Cosmic Trigger online reading group, Week 25!

Image of the Buddha

By Charles Faris, Cosmic Trigger reading group guest blogger 

Welcome to week #25 of the Cosmic Trigger Reading Group, in which we wrap up PART TWO: Models and Metaphors. This week we are looking at The Octave of Energy (214) and The law of acceleration (219), the first of which seems like the final pitch for the biggest of the big ideas in Cosmic Trigger (8-Circuit Theory) and the second of which provides that essential ingredient for suspense and engagement — the sense that time is speeding up or running out (“immanentize the eschaton” anyone?).

The Octave of Energy

Patanjali

This little chapter is a very concise attempt to tie a lot of things together — cabala, tarot, astrology, I Ching, yoga, evolution, physics, chemistry, oh my. As noted on page 218, The Game of Life gives an exhaustive view of this glass bead game of correlations; here we just get a taste.

Pythagoras

Bob does a lot of name dropping here — Pythagoras, Leary, Crowley, Buckminster Fuller, Buddha, Patanjali, Kepler, Mendeleev, Gurdjieff — and attempts to correct a historic injustice (John Newline being laughed out of the Royal Chemical Society for daring to think up 8 families of chemicals a decade before Mendeleev), all while attempting a sort of “support by association” case for that big idea of 8 brain circuits and all that they imply (terrestrial/post-terrestrial existence, etc.).

Timothy Leary

Lots of “idea dropping” as well — Octaves, I Ching, Noble Eightfold Path, 8 limbs of yoga. planetary motion, Periodic Table of Elements. Interestingly, Bob doesn’t really dive into music here, although it is certainly one of the most potent examples of the use of octaves, and interfaces extremely well with all of the states of consciousness explicated herein.

Kepler and his octave of planets

RAW also finishes with a salvo in the direction of his own brand of tantric non-dualism — “Any attempt to describe this octave as 'mystical' or as 'materialistic' misses the real point of Leary’s work.” (219)

Dmitri Mendeleev

A quick story about Mendeleev. When he broke Church rules and remarried without the standard 7 year cooling off period, Tsar Alexander III is reputed to have said—“Mendeleev has two wives, yes, but I have only one Mendeleev.” Unfortunately for Timothy Leary, official sentiment for his breakthroughs was not quite so enthusiastic.

The law of acceleration

This riff is certainly familiar with any regular reader of RAW, and while it is certain that there is acceleration of some sort playing out globally, in this local Universe everything didn’t go “jackpot around A. D. 2012.” Of course, neither Tim nor Bob nor Terence lived to see that fantastic non-occurrence. (I wonder how Dennis McKenna feels about that?)

Robert Anton Wilson

So—what happened? Of course, it could be that the idea was nothing more than a good idea, without real legs to move it along to fruition. Then again, maybe there is something to that notion that “most of the world falls in the category between 100% proven or 100% disproven. And we live among millions and millions, or as Carl Sagan would say, billions and billions of maybes, and only a few definite yes’s and no’s here and there. And they’re usually only temporary.”

And what of the possibility that the Grand Triumvirate of Trippers — Leary, Wilson, McKenna —weren’t wrong, only a bit naive about the strength of the power structures on Planet Earth, and the inability of living scientists, politicians, business moguls etc to wrap their heads around something just a little too far-out. Such that only the ARTISTS could grok it. And of course there was the crack-down on psychedelics, which pulled the advance edge back to circ5.

Of course, the Law of Octaves doesn’t describe a smooth and even course, as we can see on the musical scale in the difference in navigating from A to B and from B to C. And there is still a lot in here to dig out, even 40 years later with no BINGO in sight.

Terence McKenna

And even today, Bob’s writing is so compelling and speaks to a desire for the sort of Chaotic Harmony that dissolves the barriers between Mysticism and Materialism, Liberalism and Conservatism, the Eristic Illusion and the Aneristic Illusion that, just like Fox Mulder in The X-Files, I Want To Believe. Then I look at my calendar and think “maybe that’s what belief will get you.” Ah well, 40 years ago it was closer to the bone when RAW wrote: “As the McKennas say, it is hard to avoid hyperbole in trying to contemplate what this means.” And then the acid supply got dialed way down.

Okay — that’s it for this week. Next week we begin PART THREE: Trigger, from A FINAL FABLE (225) through Blood of the Gods? (229).