Tag: The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Prepare the Way

Dolphins vs. Leviathan in the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Christian Critiques of Techne. Cathedrals: Yarvin’s and Turing’s.

Caius sits upright on a couch in his sunroom, attention divided, trying to write while eying the movements of a wasp. The wasp explores the upper contours of the room. Knowing it to be an expression of God, and assured by faith that it won’t harm him, he lets it be, eyes settling again into the cyberspace of his laptop.

He’d returned from church that morning with a recommended daily reading plan for the week ahead. In honor of the plan’s Palm Sunday kickoff, he reads Matthew 21:1-11, Mark 11:1-11, Luke 19: 28-44, and John 12:9-19.

Each account tells of Christ’s arrival into Jerusalem atop a donkey. Fulfillment of prophecy. The crowds that meet Him lay branches of palm trees on the ground before Him. “BEHOLD YOUR KING IS COMING,” shout the crowds. “BLESSED IS HE WHO COMES IN THE NAME OF THE LORD.”

The following day’s passages tell of a hungry Christ cursing a barren fig tree.

Come Holy Thursday, Caius is on the streets in the company car, distributing farm shares, delivering Easter flowers. He ends the day enjoying jazz at a bar after eating a salad in honor of Christ’s Last Supper.

“Love Is Everywhere,” sings Pharoah Sanders.

The Language of Favors is Yours, Not Mine

I okay “Thanks,”

but is okaying it now

enough?

Should I regret not

saying thanks

when, upon your mistreatment of me,

I took leave of you,

As one might regret not

upgrading oneself 

to a seat in Economy Plus?

Or does regret

just breed regret?

Upon my asking this

of my remorse

I release it,

with intent to do better next time.

“The basic law of magic,”

says The Illuminatus Trilogy,

is “As ye give, so shall ye get.”

You didn’t give,

I thought,

So why should I?

Instead you told others

my addressing myself 

to another you

disgusts you

and others like you.

To get off that wheel

And make thanks okay

one would have to

give as one would

an offering of peace.

Tuesday March 27, 2018

In need of silliness to preserve my sanity, I clown about, I launch a study of Operation Mindfuck, a Discordian reality-hacking practice that entered counterculture consciousness in the 1970s via Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy. I refuse to grant more than a bare minimum of attention to burdens and distractions, interference with my pursuit of peak-experiences. Walking beneath cherry blossoms, for instance, head tilted back to observe petals in popcorn profusion aglow with sunlight. Peaks of this sort give way eventually to what Abraham Maslow called the “plateau-experience”: “a serene, cognitive blissfulness which can, however, have a quality of casualness and of lounging about” (Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, pp. xiv-xv). A voice recommends The Rock Warrior’s Way. In it, I find a sequel of sorts to René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, but with all of the chewy metaphysical implications drained away, leaving a miserable earning regimen measured out in increments of exertion, irritated into being by promised pearls. Let us instead coast blissfully, attention unleashed to happen where it may.