whitman, we each contain multitudes. RAW suggests—and offers practical guidance in several of his books (I recommend Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology wholeheartedly)—a number of ways in which one can trick oneself out of tricking oneself, and discover some of those possibilities.

Of course, the tendency which people have is to imagine that there's a real person In Here and a real world Out There. This is what tends to create the sort of thinking that's all too common among aspiring Magi (although everyone goes through this stage; some just never grow out of it): the idea that the Magick is inherent in the ritual itself, or the sigil itself, or an initiation, or a gooroo, or a talisman or an Order, or whatever. 'Tain't so.

The magick is woven into the spaces between the warp of our solipsistic and selective sensory experience on the one hand, and the weft of our current reality tunnel/internal monologue on the other. You have to dive deep into the spaces between to find it, to free it, to use it. It's your reality. As Wilson says, "Seek ye the master who makes the grass green."

I don't have any better advice than that. You are the Outer Head of the Order. And so am I.

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.