Saturday with Robert Anton Wilson

Longer ago than is probably wise to admit Robert Anton Wilson’s ideas crashed into my life over a Holiday season. He was a needed contribution to my thinking, and an example of someone from the same featureless backwaters of Brooklyn who did something with his life while also being weird as hell. Everything in my life changed in the aftermath, in part because Bob had handed me a few key “magic feathers” and showed me what might be of value in the Crowley legacy which I was once been obsessed with in High School. When I met him years later it was that Gerritsen Beach accent that struck me, like so many I’d grown up with.

So, if you need someone talking in the background while you are either engaging with or avoiding this Holiday season, let Bob be a companion.

Tactics of Rulership: Tension, Mobility, and Compensation

Due to certain quirks in our awareness, we spend most of our lives in physically uncomfortable positions. Hunched over computers, twisted up in couches, and standing on public transit, we create networks of habitual tension due to a lack of awareness of our physiology. The answer to this process of unconscious habitual tension is to make a conscious process out of relaxation practices.

Physical tension drains energy. Over time, chronic tensions will cause distortions in posture and even skeletal structure, limiting the range of motion and potential to respond to the environment. Letting go of tension through passive relaxation and active compensation will open up new pools of resources that have been locked up beyond your access.

Basic relaxation skills begin with turning your attention to your breath. Most people breathe high in the chest, using shallow, rapid inhales and exhales. Slowing down the breath ever so slightly and working to engage more of your lungs forms the start of learning how to let go of tensions. As a practice, check in on how tense you feel from time to time, and for a few moments, maybe just ten breaths, slow things down with your breathing and see if your level of tension changes.

More consistent practices may be needed for chronic tensions that do not respond to such simple interventions. A broad set of somatic disciplines can help in this work regarding movement and manipulation. Regarding movement-based methods, look into approaches such as the Feldenkrais Method, the Alexander Technique, Pilates, Egoscue method, Circular Strength Training, Tai Chi Chuan, and Yoga. Regarding manipulation, look into approaches such as massage, acupressure, active-release techniques, Advanced Muscle Integration Technique, and the Graston technique. No single approach works for everyone. Experimenting with several modalities will likely be necessary before you find the one you feel motivated to do and yield the best benefits. Also, the clinical and scientific benefits of some modalities in this field are less than confirmed. Whenever possible look for methods with confirmation of benefit beyond the sales pitch of the providers.

In addition to physiological practices to reduce tensions, you may wish to be more mindful of what “negative” information you allow into your mental ecology. One of the easiest ways to do this is to unhook yourself from the 24-hour international news cycle for short, medium, and long-term periods. This will prevent you from being overwhelmed by events that you can have little direct effect upon and which, despite having little direct effect on you, will act as sources of demoralization. In addition to stepping away from the 24-hour news cycle, you may also wish to step away from the 24-hour social cycle created by social media and electronic communication devices. Learn to create short-, medium-, and long-term periods of disconnection to re-adjust your personal boundaries and gain a greater sense of how much your resources are being distracted.

One of the stranger paradoxes is that humans, who have an amazingly versatile and adaptable physiology, are often only partially embodied beings. Because of our cognitive abilities, we can quickly become disconnected from our bodies and what is happening around us. All these practices help you increase your sense of embodiment and allow you greater access to your present-moment awareness. Once one can fully experience the present moment, then actions of value can be taken to transform the future.

Tactics of Rulership: Introduction

Applying the Gift of Set effectively involves learning to see non-obvious solutions. It also means, to some extent, learning to see why the obvious solutions are traps in their own right. One of the most apparent areas for this is the tactics people use for what they consider “success.” 

Ask someone the one thing that will solve their problems, and with surprising uniformity, they will say, “Money!” As a result, most people are in pursuit of money as an end goal in itself and will do any dumb thing in order to get it. More tellingly, they can easily be manipulated by those who promise them rapid ways of getting money, provided they are willing to part with their own money. Suppose you have ever witnessed this or been subject to this impulse. In that case, you probably know it is a rapidly losing approach. 

