Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics.
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Illuminatus is the most potent and interesting paradigm-shifting book I've ever read. It's like an epistemological shotgun blast, guerilla ontology indeed. Anything by R. A. Wilson is advisable, but this one really shakes you loose of your preconceptions and opens the door to new perspectives.
Illuminatus! is the political weirdness of the post-JFK-assassination period; extrapolated into a psychedelic occult fantasy; as interpreted by two white male porno writers; who were on some combination of weed, acid, plastic nude martinis, and coke for most of it.
It is very much a product of a specific time period and social situation.
I've probably re-read it more than any other book.
Wilson went on to write some good stuff, and some utter bullshit, and he's very clear on the fact that he's not telling you which part is the good stuff and which part is the utter bullshit.
I definitely have.
Honestly I don't think he wrote any utter bullshit, as such. Anything that could be described as such, was basically intended as such, with the explicit purpose of making you a specific kind of confused. In that sense, the bullshit itself was deeply profound, in a sense.
Everything is true, and false, and meaningless. I think really grokking that, which requires the intermingling of nonsensical-sounding profundity with profound-sounding nonsense, underlies an elusive sort of dynamic enlightenment.
But what the fuck do I know?
Some people need to hear that everything is a little bit bullshit.
Some people need to hear that some things are a lot more bullshit than others.
RAW was a lot better at the first than the second.
Some people huff their own farts, metaphysically speaking.
The second is a pit stop on the way the the first, which itself is a pit stop to yet higher realizations. Some people need to figure things out for themselves, they just haven't started asking the right questions yet. RAW excelled at assaulting you with more questions than you were really prepared to answer, and giving you the opportunity to try to figure out what he was really trying to say, without ever really giving you a solid answer. That's why re-reads are so satisfying: every time you read it, you've changed enough to dramatically redefine which parts are bullshit.
If you need to be told which things are more bullshit than others, you're not quite there yet. But it can still get you there, with enough iterations.