Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

Villon is great because he doesn't pretend to know what he doesn't know. What he does know he tells us in direct language—language so simple that stupid critics have debated several hundred years now on what makes his poetry so strong.

Back in 1933 — Lawdee-me, doesn't that seem like the Dark Ages now? — both von Neumann and Korzybski proposed non-Aristotelian logics, as I mentioned many chapters ago. Von Neumann just allowed for a "maybe" (1/2) between true (1) and false (0); Korzybski extended the "maybe" as far as you want — or as far as data allows you to calculate probabilities.

I have used the word "reality" because it was a major premise in don Juan's system of beliefs that the states of consciousness produced by the ingestion of any of those three plants were not hallucinations, but concrete, although unordinary, aspects of the reality of everyday life. Don Juan behaved toward these states of non-ordinary reality not "as if' they were real but "as" real.

So there we are. Aldous Huxley, Dr. Timothy Leary, Dr. John Lilly, philosopher Alan Watts and several other recent theorists have used this metaphor and this argument, usually without knowing that they were echoing Aleister Crowley.

When one begins to appreciate the roles of unconscious suggestibility and self-fulfilling prophecies in human life, this song seems as funny as the latest radioactive fall-out figures.

The baby-functions of playing with one's own body, another's body and the environment continue throughout life in all animals. This "playfulness" is a marked characteristic of all conspicuously healthy individuals of the sort Maslow calls "self-actualizers.

READING NEWS HEADLINES CAUSES BRAIN TO SHRINK: SCIENTISTS FIND HAIKU ALSO RISKY

And, since this was before the invention of Christianity, these erotic eucharists were more often identified with religion than with sin.

Confucius (as the barbarians call him) also taught that, "When the government is honest, the people will learn honesty by example; when the government is crooked, the people will learn to be thieves also.

The process by which we construct a kitchen chair out of a whirl of atomic energy is just as creative (artistic) as the processes by which Patty Hearst turned her father from a beloved parent into a Pig Imperialist.

Nobody knows why Achilles wept, but we all know that he must have wept; just as we know that Lear must have prayed for the poor hungry wretches that night on the moor. A Homer or a Shakespeare creates such scenes without knowing why they must be just as they are; and we weep over them without knowing how we are sure that they are true.

I avoid making sentences with "is" or its relatives in them because all such sentences have definite semantic defects, the first of which consists in the fact that they make it appear as if one has reached the unreachable 1/1 of proven truth, when in fact one usually only has strong maybe, and (especially in politics and Ideology) sometimes only a weak maybe.

As usual, when you look for synchronicity, synchronicity looks for you.

Do people only re-act as if words really equal things ("sticks and stones may break my bones, and names can also hurt me") in such "touchy" areas? Try opening two restaurants and have the menu in one say "Chef's special: Tender, juicy filet mignon" and have the other menu say "Chefs special: a hunk of dead meat hacked off a castrated bull." Both phrases describe the same nonverbal event, but see which sells better.

5. Did you ever really give a good trial to our exercize, "I can now exceed all of my previous hopes and ambitions?" Try it; and at the same time, try, "I can be healthier than I have ever been before.

Well, SMI2LE is Leary's slogan for space migration, plus intelligence increase, plus life extension. It's an interesting formula because, if you want to look at it this way, we all live in a triangle of space, time and consciousness. How much space can we travel through? How much time do we have? And how conscious are we of what's going on? The whole direction of evolution seems to be to produce beings that have much more space, more time and more consciousness.

An accident of the formalism is something that is mathematically useful, even necessary perhaps to the elegance of the equations, but has no measurable consequence in the experimental world.

George has other reasons. "A junkie," George says, "has no choice. He's hooked. But somebody who isn't an addict, somebody who has the freedom to say 'yes' or 'no,' has to be crazy to take a pill or powder admittedly manufactured illegally and put it in his mouth. There is just no way of knowing what you're getting.

This is why physicists, following Bohr's Principle of Complementarity, no longer believe in either the wave model or the particle model but say both models are equally useful. (Which is more useful at a time depends on the context.)

In the absence of Kerista, more sinister alternatives appeared such as the Manson family, in which each new female member was initiated by an LSD trip (or any other drug, including some weird ones, if acid wasn't available) during which Charlie cunnilinged her to orgasm several times. After that experience, these girls – like Hasan i Sabbah's followers before them – were ready to follow any orders, including murder.

as Bucky Fuller said, "The universe consists of non-simultaneously apprehended events". NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY. The universe consists of NON-SIMULTANEOUSLY apprehended events. Which means any belief system or reality tunnel you've got right now is gonna have to be revised and updated as you continue to apprehend new events later in time. Not simultaneously.

IF YOU DON'T SEE THE FNORD IT CAN'T EAT YOU, DON'T SEE THE FNORD, DON'T SEE THE FNORD . . . I looked back at the paper and still saw the fnords.

Nietzsche said that mystics never practiced the kind of ruthless honesty, or skepticism, which he dared. He would have had to withdraw that condemnation in the case of Phil Dick (and also, I think, in the case of Aleister Crowley.) Phil never did stop questioning, doubting and seeking alternative models (masks) to contain-or-explain his 'patanormal perceptions.

That Sebastian's vision of God was a true one is the dark, hidden fear of every religious person. The non-dualistic Orient accepts such a thought with equanimity: when Ramakrishna saw the goddess Kali give birth and then devour her own child, he took the vision as a true revelation of the oneness of creation and destruction.