I picked these up at the used bookstore recently; I had copies long ago but sold them at some point. I rarely see Wilson's nonfiction books any more, so I thought I should get them while I could.
Volume 1 is pretty much about the years he spent writing the Illuminati trilogy, but focused more on his experiments with meditation, drugs, and occult practices (mainly the latter two). He is coy about his use of psychedelics, but reading about some of his occult experiments, I kept thinking that he must have been doing an enormous amount of psychedelic drugs. (In volume 2 he admits it, but says he left it out due to paranoia of persecution.) He talks a lot about Timothy Leary, space migration and life extension, and predicted a lot of things would happen by now that didn't happen. Most foolish to me was his devotion to the singularity idea - that information/knowledge keeps doubling faster and faster and that eventually (I think he says 2012) it will be increasing so fast that it will be doubling more than every second, and somehow everything will be transformed. Of course he doesn't say how. And it wasn't. He fails to consider that most information is just noise. On the other hand, he's a good writer, and presents a good argument for agnosticism toward any model/worldview, but of course that's easier said than done. I think he was too attached to the Leary circuits of consciousness theory to be critical of it.
Volume 2 is more autobiography, interwoven with a conspiracy story about the Vatican bank, and the story of Wilhelm Reich, who he spoke of some in the first volume. At this point in my life I found it a bit better than the first volume. There is a third volume, but I'll have to wait until I find one. Not sure if I ever read that one.
Actually I think The New Inquisition is one of his best books, but I don't have that one any more either.
Volume 1 is pretty much about the years he spent writing the Illuminati trilogy, but focused more on his experiments with meditation, drugs, and occult practices (mainly the latter two). He is coy about his use of psychedelics, but reading about some of his occult experiments, I kept thinking that he must have been doing an enormous amount of psychedelic drugs. (In volume 2 he admits it, but says he left it out due to paranoia of persecution.) He talks a lot about Timothy Leary, space migration and life extension, and predicted a lot of things would happen by now that didn't happen. Most foolish to me was his devotion to the singularity idea - that information/knowledge keeps doubling faster and faster and that eventually (I think he says 2012) it will be increasing so fast that it will be doubling more than every second, and somehow everything will be transformed. Of course he doesn't say how. And it wasn't. He fails to consider that most information is just noise. On the other hand, he's a good writer, and presents a good argument for agnosticism toward any model/worldview, but of course that's easier said than done. I think he was too attached to the Leary circuits of consciousness theory to be critical of it.
Volume 2 is more autobiography, interwoven with a conspiracy story about the Vatican bank, and the story of Wilhelm Reich, who he spoke of some in the first volume. At this point in my life I found it a bit better than the first volume. There is a third volume, but I'll have to wait until I find one. Not sure if I ever read that one.
Actually I think The New Inquisition is one of his best books, but I don't have that one any more either.
the hands that guide me are invisible
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