Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

What is man? A bridge between the ape and the Superman — a bridge over an abyss. — F.W. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

1. Thou shalt not force thy neighbor to alter his consciousness. 2. Thou shalt not prevent thy neighbor from altering his consciousness.

Dr. Herbert sensibly asks how taking a measurement can have this magic power. I don't think it can. I think we need a model with backward causality, at this point, until we find a better model, because otherwise we contradict the facts of quantum experiments. But I do not think the model is the universe. When the model gets this peculiar, we need to build a better model.

Persons who take their heaviest imprint on this circuit are beautiful. That is, their entire body has received so many sexual neurotransmitters from the brain that they are constantly radiating the "attractive" mating signals that make up our perception of what is "beautiful" in a human being.

Time magazine, with their usual dummheit, once did a cover story entitled, "The Occult: A Substitute Faith." If this was all that could be found in occultism, I would not touch the subject with the proverbial ten-foot pole. The world already has enough "faith" to guarantee that the Idiots are always, as Ambrose Bierce said, the largest and most influential political party in any society. Occultism interests me, not as a substitute faith, but as a substitute for faith.

To the Transactional psychologist, quantum mechanics has the same fascination (and the same resemblance to brain science) as cryptozoology, lepufology and Disinformation Systems, and all these fields, the scientifically sober and the disreputably weird, bear a distinct family resemblance to each other.

Furthermore, what you can say about what you saw depends on the structure of your symbolism — whether you describe it in English, Persian, Chinese, Euclidean geometry, non-Euclidean geometry, differential calculus or quaternions. This explains why, in Dr. Jones's words, whatever we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it.

In the short run, Orr's law always holds: Whatever the Thinker thinks, the Prover will prove.*

My answer to that is that there is an alternative which appears more reasonable to some of us; namely to avoid the leap of faith and remain agnostic about all methods, although willing to learn from them in an open-minded way. The justification for this is entirely empirical and only probabilistic, of course. It is that those who have taken a flying leap of faith generally look rather silly within a few generations, or sometimes even within a few years.

In the Real Universe we are re-active mechanisms; in the experienced world, we are creators, and The Real Universe is just another of our creations — a dangerous one, with a tendency to hypnotize us.

My basic attitude has always been that the greatest drug any chemist could possibly invent would be an anti-gullibility pill, to cure humanity of its addiction to faith and dogma.

Meanwhile, we might all remember the verdict of Count Bismarck: "Laws are like sausages: you respect them more if you haven't actually seen how they're made.

You already know the Gregorian calendar. It gets drummed into our heads in our allegedly "secular" "public" schools and everybody in our society who holds Power (banks, corporations, even governments) uses it. My system intends to break the conditioning/hypnosis created by this artificial uniformity.

If we never describe anything as it is but only as it appears to our minds, we can never have a pure physics, but only neuro-physics — i.e., physics as known through the human nervous system. We can also never have pure philosophy, but only neuro-philosophy — philosophy as known through the human nervous system. And we can never have pure neurology but only neuro-neurology — neurology as known through the human nervous system . . .

In short, we don't need to postulate a supernatural Designer. Our experiments create the universe observed by our experiments — which when interpreted always yield an Anthropic universe, rather than any of the millions or billions of possible non-Anthropic universes — because we designed the experiments.

The Chinese, who seem to have had more experience with this system than anybody else (more than the Hindus, even) define non-local experience in negatives — not mind, not self, not doing, not existence, even not non-existence.

Once formulated, "morality" serves as not only a check on genetic drift but a brake against Circuit III innovation. The shamans, priests etc. define which ideas are "moral" and which are "immoral." Anything new — anything that will break the tribal cycle, i.e., take us out of cyclical mythic "time" into linear, progressive, revolutionary "time" — is usually defined, very quickly, as "immoral.

The same super-synergy appears in Dr. Bohm's attempts to describe his implicate order in words. However clear his math, his words begin to sound Chinese when he says the implicate order does not consist of mind'' but that it has mind-like qualities.

Of course, industrialism (the Second Wave) produced much illth along with its new wealth; and most of the wealth was ex-(or ap)-propriated by a minority. However much this may pain socialists, it was inevitable in a domesticated primate species. A few alpha males can always see their own advantage more clearly than the majority can see their collective interest.

Certitude is seized by some minds, not because there is any philosophical justification for it, but because such minds have an emotional need for certitude.

If we dared to proclaim Straight Pride, we would immediately get accused of homophobia — although the Gay Pride people, most curiously, never, never get accused of heterophobia.

What our instruments and brains tell us consists of relative realities or cross-sections of realities. A thermometer, for instance, does not measure length. A yardstick does not measure temperature. A voltmeter tells us nothing about gas pressure. Etc. A poet does not register the same spectrum as a banker. An Eskimo does not perceive the same world as a New York cab driver. Etc.

would consider it the height of intellectual laziness and mental incompetence to invoke the word God to cover the limitations of my imagination and vocabulary. Instead, I will conclude with the wise words of Aleister Crowley. When asked to define the Tao he said, The result of subtracting the universe from itself.

Believe that you can exceed all your previous ambitions and hopes in all areas of your life.