January 18, 1932

Robert Anton Wilson (January 18, 1932 to January 11, 2007), as evidenced by his books, lifted a corner of the curtain. Like everyone else ("statistically speaking" everyone else) a taste was enough to vitalize his creative life and like everyone else, except for those invisible few, the cost of progress on the path was more than he could bear and he looked away, towards that mirror which is the regard of men. A good example is his book Sex and Drugs: A Journey Beyond Limits (1973).  Drugs are the way of the slacker. This may not have always been the case, when elemental dangers lurked closely, but for millenia the only use of drugs by teachers have been for limited, controlled, and transient purposes. In no way do drugs form a permanent part of the path.

Above we have a book cover for a trilogy of novels,  appearing in one volume later in it's publication history (1979).  Anton's Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy includes The Universe Next Door, The Trick Top Hat, and The Homing Pigeons. (Supposedly a trilogy of books first published separately: I can't find data on separate publications at worldcat.org) You can actually see my points illustrated in this choice of cover art.

The cat repeats the colors of the game board pattern, in a triumphal pose. The colors and pattern suggest the cat is in fact, emblematic of ordinary thinking, that binary automatic action which  adults call 'thinking.' The cover suggests the triumph of ordinary thought since the egg, with its color and shape promising something novel, is firmly held by the cat of ordinary thought. One presumes this analysis was not what Wilson intended. He described himself as an "agnostic mystic." Wonderful description, but the details of the cover art suggest that, with the phrase 'agnostic mysticism', we again see cleverness has triumphed over the silence of real experience on a real path.