From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Robert Anton Wilson | |
|---|---|
| Robert Anton Wilson in 1991 | |
| Born | Robert Edward Wilson January 18, 1932 Brooklyn, New York, US |
| Died | January 11, 2007 (aged 74) Capitola, California, US |
| Notable work | The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975)Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy (1979)Masks of the Illuminati (1981)The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles (1982)Prometheus Rising (1983)Quantum Psychology (1990) |
| Spouse | Arlen Riley Wilson(m. 1958; died 1999) |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy 21st-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophyAmerican philosophy |
| School | AgnosticismDiscordianismLibertarian socialism |
| Main interests | Conspiracy theoriesFuturologyMysticismParanormalityPoliticsPsychologyReligion |
| Notable ideas | 23 enigmaCeline’s lawsEight-circuit model of consciousnessGuerilla ontologyReality tunnel |
| hideInfluencesSpoonerProudhonGeorgeTuckerFreudGesellGurdjieffFortJungBertrand RussellLillyCrowleyDouglasKorzybskiJoycePoundLovecraftFullerReichWattsLearyRothbardMcLuhanBurroughs | |
| showInfluenced | |
Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson; January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007) was an American author, futurist, psychologist,[1][2] and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized within Discordianism as an Episkopos, pope and saint, Wilson helped publicize Discordianism through his writings and interviews.[3] In 1999 he described his work as an “attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth”.[4] Wilson’s goal was “to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything.”[5]
In addition to writing several science-fiction novels, Wilson also wrote non-fiction books on extrasensory perception, mental telepathy, metaphysics, paranormal experiences, conspiracy theory, sex, drugs and what Wilson called “quantum psychology“.[6]
Following a career in journalism and as an editor, notably for Playboy, Wilson emerged as a major countercultural figure in the mid-1970s, comparable to one of his coauthors, Timothy Leary, as well as Terence McKenna.[7]
Early life
Born Robert Edward Wilson in Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New York, he spent his first years in Flatbush, and moved with his family to lower middle class Gerritsen Beach around the age of four or five, where they stayed until relocating to the steadfastly middle-class neighborhood of Bay Ridge when Wilson was thirteen. He had polio as a child, and found generally effective treatment with the Kenny Method (created by Elizabeth Kenny) which the American Medical Association repudiated at that time. Polio’s effects remained with Wilson throughout his life, usually manifesting as minor muscle spasms causing him to use a cane occasionally until 2000, when he experienced a major bout with post-polio syndrome that would continue until his death.
He attended Catholic grammar schools before securing admission to the selective Brooklyn Technical High School. Removed from the Catholic influence at “Brooklyn Tech”, Wilson became enamored of literary modernism (particularly Ezra Pound and James Joyce), the Western philosophical tradition, then-innovative historians such as Charles A. Beard, science fiction (including the works of Olaf Stapledon, Robert A. Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon) and Alfred Korzybski‘s interdisciplinary theory of general semantics.[8] He would later recall that the family was “living so well … compared to the Depression” during this period “that I imagined we were lace-curtain Irish at last.”[9]
Following his graduation in 1950, Wilson was employed in a succession of jobs (including ambulance driver, engineering aide, salesman and medical orderly) and absorbed various philosophers and cultural practices (including bebop, psychoanalysis, Bertrand Russell, Carl Jung, Wilhelm Reich, Leon Trotsky and Ayn Rand, whom he later repudiated) while writing in his spare time. He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute from 1952 to 1957 and English education at New York University from 1957 to 1958 but failed to take a degree from either institution.[8][10]
After having smoked marijuana for nearly a decade, Wilson first experimented with mescaline in Yellow Springs, Ohio, on December 28, 1961.[8] Wilson began to work as a freelance journalist and advertising copywriter in the late 1950s. He adopted his maternal grandfather’s name, Anton, for his writings and told himself that he would save the “Edward” for when he wrote the Great American Novel. He later found that “Robert Anton Wilson” had become an established identity.
He assumed co-editorship of the School for Living‘s Brookville, Ohio-based Balanced Living magazine in 1962 and briefly returned to New York as associate editor of Ralph Ginzburg‘s quarterly, fact:, before leaving for Playboy, where he served as an associate editor from 1965 to 1971. According to Wilson, Playboy “paid me a higher salary than any other magazine at which I had worked and never expected me to become a conformist or sell my soul in return. I enjoyed my years in the Bunny Empire. I only resigned when I reached 40 and felt I could not live with myself if I didn’t make an effort to write full-time at last.”[9] Along with frequent collaborator Robert Shea, Wilson edited the magazine’s Playboy Forum, a letters section consisting of responses to the Playboy Philosophy editorial column. During this period, he covered Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert‘s Millbrook, New York-based Castalia Foundation at the instigation of Alan Watts in The Realist, cultivated important friendships with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and lectured at the Free University of New York on ‘Anarchist and Synergetic Politics’ in 1965.[11]
He received a BA, MA (1978) and PhD (1981) in psychology from Paideia University, which was an accredited university in California at the time he graduated in 1981 but later on became unaccredited and then closed.[12][13][14][15][16] Wilson reworked his dissertation, and it found publication in 1983 as Prometheus Rising.[17]
Wilson married freelance writer and poet Arlen Riley in 1958.[17] They had four children, including Christina Wilson Pearson and Patricia Luna Wilson. Luna was beaten to death in an apparent robbery in the store where she worked in 1976 at the age of 15, and became the first person to have her brain preserved by the Bay Area Cryonics Society.[18] Arlen Riley Wilson died on May 22, 1999, following a series of strokes.[19][20]