Quotes from Robert Anton Wilson

General Semantics has influenced recent psychology and social science greatly but has had little effect on physical sciences or education and virtually no effect on the problems it attempted to alleviate — i.e., the omnipresence of unacknowledged bigotry and unconscious prejudice in most human evaluations.

Well, as explained in the last section, non-local correlations transcend causality and also subvert our traditional notions of space and time. If two particles — or events, or Whatnots — have a non-local correlation, in modern quantum theory, this means that they will remain correlated even when no signal, no field, no mechanical push-or-pull, no energy, no cause of any sort can travel from one to the other.

The neurosomatic circuit is "polymorphous perverse," in Freud's unappetizing terminology. This merely means that the nervous system itself, taking over as driver, is now directing the rest of the body. "Every act (becomes) an orgasm," said Aleister Crowley, giving his own Tantric emphasis to the polymorphous nature of this circuit.

Of course. Chaos and the Abyss are metaphors, of the special kind that we have called metaphors about metaphors. They attempt to describe what is left when abstractions like the leaf and the average — linguistic reality-tunnels — are dropped from our minds.

Transactional Psychology, based largely on the pioneering research concerning human perception conducted at Princeton University in the 1940s by Albert Ames, agrees with all the above systems that we cannot know any abstract Truth but only relative truths (small t, plural) derived from our gambles as our brain makes models of the ocean of new signals it receives every second.

When a paradigm shift occurs — when we go from seeing things one way to seeing them another way — the whole world is remade. All that we "know" is what registers on our brains, so what you perceive (your individual reality-tunnel) is made up of nothing but thoughts — as Sir Humphry Davy noted when self-experimenting with nitrous oxide in 1819, and as Buddha noticed by sitting alone until all his social imprints atrophied and dropped away.

In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits . . .

Opiates and small doses of alcohol seem to trigger neuro-transmitters characteristic of Circuit I breast-fed tranquility. Large doses of alcohol often reverse this and trigger neuro-transmitters characteristic of territorial struggle. Note the anal vocabulary of hostile drunks as their alcoholic intake increases. ~•~

Husserl disagreed with traditional philosophy (and anticipated modern neurology) in denying that we passively receive impressions. He insisted on an intentionality of consciousness, in which we vary from intense alertness, to moderate alertness, to weak alertness, to the total passivity that Occidental philosophers regard as normal.

This is what scientists call a pragmatic statement. That is, it is not truth as known to the theoretician or the pure scientist in the ivory tower; it is a generalization useful to the troubleshooter dealing with actual events in the laboratory. (In this case, of course, the laboratory is the human head.)

By which we mean nothing "mystical." It is now known that many physical energies radiate from the body, and that even chemical effects can be transmitted (experienced as emotional "vibes") from one person to another, the chemicals acting as stimuli to trigger neurotransmitter actions in the second person. ~•~

In short, to claim that all these theories have been proven false appears more like a propagandistic assertion than a neutral factual observation. The issue is still open, except in the minds of those who wish it were not open.

The only drug I have ever been addicted to was nicotine, which I have quit five times in the last 20 years. Speaking from experience, I must say that Crowley has great understanding of the addict mentality and the way the biological need for the drug can generate "reasons" that almost seem rational at the time. Writing down the reasons for taking another cigarette, Crowley fashion, I have found is a real help in recognizing their self-deceiving quality and really quitting.

However, the implicate order as a scientific model does not equal classic deep reality in the Aristotelian sense, because it has the role of one model among many. Bohm, its father, does not claim it ranks as the only true model or the final model or anything like that.

You can live in the reality-tunnel imprinted upon you by environmental accident or you can choose your own. You can go through brain changes as radically bad as those of Patty Hearst and Rusty Calley, as transcendentally beautiful as those of Buddha and Jesus, as epistemologically revolutionary as those of Darwin and Einstein.

If Nietzsche's existential relativism be accepted, then there will always be true things that do not fit any existing reality-tunnel, just as in mathematics Godel demonstrated that there will always be true theorems not deducible from any set of axioms. (See Chapter Two.)

Orthodoxies of all sorts are maintained by partly the intolerance I have been documenting and partly by — simple lack of curiosity. Heresy is not-tuned-in, if one already has certitude.

There are a lot of different realities going around these days," Abbie Hoffman once said. Evolutionary acceleration is forcing us to the point where each will have to take responsibility for which reality we accept.

C.H. Douglas presented a graph to the MacMillan Commission in 1932 showing that as the interest rate rises, the suicide rate rises; as the interest rate drops, the suicide rate drops. His graph was from 1812 to 1932. Psychologists who don't think about factors like that are ignoring the context of their own science.

Nietzsche would have said the Dionysian spirit was abroad in Great Britain that year. Freud, who read and enjoyed Nietzsche, would say in his own language that unconscious forces were erupting. Jung, influenced by both Freud and Nietzsche, would say the Dionysian archetype was escaping from the collective unconscious, accompanied by synchronicities (uncanny coincidences).

Every reality-tunnel is real to those who experience it, and none are real in the old sense of existing apart from us in a platonic Absoluteness.

Consider the child's riddle, Where does your fist go when you open your hand? This can be answered by thinking like Einstein, although on a less cosmic scale. That is, the child must first realize that the fist is not a thing but a relationship (a coherent synergy Bucky Fuller would say). It is not a mere etymological felicity to say that thinking of relations is the first step to thinking Relativistically.

People think that only the banks can create money. That's a hallucination. Aleister Crowley tells in his autobiography of a part of Mexico during the Revolution where there was no money available, so the people in the town just wrote on pieces of paper, "I owe you five pesos," or whatever. And they were using these pieces of paper while the town went right along and got more prosperous because they weren't paying interest every time they created money.

Thus, the Fifth Patriarch of Zen, Hui Neng, said twelve centuries before Bucky Fuller, From the beginning there has never been a thing. This is easy to see, if you are thinking in Chinese, but very difficult if you are thinking in Indo-European. Einstein only got to that mode of apprehension by thinking in mathematics (and in pictures, as he once confessed).