Sex, consciousness, drugs, yoga, and R. A. Wilson

Most people know Robert Anton Wilson as the author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, but he was also a philosopher. His writing can be frustrating at times, but he had a lot to say about topics near and dear to me—like the different ways consciousness can operate, from the primitive to the sublime, and the tools (sex, drugs, yoga, meditation) that we can use to move between those levels. Also, he has a wonderful voice, the voice of an older man who’s seen a great deal and isn’t holding on to any of it. So here are links to one of his lectures, in two parts. Enjoy!

Lecture, part 1

Lecture, part 2

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Hot springs, tantra, and mescalin

Last october I went on a trip with two friends of mine from Idaho, brothers, up to a remote hot springs in the mountains. It was the first backpacking I had done in several years, something I want to do more of again. It was late in the season. On the way in we hiked through falling snow, and crossed an ice cold creek up to our knees. The springs were beautiful, on a low island in the river, at the bottom of a steep gorge, with the sulfur-streaked slope leading down to them perpetually steaming.

In the morning we took mescaline. It was the first time I had tried it. One of my friends had extracted from cactus powder, refined it, and packed it into capsules. We chased it with dramamine to prevent nausea, and soaked in the springs for a long time, talking and waiting for the first effects, which are slow to arrive.

There’s no need to say anything about the early part of the trip. After some time, difficult to measure, I had the bright idea of lying down. It may not seem like a grand inspiration, but the best ideas are always simple. The world in that state is so absorbing, everything is ready to pull you in and engage you. The world is present and alive, but its also making subtle demands on you, demands that pull you away from center. Just the need to stay moving, outdoors in the cold, can be a drain. So I crawled into the one man tent my friends had lent me and buried myself in my down bag. Warmth! Bliss!

Now I was able to relax and observe clearly. Waves of energy swept through me. I saw red and black. I saw symmetrical patterns unfold, like Tibetan mandalas, except the images in the kaleidoscope were mouths, eyes, hands, penises, and vaginas, blossoming in and out of a perfect void.
Indescribably beautiful time passed. My normal, agitated mind had dissolved. I did pranayama, and after awhile I added a tantra technique, arching my lower back on the in breath and pressing it down with the exhale. I felt a burning light in my lower belly, and with each breath I drew it up to the crown of my head, where it would tremble and blaze.
I wanted to go deeper. I tried to see who was watching all this happen. I looked intently, and there seemed to be no one, and the space of being no one at all would give off a great wave of energy. All the various shapes and images in my mind would stir and flutter like flags, and one thing would turn into another. But it was clear that the being no one was actually only the idea of being no one, and who was thinking that thought? And so I peeled away at the onion—the onion who writes this—and each time I asked the question I found no one, and each time I found no one it was obvious I’d only found the thought of no one, and so on, faster and faster, until it became like the frames of a crude animation. And I had the thought that the no one I kept looking for was the unknown, that was constantly pouring itself into existence, and that samadhi was concentration such that you could stay there at absolute NOW, without being hooked on any one of these forms that were happening. And like swimming up a waterfall, I slowly made my way toward that point.

But I wasn’t intellectualizing at the time. I wasn’t even thinking. I was coming.

I was having an endless orgasm, and there was nothing to do but lie there and take it. There was no biological arousal. My whole awareness was being split open. As a sexual experience it was feminine. I felt like I was wide, wide open, and this torrent of images and energy was pouring into me, fucking me, life itself was fucking me. In my mind I chanted it; fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. (There was no negative sense to the words. It was a prayer, a wish.) I was intensely aware of my own vulnerability. I had come out of the world like a wave out of water, and I was a fragile thing, like a mushroom, the fruiting body, sent up by the subterranean carpet of mycelium, a momentary, transitory manifestation of an underlying order. I breathed. I pressed the small of back gently down into the ground. I held my hands against my navel and pubic bone. I saw light and dark. I trembled. I felt lightning rise up my spine. I opened my eyes and saw the red nylon of the tent ripple in the breeze, and saw it covered in living pattern. I closed my eyes. I smelled pine needles, water, and my own musk. I repeated fuck me, fuck me, and the world did. And so it went.

I discover transcendental orgasm

I had my first experiences of really transcendental sex early on in my time with K. During the first two years we were together, we tried all kinds of kink, often in combination with marijuana. I had been a stoner briefly when I first went away to college, self-medicating for depression, really. But this was my first experience of the truly miraculous synergy of cannabis and sex. Norman Mailer once said something like sex sober has to be really fantastic to be as good as ordinary sex while stoned, and to that I say, amen brother.

