Category: Dr. Robert Anton Wilson

Starseed Transmission intersection point

The following are some notes i made while revisiting the RAW high weirdness around the date July 23, 1973, and some of the influences and experiments he mixed together during those weeks.

EXHIBITS

EXHIBIT: Crowley book 4.
“It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which a man may attain to the knowledge and conversation of His Holy Guardian Angel; for that is the particular secret of each one of us; a secret not to be told or even divined by any other, whatever his grade. It is the Holy of Holies, whereof each man is his own High Priest, and none knoweth the Name of his brother’s God, or the Rite that invokes Him.–One star in sight, Book 4.
 
EXHIBIT: Starseed
“Kohoutek will have a pale blue and yellow tail stretching out for somewhere between 75,000,000 and 100,000,000 miles — the yellow portions of it in the shape of a scimitar. It will first be seen by the naked eye in mid-November and will look dull. But since it will be approaching the Sun at 250,000,000 miles an hour, it will brighten and from mid-December to Dec. 28 the peoples of the world will have the finest Christmas star ever.”
    How about that, Chump? Do you still believe everything out there “just happened by accident.”
    —From a “memo to a friend who is an atheist” in Bob Considine’s September 16 column in the San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle. The quoted paragraph is from a release by the American Museum, Hayden Planetarium.–http://www.lycaeum.org/books/books/starseed/starseed.shtml

EXHIBIT: SUN RA
Composer, keyboardist and bandleader Sun Ra’s intimate connection with the cosmos is well documented, but it was rare that Ra was given cause for real celestial celebration. That opportunity did come in 1973 however, when Ra and his orchestra played a show in celebration of Kohoutek, a comet whose sighting was billed as the “Comet of the Century.” Though the comet was ultimately a visual disappointment, the concert was an aural success; the Arkestra is in a loose and comfortable realm on Concert for the Comet Kohoutek, whose release only came in the early ’90s before being reissued.–http://www.allaboutjazz.com/concert-for-the-comet-kohoutek-sun-ra-esp-disk-review-by-henry-smith.php#.U4ZioCgUpwF

EXHIBIT: Enochian
Enochian magic forms the backbone of both the Crowley and Golden Dawn systems of magic. Latest theories include that John Dee knew of the Slavonic Book of the Secrets of Enoch, as well as the Ethiopic Book of Enoch. Many individual magicians or very small groups prefer Enochian magic to other forms as the ceremonial scale required is smaller than needed for Masonic style ritual work. On the other hand, elaborate equipment is required to perform Enochian magic properly, including correct copies of the various Tablets and diagrams, and other apparatus (see “Enochian Temple Furniture” above).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enochian_magic

EXHIBIT: LILLY
Note that when Lilly writes, “To transcend one’s limiting set, one establishes an open-ended set of beliefs about the unknown,” he doesn’t give any indication of what those open-ended beliefs should be. That’s all up to you. I also find it significant that he suggests a “set of beliefs” rather than “a belief” about the unknown.
I remember Lee Perry, of the Samadhi Tank Company, telling me that John told them when giving orientations to first time users of the floatation tank to take extreme care to NOT give them any kind of programming or suggestions about HOW to use the tank, what to do or expect in there.– http://oz-mix.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/beliefs-unlimited.html

