Cosmic Trigger audio book

The story behind RAW’s Cosmic Trigger Audio Book

posted by Rasa

Ever since I heard Ken Campbell reading Part One of Illuminatus! in the 2007 Deepleaf Audio production, I had the idea in my head that I’d love to hear an audio book of Cosmic Trigger, and Prometheus Rising, and, well, most of Bob’s books. It took some years for Christina to sort out her dad’s legal affairs enough that we could create Hilaritas Press, start republishing mosbunall of Bob’s books, and then begin thinking of creative ways to further Bob’s works and ideas. In early 2014, Daisy Campbell began to pull together the resources and diverse energies needed to pull the Cosmic Trigger and create her stage adaptation. The RAW Trust was in full support, and already thinking of how the production could one day be staged in Santa Cruz. While Daisy realized her inspired interpretation of Cosmic Trigger, we were creating HIlaritas Press and publishing Cosmic Trigger as our first RAW title.

Oliver Senton, narrator for the audio book, played Robert Anton Wilson in Daisy Campbell’s “Cosmic Trigger – The Play”

Watching video clips of the production led me to write an email to Daisy in March of 2016, asking her thoughts on making Cosmic Trigger into an audio book. Her response was enthusiastic, and she immediately said, “The best possible man for the audio job would be Oliver Senton who played Bob in the play.”

Oliver was equally enthusiastic. Before he went into the recording studio to begin the project, he wrote to Christina,

“I have a strong faith that your father’s works are going to grow and grow in popularity and appreciation in the coming years, and that this re-framing of them you’re currently undertaking can only accentuate that. Rereading Cosmic Trigger Part I recently has only reminded me of how much brilliant thought and “feeling good” there is there. Truly, his was a mighty heart.”

Christina and I were ecstatic – we had an amazing book and a great actor to narrate – now we only had to make the thing. Easier imagined than done, but the RAW community has a lot of talent. I asked Steve “fly agaric 23” Pratt if he might be able to lend a hand. Oliver knew Steve as the drummer in Daisy’s stage production of Cosmic Trigger. I knew Steve, from back in early 2012 when he approached the Trust about his RAW360 virtual reality project. Steve lives in Amsterdam, doing a wide array of creative projects, and working a lot in the last years with poet/activist John Sinclair. I put Steve in touch with Oliver, and since I was more than 5000 miles away, and Oliver and Steve only had the English Channel to deal with, I took a back seat. That was a great decision. I’m taking the same tack in writing this blog post and letting Steve and Oliver take over . . .

Steve writes . . .

Cosmic Trigger Audio Book.

“Pull It!”

Finally the final secret of the Illuminati is out in the air, the Cosmic Trigger audio book project comes 40 years after the book was penned by RAW, and with luck will inspire new generations to come.

The project reflects a labour-of-love on behalf of all involved, from the studio recording itself, through the fine tooth-comb editing, and preparations for the audio book launch. To repeat a popular phrase in Cosmic Trigger circles, ‘heroic’ – defines the project perfectly.

RAW often suggested (in his Finnegans Wake writings) that reading a text aloud can unlock what were once dormant meanings in the text. Along lines sketched out by Marshall McLuhan, RAW also propagated signals inferring that the medium defines the message, and listening to speech impacts differently on the brain-body system than reading text silently in your head. The ear world and the eye world and the interacting processes of all the senses together, produce a holistic experience in time. This audio book can literally open up new dimensions, inner and outer.

Oliver Sentons’ reading stamina and continued ability to keep the listener engrossed in the comprehensive text is a delight to behold. Rasa and Christina have given hundreds of hours and incurred considerable expenses in producing this audio book. I dearly hope you help share and spread the word far and wide, and consider buying this one of a kind, 8 hour Robert Anton Wilson audio trip. With your help and support we can start work on the audio book for Cosmic Trigger Volume II: Down to Earth.

Special thanks to Mark Sampson, Simon Reeves, Oliver Senton, Tom and Della Pratt, Scott Groves and to Hagbard Celine for the ill artwork, all RAW heads worldwide, and those who are about to hear the book. Hoo fasa.

“Pull it!”

– Steve “fly agaric 23” Pratt, April 23, 2017

And from Oliver . . .

Birmingham, the city in England, has always held a half-formed shape in my memory: my sister went to university there thirty years ago, and since then I’ve only passed through briefly, just changing trains or spending a night or two in standardised hotels. Where better to dive deep into the stream of R.A.Wilson’s thoughts and words; to attempt to capture his elusive, charming, ever-morphing wit.

