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Robert Anton Wilson

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Robert Anton Wilson (1932 - present) is a futurist thinker, libertarian, and author of the Schrödinger's Cat trilogy (1979), a complex spoof of conspiracy theories. He also co-authored (with Robert Shea) the Illuminatus! trilogy (1975), which humorously examined American paranoia about conspiracies. These books mix true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "Operation Mindfuck." (Much of the odder material was derived from letters sent to Playboy magazine while Shea and Wilson were working as editors there.) In The Cosmic Trigger (1976), he made Discordianism, Sufism, futurism, the Illuminati and other esoteric or counter-culture philosophies accessible to larger audiences. He is also a proponent of Timothy Leary's eight-brain circuit model and neurosomatic/lingustic engineering, which he writes about in Prometheus Rising (1983) and Quantum Psychology (1990), books of practical techniques to break free of one's "reality tunnels." With Leary he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, life extension, and intelligence enhancement technologies.

Other fictional books by Wilson include The Earth Will Shake (1982) and Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (1996). His nonfiction books include Quantum Psychology, The New Inquisition (1994), and other volumes of The Cosmic Trigger. He and Miriam Joan Hill co-wrote Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups (1998), an encyclopedia of conspiracy theories.


Online links:


Reference

  • Smoley, Richard and Jay Kinney, "Doubt!: The Gnosis Interview with Robert Anton Wilson," Gnosis, No. 50 (Winter 1999).