EXHIBIT: Beliefs Unlimited
“This exercise is useful when one attempts to move beyond one’s current belief structures. Record the the following in a soothing and authoritative manner five times into a tape recorder.
(start of belief unlimited tape)
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true within certain limits, to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are beliefs to be transcended.
Hidden from one’s self is a covert set of beliefs that control one’s thinking, one’s actions, and one’s feeling.
The covert set of hidden beliefs is the limiting set of beliefs to be transcended.
To transcend one’s limiting set, one establishes an open ended set of beliefs about the unknown.
The unknown exists in one’s goals for changing one’s self, in the means for changing, in the use of others for the change, in one’s capacity to change, in one’s orientation towards change, in one’s elimination of hindrances to change, in one’s assimilation of the aids to change, in one’s use of the impulse to change, in one’s need for changing, in the possibilities of change, in the form of change itself, and in the substance of change and of changing.
There are unknowns in my goals towards changing.There are unknowns in my means of changing. There are unknowns in my relations with others in changing. There are unknowns in my capacity for changing. There are unknowns in my orientation towards changing. There are unknowns in my assimilation of changes. There are unknowns in my needs for changing. There are unknowns in my possibilities of me changing. There are unknowns in the forms into which changing will put me. There are unknowns in the substance of the changes that I will undergo, in my substance after changes.
My disbelief in all these unknowns is a limiting belief, preventing my transcending my limits. My disbelief in all these unknowns is a belief, a limiting belief, preventing my transcending my limits.
By allowing, there are no limits; no limits to thinking, no limits to feeling, no limits to movement. By allowing, there are no limits. There are no limits to thinking, no limits to feeling, no limits to movement.
That which is not allowed is forbidden. That which is allowed exists. In allowing no limits, there are no limits. That which is forbidden is not allowed. That which is not allowed forbidden. That which exists is allowed. That which is allowed, exists. In allowing no limits, there are no limits. That which is not allowed is forbidden. That which is forbidden is not allowed. That which is allowed, exists. That which exists is allowed. To allow no limits, there are no limits. No limits allowed, no limits exist.
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true. In the province of the mind there are no limits. In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true. There are no limits.
(end of Belief Unlimited tape)
(from The centre of the cyclone an autobiography of inner space by John C. Lilly,M.D.)
When listening to the tape, lie in a comfortable position on the floor with the lights very dim and just allow the words and meaning enter you without any resistance. DO IT SOON, DO IT REGULARLY.
http://metaprogrammers.tribe.net/thread/62170597-3051-4625-b925-8068b67a5671

EXHIBIT: RAW GUARDIAN LSD LILLY ANGEL ZEN
Robert Anton Wilson shares his thoughts about the experience of what seems like contact of a profound nature with some kind of external intelligence. His experience began after taking LSD and listening to a tape recording of John Lilly’s Beliefs Unlimited, followed by Aleister Crowley’s Liber Samekh, which is a version of the Bornless Ritual used to invoke the Holy Guardian Angel. Wilson followed this initial experiment with the performance of additional rituals and sex magick, also including the previously mentioned tape recordings, but without the LSD.

    “On June 6, 1973, the Neurologician took a programmed trip on something an underground Alchemist told him was LSD. The program was in two parts, basically: I remained in a dark room, eyes closed, lying on a bed, during most of it. Part one was the playing back, on a tape recorder, of Dr. John Lilly’s “Beliefs Unlimited” hypnosis-tape; this was repeated several times during the first three hours of the experiment. During hours 4 to 5, a tape of Aleister Crowley’s Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel was played.
    …
    The next day, and in the following weeks, my yoga meditations were vastly enriched, and I occasionally went for days on end conscious of the two minds thinking, my mind and the “hornless” Mind, or, as Suzuki Roshi used to say, Little Mind and Big Mind.
    On July 22, 1973-six weeks after the trip-the Wizard was ready to try again, without the supposed LSD.
    This time, I used the Lilly tape and the Crowley invocation again, without drugs, but with prolonged and holy rituals or Tantric sex-trance involving the cooperation of the Most Beautiful Woman in the Galaxy.
    (pg.83-86 Cosmic Trigger)
http://www.blastedtower.com/robert-anton-wilson-on-conversation-with-the-holy-guardian-angel/
 Relevant link:
A biography of Suzuki, titled Crooked Cucumber, was written by David Chadwick in 1999. —http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunryu_Suzuki
Relevant link:
http://www.erowid.org/entheogens/writings/entheogens_writing1.shtml

EXHIBIT: Timothy Leary on Starseed
“Einstein’s equations. Nuclear energy. The revelation of DNA code as literally a code to be deciphered. Neurological imprinting. Anti-matter. Mankind clings to the old myths, avoiding the new truths. It happened before.
    “Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Giordano Bruno aroused the groggy world, asking it to fling its mind far beyond the planets. He speculated that the cosmos extended to infinity.
    “This in itself was not so shocking; but Bruno went considerably further—he postulated a multiplicity of world: suns and planets with life, unseen companions for the race of man. He toyed with man’s conception of himself; for this, and for magical claims and political entanglements, he was burned in 1600.” The Discovery of Our Galaxy, Charles Whitney.
http://www.lycaeum.org/books/books/starseed/starseed.shtml

EXHIBIT: Liber Samekh

“The Word that goeth from
(A) Free Breath
(U) through Willed Breath
(M) and stopped Breath
(GN) to Continuous Breath,
thus symbolizing the whole course of spiritual life. A is the formless Zero; U is the six-fold solar sound of physical life, the triangle of Soul being entwined with that of Body; M is the silence of “death”; GN is the nasal sound of generation and knowledge.
—http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/crowley/liber/libers/liber800a.pdf

being the Ritual employed by the Beast 666 for the Attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel during the Semester of His performance of the Operation of the Sacred Magick of ABRAMELIN THE MAGE.
http://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib800.html

