Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

I have suggested in other books that Einstein's physical relativity is just a special case of a more general neurological relativity: the observer, with or without instruments, always remains co-creator of the observation. To quote Nietzsche again: We are all greater artists than we realize.

No matter," said Pablo with the dignity of a great magician. "I can fake a Picasso as well as any thief in Europe.

What is true of the group is true of the individual. While we all have our favorite circuit, and tend to see that circuit as "superior" to all the others, we can be pushed out of it by shocks or stresses, in which case we jump to another circuit.

We have made a beautiful (we hope beautiful) model of consciousness in terms of brain hardware and software. Now we need to remember again that, while the brain can be modeled by a computer, the model is never the whole system. The model-maker or metaprogrammer is bigger than the model or program.

One is reminded of a story about Mark Twain and his very fashionable and respectable New England wife, who once tried to cure him of his salty riverboat speech. Mrs. Twain noted every cuss word he used all week long and then woke him Sunday morning and read it all back to him. Twain listened calmly and commented, You have the words, my dear, but you haven't got the music yet.

Obviously, in the new science or new idiocy of lepufulogy we are approaching the area of dream and myth; however, as James Joyce once remarked, since we already spend one third of our lives there, we ought to give that half-world some serious attention.

2) for the reasons sketched above, and developed more fully in the text to follow, I do not think pessimism is the only possible outlook on the universe, but merely the one that is currently ubiquitous;

It's possible that a meteor will come hurtling in from outer space and wipe out this whole city." And so on. The neutral and objective view that covered any other experience in Holy Out's life just couldn't reach the area of the first shot; that was permanently buried under everything he had ever read about the causes of deviant behavior.

These thingamajigs act like waves part of the time and like particles part of the time. This basic paradox has remained all through the 94 years of development of quantum mechanics and gives great comfort to those of us who believe no one model or perspective ever shows all the truth or the only truth about anything. For further details see my book, Quantum Psychology.

And with symbolism we can create meaningless metaphysics and Strange Loops so weird that society grows alarmed and either locks us up or insists on medicating us. With such weird symbols, if not locked up or medicated, we can even persuade multitudes to believe in our gibberish and execute 6,000,000 scapegoats (the Hitler case), line up to drink cyanide cocktails (the Jim Jones case), or perform virtually any idiocy or lunacy imaginable.

I don't know who first said, Science fiction is the mythology of our time. An increasing number of occultists are realizing this and are incorporating science fiction into their rituals.

Hitler was a trauma intellectually because of his batty theory of the Elders of Zion plotting to take over Europe; the horrible results of his paranoia created a prejudice about thinking about conspiracies at all. To talk of conspiracy is called the Devil Theory of History and historians make fun of it.

3) many sociological behaviors are the result of self-fulfilling prophecies, so it is worth the gamble of experimentally breaking the group hypnosis of defeatism, and experimentally testing to see what the results of more hopeful scenarios might be, and;

We do not all live in the same universe. Millions live in a Moslem universe and find it very hard to understand persons living in a Christian universe. Millions of others live in a Marxist universe. Most Americans seem quite happy in a mixed 19th Century Capitalist and 13th Century Christian universe, but the literary intelligentsia lives in an early 20th Century Freudian/Marxist universe, and a few well-informed scientists evidently actually live in a 1997 universe. Etc.

Some of this literature deserves at least a brief note. Madame Helena P. Blavatsky believed in a hollow Earth, and so did Lewis Spence. She formed the Theosophical Society and he, the AMORC Rosicrucians in San Jose, California (as distinguished from all the other Rosicrucians.) These two groups have so heavily influenced modem occultism that no amount of scientific evidence, now, can ever dislodge the hollow Earth from the Belief System (B.S.) of millions of Seekers of Higher Wisdom.

But I tend to agree with the black novelist Ishmael Reed that the history of the world is largely the history of the warfare between secret societies which are conspiratorial in most cases.

4) Prigogine's math indicates that the odds actually favor the optimists, since dissipative structures are more likely to evolve into more information-rich (intelligent?) forms than into more primitive or chaotic forms.

If you hypnotized somebody and told him not to use the word "nose," and then asked him to explain the sense of smell, you would get the same kind of drifting linguistic snow banks in his answers. Intellectuals, who have more abstractions stored in their biocomputers, are more skilled at this than most, but all can do it to some extent.

In sum, I don't believe the people who say that the world is controlled by one vile group of conspirators who are running everything, but I believe there are actually a multitude of conspiracies contending in the night.

My basic idea is from Aleister Crowley: "We place no reliance / On Virgin or Pigeon; / Our method is Science, / Our aim is Religion.

Ezra Pound had the peculiar distinction of winning an award from the Library of Congress for writing the best poem of the year, in 1948, while government psychiatrists insisted he was insane.)

And I think it's very stupid behavior, too, because conspiracies decrease human intelligence which is the function of precise and open communication. But I do think conspiracy is a factor. There is a lot of contemporary history that cannot be understood unless you assume a multitude of conspiracies, all somewhat stupid at times.

So far the "hard evidence" doesn't seem to prove much . . . But to avoid any suggestion of the weird, you have to hold a really dogmatic faith that (a) the "normal" really exists, and (b) you know all of its contents . . .

The semantic time-binding system makes a feedback loop between the verbal left brain hemisphere, the larynx, the right hand (which manipulates the world and checks the accuracy of maps or glosses) and the eyes (which read words and also scan the environment).