William Blake, Jerusalem. The Emanation of the Giant Albion
1804-20 / Ebook / 100 pages / UK**
Blake's final prophetic book is typically heavygoing and rambling as he lays out his strange, heavily symbolic, obsessively-detailed take on Biblical mythology. Like all his later works, he's got so much to say that there's little room for paintings any more, but he paints some vivid scenes with his words, between the interminable lists of people and places. I think I've read all the Blake now.
Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth (a.k.a. VALISystem A)
1976 (pub. 1985) / Audiobook / 214 pages / USA
The graverobbed first draft of what would become VALIS (reworked as a film-within-the-more-interesting-book), this is less a hidden gem and more a biographical curiosity to see Dick struggling to deal with his own visions/hallucinations in semi-fictionalised form.
Unlike the tongue-in-cheek split personalities of VALIS, here the author cautiously offloads the mystical shit onto a stand-in character so he can remain upstanding and explicitly/dishonestly drug-free, until the sci-fi comes along to excuse things.
Unlike the tongue-in-cheek split personalities of VALIS, here the author cautiously offloads the mystical shit onto a stand-in character so he can remain upstanding and explicitly/dishonestly drug-free, until the sci-fi comes along to excuse things.
Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising: Second Revised Edition
1983 (updated 1997) / Ebook / 284 pages / USA
*****
My previous experience with RAW was several attempts to get through a supposedly classic novel trilogy I turned out to be too square for, but this owner's manual for the brain is one of the most balanced and thought-provoking things I've read, even if his forecasts for the 21st century turned out to be a bit optimistic. Writing from outside all the various boxes, everyone's beliefs get insulted fair and square, with practical and impractical exercises encouraging us to temporarily abandon our own (obviously correct) philosophies and explore various opposing mindsets to realise how brainwashed we all are – and what we can do about it. Funny too.
Arch-Traitor Bluefluke, The Psychonaut Field Manual
2015 / Ebook / 44 pages / ?
Interesting pragmatic infographics aimed at agnostic sceptics, though that excuse breaks down pretty rapidly when we move on from basic meditation to Tarot, creating doppelgängers and setting fire to a voodoo doll of yourself. As someone whose faith only stretches as far as the placebo effect, any psychonautic voyages I make are doomed to be short ones, and there was a slight sense I was being groomed to open a door to madness. It was mainly interesting for clarifying how Kabbalah scholars, yogis and Alan Moore worshipping a sock puppet are all basically tapping into the exact same thing. I kind of get it.
Rizwan Virk, The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game
***
All things you've probably heard before, recapped and juxtaposed to make a case that's as flimsy as it is statistically almost certain. The first half blinds with science before he brings in ancient and new age mysticism that coincidentally shares similar ideas. He's not the most charismatic science writer, but I've read all the Brian Greenes already and Carl Sagan's dead. Or reincarnated/respawned, whatever.
