Know Your Tribe

     This triggered a total mutation in human society. As Riane Eisler has pointed out, previous human groups (“tribes”) had been based on partnership models (or as mathematical game theory would say, non-zero-sum games). Post bronze society was based on Authority and Submission (zero-sum games). Concretely, Bronze Age civilization — called The First Wave by Alvin Toffler — created an Elite of warriors with bronze spears and their Leader, a high testosterone “alpha” male of the type that usually leads mammalian herds. These alpha males almost always called themselves sons of the Sun-God, and their huge agricultural civilizations are often termed sun-kingdoms.
     These agricultural sun-king civilizations spread “westward and mildly northward” (as Bucky says [R. Buckminster Fuller]). Almost always they had the primal Sun King structure: the “divine” alpha male at the top, the nobles below, and women and slaves at the bottom. The whole world had changed. You could not mistake a citizen of one of these Sun Kingdoms for a tribal human than you’d mistake a canary for a Gila Monster.
     It took thousands of years, but eventually the largest part of humanity had been conquered, domesticated, de-tribalized and incorporated into one Sun-Kingdom or another. As late as the 18th Century, Louis XIV was called “the Sun King.”
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, p. 49.

     Aside from these psychological benefits, the major “spiritual” effect of LSD may be considered either another benefit or a dire curse, depending on your viewpoint. I began to develop a strong suspicion that there was, somewhere in space-time, another Adept of Brain Change, or perhaps a School of Adepts, helping and guiding me. This is not at all unusual. In most human societies, historically, the shamans have used similar brain-change drugs and soon become convinced they have “allies” helping them. Even a man with such a long and orthodox scientific career as Dr. John Lilly confesses that he thought he had superhuman “Guides” on some of his LSD voyages.
     My teachers seemed to have a damned peculiar sense of humor at times.
     At one point I was almost totally convinced that my teachers were a school of extraterrestrial adepts resident in the double-star system of Sirius. Strange coincidences — or Jungian synchronicities — then accumulated around me, supporting this theory.
     Later, a “psychic reader” told me I was “channeling” the spirit of an ancient Chinese sage. Coincidences or “omens” supporting this model then obligingly appeared.
     Then, another “psychic” told me I was channeling a medieval Irish bard. More synchronicities followed.
     This sort of thing always happens to people who mess around with Cabala (even if they don’t use Acid.) The late Dr. Israel Regardie, a psychotherapist and Cabalist, often distinguished two ways of looking at this phenomenon, when it happens to you. The objective theory, as he called it, assumes an external reality to these “entities.” The subjective theory, on the other hand, assumes the “entities” exist only in our brains, as anti-selves or Jungian archetypes or something of that sort. Dr. Regardie believed you will get the best results when you are not committed to either theory but just open yourself to whatever happens.
     Somewhere along the way I got concerned with the direction all this was taking and decided to safeguard my sanity by choosing the subjective theory (It’s all in my head) and ruthlessly repressing any tendency to speculate further about possible objective theories (There are super-human forces at work here…). In terms of the neurological model then current, I explained everything as my over-developed left brain learning to receive signals from the usually “silent” right brain.
    (We now know that this left brain/right brain model does not quite explain everything, and Karl Pribram’s hologram model of consciousness seems more inclusive. But I refer here to my state of ignorance in the mid 1970s, before I advanced to the more complex state of ignorance I now possess.)
     Then one night I was looking at Harvey, the comedy about the pookah, on TV. One character in the story is a medical orderly named Wilson; since I was once a medical orderly and named Wilson, he attracted more of my interest than the major characters.
     Wilson-in-the-TV was more “skeptical” about the giant rabbit than anybody else, and began to seem to me like a parody of my attempts to reduce everything to the right brain/left brain model.
     The pookah refrains from playing any nasty tricks on the Unbeliever. Instead, he arranges that just by accident Wilson meets a young woman who falls in love with him — which is obviously just what he needs. Then, when Wilson learns that the giant white rabbit is called a pookah, he looks the word up in a dictionary and reads the definition aloud. It reads:
     “A Celtic elf or vegetation spirit, wise but mischievous, fond of rumpots, crackpots and how are you tonight, Mr. Wilson?”
     Wilson-on-the-TV (me) also had a startle reaction. Thinking it over, I decided Harvey offered the best approach to Cabala and its entities. From then on when High Weirdness occurred, I would just file-and-index it as a six foot tall white rabbit from County Kerry, playing games with me.
     I still prefer this model to all others, because there is no chance that I or any sane person will ever take it literally.
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, pp. 56-57.

     In short, without language we’d have less suffering and no progress.
     Remember also that the imagined contains a great deal of both the desirable and the terrifying — what we want and what we fear. Thus, unlike our relatives the chimpanzees and baboons, however clever one of them may be, humans alone can long for things that never existed outside their language-games (i.e. their “thinking”) and can get very irritated at the world for being less pleasing than these fantasies. They can also scare the hell out of themselves, and one another, with other verbal constructs that have never appeared in sensory experience.
     Thus, the state of “living in fantasy” or “being on a head trip” is by no means uncommon and is not typical only of well-fed intellectuals in academic Chairs. Everybody does it to a quite alarming extent. Humans never deal with raw experience as other animals do; they deal with experience filtered through what Dr. Timothy Leary calls a reality-tunnel and sociologists call a gloss — a belief system. Every belief system (or BS) colors experience in a different way, rosy-red or gloomy black or some unique personal flavor.
     We can all see how other people’s BS makes them blind and “stupid” at times, but we find it very hard to notice how our own BS is doing the same to us. This is what anthropologists call acculturalization.
     Following Gurdjieff, I prefer to call it hypnosis. Every culture on the planet — from the Stone Age bushmen of Africa to the still-medieval peasants of County Kerry, from the Parisian art crowd to the Oxford agnostic crowd, from Ohio Republicans to the Iranian Moslem Fundamentalists, from science-fiction buffs to the neo-pagans and “witches,” from the Tibetan Buddhists to the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal — represents another case of group hypnosis by BS (belief systems).
     That is, when I was sent to a “school” to be “educated,” that meant I was to be hypnotized into the tunnel-reality of my tribe….
— Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger II, p. 70.