Steve Fly and Mark Sampson installed me safely inside the rock bunker which is Framework Studios, with fruit and water, and shortly we were off, engineer Simon and me, with just a mike and constellations of ideas. I’ve been carrying some of those words in my head for a while (I play RAW in Daisy Campbell’s theatre adaptation of the books), but tackling the whole thing was a whole new challenge.

How do you recite a graph? How do you describe an illustration? Above all, how do you capture for so many paragraphs that deep, rolling, barely modulating tone that Wilson had, which carried his bright intelligence so clearly to so many?

After a while, a long while, talking as somebody else for so long, it’s impossible to tell how ‘accurate’ you are (whatever that may mean); it becomes more like a meditation than a performance – you disappear down the channel between your brain and the studio’s digital memory and hope for the best when you see the light at the other end.

My thanks to the gentlemen for looking after me (and to Steve’s mum and dad for giving me a bed); my respect and gratitude to the man who provided the RAW material. Whatever you think as you listen: believe nothing.

– Oliver Senton, April 23, 2017

Listen to an excerpt . . .

00:00

00:00

excerpt: Multiple Realities chapter

 Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati – Audio Book

Written by Robert Anton Wilson
Narrated by Oliver Senton

Recorded and mastered by Simon Reeves at Framework Studios (September, 2016)
Edited by Simon Reeves and Steve “fly agaric 23” Pratt
Cover art by amoeba
Co-producers: Mark Sampson (Iron Man Records) & Steve “fly agaric 23” Pratt
Executive Producers: Richard Rasa & Christina Pearson

Special thanks to Mark Sampson for transport and logistics, and to Tom and Della at Broadmeadow for help with lodgings.

 

Eco and Wilson: Guerrilla Ontologists Are Mist

Today a country belongs to the person who controls communications.—Umberto Eco, Il costume di casa (1973); as translated in Travels in Hyperreality (1986)

"Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.—Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger 1, Final Secret Of The Illuminati.

For Umberto Eco 1932-2016

Disclaimer:

I read Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco more than 18 years ago, and i found it very dense and difficult back then, but influential none the less. I also tackled ‘Apocalypse Postponed’ (from Stourbridge Library) which i enjoyed much more, probably because it was non-fiction, and so accessible to my non-classical taste at the time. Did Umberto get high? i asked in my 20s. Still, the text required a slow reading, and challenged me on every page. Although i enjoyed Eco, i did not continue my affair with his works. Although, i acknowledged his greatness among living philosophers, i did not ever think to compare him with Robert Anton Wilson. On the passing of Eco last week, i found myself doing this in my head, and thought. Dang, might just as well write it down and out. I apologise in advance for any misrepresentations and/or skewed interpretations on my behalf, when writing of these intellectual giants.--Steve Fly

Eco and Wilson: Guerrilla Ontologists

  Umberto Eco and RAW have much in common, not least being born in the same year,1932. They were intellectual titans, able to swim out to the vast ocean of philosophy and science, classical history, occultism, and the history of secret societies, and drag the full net back to the shore of humanity in the form of fucking good story, over and over again. They both produced a mixture of scholarly works and fictional novels. They were renaissance scholars who each produced work that inspired a flurry of imitators. The Da Vinci code, by Dan Brown for example, seemed to me like a watered down mixture of major themes from Eco, in particular his most popular ‘In the name of the rose’ and Wilson’s ‘Historical Illuminatus Chronicles’ but who can really put a finger or a paw on it?  

  Both had deep interest, and a unique methodology of expressing thoughts about ‘reality’, that old slippery fish. Eco developed a rich latticework to represent the premise of ‘hyperreality’ inspired by his study of semiotics, and he translated and share his complex ideas with a large audience, a pretty rare achievement for a public figure, an intellectual who writes novels.

  Eco studied at many great learning centres of the world, in the thick of academia, whereas Dr. Wilson travelled an unorthodox route, largely an autodidactic species of genius. You could say Eco was high brow and Wilson low brow, but any two-valued comparisons such as high and low should be treated with suspicion. Both philosopher novelists turned their back on Catholicism at a young age, but continued to include it as a recurring theme.   

Not accidentally, Standard English also assumes a sort of "glass wall" between observer and observed, while English Prime draws us back into the modern quantum world where observer and observed form a seamless unity.--Robert Anton Wilson, Quantum Psychology.

