Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati was published by And/Or Press in 1977, the first of three volumes (published over twenty years) in which Wilson documented his ongoing experiments with consciousness, belief, and the nature of reality. The book is simultaneously autobiography, philosophy, occultism, science fiction, and comedy — and it refuses to clarify which mode is operative at any given moment.
Wilson describes the period (roughly 1973–1976) during which he systematically attempted to destabilize his own belief systems through a variety of methods: Aleister Crowley’s system of magick, Timothy Leary’s eight-circuit model of consciousness, Sufi practices, tantric yoga, sensory deprivation, and psychedelic drugs. During this period, he received what appeared to be communications from an extraterrestrial intelligence associated with the star Sirius — communications that were simultaneously too coherent to dismiss and too absurd to accept.
The book’s method is deliberate uncertainty: Wilson refuses to tell the reader whether the Sirius transmissions were real (contact with alien intelligence), psychological (hallucinations produced by his experiments), or synchronistic (meaningful coincidences). He argues that the need to categorize the experience (real/not real, sane/insane, natural/supernatural) reveals more about the categorizer’s reality tunnel than about the experience itself.
Wilson’s project is epistemological guerrilla warfare: he wants to make readers aware of the models they use to construct reality, to demonstrate that these models are arbitrary (adopted rather than given), and that liberating oneself from any single model is the prerequisite for genuine intelligence.
Collecting Cosmic Trigger I
First edition (And/Or Press, Berkeley, 1977): Softcover original.
Market values:
- First printing (And/Or Press): $40–$120
- First hardcover (Falcon Press, 1986): $25–$60
- Signed copies: $80–$200