I changed the title to EMAIL TO THE UNIVERSE. It's about James Joyce, Daoism, Internet and Aleister Crowley, plus my usual craziness.

It's both pleasing and flattering, of course, but I'll feel much happier when Maybe Logic, the Snafu Law and the Cosmic Schmuck Law get seeded just as widely, or even more widely.

Maybe Logic is a label that got stuck on my ideas by filmmaker Lance Bauscher. I decided it fits. I certainly recognize the central importance in my thinking -- or in my stumbling and fumbling efforts to think -- of non-Aristotelian systems. That includes von Neumann's three-valued logic [true, false, maybe], Rappoport's four-valued logic [true, false, indeterminate, meaningless], Korzybski's multi-valued logic [degrees of probability.] and also Mahayana Buddhist paradoxical logic [it "is" A. it "is" not A, it "is" both A and not A, it "is" neither A nor not A]. But, as an extraordinarily stupid fellow, I can't use such systems until I reduce them to terms a simple mind like mine can handle, so I just preach that we'd all think and act more sanely if we had to use "maybe" a lot more often. Can you imagine a world with Jerry Falwell hollering "Maybe Jesus 'was' the son of God and maybe he hates Gay people as much as I do" -- or every tower in Islam resounding with "There 'is' no God except maybe Allah and maybe Mohammed is his prophet"?
The Snafu law holds that, the greater your power to punish, the less factual feedback you will receive. If you can fire people for telling you what you don't want to hear, you will only hear what you want. This law seems to apply to all authoritarian contraptions, especially governments and corporations. Concretely, I suspect Bozo knows factually less about the world than any dogcatcher in Biloxi. The Cosmic Schmuck law holds that [1] the more often you suspect you may be thinking or acting like a Cosmic Schmuck, the less of a Cosmic Schmuck you will become, year by year, and [2] if you never suspect you might think or act like a Cosmic Schmuck, you will remain a Cosmic Schmuck for life.

I sure hope so, but it needs help, like more computers online and more pot. LOTS more pot.

I want to use Internet to accelerate human evolution by replacing faith-based decisions with research-based decisions. The others have similar or compatible goals. Our class leaders include R.U. Sirius, cyber-philosopher; Patricia Monaghan, goddess researcher; Alan Clements, Buddhist monk and activist; Peter Caroll, mathematician and inventor of Chaos magick; Douglas Rushkoff, media maven; and others will join up soon.

Let me differentiate between scientific method and the neurology of the individual scientist. Scientific method has always depended on feedback [or flip-flopping as the Tsarists call it]; I therefore consider it the highest form of group intelligence thus far evolved on this backward planet. The individual scientist seems a different animal entirely. The ones I've met seem as passionate, and hence as egotistic and prejudiced, as painters, ballerinas or even, God save the mark, novelists. My hope lies in the feedback system itself, not in any alleged saintliness of the individuals in the system.

In a word, Internet. Ever since I read Wiener's Cybernetics: Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine back in 1948 I've thought of "intelligence" as a function of feedback. The more feedback, the higher the measurable "intelligence," and the less feedback, the less "intelligence." As the computer gave birth to the Net and the Web, feedback has increased exponentially. As R.U. Sirius wrote recently, "The rise of the Net and the Web represents a victory for the counterculture and the subculture. The next generation, raised on the Net as their primary medium, won't even know what consensus reality is." In other words, feedback and Maybe Logic form a circle that spins faster and faster. The Tsarists fear and hate it -- they call it "flip-flopping" -- but it characterizes all high intelligence systems, electronic or protoplasmic.

Well, then we're sunk, ain't we? Fortunately, there exists no logical or factual reason to believe that paranoid fantasy, and it is directly contradicted by the hard mathematics of Wiener and Shannon on "redundance of control" in feedback systems. What Juang Jou said of the universe 2400 years ago is even more true of the 4,285,199,774 computer URLs online today - [21 August 2004] -"there is no governor anywhere."

Let's not take metaphors too literally. I'll admit Bozo has a lot in common with Yog Sothoth, and that he even has the same initials as GWB666 in Schrodinger's Cat, but I regard those as accidental hits. I don't think of myself as a sleeping prophet.

It got immanentized 5 years ago when the Supremes called off the election and appointed GWB --the Great Wild Beast-- to the white house.

I assume most intelligent people will continue to vote for Nobody, and the moron majority will split their votes about evenly, depending on which of the two multi-millionaire Skull-and-Bones-men has the most sex appeal. It doesn't really seem to matter: if the people marginally prefer the "wrong" candidate, the Supreme Court will assuredly "correct" them again. The TSOG seems a comfortable disease, like death by sleeping sickness. After 7000 years of Authoritarian Patriarchy, most people accept Tsarism and, in America, resent that pesky constitution imposed on them by a few intellectual freemasons.