  Wilson was a strong proponent of many different theories of ‘reality’, or perhaps he might say ‘Reality tunnels’ with an accent on the pluralistic nature of things, the process oriented world view. Wilson trawled the fields of semantics, cognitive psychology, quantum mechanics and design science, together with a practical interest in mysticism and neuro-metaprogramming. Inspired by Alfred Korzybski and ideas from Aleister Crowley, together with his friends Alan Watts, Dr. John Lilly, Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller, Wilson also had a legendary sense of humour.   

  The following quotes from Wikipedia put a nice touch to the term ‘Guerrilla Ontologist’, a tag which RAW was fond of using. Wilson published one of his first essays on James Joyce in 1958. 

'In 1967 he gave the influential lecture "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare", which coined the influential term "semiological guerrilla," and influenced the theorization of guerrilla tactics against mainstream mass media culture, such as guerrilla television and culture jamming. Among the expressions used in the essay are "communications guerrilla warfare" and "cultural guerrilla." The essay was later included in Eco's book Faith in Fakes.--https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco

"His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, references to literature and history. Eco's work illustrates the concept of intertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works. Eco cited James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who have influenced his work the most.-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco

I think that both Eco and Wilson, with their open pluralistic philosophy, or Guerrilla Ontology, and their interconnected novelistic techniques, of including real historical and literary forces, distorted by a surrealist mirror on set of lenses, would be delighted by the latest psychological research in the field of ‘Virtual Reality’. Here we have evidence that each individual perceives a different universe, due to the changing parameters of each human sensory system. In VR each participant gets a different audio visual experience, confronted with the fact that if you are not looking at something, how are you supposed to know it is there? and to a lesser degree this applies to sounds from behind too. 

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.—Philip K. Dick.

  Experiments show that even trained minds, fully aware that a they are in a simulation, perhaps walking across a steep drop on a plank, will wobble, shake and react almost unconsciously, as if, they were REALLY in the simulated scene. Meditation can have a similar effect, as can some drug use, and in fact all consciousness change techniques confront a similar question.    

  With VR, however, it’s like coming at it from another place altogether, a place where you are suddenly forced to face deep rooted questions of the nature of reality, identity, perception, likes and fears etc. You do not have to train the mind to be still, so that the clear images may emerge, or chemically alter your neuro-semantic system, no, although these techniques have their own plus and minus points. No, a convincing 3D immersive audio/visual simulation can trigger similar neuro-chemical activity, resulting in dormant, perhaps unconscious but instinctive sensory responses. It does not take much to pull the wool, or goggles, over the eyes, and influence the deep rooted physical responses to neural stimulation. I predict that soon, one may propose a new '360 immersive' expression of the meaning of Quantum Mechanics, or Quantum Entanglement, or Mirror Neurons. Make it new.

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.—Umberto Eco, "Can Television Teach?" in Screen Education 31 (1979), p. 12.

  This is my hacked together message, a trigger, whereby i hope you at least go and read Dr Wilson and Umberto Eco again. Contemplate for yourself the nature of reality and realities, and of virtual reality and virtual realities, and perhaps if you are fortunate, with the additional help of the latest VR hardware. With luck, in here, some of the the foundational principles of general semantics, and semiotics, can ride shotgun together, inside the latest 3D VR environments. 

  I think we are going to require innovative tools to help the public at large gain more empathy for what is beyond their senses, and learn to better discern the real from the unreal, or...the pretty much real from the not really so real, and so on...

...New tools to combat naive realism, together with captivating games, films, porn and beyond, all media that will shape and meta-program the minds of many generations to come. In VR, you may finally be able to go fuck yourself backwards, convincingly enough to never say that phrase again without wincing.        

—Steve Fly.

    Bristol.

    UK

I'll leave you with these thoughts...

The conspiracy theory of society . . . comes from abandoning God and then asking: "Who is in his place? - Karl Popper. From Yesod, Chapter 118 of Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco.

"You need the "is of identity" to describe conspiracy theories. Korzybski would say that proves that illusions, delusions, and "mental" illnesses require the "is" to perpetuate them. (He often said, "Isness is an illness.”) Korzybski also popularized the idea that most sentences, especially the sentences that people quarrel over or even go to war over, do not rank as propositions in the logical sense, but belong to the category that Bertrand Russell called propositional functions. They do not have one meaning, as a proposition in logic should have; they have several meanings, like an algebraic function.— Robert Anton Wilson, Language as Conspiracy, p. 277.