Of all the things we tried together, her dominating me was what was really soul-unfolding, hot-beyond-words. One of the many things I would still like to do is work on dominance more, because with her that was always lukewarm. She had a surprising pain tolerance, a tendency experience sexual things silently, and a natural stubbornness (or even pig-headedness) that made it almost impossible to get a handle on her. With her on top, everything fell into place. She seemed like she had been making men squirm and beg her whole life. She seemed to read my mind, to know what I wanted done to me, and (even better, even crueler) what not to do to me, what to deny me.

So there were those long evenings, the best ones of my life, with the doors locked and the curtains drawn, with the cats evicted from the bedroom and the eternal northwest rain running off the roof. I wish I could untangle all those different times, and all the filthy, beautiful things we did, to share with you, but they run together now. Getting high was usually the first step. Or maybe waiting nervously, half-dressed, in the bedroom while she put on lingerie in the bathroom, wondering what her mood would be. She would lock eyes with me when we put down the pipe—she was a perfect master of that hard stare, that look that always made me tremble—and she would take one of my nipples between the thumb and forefinger of each hand and begin to play with them. They were, and are, shockingly sensitive, my submissive buttons, the way to illuminate my whole body and make me crave things I don’t even have words for. I would play at reluctance, say I'm a real man, I won't do those things, you can't make me. And that made us both even hotter, because we both knew it was a lie. At that moment I was already gone, already her bitch.

Then she would begin teasing. She knew me so well, she could stroke my cock right up the edge, the last, brilliant, desperate edge of orgasm, and then—stop. Stop, and leave me humping the dark air. Dressed by now, maybe, in some of the lingerie she had taken off. (Cross-dressing in general isn’t a big thing for me, but I must say I have very nice legs for stockings) Begging like a bitch in heat for any little touch, even just her trailing her tits over me, even just blowing hot breath on my cock. And she would shake her head no, and that would send another shock of desire pounding through me. This went on and on, through a hundred different variations. At first the feeling of agony, of frustration, would grow, becoming worse with every denial. But the desire grew as she played with me, grew until I hardly knew who I was or what I wanted, and there was just the desire, going on and on and on, complete in itself.

That was the first taste of sacred sex for me. One particular night, though, was a kind of revelation. Often as the climax of the evening she would strap it on for me. She had some of the most intense orgasms I ever saw from her, taking me that way. There’s something so wonderfully scary about the woman you love taking your ass. Beyond the physical pleasure, I love the surrender, the violation, the mindfuck, the genderfuck of it all, the literally being pinned down and helpless to stop that thing thrusting inside you. Sometimes I would ejaculate without my cock being touched at all, shooting hot come into the air and across my belly, afterwords worrying the neighbors could have heard me. Or if I endured long enough sometimes she would have mercy, drop the strap-on, take me inside her for one perfect, final ride.

On this particular night, we had been playing for a long time—difficult to judge in that frame of mind, I know, but we were almost done with the second time through the James Brown cd, so close to two hours. I was on my back, and she had been fucking my ass slow and long, and staring down hard into my eyes. (Eyefucking, I thought of it) I had been on this high plateau so long, right on the edge of coming, until I had quit struggling (inside and out), until that place of intense excitement was just this place to be. And as we kept our eyes locked, and breathed together, something crazy started to well up between us, from where our lower bellies touched. The last thought I had was something like my-god-what-the-fuck-is-this. And then there weren’t any thoughts, just white light. White light, and orgasm dissolving everything. It was peaceful, and like holding on to a live wire at the same time. The orgasm had no location. I wasn’t ejaculating. It was the best thing I had ever felt, and it seemed to go on and on forever.

But maybe the strangest thing was that I knew we were having the same orgasm. Not simultaneous orgasms, but the same orgasm. All your life, you have to take it on faith that other people see the world more or less like you do. You could both look at the same scene, and you would say, for convenience, that you saw the same thing, but of course you didn’t. You don’t know what the other person saw, or anything about their internal experience, not truly. But that night it really felt different—to both of us, as we discussed later. Some essential thing in us had fused for little while, our nervous systems were one circuit, with the juice turned all the way up.

And that’s how I discovered sacred sex. Its taken me a long time to try to find my way back there. This blog is the story of that ongoing experiment.