Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

5. Psychologist Barbara Honegger explains synchronicities by saying that the right brain hemisphere (where this circuit is located) moves you in space-time to the place where the synchronicity will occur, while the Rationalist left brain invents rationalizations to go there. Synchronicities are a language through which this circuit communicates with the left brain, in this theory. Try explaining coincidences by that theory. What messages is your right brain trying to send to your left brain?

Later, alas, when Mr. Wright learned that other patients did not respond so favorably to Krebiozen, and that doctors had begun to consider the chemical worthless against cancer, he became depressed and worried. His tumors began growing again, he returned to his bed, and he died.

What we have here is worse than telepathy from the orthodox view-point. Randomizing should have produced fewer correlations, according to one application of the second law of thermodynamics, which says that disorder always increases in random processes. Here, randomizing produced more order instead of less.

Like many idle and stupid questions, this proved worth thinking about, for I realized with thunderous emphasis how little Gayness or straightness mattered in human terms: what did matter, in the moral dimension, jumped out at me like a chord in Beethoven — everybody at the party manifested love, care, kindness and support to an almost superhuman degree. These people all loved Don and they exemplified the compassion that, when it appears, makes humans noble and admirable creatures.

In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experimentally and experientially. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits. – John C. Lilly, M.D., The Center of the Cyclone

Did something unique happen physically, or was it "only" psychological? As long as the experience was truly overwhelming for the participants, what purpose can such a question serve? (After all, happiness, bravery, zest and all the other desirable qualities can also be explained away as "only" psychological.)

Kindness remains, to me, the most wonderful miracle in this incomprehensible universe.

On the other side of the dark coin of psychosomatic synergy: a South Sea shaman points a death bone at a tribesman who has offended him. The victim receives the best possible medical care from sympathetic doctors, who don't believe in Black Magic, but he shortly dies anyway. It appears that the unfortunate man died of the belief that death bones can kill people.4 ~•~ 4Rossi, op. cit. p 9-12.

Without Christian Science, shamanism, orgone or anything of that sort, the Liberal activist, Norman Cousins, has three times cured himself of major illnesses using the hypothesis that each human contains a healing energy that most of us do not know how to use.

We tend to separate subjects or areas of knowledge in our heads, whereas in Universe everything is synergetically (holistically) related. In this case, we have separated geometry from evolution, if we are blocked, and that is why we cannot see a rather obvious answer.

As we mentioned earlier, knowledge of cannabis goes back to at least the New Stone Age, when our ancestors in the Near East buried their dead with specimens of marijuana – perhaps to keep them happy on the voyage to the "other side," or perhaps to bargain with the denizens upon their arrival. This shows the same religious awe for this plant that, according to U.S. government officials, was only invented in the 1960s as an excuse to smoke it.

Dr. Jack Sarfatti offers a different interpretation. The medium of the Bell interconnectedness, he says, is not consciousness but information. Now, information is very abstract in communication theory: it is the negative reciprocal of entropy, which means roughly that it is the opposite of disorder. It is almost what we call system or organization in daily speech. Information, Sarfatti proposes, is not bound by the same laws as energy and not subject to Einsteinian limits.

Magick provides a powerful context and support system for even the darkest or most fucked-up times and experiences. Following in the footsteps of Harry Potter, every boy and girl should familiarize themselves with the disciplines of magic even if only for shits and giggles. It's also engaging and absorbing and creative to make spells and do rituals and to form rewarding relationships with things that shouldn't exist.

Thus, under hypnosis, a person who has been given salt and told that it is sugar will taste it as sweet – thereby illustrating the brain-plus-tongue phenomenon. Similarly, a hypnotized subject shown a green circle and told that it is red will see it as red. That is because we see with brain-plus-eye.* ~•~

Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, called the father of the hydrogen bomb in some circles (others attribute paternity in that regrettable case to Dr. Edward Teller) has repeatedly urged that the simplest, most honest explanation of quantum paradoxes holds that the known universe results from the observations of those who observe it. This observer-created universe bears an uncanny resemblance to some of our data about self-fulfilling prophecies, it begins to appear.

When we get down to sub-atomic or quantum level we encounter the model agnosticism I have been presenting. We have not one model but several; and we have also a widespread opinion that having more than one model may not be a fault or defect but a useful procedure in freeing up creative energies. We arrive — at least temporarily, and maybe permanently — at multi-model agnosticism rather than one-model Fundamentalism.

Magic encourages you to take charge of your own life, so it confers a sense of agency and self-control that can seem lacking at times like these when sort of epic, elemental forces seem to have us all at their mercy. Given the options, who wouldn't prefer to be rampaging around in higher planes, interacting with eternal archetypes and pop culture gods? Who wouldn't want to bring back ideas that could change the world?

To understand any idea or a person or a thing you have to see it from multiple, contradictory angles. The right wing view of things is justifiably true from a certain perspective. Justifiably untrue from others. And vice versa. The only way to understand this complex thing called reality is to understand it from all the available perspectives. See it from as many angles as possible and you might start to glimpse the actual shape of the thing.

The hidden variable theory of consciousness asserts (1) there is a subquantal level beneath the observational/theoretical structure of ordinary quantum mechanics; (2) events occurring on this subquantal level are the elements of sentient being. In other words, in this model, consciousness is a function of the subquantal implicate order of Bohm, functioning non-locally.

Robert Anton Wilson helped me realize that not all doors lead outward. The best ones, the ones that lead to the most exciting and uncharted places, are within. And no one in this world can withhold the key that unlocks those doors from us.

By the 1990s, of course, the U.S. government no longer considered people who showed respect for the Constitution to be suspected Communists. Instead, such people were considered suspected Terrorists.

The difference between a great writer and a minor one is fundamentally this: that the minor writer always has answers—glib answers, slick answers, memorably-worded answers, resounding and pretentious answers. The great writer dares to stand before you naked, armed only with his questions.

As I sat on death row, reading his work created a doorway that allowed me to walk out of my cell and into a universe of infinite wonder. He taught me how to begin creating my own world, and how to leave behind the mundane and mediocre drudgery that seemed to swallow most people whole.

But, if our brain software programs our selves and our universes, who programs our brain software? The accidents of history and environment, it seems — in most cases. But learning to internalize and use the principles of Quantum Psychology (or similar systems) adds a new factor. In that case we can gradually learn to program our programs . . . Dr. John Lilly calls this metaprogramming.