Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

How the Feds ever acquired the power to decide how much pain a sick person must suffer before dying remains legally obscure. The Constitution certainly never granted such sadistic power to any part of the government.

I don't think, contrary to fashionable opinion, that genes play the only role, and I feel acute boredom whenever I hear another round of the current debate between Gay Pride advocates and Fundamentalists about whether homosexuality (or heterosexuality, if you think about it) results from genes (alone) or "choice" (alone.) That particular either/or seems even dumber to me than most Aristotelian dualisms.

Elmyr said it most bluntly: "Without the Experts, there would be no forgers.

The chief fault of most academic theoreticians of postmodernism, as Gross and Levitt emphasize, lies in never applying perspectivism to themselves — i.e., in holding an oxymoronic position that always implies "everything is relative except my own dogmas." I do not make that error habitually, and I like to think I never make it at all. (I sure hope not, but as a Cosmic Schmuck, I assume I have slipped into it on occasion.*)

Any multi-cellular organism must, if it is to survive, contain a hard-wired bio-survival circuit, which very simply programs an either-or choice: GO FORWARD to the nourishing, the protective, or GO BACK, away from the threatening, the predatory.

Nobody can take an acid trip more than about once a week, whatever you may have read in the tabloids. This is becausd LSD has an unusual "tolerance" effect, which comes on quickly and goes away just as quickly. In general, anyone who takes a dose of acid within three of four days of their last trip will get no effect at all. A waiting period is, therefore, built into the drug.

The Cosmic Schmuck Law, as stated in several of my books, holds that if you occasionally notice that you have said something or done something that qualifies as Cosmic Schmuckery, you might become, in time, less of a Cosmic Schmuck; but if you never notice any Cosmic Schmuckery in your own thinking/doing, you will become more and more of a Cosmic Schmuck every year.

This parallelism between physics and psychology should occasion no great surprise. The human nervous system, after all — the mind in pre-scientific language — created modern science, including physics and quantum mathematics. One should expect to find the genius, and the defects, of the human mind in its creations, as one always finds the autobiography of the artist in the art-work.

Let us remember that Transactional Psychology has proven that, contrary to common sense and the prejudices of centuries, our minds do not passively receive impressions from the external world. Rather we actively create our impressions: out of an ocean of possible signals, our brains notice the signals that fit what we expect to see, and we organize these signals into a model, or reality-tunnel, that marvelously matches our ideas about what is really out there.

This archetypal circuit is replete with what Jung called synchronicities — meaningful coincidences — which he attributed to the circuit's roots in what he called the "psychoid" level, below the personal and collective unconscious, where "mind" and matter" are not yet differentiated — the royal highway of the DNA-RNA-CNS (central nervous system) telegraph, in Tim Leary's metaphor.

Punishment, discipline, obedience—these are the keys to such mysteries, and to the mystery of war itself, and to all oddities of behavior in Man and the other domestic animals. Sade saw it, and was banned for 150 years. He saw the genital fever, the need for embrace, dammed up at the center of man. Another reason he was banned.

One advertising copywriter had confided to me, after six months of relentless tripping, that he was now in daily communication with the flying saucer people from outer space. Then he added cautiously, "But don't tell that to anyone else. They might think I'm crazy.

Can we begin to ask "how much truth does this book contain?" or "how much fiction does this book contain?" instead of the Aristotelian "Is it true or false?

I dreamed I called D.A.F. de Sade on the phone and asked him, Jesus told me that he and you agree on at least one thing and it explains freedom. What is that one thing? Quite simple, he replied, don't be afraid of the Cross. The fear of death is the beginning of slavery. And the line went dead with a triumphant click like a barred door falling open.

To the Idolator, events really are what they appear to be as coded into his or her favorite reality-tunnel. Any other reality-tunnel, however useful it may appear to others with different purposes and different interests, must then be mad or bad — delusory or fraudulent. Anybody who disagrees with such an Idolator must be, by definition, a loony or a liar.

If God is not mad, as Fort claimed, then maybe God is, as Buckminster Fuller once wrote, not a noun but a verb. That is, God is what religious people do, as, in some models, an electron is an operation performed by people (physicists) — God as the act of praying, the energy raised

Science does not limit human behavior to either genetics or "free will." Although they may use other terminology, most current psychologists would agree in general, I think, with Dr. Tim Leary's notion that all behavior (Gay or straight, "mental" or "emotional," "crazy" or "sane") results from a synergy of (1) genes, (2) early imprinting, (3) conditioning, (4) school-and-other learning, and (5) blind circumstance.

Constant reminding ourselves that we do not see with our eyes but with our synergetic eye-brain system working as a whole will produce constant astonishment as we notice, more and more often, how much of our perceptions emerge from our preconceptions.

In our maturer years, when an object of vision is presented to us which bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom . . .we feel a general glow of delight which seems to influence all of our senses . . .

The reader terrorized by mathematics (persuaded by incompetent teachers that I can't understand that stuff) need not panic.

Freudians suggest that opiate addiction is an attempt to return to the womb. In keeping with our theory, it is more likely that opium and its derivatives return us to the "safe space" on the biosurvival circuit, the warm, snug place of bio-security; opiates may trigger neuro-transmitters* characteristic of breast-feeding.

We can all be glad that the word coincidence exists. Otherwise the Materialist Fundamentalists would find these stories just as puzzling and frightening as the Religious Fundamentalists will find them.

Neuro-transmitters are chemicals which alter the electro-colloidal balance of the brain and hence change the perceptual field. Brain-change agents.

If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit.