Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

It is common underground lore that repeating a consoling mantra (such as the famous Om Munnee Pudmeh Hom! or even a prayer from one's childhood in Sunday school) often quiets such an anxiety attack. It is also known that holding, cuddling or petting with a loved person also has this sedative effect. Many trippers, therefore, might have found themselves praying and balling, without any knowledge that this is an old tradition, but just to stave off paranoid and frightful feelings.

She began to think of TVland as, not just a condensed electronic image or ghost of Reality, but a mask that had undergone considerable editing and rewriting to suit those in charge of Reality Selection for the whole society in which the TV existed. She realized that what the TV showed did not represent a simple Xerox of the Real World but a complicated social "game" — or tacit conspiracy — to pretend a certain set of programs contained all of the Real World.

1. Determine to enjoy this primitive circuit fully from now on. Play with yourself and others and the environment shamelessly, like a newborn baby. Meditate on "Unless ye become as a little child, ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom of Heaven." (paraphrase of Matthew 18:3)

Of course, I know that, like the Nazi Big Lie, male "inferiority" will go on getting repeated endlessly, no matter how much scientific evidence contradicts it. Politics does not rest upon scientific validations. Politics rests upon passion and prejudice; otherwise, this planet might become suddenly stark staring sane.

So: if you have tried to abandon sexist terminology and have seen some changes in your perceptions and human relations thereafter, why not try getting rid of "is" and "all" and see what happens? As Benjamin Lee Whorf stated, "A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos.

Aleister Crowley knew about this pragmatically, before modern neurology. He taught his pupils to learn to write equally well with both hands, thereby forcing the dormant right brain to spring to activity.

The coincidance of Michael Cusack and Nicholas of Cusa and John Cusack and Henry Flower across space-time could not have been known in full to Joyce's conscious mind, of course, which is why any theory of Joyce's novels must take into account the reality of the non-local function he abbreviates as .

To put it mildly, men who hate men, like women who hate men, seem to be working on inner psychological problems, not on scientific research.

In terms of Information Theory, this appears as a dramatic increase in the amount of information processed per second. The more new circuits opened in the brain, the more new information you notice in even the simplest and most familiar objects or events. To quote Blake, The fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees.

The second circuit, the emotional-territorial networks of the brain, is concerned entirely with power politics. This "patriotic" circuit is built into all vertebrates and is perhaps 500 million to 1000 million years old. In the modern human it seems to be centralized in the thalamus — the "back brain" or "old brain" and is linked with the voluntary nervous system and the muscles.

I am merely suggesting, playfully at times, maybe seriously at other times, that Universe is a bit more complicated than anybody's models; and that using several reality-tunnels — as in Po or quantum mechanics — may show a great many interesting correlations and details and exciting and beautiful aspects that we will never see if we look always and only through one monotonous reality-tunnel which we have made into an Idol.

Kind of makes me wonder. George Lucas, as noted earlier, could fake this on film, but I don't know of any existing technology that would fake it in several parts of a "real," "solid" town.

Those extreme cases who take their heaviest imprint on the third circuit tend to grow up cerebrotonic. They are tall and skinny, because energy is perpetually drawn upward from the body into the head. The caricatured evil genius, Dr. Syvlanus in Superman, who was virtually all head, represents the extreme toward which this type seems to be evolving. Popular speech calls them "eggheads.

Man is ignorant of the nature of his own being and powers. Even his idea of his limitations is based on experience of the past. There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what he may be, or what he may do. — Aleister Crowley, Magick

The perspective of anthropology and of ethnomethodology, and of this book, is like the perspective of a cosmopolitan art critic. It asks us to try many reality-windows instead of standing hypnotized at our habitual window all our lives.

It was mass hallucination. It was not mass hallucination. It was both mass hallucination and not mass hallucination. It was neither mass hallucination nor not mass hallucination.

Almost always, these cerebrotonic Third-Circuit types ignore or are hostile to their first and second circuit functions. Playfulness puzzles them (appears silly or eccentric) and emotions both baffle and frighten them.

Yes, it was mass hallucination. No, it was not mass hallucination. Maybe it was mass hallucination.

How do you get free of the damnable books of Romance when everybody else is still living in them?

But in considering the above experiments, I feel we need to accept some sort of post-modernism, or at least some of the "neurological relativism" I preach in all my books. The instrument that measures all other instruments — the human nervous system — has its own laws, and one of them involves always seeing the results one wants to see until and unless something really startles the brain enough to reframe its experiences.

The brain never remembers like a tape recorder or repeats like a parrot. Even the most rigid and compulsive types (Catholics, Marxists, members of CSICOP, etc.) do a lot more re-associating, re-framing and creative editing than they consciously realize.

According to Alfred Korzybski, any "idea" or mental state is a brain circuit which the brain itself can contemplate, thereby having an idea about the idea, or a mental state about the mental state, etc. There is no theoretical or real limit to the higher-ordering process; it is the "Infinity Within" of which mystics speak.

I've got a tombstone disposition and a graveyard mind I'm a bad motherfucker and I don't mind dyin

The whole speed scene is pretty sad. Some go through a period where they get stuck in the same fantasies over and over again. The trip can take several years, but there are a lot of people who have been through it and finally come out the other side. It doesn't seem to have the lifelong addictive properties of heroin.