Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

A note to confirmed pessimists: Prigogine's analysis is based on probability-theory and, hence, is not certain. Thus, if you have found these lyrical pages unduly alarming, take comfort in the thought that, although human success is highly probable, there is still a small chance that we can blow ourselves up or that your favorite apocalyptic scenarios might still occur, despite the general trend toward higher coherence and higher intelligence.

Whatever is going on around you, your experienced reality-tunnel is still a synergetic product of both internal and external environments (set and setting). You do not "create your own reality," as Pop Mysticism says, but you create the larger part of it by how you evaluate, respond and give "meaning" to what happens. Your freedom is much, much greater than you realize until you start experimenting with alternative reality-tunnels and rapid brain change.

If we consider Clifford Irving's Fake! a fake itself — a fake biography of a fake painter, revealing only what the faker, or fakers, care to reveal, and dumping a great deal of disinformation on us in the process — then we must regard Orson Welles' F For Fake as a fake movie about a fake biography of a fake painter. But perhaps we would more accurately dub it a fake documentary about the impossibility of ever making a "true" documentary.

Or, as Einstein once said — quoted by Korzybski in Science and Sanity — Insofar as the laws of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain.

In daily life and in common sense, we use this agnostic caution most of the time and expect the unexpected and keep our eyes and ears open, etc. We only rush to judgment when we are under time-pressure to make a quick decision or when our prejudices are involved, as in political and religious controversy.

Metaprogramming or neurological self-criticism, developed as a habit to replace the old habit of wandering off to Real Universes, creates that kind of ecstasy more and more frequently, and it appears that one has never been using one's brain before but only misusing it.

Genetics and hard-wired imprints do not make up the whole of the software which programs our selves and our perceived universes.

Those who take a Dominant imprint in this system seek power all their lives; those with a Submissive imprint seek Dominant types to lead them (the Reichian Fuhrerprinzip) and most people settle somewhere between these extremes, taking a masochist stance toward those above them (government, landlords etc.) and a sadist stance toward selected victims defined as below them (wives, children, inferior races, people on Welfare, etc.).

Of course, if consciousness consisted of nothing but this undifferentiated tapioca of timeless, spaceless software, we would have no individuality, no center, no Self.

Why do we say "dumb" (mute) for stupid? Because "a good mind means a good mouth," and the human mind is a verbalizing circuit.

When there is no existential pressure for quick decisions, only prejudice asserts certitude.

Against that positivism which stops before phenomena, saying there are only facts," I should say; no, it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations. Nietzsche, The Will to Power

Concretely, two people can be in the same existential situation but experience two very, very different reality-tunnels.

This book, then, is basically an informal history of how certain long-hidden practical secrets of Tantric Buddhism crept into the Western world in the middle ages, were crushed and/or driven underground by the Holy Inquisition, have gradually been rediscovered since around 1900, suddenly emerged as a major social-revolutionary force in the 1960s, and were once again crushed and driven underground.

1) We cannot make meaningful statements about some assumed real universe, or some deep reality underlying this universe, or some true reality, etc., apart from ourselves and our nervous systems and other instruments.

An indeterminate proposition cannot be verified or refuted at the date when we confront it, but there are clear scientific processes by which it can be verified or refuted at some future date.

2) Any meaningful scientific or existential or phenomenological statement reports on how our nervous systems or other instruments have recorded some event or events in space-time.

Again, the traditional system works, for traditional society. A mass made of people who have intense curiosity about why Beethoven went in for string quartets after the Ninth Symphony, or whether Kant really refuted Hume satisfactorily, or what the latest quantum theories mean in relation to Determinism and Free Will, is not a mass that will easily be led into dull, dehumanizing labor at traditional jobs.

The universe is so constructed as to be able to see itself," Spencer Brown once noted. The emergence of the neurosomatic, neurogenetic and metaprogramming circuits is the universe's way of "seeing itself" ever more clearly and totally, to decide where it is going.

And there are, findable by me, four and only four theories in philosophy about the relationship of mind and matter: 1.Mind is an epiphenomenon of matter. 2.Matter is an epiphenomenon of mind. 3.Mind and matter are both equally real, but separate, and work in predetermined harmony with each other. 4.Mind and matter are human metaphors.

The Fool sees not the same tree the wise man sees.

Since the publication of Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, McLuhan's The Mechanical Bride, and similar books, it has been realized that techniques of inducing mass hallucination or something like mass hallucination are well known to advertisers.

Once again, it appears that the materialist model of mechanical consciousness covers some but not all experience, and it excludes precisely that part of experience which makes us human, esthetic, moral and responsible beings. One may suspect that this is why the materialist age has become increasingly inhuman, ugly, amoral and blindly irresponsible.

Even if you tied yourself to the ceiling with ropes and looked down, you would not see what the architecturally correct blueprint shows. You would see some degree of perspective (three dimensionality), and the perspective would vary depending on what part of the ceiling you looked down from. If the whole class tied themselves to the ceiling, their drawings would have as many different perspectives as the drawings made from ground level.