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Wilson’s appearance at Richard’s seminar, supposedly from 1997 (London).A chill danced playfully up and down my spine, goosing me as it travelled, when I heard that Robert Anton Wilson was coming to London to give a lecture.A quite separate chill played upon me when I heard the event was to be hosted by Paul McKenna, the dodgy besuited salesman-type hypnotist. However, when I heard that RAW is apparently a big hero of McKenna and that this was the reasoning behind his organising this event, my mind opened to new possibilities.So there I sat (incidentally three rows back and two along from Ken Campbell) waiting for my mental polarities to be reversed, and to see a “whole new side” of Paul McKenna. Tickets weren’t cheap for this event but I was happy to pay �40 to see RAW. What I didn’t count on paying for was over 45 minutes of pompous pontification from both McKenna and his American counter-part, Mr Breen.Their crass introductions seemed to go on for several centuries, the highlight being a snippet of audience participation. McKenna and Breen were delightfully recounting their first meeting with RAW, during which they expressed their concern “not to look like arseholes”.”You failed,” piped up the voice of reason from the back. The first smile of the night.Mr Breen seemed disappointed that most of RAW’s conversation that day concerned one James Joyce, of whom McKenna and Breen seemed entirely ignorant. You would have thought anyone who purports to hold RAW in the high esteem of “hero” would have some inkling that the guy kinda likes James Joyce. Such is life.It occurred to me that perhaps the Gruesome Twosome were testing us with a specially constructed experiment concerned with shattering our fixed concept of time. Perhaps they were working strange magic upon us, and their skill at making half an hour seem like five days was certainly exceptional.Like a breath of fresh air (virtually at the point of suffocation), they finally left the stage and the jolly old American who is known by the name Richard Bandler took to the stage.The connection to McKenna and Breen comes through Bandler but you can’t hold that against him. Bandler is the inventor of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (see Links at bottom of page for further details). The whole idea is to make people realise that their mind is their own, that they are in control, and can do anything that they wish to do – and can avoid doing the things they would rather not.This all originated from Bandler’s modelling of ‘genius’. He developed a computer system which analyses people’s minds and draws comparisons. He set up a study to try and find what exactly it is that makes some people a ‘genius’. It was a very successful trial in that ‘experts’ are normally very sniffy about this sort of thing, but hearing that it was a trial analysing the mind of genius, the ‘experts’ started to volunteer themselves so as not to be left off the Genius Hall of Fame. After several years, Bandler used these results to develop NLP.He told some great tales of his exploits and experiments in mental homes across the US in the 1960’s, which I shall try to relay to you here.Bandler always asks the audience in his lectures, ‘how do you tell the difference between the doctors and the patients?’ His answer is ‘zippers’ as the patients’ clothes are all washed in one great tub that invariably rips out the zippers and buttons. But at one of his lectures, a lady in the audience put up her hand and said, ‘the patients can get better and go home’ which I think is a great answer.To demonstrate the point, Bandler recounted a tale of a doctor in one of the institutions he visited, who would (at an appointed hour) go to the boot of his car, take out a baseball bat and beat repeatedly the pillow within. And this is a man whose role in life is to judge the sanity of others…Bandler’s tactics with catatonics depended a great deal on shock therapy – not in the conventional sense of blasting patients’ heads with electricity until they turn into drooling zombies, but a whole new medical approach. For example there was the old petrol can ploy. Bandler had arranged for a psychiatrist to be in a room with a catatonic. He entered the room with a petrol can which he had filled with water and nail polish remover so that it smelt like petrol. He put the can down on the catatonic’s lap so that it would fall over and spill the liquid all over his crotch and down onto the floor around him, and the fumes would rise and fill his nasal passages with the relevant warnings. Then Bandler ignored the catatonic and gave all his attention to conversing with the psychiatrist whilst meanwhile taking a cigarette from his packet and a lighter from his pocket. With the lighter lit in his hand, he began gesturing as he spoke, bringing the light ever closer to the catatonic’s crotch as his gestures got more frantic. When the lighter got