Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

The trouble with being an agnostic is that you are always wondering, a bit. That's what a-gnosis means: you lack the Inner Certainty of those Fully Enlightened Beings like the Pope or the Ayatollah or some Marxists we have all encountered.

Somehow, to me at least, either of those logics seem to fit the enigmas of our existence, here in the cock-eyed room of primate perceptor organs, better than Aristotelian yes/no choices. Of course, if after long analysis, some experiences can finally be reduced to an Aristotelian choice, that is convenient. But starting from the Aristotelian either/or may be rather constricting or strangulating.

You become a leading Expert by acting as if everybody else's opinion deserves no attention and never even deserves the courtesy of an answer.

Dr. John Lilly says, "In the province of the mind what is believed true is true or becomes true within limits to be learned by experience and experiment. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits.

Many of our Government officials drop amphetamine pep pills at a fantastic rate, especially those who have to jet around the world for conferences every week. They think they're using it only to keep alert, but many of them really have the habit. The American people should seriously consider the extent to which our entire international policy is shaped by people who are chronic users of a drug known to produce paranoia and irrational hostility.

It appears that some domesticated primates, over the aeons, have not precisely evolved but have learned how to criticize and examine their own neurological programs. Members of this group cannot be mechanically predicted. They exhibit, at times at least, what looks like growth or creativity, although it is possible for Fundamentalist Materialists to insist that this "is really random behavior or behavior whose determinants had not yet been understood.

Leaving aside these experiences or hallucinations of creativity and growth or self-criticism and self-overcoming — we shall return to them — it appears that most of what I have been calling Idolatry and Fundamentalism can be biologically described as normal primate behavior — mechanical imprinting and conditioning combined with normal territorial pugnacity.

Those who have had similar forbidden perceptions will have a certain sympathy for Mr. Devereux. I continue to maintain that Fundamentalist Materialism, like other Fundamentalisms, is, or appears within psychological models to be, a defense mechanism, and within neurological models, an editing-out device, to stave off the shock and sense of conceptual rape that causes the unsophisticated to panic when confronted with wonder about the nature of Reality.

What the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves . . . whether you are living in a Christian reality-tunnel, a Mansonoid reality-tunnel, an Immortalist reality-tunnel, a vegetarian reality-tunnel, a Rationalist reality-tunnel . . .

There might be something in what the man says, even if he is a Hindu mystic. He was once Dr. Richard Alpert, clinical psychologist, after all – and some of Washington's explanations of the war in Vietnam and more recent wars have sounded, at least to me, suspiciously like Tyrone's notions concerning the worldwide plot against his balls.

Existentialism dates back to Soren Kierkegaard, and, in his case, represented (1) a rejection of the abstract terms beloved by most Western philosophers, (2) a preference for defining words and concepts in relation to concrete individuals and their concrete choices in real-life situations, and (3) a new and tricky way of defending Christianity against the onslaughts of rationalists.

Daily practice of yoga, which often correlates with improved health, decreases the total amount of beta activity/outer directed attention/sympathetic nervous system function and conversely increases alpha or theta wave activity/inner directed attention/parasympathetic nervous system functions.

We, as a species, exist in a world in which exist a myriad of data points. Upon these matrices of points we superimpose a structure and the world makes sense to us. The pattern of the structure originates within our biological and sociological properties.

Do we think at all — about these allegations, or about anything else — or do we just respond mechanically with conditioned prejudices, as the Behaviorists assure us? If we laugh at the gross bigotries of the 13th Century, what do we think about the data that seems flatly impossible to us?

But whatever the source of this worldwide legend, the psychological fact to which it attests is obvious: people can imagine an ideal condition of happiness, but are usually not capable of imagining that they, personally, are able to achieve that ideal. There is everywhere a consciousness of some gate, or door, or barrier, between desire and reality. Men and women everywhere tend to feel partially impotent and incapable of achieving what they want to achieve.

We have manufactured all "material things" out of an ever-changing deluge of photons and electrons in an abysmal void. As Nietzsche first declared, "We are all greater artists than we realize." (Or, as the Zen roshi Hui Neng said, "From the beginning, there has never been a 'thing.'")

Hypnosis, whatever positive suggestions it may implant in the cortex to transduce into neurochemical immunological boosts, also begins with telling the patient to close her or his eyes and become more relaxed. Both closing the eyes and relaxing move the patient from beta waves/outer attention/sympathetic system to alpha-theta waves/inner attention/parasympathetic system.

Most of the occult literature of the world — aside from the 95% of it that is sheer rubbish — consists of tricks, gimmicks and games (which the Hindus call upaya, "clever ways") to trigger metaprogramming consciousness. This generally means leading the student "all around Robin Hood's barn" as many times as are necessary, until the poor victim discovers that he has created the barn himself.

Beta wave activity in the brain correlates with outer-directed activity and dominance of sympathetic nervous system functions. Alpha wave activity, and lower brain frequencies, correlate with inner-directed passivity and dominance of parasympathetic nervous system functions.

We've already pointed out, in Chapter One, that matter was originally a synergetic or holistic concept, including the observer, and not a reified or thingified Substance outside us — it meant, originally, that which we experience in making a measurement, remember? — and, in this connection, what do you suppose fact meant originally?

In pre-ethological terms, the emotional-territorial circuit is what we usually call "ego." Ego is simply the mammalian recognition of one's status in the pack; it is a "role" as sociologists say, a single brain circuit which mistakes itself for the whole Self, the entire brain-mind apparatus. The "egotist" behaves like "a two year old," in the common saying, because Ego is the imprint of the toddling and toilet-training stage.

The world does not consist of words, graphs or mathematics, which make up the "tickets" or pookahs we most commonly use to file-and-index our experience. The world of experience consists of non-verbal, non-graphical, non-mathematical processes, encountered and endured, which we convert into words, graphs or math (or other, more arty pookahs or masks.)

2Nor does an iron bar possess the essence of hardness. It merely seems hard to humans, but might seem comparatively soft or pliable to a muscular 500-pound gorilla. ~•~

These Rationalist robots are also very uncomfortable with the newer circuits — and some of them spend most of their lives writing articles and books devoted to "proving" that the newer circuits do not exist and that all scientists who have recorded the behavior of these newer circuits are liars, fools, bunglers, charlatans or some manner of Damned Heretics.