Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

All of which is robotic, until one learns how to reprogram and reimprint one's own brain circuits. In most cases, such metaprogramming skill is never acquired. It all goes by in a flash, on mechanical auto-pilot, in zero time. "I just found myself doing it," says the soldier as he is being court-martialed for cowardice or decorated for bravery.

Beethoven's music, I think, is often like that. Just when you think you recognize the pattern in his creative acts, he surprises you by a variation. Is that, maybe, why we sometimes feel such music is closer to experienced reality than any theory we can devise?

Obviously, the faster we process information, the more rich and complex our models or glosses — our reality-tunnels — will become.

Most primates mark their territories with excretions; domesticated primates mark their territories with ink excretions on paper (treaties, land titles, etc.). From the biological perspective, every national border in Europe, for instance, marks a place where two rival gangs of domesticated primates fought until exhausted and then left a territorial mark.

The only answer I can see is that no speculation is obnoxious to an open mind but all new and challenging speculations are obnoxious to Fundamentalists.

One of the greatest achievements of the human mind, modern science, refuses to recognize the depths of its own creativity, and has now reached the point in its development where that very refusal blocks its further growth. Modern physics screams at us that there is no ultimate material reality and that whatever it is we are describing, the human mind cannot be parted from it. Roger Jones, Physics as Metaphor

Domesticated primates battle not only over physical territories but over these mental or neurosemantic territories: York versus Lancaster becomes the Red Rose versus the White. Communism versus Free

Maybe — just maybe — the taboo breached by Velikovsky is this: We are not supposed to think about Planetary Catastrophes.

Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn't look for biosurvival security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family. Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets. "You can't live without money," as the Living Theatre troop used to cry out in anguish. If the tickets are withdrawn, acute bio-survival anxiety appears at once.

While the Citadel is building more and more nuclear missiles for the Military-Industrial Empire, it is apt to provoke anxiety or guilt or uneasy sensations in general to think about the subject of Planetary Catastrophe. The people who do think about that are likely to resign from the Citadel — or get expelled, like Dr. Oppenheimer — or even to march around with picket signs, making a nuisance of themselves.

According to philologist John Allegro in his speculative The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, these links between eros and religion also link back to mind drugs – specifically, to the phallic-looking amanita muscaria mushroom, whose effects are similar to belladonna's, and which is still used for magic purposes by Siberian shamans. Moreover, according to Allegro's hypothesis, it was worshipped as a god throughout Europe and Asia in the late Stone Age.

That's the way it always starts. By the third day of the convention, half of the delegates were having whispered conversations about which of the others were agents of the Knights of Malta or Opus Dei. There was even a rumor (I couldn't get it confirmed) that some of the delegates hired food tasters, gaunt pitiful children from the slums of Naples, even when they traveled to the other end of town for a sandwich.

When people with guns treat you as possibly guilty, you begin to feel possibly guilty.

He said after reading Illuminatus! he laughed so much that he got over his paranoia.

Must have been dual hallucination. If one person sees a blasphemy, that is simple hallucination. Two people — dual hallucination. Many, many people — mass hallucination

I congratulated him on his perceptivity. Indeed, that is one of my major messages, in everything I write — our emic realities are programmed by our expectations. You are the Master who makes the grass green.

Take this as delightful whimsy or sinister nonsense, file it as you will according to your own reality-tunnel, but — our information bank has grown richer. Dozens of UFO/rabbit stories indicate something about UFOs or something about human psychology, something we never suspected before.

Which would you consider more real — the abstract Architect's floor plan — which shows something nobody ever sees in experience but which all can agree serves a useful function — or the various drawings from individual perspectives, which show the plural realities that people actually see, but which have no practical function?

Some people (Roman Catholics, New Agers, heretical holistic physicians, etc.) will eagerly believe this yarn. Other people (the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the American Medical Association, old-fangled Village Atheists etc.) just as eagerly wish not to believe it at all, at all.

That's what I mean by Guerrilla Ontology; it's getting people to think, giving them puzzles that force them to think.

I am merely trying to show that, in the present primitive condition of this backward planet, we are still governed by imprinting and conditioning — that all of us, like Mr. Gardner and Mr. Randi, find it literally impossible to think, even for a nanosecond, about certain ideas — that you and I think we are more tolerant than Mr. Randi or Mr. Gardner until we confront that which is strictly intolerable for us —

It is accepted by all schools of philosophy that the world presents only appearances to us. Facts are deduced from the appearances, according to the various factions, by PR (pure reason) or by a combination of PR and SD (sense data) in tandem, or by PR and SD aided and abetted by creative intuition, but in any case, they are deduced, not given. Hume and Nietzsche seem to be alone in claiming that what is called a fact is just another appearance which somebody has decided to believe is a fact.

I suddenly remembered that Adolph Hitler once said that anybody who paints the sky green should be sterilized at once. I thought I understood the Right Man more deeply. The Right Man stays in one reality-tunnel because wandering into the reality-labyrinth of the creative mind terrifies him.

Beethoven, to cite him one more time, said "Anybody who understands my music will never be unhappy again." That is because his music is the song of the Sixth Circuit, of Gaia, the Life Spirit, becoming conscious of Herself, of Her powers, of Her own capacities for infinite progress.