Dr. Timothy Francis Leary, PhD (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) Psychologist, philosopher, explorer, teacher, optimist, author and revolutionary avatar of the mind. Rightly called the Galileo of Consciousness, Leary is best known for advocating the exploration of the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs under controlled conditions. He was instrumental in initiating a psychedelic renaissance which is still only beginning to elaborate itself, today.

 

Leary believed that LSD showed potential for therapeutic use in psychiatry. He used LSD himself and developed a philosophy of mind expansion and personal truth through LSD. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as "turn on, tune in, drop out", "set and setting", and "think for yourself and question authority". He also wrote and spoke frequently about trans-humanist concepts involving space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI²LE), and developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness in his book Exo-Psychology (1977). He gave lectures, occasionally billing himself as a "stand-up philosopher."

 

 

In the 1980s, Leary became fascinated with the rise of personal computing, the Internet, and virtual reality. Leary proclaimed that "the PC is the LSD of the 1990s" and urged neo-bohemians to "turn on, boot up, jack in." He became a promoter of virtual reality systems, and sometimes demonstrated VR prototypes as part of his lectures, such as From Psychedelics to Cybernetics. Around this time he befriended a number of notable people in the field such as Jaron Lanier and Brenda Laurel, pioneering researchers in virtual environments and human/computer interaction. With the rise of cyberdelic counter-culture, Leary's widening orbit attracted such cyberpunk notables as R. U. Sirius, of Mondo 2000 fame.

 

Many consider Leary one of the most prominent figures during the counterculture of the 1960s, and since those times has remained influential on pop culture, literature, television, film and, especially, music. Leary coined the influential term Reality Tunnel, by which he means a kind of representative realism. The theory states that, with a subconscious set of mental filters formed from their beliefs and experiences, every individual interprets the same world differently, hence... "Truth is in the eye of the beholder."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Anton Wilson (Jan. 18, 1932 – Jan. 11, 2007) is an American author, philosopher, futurist, reality tunnel excavator, Discordian Pope (but who isn't?), and world renown mystic-agnostic. Born in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Wilson attended Catholic grammar schools, finally landing at the elite NYC public magnet high school: Brooklyn Tech.

 

While attending Brooklyn Tech, Wilson was "turned on" to  literary modernism, particularly Ezra Pound and James Joyce... as well as science fiction, including the works of  Olaf Stapledon and Robert A. Heinlein. Wilson admired the works and utopian theories of Buckminster Fuller and examined the theories of Charles Fort, as well as the works of H. P. Lovecraft and the "great beast" Aleister Crowley.

 

Following a journalistic career that culminated at Playboy magazine, Wilson emerged as a major countercultural figure in the 1970s. Along with cohorts Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna, Wilson defined the genre that has fast become the  prevailing, noö paradigm, typified as: High Strangeness. Although a prolific writer, Wilson  is perhaps best-known for his early, 1975 cult classic,  The Illuminatus! Trilogy, co-authored with Robert Shea.

 

The three books... The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan, re-examined and re-imagined our popular understanding of the occult, magical symbolism as it appears throughout history, the 60s counterculture, secret societies, and contemporary American paranoia surrounding conspiracies and conspiracy theories.

 

 

Reality Tunnels

Wilson, along with Leary, was an avid proponent of the "Reality Tunnel" psychological roadmap. The reality tunnel theory suggests that, being encumbered with a subconscious set of mental filters, formed from beliefs and experiences, every individual interprets the same world differently... per the old saying: "Truth is in the eye of the beholder." The idea does not necessarily imply that there is no objective truth... rather that our access to it is mediated through our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors.

 

The "implied" individual world each human occupies, is thus described as their reality tunnel. The term can also apply to groups of people united by beliefs. Theological examples of this include a fundamentalist Christian reality tunnel vs an ontological naturalist reality tunnel. Socio-political examples include: a liberal-progressive reality tunnel vs an Alt-Right reality tunnel.

 

In Wilson's reality tunnel model, a fully functioning human ought to be aware of their reality tunnel, and be able to keep it flexible enough to accommodate, and to some degree sympathize with, different reality tunnels, different (in Leary's parlance) "game rules." They should accordingly recognize specific, predominant reality tunnels that influence different cultures...

 

Wilson further explained this fully functioning human's ability in the 1977 book Neuropolitics... "The gene-pool politics which monitor power struggles among terrestrial humanity are transcended in this info-world, i.e. seen as static, artificial charades. One is neither coercively manipulated into another's territorial reality nor forced to struggle against it with reciprocal game-playing (the usual soap opera dramatics). One simply elects, consciously, whether or not to share the other's reality tunnel."

 

The 23 Enigma

As we all know, the 23 enigma is a belief in the synchronistic significance of the number 23. While the number 7 is thought of as a lucky number, and 13 is believed to be unlucky... the number 23 is often described as the number of incident... or more precisely: coincidence.

Like the 11:11 transmission, the number 23 appears as an indicator of meaningful coincidence to those who have been introduced to the enigma. Beware as you read these words dear reader, for once having seen the 23 enigma, it cannot be unseen... and now virally infests your consciousness, too!

 

Wilson was no stranger to the 23 enigma, where it first appeared in Illuminatus! Wilson cites William S. Burroughs as the first person to believe in the 23 enigma. In an article in Fortean Times, Wilson related the following anecdote...

 

I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.

 

Burroughs wrote a short story in 1967 called "23 Skidoo." The term "23 skidoo" was popularized in the early 1920s and means “it's time to leave while the getting is good.” This expression appeared in newspapers as early as 1906.

 

For his part, Burroughs considered the synchronous occurrence of 23 to be a harbinger of some impending calamity. His association of the appearance of 23 with disasters also corresponds with hexagram 23 of the "I Ching", P'o, translated as "Splitting Apart." The hexagram pictures a time in which the brazen forces of "inferior" thinking (action), surreptitiously overthrows the calmative, "superior" thinking (contemplation).

 

Skeptics claim that the 23 enigma can be viewed as an example of apophenia. In interviews, Wilson himself has acknowledged the self-fulfilling nature of the 23 enigma, implying that the real value of the Laws of Fives and Twenty-threes lies in their demonstration of the mind's power to perceive "truth" in nearly anything. Ultimately, the power of the 23 signal is as powerful as the individual's powers of manifestation, akin to the law of attraction.

 

In bringing the 23 enigma to a wide pop-cultural audience, Wilson single-handedly installed "23 consciousness" within our modern zeitgeist.

 

 

 

 

 

Psychedelia

 

 

 

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