Maybe Magick
Notes from an Evolving Nervous System
Robert Anton Wilson
Introductions by:
Fritz Oz & Alan Chapman
Available in eBook and Print Editions!
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What if magick is neither supernatural nonsense nor solemn occult theater, but a practical way of tinkering with the machinery of perception? Robert Anton Wilson spent a lifetime investigating the confounding territories where magick, science, psychology, language, and belief overlap. Maybe Magick gathers essays, introductions and interviews charting three decades of exploration, tracing the evolution of a mind learning not to mistake certainty for evidence. The result is funny, provocative, skeptical, and occasionally liable to upend your favorite assumptions. Wilson does not ask you to believe in magick. He asks a more interesting question: what happens when you try it?
Here’s the full cover of the print edition designed by Richard Rasa.
Maybe Magick: Notes from an Evolving Nervous System is maybe master Bob’s single most secret-busting, awe-inspiring exposition of the esoteric arts and sciences of Magick. Every page is a thunderous reminder why I fell in love (and continue to love) this man’s scintillating wit and wisdom. (or maybe not).
– Lon Milo DuQuette, Author of The Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford
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Timothy Leary gave us the Eight Circuit model of consciousness, which he largely concocted in a prison cell. It was Robert Anton Wilson, working the occult underground press, who made the world understand what Leary’s ideas meant, and why they were so important. Along the way Wilson redefined magick itself: the investigation of hitherto-mysterious functions of the human nervous system. When I wrote my own book on Leary, Wilson’s occult journalism was my map of the territory.
—Joseph L. Flatley, author of The Occult Timothy Leary and publisher of Failed State Update
Bob Wilson was a dear friend and water-brother, and a regular columnist for my Green Egg magazine through the 1970s. We met in 1973, at the same Gnostic Aquarian Conference where I met Morning Glory, my lifemate until her death over 40 years later. Bob’s Illuminatus! and Cosmic Trigger trilogies were a staple of the early Church of All Worlds reading list. Maybe Magick evokes the reconciliation of magick and science in theory and practice via quantum physics, where reality is seen as states of probability collapse, and magick can be best grokked as “probability enhancement.”
~Oberon Zell, author of Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard
• • •
Gathering all of Bob Wilson’s thoughts on magic in one pleace is a treasure. Having them alongside such sharp, informed commentary from people working in that current makes it a pearl beyond price.
– Cat Vincent, Cunning-man
An excerpt from the book…
EXPERIMENT ONE: Get ye slightly stoned (on fairly typical, i.e. mediocre, standard American weed nothing fancy, no Columbian, no hashish. We don’t want you too far out for this.) Sit ye in a comfortable position, but with the spine erect as in yoga. Move the mind through your body as follows, one step for each word: “There” (navel) “is” (chest) “no” (neck) “God” (crown of head) pause and fully understand, grok, that there is no God, not in the exoteric Christian or philosophical sense, a being of “external” sense-experience like a whale or a NASA rocket or the man named Spiro Agnew. Nowhere, no how, no such God. Now, move the mind rapidly down to the right nipple thinking “except,” and over to the left nipple “God.” Imagine: there is a God, but not in the area of experience where you normally look, no, in a different direction, inward and downward. Now, repeat the same words with a visual image of the mind moving upward belly-to-crown as a white light inside you, turning, descending at a 45-degree angle, still as a white light, and making the path across the breast as a more brilliant white light. The pattern is a reverse 4:
Keep at it until the light pattern becomes quite bright, quite distinct, and quite warm subjectively. You are activating several chakras, but never mind that; just keep the light flowing let it pour. Always stop at the top (the crown) and understand fully that “there is no God” – then go on to “except God!”
This traditional Sufi exercise is quite mathematically and geometrically precise. Mind is not what we think it is; it is something else, something vaster. The traditional images of the Inner Light, Serpent, the Sun, the Pyramid are quite accurate and specific, too, but don’t look for them. Do the exercise and observe what happens. Then read the rest of this escape kit.
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