Cosmic Trigger 4 “is” you

…the “absolute” or architect’s blueprint has its own kind of relativity, its own “perspectivism”… – Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger III, ch31

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Robert Anton Wilson imparted a useful and intriguing “blueprint” analogy for dealing with tricky matters of “reality”, “truth” and “fact” that we encounter in the “infinite ‘patanormal’ continuum of experience” (ie everyday life).

This seems hyper-relevant to me at the moment – specifically in light of the new media’s reality-fabricating and viral-disseminating abilities (which make previous notions of misinformation seem quaint).

The Mgt.-summary

In opposition to an “absolutist”, “explains all” view of science, RAW presents his “perspectivist” position on scientific (and other) maps as probabilistic and relative to context. Some folks (Wilson critiques them) see perspectivism as a slippery slope to “anything goes” chaos and nihilism. But some of the thinkers that RAW admired (eg Karl Popper) also expressed anxieties about that latter “slope” trajectory. It seems another iteration of an ages-old philosophical debate that solidified with a grand Cartesian Either/Or – what Richard Bernstein characterised as “objectivism vs relativism”. Wilson takes a relativist position, but his versatile multi-model, mixed-genre approach escapes, or “transcends”, the meta-Either/Or – his blueprint analogy seems a good example of this.

Present-day relevance? Well, the “socials” seem flooded with all-or-nothing assertions: “media’s a big lie”, “whole system’s corrupt”, “it’s all fucked why bother”, etc. I tend to dismiss these as expressions of the essentialist-nihilist dichotomy (more on this below) – an aspect of the Grand Either/Or that RAW wanted to avoid (particularly in contexts that attempt to accurately describe things and events, eg science and journalism). Perhaps such assertions have a place in, say, guerilla stand-up comedy. Mostly I think they function regressively.

New media reality fabricating/viralising churns up “impossible” issues of accuracy and differentiation. Accurate to what? By whose criteria? (RAW used “accuracy” as a main criterion for evaluating scientific models, btw). Much of the new-media “red pilled” content I come across looks to me like variations on the above all-or-nothing mentality, or Platonist essentialism in disguise. A reading of the subtleties of RAW’s philosophical approach might… maybe might… inject a sub-atomic wave of sanity into things on the fringes (in a more optimistic world)?

Okay, back to the main content…

Blueprint vs perspective

It starts with an architect’s plan view, which, as emblem for an “absolutist” or “objective” representation of things, gets contrasted with perspective views. The floor plan, or “blueprint”, as RAW calls it, refers to an abstracted downwards schematic:

‘The “absolutist” blueprint represents the abstract or so-called “normal” view invented by the logical-mathematical mind, which has many uses but never occurs in actual human experience.’ – RAW, Cosmic Trigger III, ch31 (RAW’s emphasis – italics in original)

(This is from Wilson’s CT3 critique of Higher Superstition, by Gross & Levitt, a book that presents itself as a shredding of postmodern views of science. Bob W. argues that the authors treat science like their “One True Faith”).

In RAW’s analogy, the blueprint also represents the “scientific outlook” that many folks hold sacrosanct. Some might even regard it as always “standing above” other perspectives, like a kind of universal referee of POVs. Bob comments:

‘I hold to the contrary that we must at least partially remember, at all times, that the “absolute” or architect’s blueprint has its own kind of relativity, its own “perspectivism,” or else we risk going totally mad.’ – RAW, CT3, ch31

But before any anti-science (or anti-“mainstream”) people get too carried away, he continues:

‘In short, scientific models have wonderful uses in science – they work, as Gross and Levitt exclaim with the ardor of all missionaries explaining Truth to the ignorant heathen – but they only have these uses, and they only work, in that special context.’ – RAW, CT3, ch31

So, context seems important – we probably knew that already! We don’t need to regard blueprints as authorised by a mythical “reality as it really is” in order for them to function as intended. In the “special context” it makes sense to treat a metaphorical blueprint as more reliable than another “perspective”, even though we see the distinction as “merely” semantic, conceptual, socially-constructed, etc.

Of perspective views, RAW notes that they all have a kind of truth – “true” to experience/perception. And, “In ordinary contexts, your subjective perspective has more to tell you about how to avoid bumps, headaches, sudden shocks, falls, charges of sexual harassment and broken arms.” The blueprint has a different find of truth, but “never occurs in actual human experience” (RAW, ibid.).

Duh, “narratives”

‘[T]he blueprint view has many functions, but they all relate to abstract and technological purposes… You in your daily life remain in the “perspectivist” position, and if you want to shift to the absolutist or blueprint position you must remember the purpose of doing this’. – RAW, CT3, ch31

Even if we don’t have an immediate purpose for shifting to “the absolutist or blueprint position”, we depend on all manner of things whose creation defined such a purpose (electronics being an example that RAW liked to cite, because it relies on the spooky quantum blueprint). Consider all the realms where we require relatively “objective” reference, eg a kind of factual, socially verifiable truth – science, “news” journalism, medicine, legal systems, road safety, food labelling, environmental poisoning by Koch Industries, etc. We don’t dispense with established “epistemological” game rules (eg of fact-checking) just because we recognise these social coding conventions have no absolute grounding anywhere.