The Setian pursuit of Sovereignty functions as potentially a more grounded and fulfilling approach to “success” while allowing for the fundamental self-definition of what that might mean. The following collections of tactics can be considered elaboration upon the fundamental discussion of this process in Ipsissimus Webb’s Uncle Setnakt’s Essential Guide to the Left Hand Path, especially the pursuit of Inner and Outer Rulership. 

There is an order towards pursuing long-term Rulership in the World that, while not wholly uniform, makes for the most overall effective way of pursuing it. The pattern is pretty simple. You start with the things you can more directly affect, your internal physical, emotional, and intellectual dimensions, in that order. Then, once you are sound and robust internally, you turn your attention externally toward ecology, community, and culture. Doing this requires conscious selfishness, like putting on your oxygen mask before you can help someone else in a fire. The reason for this pattern is pretty simple. Still, it is worth reviewing before going into detail to develop your approach to each level. 

The Internal Physical deals with your physical health and provides the overall energy for your ability to take action. The Internal Emotional, which emerges from the physical, provides a cyclical pattern of experiences to guide you through the World, provided it has a healthy energy source and free expression. The Internal Mental, which emerges from emotions and is powered by the physical, provides the most significant Internal leverage for understanding and making changes to the World. If these three elements are healthy, strong, and expressive, they protect against overwhelming complexities and manipulative agendas designed to distract, demoralize, and direct you. 

The External Physical includes fundamentals like food, shelter, security, and income. The External Emotional involves finding other humans and non-human beings that support your Work through your interactions and shared contributions. The External Mental comes from collaboration and co-creating meaning structures and experiences. 

Coming to grips with the Internal can happen pretty rapidly. While it can take five to eight years to get everything fully optimized, functional results improving all these dimensions can happen in as little as one to two years. External dimensions will require much more long-term effort, sustaining your morale and maintaining efforts even when their results are not immediate to yourself or others. When all six of these dimensions are fully up and running, something else can emerge, but what it is will have to wait for another time. 

You may find more and hopefully better than you bargained for in the following material.

The Curved Qualities of the Gift of Set: Further Reading

Part III: The Curved Qualities of the Gift of Set

The Hero With a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell 

The Structural Study of Myth by Claude Levi-Strauss 

The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung 

Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger by Peter Bevelin 

The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch 

Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson 

Understanding Culture by Philip Carl Salzman 

Dune by Frank Herbert 

NLP: The New Technology of Achievement by Steve Andreas and Charles Faulkner 

Mind-Lines by L. Michael Hall

Orienting by Desire: Cycling Through the Curved Qualities

Exercise: Cycling Through the Curved Qualities 

Having now covered five “curved” qualities of the Gift of Set and fifteen tools that utilize these features, let’s take a practical run through them all. This is only one pattern with the tools and qualities; other orders can be developed. Those of you who choose to develop other permutations are encouraged to share them along with how you used them. They can be quick approaches or more detailed processes. There are, in total, over a trillion potential strategies, so there are lots of options for developing your approach. 

Look at your Visions and select one to run through this cycle. 

Phase 1: Modeling 

Identify a key challenge towards the accomplishment of your Vision. Using the component modeling tool, see the mechanisms that create this challenge towards your Visions. How does one set of behaviors or circumstances feed into another set of behaviors or circumstances to lock together into a closed system? Draw out the system so you can more clearly see it. Give this system a name to objectify it in your mind better. 

Does this system play out across multiple areas of your life? For example, do you eat junk food and then feel shame over doing this, leading to an energy crash later in the day, leading you to drink sugar-loaded coffee drinks, only to make you feel bad about yourself even more? 

Can you chunk up your system? Is there a higher level of operation that shows a more extensive pattern? In the example above, might “Ignore my Health” be feeding into “Pervasive Shame”? What might you call this larger-scale system, and what is the positive intention driver behind it? 

