In an essay which was published last year but which I missed, "Robert Anton Wilson on how to integrate weird experiences," writer Jules Evans reflects on Robert Anton Wilson's experiences in Chapel Perilous. (It was published at Medium, and you will have to log in with a free Medium account to read it.)
Evans reads Erik Davis' book, High Weirdness, about Terence McKenna, Philip K. Dick and Wilson, and they went through.
"All of them had spiritual experiences in the 1970s which were extremely messy, quasi-psychotic and baffling, so baffling that they came back to them again and again, trying to make sense of them for the rest of their lives," Evans writes.
"It seems to me that, of the three freak prophets, Robert Anton Wilson (RAW) emerges from his weird experience best, because he is best able to go on with his life. The other two seem to me to have become frozen in their epiphanies, unable to integrate them and carry on productively with their lives, and also to have become captured by rather lurid explanations of them," he writes.
Much of what Evans writes will seem familiar, but he comes to some interesting conclusions of his own, and relates an anecdote about the Illuminatus! play I had not encountered before.
1 comment:
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