The blueprint idea serves as a useful reminder when folks get too smug about “narratives”. The arrogance can go either way. RAW critiques that of Gross and Levitt in dismissing reality-tunnel perspectivism as a pathway to “nihilism”. But he also avoids the postmodern smugness of those who dismiss science as mainstream authority narrative: “I don’t want it to seem that I stand at the opposite side of an either/or debate with Gross and Levitt” (RAW, ibid.).

Brain & nervous system?

Naturally RAW doesn’t provide a final, “metaphysical” blueprint. He generally uses a scientifically informed view of the brain and nervous system as perceiver/co-creator of our experiences/views (models, metaphors, etc). Even in the radical last chapter of Cosmic Trigger III, which unmasks, or deconstructs, “material” “things” and every-“thing” else, he lands on “brain and nervous system” as the subject side of a perceiver-perceived dichotomy. That seems to serve as the main useful blueprint in his (and also Tim Leary’s) books.

Maybe the “brain and nervous system” as blueprint (or “final vocabulary”) has led some to declare Bob’s work as somehow “not really spiritual”, or over-materialistic? That seems misconceived to me, given passages like the following in his Cosmic Trigger series and elsewhere (not to mention his polemic against fundamentalist materialism, The New Inquisition):

‘At the last gate, naked, Ishtar entered Eternity. This symbolizes the removal of one mask after another until no masks remain. That state, as described by all who’ve lived it, transcends all words and categories: we cannot communicate the unmasked by any new mask.’ – RAW, CT3, ch37

When Wilson deconstructs material “things” (eg his “chair” examples – see Wilson’s chair), I feel pretty sure he doesn’t forget that these deconstructions apply also to material “brains” and “nerves”! And that we lack a “direct” experiential perspective of our brains functioning as our perceiver-thinker selves in daily life. (Direct? See Douglas Harding’s exercises on having no head). The blueprint (abstraction/inference) of our brain/NS-selves that RAW mostly runs with doesn’t form an Idolatry, to put it in his terms. No blueprints do, if we’re to retain sanity.

Cartesian Anxiety. Fnord

To digress a little (not much), Richard Bernstein coined the phrase, “Cartesian Anxiety”, to refer to our need for firm ground (in a conceptual, metaphorical sense) – something “solid”, certain, dependable to stand on. We don’t want to build our realities on shifting sand! Descartes articulated this anxiety in his Meditations, when he talks of the desire to establish “a firm and abiding superstructure in the sciences”. Bernstein comments:

‘With a chilling clarity Descartes leads us with an apparent and ineluctable necessity to a grand and seductive Either/Or. Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelope us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos.’ – Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, ch3

Bernstein doesn’t take sides in the Either/Or (which he characterises as “objectivism” versus “relativism”). Instead, like Wilson, he identifies the either/or itself as the problem, and wants to evade or “transcend” it by re-framing the practice of philosophy (cf: RAW’s multi-tone/context field- and genre-spanning “praxis”. Also, Bob says it’s the postmodern artists he identifies with, more than the academic postmodernist theorists).

To give an inept micro-lecture: Western philosophies have sought the metaphorical underpinning of “reality as it really is”, going back to ancient Greece, and they disagreed primarily on what “it” “is” in essence. “Is” “it” material substance, ideal form, God’s mind, spooky sub-atomic particles/energies, the necessities of logic, what…? Whatever “it” “is” exists (in this “metaphysical realist” vocabulary) inherently, objectively – ie independent of our perceptions, conceptions and descriptions of “it”.

Then comes along the “dialectical” tradition, in which we can include RAW, among the anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist, anti-metaphysical, perspectivist, pragmatist, sceptical (etc) thinkers. Sorry about the big words. In some sense, and to some degree, they question “realist” assumptions of philosophy as providing a representation, or “mirror”, of nature.

Despite (or because of) this latter revolution in thought, we can’t seem to shake off the Cartesian Anxiety. It haunts us like the “cunning demon” that Descartes supposed could deceive us about the true nature of “external things” (like a forerunner of The Matrix). Given this background, it maybe shouldn’t surprise us that folks like Robert Shea mistook RAW’s philosophy for solipsism (Wilson explained that “transactionalism is not the solipsist pole of the Aristotelian-solipsist either/or but is a third alternative.” He goes on to say that the fact that some people don’t get this shows “the extent to which the Aristotelian dualism still controls Western thought.”).

Essentialist / nihilist

The “all-or-nothing” stuff that I mentioned (flooding social media) appears to say something like this: “Media and government (etc) narratives don’t speak the essential, unfiltered truth. We should therefore reject them all as equally worthless”, etc.

(What some people call “bothsidesism” or “whataboutism” seems related to this. John Oliver, the comedian, characterises the latter as the implication that “all actions, regardless of context, share a moral equivalency, and since nobody is perfect, all criticism is hypocritical and everybody should do whatever they want”.)

