Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

Remember that this computer is only a few decades ahead of present technology, so it cannot "understand" your commands if you harbor any doubts about them. Doubts tell it not to perform. Work always from what you can believe in, extending the area of belief only as results encourage you to try for more dramatic transformations of your past reality-tunnels.

All "paths of liberation" (brain-freeing schools) know that we cannot remain in the abyss of the nameless forever, unless we choose to become hermits. (Very few do.) Once we have returned from a school of brain-change to the ordinary world, we again must see and think in masks, or we will not have the ability to communicate with and deal with others.

Jan Huizinga, a Dutch sociologist, studied the game element in human behavior, and noted that we live by game rules which often have never risen to the level of conscious speech. In other words, we not only interpret data as we receive it, we also, quickly and unconsciously, fit the data to pre-existing axioms, or game-rules, of our culture (or our sub-culture).

Whatever you say it is, it isn't," Korzybski, the semanticist, repeated endlessly in his seminars, trying to make clear that third-circuit semantic maps are not the territories they represent; that we can always make maps of our maps, revisions of our revisions, meta-selves of our selves.

This is why Stephen tells the fatuous Englishman, Haines, that the Irish artist is the servant of two masters—the imperial British State and the Roman Catholic Church. In this sense also, the dead live: the Irish writer of Joyce's day made his obedience to the dead invaders and traitors who made Ireland a colony of Rome and of England, or else he was forced to choose Joyce's path of exile: as did Shaw and O'Casey and Beckett and a dozen lesser lights along with Joyce.

The great Soviet film director, Sergei Eisenstein, once wrote an essay claiming the camera is a liar. What did he mean by that? An old Zen Buddhist riddle asks Who is the Master who makes the grass green?

Besides, I cannot imagine a first-rate artist or scientist who could possibly qualify as Politically Correct, since P.C., like all dogma, creates an information-impoverished environment and art and science always seek information enrichment.

But, after the unmasked or naked vision of Ishtar—the world experienced as infinitely more than all masks — we can never take any one mask (or any one pookah) as seriously as its Idolators. We can see many kinds of truth in many kinds of masks, and we can see the fallacies in all of them — chiefly, the fallacies of allness (the mask includes all) and Identification (the mask "is" all.)

4. Accept this book, if not in whole at least in general outlines. Assume you have been brainwashed. Try to learn as much from every human you meet about their separate reality-tunnel and see how much of it you can use to make your reality-tunnel bigger and more inclusive. In other words, learn to listen.

R. Buckminster Fuller illustrates the metaprogramming circuit, in his lectures, by pointing out that we feel puny in comparison to the size of the universe, but only our bodies (hardware) are puny. Our minds, he says — by which he means our software — contain the universe, by the act of comprehending it.

Phenomenological sociology owes a great deal to Husserl and Huizinga, and to Existentialism. Denying abstract or Platonic reality (singular) the social scientists of this school recognize only social realities (plural) defined by human interactions and game-rules, and limited by the computational abilities of the human nervous system.

The second, emotional-territorial circuit, creates a two-dimensional social space in conjunction with first-circuit advance-retreat.

And I repeat that we might all become startlingly sane, or at least much less stupid, if we tried, even occasionally, to look dispassionately and without prejudice at precisely those events which do not seem to fit our own favorite reality-tunnel or tunnels.

5. James Joyce said he never met a boring human being. Try to explain this. Try to get into the Joycean head space, where everybody is a separate reality-island full of mystery and surprise. In other words, learn to observe.

In the very real sense we are, as the Buddhists say, a void. We are empty. We can become anything. Most people have very strong armors to prevent themselves from realizing the void. It's frightening. But once you've accepted the void, you realize you can become anything. You can fill the void with anything you want, if you have the psychological techniques to do it.

Information, mathematician Norbert Wiener once said, consists of signals that you do not expect. Remember?

The grid of Circuits I and II creates four quadrants. Note that Hostile Strength (the tyrant) is inclined to paranoid withdrawal; he must govern, but he is also afraid. Cf. the careers of Hitler, Stalin, Howard Hughes, etc. and the inaccessible Castle and Court in Kafka's allegories. Note also that the dependent neurotic is not in retreat at all; he or she advances upon you, demanding fulfillment of emotional "needs" (imprints).

Joyce announced that he did not believe in heroes, and Bloom is no hero: just an ordinary decent man. There are a million like him in any large city: Joyce was merely the first to put him in a novel, with biological functions and timid courage unglamorized and uncensored.

The "soul" or Circuit VII is constant, because it is, as the Chinese say, void or no-form. It plays all the roles you play — oral dependent, emotional tyrant, cool rationalist, romantic seducer, neurosomatic healer, neurogenetic Evolutionary Visionary — but it is none of them. It is plastic. It is no-form, because it is all forms. It is the "creative Void" of the Taoists.

If this begins to sound like nonsense, that is inevitable on this level. As Lewis Morgan notes, in books on linguistics there always comes a point at which the prose itself becomes wildly incomprehensible, disintegrating into nonsense.

Pragmatism has a family resemblance to existentialism and phenomenology and arose out of the same social manifold. This philosophy, or method, derives chiefly from William James — a man so complex that his books land in the philosophy section of some bookstores and libraries, the psychology section elsewhere, and sometimes even appear in the religion section. Like existentialism, pragmatism rejects spooky abstractions and most of the vocabulary of traditional philosophy.

I believe that's only because it's an unconventional idea. It breaks down our whole conditioned system. The first thing you learn in a logic class is the syllogism, "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal." And to knock that one over really disturbs people and I find it fascinating that they are disturbed because I don't think they really want to die; they just don't want to think a new thought.

Mind" is a tool invented by the universe to see itself; but it can never see all of itself, for much the same reason that you can't see your own back (without mirrors). Or as Alan Watts liked to say, because the tongue ultimately cannot taste the tongue.

Or maybe the universe has wobbles and weirdness indeed. Maybe belief in any system is maintained by forgetting all data that does not fit the system?