Prometheus Rising exercise and discussion group, Week 39

 

By Eric Wagner
Special guest blogger 

Well, I’ve struggled to practice two fifteen-minute meditation sessions every day. I have meditated most days, but have missed a few sessions. I do plan to get up to a month in a row. We will see. I have allowed life chaos to interfere with this exercise. I did find it interesting to return to Christopher Hyatt’s Undoing Yourself with Energized Meditation. I have the third edition. I remember haunting bookstores in the 1980’s searching for Wilson and related books in those pre-Amazon days, especially the Alpha Book Center in Phoenix, which got most of the Falcon titles.  

I remember in 1986 feeling delighted when I found a copy of the second edition of Undoing Yourself at Alpha Book Center. I started reading it at my job at Hunter’s Books, and around pg. 36 I came across “The oral-anal pit can be referred to as 333. If you don’t know what that number means please look it up.” (I don’t know  the page number in the second edition. I may still have a copy in a box in the garage. If it turns up, I will look it up. I don’t think any of my local libraries have a copy of any of Hyatt’s books.) 

Well, back in 1986 I didn’t know about 333 and Choronzon, and Hunter’s Books didn’t have any Crowley. We did have Cosmic Trigger, though, the only Robert Anton Wilson book I could order through our distributor at the time. I didn’t recall any reference to 333, but I looked it up in the index. Lo and behold, it did have an entry for 333. Wilson discusses 333’s appearance in a UFO story in Fortean News and he adds, “333 is the Cabalistic number of ‘that mighty devil, Choronzon,’ who once afflicted Dr. Dee in the 17th Century and gave Aleister himself a rough time in Bou Saada, North Africa, 1909, as recounted in The Vision and the Voice by Aleister Crowley” (Cosmic Trigger, pg. 168). 

Rereading Undoing Yourself in 2021 it struck me that Hyatt pulls the reader’s leg at times, playing the trickster. On page 19 he tells the reader, “Now stand on your head and re-read Info-Psychology.” Bob Wilson pulls the reader’s leg at times, and I wondered if he really wanted the reader to do all of the exercises in Prometheus Rising, or at least to do them in the way he described them. Some people have complained about taking six months or more for the chapter one exercises, for example.  

Upon reflection, I think Bob really did want us to do these exercises pretty much the way he wrote them in the book, especially in the revised second edition. He pointed to Prometheus Rising over and over again in his writings after 1983, saying basically that if you want to improve your life, try the exercises I put in this book. I may seem gullible in this conclusion. 

Last century I attended three encounter groups, Omega Vector, Omega II, and Delta Vector. I found them interesting, and I appreciated that they didn’t charge any money. I have some friends who paid for the EST Training. I love the send-up of EST in the film The Spirit of ‘76. 

I look forward to visiting the Lion House again. Nora Joyce liked the fact that one could hear the roaring of the lions in the zoo James Joyce’s grave in Zurich. 

In 1988 I attended Who Framed Roger Rabbit? with a friend and his two kids to fulfill the exercise to watch a film “that small children like”. I wonder if the screenwriters named Roger and Jessica after the characters in Gravity’s Rainbow? A few months later I saw a theater marquee with a missing letter: Who Framed Roger Rabbi ? 

In 2021 I watched a few Three Stooges short films and Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates (1941).