Books › Prometheus Rising
Prometheus Rising
First published 1983 · 321 pages
A playful, mind-expanding operating manual for hacking your own consciousness and breaking free from consensus reality.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like sitting in a smoky, late-night diner with a brilliant, eccentric professor who is determined to dismantle everything you thought you knew about reality. It moves at a brisk, intellectually restless pace, tossing out ideas from quantum mechanics, occultism, and psychology with irreverent glee. The mood is distinctly psychedelic and expansive, inviting you to step outside your ingrained reality tunnels and experiment with your own consciousness. The prose is conversational, witty, and densely packed, yet it never takes itself too seriously. It is an empowering, mind-bending experience that will delight psychonauts, seekers, and anyone who suspects that the human brain is capable of far more than society has programmed it to do.
- Mood
- psychedelic
- expansive
- inquisitive
- mind-bending
- Tone
- irreverent
- provocative
- playful
- intellectual
- wry
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- cognitive liberty · malleability of belief · breaking mental conditioning · human potential · reality tunnels
- The writing
- Conversational and witty, blending dense esoteric theory with accessible, punchy humor.
- The arc
- Begins with a playful dismantling of the reader's assumed reality and builds toward an empowering, expansive sense of limitless cognitive freedom.
- Who it's for
- Counter-culture seekers, psychonauts, and armchair philosophers eager to hack their own minds and question everything they know.
Content notes
- discussions of drug use
- occult practices
- psychological manipulation
About the book
Prometheus Rising is a book by Robert Anton Wilson first published in 1983. It is a guide book of "how to get from here to there", an amalgam of Timothy Leary's 8-circuit model of consciousness, Gurdjieff's self-observation exercises, Alfred Korzybski's general semantics, Aleister Crowley's magical theorems, Sociobiology, Yoga, relativity, and quantum mechanics, amongst other approaches to understanding the world around us, and claiming to be a short book (under 300 pages) about how the human mind works and how to get the most use from one. Wilson describes it as an "owner's manual for the human brain".
The book examines many aspects of social mind control and mental imprinting, and provides mind exercises at the end of every chapter, with the goal of giving the reader more control over how one's mind works. The book has found many readers among followers of alternative culture, and discusses the effect of certain psychoactive substances and how these affect the brain, tantric breathing techniques, and other methods and holistic approaches to expanding consciousness. It draws a parallel between the development of one's mind and the development of higher intelligence theorized by biological evolution.
Prometheus Rising was copyrighted and published in 1983 but began as Wilson's Ph.D. dissertation called "The Evolution of Neuro-Sociological Circuits: A Contribution to the Sociobiology of Consciousness" in 1978-79 for Paideia University in California.[1] In 1982, while in Ireland, Wilson rewrote the manuscript for commercial publication, removing footnotes, improving the style, adding chapters and exercises, and sketching out diagrams for the illustrations. Eventually Wilson submitted the work to New Falcon Publications, which accepted it within 48 hours. Wilson received his advance 48 hours after that, according to his preface in the tenth printing of Prometheus Rising.
Description from Open Library.
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