Unlike the other people I’ve interviewed on this site to date, I’ve never met Phil Farber. Through his words and what others have said about him I feel I know Phil, at least well enough to want to find out more about what he gets up to. He’s an excellent writer, as I’ve discovered several times, most recently in his new book Brain Magick, which clearheadedly presents a model for approaching matters of consciousness, change, and making things happen. It’s an inspirational text, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone with a passing acquaintance with neuroscience, hypnosis, NLP, magick, and the work of Robert Anton Wilson. Which is pretty much the profile of a good few of the readers of this site. Meaning you’re sure to enjoy reading this interview as much as I did when Phil’s funny and insightful answers came back.
The Prime Minister David Cameron recently called for a restoration of Britain’s ‘bulldog spirit’? If you were hired as a consultant to implement that project, how would you go about it?
I’m not very big on nationalism, but I’m happy to serve as a memetic mercenary and offer some suggestions.
The essence of using a symbol of this type is simple enough: create a state of excitement and then anchor it by showing the symbol. In the spirit of NLP, we might explore governments that have successfully used animal totems to influence national spirit. Here in the USA, for instance, our totem animal is the Bald Eagle, a large, contentious, well-armed bird that can hunt its own food but prefers to feed off carrion. I’ll leave it to your imagination to decide how successful the use of the eagle totem has been toward defining the national character and, rather, focus on how it has been anchored and used:
Official ritualization. The eagle went through a vetting process, being chosen in preference to Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion, the turkey, and was granted its status as National Symbol by legislative bodies of various sorts, via a variety of official rituals. Has the bulldog been similarly appointed and anointed? Figure that the more the big-wigs talk about the bulldog, the more apparent importance it may acquire. Even if it has been commemorated many times, there’s always room for more bulldog-themed statue dedications, charitable fund kick-offs and battleship launches. If big, bulldog-themed rallies can be arranged, so much the better. Pump up some woohoo and show the dog.
Images on money. In the USA, eagles appear on many of our coins and bills. Everybody likes money (except communists, anarchists and others who oppose the national spirit) and most people attach strong feelings to it (even communists). Adding images of eagles ensures that people will be looking at those images with feelings of longing, happiness, reward and so forth. Perhaps if you can replace the old man on your £50 note with a noble canine, it might raise esteem and desire for bulldogs.
Narrow focus. We usually don’t mention that the eagle feeds off roadkill and, instead, talk a lot about how majestic it looks flying overhead or posing for its portrait at the mint. Similarly, and I suppose this is largely understood but warrants a mention, you might want to minimize the ball-licking, carpet-soiling, drooling, leg-humping aspects of the bulldog and instead get a few good images of it behaving properly. These can be adapted to an official Bulldog/UK logo for use in:
Ancillary marketing. Specifically branded Bulldog/UK t-shirts, shopping bags, small cars, undergarments, and Bulldog-branded sex toys can lead the way. In effort to bring the bulldog image everywhere, stores and media outlets can be filled with bulldog-themed products and stories, both branded and non-branded. Stuffed animals, ribbon-winning bulldog photo calendars, bulldog holiday costumes, and so forth. Partnering with famous designers, artists and celebrities adds another level of woohoo to be anchored. Here in the USA, we love nature specials about eagles. I’m sure that nature and historical documentaries about bulldogs would also help raise bulldog awareness, especially if they can avoid too much drool footage.
Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer a turkey for your national spirit? They tend to scratch their butts on the Persian carpet a bit less than bulldogs.
When people think of magic, they tend to go for the ookey-spooky images which popular culture has equipped us with. I’ve started to realise there are examples of invocation and evocation everywhere. Cheerleaders at football games are there to ‘raise spirits’. People gather to see a comedian, who is someone who invokes laughter from them. Much of what’s called magic is a way of changing state, often in groups. What are some of your favourite examples of this in everyday life?
Just as Erickson characterized hypnosis as directed use of our natural behaviors and tendencies, we can describe magick as conscious use of naturally-occurring behaviors. “Invocation” describes the techniques we use to draw qualities or entities into us; “evocation” is defined as the techniques we use to externalize/objectify states and entities. While these are classic operations in ritual magick and religion, we can easily notice them as everyday activities, processes that seem almost universal from individual to individual and across cultures. In magick they are used consciously as a means to understand, unify and integrate the elements of our psyches.
I think rock concerts are wonderful examples of invocation on a mass level. I covered the Woodstock ’94 festival as a journalist, an event which was a great big mess that bordered on the edge of “riot” for a couple days. On the last day of the festival, Peter Gabriel took the stage. When he arrived, 350,000 people were pushing and shoving each other, throwing mud, and being generally uncivil. Within minutes of playing “Biko,” Gabriel had the whole crowd calm, joyously singing together and lighting candles. It was a wonder to experience how one person (and his band) could shift state for that many people, that quickly. Awesome example of invocation.
In terms of evocation, I have a lot of fun watching how individuals and media sources perceive and describe various phenomena as entities and relate to them as such. Right now we’re having a showdown in the USA between “the 1%” and “the 99%” or “Wall Street” and “the people.” Of course, there are no such things as any of these entities – it’s really just a bunch of individual people – but they become useful delineations in the process of social change. We also have a related situation here in which we are debating whether or not corporations should be treated legally as individual people. If our courts continue to rule that corporations have the same rights as individuals, then the courts have performed evocation.
You got to know and work with Robert Anton Wilson, whose books have shaped my thinking in positive ways. What did you learn from your time with him above and beyond what he wrote?
Bob Wilson was always a treasure trove of information. He had encyclopedic knowledge on a wide variety of subjects and he had a very unique way of processing that information and drawing connections between diverse sources. In person, conversation could sometimes be very much like reading his books – full of “Wow! I didn’t know that!” and “Aha!” moments. Along with many personal conversations, letters, phone calls and e-mail, I got to attend a significant number of his lectures and workshops. As a result, I’d be hard pressed to list all the information that I learned from Bob that could not be found in his writing. Subject matter included, but was not limited to, psychology, physics, tarot, the eight circuit brain model, James Joyce, general semantics, ritual magick, hypnosis, books, movies, and secret societies.
One piece that he used to talk about in person but that I don’t think ever made it to a book was his idea about “the evolutionary value of stupidity.” In The Illuminati Papers he argued for the abolition of stupidity. In later years, he came to accept stupidity as having a function. In short, the stupid people force the rest of us to be much smarter. We have to adapt. A frequently-cited example was the stupidity that enacted prohibition against various drugs – which forced those with an interest in evolving consciousness and altered states to develop new and different means to change their brains, including electronic brain machines, hypnosis and meditation explorations, and new, legal drugs, among much else.
More important to me than the information (which was pretty important nonetheless!) was exposure to his attitude and behavior relating to various aspects of life. He embodied an attitude of curiosity, optimism and intellect. He lived with great humor and died with grace. The last e-mail I received from him, about two days before he passed away, was a joke. He never acquired much wealth from his accomplishments, but left us a legacy of paradigm-shifting wisdom.
Over dinner one evening in the mid-’90s, Bob told me about the presentations he was giving with Richard Bandler and how much fun he was having with that. He encouraged me to check out the show. Alas, I never did get to one of the events where both Richard and Bob did their shtick, but on Bob’s recommendation I went to a Bandler seminar soon after and re-entered the NLP world. I’d taken a practitioner course in the early ’80s and then didn’t go to any seminars for many years. So credit Bob Wilson, for good or ill, with my continued involvement in NLP.
