Improvisations off Leary and Wilson's 5th Circuit

A couple of years ago I read Harvard History professor Daniel Lord Smail's On Deep History and the Brain. Smail is interested in pre-history of humans, so he has a tough row to hoe, since by definition there are no written documents. Still, I thought he did a hell of a job. What a terrific read. And what's stuck with me ever since was his notion that, very early in our development as hominids, we began to develop techniques to alter our own consciousness ("autotropic") and the neurochemistry of others, from a distance ("teletropic"). Smail notes that we haven't stopped since we began this and have developed an extraordinary "array of practices that stimulate the production and circulation of our own chemical messengers."

This resonated with me in a number of ways. Books on the cognitive science of pleasure have been proliferating over the past ten to 13 years, and some of them seem quite good. I also read about pleasure with an eye toward Timothy Leary's and especially Robert Anton Wilson's posits regarding their Eight Circuit Brain model and metaphor, and pleasure seems to have most to do with their 5th Circuit. For those new to this Model, who are interested in finding out more, both thinkers wrote quite a lot about the Eight Circuit Brain (8CB) model, and much of it is diffused throughout their texts; for starters I would look at Leary's Info-Psychology, section 11, "A Neurosomatic Aesthetic: Beauty is Natural, Art is Artificial," pp.27-31. Very late in Leary's life he told his colleague R.U. Sirius (AKA Ken Goffman) that Wilson had developed Leary's 8CB model to such a degree that he knew it better than Leary himself did. (I'm paraphrasing from a passage in Design For Dying that I don't have on hand at the moment.)

From Wilson there is much writing on this 5th Circuit all-over-body pleasure/rapture, but if I had to pick one section of one book, read chapter 11 of Prometheus Rising: "The Holistic Neurosomatic Circuit," pp. 177-194, which is replete with ideas about the evolution of this circuit in humanity, quotes from Adepts, a discussion that intertwines history, class, yoga, cannabis, sex, comparative religious aspects, fear of these states of pleasure by Priests and Kings, its relationship with hypnosis and brainwashing, exercises for the reader to experience this "circuit," and the idea that this circuit might be involved in some sort of teleological movement in human evolution toward space travel. Most of the time, in any of Wilson's books, when he's discussing tantric sex or cannabis use he's also writing about some aspect of this "circuit."

For both Leary and Wilson this metaphorical "circuit" is associated with healing, floating, bliss, aesthetics, deep enjoyment in the whole body, flexibility in mind and body, "glowing" sexual and sensual beauty, and tolerance of difference.

Both thinkers employed various nomenclature regarding this "circuit": hedonic, neurosomatic, cybersomatic intelligence, psychosomatic synergy, and many others. You get the picture. They guessed that this circuit was relatively recent historically, and was indeed historical: there was writing and surplus and a relatively wealthy caste that had the time to pursue methods of whole-body bliss. The first articulators of this circuit may have been Hindus, but Smail's book and others suggest the picture may be more complex than this.

Some Recent Riffs on Pleasure
First off, I'm struck by the proliferation of books and research on the subject while the very cultures that support the research and readership seem to be undergoing crises of mistrust between governments and the governed (see "NSA and Snowden"), and rapidly accelerating inequality in income. One wonders about the semantic unconscious and this development, which might require a better mind than mine for a satisfying analysis.

1.) Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus (last seen at NYU) wondered about our appreciation of cave paintings versus the latest 3-D, audio-sensurround extravaganza. He thinks artists become savvier and savvier over time about what makes humans tick, and takes a page from Stephen Jay Gould, who in his 1980 collection The Panda's Thumb described how Disney had, over decades, retooled Mickey Mouse's image, so slowly that no one noticed. But Mickey has become "cuter and cuter: less adult, less threatening, more juvenile, more adorable." (Marcus) In describing the "evolution" of music, Marcus writes, "My contention is that music is like Mickey: not the direct product of evolution at all, but the product of artists evolving their craft in order to tickle the brain in particular ways. Music, art, and iPhones spread not because we have innate circuitry for funky dance beats or electronic toys, but because musicians, artists, and inventors are often uncommonly talented at reverse-engineering the human psyche." (see Guitar Zero, p.113)

Here we would be talking about Smail's teletropic aspect of brain-state modulation. For autotropic developments, pay attention to whatever you and your friends are doing that gets you high or makes you feel a deep pleasure.

2.) Two "field reports" on cannabis use from Dale Pendell's marvelous Pharmako/Poeia:

I used it to learn organic chemistry. If I memorized the reactions both straight and high, they stuck and I never forgot them. - "a student"

Sex is affected also: other worldly, this worldly, her worldly, his worldly, one-worldly. Two voices singing one aria, creation and improvisation in one long, stretching, eternal now. Tactile sensations exist in their own space: accessible to both but owned by neither. Genitals and other bodily parts expand, become the whole body, the two of you climbing over them like Lilliputians. - Pendell himself, see p. 202

If ya ain't got the gnosis...We're making it more available all the time. Step right up! (And board a trip to Colorado?) Or just go get your Card?

[Side note: for all those who see the reading of James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and...poetry in general as unpleasantly effortful or just too goddamned difficult, I report very good results from using a method much like the organic chemistry student, above. And aye: deeply pleasurable.]

Talk about pre-history: how does the Cambrian explosion hit ya? 600 million years ago, the fossil record shows that, for some "reason" Life decided to go nuts with just the most psychedelic expansion of new forms of critters. This seemingly overnight copious display of creativity by Nature was one argument, Darwin thought, against his idea of relatively slow evolution by means of natural selection. It led Gould and Eldredge to invent the evolutionary of idea of "punctuated equilibrium."

What does this have to do with pleasure? Stick with me here for a sec or two.

The US government, for near 100 years, has been at war with cannabis. Agents for the government still claim that we don't know enough about cannabis to declare its safety. Being morally and intellectually bankrupt themselves, they ought have no say in the matter. But they're wrong anyway: despite the prohibition against doing scientific research into cannabis, there's now an overwhelming body of evidence to make Obama look like a damned fool (again?) when he recently said - probably thinking himself charitable? - that pot is no more dangerous than alcohol. In fact, it's far, far more healthy. Ironically, the Unistat government funded a study of the human immune system, giving funds to researchers at the St. Louis University School of Medicine. In 1988 the researchers showed that a major component of the immune system is the endocannabinoid system: these are receptor sites all over the body (recall Wilson's term "psychosomatic synergy") that regulate immune function, body temperature, blood pressure, hunger, relaxation, sleep cycles, bone density, inflammation, and fertility.

And when did the endocannabinoid system arise, evolutionarily? In the Cambrian explosion, with tunicates. Sea-squirts! They had elementary backbones and a cannabinoid system 600 million years ago. (We share 80% of our DNA with them, as Ripley would say: believe it or not!) Today, all animals except insects have this system.

But wither pleasure here? Just this:

Smoking cannabis docks one of around 100 phytocannabinoids (plant-based cannabinoids) in receptor sites that we have endogenously. One of the psychoactive effects of cannabinoids is the ability to cause us to "break set": we become temporarily more amenable to new ideas, new approaches to things that we previously reacted habitually to. Speculating from there: Darwinian survival is all about fitness over changing environments. When the environment changes, time for new ideas. And for new ideas to come into play, there should be some alteration of memory, which plays a big part in habits. Endocannabinoids such as Anandamide help us to forget things that we don't need to clutter our minds with, which is easily seen as adaptive. Cannabis has been shown to encourage neurogenesis in the hippocampus: new neurons, new neural-circuits, novel connections. Cannabis seems to have played a big part in adaptation over the Longue Duree. When the "normal" environment threw us for a loop, it may have been a very good idea to just, like...hold on, man. Let's sit down and have a smoke or ingest this godstuff and talk this out. There's gotta be some way we can deal with this. Let's chill. Memory seems thus psycho-somatic, all over the body. The cannabinoid system CB2 has receptor sites distributed throughout the body and internal organs. There is no mind-body duality...

Pot does more
Than Newton can
To justify
Goddess's ways to man.
-paraphrase from a classic poem

A cannabis high feels so good maybe because we co-evolved with the endocannabinoid system, which probably got going with the Cambrian Explosion. Nature threw in this Gift, and we ought never let any cops keep us from it, for any reason. (Still have some ways to go...)

Summary of this section: I posit the development of the endocannabinoid system as at least the scaffolding for very much of what we consider "pleasurable" today.