within a few inches of the catatonic, he leapt up and started trying to kill the psychiatrist – the experiment was a huge success.Bandler says that whenever a catatonic is brought out of their slumber, they invariably wake up very angry – at least the way he brings them round. He said it is always good to have a carefully positioned psychiatrist in the room so that when they come round, ready to strangle someone, it’s the psychiatrist that gets it in the neck.His experiments concerning delusional patients sound equal fun. One poor soul who thought he was Jesus Christ got the Bandler treatment, which sounds more like a play than medical therapy. He had arranged for Roman costumes to be issued to members of staff and for them to patrol outside the patient’s room. Bandler went into the room donning full Roman outfit, carrying two huge planks of wood, some very large nails and an even bigger hammer. It wasn’t long before the patient started protesting that he wasn’t Jesus at all and Bandler responded in true jobsworth style, ‘sorry mate, out of my hands, just following orders..’. Soon enough the patient, who had thought himself to be Christ for years, had remembered exactly who he was.In another experiment, the delusional patient in question thought Satan had been talking to him every night for years. Bandler arranged a huge soundsystem to be wired up and speakers placed in the patient’s room. He then organised a laser light show which would project a picture of Satan through the patient’s window. The picture of Satan he used was a conglomeration of two faces, one of which I cannot remember, but the other one was Nixon. That night, a system loud enough to shake the room, and lasers beamed from afar, told the patient that the Satan who had been talking to him before was an impostor, that he was the real Satan and that he better not do what the other Satan said or he would burn in hell forever. Although this had a very positive effect on the patient, many nurses and psychiatrists lost their buttons that night, as Bandler had forgotten to tell them of his plans…Bandler commenced the Pope-bashing and the PC slapping, which was to continue as a theme into RAW’s words of wisdom.”People ask me why I have to use bad language all the time. Do you know what I say to them? Shut the fuck up.”After a very entertaining and enlightening hour, Richard Bandler left the stage. Once more, we were subjected to much unnecessary input from McKenna and Breen. The only point of interest they did make was that the chair to be used by RAW had once seated Marilyn Monroe, another of his great heroes.RAW seated himself, the lights dimmed and after a brief, smiling, silent contemplation RAW reminds us of Bell’s Theorum (a mathematical demonstration by Dr John S Bell, which shows that – if quantum mechanics is valid – any two particles once in contact will continue to influence each other, no matter how far apart they may subsequently move. This violates special relativity, unless the influence between the particles is not employing any known energy.) I begin pondering the date of Marilyn’s interaction with ‘what we call a chair’ – depending on the timing, and the choice of Conspiracy Theory, Bell’s Theorum would imply that RAW was also interacting with JFK, amongst many other notables purported to have had direct interaction with Ms Monroe.The first subject to be covered (and indeed the underlying theme) was cosmic schmuckery, the battleground for which is awareness of self. Yup, we’re all cosmic schmucks – you and I and everyone else – and only by taking on the role of the aggressive grounds-keeper of the mind can we become aware of the steaming piles of schmuckery we leave in our wake, and of the shit that has to be shifted to clear up said schmuck. Hopefully a learning curve will teach us that the grounds-keeper isn’t such a bad guy after all and can really be quite pleasant as long as we keep our schmuck to ourselves, or at least dispose of it carefully.This line of thought led to RAW’s cheering comment that “the evolutionary function of stupidity is to create intelligence.” That is to say, the more one becomes aware of one’s cosmic schmuckery, the less of a cosmic schmuck one becomes.And then the Pope-bashing continued:”Anyone who is not aware of their cosmic schmuckery is a menace to society – like that queen in Rome who still thinks he’s the only Pope…”.And if the thought of more than one Pope confuses you, I suggest a hop to my section What The Hell Is All This Discordian Stuff About Anyhow? which details the Discordian and Erisian stories related by RAW on this night, with particular reference to The Original Snub, What We Know About Eris, The Birth of the Erisian Movement and The Law of Fives.Having referred to “the” Pope as “this dumb muthafucker from Rome,” like Bandler, RAW seemed to think a few words of explanation were necessary for his colourful use of language. Personally I have always delighted at the