Raymond Chandler, who served as a lieutenant of infantry in World War I, pointed out the same paradox on a smaller scale: in charging an enemy, troops are statistically safer if scattered broadly, but they all show a tendency to bunch together near the lieutenant, thereby increasing their risk. This seems a hardwired [even premammalian] vertebrate program. On top of that we've got the 7000+ years of authoritarian conditioning documented by Reich. Seems rather bleak, doesn't it? My optimism rests on the fact that, historically, in emergency, people often mutate in unpredictable and creative ways. As John Adams said, the American Revolution took place "in the minds of the people in the 15 years before the first shot was fired." I suspect a similar revolution is occurring in the minds of educated people worldwide.

I suspect all lines exist only in our minds -- especially political lines. Universe seems more like waltzing chaos than like an account book.

Well, Phil certainly lived there. I feel more like I live in Tsarist Russia. Sometimes I think of myself as the last Decembrist - and if that seems obscure or too kooky, just set your search engine for "Decembrists + Illuminati" and grok in their fullness the URLs that come up. Anyway, we certainly don't live in a constitutional democracy. I feel almost 99.999999999999999999999999999999% sure about that.

Frequently--- especially when I test my Buddhist detachment by trying to listen to "our" leaders without growling or cussing under my breath. I feel like the Decembrists, very poignantly. But I also identify a lot the founders of this moribund Republic. They knew the Constitution alone could not restrain the power lusts of Certain Types and warned that we needed eternal vigilance - - but they could only give us the Constitution, not the vigilance. Alas!

First, my passion turns toward CONSTITUTIONAL democracy, not just "democracy" in general, which I fear as much as our founders did. I want LIMITS on government, clearly defined and virtually "graven in stone." As John Adams wrote "My credo is that despotism or absolute power is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratic council, an oligarchical junta or a single emperor --equally arbitrary, bloody and in every respect diabolical." I agree totally. Yeah, I think we have lost a lot of light lately - and by "we" I mean both the suidaen politicos and the masses.

I've "activized" for various causes since 1959, because I have that sort of temperament. I got involved actively in the medicinal marijuana cause long before my post-polio symptoms made medical pot necessary in my own case. Now, stuck in a wheelchair most of the day, I feel not just activated but super-activated. I supported a wife and four kids most of my life. I have 35 books in print. NEW SCIENTIST called my CAT trilogy "the most scientific of all science-fiction novels." Now, at 73, I'm treated like a child by the TSOG -- and so is my doctor, a fully qualified M.D. Only the Tsar knows what's best for me, medically, and he knows without doing a medical examination even, just by consulting some faith-based organizations... To quote George Carlin "stunningly, STUNNINGLY, full of shit." If you'd like the view of research-based organizations see http://www.medical-marijuana-testimonials.org/

Temporarily. Only Internet creates the real possibility of a Global Autonomous Zone. I think all problems have gotten solved and will get solved by [a] more information and [b] more rapid and ubiquitous transmission of information

My major interest remains, as I said, in the area of non-Aristotelian logics, and around 1969 Bob Shea and I got the idea of writing a funny novel applying Maybe Logic to the arena of conspiriology. The result, ILLUMINATUS. went so far outside consensus reality-tunnels that it took us five years to get it published, and now, for 30 years, I keep receiving feedback from two groups who cannot handle the concept of "maybe" at all, at all. The first group believes fervently, beyond all doubt, that I endorsed the craziest ideas I've discussed and hence regards me as a dangerous nut. The second group has an equally ardent belief that I work for the CIA's disinformation bureau and want to make all conspiracy theories look equally crazy. I've written dozens of books on other subjects, but those two gangs continually provoke my stoned-out sense of humor, so I continually surrender to the temptation to have a little more fun with them......

As an admitted Cosmic Schmuck, I don't claim to "know" the answer to that -- or anything else -- but I do have certain persistent suspicions. I suspect, for instance, that "the Establishment" -- i.e. the TSOG and the corporate media -- have told so many outrageous lies that nobody really fully trusts them anymore. The weapons of mass destruction in Iraq still remain hidden from human perception. After that lie collapsed, the TSOG did not merely appear full of shit; it appeared, to quote Carlin again, that seems STUNNINGLY full of shit. So naturally a market has grown for explanations of what the hell really motivates Bozo and his gang. I regard my job as applying the same scathing criticism to all models that try to imply the model-maker really knows more than me and doesn't just guess, and speculate, and grope in the dark, like I admit I do

The same that I simultaneously discovered in Buddhism and quantum physics: namely, the alleged "wall" between "me" and "the world" does not exist at all. Clearing thought and language of that fictitious split adds immeasurably to clarity. Oh, yes, and it improves your sense of humor, too!

Three guys are drinking and arguing in a bar. "I tell you it should be spelled W-O-O-O-M," the first says dogmatically.
"And I still say W-H-O-O-M sounds right," the second counters.
"No, no, no," says the third. 'It's definitely W-H-O-M-B-B."
"You've all got it wrong," offers a gynecologist at the next table. "It's W-O-M-B."
They stare at her coldly. "Madam," the first says, "it's obvious that you've never heard an elephant fart."