3.) In a recent book by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, How Pleasure Works, he notes early on his colleague Paul Rozin's observation that, "(I)f you look at a psychology textbook, you will find little or nothing about sports, art, music, drama, literature, play, and religion. Bloom says that these are "central to what makes us human, and we won't understand any of them until we understand pleasure." (p.xiv)

A most fascinating aspect of Bloom's book, for me, has been his very-convincing argument that humans are essentialists: they/we perceive/imagine a "real" essence "in" objects and people. This essentialism was something that Korzybski (not mentioned in Bloom's book) thought was a mistake that led us to act irrationally and non-adaptively, and should be overcome if we are to survive as a species. Bloom shows that rationality and looking into things - say, scientifically - was essentialist and yet led many humans to reject essentialism for a nascent body of mathematical and scientific "facts" about the physical world. I now see essentialism in a new light, and I do think these relatively new insights can be read as making Korzybski's thought even more robust...even if we must accept essentialism as something that absolutely will NOT go away any time soon.

In a chapter on how religion gives pleasure by firing our imaginations about "deeper realities," Bloom discusses some of the so-called New Atheists:

They are not blind to the attraction of a deeper reality; they just resonate to this attraction outside the bounds of organized religion. As an illustration, consider the view of some prominent modern-day atheists. I have already discussed how Richard Dawkins wrote a book about the transcendent appeal of scientific inquiry. Sam Harris is well known for his attack on the monotheistic faiths, but he is strongly enthusiastic about Buddhism, describing it as "the most complete methodology we have for discovering the intrinsic freedom of consciousness, unencumbered by any dogma." And Christopher Hitchens, author of  God Is Not Great, has spoken about the importance of the "numinous" - which usually refers to the experience of contact with the divine - and has argued that one can experience it without religious or supernatural belief. He suggests that humans rely on the numinous and transcendent, and says that personally he wouldn't trust anyone who lacked such feelings.
-p.215

4.) Because I've gone on too long, I take leave here by linking to a popular listicle-article about why sex is good for us, trusting the links within my link will lead to something moderately illuminating, or at least for laffs. What interests me here is how much of what sex does that's healthy intersects and intermingles and even seems to have intercourse with what cannabis does.

I take hashish with some followers of the eighteenth-century mystic Saint-Martin. At one in the morning, while we were talking wildly, and some are dancing, there is a tap at the shuttered window; we open it and three ladies enter, the wife of a man of letters...caught in our dream we know vaguely that she is scandalous according to our code and to all codes, but we smile at her benevolently and laugh. - William Butler Yeats, Autobiography

a prominent 20th century science writer and thinker and public intellectual, on cannabis:
I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I’ve had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word ‘crazy’ to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: ‘did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.’ When high on cannabis I discovered that there’s somebody inside in those people we call mad. - Carl Sagan, in 1969, on his experiences smoking cannabis, which he did to the end of his life. See HERE.

Some Sources
"The Marijuana Miracle: Why a Single Compound in Cannabis May Revolutionize Modern Medicine," by Martin Lee
"The Lie That Won't Die: 'We Don't Know Enough About Marijuana'," by Paul Armentano
"High on Health: CBD in the Food Supply," by Allen Badiner
"Science For Potheads: Why People Love To Get High," by K.M. Cholewa
"Sea Squirt, Heal Thyself: Scientists Make Major Breakthrough in Regenerative Medicine"
"Introduction To The Endocannabinoid System," by Dustin Sulak
"The Endocannabinoid System"
"How Sex Affects Intelligence, and Vice-Versa," by Dan Hurley
The Eight-Circuit Brain, by Antero Alli (I don't know what happened with this book, which I find to be a very unique take on Leary's and Wilson's ideas. Antero diverges from both significantly, but he's never boring. He knew RAW in Berkeley and writes about him in this book. Why is this book only available for $1500? I have a pristine, signed copy I'd be willing to part with for a mere $800. Contact me at that address ----->)


A 3 min, 30-second film that addresses tunicates (sea squirts) and the endocannabinoid system in all of us:

Promiscuous Neurotheologist: The Atheologies of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Robert Anton Wilson

In the past few weeks I've been reading the so-called New Atheists - articles and passages in books by and about them, interviews, etc - and the more I read them the more each thinker seems slightly different than the others. The ones I'm talking about are Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, Dennett, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Victor Stenger, Michael Shermer, and Lawrence Krauss.

                                              Ayaan Hirsi Ali, moving the New Atheist
                                              debate forward, although I must wonder
                                              why she's allied with the retrograde
                                              American Enterprise Institute

I could go into why I started to see individuation with each of these thinkers, but that's for some other day; what really fascinated me was what was not said, and the idea that this sort of thinking is "new;" it is not. Atheism has a long pedigree, even in Unistat, but it's largely been marginalized. I don't recall any atheist thinker being singled out in any class I ever took in high school. When I started reading compendia of atheist thought, one thing led to another and I realized it was just another marginalized discourse in Unistat; Randall Collins would say that the social and intellectual conditions were not right for a more mainstream discussion of atheism in the culture at large. It is no accident that this "new" discourse (also a publishing phenomenon, but it wouldn't be if people weren't buying the books) exploded after 9/11.

Randall Collins's magisterial The Sociology of Philosophies has a robust theory about why ideas gain ground at certain times and not others. He seems heavily influenced by Erving Goffman in developing ideas about emotional energies gathered in groups around a seminal thinker, and how the group branches out and disseminates and develops ideas, depending on culture and history, space and political  propinquities. Cultural capital is actualized around attention spaces and I'll just quote from him to give you a feel for where Collins is coming from:

Imagine a large number of people spread out across an open plain - something like a landscape by Salvador Dali or Giorgio de Chirico. Each one is shouting "Listen to me!" This is the intellectual attention space. Why would anyone listen to anyone else? What strategy will get the most listeners? [...]
A person can pick a quarrel with someone else, contradicting what the other is saying. That will gain an audience of at least one; and if the argument is loud enough, it might attract a crowd. Now, suppose everyone is tempted to try it. Some arguments start first, or have a larger appeal because they contradict the positions held by several people; and if other persons happen to be on the same side of the argument, they gather around and provide support. There are first-mover advantages and bandwagon effects. The tribe of attention seekers, once scattered across the plain, is changed into a few knots of arguments. The law of small numbers says that the number of these successful knots is always about three to six. The attention space is limited; once a few arguments have partitioned the crowds, attention is withdrawn from those who would start another knot of argument. Much of the pathos of intellectual life is in the timing of when one advances one's own argument. (p.38)

                                         Randall Collins, sociologist extraordinaire

The so-called New Atheist's arguments seem to have reached a plenum, but quite possibly we will be surprised by some new development in their lines of argument. I do think Unistat needed an intellectual avalanche of books and articles espousing atheism for one reason or another. I find the right wing Christian ideology - which to me always seemed closer to fascism than Jesus's words from the Gospels - stultifying. And no doubt there were plenty of people who didn't believe but found themselves in pockets of Unistat in which ostracism for "coming out" was a very real threat; so they endured Sunday mornings. Possibly the New Atheists, as their ideas trickle into the capillaries of small town thought, make it just a little bit easier to realize oneself. The rise of mainstream atheism in Unistat seemed dialectically necessary. We'll see where it goes. Meanwhile, I have my fascinations with the two thinkers mentioned in my title: their quasi-atheistic ideas don't seem to have captured an attention space.

Collins's ideas are about ideas appearing at the right place, right time, under the right conditions. Nonetheless we are free-thinking agents and do not place a high value on following the main streams in order to have the correct ideas to trot out at cocktail parties.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT)
I combine two thinkers (Taleb and Wilson) of seemingly disparate personal disposition, each with seemingly quite different audiences, yet both thinkers have produced a body of work that shows a fascination with chaos, randomness, erudition and epistemological doubt. Indeed, Taleb's three major works (Fooled By Randomness;The Black Swan; Antifragile) are now being labeled "The Incerto Trilogy." A taste of Nassim's basic incertitude: "Prediction requires knowing about technologies that will be discovered in the future. But that very knowledge would almost automatically allow us to start developing those technologies right away. Ergo, we do not know what we will know." (p.173, The Black Swan)

Taleb - who seems a strident character who insists he has a good sense of humor, so I'll take him at his word - thinks it's a bad idea to bash religion, even though he himself seems an atheist. Why not bash like Dawkins, Harris, et.al? Because nature abhors a vacuum, and he points to the atheistic USSR under Stalin: something else takes the place of irrational religion, and it could lead to far worse outcomes. He traces the first suicide bombers. Were they actuated by fundamentalist religious fervor? No, they were not Islamic terrorists from the Middle East. Rather, they were Greek orthodox Communists in Lebanon. The vacuum left in the wake of The State's abolition or proscriptions against religion are replaced by "all kinds of crazy beliefs." NNT also would have rival religions not be in physical contact, which seems a tall order but interesting idea. Top-down attacks on religion do not work, and NNT points to the diminution of Catholicism in Southern Europe and Ireland, which saw an accompaniment of usury and debt. (Unforeseen consequences?) And here's one of my favorite passages from NNT; it gives much of the flavor of his overall philosophical caste of mind:

I am most irritated by those who attack the bishop but somehow fall for the securities analyst - those who exercise skepticism against religion but not against the economists, social scientists, and phony statisticians. Using the confirmation bias, these people will tell you that religion was horrible for mankind by counting deaths from the Inquistion and various religious wars. But they will not show  you how many people were killed by nationalism, social science, and political theory under Stalinism or during the Vietnam War. Even priests don't go to bishops when they feel ill: their first stop is the doctor's. (p.291, The Black Swan)

Later Nassim said that if you're critical of religion but invest in the stock market you're a hypocrite, which reminded me of Dawkins saying that the postmodernists who questioned the fundamental laws of physics who then got on airplanes were hypocrites. Skepticism is "domain-dependent" and 19th century "rational" Western medicine no doubt killed more people than it saved. When you have "experts" you have the "illusion of control."

NNT thinks that if religion has survived for millennia we shouldn't uproot it unless we can be damned well sure we can replace it with something less damaging. (But we cannot be sure, right?)

Like the late Robert Bellah and Robert Anton Wilson, NNT thought religion was not about "belief" but about action, and it starts with ritual. We have ideas about "God" all mixed up. Most religions started off with rituals, then developed deities post hoc. Religion makes people do things, and then the King arrives and uses the local religion for social control.

Further, NNT sees very strong historical lessons in Christianity and Islam that support his idea that history does not crawl but "jumps" and is best not thought of as something that develops slowly and relatively predictably: in noting the paucity of extant writings by contemporary thinkers in or near Jesus's time, "Apparently, few of the big guns took the ideas of a seemingly heretical Jew seriously enough to think he would leave traces for posterity." And: "How about the competing religion that emerged seven centuries later; who forecast that a collection of horsemen would spread their empire and Islamic law from the Indian subcontinent to Spain in just a few years? Even more than the rise of Christianity, it was the spread of Islam (the third edition, so to speak) that carried full unpredictability; many historians looking at the record have been taken aback by the swiftness of the change." NNT follows up these observations by making a general note about our study of history: "These kinds of discontinuities in the chronology of events did not make the historian's profession too easy: the studious examination of the past in the greatest detail does not teach you much about the mind of History; it only gives you the illusion of understanding it." (p.11, op.cit)

Illusions of understanding: this is at the heart of NNT's work.

For NNT, the Economist's religion of probability is as primitive as religious fundamentalists; here NNT's deliberate provocation seems to dovetail with Robert Anton Wilson's guerrilla ontological takes on "serious" bodies of thought. NNT reminds us that Syria, Egypt and Iraq were "secular" states, that churches are standing-room-only in Russia now, and that Dennett's argument for "science" clashes with most individual scientists,who understand how very much we do not know in the scientific world. Almost every decision every day is probabilistic and faith in the stock market or communism or "capitalism" works really well...until it doesn't.

NNT has also observed something interesting about the three monotheistic religions that most people would consider "good" or "fair" and I rarely see this mentioned: Christianity's ideas about sex ended the anthropologist's "Big Man"'s monopolization of women. One man, one wife: the little guy was not left out any more. Islam came along and made a restriction to four wives. Judaism had been a polygamous religion, but in the Middle Ages is became monogamous. NNT observes that this may have been a political move that headed off potential revolutions of angry, sexually-deprived men fomenting violence from the bottom of society.

So, for Nassim Nicholas Taleb: no New Atheism for him. And yet he's not exactly a believer. With regard to the desirability of religious belief, there seemed much unsaid, much overlooked, and he tried to point some of it out.

Robert Anton Wilson (RAW)
Born poor into Catholicism on Long Island in the 1930s, RAW recalls, in a documentary about him, that he found out that Santa Claus wasn't real. He kept waiting for them to admit that God wasn't real, but they never did. RAW's atheology - I adopted the term after reading a piece in which he used the term within the context of the serious/joke religion Discordianism - seems more avant garde than NNT's. RAW began satirizing the Bible and all monotheistic religions in one of the first articles he ever published, "The Semantics of 'God'" in Paul Krassner's The Realist, in 1959. RAW's main riff was Why do we call God a "he"? If we do, we must assume He has a penis. And how large must it be? Then RAW pretended to use math in comparing King Kong and the average man's penis size, Kong's height and the relative size of a penis-per-height ration for gorillas, then speculating about the size of God's schlong. If we're not prepared to admit "God" has a penis, let's stop calling God "he" and say "It." Neurosemantically, we might derive a more sane view of "God" if we said "It."