EXHIBIT: Guardian Angel
The Bornless Rite takes about half an hour to perform start to finish, and it involves a certain amount of visualisation, statements of intent, and a whole lot of resonating ‘barbarous names’ (i.e. words which don’t mean anything but which help you focus or meditate on the energy you are trying to evoke).  If you want to read Crowley’s text about how to go about the rite you can read it here.  However, as with most text by Crowley it isn’t always as clear as it might be.
Performing it the first time I wasn’t terribly competent – there’s a lot going on, a lot to remember, and frankly barbarous names are a pain in the backside.  Just exactly how are you supposed to pronounce AR-O-GO-GO-RU-ABRAO without feeling slightly self conscious?  But it rapidly became apparent there was something to this – if the goal of a magickal ritual is to shift the consciousness of the magickian, then this worked a treat.  By the end of it I felt like I was buzzing with energy, and I did, indeed, feel a certain ‘divine authority’ had come upon me.  Cool, I thought, this is something to do again.
The history of the Bornless rite is pretty interesting.  First of all, the title seems to be a mistranslation – it should be the Headless Rite.  But that sounds a lot less cool.  There’s an argument to suggest it means head as in the beginning or start, therefore headless means without beginning, and Bornless might be a reasonable parallel for that concept.
http://www.weirdshitnotbullshit.com/getting-to-know-your-holy-guardian-angel-the-bornless-riteliber-samekh/

Exhibit: from wikipedia: July 23, 1973 (Monday)

    A member of the Japanese Red Army and four members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijack Japan Air Lines Flight 404, a Boeing 747-246B with 140 other people on board, shortly after it takes off from Amsterdam Airport Schiphol in the Netherlands for a flight to Anchorage, Alaska, en route a final destination of Tokyo International Airport, Tokyo, Japan. One of the PFLP members is killed when her hand grenade explodes during the hijacking, also injuring the airliner’s chief purser. The surviving hijackers force the plane to fly to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates; after a long stay there, they force it to fly to Damascus, Syria, and Benghazi, Libya, where they release the passengers and crew 89 hours after the hijacking began and blow up the airliner.
    Ozark Air Lines Flight 809, a Fairchild Hiller FH-227, encounters windshear in a thunderstorm and crashes at Normandy, Missouri, while on approach to land at St. Louis International Airport in St. Louis, Missouri, killing 38 of the 44 people on board.
    The Avianca Building in Bogotá, Colombia, suffers a serious fire.
—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1973#July_23.2C_1973_.28Monday.29

Exhibit 2: From wikipedia:
1829 – In the United States, William Austin Burt patents the typographer, a precursor to the typewriter.– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_23

EXHIBIT: Book 4, One star in sight.
Liber 185 need not be quoted at length. It is needful only to say that the Aspirant is trained systematically and comprehensively in the various technical practices which form the basis of Our Work. One may become expert in any or all of these without necessarily making any real progress, just as a man might be first-rate at grammar, syntax, and prosody without being able to write a single line of good poetry, although the greatest poet in soul is unable to express himself without the aid of those three elements of literary composition. —http://hermetic.com/crowley/book-4/app2.html

EXHIBIT: Secret Chiefs
Several 19th and 20th century occultists claimed to belong to or to have contacted these Secret Chiefs and made these communications known to others, including H.P. Blavatsky (who called them the “Tibetan Masters” or Mahatmas), C.W. Leadbeater and Alice A. Bailey (who called them Masters of the Ancient Wisdom), Guy Ballard and Elizabeth Clare Prophet (who called them Ascended Masters), Aleister Crowley (who used the term to refer to members of the upper three grades of his order, A∴A∴ ), Dion Fortune (who called them the “esoteric order”), and Max Heindel (who called them the “Elder Brothers”).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Chiefs

The Enochian Calls or Keys (the angels refer to them by both titles) are 48 spirit evocations delivered to Dee and Kelley in the Enochian language and then translated into English word for word by the angels. The overt purpose of the Keys, the angels declared, was to enable Dee to establish ritual communication with the spirits of the 30 Aethers or Airs who rule over the tutelary spirits of the nations of the earth. There are actually 49 Keys, but the first, the angels said, is too sacred and mysterious to be voiced. The first eighteen explicit Keys are completely different in their wording; the last 30 are similar save for the name of the Aether inserted in the first line. The angel Raphael declares the expressed purpose the Keys to Dee: —http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/bb/bluebook418.htm

