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Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson or RAW (born January 18, 1932) is a futurologist, libertarian, and novelist.

His best-known work, The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975) co-authored with Robert Shea, humorously examined American paranoia about conspiracies. These books mix true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "Operation Mindfuck". (Much of the odder material derived from letters sent to Playboy magazine while Shea and Wilson worked as editors of the Playboy Forum.) It was advertised as "A fairy tale for paranoids." Although Shea and Wilson never partnered on such a scale again, Wilson has continued to expand upon the themes of the Illuminatus! books throughout his writing career.

In Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977), he made Discordianism, Sufism, Futurology, the Illuminati and other esoteric or counter-culture philosophies accessible to larger audiences. He is also a proponent of Timothy Leary's eight circuit model of consciousness and neurosomatic/lingustic engineering, which he writes about in Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and Quantum Psychology (1990), books of practical techniques to break free of one's "reality tunnels". With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, life extension, and intelligence enhancement technologies (SMI2LE); he is arguably a more cogent and persuasive exponent of Leary's "imprinting circuit" theory of psychological development than Leary himself.

Ironically, considering Wilson has long lampooned and criticized new age beliefs, his books can often be found in bookstores specializing in new age material.

In a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, RAW described himself as a "Model Agnostic" which he says "consists of never regarding any model or map of Universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory."

RAW holds the post of American director of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON).