The Canon / Living / Psychedelics & Shamanism
Living · 1983
Prometheus Rising
Psychedelics & Cyber-ShamanismPrometheus Rising is Robert Anton Wilson's accessible exposition of Timothy Leary's eight-circuit model of consciousness, organized around the central idea of the "reality tunnel": that each person perceives the world through a constructed, conditioned model, and that no single model is the truth.
Drawing on Leary, John Lilly, Alfred Korzybski's general semantics, and Discordian humor, Wilson advances a practice of "model agnosticism," the deliberate trying-on and discarding of belief systems to reshape one's experienced reality. The book is studded with exercises in believing things on purpose, dramatizing his maxim that the universe contains a maybe and treating belief itself as a manipulable tool.
The work is an important transmission node, translating the laboratory metaphor of the mind as reprogrammable software into popular practice. Its conception of belief as a tool fed directly into chaos magic, into reality-shifting and manifestation discourse, and into the wider internet occulture.
In its words
When we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality is obviously far different from ours, we are a bit frightened and always disoriented. We tend to think they are mad, or that they are crooks trying to con us in some way, or that they are hoaxers playing a joke.
Yet it is neurologically obvious that no two brains have the same genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints, the same conditioning, the same learning experiences. We are all living in separate realities.
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Robert Anton WilsonReality tunnels & model agnosticism
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