Pull my ring:

Back in the mid to late 1990’s while reading the first ‘Cosmic Trigger’ by RAW, i was struck by a perceived synchronicity when reading the section about Dr Timothy Leary and the starseed transmissions, due to my recent encounter with Sun Ra and the concert for comet Kahoutek, which is the same comet that Dr Timothy Leary mentions in his starseed transmissions, as the cosmic trigger, in some sense a literal cosmic trigger from the skies, perhaps you could say. I would say, and i picked up on this synchronicity and made an early association between, RAW synchronicity cluster fucks from his book Cosmic Trigger,and my own feelings about special kinds of free jazz, out there experimental jazz, the later works of Coltrane, the strange worlds of Sun Ra, and of course my own experiments with altered states of awareness, a little Yoga, some Magick and strange drugs, mostly of the organic and local variety.

Almost 20 years ago i turned on to what was happening and within only a few short years i was lucky to be immersed in channeling interests based around RAW and his tribes that unfold from his books. A memorable moment that tipped me into a slightly more receptive state to mystical happenings, or strange synchronicity, was when the tripper was reading the book ‘Design for Dying’ by Dr Timothy Leary and R.U Sirius (Ken Goffman), and listening to to ‘the bottle’ by Gil Scot Heron, when the music and text synced up together upon the word ‘John Coltrane’, Leary was using his music as a metaphor to describe the sub-atomic world of quantum mechanics, clouds of probabilities.

 I like the idea of a constellation’ of harmonic vibrations, cohering to the individual mind-body conduit making it all happen, with luck on behalf of all the tribe, the global epic, in this case the music of John Coltrane and/or Sun Ra. ‘Cosmic’ in the best sense of that word. And, it was comet Kahoutek that first struck me with a strong enough synchronicity to break me out from my conditioned rigid reality constructs into a new world, with my own spirit, off and out billions of light years away, entering chapel penniless.

New ideas flew out from my head and a few others around me, and a rising tide of terrible popular assimilation’s and degradations of everything and anything that could be purchased, thanks, in the most part to the Thatcher/Reagan invasion, and move toward an unrestricted global finance capitalism, a true monster that swallowed up anything original, churning out cheap imitations and co-opting the signals, signs, music and culture of rebellion to simply extend the universal brands. Enough moaning.

Getting back to today, i just returned from a Sun Ra centennial celebration concert with the Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen, held at the Barbican theater. I was fortunate to be the guest of poet John Sinclair, who performed with the Ra esque, out jazz cats Flounder Effect, reading a freshly composed ode to Sun Ra, and introducing the Arkestra itself. I met Marshall after the show briefly, shook his hand, said ‘beautiful, thankyou’ and saw his friendly spirited greetings and loving vibes for John.
The plot thickens a little more when you consider that John Sinclair introduced me to the great Michael Ray (Galactic tone scientist) and driving force of the Sun Ra Arkestra and formations since 1978. Michael kindly managed to slip into the studio in Amsterdam while visiting with Kool and the Gang, and incredibly improvise a special language for trumpet, to fit snug with Johns 23 poems all taken from his great work in verse dedicated to Thelonious Monk: I mean you.

I had previously seen Michael Ray in the context of his Kosmic Krewe when living in new Orleans 2004, and his band often criss-crossed with the touring band ‘Garaj Mahal’ who i was fortunate to ‘jam’ with between 2000-2005 across the U.S. I have a fond memory of seeing his band at the Blue Nile in 2004 at the rather strange time of 2.00 P.M on a mid-week afternoon. The new language of responsive improvisation struck me at that gig, the outness of some parts, and then leading into loverly swinging epic masterpieces.
That was a decade ago, today, i sit at the kitchen table with John Sinclair, Tuesday 3rd June, 2014. Only a few hours ago John recorded his new poem dedicated to Sun Ra here in Blackheath studios, London, thanks to Caleb Selah. Who knows what will conjure itself up from this collaboration, but it will be certain to lift a few Whigs and air out a few earlugs, not least illuminate with the condensed special language of poetry deployed by John Sinclair.

The other piece to this puzzle, and perhaps the main driving force that led me to write this blog-post, whathaveyou, is my recent role as musical director for the ‘Cosmic Trigger’ stage play.

Compiled by Steve Fly