This frequently goes downhill into a kind of nihilism – the flipside of an essentialist belief in things existing in a fixed observer-independent way (and available unfiltered, as it were, to contrast with mere models/narratives). Since essential, unfiltered truth never becomes available, it all seems pointless and false – to this style of mentation. RAW saw “essentialism” as a neurolinguistic habit “that [Joyce] wanted to undermine”, and which “Korzybski claimed invades our brains and causes hallucinations or delusions every time we use the word ‘is’.” (TSOG, 2002 ed. p85)

A flexible take on “blueprint” truths, as RAW presents them (ie claims made “authoritatively” in a given context) would tend to work against that kind of nihilism – or might do in a more optimistic world (to repeat myself).

Buddhist “two truths”

‘Without a foundation in the conventional truth,
The significance of the ultimate cannot be taught.
Without understanding the significance of the ultimate,
Liberation is not achieved.’
– Nagarjuna, MMK 24:8–10 (150 CE)

(As always, the Buddhists had something interesting to say about all this centuries ago!)

Nihilism as a flipside to a kind of essentialism or objectivism naturally also seemed like a hazard to students of “emptiness” Buddhism (Mādhyamaka tradition – I’m no expert, don’t quote me!). The Tsongkhapa-type Buddhist antidote to nihilism recommended compassion together with a “two truths” teaching that distinguishes between “conventional” and “ultimate” truths, This bears comparison with RAW’s observations on blueprints, perspectives and absolutes.

In Tsongkhapa’s time (1357–1419) “conventional truths” no doubt comprised a limited set of Buddhist teachings and ideas about everyday life. These days, “conventional truth” covers the gamut of ways we encode our functioning in the world: the various maps, masks, models, muddles, narratives, glosses, gestalts, games, frames, figments, fantasies, Pookahs, paradigms, etc. This would include the different ways we distinguish conventional “truth” from “falsity” in various fields.

“Ultimate truth”, on the other hand, recognises the “emptiness” of conventional truths (ie their non-“essential” constructed, mapped nature). But it also realizes that we have no truths except conventional truths – our idea of ultimate truth (and “emptiness”) counts as conventional truth.

That makes it silly to reject conventional truths (narratives) as lacking “real” truth. Embracing convention also helps with compassion – you don’t have to take it literally for it to work!

Cosmic Trigger 4 “is” you

‘Zen represents that “naked” state, not by Cross or Crescent or Eye in Pyramid or any other model, but by an empty circle; the emptiness, not the circle representing the unmasked, the unspeakable, the unconditional.’ – RAW, CT3, ch37

The blueprint + perspective analogy possibly hasn’t been picked up much, as it forms the first part of a chapter that mostly gets taken up with RAW’s defense of Leary, Velikovsky and Rupert Sheldrake (against criticisms/insults from Gross and Levitt). But for me it stands out as a shortcut for thinking about complex matters of “truth” versus “falsity” (etc) in contexts where convention and “authority” (of some sort) necessarily play a part – and where “anything” doesn’t go, at least if we don’t want to see people get harmed!

Wilson remarks (using Einstein’s metaphor) that we don’t extract the essence of things/events to form our models. The relation between supposed things and our images “of” them doesn’t resemble that of beef and beef-broth. Neither does it resemble the relation of a photograph of Chartres cathedral to a supposed “objectively” existent Chartres cathedral. RAW writes that what occurs in perception and thought resembles more (not “is”) “the assigned (arbitrary) connection between our hat and the ticket we receive when we check the hat.” (RAW, CT3, ch37, his brackets). We have a blueprint for that, as well.

‘Unlike some relativist or postmodernist thinkers, you – as a joyful ironist, someone who has realized emptiness – feel free to embrace a grand narrative or a realist or objectivist view if you wish. You don’t have to be on guard all the time, in constant refutational or deconstructive mode. You are free to engage in things in an intense and passionate way. The difference will be that your engagement will be ironic, not metaphysical.’ – Greg Goode & Tomas Sander, Emptiness and Joyful Freedom, ch7

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Note: Our Lady of Chartres

Decades ago I spent a blissful sunny day at Chartres, mainly at the cathedral, mellow and buzzing on cheap wine and baguettes. Back then (Chartres has probably grown since) it seemed as if a gigantic ancient spaceship had landed in the middle of a sleepy French village. It made more of an impression on me than any other building I’ve visited (including Notre-Dame de Paris), and I got the “medieval vibe” like never before or since. The interior seemed kept much darker than other Gothic cathedrals I’ve visited. I don’t remember the detail, but probably the only light came from the windows and some candles. A detail: I recall noticing what I took to be “occult” or “pagan” symbols in the internal structure (eg a pentagram carved in stone). I remain awed by the beauty/scale of its creation (mostly between 1194 and 1250).

Acknowledgements: The excellent ‘Emptiness and Joyful Freedom’ (by Greg Goode & Tomas Sander), which provides the final quote, contributed as much to this post as does RAW’s material from CT3 – in terms of pointers/insights on various things. Greg discusses Cartesian Anxiety in both that book and his ‘The Direct Path’. Having then acquired the Richard Bernstein book myself, I found it a clear and fascinating read.