Having given a little thought to the matter, I have finally gotten around to reading Prometheus Rising. I'm about two-thirds of the way through it, which is to say that I haven't even really begun.
Robert Anton Wilson makes it clear early on that you can't really understand the stuff in the book without actually doing something with it, which seems entirely reasonable to me, since the whole point of the thing is the subjective power of different thought patterns. Some of the stuff I've done before, a lot I haven't, and I certainly haven't done any of it in the context of any kind of gestalt. He provides just a ton of exercises: every chapter ends with half a dozen to a dozen, ranging from "re-read these paragraphs and consider them in light of your personal experience" to "read this book by Margaret Mead and write two five-page essays defending contradictory positions from it" to "get high, if you're permitted to do that, and spend the day watching nature shows" to "go to a Fundamentalist revival where faith healings are performed" to "train in a martial art for six months" to "read this other book/program and do everything in it." Really, it's not a book, per se, it's a course. Hell, it's a meta-course. It'll probably take me at least a year to get through it all, quite possibly longer, but it's all cool, fun, intellectually engaging stuff, so it should be a pretty crazygood time. Still, I'm the impatiently curious sort, so I'm letting myself cheat just a little bit by reading the whole thing through before I go back to the beginning and work through the exercises.
Even if one were to just read it without doing the exercises, it's an amazing book. If RAW were to write a book that was just a completely straightforward, pure exegesis of the individual and collective human experience... well, this is it. Like other attempts to explain What The Hell Is Going On And What To Do About It, it's not perfect. There are bits that are reductionistic and other bits that just strike me as incorrect. This is all palatable, though, because RAW knows and freely admits that it is a system of useful, but fallible, generalizations. And, of course, it's Robert Anton Wilson: he may believe that his perspective is usefully accurate, but he has fun with it and never quite manages to become a dogmatic dick about anything. This alone makes it vastly better than a lot of the other material I've seen out there, but his survey of human experience and human knowledge about human experience is incredible, too. He brilliantly synthesizes psychology, biology, anthropology, technology, society, power, the psychedelic, the religous, and the occult into something that makes a lot of sense. A lot of the crap I've been trying to figure out, a lot of the crap that I feel I have figured out but don't quite know how to categorize, a lot of the crap I've seen other people hashing out but don't quite know how to categorize, a lot of those hard-earned bits of isolated understanding fit into this paradigm. It even explains -- without directly trying to -- other systems I've looked into, and provides a view that allows me to clearly articulate what I felt, intuitively, was wrong with or incomplete about them at the time. This is the first work of its type I've read that feels like it somewhat contains and explains my experience without some ridiculous effort on my part to force my experience to fit into it.
Again, this is not say that it's perfect or complete. There are things that I suspect are flatly in error, and there are areas of my experience that do not fit cleanly into it. But as All-Encompassing Human Meta-Paradigms go, it is remarkably lucid and substantially broad. It doesn't Explain Everything, but it provides a view that seems capable of making useful sense out of a whole lot, in both the individual and the world. Of course, it looks like it will also be a lot of work. A lot of fun work, a lot of productive work, a lot of interesting work, but damn, a lot of work. The implications of some of it are, honestly, kinda scary -- this is ego death territory, so I guess that's to be expected -- but they're equally exciting. The next foreseeable future should be interesting.
Sooooo, in summary: good book so far. Sure, it's no Clive Cussler Code, but it ain't too shabby.
Robert Anton Wilson makes it clear early on that you can't really understand the stuff in the book without actually doing something with it, which seems entirely reasonable to me, since the whole point of the thing is the subjective power of different thought patterns. Some of the stuff I've done before, a lot I haven't, and I certainly haven't done any of it in the context of any kind of gestalt. He provides just a ton of exercises: every chapter ends with half a dozen to a dozen, ranging from "re-read these paragraphs and consider them in light of your personal experience" to "read this book by Margaret Mead and write two five-page essays defending contradictory positions from it" to "get high, if you're permitted to do that, and spend the day watching nature shows" to "go to a Fundamentalist revival where faith healings are performed" to "train in a martial art for six months" to "read this other book/program and do everything in it." Really, it's not a book, per se, it's a course. Hell, it's a meta-course. It'll probably take me at least a year to get through it all, quite possibly longer, but it's all cool, fun, intellectually engaging stuff, so it should be a pretty crazygood time. Still, I'm the impatiently curious sort, so I'm letting myself cheat just a little bit by reading the whole thing through before I go back to the beginning and work through the exercises.
Even if one were to just read it without doing the exercises, it's an amazing book. If RAW were to write a book that was just a completely straightforward, pure exegesis of the individual and collective human experience... well, this is it. Like other attempts to explain What The Hell Is Going On And What To Do About It, it's not perfect. There are bits that are reductionistic and other bits that just strike me as incorrect. This is all palatable, though, because RAW knows and freely admits that it is a system of useful, but fallible, generalizations. And, of course, it's Robert Anton Wilson: he may believe that his perspective is usefully accurate, but he has fun with it and never quite manages to become a dogmatic dick about anything. This alone makes it vastly better than a lot of the other material I've seen out there, but his survey of human experience and human knowledge about human experience is incredible, too. He brilliantly synthesizes psychology, biology, anthropology, technology, society, power, the psychedelic, the religous, and the occult into something that makes a lot of sense. A lot of the crap I've been trying to figure out, a lot of the crap that I feel I have figured out but don't quite know how to categorize, a lot of the crap I've seen other people hashing out but don't quite know how to categorize, a lot of those hard-earned bits of isolated understanding fit into this paradigm. It even explains -- without directly trying to -- other systems I've looked into, and provides a view that allows me to clearly articulate what I felt, intuitively, was wrong with or incomplete about them at the time. This is the first work of its type I've read that feels like it somewhat contains and explains my experience without some ridiculous effort on my part to force my experience to fit into it.
Again, this is not say that it's perfect or complete. There are things that I suspect are flatly in error, and there are areas of my experience that do not fit cleanly into it. But as All-Encompassing Human Meta-Paradigms go, it is remarkably lucid and substantially broad. It doesn't Explain Everything, but it provides a view that seems capable of making useful sense out of a whole lot, in both the individual and the world. Of course, it looks like it will also be a lot of work. A lot of fun work, a lot of productive work, a lot of interesting work, but damn, a lot of work. The implications of some of it are, honestly, kinda scary -- this is ego death territory, so I guess that's to be expected -- but they're equally exciting. The next foreseeable future should be interesting.
Sooooo, in summary: good book so far. Sure, it's no Clive Cussler Code, but it ain't too shabby.
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