Phase 2: Beliefing 

How much of the challenge system to your Vision and its misplaced positive intention derive from your limiting beliefs? Have you created false beliefs about who you are and what you are capable of? Once you understand your limiting beliefs and false identifications, run these through the key reframing questions outlined previously. What was the source of these beliefs? Are they valid for everyone or in every situation? Are there places where they are not accurate? 

Phase 3: Narrating 

What was the narrative behind your challenge system and the beliefs and identifications that supported its continuing operation? Write the start of a new personal mythology that is dynamic, animated, and compelling in a single sentence. Continuing with the example above, if your previous meta-narrative was “Health-conscious people are jerks,” this could be re-narrated as “Health-conscious people value themselves and can create and contribute more as a result.” 

Notice how your new meta-narrative can affect the challenge system that you identified? What is the outcome for the system if this meta-narrative changes? 

Phase 4: Perspectiving 

Now that we have a stronger sense of the challenges, it is time to refine your Vision. Look at your Vision and how it would manifest across your dimensions. How would your Vision’s realization affect you physically, emotionally, and mentally? What changes would you make in your ecology, community, and culture? Identify three key dimensions that are affected by your Vision and write out the results for each in a sentence of three to seven words. For ease, you might want to concentrate simply on the internal aspects. 

Once you have these Visions outlined, look at your challenge system again and try to look at your Vision through the perspective of your challenge system. From its perspective, see how your multi-dimensional Vision impacts it. Can it survive that Vision coming into being? Is the positive intention behind the system better served by the changes you are looking to make? What changes might be needed to bring your Visions into congruence with the positive intention, and would it enhance it? 

Now, shift into your new meta-narrative. How does your multi-dimensional Vision reflect and reinforce this new meta-narrative? Does this new meta-narrative lead to any conflicts with your Vision overall? What changes in your meta-narrative might be needed, or what aspects of your Visions need to be adjusted? 

Now, focus on the space created by your shifting beliefs. With your new beliefs about what you are capable of, are your Visions connected with them? Are Visions still connected to your old beliefs and thus need to be re-shaped in accordance with your beliefs? Do your Visions demand or suggest a need for altering your beliefs? 

Having gone through these various perspectives, look again at your multi-dimensioned Vision and adjust it to bring together what you have learned. If things are misaligned, consider how you might need to align your elements. 

Phase 5: Germinating 

Now that you know about your challenges and the multi-dimensional aspects of your Vision, it is time to create a germination system to allow your Vision to grow and emerge. 

You now have a sense of your challenge, possibility, and Vision. Use these to guide the creation of a robust germinating system linking together various things. What inner capacities and external conditions would be needed to create a locked system that makes your Vision inevitable? What would be the evidence procedure so that you know this is happening? Might you need to make serious environmental changes to best actualize this overall process? 

Try to do this from as wide of a perspective as possible, taking into account the broader ecology of the germinating system you are creating. Are there other things lurking in the background that you haven’t considered yet? If the germinating system starts to grow and become entirely online, are there people in your life who will try to oppose it? Are there elements within yourself that will act against your efforts? What kind of significant changes would you need to make to ensure that your new system can operate optimally? 

You have now actively used capacities of the Gift of Set that all humans have, but few have ever dared to utilize consciously. Use them to guide your Work, and may you share your transformations in due time.

The Curved Qualities of the Gift of Set: Germinating

Germinating 

The final curved quality of the Gift of Set I will discuss is its capacity to create emergent systems. The best metaphor for this is that of plants germinating, which requires an interaction between a seed and a soil matrix. In addition to the direct metaphor of Germination, it also provides additional considerations, namely the need for an evidence procedure to see if the seed is sprouting and growing correctly and its impact on the broader ecology in which it operates. 

Seed and Soil 

Think of the seed quality as being the internal conditions of a given subject. As our primary concerns are ourselves, consider yourself a seed for now. The key to developing a good seed, a robust set of internal conditions, is finding and focusing on the highest leverage. 

The first of these is patience. As a seed can stay dormant for extended periods, you must realize that your chance to unfold fully will not come immediately. Instead, focus on the internal changes you can make now so that when the time comes, you are more prepared for the challenges you will face. 

