Dreams of Flying by Robert Anton Wilson

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Robert Anton Wilson - Dreams of Flying(This is a shortened version of an article originally printed in

Magical Blend

in 1988,and reprinted in

Email to the Universe and other alterations of consciousness

in2005)I have recently read a most enjoyable novel called

The Dream Illuminati

by WayneSaalman (Falcon Press, Santa Monica, 1988). Mr. Saalman has found an epic theme—dreams of flight, and the achievement of flight.Historically, dreams of flying appeared in the collective unconscious before the realityof flight existed in technology, and I suspect that if we understood our dreams betterwe would use our technology more wisely. Our machines manifest our dreams inmatter crafted to coherence, and a psychoanalysis of our culture could easily derivefrom an examination of how we use science to materialize our fantasies andnightmares.Mr. Saalman's science-fantasy made me wonder: why have we always dreamed of flying, and why have we built flying machines? This question seems "eminently"worth pondering in a world where 200,000,000 people pass through KennedyInternational Airport every year, flying the Atlantic in one direction or the other. To understand the profound, it often appears helpful to begin with clues that seemtrivial. I suggest that we contemplate what our children look at every Saturdaymorning on TV. One of the most popular jokes in animated cartoons shows theprotagonist walking off a cliff, without noticing what he has done. Sublimely ignorant,he continues to walk—on air—until he notices that he has been doing the"impossible", and then he falls. I doubt very much that any reader has not seen thatroutine at least once; most of us have seen it a few hundred times.It might seem pretentious to see a Jungian archetype adumbrated in crude form inthis Hollywood cliché, but follow me for a moment.When Hollywood wishes to offer us the overtly mythic, it presents Superman, whocan "leap over tall buildings in a single bound", and a more recent hero named LukeSkywalker. The Tarot, that condensed encyclopedia of the collective unconsciousness, beginswith the card called The Fool, and The Fool is depicted walking off a cliff—just likeDonald Duck or Wily Coyote in the cartoons.Funny coincidence, what?A Greek legend (which James Joyce took as the archetype of the life of the artist) tellsus of Daedalus and Icarus: Daedalus who, imprisoned in a labyrinth (conventional"reality"), invented wings and flew away, over the heads of his persecutors; andIcarus, the son of Daedalus, who flew too close to the Sun Absolute and fell back toEarth. Like Porky Pig walking off a cliff, Icarus' fall contains a symbolism many haveencountered in their dreams. The Sufi order employs as its emblem a heart with wings (and the Ordo TemplisOrientis employs a circle—symbolizing both emptiness and completion—with wings). The Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth, had the head of a winged creature, the ibis: hisGreek equivalent, Hermes, was portrayed as more human, but had bird's wings on his

sandals. The Wright Brothers, who made flying possible for all of us, remain beloved figures inthe folk imagination—but how many readers can name the inventors of such equallymarvelous (but earthbound) devices as the television, the vacuum cleaner, thecomputer, the laser, or the modern indoor toilet? Yet while other geniuses seem "forgotten by the masses", the classic put-down tosatirize any conservative who sets limits to what human craft can accomplishremains "I told Wilbur and I told Orville, you'll never get that crate off the ground." You see? We even remember their first names.I suspect that part of the function of flight consists in destroying our concept of limit,opening us to the insight Dr. John Lilly expressed so eloquently in

The Center of theCyclone

:In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomestrue,within limits to be found experimentally and experientially. These limits arefurtherbeliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits. The poet Hart Crane, trying to describe what Wilbur and Orville Wright meant to hisgeneration (he died in 1932), wrote that from Kitty Hawk onward, he sensed “thecloser clasp of Mars”. By 1938 people tuning in on an Orson Welles radio programafter the drama started, believed they were hearing a newscast and the Martianswere already here. A quantum jump had occurred in the limits of our socialimagination. Humanity had, like the poet, sensed the "closer clasp" of Mars. Just slightly more than 30 years later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, like acharacter in the fiction of Jules Verne, and tens years later, our instruments invadedthe Martian desert already familiar to “us” through the visions of Edgar RiceBurroughs and Ray Bradbury. If this does not confirm William Blake's notorious claimthat “Poetic Imagination” should be considered another name for “God”, it certainlysuggests that Poetic Imagination may function as another name for Logical Destiny.Perhaps we should ponder more deeply on the fact that Daedalus means “artist” inGreek. Daedalus, designer of labyrinths, imprisoned by those he served in a labyrinthhe himself built—Daedalus, inventor of wings that took him from the Earth to OuterSpace—why does he represent Art, instead of Science?Well to understand this we must remember that the ancient Greeks did notdistinguish “Art” from “Science” as we do. The genius of an artist, Aristotle says, liesin his