expressiveness of ‘fuck’ and the power of the word ‘cunt’, which still seems able to impact physical blows on those who hear it – especially the RadFems. Silly that, instead of getting so uptight and feeling so degraded by this word, they didn’t turn it to their advantage: if the female is a cunt, surely the male can be considered nothing but a “cunt stick”…Sometimes no other words will do; the reason slang expressions exist is that they quickly relay their meaning, without having to get your sticks out and beat around the proverbial bush. Indeed, there is a rule in English grammar which tells us it is incorrect to use more words than necessary to say what you mean.As RAW said, when people ask him, “do you have to use such language”, he replies:”Fuck, yes.”Of course, all of this Pope-bashing does not mean that RAW purports to be an atheist, no sir – one of my biggest chuckles all night was when RAW quipped that “I used to be an atheist but I gave it up – I had nothing to say during blow jobs.”The subject then turned to all things Slack and, judging by the whinnies and cackles, the Bobsters were out in force. The Church Of The Sub-Genius was conceived by Bob Dobbs after too long stuck in a lift with Ron Hubbard. Again I presume that most readers of this review will be quite familiar with Salesman Bob, but if not click yourself off to one of the many Church Of The Sub-Genius links at the bottom of this article.Another of my scribbled shorthand notes reports RAW as saying: “I have found a way to get high, stay spaced out for hours and the government can’t take it away from me – it’s called senility.”Fortunately this allowed me to laugh through my anger – RAW had just been disturbed mid-sentence by someone bringing an additional chair onto the stage, much to the surprise of RAW and everyone else. As he tried to continue his train of thought, and make his point, the Gruesome Twosome returned and lingered ominously at either side of the stage until RAW stopped speaking.I was absolutely furious about this incredibly rude interruption, and my anger certainly wasn’t subsided by Breen’s five-minute lecture on “how to ask questions”, which was probably the most patronising hogwash I have ever had the displeasure of being subjected to. I fully understand that Q&A sessions are often nightmares and that sometimes the audience needs a bit of guidance. However, the obvious solution is to either:      a) Not bloody bother with it and just let the man speak.      b) Ask people to submit questions in writing prior to the lecture.Eventually the pompous pontificating prat put a cork in it, and the question and answer session commenced. Unfortunately, it seemed to me that people were asking questions the answers to which are contained in RAW’s literature. For example someone asked RAW whether or not he is dead, to which I could have easily provided the answer (“read the very first chapter of Trigger III”), though it was appealing to my ironic amusement centre to see RAW on stage looking as he did and contemplating the idea that he may indeed be a CIA android…Though I have seen photographs that purport to be of RAW, I have never afforded much time to contemplating the matter of “what-does-RAW-look-like?”. Of course there is the understanding that this question only has validity in the form “what-does-RAW-look-like-to-me?”, and indeed no amount of research into pictorial evidence of RAW would have prepared me for the visual images processed by my brain as The Legend sat before me that night.At first the house lights were on, and RAW looked not dissimilar to the many learned professors I meet during the course of my daily grind, though my colleagues do not often have eyes made of piercing laser lights and a grin full of wickedness, sauce and delight.As the house lights dimmed, I slowly became aware that RAW had begun to take on another form: only when I focused my mind on his ‘original appearance’ could I again see him in that way. I was filled with a strange mix of excitement and fear, the blend not dissimilar to the onset of some psychedelic journey. I realised that RAW looks like an alien and, whilst this doesn’t unnerve me greatly in itself, what does start to rock my mind is that he looks nothing like my preconceived ideas of alien forms, nor does he closely resemble anyone else’s rendering of aliens. There are similarities – the enlarged brain, the huge eyes (though they appear to be only skin-covered sockets which never open – perhaps he has disposed of these deceptive devices?) and minimal nose and mouth. The cheekbones are jutting and square, giving an almost android appearance, and his movements are undefinably alien. But more that than he is surrounded by energy fields, which he produces from inside himself and absorbs from all around him, constantly interacting, shifting, changing, growing, shrinking, mutating – like a visual display of a complex intelligent force.Approx. 3 hours long.ENJOY, ppl!