RAW even neologized over the overwhelming male-ness in monotheistic religions - why women can't be priests, etc: "theogenderology."

After more than a decade of very intense self-experimentation with psychedelic drugs, abstruse Crowleyan magickal practices, an immersion in the most difficult High Modernist texts, and all sorts of other self-described "gimmicks" in order to see how malleable his own mind was, RAW decided he was a "model agnostic," taking Neils Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics and combining it with phenomenological sociology, a studiously ironic take on conspiracy theories, and Korzybski's General Semantics to make a heady personal philosophical brew about the "self" and the world of perception, "reality tunnels" and ideologies, and a radical doubt filled with endless wonder about the world, of which we must always be uncertain.

Some scholars of hermeticism may be able to discern a long line from 14th century thinkers to Wilson; what's interesting to me is RAW's abiding interest in popular culture, surrealistic humor, neuroscience, the quantum theory, Einstein's relativity, the main strains of 20th century philosophy (including Existentialism, Phenomenology, Pragmatism, Logical Positivism, and the "Linguistic Turn"), combined with Crowley's synthesis of seemingly all the major alchemical and hermetic practices. He liked to quote Crowley's line from The Book of Lies:

I slept with Faith and found a corpse in my arms upon awakening; I drank and danced all night with Doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Doubt keeps the mind alive and questioning. And yet doubt requires belief. Why not watch your own nervous system as you decide to "believe" in some idea for a week, and then doubt it? Believe, then doubt; believe then doubt. See what happens to your ideas about "reality." RAW seems to dare his readers to try this. (At times he explicitly advocated it.)

Here's the thing: for RAW and many other modernistic antinomians: all gods and goddesses are "real" in the sense that they are projections the human genome has made; they are externalizations of deep inner aspects emanating from the biology of humanity. And so, on that level, let us use them to gain poetic insight about ourselves. Note: he doesn't believe the gods and goddesses of history "really" exist "out there;" they exist "in here," which seems "real" enough. I think it will be quite some time before the New Atheist's ideas, working dialectically with the traditional believers of a monotheistic God, create a intellectual space in which to consider "god" in these terms.

Moreover, I have oversimplified RAW's atheology, as at times in his writing career he considered himself a sort of theologian, and near the time of his death he seemed to still agree with a boyhood influence, Ezra Pound, about "seeing" gods. Here's a passage from Pound that gives us a tinge of the flavor:

We find two forces in history: one that divides, shatters and kills, and one that contemplates the unity of the mystery. 
                         
                                    "The arrow hath not two points."

There is the force that falsifies, the force that destroys every clearly delineated symbol, dragging men into a maze of abstract arguments, destroying not one but every religion. 

But the images of the gods, or Byzantine mosaics, move the soul to contemplation and preserve the tradition of the undivided light. 
(pp.306-307, Selected Prose 1909-1965, Ezra Pound)

RAW at other times seemed to identify with William Blake in naming our creative spark as God.

[But is this not what the modern guerrilla-ontological trickster hermeticist does?]

In an article published in Oui magazine in 1977, RAW quoted a fellow counterculture-hero-writer, Kurt Vonnegut, about the clash between science and religion:

As Kurt Vonnegut says, "A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete. All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Even and Jonah and the whale." Vonnegut goes on to say there is nothing in science that contradicts the works of mercy recommended by Saint Thomas Aquinas, which include: to teach the ignorant, to console the sad, to bear with the oppressive and troublesome, to feed the hungry, to shelter the homeless, to visit prisoners and the sick, and to pray for us all. (p.57, The Illuminati Papers)

In the bulk of RAW's writings on organized religion, though, he seems much more in the line of Nietzsche and Mencken and Carlin, with surreal barbed satire about good rich vicious Christians in church enjoying hell-fire sermons that seemed like the worst S&M trip ever, while they politically advocated "more bombs for Jesus."

Finally, a little article I found a while back made me think this would make RAW smile: The Claremont College Theology School desegregated the way the religious books were categorized and shelved in their library.

Some Sources:
Robert Bellah interview: Religion isn't so much about what we believe, but what we do
Nassim Nicholas Taleb on YouTube: 9 mins: On Role of Religion (live talk from Q&A with audience)
"Why Monotheism Leads To Theocracy," by Joshua Keating
"Atheism Is Maturing and it Will Leave Richard Dawkins Behind," Martin Robbins