The Signals From The Stars post, meditations on the plausibility of delusional thinking when it came to RAW (strongly?) suspecting he may have received communications from an alien... If I had read this thread before I posted my thoughts on this subject in another of the pd.com boards, I would have posted those thoughts here.
I too am skeptical about whether it was real aliens. I consider the two most plausible possibles that (1) it was a hallucination of alien communications or (2) telepathy is real and everything, but it was just pranksters from earth staging an elaborate practical joke.
I just finished reading
the Starseed Signals: A RAW Perspective on Timothy Leary PhD, and the gullibility of 70s RAW about the possibility it was aliens communicating with earthlings is one of two main flaws I seem to have detected in early RAW thinking. The other major flaw I suspect comes from the letters at the end of the book.
On giving up suffering: "If one is trying to give up something, then one has an object - which causes suffering." (G, Hill, last letter.) I respond: bullshit.
- RAW, page 429 paperback edition.
I translate the lack of an object as the answer to ending suffering to mean total selflessness is without suffering, because the self cannot attach to objects if it has been transcended. Selflessness as Nirvana, love not bound by the ego unconditionally expanding.
I cannot say how selfless it is possible to actually become. But RAW's conclusion that the koan is bullshit because the 8 circuits are an object that can overcome suffering seems to me to miss the point. Without noticing the approach of selflessness of mysticism and right hand esoteric paths, 8 circuit consciousness can become a thing which inflates one's pride in one's "level of consciousness".
I try to share my research into 8 circuit consciousness. So I don't discount that Wilson and Leary's research into this avenue was important. But I don't think intellectual enlightenment is as sustainable unless it induces less pride and more (openness to) love.
edit: the object is selfishness because it is a possession. it requires selfishness to value a possession, or to have anything for one's self rather than all sentient life, or whomever one loves.