texne

, the root from which we get our word “technology”: but

texne

basicallymeans skill or craft, or the ability to make things that never existed before. Negativeentropy, i.e. information.In our age, by contrast, Stravinsky was regarded as “witty” or “paradoxical” (ordeliberately enigmatic) when he called himself a “sound engineer”. An artist whoconsiders himself a kind or engineer? That is a hard thought for us to grasp. Yet a few moments’ reflection will show that as much precise structural knowledgecan be found in Stravinsky’s music as in Roebling’s blueprints for the Brooklyn Bridge—that edifice (considered “miraculous” when it was new) which Hart Crane took as a

symbol of the unity of Art and Science. The Occidental obsession with dichotomized and dualistic thinking has beendenounced so often lately that I hardly need to labor this point. I would prefer tosuggest a possible common origin of both art and science. The musician and the architect, the poet and the physicist—all inventors of newrealities—all such Creators may be best considered late evolutionary developmentsof the type that first appears as the shaman. Please remember that shamans in mostcultures are known as “they who walk in the sky”, just like our current shaman-hero,Luke Skywalker.It should not be regarded as accidental or arbitrary that Swift put Laputa, the homeof the scientists, in the sky, in order to disparage the wild-eyed and Utopian scientistsof his time for not having all four feet on the ground; Aristophanes put Socrates in theclouds, to similarly disparage speculative agnostic philosophy.Outer Space seems the natural home of all descendants of the shaman, whether theybe called artists, philosophers or scientists. The ironies of Swift and Aristophanes, and the myths of the fall of Icarus and DonaldDuck, indicate that the collective unconsciousness contains a force opposed to ourdreams of flight. This appears inevitable. As Jung, the foremost explorer of thecollective psyche, often pointed out, an ineluctable polarity exists in the symbols of both dream and myth, a “Law of Opposites” which Jung compared to the Chineseconcept of yin and yang energies. Jekyll contains Hyde; love easily becomes hate; Cupid and Psyche reappear as thePhantom of the Opera and Margaritta, and also as King Kong and Fay Wray.In the present context, the Law of Opposites means that we yearn to soar, yet wefear to fall.Our “inner selves” are mirrored not just in Orville Wright rising like a birdfrom Kill Devils Hill at Kitty Hawk, but also in Simon Newcombe, the great astronomerwho “proved” mathematically that such flight was impossible.As I have elsewhere suggested, neophilia and neophobia—love of novelty and fear of novelty—result from the primal polarities of the first imprint of the newborn infant. Inother words, what Dr. Timothy Leary calls the bio-survival “circuit” of the nervoussystem—the oral bio-survival system I prefer to call it, since it includes the immune,endocrine and neuropeptide sub-systems as well as the autonomic nervous system—always and only imprints either basic explorativeness or basic conservatism veryquickly. That explains, I think, why some babies “chortle with delight” when tossed upin the air and caught, while others scream with terror. Infants who like this experienceof flight, I suggest, already have the infophiliac imprint and those who act terrifiedhave the infophobic imprint.Of course, “the universe” can count above two (even if Aristotelian logicians cannot),and few of us are either pure neophilics or pure neophobics. Rather, we wobble abouton a gradient between neophilia and neophobia—between joy and anxiety, betweenconservatism and experimentalism, between yearning to soar and fear of falling. Attimes we feel like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, convinced that “a true Heaven has nolimits” and trying to fly higher and faster; other times we become the old Reaganitegulls, nervously warning that to fly too high too fast will ruin your brain and directlycontradicts the traditional mores of the flock. (“Just say no to soaring.”)

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