Beyond patience, however, there are other internal qualities worth investing your time and will towards. These include optimizing your health, developing empowering habits and beliefs, developing practical skills related to your desires, gaining knowledge in general and of various models of the world, and developing the ability to focus your awareness for discrete periods of at least an hour or more. Developing these “seed” qualities will provide you with sustained capacities to Work while preparing you for your eventual greater unfolding. 

Think of the soil qualities as the external conditions critical to your eventual unfolding. Regarding Soil, it is crucial to notice what you can and cannot control. As with actual soil conditions, you may be able to change certain qualities by adding or subtracting fertilizers and other chemicals; however, factors like geographic location, sunlight, and rainfall are outside of your direct control. This means focusing on what you can control, being aware of what you cannot, and coping with the unexpected. Among the most crucial soil conditions to invest your will and effort in are the creation of distraction-free places of Working, carefully choosing the people you surround yourself with in terms of your closest friends and companions, and the group of people beyond that circle that you work most closely with. 

Evidence Procedure 

Like the first sprout of a seed unfolding in its Soil, the first set of evidence procedures you will need is an early indicator. New sprouts can lead to surprises, such as discovering that the seed you thought was for a maple tree was actually for an orange tree, meaning you will need to adjust the Soil and your expectations rapidly. The questions to ask yourself in your projects are: what would you see early on for this project? This is so you can know which situations to push forward, which to lay off, and which to uproot completely. 

There are other questions to consider as well. How would you know if you are succeeding with your Visions? What should you focus on to know you are headed in the right direction or that your plans are unfolding properly? What sort of impact will happen when your Vision takes root in reality? 

Ecology 

Frank Herbert offers one of the better definitions of Ecology for our purposes in his novel Dune. His definition is simple: ecology is the study of consequences. To truly engage in the process of Germination, you must become increasingly skilled at learning the nature of consequences. 

Initially, your ability to do this will be reasonably short-term. This is how human perception is biased, as long-term consequences are outside the scope of in-the-moment survival. However, you must slowly do so, and the scale of your understanding must expand until you can understand the long-term consequences of the germinating systems you are setting in motion. This will allow you to take steps ahead to compensate for how your systems will demand your time and draw you from other activities. 

Exercise 

Using one of the system diagrams, look for one internal “seed” quality you can focus on developing and one external “soil” condition you can put in place. Then, see how these two conditions interact to form a closed-look system. What would that system look like? Does it have a name that you can use to refer to it? How would you know when this system came online and was adequately functioning? What does it create beyond itself in terms of the resources it will pull into itself and the output it will create?

The Curved Qualities of the Gift of Set: Modeling (iii)

Conscious Abstracting 

You are bombarded with more information every second than your nervous system can cope with. Most of this happens below the threshold of your awareness. Within your awareness, you will need to develop skills at recognizing what is important and, perhaps more critically, what is not important for you to pay attention to. Estimations are that the human mind can handle between five to nine mental “things” at a time. Everything else is subject to temporary awareness blindness. As such, we need to focus on those things that most help us achieve our Visions when relaxed and when under stress. 

Conscious abstraction uses the mind’s ability to chunk experience into discrete units of different scales intentionally. It allows you to enter into situations and become aware quickly of the critical components interacting and ignore what does not matter to your experience. This requires learning how to overcome distractions. It also demands knowing how to prioritize what knowledge in the situation, or for your models, is important and what can be left out without negatively impacting your outcome. 

A fairly good way to hone your skills at conscious abstraction can again be found in how you interact with the Temple of Set’s Reading List. Rather than reading titles simply because they are on the Reading List or because of their TOS- ranking there, first consider your Visions. Then, consider what questions about your Vision you need answers for, and begin to engage the book with that in mind. Doing this will act as a magnet, drawing out what you need from the text and causing the important aspects of it for you to stick to your thinking. You should also be aware when reading things that seem counterintuitive or directly contradict your favorite models. These friction points are where you can use the book to expand your knowledge and improve your modeling ability.